Tranquility

Sitting in a quiet zone noon hour
Nourishment
Zen equilibrium peace

Overhead fan curls churns air
Grandmother peels purple grapes
Mother waits for noodle soup people

Son plays homework game on phone
Chattering with friends, no TV, no obscure blaring idiot box
Voices from slurping nurses, doctors, poor Lao patients
Wait for a miracle of modern medicine

It's quiet enough for scribbles, a poem story
Tranquility
Stranger sits alone
As whirling fan
Discovers invisible air

Angkor Wat

Wisdom Mind

Memory spoke: After they cut my tongue out during my re-education through shit labor experience I started writing script. I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire.

I added a little water to a recessed gray stone surface. I placed the ink in the center. Then, using my right hand, as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me, I rotated the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid as a drop of water rippled a pond.

After collecting ink I selected my white wolf hair brush. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin rice paper. I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, with my left palm flat on the table and fingers spread.

I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink and slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess. I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality and character. There are 7,000 characters in my written language.

My Chinese script is about unity of mind and spirit.
I have much to see and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth.

My teacher recited a poem.

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.

I stood up straight inhaled three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness. I centered my unconscious on blank paper filled with nothing. Respect white emptiness.

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.

The Language Company

Burma

Courage

On his final day in Ankara he shared a Chinese calligraphy poem with adult students.

It was a Qing dynasty gift from primary students in a rural Sichuan school. This visual simplicity symbolized impermanence.

Bright beautiful elementary children in a radiant universe wearing Young Chinese Communist Pioneer red scarves around well-scrubbed necks sitting upright at colorful plastic desks raised hands when he asked questions yelling, “Let me try, let me try!”

Young brave students had the courage to say this.

Older students at a Chinese middle school, Chinese university and at TLC were aged, silenced and dumbed down through tyranny, fear and oppressive parental and educational brainwashed ideological structural systems.

Shame married Guilt, producing twins. The more the merrier.

Adults had lost their instinctual curiosity, humor and enthusiasm. Only primary kids had the courage to say, “Let me try, let me try.”

Their beautiful pictographic black ink calligraphy read, “One day a man climbed into the mountains and reached a hut. He met some children.”

“Where is the teacher?” he said.

“They pointed up the mountain covered by clouds. ‘He is not here, he’s gone into the mountains to look for herbs.’”

He folded the poem creasing Chinese ideograms where latitudes and longitudes met horizons.

His linguistic healing efforts departed Ankara with Bamboo.

The Language Company

China

Floating

massage girls
wait with white sheets on brown tables
under red umbrellas
resting on golden sand

cuticle management women
tread sand looking for needy nails

lost fat Russians slather on UV 30+
stare inland at backpackers

young eyes down on phone fingers
TEXT ME lonely baby of my heart and soul

mind rapture

a lone swimmer backstrokes
in calm blue green water

a small boat engine hums
toward a green forested is-land

floating away
on the surface of reality

in a dream bubble
laughing in the divine comedy

River

A river sang
Please don't push me

You can't push me
You can't step in me twice
You can try
Everyone fails

I am from the source
Consider my source
When you drink me

Tibetan clouds obscure granite peaks
Climb high

Humans carry a short life on their back
Women wear love's labor
Feeling a child's warmth behind them
Harvest

Heartbeats mingle
Possibilities and potentials
Dreaming their long walk through jungles forests along a river

Be a river
Below the surface of appearances

Crescent yellow moon
Reflects hello dream

Dance on my surface
I am a mirror

Beauty before me
Beauty behind me
Beauty to my left
Beauty to my right
Beauty below me
Beauty above me

I am wide deep
I flow forever

No beginning no end

Are your needs being met

Mountain asked River
In the stream of life
Flow