her eyes are the world

A voice was missing.

Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious Chinese children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in Maija village shoe factories years away from wealthy cities and dummies in display windows. 

One joy was selecting the cover photograph. The girl’s image expressed emotional honesty with natural innocence.

She was trapped behind a hard steel grate-full educational reality.

Her eyes held world secrets and unlimited potential. She’d stared at a professional stranger and an aberration in her universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her. She was trapped against a locked gate. He was on the other side.

He raised a small black machine to his eye. She heard a subtle click. A shutter opened and closed freezing time, capturing her soul on a memory-fiction card. He smiled, thanked her and disappeared.

She had no way to know her child eyes would grace a book cover for everyone to see, breathing her immortality in alchemical manifestations.

He’d visited her primary school speaking strange unintelligible words and singing and dancing.

His laughter and smiles were a relief for the kids after the autocratic, punishing manner of bored illiterate women teachers. They didn't want to be prisoners any more than the kids.

No one had a choice here.

You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability, fear and shame ordered from Beijing well removed from a world where farmers followed oxen in rice paddies.

Green rice stalks revealed their essence below a blue sky in mud and meadows of reality.

A Century is Nothing

short odds

kick boxers attack green mangoes

chopping white ice while

shifting gears after school in wind

cradled infants

dying of malnutrition

wail at the cambodian hospital

for a free blue placebo pill

(an orange pill is $1.50)

smelling charcoal fired waffles

a boy pedals his bike seeking

recycled trash

before wicker baskets say hello

spare change searches for user value

collecting cardboard images in a squall

red ink meets onion paper at an intersection

whispering secrets without speaking 

Reading in Mandalay

notes from nepal

Tibetan energies. Joy. Laughter.

This joy - new beginning - transformation.

Empty/full.

At this very moment  they look and leave.

Abstract metaphorical language.

Non-attachment.

Ink whispers it's secrets of silent mystery where life is found in a desperate situation.

Balancing precariously.

Young boys stare at a scriptor.

The blind lead the blind.

Everything is Under Construction at the Source.

The vast self.

Existential awareness.

Cessation of sensation and perception.

It's a walking meditation.

Rivers, like people, only know why they were born when they reach the end.

Poverty and illiteracy. I work, I breed, I get slaughtered.

Imagined or invented conversations and episodes.

Fiction is a tool for unveiling, not obscuring the truth.

Literary fiction expounds historical truth.

The necessity of that moral choice.

Bookends of Bhaktapur. In between 90 years/moments. 90 breaths.

Non-attachment.

Sitting.

Awareness of energies.

Fleeting impressions. Images tell visual stories.

Illuminate expand invent.

Passing through.

Light, bell, crow morning. Laughing sparrow. Little wing.

Translations, transitions, transformations.

Zen path. Diamond in mind.

Haiku.

Short, fast and deadly.

Boudhanath, Nepal

Lhasa

Becoming

Begin this day at dawn.

Pashupatinath Hindu cremation ceremony along Bagmati River.

Shiva is the destroyer and creator.

Wood pyres. A woman kisses her shrouded husband goodbye.

Light his fire.

Fire is the beginning and end.

Fire is your rosé flame.

Stir his bones.

His ashes flutter with death and mortality.

Silence. Solemnity. Serenity. Grounded and transient. Flowers. Offerings.

Glorious color dancing fire.

Return to Source. 

one day

A traveler joined a Jewish and Turkish man talking over tea at the Bursa silk market in an exquisite stone Caravansary.

“I lost today,” said the Jewish man.

“What do you mean," said his friend. “You made 3,000,000 Lira.”

“Yes, but I lost one day.”