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Entries in meditation (84)

Monday
Jan182021

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 medications 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, and Transformation - A Memoir

 

Thursday
Dec102020

Tall Tale

"Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment."

This is a camelo, Spanish for a tall tale.

Hello. May this find you well. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Omar. I am a Touareg Berber nomad from the Sahara desert in Morocco.

I am a blind prescient writer in exile.

This is my story about how I and other tribal members met a strange kind man named Mr. Point immediately after 9/11. He just showed up and the Sahara is a big place.

When others hear this tale they express disbelief.

“How can that be?”

Living Baraka, a supernatural energy and magic power practiced by our people, his appearance was, shall we say, expected. He is a poet, shape shifter, cosmic comic clown and literary outlaw.

Now it happened that we traveled together just like you and I now and we formed a community. We shared many tales and I have taken the liberty of including them here with some of my own stories. We enjoyed amazing adventures together.

I confess this narrative is not linear. In a sense, this is for and about children: innocence, curiosity, empathy, and playful pure intentions. Children love inventing stories and hearing them.

Stories are essential like air and water.

My friend and I love to travel and besides calling the Sahara home I also inhabit a very real magical late Paleolithic Spanish cave in Andalucía. It encompasses 26,000 years of art and history. The word ‘history’ comes from the Greeks. It means story. This explains the title, A Century Is Nothing.

Someone in our tribe said, “Imagine the earth is 24 hours old. To see a perspective of how long humans have been around, imagine they’ve been on the planet for only the last 60 seconds.”

Marco Polo, a famous traveler near death in 1324 at seventy left his famous epitaph for the world. “I have only told the half of what I saw!”

Keep an open mind and fasten your seat belt as we may experience a little turbulence during flights of imagination grounded in invisible particles of reality. In the event of a water landing your heart-mind may be used as a flotation device.

We’ll meet again. May your journey be filled with loving kindness, compassion and authenticity.

 *

Meditating, my head is held by a string. I transfer my delicate weight from cloud to cloud, disengaging from the stimulus. Incense rises from flames. I join my muse spirit in the Department Of Wandering Ghosts.

I sharpen rose thorns for my work. My muse, bless her heart, uses the thorns to make a comb. She weaves on the loom of Time. I feel sorrow and joy seeing two drops of blood on a finger after brushing a rose thorn. I pull my hand away with a thorn embedded in my finger. Old human flesh dissolves.

I’m filled with wild passion. A mind-expanding drug of wonder, delight and freedom increases my awareness of infinity without pushing me into psychosis. My power is a medicine, a sacred connection to Gaia after years of paying attention.

I observe a spider meticulously wrapping a captured insect with thin microfilaments. The spider recycles her old web on the periphery hauling sustenance to the diamond center where it vibrates in a soft breeze. Does the spider intend to create the web to catch an insect? Does the flying insect intend to discover the web? Where does instinct end and intention begin?

One instinct is to create and sit with meditative patience, another instinct is to take risks and move.

My serenity is not bought over the counter with pharmaceutical coupons cut from old magazines. No dust collects on my mirror reflecting Beauty in my heart. I experience myself as a breath of fire, a lightning bolt sacrificing my fear, doubt and uncertainty, shattering myth. Lightning bleeds off the charge. I am an unemployed fortune teller. I am the soft sand of sleep-dream calming a tortured heart.

Abracadabra!

My feminine muse hurls her lightning bolt even unto her death. She is a death deferred. She is on death row with a small short reprieve. Her tranquility is a lethal injection of travel.

A Century is Nothing

Wednesday
Nov252020

Mahling

Rural Burma.

Blindfish heads whisper The Sea, The Sea. Silver scales reflect light.

A woman hacks chickens. Blood streams down circular wooden tree rings.
The gravity of thinking sits on a suspended handheld iron pan scale.

A white feather sits in the other pan.
Balance.

Twenty-six varieties of rice mountains peak in round metal containers or scarred wooden boxes.


Horse drawn cart traps unload people and produce. Neck bells tinkle: Star light star bright first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might get the wish I wish tonight. Well. Fed horses paw dirt.

Ancient diesel tractor engines attached to a steel carcass hauling people and produce bellow black smoke.

Old wooden shuttered shops with deep dark interiors display consumables, soap, thread waiting for a conversation, stoic curious dark-eyed women, others laughing at the benign crazy traveler. 

A ghost-self sits in meditative silence, absorbing rainbow sights, sounds, colors, smells, feeling a calm abiding joy.

Wander and wonder.

Two new teachers arrived for three weeks. One tall relaxed American male has serious eyes. His Irish female’s unhappiness confronting the hardship assignment masked emotional distress and deep bitterness.

She lived at the girl's dorm fifteen minutes away by dusty footprints. I feel isolated, she lamented.
Cry me a river, said human nature.

Hardship and deprivation develops character, said an Asian child.
Don’t give me that crap, she said. I have twenty years of teaching experience and this is hell.

Hell is other people, said Sartre.

Be a good Catholic girl and make a confession, said Personal Problem.
It’s life lesson #5, said a child.

Yeah, yeah, said the whining adult eating her frustration and anger garnished with succulent tomatoes.

The world is a village. 

Saturday
Nov072020

Tranquility

Sandman flow waves
Flat line horizon
Tattoo queries with That Song in Sin City

Dancing orange sunset light
Collapsing blue waving rhythm
Flow

New water sparkles light waves/particles
Sparrow wing free flight wing seashell

Gauguin’s primitive visions - imagination

A shudder passed through his body tingling every nerve cell.
It was predicted by a long deep slow meditative breath

this inhalation staring at blue green gray waves

emanating from a flat purple horizon line.

Every afternoon is the same after four winds dance waves

Glitter, details, flow, tranquility, Wushu focus

Wind dances waves. Turbulent music.

Chinese visitors hide under umbrellas

gripping wrists walk the shore staring blindly at white Europeans on sun beds sucking beverages.

Dazed and confused by everything

shrouded women wear gaily painted floppy hats, sunglasses,

face masks devour their faces, shawls, long sleeved gloves and blind terror.

Self easy foam at the mouth.

The sea waved. Two white jet skis danced twirled and exploded over waves as wind pushed water.

A Khmer woman balances a large bamboo platter on head.

Light reflects bananas, mangoes yellow pineapples.

A man with a tray of sunglasses walks past with visual acuity.

In cheap mass-produced red and white soft-soled squash shoes

Tourists abandon exposure to ultra violet radioactive light

running into hard fast shade. Safe at last.

“Protect my fair skin,” they sang saving face,

a fear greater than death. Shrill echoes.

 

Grow Your Soul - Prose & Poems from Laos & Cambodia

Tuesday
Sep292020

Celebrate

I just want to celebrate
Another day of living

Vocabulary of touch

Pleasure principle sensuous femme fatale guide

Mutual satisfaction
Release tender tension


You stash your bags in a simple bamboo room
cut through a distorted distracted disrupted deserted
zone of empty rattan chairs to the beach
It stretches from Sin City to expensive southern resorts
M/F teams rake mourning sand

Grains complement musical melodic waves
breaking the shore day after day
Enjoy a slow walking meditation on a long empty beach

Breathe in - out
Water music laps ankles
Yellow dawn streaks sky
You salute the sun

Celebrate another day of living

Three green islands float long ago and far away on an event horizon
Bright red, blue and yellow tourist boats plant anchors
Engines hum fuel songs

Day unfolds. A lotus grows from mud.

Angkor Wat