Omar's Book Club

Omar turned a page and read to his book club.

They were among the lost and looking tribe.

They were figments of someone’s imagination, caricatures of wild inventions in abstract designs spinning webs from the center. They laughed at everything with cosmic perspective.

Through laughter they regained their sense of delight inside the mystery.

Someone somewhere rang a bell. Noon’s mechanical hands said hello. Calibrated craftsmen hands read luminous dials. The facade of a Catholic church on a Spanish hill in a pueblo contained fissures and cracks in its foundation.

Long spider tentacles streamed from the base into dusty shadows where birds rested from flights of fancy along Roman walls covered in soft green moss. The church bells were old hollow iron shells with a broken clapper. Rusting heavy metal shreds in weeds weighed down wet script reading ‘O come all ye faithful’ in Sanskrit next to a book of poems written on Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

Blood flowed down white walls soaking green stems in brown soil feeding roots beneath the surface. Roots had no shadows, below the surface of human awareness.

Their expectations were Southwest desert creation myths.

A young Anasazi girl shared her wind note vision.

My name is Kokopelli the humpbacked flute player. I am 1,000 years old. My image is found on petroglyphs or rock carvings and also on rock paintings or pictographs in kivas, on ceramics and woven baskets. The ancient ones, the Anasazi, regard me as a symbol of fertility, a roving minstrel or trader. People also call me the rainmaker, a hunting magician, trickster and seducer of maidens.

In the Pueblo myths my hump carries seeds, babies and blankets to maidens. I wander along the upper Rio Grande between villages carrying seeds and bags of songs on my back. Because I represent fertility I am welcomed during the corn- planting season and sought by barren women and avoided by maidens. If you listen well, you will hear my flute music echoing through canyons playing traditional songs.

She disappeared along fault lines in long undulating dry washes full of sagebrush playing her flute near rainbow mesas strewn with geological strata.   

Listen, said Little Nino, do you hear the music, clarity, gentle sweetness echoing through space? It’s sublime.

A flute joined the tribal tolling bell. Form whom the bell toiled and told?

Someone had passed on.

Sublime, said a person named Art, an unemployed American realtor. Survivors gathered around him admiring torn muddy glossy brochures of multilevel and split-level green and white pastel clapboard low mortgaged homes financed with borrowed capital surrounded by security walls decorated with barb wire and shards of glittering green glass.

Venomous Diamondback rattlesnakes, cobras, and African pit vipers attacked soft city folks on their trail of tears inside shadows coalescing like shape shifters, said Artsyfartsy. 

Domestic violence erupted inside hearts, homes, cities, villages, towns, and countries between resentful, bitter out-sourced wives, their alcoholic husbands, frustrated lovers, and their catatonic, aggressive video game programed kids. Someone called the feds.

The feds arrived, said everyone in the compound was Waco and leveled the place with heavy tank fire.

Prime time news, baby.

And then O Art?

Down on Mean Street near the Tigris River someone detonated a land mine under a diplomatic silver Suburban, shredding level-5 armor designed to protect it from RPG's, killing three American intelligence agents on the West Bank of heaven. Their cover was blown. Blood rivers flooded streets. An old woman of a displaced tribal nationality with a mop began her clean up operations. Shit happens.

Everyone in the region denied responsibility for the attack. Analysts said it was very sophisticated and similar to attacks against an evil empire in Iraq fueled by sectarian strife, poverty, greed, hatred, animosity, and stupidity fighting for power and control dating back to the Assyrian empire in 689 BC.

Thanks Art. Speaking of empires, how about this tasty morsel of history? Omar said, thumbing a page.

A Century is Nothing

TLC - Facilitator of courage

A secret compartment in a unique one-of-a-kind jeweled knife illuminated the Tibetan plateau with antelope, snow leopards and gazelles among wild mountain pashmina underbelly goats knitting high-end sweaters and shawls for couture.

Shaggy yaks tinkled bells as eagles, Golak ravens and Winter Hawk winged free over remote white monasteries, rainbow Lung-Tao prayer flags and meditation halls filled with burgundy clad chanting monks playing gongs and cymbals, blowing silver jallee horns, lighting incense, laughing and reciting sutras in Himalayas near melting glaciers feeding wild torrential rivers flowing through slag scrabble rocky terrain, lush wildflower meadows, past isolated stone homes with yak dung drying on flat roofs, pilgrims studying a traditional herbal chart in the Amdo hospital and walking the Barkhor circuit in Lhasa filled with prostrating joyful people fingering prayer beads, whispering mantras and offering sage and pinion into a burning chorten under the ever-present watchful blind suspicious eye of naked plainclothes Chinese secret police disguised as international human rights observers employed by an NGO scam organization.

“You have some cool tools,” Foot said. “I am a tool of nature.”

“Yes you are and yes I do. Health care is expensive because patients and families incur 90% of the medical cost during the final years of their life. Hospice, home care, nursing homes, drugs, medicine, in & out patient care increases cost, long term debt, poverty and so on.”

“The dead paid sooner and the living paid later. Another unpleasant global fact is uncontrolled population growth, lack of job opportunities, substandard education and no medicine.”

“Life is filled with inconveniences. We have millions of idle unemployed here in Turkey. Bankers and politicians stole all the money. Greed is good is their mantra. Government is organized crime. Soma mine disasters with catastrophic loss of life is a fact of life for diggers making $500 a month. My job is to sell stuff. Treasures to be dusted on archaic mantelpieces. People buy things to make themselves happy - in the short term. They want to impress family and friends. They get bored, forget about it, lose it, throw it away or donate it to charity and buy more stuff. It’s a never-ending insatiable desire of supply and demand consumption dramatics. Advertising never dies. Fools are ruled by their emotions. Fear. Enough psycho-social-babble. What brought you here?”

“My feet. I work at The Language Company. I’m a facilitator of character and courage.”

“I know intestinal fortitude. It’s the most expensive virtuous school here.”

“Education is a business. You pays your money and takes your chances.”

“An open hand holds everything.”

They stirred sugar cubes, drank tea, and made small talk. 

The Language Company

Creative non-fiction. Journalistic facts. Literary imagination.

Unpleasant facts are littered through TLC like landmines, lovers, literary outlaws, educational malaise, geography, butterflies, rice, luck and sex.

Lucky Foot taught English at The Language Company in Turkey in 2008. He returned in 2012. Creating field notes.

A Vietnam veteran, journalist and facilitator of courage he gifted luck to people in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos since 2004.

He showed up to sit for a spell nurturing positive relationships in the long now.

Accompanied by Humor and Curiosity he helped students speak English with fluency minus their illusions of fear and phobia's relatives:

Fear of taking a risk.

Fear of being incorrect.

Fear of peer ridicule.

Fear of poverty.

Fear of starvation.

Fear of being ordinary.

Fear of success.

Fear of abandoning a manuscript by Zeynep entitled TLC.

Fear of accepting responsibility for their choices

Dear of accepting the consequences.

Fear of letting go of old conditioning. Shadows.

Fear of being alive and real. Growing.

Fear of_______. (Your free choice)

Lucky, Humor and Curiosity observed parents, schools, and religions fostering passive acceptance, fear, indifference and rote learning teacher-centered systems. It was all about passing exams, not learning how to be more human and think for your self.

Status quo. Sheep mentality. Blend in. Questions are forbidden.

Authority washes your brain daily.

Zeynep, his young genius friend in Bursa, Turkey taught him about life in her totalitarian country. I say what others are afraid to say. Anxiety is a chronic national problem. Adults here are good at two things, eating and fighting. Dissent is terrorism say our corrupt manikin authority figures.

Leo, the Chief of Cannibals revealed dystopian China. I spent years carrying word shit in a Re-education through Reform Labor Camp for questioning Authority. Everyone here belongs to the Big Ears, No Mouth society.

Oh the shame.

Rita, the independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung shared stories about Khmer culture and Cambodian history. We've had twenty years of hopelessness. We breed. We work. We get slaughtered. Poor people see education as a waste of time and money. Rice comes first.

I dream I am a free person in a free country.

A seven year-old Vientiane kid explained Laos. I develop my authentic character with critical thinking skills, gratitude, abundance and wonder as an independent individual.

If you want to do great things you must take great risks and suffer greatly, said Zeynep. You either let go or get dragged along. 

Awareness. Mindfulness. Compassion.

It's not about people buying this book, Zeynep said. It's about people reading it.

Amazon Kindle and Paperback

Zeynep the heroine genius.

treehouse

I’m broiling on the balcony of my Oregon treehouse.

Getting down and dirty after 1,001 years away from the typewriter. Covered in construction dust and needing oil it’s a small portable dangerous machine. It’s capable of transforming life energies and weaving adventures. Threads follow the needle.

I am a peripatetic traveler, literary outlaw, photographer and journalist. I’m lucky to get it down now and make sense of it later.

I’m a mirror in the mandala of my labyrinth.

I am Labrys, from the Greek for a two-headed axe.

I write with passion and vision.

Short fast and deadly.

Punctuation is a nail.

My mirror reflects everything. I’m confidant and self- reliant. I explore the human condition.

Human energies, frequencies and vibrations reflect languages, lives and attitudes. I absorb being, joy, anger, jealousy, ignorance, desire, fear, passion and suffering. Hurl your thunderbolt unto death.

Meditate on the process of your death.

Suffering is an illusion.

I accept universal illusions. Wishes, values, attitudes, joy, belief systems and dreams project perceptions in my mirror. My mirror is free of dust. I evolve discovering emotional strength, trust, wisdom, peace and love.

I experience forgiveness with emotional honesty. I am tired of beating myself up. I know the words limitations,boundaries, vulnerability and creativity in multiple languages. These truths don’t surprise you after 1,001 years of wandering.

Keep a diamond in your mind.

A Century is Nothing

a 3,000 year old city

“Once upon a time,” Nino said one bright future day as the tribe rolled along, “and such a strange time it was, the gravity of thinking played music in a new century. There was a Spanish man with a hammer. At exactly 9 a.m. on an overcast Cadiz morning he began chipping away at unexplored caverns. The Alio modo Fugue a 2 Clavier by Bach drifted in the background.

“He was building an extension on a roof where housing was scarce and straight up. The only split-level ranch duplexes with multiple garages in sight were American reruns on old battered televisions. He hammered stone under a sheltering sky. It was over 100 degrees. His hands were bleeding. Blood seeped through an old Moorish roof splattering into a room where a writer in exile lived with a blind prophet. Hemoglobin landed on a keyboard. Directly on the letter B. He let it dry. He treasured sudden rare immediate insights. Drops fell and congealed.”

“Fascinating,” Omar said turning a page. “And then?”

“Down below in deep morning shadows Rosario swept her front stoop on Benito Perez Galdos. Her white apron was clean and starched. She swept away yesterday’s accumulated debris and the fine mist of pedestrians coming and going. Old shit, dog urine and dust received her mop’s holy water. Their accumulated real and imaginary sins littered Galdos, heading for the gutter.”

“Let me guess,” said Omar, picking up the thread, “church bells pealed eternal melancholy songs of hope and redemption across from the Castelilo de Santa Catalina, the main citadel of Cadiz built in 1598.”

“Exactly,” Nino said. “Inside tight white oval corridors, an exhibition of black and white photographs depicted Nicaraguan people fishing, polling canoes through tangled jungles, chopping down forests, sitting for the camera, living and laughing.”

“One room held beautiful black handmade fans in tribute to Federico Garcia Lorca. Considered the greatest poet and playwright of 20th century Spain, he was assassinated by members of the Escuadra Negra (Black Squadron) a Franco death squad in August 1936 for his left-wing sympathies and homosexuality.

“He belonged to the Generation of 1927 with Dali and Bunuel identifying with the marginalized Gitanos and woman chained to conventional social expectations in Andalucía. He wrote about entrapment, liberation, passion and repression.

“A long red scarf lay draped over a single rattan chair. Invisible wires held black fans decorated with peacock feathers and rainbow colors suspended in silence. Outside a dark window Atlantic waves smashed ramparts.”

Nino took a breath. Omar peeled an orange skin. 

A Century is Nothing