world photography day

Tibet

Laos

Burma

Indonesia

China

Cambodia

Turkey

Vietnam

Nepal

Whisper

Laos

It's a walking meditation.

How do you spell loss?

What I called "memory" contained an entire world.

Imagination is memory.

A blind painter paints from memory. A blind writer. A blind poet. A blind musician.

Painted words of yellow laughter.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

The old monk in the shade reads to his 95 year-old blind friend resting/dreaming in a hammock.

The wailing infant gets a job as a siren on an emergency vehicle.

Once upon a rainy day Whisper paid attention to sensations.

Whisper paid Now.

Whisper is Now. Not Later.

A heavy deluge increased the density of murmurs and ideal idea voices sat quiet.

Voices heard rain bouncing off recycled Asian war PSP sheets in sheets. Steady yellow Agent Orange rain hijacked a life jacket.

He shuddered with the sensation that an entire life had ended that day.

Another unpredictable life was beginning.

Designing the charcoal elements of crisp fire as infants scream at talking heads women drive young ones crazy in out in out their tongues banging like pistons on a desultory 125cc engine propelled by virgins returning home with their unblemished shy dignity intact.

One woman fans skewered buffalo meat to a crisp.

A grandmother cradles an infant. She suffers from diabetes Type II.

Shuddering wedding photos are frozen on a wall. It never turns out like people imagine.

They breed, work and get slaughtered. They trade hands and hearts.

She skewers another hypnotic form of laughter to preserve her conversation.

Fat lost European tourists waddle past.

With an accusatory tone men get smashed on beer Lao.

A mechanic hammers one sharp line of description vs. mundane observation.

Land Mines

Below 5* hotels at the House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, welfare, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C in her crying heart, a 10-year old Cambodian girl stared up at mirrored skyscrapers watching the Wheel of Life flash prisms into sky.

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported 300-count Egyptian threaded linen. No lye. A thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage.

She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food. She is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one leg after discovering a land mine on her way home from school. Her t-shirt screams:

Beware of Land Mines

She wears a permanent tear on her left cheek.

She said: Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. 

My country has 16 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines. Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Too many died because we don’t have medical facilities. Mines are cheap.

A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000 to take out of the ground.

I’m really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. He suffers from denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world.

My village is the other world.

Where do you live?

I am one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year in the world by land mines remaining from some ongoing or forgotten conflict.

I love unpleasant facts.

I am a walking, talking, breathing encyclopedia of knowledge and wisdom.

Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million land mines buried in 45 countries. It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.

Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

I hear children crying. Doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from my skin. I cannot raise my bandaged hands to cover my ears. Perpetual crying penetrates my heart. Blood tears soak my skin.

The technical mine that took my right leg off that fateful day as I walked through pristine rice paddies near my village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around me.

It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Perhaps it was a plastic Russian PMN-2.

I never saw it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot me up with morphine.

All strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

Standard issue.

April 4th is International Day for Mine Assistance.

Grow Your Soul

31

See through soft eyes
Gratitude

No mistakes in life art - happy accidents

Ink dances point line shadow

Watercolor pencils
Creativity has no rules

Take a dot/line for a walk

Hospital poem story

Remember - Every story is a poem and every poem is a story.

1

Create like a god, order like a king, work like a slave

Work like you don’t need the money

Love like your heart’s never been broken
Dance like nobody’s looking

I am a short story

You are a novel

Her Zen like awareness
Stoic serene
Shamanic wisdom seeks wisdom

Wabi-sabi

Everything I do is an experiment

Art is what everything else is not

Art is medicine - a cure

Laughter medicine

Spill sounds letters words phrases sentences sing

Grow Your Soul

Pay the price

I never take yes for an answer.

What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high.

*

Every day in Utopia is Clean Your Ears Day, said Leo. It’s a big deal considering ears are small and portable. They go everywhere you go.

The first time my ears were deep cleaned was in Chengdu. A woman worked at the open-air opera theatre decorated with gigantic red and black demon masks.

I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax. Cotton swabs.

It’s a great feeling. BUZZ. Today was the perfect opportunity to clean out the old ears. Bliss baby. Say what?

Aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed debris and clutter as analyzed by auditory forensic experts:

1.         cycle of cycles including life cycles

2.         incessant trajectory of love and passion orators

3.         hummingbird whispers

4.         laughter

5.         crying, whining, screaming children - many over 25

6.         heartbroken lovers

7.         distraught wandering tourists

8.         dancing fools. you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance

Vientiane, Laos

8a.       crazies I love, fools are sheep

9.         distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels

10.       minstrels

11.       singers, dancers, hustlers

12.       motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, rich/poor wage slaves

13.       laughing sheep (volunteered slavery)

14.       lonely philistine Filipino maids in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in Saigon parks bothering travelers, talking about the weather, breaking their lonely ice lives discussing the value of shoes and jewelry on sale at discount stores

15.       bored frustrated wives, husbands, lovers and mistresses with tresses in distress

16.       unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, orphans, storytellers

17.       fortune tellers, employed or not, and prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations

18.       nutritional experts and particle collider scientists

19.       visions of a supreme creator laughing at everyone

20.       people who say, I don’t have a listening problem, I have a hearing problem

21.       your choice for $2.77 plus tax

Open your ears, open your Mind-At-Large, said Leo. Taking a risk is not fatal.

Book of Amnesia, V2

Yangon, Burma