Poem

In a Brave New World you shift

from truth and beauty

to comfort and happiness

I ate civilization

Aha ha

A new notebook deciphers emptiness

The fisherman

In a long blue boat

Cuts the engine

Drifting with current

Cool cornflower silk red ink

Slashes memory's fascination

Forgetting

Letting go

Be silence inside the labyrinth

Dancing shimmering red blazing wisdom seeks wisdom

In Laos

Wats glow golden

A sleeping Buddha

Dreams of compassion

Direct immediate experience

I am twinkling 

Lao Dwarf - Ice Girl

Chapter 19.

At that moment following a 90-minute chakra body massage in Luang Prabang, a Disneyland of world heritage culture filled with French and German and Italian babbling idiots staggering on medical canes while craning arthritic necks toward cold European winter memories and grasping creased maps filled with blood red dots depicting guesthouses and casinos featuring obsessive oval tongued storytellers without maps, canes, awkward packs, widows, orphans, or land mine survivors piloting bomb boats down the Nam Ou river and recycling Grade A ordinance, a foreigner put a pile of gold on a table in Laos. He turned to a one-eyed squinting old man. “I will give you this pile of gold for your daughter.”

  “I want more,” said the man. “Her face and body and heart are Lao. She has Vietnamese blood. It’s supply and demand. Business is business. Politics is business and business is politics. It’s all about value. No plastic. Cash only. See this machete?” waving it in the man’s face, cutting him off.

  Nearby, two American males hadn’t decompressed. Trying to communicate in complete sentences was impossible. One released sounds, nouns, impressive words, past and present participles, guttural phrases, heavy deep real sentences and, like a game of chess, war or blind love showing no respect, the OTHER cut him off at the throat with a sharp sophisticated verbal annunciated machete.

  Frustrated and grimacing, he suffered severe irreparable brain damage. Short circuit. Transmission lines went down. Thud. Crash. Burn.

  The two Yankees were fresh off the banana boat. They’d sailed out of NY, past the oxidized tall green torch lady, diverted through the Suez Canal, picked up palm oil in Goa, and translated the lack of wind into thermal icecaps near Ceylon surveying tea plantations harvesting vast green high grade qualities of pure logic in a scientifically approved coherent genesis. The ship’s captain texted his mistress in Kuala Lumpur, “I’ll be late for dinner.”

She was engaged to a dour celibate hypocritical monk disguised as a novice meditating in an isolated cave on the Tibet-Bhutan border at 21,451 feet. She missed his calm sense of (purpose) intention and clear motivation. She prayed he’d complete his destiny to be One With Everything, leave the cave and travel south living fearless inside fatigued winds to meet her at an undisclosed location. This was her secret desire, wish, dream and consistent memory. 

   She imagined him bargaining his flesh-covered skeleton in a brief temporary life condition. He negotiated passage using Sumerian script etched on clay tablets. Brushing shard dust off shard dust revealed time-lines, sharp indentations, incomplete circles, zigzag lightning bolts and fingerprints of whirling dervish dancers. 

  Whorls reflected afternoon light into somnambulistic retinas.

  A middle aged male Laotian dwarf in a well cut gray suit coat, black baggy pants and sturdy green army issued tennis shoes walked past. Pink sky streaked sunset. He’d been walking all day. His stride was steady. Other than a bowl of noodles near the Mekong he’d been raising dust. He was headed home, passing golden Wats, shimmering pots of food cooking on clay burners fired by kindling, blaring TVs, noisy greasy engine repair shops, bamboo pavilions and a sleeping tuk-tuk driver. 

  He passed a teashop chalk sign:

Smile. We Will Help You Practice.

  He walked across a narrow red iron bridge above a river and down a dusty road to his bamboo home complete with a single watt bulb surrounded by dancing omnivorous insects.

  His shoes went near the door. Slapping his jacket against a wall released day’s dust. He hung it up. He splashed water on his face and smiled at his incomplete reflection. He poured a cup of green tea, ate a handful of sticky rice and prepared his table. 

  He spread out a large sheet of rough handmade beige paper, camelhair brushes and black ink.

  Memory spoke: After they cut my tongue out during my Re-education through shit labor experience I started writing script. I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire.

  I added a little water to a recessed gray stone surface. I placed the ink in the center. Then, using my right hand, as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me, I rotated the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid as a drop of water rippled a pond.

  After collecting ink I picked up my long thick brown brush with white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper. I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, with my left palm flat on the table and fingers spread.

  I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink and slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess. I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality and character. There are 5,000 characters in my written language.

  My Chinese script is about unity of mind and spirit. I have much to see and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I know. The more I see the less I know.

  My teacher recited a poem.

A mountain loses its spirit without cloud,
loses its peculiarity without stones,
loses its elegance without trees,
and loses its life without water,
and in painting,

one should concentrate the mind,
and hold the breath,
with concentration of the mind,
serenity is maintained, with the breath held up,
preciseness is attained.

One should be as serene as an old monk in meditation and be as precise as a silk worm in spitting silk.
The spirit and real fun of painting are from nature and beyond brushes and paints.

  I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness. I centered my unconscious on the blank paper filled with nothing. Respect the white emptiness.

  My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus. I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit. Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

  Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

  My useless tongue flapped like a prayer flag in Himalayan winds. Stories and songs are nightingales. I heard children laughing and singing. They greeted each other in the babble of playful nothing with laughing word pearls.

They dream with their eyes open. When we are asleep we are awake.

  Life gave me art and I used art to celebrate life.

 Ice Girl in Banlung

Life Lesson #5 - Ice Girl

Chapter 18.

I’m a big seven as in 7, said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator.

  Your life is a test. It isn’t a dress rehearsal. If it’s an actual life your invisible friend will protect you from ignorance and fear.

  My dad’s not very smart. It’s probably his DNA. A string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

  Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It's the rainy season here in Vientiane. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

  Rain pours like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress dry watchers with his intelligent hose running wealthy water over poor rain. Cleaning. He ignores me mostly.

  It’s amazing what people do when they have nothing to do. Maybe it’s an innate creative instinct. Like milling around. Anyway I’ve learned there are three kinds of people in the world.

a) people who make things happen

b)people who watch people make things happen

c) people who don’t know what the fuck is going on

  My grandmother sits on our 1924 austere colonial dark brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony. Every day is a ceremony. Every morning at dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong and offers wandering Buddhist monks a handful of rice. She earns merit in this life. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

  Grandfather stares at rain collecting in pools.

  Father’s very busy. He disappears for hours. Drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for affection and cash. A poor girl from a poor family needs to make a living, poor thing.

  My mom’s also really smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever?

  After the rain, when it’s dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and yellow flaming candles she burns all the plastic garbage. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

  It’s a sweet smell let me tell you. Like that Duvall character said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Kind of like that smell. What’s the word? Acrid. 

  When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby machine. What’s another mouth? In China I’m worth $3-5K on the stolen kid market. My sister would have been aborted.

  Mom ignores me mostly. She’s very busy doing her humble mother routine. Later, she squawks. She’s a soft kind later.

  People like parents and teachers and lazy humans love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life meaning.

  Milling around is an art form with style. Hemingway had style. Fitzgerald had style and class.

  Lao people are soft and gentle. We have good hearts. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera.

  The trick is to tolerate, with kindness and patience, your great teacher, the bland empty-eyed star gazing hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be. Zap, like a white zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

  The kid continued: For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity. This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg.

  I used to complain I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.

  This fact needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate danger and way of life.

  Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, expensive medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance milling around.

But what do I know?

  Milling kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease. Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get educated. Cambodia and Lao and Vietnam are alive with ghosts.

  A human’s existence is one long perpetual distraction.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to go and finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, grit, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

  How do you build self-control and grit, asked Leo.

  Through failure, said the boy. There are two kinds of character.

  What are they?

  Moral character is fairness, generosity, and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence, and perseverance.

Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Yeah, it’s trial and error and taking risks.

  Thanks for the life lesson, said Leo. You are the future of Laos.

Ice Girl in Banlung

 

Life in Laos - Ice Girl

Chapter 17.

Banlung was 100 degrees with no clouds. The landscape was flat. Intermittent rolling parched Eastern hills led to a shimmering blue volcanic lake and cool shade.

To the north The Heart of Darkness flowed strong. Impenetrable jungles bordering Laos sheltered animists and cannibals.

How’s life in Laos, asked Ice Girl.

  A French doctor in Luang Prabang told me this, said Leo. He’s lived there six years. He has a young son and daughter with a Lao woman. He invested time and money to develop a guesthouse. They expanded to five properties.

They had problems. Her extended family smelled a huge profit. She threw him out. She wanted all the land. I saw her when she brought their daughter to a pre-school where I played and learned from kids. They were both fat and unhappy.

  So how does it work in Laos, said Ice Girl. You didn’t answer the big quest-ion from a small person.

  Men make the rules, said Leo. Women take care of the home, kids and money. It’s all unspoken subtleties. They do their thing. Women worship in the temples. They do their meditation. Men sit around getting drunk, discussing new night girls, ethics, morality and behavior.

  What happened to the French man and kids?

  He plotted a way to get them out of the country. He let her keep the land and buildings.

  Many people never leave their village, asked Leo. Why?

  Everything we have is here. A village maintains the other world.

  The world is a village.

  Good things happen when you take risks, she said. You risk expanding your perception. You risk losing everything in the expansion. Are you prepared to lose everything? I know the feeling, said Leo. They killed my family. I’m sorry, she said. We have to accept loss forever.

  What is the most beautiful word you know, she said?

  Kindness. And yours? Food.

  Less talk and more drawing are essential in life, she said. Experiment with circles, dots, triangles, squares, lines and curves to reach magical levels of realization. Connect the dots forward.

  The asylum is a prison and protection, said Leo.

  You create art to explore your sense of self and find out how you feel you are, rather than whom you think you should or ought to be, she said cutting crystals.

  Make the right choice for the wrong reason, he said.

  Make the wrong choice for the right reason in the right season, she said.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Leaving Laos

You lived in Laos for one year.

Miracle gift blessing.

Tourist visas last thirty days. In and out tourists do Asia.

Please don't rush. PDR.

You had a one-year multi-entry business visa as a volunteer to facilitate English with 101 H'mong people in Phonsavan. Plain of Jars. Archeologists hypothesize funeral jars. Burn bodies in nearby cave and stash bones in jars. Roll your bones. Bone oracle.

Illuminated ones know they are 4,000 year old drinking vessels of GIANTS.

Visa paperwork said you are a Soap Consultant.

Somebody paid off somebody in the food/money chain.

$500 bones.

How life works. Money talks. Hello. Before speaking put your hand out. A wink will suffice. You know how to play the game. Wiggle your fingers. Here comes the paper, see it. Do the numbers. Enough? No, wiggle again. See the paper. Love the colors. I like doing business with you. Here's the pepper. Thank you.

You dreamed to be a Soap Consultant.

Now you are.

The Phonsavan Ministry of Security requires an audience.

Bureaucrazy stamps, photographs, work permit card, residency permit card, all micro managed by droning gnomes sitting passive, hungry, tired and bored in obscure drab communist rooms inside old decaying cement buildings surrounded by rusting bard wire behind brown shuttered windows against blinding sun held together by corroded grated bars, confronting blaring Thai soap operas, imprisoned below portraits of smiling kings, white goateed Ho Chi Minh painting in his garden of early delights and grim faced suited officers in olive drab wearing burnished medals.

Each person has one job in a compartmentalized system. Only one.

One takes the papers, reads and enters data in a ledger. Passes documents to #2. They read the papers, acknowledge signature and stamp of #1, sign it, enter data on a form, passes it to a woman writing in a ledger. She checks the stamp from # 1 & #2 and enters critical data in her ledger. She hands it to #3 who reads all the names, studies all the stamps and ledgers, smiles, hands it back and says you cannot work here as a Soap Consultant. Thank you it was only a fragrant dream. Bubble drama.

Checks and balances.

You put your time in. You learned this phrase as a soldier in Nam.

Put your time in.

If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space. Get out take risks get your shoes dirty.

Phonsavan was dusty, cold and invigorating. Education was fun, helping 10-30 year olds develop courage. Drawing, speaking, chess, teamwork, critical thinking skills.

I need help.

A place to sit down and establish temporary relationships, explore traditional fruit and vegetable markets, process new languages, do street photography, write it down.

Make sense of it later.

After seven months new volunteers arrived. You briefed them.

1. Lao don't plan 2. They have no concept of time. 3. They don't accept responsibility for their actions. 4. Family and farming come first. 5. They are eager to learn. 6. Retention is a problem. 7. Practice meditation and comprehension checks.

Return to Luang Prabang for 90 daze. Sit in herbal steam baths every afternoon clearing accumulated gunk dust from lungs. Polish a new narrative nonfiction book entitled The Language Company.

Shiny. Dented from dialogue, drama, dreams.

All writing is garbage.

A friend recommends an opportunity. You make contact and get lucky finding a p/t volunteer job at an upscale eco-lodge seven hours by boat up the Nam Ou River helping with management and English practice with fifteen staff. Low season. Husband wife and daughter left for a Thai hospital where she will birth Emil.

Stay two months. Facilitate courage with kitchen, restaurant, and housekeeping staff.

Laughter is an effective elective.

Live next to a wide flowing brown river rushing south for 448 kilometers from China to the sea near Nam. Gardens of butterflies, red hibiscus, looming granite mountains, river, forests.

Dancing cloud thoughts.

Calm wisdom mind meditation.

Everything you do is a meditation.

Culture is what you are.

Nature is what you can be.

Linguistic Semantics. The map is not the territory.

Your visa will expire. No new job no chance to renew.

Return to Seems Ripe. Discover a new adventure. Let's go.

Luang Prabang - exit. Kiss your Lao artist lover good eye. You've known each other three years. In out love dialogue. She has the imagination heart. You've encouraged her skill these years providing her with watercolor paper, inks, and pens. She's created a nice portfolio.

You're not saving anyone.

Modern fancy glass and brass empty new LP international airport. On the second floor among rows of empty seats and shops, three steel accordion passenger tubes wait for big planes. Tourism=money=tourism.

The old squat French style fading yellow airport disintegrates down the road. It has character speaking memories. Remember when?

Heavy rain, clouds obscure mountains. Smiling security man said, nice hat, real style. It's an Akubra Traveler from OZ you say, showing him the sweat stained interior. Twenty rabbits made this hat. Rabbits love making hats when not nibbling in gardens or making baby rabbits. Wearing this hat brings me good luck. I can't be manipulated, fooled, folded, stapled or spindled. He smiles, have a nice trip.

Fifteen people go to Pakse on a prophet. 1:45 airborne. Clouds, blue sky. Clouds should know you by now.

In transit. 30 minutes. You walk out, free as a bird. A Lao man with a gold watch put his black attaché case down, lit a cigarette, made a call. A man pulls up in a black SUV, walks over to the man, talks and picks up the case. They board a flight to Vientiane.

The bag contains top-secret nuclear vision material and contracts with Chinese/Thailand developers to build twelve dams on the Mekong. Signed sealed delivered. COD.

Carlos and his wife from Mexico sit in 14 A/B. He's a government official. Sleek gray black hair and meticulous bushy moustache. You mention Gabo, yes, said Carlos, he was a great man and writer.

100 Years of Solitude

They're going to Angkor Wat for two days. You give them a quick vision - get a tuk-tuk at 5:00 a.m. Have a noodle breakfast on your way out. Enjoy exploding sun over fields. You get to Banteay Srei early. Before Japanese and Chinese locusts. It has the most intricate hand carved designs by women.

See Preh Khan-hall of dancers, Bayon, Ta Prohm, main Angkor temple. Ramayana story in stone. You show them Srei black and white images. Carvings, monkey guardians, stone stories. Did you take them, she said. Yes. They are beautiful.

Explore the jungle. See how you feel. Meet butterflies. They know the way through mysterious passages.

His questions: currency, safety, cost, typical Khmer food, scams, mosquitos. Brief them. I talk to airborne malaria insects. We speak the same language. They don't bother me. You need a hat, water, open heart-mind. Slow steps.

It's all a spiritual journey, said Carlos. Thanks for your help.