Source Material

Way back when I smiled to the Irish women on a Donegal provincial bus.

I was heading for Tra-na-Rossen, an isolated northern youth hostel to work as the warden in dead winter.

I use yellow legal paper called Evidence. It’s perfect for this kind of adventure.

It collects source material because we, the royal I, remain open. We acknowledge we are from the source, in a sense, beyond sense data, we are a fundamental vibration, each of us possesses the innate capability to create and embrace Metta the loving kindness permeating throughmeridians, we tap into the source, we transmute through fields of energy, resolving, flowing from the source, the infinite vibrations of love. 

Many writers prefer using these yellow papers to capture their stories, characters, intention and motivation from scene to scene. It flows.

I write with a cloud pen nib on mirrors. Creating amnesia. The clouds should know me by now. It’s a strange mixture of life and death, so it is. 

I was on fire. I showed them a notebook. Yes, it’s tight, flat, hard rough paper parchment, badly stitched and while it is useful and shaking in laughter it is not quite as free as this evidence. Two more Moleskine are filled. One sits empty and blank. I am empty and blank.

The women stared in amazed silence. Asleep with eyes wide open. Stoned dolmens. 

*

In Vietnam Tran hobbles into the ancient citadel in Hue. Children tune violins, cellos, flutes and recorders in bomb craters and shadows of demolished brick walls. Humid sunlight filters through banana leaves. He relaxes against a crumbling wall hearing his melancholy music language. 

Storytellers re-calibrated their true compass bearing on a dirt road in a third world country thumbing open a useful ragged egalitarian existential foreign dictionary.

It spilled myths
creation stories
symbols
forms
sensations
perceptions
images
ideographs
pictographs
virus inoculations
musical interludes
sonatas
vibratos
journey notes
bleeding tomatoes
broken hearts
haiku
khata scarves
poetry and type-A negative blood donor manifests.

A Century is Nothing

Blue Eyed Ghost

Shuangliu, south of Chengdu, Sichuan.

Yes my dear friend it is true or at least as real as can be. He returned to the beginning where his small tale begins. 

Rickshaw bells and heavy groaning green and purple pedicabs propelled by thick-legged men prowl through humid air. No one sees him. Everyone stares at the ghost. They are oblivious to his existence.

He walks along a broken cracked sidewalk past hammering men building a six-story high extension at the high school. Cement mixers, bamboo scaffolding, emaciated men haul crumbling red bricks. Dancing immigrants sing in the rain. The developer drives a shiny black Benz.

Streets are congested with yellow bulldozers, lorries loaded with dirt and salvaged steel pig iron, City Boat blaring bus horns, small red cabs and tired students trudging to cold cramped cement caverns where teachers arrive late and leave early after smashing wooden sticks on desks to get their attention threatening them with Re-Education through Labor gulag camps in the Gobi. 

Men pedal carts overflowing with large blue plastic barrels of leftover restaurant slop for village pigs and children splash water. It is all play on the streets of dreams.

Weathered women in dirty white aprons chop vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Girls mop cement passageways from dawn to dusk.

Dutiful daughters sweep floors or stare at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent, dreaming on hairline fractured straw mattress bedding.

This is the entertainment capital of the world.                   

Retired pensioners slap white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured rows of strategies as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes paint the city’s rising dust as a ghost dances by, an apparition in their wide eyed wonder.

He speaks the language of silence and this comforts them.

He articulates passion and suffering because like you he is a witness, a mirror reflecting reality in humanity’s garden - another incarnation where he trusted you to be compassionate.

Meaning of meaning was obscured by cloudy anger, fear, desire, ignorance and attachment as you waved him away.

You cast him into deep water where he replenished his spirit. Solitude is a blessing.

His meditation on motivation and intention was clear as he passed through.

Weaving A Life (V1)

Life Stream

Tribal voices spoke.

“Think of it as a small sacrifice, an offering, a form of suffering.”

“The river of life will wake you up,” said an elder. “You go up river and reach pools. They are as quiet as your mind in deep meditation. No people. Nada. Zip. Zero Homo Sapiens. You are water, stones, vegetation, soft green moss, animal skulls, blue sky, nature and sound. The sound is water. It is soft. It is all you know. You sit in the middle of everything pure and simple. It is all you will ever need.

"Water is the first thing an infant needs and the last thing an adult requests. To satisfy thirst for your dying father you will smash ice with tools. You will inhale his death and exhale his life. He was appointed to have you. You selected him to pay for awareness, to accept the responsibility of his life. You will memorize every silent sound and carry it with you. It is light and very portable.

"It will divide and multiply its flowing vibration around rocks in the stream. You are a rock and a stream. Amplification of clear water sound is a single bird throated song. Short immediate. It is heavy deep and real. HDR baby. It will wake you up, as I said. You pay attention.

"You fly away and we will never see you again. We know where you are and see you’re safe, blessed by the sound, pulse and flow being part of the river. Its magic spirit is strong. It’s flowing through civilizations, its adventure down, down, down. It’s distributing itself along the way. The stream is never ending, never beginning. As above so below.

“It is the stream of life.

“Listen to the energies. They will swallow you. You will be absorbed into the flow and you will be still. Stones sing with water. They sing their softness, their wildness, purity unimpeded, reflecting deep pools below open shadows. You are the flow.

“We move forward. Living in the past is time consuming. Nothing behind. Everything ahead. We pay attention. The road gives us our fate. Fire begins with one ember.”

“Funny,” said a child. “Someone along the way said it wasn’t the mountain they thought was difficult but the pebble in their shoe.”

“True. We will meet people and establish a mutual form of simple heart-mind language.”

“Is it paved?” asked one, “this so called road of language?”

“With good intentions, phrasal verbs, grammar, and simple present continuous obscure contextual meaning,” answered one.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said someone in shadows.

“Is that a detour sign up ahead?” said a forward observer (FO). He was so far forward it scared some of the tribe. He was out there, testing frequency shifts.

They suspected he had a psychic ability to see stuff that hadn’t happened yet and they were at a loss, trying to figure it out. They had to trust him. They released their fear, healthy doubt and uncertainty. It was beyond, well beyond their comprehension. He mumbled things like, “You can’t step in the same river twice,” sharing stories, histories, legends, myths, dreams, and illusions.

Omar, Ahmed, and tribal survivors didn’t know if he just made the stuff up out of sheer boredom or if it was the truth of history. Much to their amazement while others carried a lot of stuff like emotional baggage, fear and generic uncertainty, he kept it simple.

His pen sketched and scribbled notes. Pencils and colors danced across Moleskine pages. They noticed in their simplicity and sympathy he carried a kid’s watercolor set. He used river streams and tributaries to mix paints. He splashed pigments left, right and center.

He loved making Fibonacci spirals. They couldn’t figure him out with their subjective abstract sense data perception tools so they relied on trust, instinct, blind faith and a crazy thing called love. Love, a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor drove bus #11.

Passion creates and destroys.

They were blessed by their imperfections. He used life to create art and used art to celebrate life.

Many adults in the tribe being programmed and conditioned cynical skeptics didn’t get it. Indigo kids were clued in to his natural wild mind and trusted him. Implicitly. Their collective language transcended words. There were 6,912 known living languages on Earth and he spoke every one.

He was cognizant a spoken language on the planet perished every two weeks.

“We have a huge responsibility here. No language no culture,” whispered FO. “Culture is what you are and nature is what you can be.”

They sang oral traditions.

They experienced seasons, celebrations, ceremonies, rites, and magic. They created and exchanged clan and tribal myths. Children heard, memorized, chanted and recited songs of their ancestors.

Weaving A Life (V4)

Hello Chicken Soup

Goes the market women’s mantra song waiting for customers in Sapa, Vietnam.

Basic English is all you need to sell chicken soup. It arrives with long white noodles. Food women work from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. 

Sellers, shoppers, locals, a few tourists with guides or in pairs feel comfortable with inexpensive market food. What is the profit margin, food cost, labor cost? 

Two foreigners live here. One is a Frenchman mid-20 with a brown ponytail. He speaks fluent H’mong. He stands on the cement staircase between the cloth market and sprawling food tables. He stares at people eating. He doesn’t smile.

He was married to a local H’mong girl, 19. She had a baby. Two years ago he left her. He pays support. Now he is chasing a Red Dzao girl. He works for the International Manipulate Relations Love Company with a Big Orgasm.

A fluent thin foreign man in his 20’s wearing large framed glasses carries a worn knapsack. He walks fast. He buys greens and tofu. He goes into a small shop for cooking oil. He hurries away over broken disjointed concrete blocks covering the central sewage system. He is in exile from far away. 

The Red Dzao women are persistent sellers, Buy from me. Repeat. Repeat. They never give up.

Mo, my 10-year old teacher gave a good lesson in how to handle these sellers. We were hanging out.

She said, When the women ask you to buy something, don’t say maybe, or later, or not now, or tomorrow, they will remember you and now and maybe and later and tomorrow they will tell you, you said tomorrow, later, maybe, now, Thanks for the lesson, Yes, I don’t know but I understand.

My and Mo, Sapa, Vietnam

Red Dzao

Mo

Grit & Gratitude

Being nine Lucky helped 4th grade geniuses become more human near Jakarta.

Engage-study-activate. Everyone had fun.

Students learned that whining was boring and useless. Smart ones knew without understanding. They knew what they didn’t know.

Kids shared Socratic discussions. They explored and expanded creative imagination journal writing, cross-disciplinary art, chess and teamwork development projects. They built and flew kites.

They practiced good manners and treated everyone with respect.

They focused on developing character: zest, courage, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity, fairness, generosity and integrity.

They shared soft eyes, relaxation techniques and meditation mind maps. They accepted personal responsibility for learning and exploring the process of becoming.

He assisted them to develop critical thinking skills outside imaginary social and educational conditioning traps. “I am here to help you make mistakes.”

One day a young teacher kid said, “We need challenges, Teacher Lucky.”

“What kind of challenges?”

“We need hardship and deprivation.”

“Yes,” said another teacher, “we need to take more risks.”

“How do you develop courage?”

“Through failure. We love to fail better."

“Correcto mundi. Welcome to The Think for Yourself Academy. Everything we do is an experiment.”

They planned, designed and constructed an elaborate high-risk rope and creeper vine obstacle course in jungles challenging body, mind and spirit. Teamwork skills blossomed like orchids.  

*

Residents near his garden sanctuary passed a tall green spiky cactus stretching arms into bluebird songs. A nanny carrying an infant memorized the echo of white cat paws trailing flip-flops. Faustus, seeing throughinnocent eyes rode behind his pedaling Chinese father.

A laughing skipping girl negotiated freedom.

A beggar wearing broken shoelaces studied pavement. A man spinning in his labyrinthine puzzle struggled with an activated cell phone in worn green baggy shorts hoping the call would save him from loneliness, boredom, alienation and metaphors like death.

Children in pink pajamas collected brown leaves and fragrant yellow-white hibiscus flowers.

In Bahasa sun a middle-aged daughter spoon-fed her mother in a wheelchair. Swallowing love her smiling mother remembered when she did all the feeding.

The Language Company

 

 Gili Air Island