a Japanese friend translates a poem

We met in Bhaktapur, Nepal three hundred years ago.

He has a famous beard, laughs a lot and writes haiku.

His wife is known for her oils and watercolor paintings with a touch of fantastic harmony and mystery.

Every morning we sat near a Hindu temple when a man rang a huge iron bell at 7:30. Exactly.

Ame ni mo  Makezu (Be not Defeated by the Rain)

standing against the rain,

standing against the wind,

standing against the snow,

the intense heat of summer

keeping a strong body

free from desire

free from anger

regardless, smiling peacefully

four bowls of brown rice

miso, a few vegetables, enough for a day

putting myself aside in everything

taking care of others first

watching, listening carefully to the inner meaning,

appreciating

never forgetting

beside the pine forest in the field

sitting in a little thatched roof house

hearing news about a sick child in the east

I go and nurse him

hearing news about a tired mother in the west

I go and help her, rice bundles on my back

hearing news about a man on his death bed in the south

I go and comfort him

hearing news about a quarrel or lawsuit in the north

I go and tell them not to be so petty

weeping with them in a drought

aimlessly wandering around with them in the cold summer

being called useless by others

never being praised

never receiving complaints

such a person

I want to be Ame ni mo makezu (Be not Defeated by the Rain[1]) is a famous poem written by Kenji Miyazawa,[2] a poet from the northern prefectureof Iwate in Japan who lived from 1896 to 1933. The poem was found posthumously in a small black notebook in one of the poet's trunks.

escape the tyranny of life

I am alone in my silent prison. It is a blessing and a curse. It confines me and it liberates me.

Silence is everything. I am one with everything. A singularity.

All visual colors, sensations, perceptions, forms, symbols, imagination and energies of transient tactile existence permeate my being.

Everything floats away. Mu. Nothing. Maya. Illusion. Suffering is an illusion. I don’t understand suffering. Does suffering mean experiencing taste, sound, temperature, and texture feeling regret, loss and a death of the spirit? I witness sad lost blank faces. People wear sadness like discarded rags. I see mouths moving.

I never hear laughter as I pass through life with my Dream Sweeper Machine.

What does laughter sound like?

What color is sound?

This is my Beauty. Fear and trust dance in stillness. I meditate. Calm. Centered.

I am a stone cold Apsara silent dancer dancing with my revolutionary evolutionary soul.

I feel like screaming.

The dancing hall inside the Preah Khan temple at Angkor Wat is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king. The god-king. He resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs and decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, family, harvests, seasons, sun and moon. 

They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. A celebration of tranquility is their eternal dance. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. Diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.

I dance to escape the tyranny of life. I use my dance to express life. I’ve danced all my short, sweet existence.

The Hall of Dancers has laterite columns and portals with broken jumbled green mossy stones. Stones whisperdance. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots below the surface of appearances in deep burial crypts crawl toward dancers. They dance through exposed roots, past Shiva and Vishnu, the preserver and destroyer of life. 

shatter the blindness

"Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself."

 - Thomas Merton  Read more…

"When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking. Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light."

 - Anne Spollen
The Shape of Water
bufflehead cabin  Read more…

sign language

He comes to me in the heat of the day. I welcome him with my dark eyes gesturing a fingertip on lips...quiet. We share the present. My passion is deep and strong. My language - a smile, brown eyes, calloused hands, worn fingers and rolling sounds whisper: 

time

relationships

secrets

fear

family

passion

laughter

sadness

a heart

I dream traditional ignorant silence kills everyone, the others. Truth is a powerful weapon. People are afraid of truth. When I express truth I don’t have to remember what I said. I say what others are afraid to say.

I am an anarchist, a linguistic magician.

Speaking, living and realizing truth with beauty entails risk. If you want to do amazing things you must take amazing risks. Daring is not fatal. I am truth incarnate. I am an objective mirror, free of dust.

Everything here is a secret. Shhh. Fingers on my lips. I am secretly engaged to a false dream of going to Australia with Thorny. He is 50, married with family. He works for an NGO here. He builds fake bamboo homes. He plays my father figure and unconscious rescuer. Fat chance.

I come from a poor rural village. I was the last of eleven children. I am 28. I came here with my sister, 32. She got pregnant by a married New Zealand man. She had a daughter named Moaning Lisa. She pretends to be married. It’s all show here. He sends her a monthly handout, pays the electricity. 

When I dance I am alive.

echo

New music echoed. Everyone ran to a window. 

Across the street an Indonesian boy sat on a piece of plywood in the shadow of a long tall Sally art deco three story building. It towered above a gated Jakarta community filled with designer homes, wild tropical blossoming fruit trees, displaced dysfunctional spoiled offspring spinning yo-yo’s and orphans sleeping on broken bamboo bed springs or swimming to Cambodia through flooded dreams. 

In his left hand he held a shining silver chisel. In his right, a flat edged hammer. He slammed metal against metal on a bronze bridge between the Stone Algae and the Iron Algae.

Between knowledge and wisdom.

Between an object and a concept.

Tap-tap-tap. Music flaked dust. His chorale was a tribal creation song remembering family and soft rice paddies feeling wind carry his song.

A Cambodian slave girl in the background using a brothel broom of thinned tree branches whisked a gentle rhythm. She created her symphony of sadness and neglect waiting to be abandoned like a manuscript.