Tribal Narrator

After they cut out my tongue I started writing script.

I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire. I added a little water to a gray stone surface and placed the ink in the center.

Using my right hand as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me I turned the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid. A drop of water rippled a pond.

I picked up my long heavy brush with pure white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper.

I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, my left palm flat on the table with fingers spread.

I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink then slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess.

I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality character. There are at least 5,000 characters in my written language.

I have much to learn and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth.

I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness.

I centered my unconscious on the paper filled with nothing. My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus.

I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit.

Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

My useless tongue flapped in the cold December Himalayan wind. Stories and songs were birds. I heard children laughing and singing. Playing with strings of word pearls they greeted each other in the babble of nothing.

They dream with eyes open.

When we are asleep we are awake.

I memorize ancient chants with black ink soaking through parchment skin.

I am not of this world.

I sit with a diamond in my mind. It reflects 10,000 things. It is free of the five dusts: greed, anger, pride, hatred, and jealousy.

I sing my tongue-less body electric.

Where do I park this empty vehicle?

I have paintings, poems, stories, translations of oral traditions to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

If I had more time I’d make them shorter.

Bubble Life

Greetings from a sleepy little town down south along the mighty Mekong,

After finding a pillow and delicious local cold java swimming in a glass you get a hair cut and your ears cleaned.

It's essential, as we've said previously, from China, Vietnam, Cambodia and now Laos to relax.

Sit back close your eyes hearing the whirling overhead fan rotating like helicopter rotor blades over rapid cobalt rivers inside deep forested green jungles, skimming granite mountains, swooping toward rice valleys allowing a thin man with shiny silver tools to clean, vibrate, scrape, identify, probe, assess, magnify, illustrate and remove old historical debris, leaves, brooms, the click-clack of shuttles, blue and yellow butterflies, children's laughter, language acquisition cycles, tonal frequencies, vibrational shifts and so forth.

A new marveLaos gallery is live.

http://tmleonard.squarespace.com/marvelaos/

It contains clouds, art, design, black & white, wats, paper making, rice threshing, weavers, kids and big serious humans.

The Luang Prabang airport has one simple concrete runway. The control tower needs a coat of paint.

There are two gates. A French tourist is worried because their boarding pass has a big number approaching infinity. "We only have two gates," said the serene and helpful girl behind a desk.

"Oh, my goodness," said the tourist holding a can of white paint and a brown sable hair brush. "I was so worried I wouldn't get home for Christmas. I mean I was feeling so anxious and neurotic and lost and dazed and confused and sullen and tired and suddenly I felt comfortable in a calm way knowing I will realize my vacation dream and paint a control tower at a small airport in Asia." 

"Be a work of art or wear a work of art," said the smiling girl, or, as Picasso asked, "what is color?"

Metta.

Paper is an essential part of Lao life. The art of paper is in the making, using, honoring paper in the community and burning paper to honor ancestors. Artists use white fibers from plant stems to make paper. To soften it they mix it with ash and soak it in wood fired 55 gallon drums. They pound it to a pulp. The woman spreads fibers over a screen. It is dried in the sun and used to create tactile textured paper books, umbrellas, bags, cards, lanterns, envelopes and airport control towers.

iPhone test entry

Greetings,

Once upon a time before I invented the Internet I created poems, stories and comprehensive travel dreams using paper and pen. Notebooks, flattened by geological pressure, strata layers, spirals, Fibbonaci.

Even using pencils or crayons or watercolor brushes. Be the paper. Be the brush, the ink, the water. It wasn't clean which always made it creative, fun, exploratory and a mess. A beautiful mess.

Then I used a typewriter. I carried a red portable Smith Corona around Ireland for two years. Working as an au pair in Dundrum, then as a youth hostel warden in Wicklow, Donegal, Mayo and Killarney.

I used inexpensive thin paper and carbon paper. The carbon paper was the original "save" feature. Sheets in a thin box. Valuable and recycled until every space became blackened, white dreams where words played, escaping like free wild geese in Ennisfree. Oh. I amost forgot, yes ribbons. Ribbons for the machine.They were black and came on stainless steel spools. They were packed in small clear plastic bags in a box from a stationary shop on a small Dublin side street. I used a toothbrush to clean the keys.

It was a sweet, fast lightweight machine. Kinda like this iPhone tool. Same-same but different. Wow! Star-techie.

I'll always prefer the heart-hand connection holding a pen, feeling the nib on paper, seeing ink marry paper.

Metta.

Small paper gifts open doors

Settling into the flow of the street, city, parks, lakes, and people. It's a joy.

Irony of remembering arriving about a year ago in Jakarta from Turkey. How, during the long flight I studied packaging, how plastic wrap and tin foiled meals are air tight and require a degree in engineering to open them without spilling the contents everywhere.

Miles of tourists waited to have their passports stamped so they could get to Balinese temples, massage parlors and blue-green waves of laughter along some forgotten coast. Where palm oil plantation owners destroy the rain forest so women have sweet facial cosmetics. Where poor farmers kill elephants with poison laced pineapples for the black market ivory trade. Where people spend more time looking back than forward.

How the young immigration man asked me, "Do you have a return ticket?"

No.

"Come with me." He led me to a desk where he talked to another man. My school employer had failed to tell me I needed a return ticket - they assumed I would be stopping in Singapore for a visa but this was never explained. Clearly.

They talked. The man returned. "You need a ticket out." I took my passport from him, opened it and put a $100 note inside. "Will this help?" His eyes brightened, meaning yes. Money talks.

He returned to the box office, whispered to a colleague stamping tired expectant tourist faces and led me down the hall toward immigration officials. We passed rows of people waiting for their final turn at Stamp Entry Verification Headquarters. He went to an important man sitting in his cubicle staring at a computer. Mr. Big.

"Go through and wait there," he said, pointing to the free zone. He handed my passport to the man, they talked, the official stamped my document and returned it to him. He walked over, handed it to me, smiled and said, "Welcome to Indonesia."

"Thank you for your help. Goodbye."

When I shared this memory with the woman in charge of administration for foreign teachers she smiled, "Yes, that's the way things are done here."

So it goes.

Metta.