The world is made of stories not atoms

I’m filled with wild passion.

A mind-expanding drug of curiosity, delight and freedom increases my awareness.

The eternal present is a long now.

My power is big medicine. It’s a sacred connection to Gaia after 60,000 years of paying attention to details.

I observe a spider meticulously wrapping an insect with thin microfilaments. Spider recycles her old web on the periphery. They haul it to a diamond center. It vibrates in a soft breeze.

Does the spider have any intention when building the web of catching the insect?

Does the flying insect have the intention of finding the web?

Where does instinct end and intention begin?

One instinct is to sit in meditation. Another instinct is to take risks.

To do great things you must take great risks and suffer greatly.

JUMP over the abyss.

My serenity is not purchased over the counter with pharmaceutical coupons. No dust collects on my mirror reflecting an elegant universe in my heart. In my expanded state I am a breath of fire, a lightning bolt sacrificing fear, doubt and uncertainty.

I shatter myth.

Lightning bleeds off my charge creating transformation.

I am an unemployed fortuneteller. I am ahead of the future. The day after tomorrow belongs to me.

I am a gravedigger/archaeologist. Soil is my groundwork. Look at my hands. I know two things. See good dirt under fingernails. I am the soft sand of sleep calming tortured hearts.

Abracadabra! My feminine nature hurls her lightning bolt even unto death. She is a death deferred. She is on death row with a short reprieve. My tranquility is a lethal injection of travel.

It’s 100 degrees in blistering sun. I work hard and fast pounding typewriter keys, digging graves, discovering artifacts.

I dust history off history. I destroy the present to discover the future.

I hammer keys in a new form of construction business. Before bits, bytes and gadgets.

The world is made of stories, not atoms.

Shovels plow archaeological deserts reflecting passion and curiosity. An archaeologist inside a tomb waving Diogenes’s lamp yells, “Every bit we dig out tells a little more about the story.” They unearth a story revealing communities, customs and cultures.

A digger explains how it works. “This stuff we roughly estimate is between 1,800 to 1,990 years old. We use a method called carbon dating. It measures the amount of carbon-14 remaining in ancient material.”

“What is it?”

“Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon found in all organic matter. Scientists determine the age of fossils and artifacts by comparing test results to an international standard. We’ll send it to a lab for analysis.”

“Beautiful. Let me know what you discover, what you learn.”

Tourists find. Travelers discover.

Explorers sift discoveries through mesh screens. A delicate camel hairbrush caresses historical fragments. They dig toward 8,000 well-rested Chinese terra-cotta warriors in battle formation standing ready for excavation.

Chariots, horses and supplies with trapped Mandarin survivor voices echo toward the surface causing vibrational shifts.

Confucian scholars join them. Buried since 210 B.C., guarding Qin Shi-huang-di, the first Emperor of China, their collective consciousness breath creates tremor waves near Xian, the capital of Imperial China.

Warriors stand silent on the edge of the Gobi desert along the Silk Road. Voices sing swirling word storms. They hear brushes shovels, earth moving equipment and hammering keys approach their hidden truth.

“They are coming for us,” said a warrior.

In my inner garden of crimson stimulus I tend wild roses. Nostrils scent sense.

I have a responsibility to the thorns.

Finch's Cage, Sapa, Vietnam

In Sapa, Vietnam I discovered a side street and thick cold java at a run-down Internet cafe. I sat outside.

Finch had a yellow chest, red beak and brown feathers. It was outside a plate glass door. It’d escaped from its small yet safe bamboo cage in the main room. Someone, perhaps the young mother worried about her wailing infant or her brother worried about dying of boredom or her old mother worried about dying alone had left the cage open.

Finch sang, “Where’s my home? What is this beautiful world?”

Finch hugged the ground. It looked at green trees waving across the street. It saw a deep blue sky. It inhaled clear, clean mountain air. It heard birds singing in trees but didn’t understand them.

They sang about nesting, exploring, flying, clouds, trees, sky, rain, warm sun, rivers, bark, worms, snails, and melodies of freedom.

I wondered if Finch would fly away. I hoped so however I knew it was afraid to go. Perhaps it lacked real flying experience, the kind where you lift off fast beating your wings to get up and get going to escape the weight of gravity or memories filled with attitudes, beliefs, values and fear pulling you down.

Free, you turn and glide, relax and soar.

Finc, being conditioned to the caged world of bamboo with a perch, food and water looked and listened to the world.

Finch retreated from the possibility of free flight and pecked at loose seeds in a narrow crevice below the door. It smelled the dark stale room where the cage hung on a wire. It pecked under the frame. It wanted someone to rescue it.

It sang, “Help! Let me in. I want to come home. I’ve been outside and I’ve seen enough. It’s a big scary place. I promise I’ll never try to escape again. I was curious, that’s all. I’ve seen enough. Let me in.” 

Finch was amazing in it’s beauty. Yellow, red, brown and bright eyed in its aloneness. 

An old woman opened the door. She trapped Finch in a purple cloth and returned Finch to its cage. She closed the bamboo door and snapped the latch shut.

“Did you learn your lesson little bird?” she said.

Finch sat on its perch, enjoyed a long cool drink of water and sang, “Thank you. Now I am truly happy.” 

The old woman didn’t understand this language.

Muttering under her breath about inconvenience she shuffled down a long dark hallway to a kitchen where she killed a chicken for lunch.

 

Blend In

“You have a criteria for beauty,” said an austere Chinese business university teacher-mother in an apartment elevator going to ground zero. “You should just blend in.”

She was petrified like 1.7 billion of being singled out, purged, tried and executed or sent to the countryside and re-educational brainwashing for expressing bourgeoisie ideology in a harmonious Marxist society.

Her paranoia meant no one dared talk about June 4, 1989. No one whispered about freedom, human rights or democracy. Their collective hardwired brains were wiped clean by Big Brother.

“I’ve learned,” she said, “to keep my mouth shut unless I’m eating fast before starving thieves steal my food or laughing to myself at the stupid laconic narrow-minded ways of our leaders. They are old despotic men. They sit behind blood stained teak desks imported from Burmese dictators. They chop seals and devour dolphins and whales with malice. They swallow tiger bone extract for sexual potency and wash it down with bear bile. Silence is our golden mean. My husband works in a distant province. He has a mistress named Orgasm. No money, no honey.”

Pouring restaurant slop in Mandalay Burma market

She cried silent tears, raised her son and wrote life lesson plans. “By the book,” she screamed in silence facing eighty comatose students scrambling for a pass. It fell incomplete.

“Sixty is heaven and fifty-nine is hell,” said a thin girl in a freshman speaking class of 80. “My parents will kill me if I fail.”

“What is your dream?” said Lucky.

“I want to be a waif when I grow up.”

Her naive honesty surprised him. “What is a waif?”

“You know, a homeless person existing on the street. Living on their wits with silence and cunning, like a mercenary, assassin or literary outlaw. Authentic experience. A free person has courage. They take risks. Not taking a risk is a risk. They don’t live off state handouts in a broken down system filled with graft, corruption and nepotism. They overcome suffering and hardship and deprivation. I mean a real person with dignity, self-respect and courage.”

Seventy-nine others failed to grasp her awareness and honesty.

“You are wiser than your years.”  

 

The Language Company

take amazing risks

More Cambodians and Burmese own a cell phone than have a toilet.

Welcome to the entertainment capital of the world!

The science of imaginary solutions that regulate exceptions.

To do amazing things you have to take amazing risks.

Bolano: "he didn't believe in countries and the only borders he respected were: Borders of dreams - musty borders of love & indifference."

Borders of courage or fear - golden borders of ethics.

"To never be polite again." Camus on outrages we inflict.

Acting as a fundamental form of existence.

To be natural with a mask. My mask is eating my fAce.

The entire universe is a vast theatre.

"Black and white are the colors of photography." - Frank

The Language Company

Creative non-fiction. Journalistic facts. Literary imagination.

Unpleasant facts are littered through TLC like landmines, lovers, literary outlaws, educational malaise, geography, butterflies, rice, luck and sex.

Lucky Foot taught English at The Language Company in Turkey in 2008. He returned in 2012. Creating field notes.

A Vietnam veteran, journalist and facilitator of courage he gifted luck to people in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos since 2004.

He showed up to sit for a spell nurturing positive relationships in the long now.

Accompanied by Humor and Curiosity he helped students speak English with fluency minus their illusions of fear and phobia's relatives:

Fear of taking a risk.

Fear of being incorrect.

Fear of peer ridicule.

Fear of poverty.

Fear of starvation.

Fear of being ordinary.

Fear of success.

Fear of abandoning a manuscript by Zeynep entitled TLC.

Fear of accepting responsibility for their choices

Dear of accepting the consequences.

Fear of letting go of old conditioning. Shadows.

Fear of being alive and real. Growing.

Fear of_______. (Your free choice)

Lucky, Humor and Curiosity observed parents, schools, and religions fostering passive acceptance, fear, indifference and rote learning teacher-centered systems. It was all about passing exams, not learning how to be more human and think for your self.

Status quo. Sheep mentality. Blend in. Questions are forbidden.

Authority washes your brain daily.

Zeynep, his young genius friend in Bursa, Turkey taught him about life in her totalitarian country. I say what others are afraid to say. Anxiety is a chronic national problem. Adults here are good at two things, eating and fighting. Dissent is terrorism say our corrupt manikin authority figures.

Leo, the Chief of Cannibals revealed dystopian China. I spent years carrying word shit in a Re-education through Reform Labor Camp for questioning Authority. Everyone here belongs to the Big Ears, No Mouth society.

Oh the shame.

Rita, the independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung shared stories about Khmer culture and Cambodian history. We've had twenty years of hopelessness. We breed. We work. We get slaughtered. Poor people see education as a waste of time and money. Rice comes first.

I dream I am a free person in a free country.

A seven year-old Vientiane kid explained Laos. I develop my authentic character with critical thinking skills, gratitude, abundance and wonder as an independent individual.

If you want to do great things you must take great risks and suffer greatly, said Zeynep. You either let go or get dragged along. 

Awareness. Mindfulness. Compassion.

It's not about people buying this book, Zeynep said. It's about people reading it.

Amazon Kindle and Paperback

Zeynep the heroine genius.