Rice

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

*

A Turkish train chased moon, seawater and oil freighters. Two veiled lovers held hands at a station. Heavy green and purple grapes draped fences around barbwire stations. A sad man waiting for his life to unfold stared at the ground.

He’s married to his mother and her tomato-based history of love, regret, unemployment and zero opportunities.

A commuter ferry sailed across the Bosporus in elemental light. Visions of a Blue Mosque, spires and silver domes sparkled as blue waves swelled hearing artists carve Churning The Sea of Milk at Angkor Wat in the 9th century.

A heavy Chinese rain mutes voices with refined elegance. Moisture softens edges where words slash and stab, committing heinous crimes inside the imagination of lovers stranded in the long sad misfortune of falling water.

The moisture is a blessing for farmers huddled below brown and yellow ponchos planting rice in geometric rows as shallow water stalks reeds.

Rice steams in cauldrons being stabbed by steel spatulas as 15,000 university students stare at empty bowls. Farmers don’t know them, see them or begin to imagine the spoiled ravishing eaters with heads bowed over chipped white rice bowls, not in gratitude but in hunger’s anger being never satisfied and talking with their mouths full spilling grunts of MORE.

The farmers plant rice. They walk along brown dirt dikes inspecting a precious state owned agrarian middle kingdom as pouring rain music bounces off the surface, slides down leaves, collating green feathers.

Twilight’s heavy mist collects in thick clouds rolling over green forested Utopia mountains caressing valleys, streams and rivers, layering fields where silent men and women plant rice stalks one by one becoming invisible. It’s a poetic Tang landscape painting.

Book of Amnesia V1

Earth Speaks

Earth 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 live 100 years. A blink of an eye. Just be kind.

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

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 Pie. A 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 cinder and molten rocks the size of small projectiles into the atmosphere where they fly, float, fall, dance and evaporate in wind.

Curling tsunamis wave goodbye to land.

Nature is a gigantic, sublime, violent experiment. Nature is an awesome, beautiful, terrifying and magnificent dramatic teacher. Magma at work. Do not disturb.

Nature informs humans in clear non-negotiable terms, you adapt, adjust, evolve or you die. You die anyway, said Death. No Exit. This is natural selection.

You have a brain and a big toe. You are destined by natural selection to walk many journeys as a storyteller. Simple as that …

Nature said, I have no plan, agenda, flight plan, schedule, meeting, economy, government, or boarding pass. My departure gate is the crust.

I have total power … I am unpredictable … I am violent and benign … I am gentle, kind and generous … I giveth and I taketh away … Humans with their limited intelligence will never control me, manipulate me or own me … I create and I destroy. That’s my Nature.

Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds, said Oppenheimer witnessing an atomic test blast on the Bikini Atoll, according to Vishnu.

Another manifestation is Mahakala, the Tibetan Lord of Time.

Humans are naïve and lazy. They don’t pay attention to Nature until I shift plates below the Tibetan plateau causing an earthquake or rattle their sushi along The Ring of Fire. Blast off!

Humans use fire to cremate bodies. There are not enough vultures to eat the remains.

Ash, a natural by-product, goes with the flow.

Dummies

Breathe & Move

I am the rebel angel and my tears the trace of one virtue: patience.

You can beat me my time will come. - Max Jacob

Laos

Good writing is about telling the truth.

Write one true sentence.

Write the truest sentence you know.

Find meaning in an experience or feeling.

Perfectionism is a high end version of fear.

Writing needs to breathe and move.

Stay curious & amused by yourself.

*

North Burma

Ride the rails click clack click clack click clack

Nature visions and bamboo forests

silver rivers feel fresh air hanging out the door of a rock’n roll train

rail alliteration starts at 4 AM

space stars open the sky

A red shaped leaf

Fields of lilacs, purple black and gold, butterflies,

sense of stillness, renewal of free rolling spirit,

yellow bamboo leaves at lower elevations,

then green exploding in high lush gardens with fir, pine, evergreens.

Fields being planted

Women and men and children hoeing, watering, turning soil

Say yes to everything.

 

Laos

John Lennon

This didn’t scare the old woman. She was from the ancient school.

“Hmm. Well then, I shall make a small gift for you. Take this.”  She handed him a piece of cloth. It was a coarse, mottled, brown and white checkered wool with faded symbols running the edge.

“Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

“Carry it with you and only use it to clean the mirrors,” she said. “It’s older than sand.” She rolled it up and gave it to him.

“One kindness deserves another,” I said. I rummaged into my pack and pulled out a piece of kamben gringsing cloth.

“Here, this is for you. It is a magic cloth woven on another island. They use bark and roots to make the dye and the cloth is for all their social rituals from birth to death. It will protect you from evil vibrations and, if you ever get sick, soak an edge in water and drink the moisture. It will cure you.”

“Wonderful. Many thanks. Travel safe and look after yourself. Before you go I will reveal a small future to you,” she said. “After Tiglin you will ramble across country to the Killarney hostel where, sadly and unfortunately, you will be awake in the predawn morning of December 8 hearing a BBC news announcer tell the world about John Lennon being shot in New York.

"You will turn your head to the wall and cry. Later you will take the black push bike down narrow wet twisted streets and meet a nun opening heavy steel black church gates and you will tell her what happened. You will push open the heavy wooden doors, genuflect, cross yourself, walk the length of a cold aisle and light votive candles in silence.

"Then you will ride into town and go to every news agent to buy every Irish paper with the screaming black tabloid headlines full of desperate black ink and grainy images of death personified before retiring to a pub to sit by a peat fire drinking, reading, and sadly, quietly remembering John’s creativity and his words Imagine and Give Peace a Chance.”

A Century is Nothing

Beauty & Respect

Tell me about the village. It is a microcosm.

Simple happy people live, work, breed and die.

They know desire, anger and ignorance exists outside the village.

Inside they practice compassion and meditation. They love singing and dancing.

They cherish nature with beauty and respect.

They accept responsibility for their choices and actions with free will.

A free people they practice gratitude with an open heart-mind.

Kind and loving they walk to the pagoda or wat

daily to make offerings and receive blessings from the monks.

They sit in meditation together. Their calm heart-mind is a lotus blossom.

A monk rings a bell.

Echoes flow to the village and beyond. Frequencies and vibrations dance.