one village

He was useful here for thirty-seven days. Passion and compassion. Joy and laughter.

Savon, her husband Savuth and two adolescents have a hard rural Cambodian life.
She sold spices in the Siem Reap market.
She dreamed having a small school at her home where village kids could learn English.
Private schools are expensive.

She asked foreigners if they would visit and teach for a short time. Beginning.
They started the school one year ago. EEC - English Education in Community, an NGO in a dusty village.

They advertised on work-away a site for volunteer ops around Earth.
Volunteers come and go. Children need consistency.

Volunteers visited from Japan, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, Australia, USA, and UK. 
The majority stay two weeks or longer. They teach and/or build new rooms and prepare the house before rainy season. $5 a day covers accomodation and meals.

Community. 

Kids learn Japanese, English, have fun, how to think for themselves and help each other.
Fifty kids from 3-18, all levels.
Two classrooms - dirt floors, wooden benches, white board. Limited textbooks. Sigh.

One local Khmer girl, 15, showed exceptional progress translating and helping young ones. He suggested Savon hire her. She did. 

Nature is the teacher.

There are two classrooms at a forelorn pagoda three kilometers away. 

Ride a bike through world dust. Mid-day heat burns everything. Water buffalo, white oxen, rice paddies, naked kids, bamboo homes, ancient wooden structures, flat endless horizons, flaming plastic.

Celebrate your existence. 
Rain is coming. Life blossoms this beauty.

Brushes iPad - Lao mountains

from nature

A mountain loses its spirit without cloud, loses its peculiarity without stones, loses its elegance without trees, and loses its life without water, and in painting, one should concentrate the mind, and hold the breath, with concentration of the mind, serenity is maintained, with the breath held up, preciseness is attained. 

One should be as serene as an old monk in meditation and be as precise as a silk worm in spitting silk.

The spirit and real fun of painting are from nature and beyond brushes and paints. 

a short story

Once upon a time there was a king.

The king wanted a painting. He'd heard about a famous painter in a distant village. "I don't care how much it costs," said the king. He sent a messenger to the painter.

"My king wants a painting," said the messenger. "Ok," said the painter, "give me two million gold coins and come back later." The messenger paid.

The messanger came back a year later. "It's not finished yet," said the painter. "Come back later."

Ten years passed.

The messenger returned. "Where is the painting for the king?"

The painter grabbed a canvas and painted a painting. "Here, give this to the king."

"What, you just made it!" said the messenger.

"Yes," said the painter, "but I've been thinking about it for ten years."

Picasso and Dali discuss life

They are speaking in A Century is Nothing.

"Have you thought of a name for your new work my friend?” asked Dali.

   “Guernica comes to mind,” Pablo said.

   “How appropriate,” Dali replied, stroking his exquisite mustache. “It will become a classic. It will connect the wild subconscious and rationality. It’ll make you famous, old boy.”

   Picasso’s Guernica commemorated the small Basque village of 10,000 in northern Spain. It was market day on Monday, April 27, 1937. In the afternoon waves of planes from the Condor Legion, Heinkel 51s and Junker 52s piloted by Germans blasted Guernica. Survivors found 1,660 corpses and 890 wounded people in the rubble.

   “Be that as it may,” Pablo replied. “Art historians and critics will have their say hey kid. It will shock supporters of social realism and propaganda art in France and Spain.”

   “How did you do it?” Dali queried.

   “From May 1st to June 4th in 1937 I made forty-five drawings on blue or black paper. I incorporated the bull, the horse, classic bullfighting figures and the lantern from my 1935 Minotauromachy. I used the weeping Dora Maar because she has always been a woman who weeps. Guernica is a bereavement letter saying everything we love is going to die. And that is why everything we love is embodied in something unforgettably beautiful, like the emotion of a final farewell.”

   “I still think your vision aspires to greater heights,” said Dali. “Your work contains your fantasies meeting the objective violence of history.”

   “You are too kind my dear Dali. People are talking about your work. Your intentional dreams, so strangely manifested, in the way you masterfully allowed your subconscious free rein on the canvas. Most amazing, your Persistence of Memory.”

   “You are too generous Pablo. I merely reflect the ongoing crisis in society, the surreal absurd nightmare, with shall we say, a twisted rather sordid but truthful elusive creative beast we must acknowledge to allow our perverse authenticity freedom wherever it leads us.”

   “So true my friend, for we are only the conduit of the magic,” said Pablo. “We paint what we see with our innermost senses, born by authentic inner visions.”

   “We are the mysteries speaking through the mysteries,” said Salvador. 

goodpie poetry month

farewell versifiers

feeling sun light

dress saliva beads

blend, weave, texture, tactile, design

hello blind Beauty

words escaped tyranny's memory

express themselves dancing, resilient, radiant

negotiating a fine line as

4 japanese in wheelchairs laugh in Laos

eat noodles spilling syllables