Loving August

Namaste,

August may be cruel. She may be kind. 

Here in Coma-Land, somewhere below the equatorial zone it is the rainy season. Coming down. Sheets.

What it is. Two seasons. Dry and wet.

Laundry hangs itself. Why does laundry hang itself? Poverty? Lack of initiative? Boredom? For the same reason the juvenile boy facing glass across the street passively performs circular tedious rag motions on a glass door.

His decrepit grannie living upstairs waiting to die a glorious peaceful death will inspect it. If her old tired gray eyes see one dancing smudge she'll begin screaming, Clean it again, Clean it again. He will hang his head.

In shame.

Listening class is permanently cancelled.

Around and around we go. Where we stop no one knows. If he knew the end game he'd cease breathing. He'd hang with laundry. He'd go to school. Too expensive. Yeah, yeah. 

Dirt roads are now expansive expensive elaborate esoteric lakes. Welcome to the lake district. Take the long way home. Endless landscape shrines are a luminous green. Eat it with your eyes, said Saigon.

Metta.

rain dance

white clouds dance
inside, around, with
mother mountains
singing
om mani padmi om
rain voices 
consider ethereal 
neurotic human concerns
hard steady tears
wash feathers
lake mirror stars
breathe clouds
stillness

 

Jumping Thunder

"Find whatever freedom it is that you need or whatever freedom from need that you seek" - a post on Hanoian from a writer in the Botanical Garden. Everyone lives in their personal garden, visible, secret, serene and portable.

Now then. From the notebook extolling recent Hue travel. On our first afternoon in Hue, Joe, Andi, Isabella and I walked to the Citadel. It sits along the Perfume River, long walled enclosures. It's huge with many exhibits, temples and rooms filled with photographs, art objects and paintings. Old images show an arena where they staged fights between elephants and tigers. 

It rains heavy and the girls disappear. Joe and I take shelter under a pagoda roof with a young couple.

She teaches poetry. Joe asks her to tell us a poem. Thunder. Lightning. She jumps. Rain pours on fields, old marbled stone stones, inside green. Initially she is shy, then she recites a poem. It is musical and mysterious. It is about love, about two people missing each other. Her voice is strong. She feels this poem through her, it is her life, history, all the stories and songs and poetry she learned growing up surrounded by friends and family.

She gets into it. Her voice is an angel. Her melody, rhythm and voice flow as the thundering rain and lightning flashes and dances.

We applaud her performance. She is retiring, relieved. Joe and I perform "Singing In The Rain," for them, circling around stone pillars, twirling with the words, feeling the music. Rain dance. They laugh.

The intensity of the rain slows down and we all walk through the drizzle. Say farewell.

The sun comes out, reflecting diamond light on stones inside shallow water pools. Deep dark blue skies fill the air above mountains. The sun drenched fields are an amazing brilliant shade of green.

We walk over the bridge, over the river.

Metta.

Flood

My dear friend Sir Thomas, knighted by William Butler Yeats in Sligo, asked about floods here. Am I drowning?

I sang, row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, life is but a dream. When I say I am floating I don't mean in a boat, at least not yet. We've had some rain, often heavy. Cleans the air.

This is the rainy season and you know how the media likes to present disasters, epic dramas of humans battling the natural elements, battling themselves and so on.

I am floating in the clear sense of sitting, writing, reconfiguring this web site, aligning stars and exploding galaxies, nebulas and infinite diversity. I've been heretwo weeks tomorrow. A delightful respite from civilization and the abyss.

After working in the morning I wander through narrow twisted alleys to a side street clogged with motorcycles, women hawking fruit, veggies, meat, tofu, used clothing and babbling in their incomprehensible tongues. I covered a lot of Ha Noi ground the first two weeks so it feels good to sit down and organic stuff.

For example, I cleaned all the useless shit off my hard drive to free up space. Here's to free space, outer space and inner space!

I sit down off the curbing street on a red kinder garden chair at one of my usual eateries. The woman serves delicious freshly grilled spring rolls filled with veggies, cold white noodles and a plastic container of greens along with the bowl of chilies and sauce. Using your clean chopsticks you dip the noodles and spring rolls in the sauce. You smell, chew and swallow. It's cheap and filling. Great taste. It runs less than a buck. Some people stare at you. Others have seen you here before so they accept you. To them you are just a little stranger than yesterday.

She is busy - only doing lunch. She's gone before dusk when a woman selling fruit uses the stone space.

I wander up the choked street dodging speeding motorcycles, women lugging baskets balanced on bamboo staves past merchants selling merchandise out of their ground floor flats. Mechanics hammer metal fixing bikes and broken appliances, salon girls cut, wash and dry, old women sit and gossip about how the younger generation is wild and crazy, young boys haul bricks on a deranged pulley system up to a flat undergoing renewal, older men in their pajamas play GO slapping scarred wooden pieces on the board while drinking beer or tea with their friends, children scamper through the maze.

No one bothers you because they know you live nearby and no foreigners are crazy enough or lost enough to find this narrow area filled with families and life daily.

I sit down with a delicious thick iced coffee in a cafe where the owner smiles and watches family dramas about love, hope, deception and scheming hollow scripts on the box. Everyone has a box here. It's the BIG diversion, all entertainment. Loud and louder.

I return to my little cave and go up on the balcony with a chair, blue plastic table and two plants - one a flowering bougainvillea. I enjoy green tea, watch the clouds fly past, savor quick rain storms sharing whistle songs with birds, some free, others on distant balconies in sad cages.

Riding the rails south to Hue soon. Playing my blues harp.

Metta.

Memory as Fiction

Rainy season. Dancing black birds inside dark leafed night.

Shuffling wings, rustling feathered bodies.

"Don't forget to bring the sewing kit back," she said.

Stitch a long highway, rolling thunder,

fast clouds, heavy cool tropical rain, cool refreshing music.

A single drop of water on a red hibiscus. 

Metta.