artificial

We decipher riddles, forecast speechless tongues sensing passion.

We accept ignorance in quicksilver’s desperate wandering. Boredom carves a niche in a soul. 

I hang laundry near the street. Memory is tempered by the slow heat of talking monkeys. Two boys walk past harvesting trash. One barefoot boy plays silent music with a long thin bamboo fiber.

The other twirls a walking stick carrying a plastic bag. His stick is used for prodding bags and garbage.

Local people mill around. Bored. They exist in their adolescent immature childlike wisdom. Passive is their inherent religious cultural nature. 

Others voice imaginary alien freedom concepts. 

A sofa attached to a roof towed by a motorcycle carries fat white Europeans to see 9th century temples.

A young man named Eternity wearing his new skin tight artificial plastic leg and artificial plastic left foot shuffles through dust. 

i am a slave

He realizes through my movements I was born to dance. 

My gratitude is stillness. There is a big difference between sitting still and doing nothing. 

I smell roses. I swallow fresh orange juice. I engage all my senses in direct, immediate experience. He cannot save me from my destiny. He can only allow the process to open.

He talks to me with non-speech one overcast day. He brought me apples, oranges and mangoes. He pretends our passion is a glimmer of want’s potential desire in the long now.

Inside my deep eyes, a mischief of strangers comfort each other without discrimination. 

I am a singularity. 

Detach

Namaste,

They needed masks.

They needed to understand the underlying unconscious animist mysteries inside their masks of death. They confronted the realm of spirit. They bought masks in open air markets on their pilgrimage, masks signifying the dignity of their Being, thwarting demons, Being demons and ghosts dancing in light. 

It was all light in their shamanistic interior landscape. They learned to let go of the ego, detach from outcomes, eliminate the need to control, trust their spirit energies and remain light about it.

Inside light with slow fingers and long thin ivory nails they turned clay into pots. Spinning circles danced turning on a Wheel of Time.

They finished throwing them, used them for tribal ceremonies and smashed delicate clay pots to earth. They exploded into air creating volcanic ash coating everything in a fine dust.

Metta.

Boudhanath

Namaste,

The road from Bhaktapur to Boudhanath is paved or broken or nonexistent.

Broken dirt rutted cement narrow filled with humans and black belching diseased smoke. Green fields, planting, turning dirt, harvesting beans, potatoes, cauliflower, hauling wicker baskets to market. Soldiers running their future, pounding old boots past a rising forest. Mountains run in shadows. Children in cold dawn light brush white teeth.

It's a returning to Tibet. Pilgrimage around around around circumambulation. Chanting prayers, earning merit. A shift from the Hindu spirit world of Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu. A feeling of peace and tranquility permeates your walking meditation.

Spin prayer wheels.

Lhasa Morning Meditation. We slow down. Each step is a breath. As before, in other planetary places we savor the beginning of a new day becoming - cold, isolated, sublime mysterious reality. The street blends into the circuit. Go to the main square.

Two large chorten furnaces are breathing fire, sending plumes of gray and black smoke into the sky. Figures of all ages and energies, sellers of juniper and cedar. Buyers collect their offerings - throw sweet smelling twigs into the roaring fire, finger prayer beads and resume their pilgrimage. Merit.

We join the flow, shuffling along. Feel the softness being with the ageless way of meditation, a walking meditation.

It is a peaceful manifestation of the eternal now. The  vast self vibration of frequencies in the flow. Our restless wandering ghost spirit feels the peace and serenity inside the flow.

The sky fills with clear light. As above, so below. Prayer flags lining roofs sing in the wind as incense smoke curls away. The shuffling pilgrims create a ceaseless wave - the sound of muted consistent steps, clicking of prayer beads, a gentle hum of turning prayer wheels, murmurs of mantras from lips. Everything is clear and focused on offering, sacrifice, gaining merit in the collective unconscious. Our river flows.

Dawn light blesses eastern snow capped mountains with a pink glow. A black faced half-naked boy throws himself down and out on his hands and knees prostrating the length of his skinny skeleton. He wears slabs of wood on his hands and an old brown apron. He edges forward, pulling himself along, rises, gestures to the sky, hands together, down along his skin out and down to the ground scrapping away flesh edging forward inside shuffling pilgrims. His eyes are on fire!

One completes one circuit after another, circling the Jokhang, the spiritual center of Tibet. More light, more people ascending into the square - handfuls of juniper feed roaring flames, Crack! Hiss! Burn! Back to Dust!

You will walk through the fire. Do this practice every day.

Metta.

 

Mandala

Namaste,

An old caretaker man lies on his back inside an erotic temple with 24 carved images of playful sexual pleasure. He welcomes devotees covered in their piety, devotion, shadows, offering flowers, oil flame light, petals, incense, foot worn stone paths. Interiors.

Ring a bell, many bells, fingerprints wear down stone. Human gestures vibrating bells across a valley.

Endless brick factories fill the Sudal valley. Humans living in brick shacks, using water, clay, wooden forms, creating gray bricks. Sand, dust, hand labor, coal fired smokestacks, piles of coal being crushed, hauled on backs to fire. Fire gray red. The scope and density of men, women and children pouring their lives into their daily effort.

This massive element of people surviving. You walk on streets made of bricks, seeing brick homes rising to blue sky. Brick by brick. 

A mandala. Centering the universe with non-attachment.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. I have no reason to despair because I am already there, sings a Nepalese child.

Gallery.

Metta.