Journeys
Images
Cloud
Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

Amazon Associate
Contact

Entries in Laos (182)

Friday
Jul242020

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

Sunday
Jul192020

Impermanence

Dirt path yellow flowers
Kids collect plastic bottles and cardboard treasures
Resale value
Slow Sunday in a random universe of unlimited potential
Energies

Enter the zone of stone
Machines, street food sellers, LOVE balloons
Black and orange butterfly lifts into air from stagnant water

 

Composure present grounded with music curious eyes
Pregnant pigments
A new Joker card complements
Old Joker discovered on ground inside Lao market
Near the Plain of Jars
4,000 years ago
Pocket talisman

Little red house over yonder

Where my baby used to stay

PSP music from sleeping room

Razor blade coagulates in water stone 

Two dogs sleep in sultry shade

Old woman with broken teeth curls into hammock

Destined to be

Silent

Wooden red dusty 2x4 entrance planks small ditch

Littered with plastic bags bottles and shy language

Acquisition

Curious kids ask what is your name? Sky.

Market laughter congratulates broken light silhouettes

A girl on a wooden platform

Fingering green leaves, condiments - her radiant smile

Adult children play rocky feely tag

Green girl yawns

 

Ah the sweet smell of garbage this human accumulation

Tangy spoiled fruit aroma gift-wrapped, bows tinsel moldy memories

Smiling familiar stranger wanders from spicy bean curd noodles

2 ice java

Imaging fractured light

One-armed old beggar man sitting down at the crossroads

Smiles “hello uncle” give him Real notes pass by

Let’s have an adventure

Rhythm of sunlight

Broken tattered umbrellas

Red dust path

 

Haiku impermanence passes through

Senses are limited

4:55 sunset heavy motorcycle traffic on red dust shoulder

Antiquated dump trucks rumble toward solemn flags

 

Play the 125cc thrill like Mars in 200 years

Children walk life choices and destiny’s decision

Quality of life torments

A child in a sling (first human vehicle)

Perched on a young girl's hip...

Grow Your Soul

Wednesday
May272020

Experiment

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

Create happy little accidents

There are no mistakes in art

Art is what everything else is not

Laughter medicine

Spill letters words phrases sentences

Chinese financed damns block flow

(One damn on the Nam Ou River north of Luang Prabang)

+

Sell electricity to Thailand

Lights are on and nobody's home

Lao suffer land fish loss

Environmental damage, economic stress

Downstream in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam

60 million people struggle to survive

Rapid spray...fresh air skin laughter

After she stopped crying

The lonely woman

Killed herself

Where is my face, said her mask

Eating her face


Waif on her own walks along Mekong

In a flow state

Bare structure angular momentum

Ballet dancer on point

Permanently poised

Dance energy sways hips

Shift down all the days walking a gentle rolling

Wu-Wei

    Live your story

Welcome to Earth

Grow Your Soul

Sunday
May172020

Butterfly Shadow

Outside fog shrouded morning 4 a.m.

Sitting meditation Zen heart-mind

Engage senses

Talented person hits the targets others miss

Genius hits the target others cannot see

How you learn. How you feel.

How you grow

Wisdom of heart-mind

I used to be someone else. I traded him in. - Other


Writing in Mandalay, Burma

+
Storyteller fragments imagination

Shadow of butterfly

Blue sky enjoys clear pronunciation

Intonation rising falling sounds

Language chunks

Spill shred synchronicity symbols

Learn. Play. Share.

Chess bishops develop long line of attack

Knights are unpredictable

Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play

River song butterflies

Moored on bank

Wake flow electric H2oh

Feeling mid-day sun

Gestures use us

Cloud song white air

Floating world

Up a lazy Mekong river

Turn the boat around

Huck said to Jim

Mark my words

If I had more time I’d make it shorter - Twain

Patterns

Elemental dance

Particles

Wheel of Time

Rainbow Earthman

Poet

Shaman

Grow Your Soul

Saturday
Jan112020

Landmines

“We are not here for a long time. We are here for a good time,” laughed Meaning, a twelve-year old survivor wearing a ragged Beware of Land Mines skull and crossbones t-shirt and prosthesis leg scampering a random life pattern across fields near a stilted bamboo home in Cambodia.

“Are you with us?” pleaded a landmine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

It costs $300-$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. 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.

*

Expanding her awareness of mankind’s genetic stupidity, Lucky showed Zeynep a Laos map illustrating Never-Never Land.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.         

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

*

Meaning hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg away one fateful day as she played near village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart-mind.

It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy.

She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate.

Fortunately or unfortunately she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

*

Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a female Banlung shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is blissful ignorance.

Weaving A Life V 1