Kids Talk

“Are you a ticket taker or a risk taker?”

“If you want to do amazing things you need to take amazing risks and suffer greatly.”

“Anybody have any spare change?” asked a panhandling waif on an aspirator with wealthy aspirations.

“Hmm, I see a faint star at the conjunction of the head and heart life lines. Does that mean anything?” said a kid fingering green palms approaching Easter Is-land on a bamboo raft.

“Depends,” ranted a child orator standing on a soapbox. “Do you mean faint as in non-distinguishable or feint meaning to throw one off a socially agreed upon tacit path implied by pretending to understand anything while processing information with a deft movement?”

“Yes,” philosophized a child with the wit of Camus, “it’s a sublime paradox, this absurd metaphorical life theater. We have aspects of knowing. We know so much and understand nothing. We are affected, infected, rejected or injected by how we feel not what we think we understand. Life is short and sweet. Art is long. Our lives are works of art. It’s not so much that there is something strange about time. What’s strange is what’s going on inside time. We will understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.”

“You’re just saying that,” said a voice.

“Sounds like a description of the food they serve here, speaking of strange,” one resident commented to no one in particular.

“No lie flutter by,” sighed a Monarch’s wings in Greek.

“What’s that have to do with the conservation of angular momentum and a parabola?” queried a child spinning wheelchair tires on a tennis court and making a racket while performing real alignments for friends.

“Do I love you because you are beautiful,” said Rose, “or are you beautiful because I love you?”

“Both,” sang the Greek chorus.

“You get what you pay for,” said a kid ironing words with grit, perseverance and discipline.

ART

Every kid needs a bike.

Magic Story

The tribe dreamed. Wood became ash. Their fire dream consumed itself. Sighing sensations tingled through Raven’s body. Night winds played around her heart. She danced with stars. Diamond crystal swallowtails flew from her hands into silent endless space. Her breath released peace.

She fell awake.

Sunlight streamed through ferns, plants, and roses. A morning breeze delivered rose petals at her feet. She stretched like a solitary snow leopard at 16,000 feet feeling freedom’s wildness. She glanced at the fireplace. Her shattered glass lay on the brick floor near a charred pencil and scraps of paper. She gathered word edges, lines, drawings and blurred prisms of light.

She felt a searing pain in her heart, released the papers and touched her third eye. She went deep inside. A calm feeling blessed her. A warm breeze carried her into the center of a sacred wisdom circle.

Her essence was joy, gratitude, truth and compassion. Pure being.

The world of appearances was heavy, grasping, suffering, desire and illusion.

Discovering her essence her spirit energy breath renewed her heart, her passion and vision with pure luminous light.

People seeking to know their future with wisdom sought her out for guidance. She opened her heart finding solace, peace, strength, and dignity in the sacred flames of regeneration through quiet simplicity.

She kept her own counsel. Others would discover their own way through their personal labyrinth.

Gathering flames she lit a piece of bark in a Paleolithic cave. She lived in 26,000 year-old paintings.

She mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm to gain entry and passage into the spirit world of ancestors.

She walked through fire, dancing in her inner light of pure intention in a magical world realizing childhood’s innocence.

She became an angel of light.

Her Jinn emanated fire, life and consciousness. This fire consumed ignorance, and my memory of her became a meditation on the physical process of identifying with higher energies through form, sensation, perception, sense impressions and consciousness. Her meditation inside the cosmic dance dissolved the self.

Fire became her driver. Sexual kundalini yoga burned soft and hard wood together. The sleeping serpent coiled at the base of her spine ate energetic fires. The Jinn manifested by the fire of the telling.

“Yes," said Omar, “Jinn are summoned through spirit ceremonies. People communicate with music and dance.

“I am a character in my own story,” said Omar, “a hakaawati, a professional Persian storyteller inside the shadow of my imagination. I manifest an oral way of transmitting khurata, fanciful stories, inside the ocean of stories.”

“Wonderful," said Jamie. “I like the part about the sacred wisdom circle. It’s a magic story. Reminds me of a woman talking about her Ghost Dance. In her wishes, lies, dreams, memories and reflections she is a Wovoka, a Paiute weather doctor with power over rain and earthquakes. Her Ghost Dance magic is destined to return souls of those who have died. Is it my turn?”

“Sure Jamie, just keep it shorter than life because a reader doesn’t want to struggle if the narration is hard to follow.”

“Yeah," said a kid. “This Zen tale may be too much for some readers to wrap their head around. You become the thing you fight the most. Let’s see all the beauty and ugliness without hope or fear.”

“Ain’t that truth? What is the sound of one hand laughing?”

Someone in the tribe asked Other to tell them about the beginning of his wandering ways.

Omar wrote it down and translated it into unspoken languages.

Weaving A Life (V1)

Martha Ann

After Nam I spent a month with my family, did the DOD School and went to Germany to finish my military time.

My sister, Martha Ann, 13, developed a cold that winter. My father wrote letters about her condition. Her energy dropped. She became weak. He took her to doctors for a diagnosis.

She had a rare form of AML leukemia and started chemotherapy. She needed bone marrow transplants in her short future. The prognosis was maybe five years for a complete remission.

She prospered in school and Girl Scouts with a positive mental attitude.

Neighbors had horses and she formed a loving relationship with them.

Her long blond hair flies in wind. She embodies a strong discipline in the saddle. Her back is straight. Approaching a jump over an abyss, fear is defeated by her courage.

She leaves the stable leading a Palomino. She wears tall black boots, riding pants, and a stiff white shirt buttoned at her frail neck. Only I know she is sick and dying. It is our secret. She smiles at me.

She whispers magic words and you know by the animal’s response they love and trust each other. She rides in green pastures under a bright blue sky. Her face is serene.

Her sickness was a long slow meandering journey. She maintained her optimism, smiling, laughing, and doing excellent in school. She knew she was sick. She was a warrior girl child.

Horses gave her freedom and passion. She rode every day after school. Weekends were cleaning, grooming, laughing and loving her relationships.

Her spirit is clear. She has no fear.

Her pain was a sickness leaving her fragile body.

Doctors tried every experimental drug on the market. Drugs made her long blond hair fall out. She wore a wig. She tolerated inane questions and insinuative cruel bullying from classmates. She maintained her dignity and integrity.

“Dad, what happens when they run out of experimental drugs?” she asked at dinner. He had no answer.

The broken-hearted man brought his daughter home from Children’s Hospital in Denver for her last Christmas. She enjoyed snow, a warm fire, magic tree, cats, presents and love.

Her heart gave out three days after Christmas, 1972.

I received the expected phone call at the Kassel Field Station.

“Martha is gone,” said my father’s cracking voice.

“What happened?”

“I went to the hospital on my lunch hour and she was lying there and she looked so beautiful yet so weak and she said, ‘Dad, hold me, I’m going to faint,’ and I did and then her heart stopped. It just wore her out.”

I cried, “I’m so sorry dad. I’ll get a flight out.”

“You will always remember her as a happy little girl.”

Angels and peace welcomed Martha Ann. She never saw fourteen of anything. She never went to high school or college, fell in love, worked, lived, laughed, traveled, explored future worlds or experienced a longer life with her vibrant trembling spirit. Her existence was all wrapped up in one tight package with an expiration date.

Cold winter was her refuge and now.

Her childlike joy and spirit energies soared away from her labyrinth. She evolved on her path of light, love, and perfection. No longer a human on a spiritual path she was a spiritual being on a human path.

On her brief sojourn before crossing time’s river she demonstrated tolerance, integrity, kindness, tranquility, dignity, empathy and truth. Martha Ann validated her authenticity. She hurled her thunderbolt.

ART

Read

I carried a copy of Omar’s book, A Century Is Nothing from Turkey to Indonesia to Nam in 2009.

Together with Omar we used fire, this crucible of alchemical combinations, diversities, sweat, blood and tears to create it so I’d use fire to release it.

Save books, build a library.

Books are universes of ideas, experiences, feelings, visions, paths, and destinations obliterated through discovery reminding memory.

They are worlds of dreams, stories, dramas, plays, songs, histories and guides into new visceral experiences. Pages sing their laughter with wisdom, song, and poetry.

Preserve memory. Live forever with paper’s tactile voice.

Voices of reason, imagination, comedy and tragedy are skintight drum stories. They are oral transmissions recorded on parchment, vellum, illustrated manuscripts in Irish Gaelic talking tongues, Sumerian clay and Asian scrolls.

I didn’t burn it, a way of sacrifice offering and letting go. Down the road I gifted the brick to three Asian women in Saigon. They had Chinese ancestry from Hong Kong and lived in Australia.

I said a friend wrote it so I signed it and laughed letting it travel with them. Thanks for the book. You’re welcome. I hope you enjoy it.

It took all three to carry it. They staggered up guesthouse stairs with the tome. After breaking down a wall they struggled to get it through an opening.

People need to break down before they break through.

Maneuvering it into a bag they discarded cheap Vietnamese souvenirs. We’ll have to check this monster all the way to Sydney.

ART

Ankara

Brown rolling hills said, Open sesame. Shazam. 1,001 Arabian Nights shared stories inside stories. Dervish mystic dancers wheeling in trances welcomed his spirit.

Lucky learned the majority of Turks suffered from anxiety. They took anti-depressants called Xanax to calm psychotic neurosis. Symptoms of overwhelming sadness dressed citizens in rose petals between self-pity, loathing and thorns.

Ankara was a boring, cold capital city filled with sad administrative paper-pushing androids.

He’d accepted a teaching/facilitating TLC job with an acquisition cycle.

A part-time female teacher from South Africa married to an English environmentalist studying seal habitats along the southern coastline helped Lucky buy a DNA cell phone. He’d never had one.

It was a 1984 red gadget with buttons and functions like calendars, tools, SMS, IM, Teams, Bluetooth, internet access, GPS and To Do, Did, and Does it work? Connections. Locations.

It displayed points of interest at low interest rates.

Instant,

Everywhere You Are

Or Imagine You Are

or Need To Be

Where You Are Now

at this precise moment

with dimensional proportions

suited his nomadic status

acquiring mobility extremes.

One morning he walked to the Ulus garden nursery below an old Roman castle. A red hammer and sickle flag waved above ramparts. He discovered white, red and purple roses, cactus, ten small plants, containers and potting soil. Good dirt.

A word gravedigger craves good dirt.

The Language Company