Spin Your Wheels

I have a spaceship here in SR.

It’s disguised as an old reliable small black Japanese made folding bike with 20” wheels and five gears.

It cost 50 bones a year ago at the used bike market across town or, if space travel is your lingo, across the universe. It’s fun to spin the wheels.

Considering many Khmer vehicle operators have a death wish, riding the bike is more akin to playing Russian roulette in traffic. Slow is the mantra.

While walking is the preferred way to travel especially for street photography the bike is fun.

Every kid needs a bike.

Like Laos, it’s a motorcycle culture here with many young immature zombies talking on phones while driving at high speeds.

Caution is advised. Traffic laws are nonexistent.

You do see the occasional partial roadblock by police when they stop drivers w/o helmets.

The tender gravity of kindness says howdy hi howdy ho.

Buddhist Khmer are soft and gentle. They live in the now. The advantage is being present.

The challenge for them is to focus on more than one thing at a time. This unpleasant fact is illuminated by their dopamine addiction to phones + everyone talking at once w/o comprehension. Embrace chaos.

Gadgets make great babysitters.

For the majority it’s about entertainment distractions not information.

Relationships here are like adopting a child.

All the adults need childlike supervision.

Fragrance

Khmer woman 70 in wheelchair

Dances her smile
Extends worn plastic basket

Grateful for .50

Her smile a fragrance

Beauty remembers graciousness
Facial treatment waxes poetic
Edges of bi-lingual tongues express calligraphy

Older now a Khmer woman
Still carries a bathroom weight scale

Around Siem Reap
Step on it
Small money enough for rice

Strangers destined to wait
Confront their deepest fears
At the intersection of Courage & Creativity

The menu is not the meal

Grow Your Soul

China Street

Here's a passage from an abandoned Moleskine notebook on street life in China.

After a long steady heavy rain

a pregnant woman propped her mop made of discarded rainbows -

as her solemn dispassionate husband shucked peas before removing garlic shells from their protective casing

after sky finished crying

washing student street where parades of disenfranchised youth sought shelter from the storm

open windows released cello notes

as a child sitting rigid practiced tuning their eyes to black notes on white pages

determined to master the instrument to please her parents

another music student hammered piano keys behind locked doors to please his parents

flies gathered around brown sticky paste dripping off a cracked plate

as feelers extended hope toward a thin white butterfly lifting off a green leaf

Type A

Type B

Mindful

Mindfulness gives you time.

Time gives you choices.

Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom.

You don't have to be swept away by your feelings.

You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.

Blindness solved the mystery of sight by crying tears of silence.

A van of sad white Europeans trapped behind glass held repressed rampant desires and expectations in Siem Reap.

Fidgeting with uncomfortable languages floating in inner ears they pretended to be interested in nature's fleeting formless form flashing past starvation's widows.

Assaulting long painful strides navigating tomorrow’s promise they sat stone cold feeling nothing.

Look and leave people.

Blindness resolved to practice the subtle art of Tai-Chi with precision.

Blindness exchanged Midnight Blue ink for a dark shade of racing green in a Mont Blanc 146 piston driven fountain pen.

A handheld hair dryer waved hot air over a shampooed head. Mirrors whispered secret illusions.

A Vietnamese salon owner replaced a straight razor blade. She sprayed water on an invisible traveler's crown. He closed his eyes. She edged her blade over and around his head, ears, down his neck across Buddhist temples.

A 4:00 a.m. gong suspended on a rope carried on a bamboo pole reverberated its magic echo through Yangon stone corridors. A woman flamed incense.

Chattering fish sellers bagged swimming protean.

Elements of silence said farewell.

Random eyes investigating decompression swallowed fresh yogurt with peach slices inside afternoon’s languishing empty promises.

Intention and motivation discovered a new day by day.

Explanations have to end somewhere said a well-dressed mistake.

In her village, the other world, Blindness threaded new rainbows. Her loom experienced pressure and tightness between notes.

Sunlight dressed saliva beads blending a weave, texture, design saying hello Beauty.

Beauty has no tongue.

She whispered, I have been waiting for you.

Improbabilities

I disappear into possibilities
floating into a parallel
universe
outside 3 dimensional improbabilities
on string theories of 10-26 dimensions

drumming ancient hieroglyphics
hammering stone dulcimers
polishing Dali marble

breathe melting snow
dream love floods
screaming eagles float

below Snow Dragon shadows

Lao Girl Reflects World