Omar's Dream

A month later Omar returned to the caves to wait for me. He had a dream.

“I’m afraid you will have take your boots off,” said a soldier wearing a 45-caliber sidearm with an M-16 slung over his shoulder when he saw my scarred climbing boots at SeaTac airport in March 2002. They had steel rivets.

“Anything interesting happen while I was away since September 1, 2001?”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Do you mean the half before the shift or the half after the shift?”

The G.I. answered with a dull blank stare.

A retired homeless bag lady approached security. “It’s good to know that 450 airports in early 2002 hired more than 45,000 workers. Maybe I can get a screener job here.”

“Why not?” said a T.S.A. official standing near an X-ray machine. “Each month, screeners take from passengers about a half-million things, including 160,000 knives, 2,000 box cutters, seventy guns.”

“Look like things have improved since I’ve been gone,” she said, pushing her grocery cart down the discount aisle. “Now I feel really safe.”

Along the concourse I studied glossy high definition pixel posters of airplanes slamming into towers with the admonition:

Beware!

This could happen to you.

Live in fear.

Report any and all suspicious activity.

Do not trust anyone.

Spy on neighbors and report them to the Secret Police.

Do your civic duty.

Be a Patriot Act.

Big Brother Is Watching 24/7

I’d created this reality with precise clarity.

Returning to the United States of Amnesia after centuries on the ground in Morocco and Spain I sat in my Tacoma tree house. I worked in a room bathed in light.

I had a maul, a hatchet, and a double bladed axe named Laughter.

Inside shifting forest tides, I was buried beneath 150- foot tall Douglas firs waving in wind.

A blade’s swinging, singing weight edge sliced through old growth tree time rings with ferns, moss, and rain.

I sat down spinning out tales, weaving spider webs on a loom of time. My mirrors reflected everything.

I carried Omar’s palimpsest through the forest. It was a bird song trill and spring music with owls, ravens, crows, eagles and vultures circling on thermals offering shamanic visions of clarity, insight and ancient wisdom.

I established a refuge from the storm with simplicity, serenity and sanctuary.

Living on the edge I savored shelter in a bird’s song. Trimmed cuticles spiraled into spring. It snowed flowers.

I looked deep into the forest of the mysterious manuscript. It was true and filled with sensory details. I connected new narratives with Omar’s animal skins revealing adventures, quests, dreams, conversations and awareness blended with joy, delight, courage and healing energies.

People wondered and wandered, chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of their eyes. We see through our eyes not with our eyes.

I resumed my Spanish exile.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Buy Low, Sell High

In the Sahara removed from death, chaos, tears and 3,000 funerals I suggested to Omar maybe it was about economic terrorism, poverty and empathy.

He understood the economics of survival, bartering, trade, exchange value, supply, demand and getting the best price. Not too low and not too high.

“A person cannot drink or eat more than they need. It’s about hospitality,” he said.

Omar’s tribe migrated from Mali, Southern Algeria and Mauritania. Prior to 1956 there were six million Touareg on nine million square kilometers of desert with no government borders controlling movement. Now there were 7-10,000 in the Sahara Occidental.

Berbers controlled the Iberian Peninsula as a colony from Marrakech castles. Fierce warriors, they resisted outside control while maintaining their language and culture during Roman, Vandal and Arabic rule.

“Your enemy is my friend,” said Omar.

His tribes conquered and ruled Spain for centuries.

He’d seen boring television images. He preferred human conversation. Omar knew television and cell phones were the most insane consciousness-stealing inventions of all time. They sold desire and greed designed by advertising companies pitching food, sex, self-esteem and illusions of false happy secure lies.

After the successful 9/11 attacks desperate stories, lies and myths evolved, adapted and adjusted like petri dish cultures.

They created new languages, art, music, attitudes, values, principles, weapons of mass distraction and historical chaos in the long now. They took on new fragmented impartial impervious identities.

“Buy low and sell high,” said Omar as sand shifted below a blue sky.

“Simple as ABC,” I said.

“It’s easy to comprehend at the heart-mind level.” He was a man of few words. We contemplated a vast silent world.

“No language, no culture,” he sang as shooting stars played celestial tag.

I visualized elements of fear, disinformation, misinformation, bias, lies, half-truths and paranoid propaganda bloviated by politicians, popes, prelates, mullahs, and animists in every oral language on a spinning blue marble in space-time. 24/7.

Fear sells. People buy.

Human brains overflowed with data and visual distractions. Incoming! Run for cover.

Free C-19 vaccines were administered to seven billion humanoids.

Survivors crammed mountain caves as orphans sang, “A tisket a tasket we need a casket.”

Peaceful people lived wisdom, empathy, and compassion. Meditation, deep breathing, harmony and forgiveness of Spiriti Sanctus were portals into clear awareness.

Arabic speaking scholars recited poetry by Rumi. They shared stories about rising and falling civilizations. Transmitting oral stories they diagramed hieroglyphics, cave paintings, metaphors and unconscious archetypes.

I envisaged historians, political scientists, talking heads, taxi drivers, unemployed fortunetellers and morticians answering suicide hotline calls. The number of callers increased exponentially.

Governments increased military spending.

They cut education, health care and social programs.

Citizens overwhelmed hospital emergency rooms pleading, “Give us drugs to alleviate our fears and illusions of desire and suffering.”

Fear and Consumption demand outstripped supply.

Scarcity was thrilled.

“What happens when they run out of CONTROL programs and advertising?” a girl asked her mother, the mother of all answers.

“Don’t worry my sweet,” said her mother living her worst nightmare, “They will invent, fabricate and illuminate something new. The manufacturing sector will rebound when shelves are empty. Advertising and propaganda never dies. We’ll always have sugar and we can always go shopping.”

“How long will it take to reduce these feelings of imaginary fear?”

“Healing, empathy and compassion require our individual intention. Many practice a calm way like there’s no tomorrow,” said her mother.

“Healing energies, peace and love sustain us.”

“There is only F.U.D.,” said the mother twisting her daughter’s hair until it caught fire.

“What is F.U.D. mother?”

“Fear, uncertainty and doubt. It’s part of our DNA since we jumped or fell or were pushed from The Tree of Life 60,000 years ago. FUD evolved with a vengeance as hungry unconscious greedy demons.”

“What about adventure and surprise?”

“They are factors in our adaptation as a species. You ask great questions my dear,” fanning her daughter’s flame. “A long now-time. A century is nothing.”

“It’s good to know some things,” said the girl. “We know so much and understand nothing.”

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve already said a lot.”

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Tell me the truth,” mother. “I want to know your truth.”

“It’s a miracle we are here is my truth. It’s a big cosmic joke. Our insecurities are disappearing and our strengths are growing. Consider this. The letters F.E.A.R. can mean face everything and recover, or fuck everything and run away.”

“Life is a magical celebration, mother. We are flukes of the universe. We are miracles. Life is a beautiful short dream. There’s no rhyme or reason. It’s about realizing peace and gratitude in our heart. We connect with family, community and world tribes. Inhale other’s suffering and exhale healing. Cultivate our heart-mind awareness.”

“I love you,” said her mother.

“I will be present and grateful mother. May we go out and play now? May we take the day off and be creative?”

“Yes, let’s invent a game theory my sweet.”

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Healing

Rose, a healing clown, wove her way through Intensive Care pushing a cart of snacks, books and toys.

“One size fits all,” Rose yelled above children’s laughter. “Come and get it.”

Children accepted rabbits, bears, yaks, animist tribal masks, elephants, snow leopards, tigers, panthers, and turtles wearing hexagrams.

Rose gifted wolves, foxes, spiders, eagles, ravens, fire breathing dragons, watercolor brushes, Chimayo blankets, Hopi Kachina Earth spirits, 232 butterfly species from Cambodia and Tibetan prayer wheels.

“Hey,” shouted a child, “what’s your name?”

“Rose. What’s yours?”

“Ash,” smiled the kid, “short for Ashley.”

“Well,” said Rose, “you don’t look so short to me. In fact, you look larger than life, if you know what I mean, jelly bean.”

“That’s funny,” laughed Ash, reaching her thin arm into the space of Rose dancing fingers in a dervish whirl.

“Here, have some colors Ash.” Rose zapped her with a rainbow spilling laughter, prisms and stardust.

“Wow, cool. Thanks Rose.”

Rose shared extra crunchy peanut butter, strawberry jam, green tea, fresh pitta bread, grape juice, bananas, apples, milk, eggs, cheese, tomatoes, rice and toothbrushes. She offered mint-flavored dental and mental floss.

She gifted fragrant soaps, candles, multicolored silk threads, bells, gongs, cymbals, looms, shuttles and bilingual dictionaries.

Rose dispersed gamelan orchestras, watercolors, camelhair brushes, calligraphy ink, Laotian silk, papyrus sheets and illustrated poetry books. Multifaceted mirrors reflected and refracted waves of eternity.

A Lao child carries the world on their back.

“Wow,” said a dreaming child, “this is beautiful,” beaming innocence around the room in a spiral vortex.

“You are beautiful,” said Martha Ann. “Mad and innocent.”

“Make my day,” yelled a boy looking through a telescope into the infinite expanding universe composed of 13.5 billion-year-old stardust. Children swarmed like bees making honey, “Let me see, let me see.”

“Guess what?” said astronomer. “There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on the planet.”

“May I see?” said a kid.

“It’s a see saw,” said a joker, “around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows.”

“Am I this or am I dreaming?” said a child. “I am real. I invent your dream. Tran and I with our Dream Sweeper Machine decipher and reconfigure old dreams to create new memories.”

Voices sang a cold mountain poem. “Am I the soft sand of sleep that calms your tortured heart?”

“What strange mixture of life and death am I?”

“I am a wanderer searching for a Who to What I am.”

“You can indicate everything you see.”

“I am a butterfly dreaming I am a healthy child.”

A rational child said, “Pain is a sickness leaving my body. I feel free.”

“You is what you is,” said a small voice. “My mother was appointed to have me.”

“That must have been terrible.”

“It was her karma. Intention is karma.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s being aware of your actions and how they return in new forms and opportunities in your life. How they manifest your destiny. Today is our destiny. We accept responsibility for our choices and actions. We accept responsibility for our freedom.”

“Are you one with everything?” said one.

“Yes,” said a wise child. “We are a singularity. We are a witness. It’s part of the sacred contract. We are not in this room, we witness it.”

“Is absorbing our parent’s pain and suffering expensive?”

“Can be to be or not to be is the question,” said a kid named Shake Your Sphere.

“My mom says anger is expensive,” said a child.

“That explains why I can’t find the price tag,” said the joker child playing with a full deck. Ace high. Play the hand you get. Run the table. Outside hospitable windows a sparrow seeking crumbs darted from branch to branch on the Tree of Life.

“You betcha,” said Rose, grinning ear-to-ear not fear-to-fear through her Tantric death mask. “You are one third the life of the universe.”

“Like a rolling stone,” sang a child playing a riff on her blues harp in the key of C. “Ain’t it a crying shame. That old feeling is gone.”

“Ain’t nothing but the blues talking sweet thing,” said a sanguine one.

“Sometimes I blow and sometimes I draw. People should talk less and draw more. Ha ha ha.”

ART

 

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

The narrator, a soldier, talks to a priest while serving in Vietnam.

"The histories speak about humans shedding old habits, attitudes, values, and beliefs and loved ones to go on journeys with new opportunities and compassion.

"How they renewed their spirit with pure gratitude and joy. It’s amazing. I mean here I am sacrificing my youth, desire, ignorance and anger to be cleansed, to be made whole, to integrate my unconscious into oneness with the ALL as an authentic being. We are stardust. We are one third the life of the universe.”

“Yes, my son, using religion I sacrificed bodies and souls. I created sorrows and depravity. I wandered through Sumerian, Greek, Roman, and Spanish villages where I administered suffering, pain and death. I burned 12,000 innocent men, women and children at the stake during the Inquisition. Ah, such a time I had condemning heretics to damnation and life everlasting. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

“Did you record these events?”

“I dictated my myths, legends and story-truth to Omar, a blind Touareg scribe. My amanuensis. You’ll meet him in Morocco on 9/11. You will combine stories and adventures in this tale. Anyway, to continue my little saga, I licked civilization’s fire. As a fire-eater in a traveling carnival I blessed sinners with ashes on Palm Sunday. I drove a tank through Middle Eastern deserts converting the heathen with fire and brimstone. I kneeled and prayed in mosques facing Mecca five times a day.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yes. I survived in Afghan caves near destroyed statues of Buddha hearing Taliban confessions. I tended to suicide cases in GITMO. I meditated in Tibetan caves for three centuries, three decades, three years, three months, three weeks, three days, three minutes and three breaths. Ah, the blessed trinity. At Tibetan sky burial ceremonies north of Lhasa after flaying skin off bodies, I ground human bones to mix with blood for vultures so the departed spirit could, would, should be reborn. Karma and reincarnation.”

“You did all that?”

“Yes. I walked the length of the Silk Road from Venice to Guangzhou bringing comfort to the lame, blind and destitute. I traveled with Italo Calvino from Italy a scribe blessed with magical realism insight when he created Invisible Cities in Kublai Khan’s court. Perhaps you know of it?”

“Yes, he and the great Khan played chess.”

“Ah the great game and a metaphor of life. Castle early. Control the center. Divide and conquer.”

“Checkmate,” whispered Death.

ART

Literary Agent Orange

Rip my heart out. Build the tension with cinematic pace. Then en masse in a dramatic climax they escape the clutches of the evil manipulators. In the falling action they join a safe community women’s shelter based on healing, recovery, regaining personal strength, dignity, self-respect, empowerment.

         They learn new job skills like cutting and selling ice.

         They learn how to weave. They discover their life needle leads a story thread. They take control of their life.

         They form love killer groups and hunt down men and women who betrayed them. The women kill them with love and compassion. The denouement is their brutal REVENGE. Best served cold. Calm, detached and honest. Short fast and deadly.

         BUT, said agent alliterated, I’m pretty. I’m pretty busy reading obscure vague query letters and synopses filled with vowels, consonants, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, tough love, mysteries and dime store romance, not to mention salacious graphic comics.

         Get to the verb. Get to the action. Establish a scene. Paint a voice. Develop characters, narrative, structure, plot, thematic unity, setting and multiple marketing platforms from recycled manuscripts. Pulp. Keep me turning the page.

Make the characters want something even if it’s a drink of water in the middle of the Gobi. Everyone needs water. Leo can tell you about the value of water in the Gobi.

         You mean, said Ice Girl, writing is like standing on the edge staring into an abyss called civilizationwith Leo, a courageous noble savage cannibal wearing an alarm clock around their neck committing sewer side with absolute free will above shimmering blue pools of incandescent liquid molecular frozen particles with brave stone cold clarity immobilized at heights of illusionary immaculate freedom seeing their immortality, their deepest fear in ROOM 101 alongside brave OTHERS unflinching in their love, compassion and goodness, this infinite potential?

Destiny in eternity? Where all points end at infinity? Where eternity plays with time? Before jumping they yell, People think art is easy. Tell them it’s like jumping off a 12 story building every day. JUMP!

         Yes, said the agent. I know it can be heart breaking. You develop your wings after jumping.

         You don’t know the meaning of heartbreak said Ice Girl. I’ve buried more people than you’ve published. Once I witnessed an old man wearing a rainbow knit cap write Eternity on a paper napkin in Planet Paradise, a coffee joint in Eugene, Oregon.

He torched Eternity with a match. His tired traveling blazing eyes watched Eternity burn to a cinder. Black and white ash and dust fluttered from his fingers. He mumbled incoherent incantations about fate’s joke, meaningless life, existential choices, irony and consequences. Something like that, said the agent with vague ineptness. Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play.

         The burning seer burned his inner light. He walked into a world trailing ash, feeling wind in his heart. Sun burned his retinas. Tides of time in the long now ebbed and receded where the event horizon blurred his cognitive facilities.

He lapsed into a stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence talking to shadows, ghosts and shamans. He approached the point of universal consciousness with mind-at-large where fiction memory dream and imagination are the same thing. He confronted the endless abyss. He jumped. He saved himself, said Ice Girl.

         Go on, said agent. The publishing world is a crapshoot. A casino. After expanding the narrative angle give me mythical evil, cold blooded sadistic mega maniacs, corrupt politicians, civil servants, millions of poorly paid laconic Asian teachers, nurses, doctors and financially motivated international bankers and politicians practicing fraud, sexual harassment and NGO graft under the auspices of organized crime.