Defrost Your Imagination

“Today is a good day to be empty. Practice 10,000 breaths until you disappear,” said a Lhasa monk petting a Sumatran tiger facing extinction by Malaysian villagers burning down forests to develop cosmetic palm oil exports.

“Yes, not too detached and not too sentimental,” said Zeynep sitting at a restaurant table creating surrealistic art in her notebook.

She drew stick figures with wild forested hair eating purple paper mache houses beneath a startled orange sun as disoriented Bursa talking animals crammed in spinach, green salad, tomatoes, grilled meat, rice and beans.

Across town on the TLC teachers’ apartment balcony sentry ants alerted the tribe to food. They marched from a drainpipe in single file, climbed over the edge of a plastic pot discovering good dirt. Teams fanned out sensing discarded muesli particles.

A mottled wingless insect living in bamboo detected worker ants approaching. Insect couldn’t fly. It scurried up a thin stalk to a green leaf blending in. Its feelers cleaned dirt off head and shoulders sham poop.

A gravedigger eating a hazelnut and strawberry jam sandwich on whole grain bread with grade A black olives harvested from Mudanya orchards nestled tight against Marmara Sea soil spoke to the insect as ants preparing their final assault gathered below the leaf.

“I need to move you.”

“Thanks. If I’m discovered I’ll perish. What do you suggest?”

“We use a leaf. Climb on it. I will let it go, floating over the garden. It will cushion your fall from grace. You will have a soft landing and better than a 51% chance of survival. Ground zero with better cover, food and dew you understand?”

“Ok. Thanks. 51% is better than zero.”

“You sound like an investment banker. Don’t mention it.”

“I need a new adventure.”

“Don’t we all. Here you go.”

Digger did what he had to do. Found a broad brown leaf. The insect climbed on. He released the vein-lined parachute into thin air. It floated. It landed on a huge exploding yellow sunflower.

“Goodbye,” sang the insect, “you extended my little life. I’ve survived to walk another day.”

The gravedigger sang, “Happy trails...to you...until we meet again.”

Weaving A Life V1

The Language Company

Writers On Steroids

“Ok,” I said to the Senate Committee investigating Writers On Steroids in Room 2143 of the grand facade off Bluejay Way. They stared at me with jaundiced eyes. They shuffled paper. An old tottering fool of a Grand Inquisitor pounded his gavel.

I remembered him from the McCarthy Era and feared the worst.

“You are accused of taking steroids to enhance your writing performance. We have evidence from editors, hacks and wan-ta-na-bees that you and perhaps thousands of your ilk slaving away like drones in the dungeons of mediocrity, dreams, illusions and journalistic heaven on word machines have boosted your word output through the use of banned, I repeat, banned substances. Say it isn’t so, say it’s all a lie, a misconception, hearsay. What say you?”

I took a drink of pure spring water from mysterious unfiltered Alaskan lakes. A naked trout started dancing on the table in front of me and I laughed.

“Ha, you're joking aren't you?” I stuttered, spitting water all over the microphone. It shorted out and I was forced to use my voice minus amplification.

“Of course I sue steroids, why, in fact, in truth of fact and fiction I sear the meat on your grill with my defamatory remarks. The pills are beautiful and come in a variety of colors, like rainbows. They open doors of perception with wonder, shock and awe. I have irrefutable evidence that your committee grooved the approval of these pharmaceutical delights thanks to the huge financial contribution by multinational drug companies to keep you in office. It's well known this country, let alone sports heroes have been programmed to ingest chemicals.”

I jumped on the table with the naked trout and started yelling. “We are ALL filled with chemicals you idiots. It's the American way of life. It's the new mantra, Run, Read, Write with Greater Efficiency and Prose the Poem with diligence and fortitude using Elements of Style. It’s the style baby, the demolition charge under your hat, Jack.”

“Order, order,” yelled a bailiff approaching me with caution, mace and industrial strength handcuffs. “Down boy!” They shackled me. The Grand Inquisitor handed down my sentence. It had a noun, verb and object.

“Take the prisoner to Cuba and give him an orange jump suit. Interrogate him and deprive him of his writes.”

I screamed in anguish as they dragged me past a pharmacy filled with promise, hope and salvation.

“You haven’t heard the last word from me. Where’s my trout?”

Building A Chinese Wall

English teachers unite in Fujian, China.

Let's get dressed and gather our Moleskine notebook filled with poetry, drawings, dreams, stories and visions. Collect one fountain pen filled with green racing ink.

Remember water. You've gotta have H2O where you go. It's gonna be a hot one. Seven inches from the mid-day sun.

Let's go to a classtomb on the old university campus surrounded by luscious green trees straining to light. They are a canopy of welcome relief.

Rose petals wither on the ground.

Smile and greet your compatriots, your stalwart educational guides. Take a seat. Look around. Engage your senses.

Gaze out the window toward the lake. It shimmers blue.

You hear scraping. What is it? Local workers are building a wall. A new Great Wall. Exciting. History in the making. How do they do it?

It's simple. Materials and raw labor.

Ten local village men and women - who do most of the heavy lifting -  bags of cement, trowels, shovels, plastic buckets, water, piles of gray bricks, empty drums for support, boards, and two wheelbarrows.

Step 1. Build rickety scaffolding using drums and boards. Remove the old steel fence. Discard to side.

Step 2. One team mixes cement and water. Shovel into buckets. Another team puts bricks into a wheelbarrow and pushes it to a dumping area.

Step 3. Men wait for women to hand them bricks and buckets of cement. They slather on the goop and align bricks. Brick by brick the wall goes up. It blocks the green sward, blue lake and wild flowers.

Only the sky is safe.

Step 4. Another team coats the exterior with a bland gray mixture.

It's never going to be finished. Art is like that. It's so beautiful we feel like crying.

Someone steps to the podium and starts speaking - using exquisite language - about the value of education. Cost benefit analysis. Profit and loss statements. How we have a huge responsibility to our shareholders.

Inside a brief silence you hear a shovel, a trowel and laughter. Another day in workers paradise.

Walnut Meditation

A Zen monk related a story.

“Before becoming a monk I was an English teacher in 8th grade at an Experimental School south of Chengdu in Sichuan, China. One day I held up a walnut. What is this?”

They answered in Chinese.

I wrote “walnut” and “metaphor” on the board. “This walnut is like a person I know, very hard on the outside. They are very safe and secure inside their shell. Nothing can happen to them. What is inside this shell?”

“Some food,” said a boy.

“How do you know?”

“My mother told me.”

“Do you believe everything your mother tells you?”

“Yes, my mother always tells the truth.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s good, but I wonder if mothers always tell their children the truth. Why? Mothers and fathers protect their children and keep them safe. Now you are developing as a more complete and mature human being. It’s good to question things and find out the truth for yourself. Do you understand?”

Some said “yes,” others nodded passively.

“This walnut is a metaphor for the self. A symbol. The self that is afraid to take risks because they are “protected” by their shell. Maybe the reality is that the shell is empty. How do we really know what is inside.”

“It’s a mystery,” said a boy.

“That’s right, life is a mystery. How will we find out what’s inside?”

“You have to break it open,” said a boy with poetic aspirations.

“Yes, you or I will have to break open the shell, our shell, break free from the shell to know what is inside. That can be a little scary when we are conditioned and comfortable carrying around the shell every day isn’t it?”

“It’s our self,” whispered a girl in the front row.

“Very good. It’s our self, this shell and the mystery. We have to take risks and know nothing terrible is going to happen, like trying to speak English in class.”

“If we don’t break the shell we’ll never feel anything,” said another boy.

A girl in the back of the room said, “it means it’s hard to open our heart. It’s hard to know another person and what they are thinking, how they are feeling.”

“You got it,” I said. “We’ll never experience all the feelings of joy, love, pain, sorrow, or friendship and miss out on life.”

This idea floated around the room as I juggled the shell in my hand.

“I know people who grow very tired every day from putting on their shell before they leave home. It gets heavier and heavier, day-by-day. Many carry their shell into adulthood. It’s like wearing a mask. They look alive but inside they are dead. But eventually, maybe, something important happens to them at the heart-mind level and they decide to break free from their shell and see what’s inside. They say to themselves, ‘This shell is getting really heavy and I’m so tired of putting it on and carrying it around. I’m going to risk it.’”

I smashed the shell on the table. It splintered into pieces. Students jumped with shock.

“There, I’ve done it! I smashed my shell. Can it be put back together?”

“No.”

“Right, it’s changed forever. The shell is gone.”

I fingered small pieces of shell, removing them from the nut.

“See, it’s ok. Wow. Now it’s just an old useless shell. It doesn’t exist anymore. It’s history. It will take time to remove pieces of my old shell. Maybe it’s fair and accurate to say the old parts represent my old habits, behaviors, and attitudes. It happened. From now on I will make choices using my free will accepting responsibility for my behavior. And, I know nothing terrible will happen to me. I feel lighter. Now I can be real. That’s the walnut story.”

“Well,” mused a sad serious poetic girl named Plath, “I believe every living object; seed, flower, tree, and animal has an anxious soul, a voice, sexual desires, a need for survival, and feels the terror at the prospect of annihilation.”

Language dreams.

Weaving A Life (V4) - paperback and/or Kindle

Celebration Day

Zahara, Andalucia, Spain

After I turned the key in room twelve leaving a hostel in Ronda I passed a dim corridor. A dark shadow entered a room down the hall. I remembered seeing her at Relax eating a large salad.

We’d spoken about the size of the tomatoes and she’d laughed saying it was too much food.

I stopped, stepped back looking down the hall. We recognized each other, laughing and talking like deranged idiots. We filled in the blanks.

 "What are you doing here?" I said.

"I’m checking in to save money. What are you doing here?"

"I’m checking out to save money. Let’s go enjoy sun, coffee and conversation."

We went to an outdoor cafe. She carried day old food in a plastic bag.

Monica was from Sydney and had traveled to London, Paris, Lisbon, Granada and now Ronda. She’d never been away from home and friends before. She didn’t like London and got out. She had relatives in Rome.

“I had to live with their rules," she said. Hard. Her epiphany occurred in Nice, France. “That’s when it hit me, all the loneliness, all the insecurities came piling out. I hit bottom.”

Her moment of truth hit her like a ton of bricks.

“I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. I was in chaos. I started sitting meditations.”

She made her breakthrough and it changed her life. She became free to move. It was about her expectations. She’d suffered enough, made enough wrong turns, listened to others’ advice about how to survive.

She discovered compassion and meditation saved her. She moved forward with an open heart-mind.

We sat near the Plaza de Socorro as people streamed to church, markets, shops, and met friends. She opened a can of garbanzo beans. We broke bread.

“A spoken language on the planet dies every two weeks.”

"Really?"

“Ethnologists estimate there are 6,912 living spoken tongues left on Earth. Here’s something you may find interesting. Omar a blind man in Morocco I met just after 9/11 gave me his book of stories, A Century is Nothing.”

“May I touch, see, smell, taste and hear it?”

I pulled it from an Eagle feather pack, handed it to her and entered the cafe for coffee. She opened it and read.

“There are multiple narrators in this journey. One narrator wrote on mirrors, another carved on 26,000 year-old Paleolithic cave walls and Little Wing weaved magic cloth. A change of context changes experience.

“On the loom of time the three fates did their work weaving the word ‘context’ from Latin. “Con” means 'with or together' and 'texere' means to weave. A change in context is an essential and active process. Weavers direct thoughts, emotions and actions as a kairos shuttle passes through openings in the time-space continuum. The loom binds or connects the weaver’s ability and power to speak.

“A nomad finished an extensive tragic-comic jazz poem opus in August 2001 heat and wandered away from the Pacific Northwest. On September 1st he flew from Seattle to Casablanca under a full moon dancing its reflection on waves. Fate, chance and timing.”

I returned. "Did you read about Natasha?"

“I don’t believe so,” she said. “Is she a Now or a Later in your tale? This looks fascinating,” handing him the blind book.

"It’s not my tale. I’m a conduit. Omar’s a beautiful man and dear friend. He has Baraka, supernatural blessing powers. I’ll give his prescient tale a deeper look-see when I return to the Sierras and share it with Little Wing, a weaver on the loom of Time. To question your answer, Natasha arrives later."

Monica resembled Ingrid Bergman, a star in the universe. I made an image of her because I was a rangefinder with excellent optics, good depth of field and focused manually.

We met friends at Relax, a vegetarian restaurant. Susan a lively blond dancer from North Beach studied Spanish. Simon and Christian, open-minded German guys were setting up a travel expedition company. Jon was their creative Spanish genius interpreter.

Jon’s English father was an author who’d written books about the white pueblos in Andalucía. He’d written about hardship, trying to fit into the system and make a living by buying, working and eking out an existence on a campo farm in the late ‘50’s before it became fashionable. Politics mixed with luck and perseverance. Now he was retired on his campo near Ronda and painted oils.

At a lavish Christmas dinner for fifty friends and relatives he gave Omar solid advice.

“Get out of the way and let your characters tell the story.”

Simon worked for the German police for eight years. He got tired of picking up body parts along the Autobahn in freezing cold weather. He switched to infiltrating gangs doing undercover drug busts for a couple of years. Knowing he’d be killed if his cover was blown he quit and moved to Spain.

Simon told two short stories.

“I am a millionaire. Everyday I have a beautiful view.”

“There was a poor man in South America. For forty years he slaved away digging for gold in distant mountains far from home. Everyone in his village said he was crazy. One day he found a lot of gold and exchanged it for money. He bought some rope. He tied the rope around his waist, tied the money to the other end and ran through the village dragging it behind him. Everyone said he was crazy. ‘Why?'

“He said, ‘for forty years I’ve been chasing money and now money is chasing me.’”

Everyone drove to Grazalema below the Penon Grande Mountain where I lived with Little Wing, a weaver. She was in the mountain collecting herbs.

Declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, Sierra de Grazalema Natural Park was located in the north east of the province of Cadiz northwest of Malaga, at an altitude ranging from 250 to 1,654 meters above sea level. A Special Protection Zone for Birds, the park covered 51,695 hectares of ecological importance in the south of the peninsula.

It had the highest rainfall in the Iberian Peninsula, with an annual average over 2,000 liters per square meter. It was the most important western massif of the Subbetica range.

It was an old Roman village of 2,300 people. An isolated white pueblo with narrow cobblestone streets filled with suspicious conservative kind, simple people who’d been shut away from the ‘modern’ world forever.

My small white habitat for humanity was old, cold and intimate. When I wasn’t scribbling notes in my Moleskine, climbing back in time and loving a beautiful seer woman weaving on her loom of Time, I admired leaves turning green to yellow and brown dancing through air in silence.

In the patio were lemon and orange trees. Christian juggled three lemons. We met Antonio and Sophia from Seville. Antonio sold discount sofas for a furniture company, loved Formula One racing and Sophia was the queen of video sales. We drove into the national park for fresh air and views of mountains and valleys.

We ended up at the old abandoned Arabic Zahara Castle. Castillo de Zahara sat on a pinnacle above land and artificial lakes. Founded by Romans, Muslims took it over in the 8th century and it fell to a Castilian prince in 1407. It was recaptured in a night raid in 1481 by Abu-al-Hasan from Granada and was home for anarchists in the 19th century.

Someone said George Harrison died the day before. We remembered My Sweet Lord and hummed, ‘I look at the world and know it is turning while my guitar silently weeps.’

We sat inside vast plains, mountains ranges and sky.

“Anyone seeing the sky here would understand where Picasso got his colors,” Christian said.

We were in the Spanish province of light. Luz - land of light. A sharp sunset painted orange horizons. The sun bounced blue and green rays off El Torreon at 1654 meters, the highest mountain in Andalusia. We were mesmerized by beauty.

We climbed steep jagged stone paths skirting Roman baths through history’s past into history’s future. We held hands inside pitch-black stone passageways toward the top of the tower.

It was a kid’s day.

A full moon showed a sliver of itself over mist hills and valleys in the east. It exploded up, a perfect white orb surrounded by purple, orange and blue light.

We were in the perfect place at the perfect time. A history of Romans, Moors, and Christians, as lakes stretched along the valley. Water reflected moonlight.

“Before meditation the moon is the moon and the water is the water. During meditation the mountain is not the mountain and the water is not the water," said a Zen monk.

“True,” said Omar. “We were in a dream of light. Colors flashed across the sky. Shooting stars came out to play. Mountains shimmered in the moonlight. The lakes were mind mirrors.”

“In an improvisational acting class they had us do this when we made a mistake,” Sherri said. She arched her back, threw her arms into air and screamed, “I SUCK,” and relaxed. Everyone laughed seeing her intention in an instant. ZAP. Clearing the way with heart.

Driving past lakes reflecting blue and silver moonlight Sherri said, “You know this would be a perfect night to be able to fly. To make love in the sky.”

“Yes," I said. “We’d make love flying upside down doing acrobatic turns in space while connected.”

“Yes,” she said. “If the earth were a marble and dropped into the lake we could swim to the surface.”

“Yes, and burst free and fly, glide over the mountains and plains end to end forever.”

“Yes. Just for one night.”

“Yes. Only during the full moon we’d have the freedom to fly all night long.”

Our universe was Yes.

We listened to Portuguese Fado singers sing sad songs about fate and love as headlights created shadows. Moonlight dancing on lakes illuminated jagged gray dolomite mountains in a black sky full of shooting stars. Our collective energy made it a day and night we’d remember forever.  

We were shooting stars.

Weaving A Life (V1)