Rose, a healing clown, wove her way through Intensive Care pushing a cart of snacks, books and toys.
“One size fits all,” Rose yelled above children’s laughter. “Come and get it.”
Children accepted rabbits, bears, yaks, animist tribal masks, elephants, snow leopards, tigers, panthers, and turtles wearing hexagrams.
Rose gifted wolves, foxes, spiders, eagles, ravens, fire breathing dragons, watercolor brushes, Chimayo blankets, Hopi Kachina Earth spirits, 232 butterfly species from Cambodia and Tibetan prayer wheels.
“Hey,” shouted a child, “what’s your name?”
“Rose. What’s yours?”
“Ash,” smiled the kid, “short for Ashley.”
“Well,” said Rose, “you don’t look so short to me. In fact, you look larger than life, if you know what I mean, jelly bean.”
“That’s funny,” laughed Ash, reaching her thin arm into the space of Rose dancing fingers in a dervish whirl.
“Here, have some colors Ash.” Rose zapped her with a rainbow spilling laughter, prisms and stardust.
“Wow, cool. Thanks Rose.”
Rose shared extra crunchy peanut butter, strawberry jam, green tea, fresh pitta bread, grape juice, bananas, apples, milk, eggs, cheese, tomatoes, rice and toothbrushes. She offered mint-flavored dental and mental floss.
She gifted fragrant soaps, candles, multicolored silk threads, bells, gongs, cymbals, looms, shuttles and bilingual dictionaries.
Rose dispersed gamelan orchestras, watercolors, camelhair brushes, calligraphy ink, Laotian silk, papyrus sheets and illustrated poetry books. Multifaceted mirrors reflected and refracted waves of eternity.
A Lao child carries the world on their back.
“Wow,” said a dreaming child, “this is beautiful,” beaming innocence around the room in a spiral vortex.
“You are beautiful,” said Martha Ann. “Mad and innocent.”
“Make my day,” yelled a boy looking through a telescope into the infinite expanding universe composed of 13.5 billion-year-old stardust. Children swarmed like bees making honey, “Let me see, let me see.”
“Guess what?” said astronomer. “There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on the planet.”
“May I see?” said a kid.
“It’s a see saw,” said a joker, “around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows.”
“Am I this or am I dreaming?” said a child. “I am real. I invent your dream. Tran and I with our Dream Sweeper Machine decipher and reconfigure old dreams to create new memories.”
Voices sang a cold mountain poem. “Am I the soft sand of sleep that calms your tortured heart?”
“What strange mixture of life and death am I?”
“I am a wanderer searching for a Who to What I am.”
“You can indicate everything you see.”
“I am a butterfly dreaming I am a healthy child.”
A rational child said, “Pain is a sickness leaving my body. I feel free.”
“You is what you is,” said a small voice. “My mother was appointed to have me.”
“That must have been terrible.”
“It was her karma. Intention is karma.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s being aware of your actions and how they return in new forms and opportunities in your life. How they manifest your destiny. Today is our destiny. We accept responsibility for our choices and actions. We accept responsibility for our freedom.”
“Are you one with everything?” said one.
“Yes,” said a wise child. “We are a singularity. We are a witness. It’s part of the sacred contract. We are not in this room, we witness it.”
“Is absorbing our parent’s pain and suffering expensive?”
“Can be to be or not to be is the question,” said a kid named Shake Your Sphere.
“My mom says anger is expensive,” said a child.
“That explains why I can’t find the price tag,” said the joker child playing with a full deck. Ace high. Play the hand you get. Run the table. Outside hospitable windows a sparrow seeking crumbs darted from branch to branch on the Tree of Life.
“You betcha,” said Rose, grinning ear-to-ear not fear-to-fear through her Tantric death mask. “You are one third the life of the universe.”
“Like a rolling stone,” sang a child playing a riff on her blues harp in the key of C. “Ain’t it a crying shame. That old feeling is gone.”
“Ain’t nothing but the blues talking sweet thing,” said a sanguine one.
“Sometimes I blow and sometimes I draw. People should talk less and draw more. Ha ha ha.”
ART
ART
Adventure, Risk, Transformation
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