mask eats face

He broke down.

He returned to the bamboo shock shacks in deep rutted fields. Under cover. She wasn't there. Massage love called a sprite of 25 wearing flower ring on her finger. Silver with seven petals. Open. Consternation in his weak heart. He felt the sense of loss. Accept loss forever.

This symbol, how it transformed men's eyes into want.

This silent metallic flower only now, under a weak light as mama smiled through her destined crooked teeth, saying, Money.

Ling's 25-year young friend is beautiful, they all are, in an immature, petulant way.

Lack of confidence met betrayal.

Betrayal knew the stranger desired L.

The sensitivity of seeing the future with Awareness - Attention – Non-attachment.

Transference - emotions - an instinctual way of living objectively.

POWER

Masks - good or (d)evil?

           - money or sex

           - relationships

           - life and death

           - beauty and truth

The mask eats the face. 

Maybe, she said, being a Player. Lying in her Ling heart. No intention. Intention is karma.

She got what she needed. Money. Traded her passion for cash. You can't put passion in the bank. You can't eat passion, it eats you. Grasping is suffering.

Solvent with clear heart. Heart had nothing to do with passion. Passion sang its joy describing her minor character.

The 3-act play ran five weeks in Luang Prabang.

On opening night her love opened like a flower. It rained flowers over a lonely man.

Mutual needs were satisfied.

Intuition augured well, laughing.

It's difficult to take any of this seriously.

Posture. Breath.

Plant heliotropes. Night aroma in gardens. 

Smiling is a virus

The magic IF.

Smiling is a virus.

Risk vs opportunity.

Murakami - themes - boredom, loneliness, loss.

See a situation.

Create characters.

Shame and guilt issues.

Death is the mother of Beauty.

Beauty has no tongue.

She is the mysterious light. She is a light worker. She sings with her light.

She is a fiction. A white butterfly named Psyche wings her face.

A messenger from higher realms of beauty.

She is a scale. On her scale two are two objects. One is a human heart. A feather.

Season of the witch, all the rabbits running in the ditch.

West child - where did I come from?

East child - how did I grow?

Blues - TLC 41

In Fujian, China using flakey chalk Lucky wrote Blues Music Story on a broken green board for eighty classless university students.

He spoke of the African Diaspora, history and slavery in America and how indentured humans gathered to make music and dance after long hard days in the sunshine of their love.

The blues manifested stories and songs as men and women left rural villages on economic migrations for city jobs like China now. Floating people in a floating world.

The blues expressed physical and spiritual loss from family, friends and communities. It’s “feeling, emotional, deep in your spirit soul” music. He pulled out his blues harp and they said, “Oh it’s a cochin.”

“Want to hear some blues?” 

“Yes.”

He blew sweet slow stuff, picking up the tempo blasting rifts of wailing train whistles and a sense of loss forever.

“This is called, ‘If you don’t help me I’ll find someone else,’ by Howling Wolf. When you’re a wandering minstrel or a Griot - a West African performer who perpetuates oral traditions of a family or village by singing histories and tales, considered by musicologists to be a link with the acoustic blues - or a Seanachai - a traditional Irish storyteller of truths, myths and legends - or a shaman, seer and adept it’s natural. I am a conduit for music. It comes through me.”

After hearing and feeling the blues students practiced making a Western sandwich: bread, tomatoes, mayo, relish, turkey slices, mustard, onions and lettuce. How do you consume a sand wish with chopsticks?

Let’s eat, said 1.6 billion peasants. We’ll eat anything with wings and legs except tables and planes.

New music echoed outside Room 317. Students ran to painless windows. 

Across the street a young Indonesian boy sat on a piece of plywood in the shadow of a long tall Sally art deco three-story concrete building.

It towered above a gated Jakarta middle-class community filled with designer homes, wild tropical blossoming fruit trees and displaced dysfunctional spoiled offspring spinning yoyos. 

In his left hand he held a silver chisel. In his right a flat edged hammer. He slammed metal against metal on a bronze bridge between stone and iron ages.

Between knowledge and wisdom.

Between an object and a concept.

Tap-tap-tap. Music flaked dust. Wind-spirits carried his chorale and tribal memories of family, rice paddies, nature and seasons.

Accompanying him a girl using a brothel broom of tree branches whisked a gentle rhythm creating their symphony of sadness, loss and neglect. They went on tour. Standing Room Only. Sold out forever and a day.

accept loss forever

He saw his first , or maybe second, it only takes a second, Cambodian woman with a prosthetic leg. The majority minus arms and legs or fingers and hands are men and kids. Kids love to play with buried things. Dirt play.

Today it was her turn. 

It was her gait. How she dragged the drab olive green right leg behind her.

It reminded her of a lost conversation where one whispers more than they know. More than they can reveal. Truth be said.

She was maybe 40. Give or take a moment.

It was a moment years ago when she stepped on the invisible mine. What you don't see is fascinating. Her story evolved into family taking care of her after they heard the explosion. After it rained dirt, rice, weeds, tears, light, broken clouds, false dreams, expectations, celebrations and musical thunder notes.

A doctor. Blood. Pain. Loss. Tears and memory comforted her. She absolved her faint quick belief in Buddha beyond all the mysteries.

After she went to Siem Reap she got her new artificial leg at Cambodian Handicap.

If her husband and family rejected her then she ended up in the city, like today, sitting on a sidewalk offering handmade bags and bracelets or selling her sorrow and loss and smile and understanding among friends and polite distant tourists afraid to look her in the eye. Later, she dragged it through night comforted by the fact it was a long way from her heart.

If your legs get heavy walk with your heart.

 

Sing

I found a temporary room at an expensive private suburban hospital. Clean sheets, a cot and three daily hots. It was an intensive care color spectrum zonal theory filled with young lovers in their emotional zombie reality of lies and uncertainty.

Downhill from the hospital a crying man waiting at the Metro station held a cardboard hospital chart and paper package. An orange paper folder discovered papers from a doctor, a lab, a prognosis, a definite definitive defining medical history. It revealed a story about someone dying, a wife, uncle, someone he loved.

He waited in heavy unconditional silence for a green Metro to collect him and his package of fear, loss and regret transporting him down the line. Home. Where he’d spill the contents on a table surrounded by friends and relatives sharing his tale. Loss and hypodermic needles of pain, pleasure, desire, sloth, envy and assorted fabulous conversations laughed.

A bird pressed itself against a thorn to make herself sing.

A stranger passing the hospital smelled wild roses. A bird sang. He whistled. Bird answered. 

The bird’s song were short sharp sounds, a trill, long deep vibrational throated mysteries, harmonic scales, warbling. 

“Now I know why the caged bird sings,” whispered an orphan child scrambling across mined fields next to her Cambodian bamboo home.

The man and bird carried on this musical conversation until the bird was satisfied the stranger knew the music. It flew, singing.