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Entries in religion (4)

Sunday
Oct062019

Pollatomish, Ireland

The view from the one-story grey stone hostel in County Mayo was exquisite, the Atlantic Ocean all blue-green opening up its long voyage.

A terrible sad beauty recognized the spirit of the young girl who killed herself in a room upstairs years ago.

She visited often, looking for her love, looking for meaning. It took a long time for us to trust each other.

She visited at night, her spirit roaming upstairs.

It took courage for her to trust me.

I practiced silence. Listening.

She told me stories.

She opened her windows to let darkness invade her privacy. She took comfort in the stillness. Her heart was pure but her spirit was restless.

She told me what happened in this dark place when she was a child. She grew up fast and sure of herself before they took the key away. She was a prisoner of memories, dreams, and reflections.

She had few if any friends. Her school was Nature. She was trapped in time, a circle of guilt, punishment, suspicion and neglect. Her mother died of a broken heart.

She was the daughter of a priest. He wouldn’t let her out. He locked her up. He taught her fear. He carried a big black heavy book full of fire and brimstone with him forever and ever and ever.

She died for his sins or so he wanted to believe. He wanted the scared primitive narrow-minded simple village people to believe. He ordered them to believe he sacrificed his love for her out of anger at his wife because she was weak. He taught her to be weak and when she became weak he loved her. She was vulnerable and he worshiped a book of prayer. The Word.

His daughter’s silver eyes were chained to her destiny, her fate. Her heart was stained with blood.

Local people had a real fear about the house. You can feel it when they see you coming up the narrow road. They think they know who you are, who you might be, but they are not sure. They know you are not one of them. This fact ensures they remain suspicious and guarded. You are an outsider. They remain uncertain about you being here in this sad, lonely desperate place.

They are blind in one eye. They want to live in your pocket and know your past, present and future.

Knowing and understanding are two different things.

Suicide was not a viable option in their cloistered world of saints, superstar nova and bursts of gamma rays. They were illuminated manuscripts on vellum.

They congratulated themselves with a real superstition about her death. It carried them through hard times. It gave them the will to live, the will to accept their destiny without questioning autocratic authority. They kneaded, rolled, basted, baked, sliced, and buttered hope.

After the girl vanished they huddled around peat fires wrapped in her death late at night speaking in mute whispers. Her death became their perpetual source of gossip and innuendo. Her iconic free spiirit confused their sanity, sense of purpose and sacrifice.

The house was a heavy stone fortress in the middle of nowhere facing east. No trees, no flowers, shrubs. Living, growing thing were cut down, burned down, and destroyed by hysterical madness.

Estranged distant provincial neighbors still talked about her in hushed quiet scared tones. She was the young vagabond spirit and cheated old age with her eternal restless way. She saw through their hypocrisy, mediocrity, piety and failures.

They never figured her out. Her father was the command and control module in their economically and geographically distant distinct world. They were lost sheep wandering heather ridges and he was given the mandate to drive out imaginary snakes.

The small cemetery off the path of lonely planets was overgrown with wild waving weeds, tall Timothy grass and broken purple heather in harsh winds. Gray stones whispered hand chiseled names, ages, dates. The rusty iron gate hung on a broken hinge at a precarious angle.

400 million year-old orb weaving spiders created their magic. Dew diamonds danced and sang along strong supple silver amino acids mixed with protein in wind rushing from the sea.

Two mute men dug a new grave on the gentle sloping hill surrounded by heather and wild flowers. Their tools bit hard soil. They’d finish their labors and retire to the warmth of a peat fire, cold whiskey and gossip. They’d toast the passing of another soul gone to the greater glory as tongue flames leaped and danced.

Dance and melancholy music, a common ancestor, integrated the community. The keener wailed her banshee oral tradition and they blessed themselves in the silence of accepting what they couldn't see.

“A shudder passing through your body means someone has walked over your grave,” I said.

“Grief for the dead was the origin of poetry,” said the girl's spirit.

Weaving A Life (V3)

 

Writing in Burma

Thursday
Jan282016

A private Jakarta school - TLC 70

Monday at 6:45 a.m. is formal education tyranny time.

Players call it Stormy Monday. Tuesday is just as bad. Wednesday is kind of rough and Thursday’s oh so sad. The eagle flies on Friday. Saturday I go out to play. On Sunday I go to church get down on my knees and pray. They call it Stormy Monday.

Lucky stood in front of an open rusty iron green gate wearing a pressed green shirt made of palm fronds. He waved an iridescent peacock feather wrapped in a Native American leather braid decorated with rainbow beads welcoming students at a private school.

Parents rule fool. 

Martial Catholic music blared from tinny church loudspeakers at the nearby church of the Immaculate Misconception. Religion was under permanent construction. Empty false hope the greatest evil based on blind faith filled towering grey artificial plastic golden arches with compressed dust.

Air conditioning ducts lay scattered in the vestibule. Purple priest garments hung by a broken thread in a chastity of lotus blossoms. Heaven’s holy light played along a contorted floor jangling cracked tolling bells.

The incomplete church thrived underground. Shadows and illusions named shame, guilt, sin, jealousy, regret, sloth, and lies had enough parking spaces for a choir of angelic forms in the rising Indonesian middle class.

Humans invented religion in their free time. We need meaning and intention sang priests, poets and philosophers. We is educated. Order poor uneducated slaves to get back to work, said a king of dubious origin waving a jeweled mind-sword.

Black tinted SUVs arrived at the gateless gate. Sleepy-eyed kids extricated themselves from air-conditioned nightmares. A green uniformed whistle-blowing male slave directed traffic. Blue clad office boys unloaded suitcases of textbooks, water bottles, lunch baskets, severed cultural connections, identity theories and universal mind maps.

Sleep deprived children waited for a maid, a driver, a mom, a dad, or a perfect stranger to hand them a suitcase handle, a plastic get a life grip. 

Children said good morning to Lucky before dragging cumbersome baggage along slick mopped tile floors down a hall-like crypt. They manipulated life luggage around corners before hoisting it onto little shoulders killing back muscles or pulled it clattering up two flights of stairs. Click-clack-click-clack music echoed through corridors absorbing childhood.

After leaving her vehicle Amanda a 4th grade genius waited in tropical sun. Her right hand was empty. It held everything.

Exhaust from idling cars, vans and flaming plastic bags filled the air. Everyone choked. Feeling exasperated she was angry tired and bored. She opened and closed her empty right hand suffering a desperate spasmodic fever.

She stared straight ahead. Her brown eyes focused beyond green gates. Retinas explored tropical subterranean rain forests. Wild purple orchid aromas permeated shade near a flowing river. Blue-green waterfalls crashing into jungles gave her a cool essential meditation in her heart-mind.

“Give it to me. Give it to me,” shouted her grasping hand. Someone handed her a plastic suitcase handle. She dragged educational baggage into a cave. It would take eight more tedious years to exterminate her innate childhood curiosity and sense of humor.

The Language Company

 

Tuesday
Nov062012

push them through teol school

One of the tyrannies of formal education, said Orphan, is how it takes 12 tedious ominous years to beat creative curiosity out of a child. It's a tortuous Byzantine procedure of endless suffering.

I agree with you, Elf said in simple English. Take Turkey for example. It's all dumbed down grammar text-based learning dulling the mind. By the book. Keep your mouth shut, warn teachers conditioned by the machine using fear to control and maipulate.

Yeah, they know the grammar RULES for taking exams. That's it. Past simple, present continuous and NO SPEAK.

They love RULES.

They need vocabulary and the confidence to use it. Open head, heart and mouth. Risk.

I eat my sorrow with fresh yogurt, said a woman opening her creative notebook to a blank page. She wrote. She drew. She danced colors, dreams, rainbows, the Black Sea, caricatures of friends, flowers, gardens and butterflies.

I feel free, she laughed.

Use it or lose it, said a silver spoon dancing around brown tea leaves dissolving a white sugar cube. 

Clink, clink, clink.

Do you want a verb to get going, asked a tea man.

On the side please with fresh tomatoes, kasher cheese and black olives at Hagia Sophia in Trebazon.

 

Thursday
Feb162012

slideshow V2

couldn't you find something more inspiring, more complete, more enthralling, more enlightening, more honest and truthful and symbolic with eternity and infinity dancing arm in arm amid facades of dust, debris, fake columns, broken air conditioning units, shafts of light beaming down from heaven, guilty confessionals, abstract helmets of deadly imaginary sins like evil, gluttony, sloth, greed and so forth than an incomplete catholic church 1.5 hours north of jakarta, indonesia near a private elementary school where bells tolled, Hey here's the new super efficient and totally amazing Squarespace Slideshow V2?

perhaps.