Earth Day

Greetings,

If you're reading this while flying the friendly skies, Earth is outside and way below. Millions of you are to be congratulated for finally managing to escape the forces of gravity.

You have successfully overcome terminal inertia. You have departed one small place on Earth for another small place on Earth. You deserve a medal.

Step outside your plane for panoramic views of infinity. This may be your last and final chance to be famous.

You hope Earth is there when the machine goes down. If it's not there check the overhead compartment for an instruction manual. Please read the fine print.

Mr. Gripe in seat 23A turned to Ms. Impatient. He talked with his mouth full. "You know, I used to complain about airline food, but this processed chicken is ok." Ms. Impatient, being well lubricated by 90-proof fuel dribbled saliva down the front of her urine stained blouse she'd used as a towel. "Yeah, it ain't half bad. Want my peaches?" They were succulent shock absorbers.

If you're on terra firma, plant a seed, start a community garden, spread manure, water the orchids, smell the roses. Practice a walking meditation.

Nature is your inspirational teacher. Celebrate your daily existence on Earth.

Metta.

Ash fallout

Greetings,

As hostage travelers get a grip and get a life discovering the diverse thrills of living in airports, bus and train stations along life's tortuous path Ash flies merrily along, singing a song, Blow Wind Blow.

Humans are learning how to mill around. They are learning how to adapt, adjust and evolve in situations and consequences outside their control. Many practice meditation. They know that suffering is an illusion. They make new international friends in transportation hubs. They learn how to share. Some are grateful. They get married, have kids, get divorced and attend correspondence schools in transit lounges. Some mature. A few are beginning to understand that air travel is not so exciting. After all.

The soul travels at the speed of a camel. Walking is the way.

Such a terrible hard unpleasant fact. Life goes on. Nature loves the drama. Especially at the expense of humans. 

Comments from the ground echo through thin atmosphere. Ash is all ears. 

It's a crying shame how Nature does this to us. 
It's all about money and greed, citing airline, hotel and food suppliers. It's about supply and demand. It's about taking advantage of the situation. It's about PROFIT.
People scream, "I hate the government." People cry, "I want my government to save me, to get me home, to get me out of this horrible mess."

Artists slow down and create masterpieces.
Sue Iceland.
Throw all the bankers into the volcano.

Sam, an African farmer from Kenya believe it, drinks a Bloody Merry in Asia and yaks on his cell phone to friends about his boat and how difficult it is here to live and get decent food and how he's not REALLY interested in the 19-year old bar girls.

He is surrounded by smelly containers filled with rotting fruit and wilting flowers destined for white rich folks in Europa, a brand of Confusion. He leaves messages on answering machines. He orders another bloody drink.

Old frail Sam wobbles away on thin legs thinking, "I don't get home until the 3rd. I'm going to die before I see my boat."

He's one of those terribly sad rich men reading the fine print, NO EXIT. Lost and alone he strums his sad guitar. "I look at the world and see it is sleeping while my guitar gently weeps." Ash understands with empathy. Empathy is a circle. 

The reality on the ground is that international travelers are not starving. They are not homeless. They are not begging in the streets. They are not whining, sniveling idiots. No. They are learning a hard fast lesson about the vagaries of travel. They are learning why it is important to always have a supply of energy bars and a towel.

Lost and alone in a vast empty Departure area is a little girl in a white dress. She wears bright red shoes. She clicks her heels together three times and says, "I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home."

Fly the friendly skies. They call it ADVENTURE TRAVEL. 

Metta.

Ash China

Greetings,

Ash heard two jokes in Iceland.

After Iceland caused a financial meltdown in 2008 Europeans wanted cash not ash.
Icelandic people don't want their ashes spread all over Europe.

Europeans, rather than accept accountability, escape the responsibility by blaming someone, somewhere, somehow for this beautiful majestic natural mess.

According to Mr. Bisignani of the International Air Transport Association, "This is a European embarrassment and it's a European mess. The decision that Europe has made is with no risk assessment, no consultation, no co-ordination, no leadership," he said.

"Europeans are still using a system based on a theoretical model which does not work... instead of using a system and taking decisions on facts and on risk assessment."

Ash currently holds 6.8 million travelers hostage around the world. It is the largest hostage situation in the history of mankind since Red China held 1.6 billion citizens hostage in the spring of 2010. 

Ash flew to China to verify this unpleasant fact. Ash rested inside 1.6 billion pairs of ears.

Easy to say and hard to do they say in China.
Speaking of China in Mandarin, you can get your ears cleaned there.
What! Really?

Yes. Now it happened at the empty Chinese opera one afternoon in Chengdu, you sit down in a wicker chair and give the girl in a blue uniform 10Y or slightly more than a buck. A group of Chinese men in wicker chairs drinking tea stare and laugh at you. Everyone stares at you in China because it is a zoo and you are an exotic humanoid species of endless speculation.

Look at the funny foreigner! He’s going to get his ears cleaned. Boy is he in for a surprise!

You sit back and close your eyes. She has all the tools; long steel wires, cotton swabs, some ointment, a microscopic spoon on a post and a pair of stainless steel tongs.

She probes into your right ear with the spoon and digs out hard brown wax. She flicks it on the ground where it becomes part of Ear Wax Mountain, a new wonder of the World. She swabs and cleans out your ear with a small cotton ball on a thin wire.

While this is buried in your ear she taps the tongs creating a vibrating frequency. She touches the steel rod in your ear and you hear the WHIRLING BUZZ BUZZ as 1,000 bees and cicadas invade your consciousness with a deafening crescendo.

She has opened your aural chambers big time taps the tongs again, and you receive the echo chamber canyon of sound, the WHIRLING BUZZ like sandpaper being rasped against old fibers of skin or yes, the fast centrifugal centrifuge of heartbeat reactors, roaring rivers inside a galaxy of weightless streams. BUZZ!

So she eases it out, massages your temples and your eyes are closed and you are dreaming you are in a Chinese opera playing the role of an old dramatic hero dying at his post after proclaiming his undying love for family and harmonious social order and stability in the country.

She attacks and cleans the other ear and the vibrations take you away.

BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ! Far away. She caresses your ears with something soft, massages your temples and scalp and when she finishes you no longer have a hearing problem. It’s all in the listening. You’ve been buzzed back to clarity.

Everything that goes in the ear comes out as language. It becomes a tool for emotion and expression.

Metta.

Gypsy Ash

Greetings,

Welcome to Earth.

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It is a spinning rock with a core, mantle and crust. It is cold in the winter and hot in the summer. It's round, wet and crowded. Fortunate humans maybe live 100 years. A blink of the eye. 

The core is 1,800 miles below the surface. It is a dense ball of iron and nickel. The inner core temperature is 6700F. The inner core is 750 miles thick.

The outer core is 1,370 miles thick.

The mantle is above the core. The mantle is 1,800 miles thick.
The crust is 3.14 or apple Pi. Or as a statistical genius said, 'there are lies, damn lies and statistics.'

Deep inside the core fire burns through levels of shifting Teutonic plates, shuddering massive pressure, blathering hot embers, fumes, mixing gases, molten silica, and impatient promiscuous sulphuric acids.

This natural evolutionary pressure creates a gigantic orgasm, spewing, releasing, exploding, melting, through the mantle to the crust, surface and into the atmosphere. My volcano blasts ash and cinder and molten rocks the size of small projectiles into the atmosphere where it flies, floats and dances in wind. 

Nature is a gigantic, sublime, violent experiment. Nature is awesome, beautiful, terrifying and magnificent dramatic lesson in natural laws. Magma at work. Do not disturb.

Nature is a wonderful teacher. Nature informs humans in clear non-negotiable terms, 'you adapt, adjust, evolve or you die. This is natural selection.'

Simple as that. Nature says, 'unfortunately for living species, I have no agenda, flight plan, schedule, meeting, commerce, economy, plan, or boarding pass. My departure gate is the crust.

'I have a free pass. I have total power. I am unpredictable. I am violent and I am benign. I am gentle, kind and generous. I giveth and I taketh away. Humans will never completely with their severely limited intelligence control me, manipulate me or own me. I have vast powers. I create and I destroy. That's my Nature.

'Some humans call me Shiva, the Auspicious One. I am the destroyer of life. Fire is my source of power.

'Another manifestation is Mahakala, the Lord of Time.'

Humans are naturally naive. Naivety and stupidity and laziness is their Nature. They don't listen or pay attention to Nature until it, for example, shifts the plates below the Tibetan plateau causing an earthquake. The natural result is loss of life because shoddy buildings built by greedy humans all fall down.

Humans use fire to cremate bodies because there are not enough vultures to eat the remains. So it goes.

Ash, on the other hand, a buy product of Nature goes with the flow.

Metta.

A World Without Planes...read more 

Dance hall

Greetings,

The dancing hall at Preah Khan is where dancers don't smile. They dance. They are slave dancers, all the women.

They dance for the king. He is the god-king. He has resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs, new decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, conquest, harvests, seasons, sun, and moon. 

They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. They dance the celebration of tranquility. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. They wear diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.

One dances to escape the tyranny. She's danced all her short, sweet life.

The hall of dancers is surrounded by columns, portals and broken jumbled green moss stones. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots crawl toward dancers. They dance through roots, past Shiva and Vishnu. The preserver and destroyer of life. 

Two foreign dancers dance with guide books. Golden leafed pages dance past their eyes. A guide who knows everything watches them. They are blind. He dances alone.

Metta.

Phimeamakas, Preah Pithu, Thommanon, Chau Say Thevoda...