music muse

A word mercenary is free and roaming.
Roaming changes may apply.
Smiling is a virus.
Intuitive improvisation is a sign of genius.
Slowing down is the name. Exploring is the game.
Vientiane airport. A man pushes an empty wheelchair across airport tarmac.
Boarding pass woman does eyeliner.
The modern stainless steel global glass hair port design hasn't reached Vientiane time warp.
Laughter is the Beauty.
Transitions are radiant and clear.
One life, no plan, many adventures.
Intention. Mindfulness. Impermanence.
Ancient stories.
Music is the muse feeling alive on the ground in Luang Prabang.

Clean air, excellent light, brown scared rocks, elevations, green rolling hills, deep valleys and long visions.

Ancestor Worship - TLC 55

After a year at TLC and a year in Indonesia he rented a room near Lenin Park for four months. Dream Sweeper Machine evidence verified life in Hanoi.

He planned to burn a hardback copy of A Century is Nothing near Hue where he was transformed. Sacrifice. Omar said, please gift to three Vietnamese-Australian girls you meet in Ho Chi Minh before you walk to Cambodia. They’ll carry it back to Sydney. Sharing is caring. He did.

His Hanoi neighbors were Sam and Dave. Sam’s the kid. Dave is Daddy. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin or new Yin and old Yang. 

Dave had kids so he and his wife had someone to yell at. They needed someone, anyone to take care of them in old age sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 dancing kitchen smells with the sweet memory of insistent incense. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000 cash up front or no deal. Pay to play. Dave and his wife pretended to need kids so offspring would feed them later. When you’re young and naive multiple pregnancies are paramount. Accelerate production comrades.

It’s easy to produce kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are ninety million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the popular Communist Party bestseller, Produce & Consume.

Get married early the pressure is on. Honor off her.

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, and forgotten. Loneliness and alienation increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and instability in a well-mannered informer-driven paranoid society. 

Extreme pressure is on girls to get a husband.

Hi. My name is Li. I am almost 14. I speak excellent English. I finished nine years of school in my village. I learned what I really needed to know on the street of life. What I really needed to know to survive. What I really needed to know to make money. What I really needed to sustain my curiosity and sense of humor. I use really a lot.

Don’t let school interfere with your education.  

More tourists than travelers visit Sapa. It’s near The Middle Kingdom. I've never been there. It’s an old civilization. Someday I plan to go back to school. It’s good to have a plan. If you fail to plan you plan to fail better. I have a dream, to be.

I’m not talking about the hungry, angry, crazy, confused day-trippers from Hanoi or HCMC. They never talk to us. They are busy eating, drinking, fooling around with special friends at the nightclubs and buying cheap Chinese products. They don’t buy from us. They buy a lot of junk. They must be rich.

They make me laugh. You can always tell who they are: 1) they arrive on big white buses polluting pristine air 2) they wear bright red baseball hats so they don’t get lost ha, ha, ha 2) they travel in packs like scared animals 3) they stay in government hotels and eat at Vietnamese places 4) they ignore me.

No, I’m talking, and I speak excellent English among other languages about the foreigners. My friends and I working the street politely pestering visitors to buy our handicrafts, embroidery work and offering guided treks, don’t call the foreigners real travelers because they are only here for 2-3 days. It’s weird. Sapa is a beautiful place and they don’t stay long. In and out people.

Tourists have a holiday schedule. I think a vacation means free time. Time is free isn't it? A Greek guy named Arrest Throttle said time is the greatest wealth or maybe it was health. They’re related.

Anyway, they eat, sleep, wander around and maybe if I’m lucky take a trek to my village and then, POOF - like magic they disappear. 

Then the tourist machine spits out more day-trippers for us to sell to pester and offer village treks. Some want to see the real deal. They want to experience nature and the real Sapa. Life is all about meeting, engaging and establishing emotional connections with people.

It’s about what you feel not what you understand. I feel free.

Engage-study-activate.

Some stay overnight in my village, which is fantastic because by avoiding the greedy hotel middlemen after profit, my folks make some small money.

For instance, all the Vietnamese hotels - H’mong people don’t own hotels or guesthouses because we are free - charge tourists $25 for a day trek. So, let’s say they get ten. Do the math. $250. The hotel guy gives me $5-10.

I am smart. I meet trekkers the day before and agree to take them out at a discount before they pay the hotel. I show up early. 90% of life is showing up. I heard a foreigner say that. One said that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you deal with it. I am a wise owl.

I take them out, down hills, up hills, across rivers, through valleys and forests into villages and we have lunch with my family. Foreigners love it. They discover how calm and beautiful nature is. They slow down. They sit and talk with my mom and dad. They take some snaps. Here we are.

Then we follow trails through forests, crossing rivers, trekking along rice paddies, climbing up and down hills and I bring them home. They are happy and tired. They are happy to pay me for their experience. This is why I deal directly with tourists and trekkers. I am a smart, aggressive little businesswoman. I eliminate the middleman, ha, ha. Does that make me a middle woman?

I live in the middle way.

I’m learning more English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Pashto, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Arabic, Swedish meatballs and Italian from them since I was a kid tomorrow. I love pizza with cheese. I learned this from tourists with cameras, Say cheese.

It’s fucking hilarious.

They say cheese and freeze. They stare at a little black mechanical box. What’s up with that? Squeeze a memory. Some really get to know us. They are intelligent and thoughtful and seem to really care about us, how we live, work-play, evolve and grow as human beings. They want to understand at a cultural level why we are considered minority savages by the Vietnamese and get screwed. Literally.

Many are super friendly. They don’t leave a mess like trash and stuff.

I’ll tell you a secret. Many of us stay in Sapa. We share a room for $20 a month so we can get to the hotels early and meet tourists who want to go trekking. It’s more convenient than walking home that takes two hours and…you understand. 

My friends and I have a lot of fun in the room. It has beds and a toilet. We talk, sing songs and do our embroidery work. I’m a great little trek leader.

I am a private operator. It’s nice to do what you love and love what you do.

Nature is my teacher. Life is good in Sapa. Bye-bye and good luck.

The Language Company

Han Shan

I follow my impulsive feet

wherever they might go

my body is a pine tree

surrounded by the snow

sometimes I simply stand

beside a flowing stream

sometimes I chase a drifting 

cloud past another peak

- Han Shan Te-Ch'ing (1546-1623)

Translated by Red Pine

Kalapuya

I am an old dialect of Kalapuya tribes. I respect the spirit energies. I hear with my eyes and see with my ears. I understand your love for the spirit power guardian. I am an ancestor speaking 300 languages from our history. Now only 150 dialects remain.

A hunting gathering people, speaking Pentian, we numbered 3,000 in 1780. We believed in nature spirits, vision quests and guardian spirits. Our shamans, called amp a lak ya taught us how seeking, finding and following one’s spirit or dream power and singing our song was essential in community.

I speak in tongues, in ancient dialects about love. They are dialects of ancestors who lived here for 8,000 years before where you are now. In the forest near the river all animal spirits welcome you with their love. They are manifestations of your being.

I am blessed to welcome you here. You have walked along many paths of love to reach me.

My dirt path is narrow and smooth in places, rocky in others. I am the soil under your feet. I feel your weight, your balance - your weakness and your strength. I hear your heart beating as my ancestors pounded their ceremonial drums. I feel the tremendous surging force of your breath extend into my forest. Wind accepts your breath.

I am everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. I am the oak, the fir and pine trees spreading like dreams upon your outer landscape. I am your inner landscape. I see you stand silent in the forest hearing trees nudge each other. “Look,” they say, “someone has returned.”

I love the way you absorb the song of brown body thrush collecting moss for a nest. I am the small brown bird saying hello. I am the sweet-throated song you hear without listening. At night two owls sing their distant song and their music fills your ears with mystery and love.

I am warm spring sun on your face filtered through leaves of time. I am the spider’s web dancing with diamond points of light. I am the rough fragile texture of bark you gently remove before connecting the edge of an axe with wood.

You carry me through my forest. Your flame creates heat of love. I am the taste of pitch on your lips, the odor of forest in your nostrils filling your lungs. It is sweet.

I am the cold rain and wet snow and hot sun, and four seasons. I am yellow, purple, and red, blue, and orange flowers from brown earth.

Language cannot be separated from who you are and where you live.

I say this so you will remember everything in this forest. I took care of this place and now your love has the responsibility with respect and dignity and mindfulness.

fish likes hamburgers

A Siem Reap street juggler balanced a flaming stick on his nose.

Tourists owed and awed.

A traveler spread thirty watercolor pens on a table.

“Here.”

“Can I use them?” said Lukas.

“Yes you may. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Color your dreams.”

Lukas drew two blue dragons and some red slashes.

“The top one is the dragon elephant. This one on the bottom can fly. Between them is a dead fish. They are fighting over it.”

“Why are they fighting?”

“They are hungry dragons.”

Lukas drew another fish outside the battle.

“This fish likes hamburgers.”