Leaving Laos

You lived in Laos for one year.

Miracle gift blessing.

Tourist visas last thirty days. In and out tourists do Asia.

Please don't rush. PDR.

You had a one-year multi-entry business visa as a volunteer to facilitate English with 101 H'mong people in Phonsavan. Plain of Jars. Archeologists hypothesize funeral jars. Burn bodies in nearby cave and stash bones in jars. Roll your bones. Bone oracle.

Illuminated ones know they are 4,000 year old drinking vessels of GIANTS.

Visa paperwork said you are a Soap Consultant.

Somebody paid off somebody in the food/money chain.

$500 bones.

How life works. Money talks. Hello. Before speaking put your hand out. A wink will suffice. You know how to play the game. Wiggle your fingers. Here comes the paper, see it. Do the numbers. Enough? No, wiggle again. See the paper. Love the colors. I like doing business with you. Here's the pepper. Thank you.

You dreamed to be a Soap Consultant.

Now you are.

The Phonsavan Ministry of Security requires an audience.

Bureaucrazy stamps, photographs, work permit card, residency permit card, all micro managed by droning gnomes sitting passive, hungry, tired and bored in obscure drab communist rooms inside old decaying cement buildings surrounded by rusting bard wire behind brown shuttered windows against blinding sun held together by corroded grated bars, confronting blaring Thai soap operas, imprisoned below portraits of smiling kings, white goateed Ho Chi Minh painting in his garden of early delights and grim faced suited officers in olive drab wearing burnished medals.

Each person has one job in a compartmentalized system. Only one.

One takes the papers, reads and enters data in a ledger. Passes documents to #2. They read the papers, acknowledge signature and stamp of #1, sign it, enter data on a form, passes it to a woman writing in a ledger. She checks the stamp from # 1 & #2 and enters critical data in her ledger. She hands it to #3 who reads all the names, studies all the stamps and ledgers, smiles, hands it back and says you cannot work here as a Soap Consultant. Thank you it was only a fragrant dream. Bubble drama.

Checks and balances.

You put your time in. You learned this phrase as a soldier in Nam.

Put your time in.

If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space. Get out take risks get your shoes dirty.

Phonsavan was dusty, cold and invigorating. Education was fun, helping 10-30 year olds develop courage. Drawing, speaking, chess, teamwork, critical thinking skills.

I need help.

A place to sit down and establish temporary relationships, explore traditional fruit and vegetable markets, process new languages, do street photography, write it down.

Make sense of it later.

After seven months new volunteers arrived. You briefed them.

1. Lao don't plan 2. They have no concept of time. 3. They don't accept responsibility for their actions. 4. Family and farming come first. 5. They are eager to learn. 6. Retention is a problem. 7. Practice meditation and comprehension checks.

Return to Luang Prabang for 90 daze. Sit in herbal steam baths every afternoon clearing accumulated gunk dust from lungs. Polish a new narrative nonfiction book entitled The Language Company.

Shiny. Dented from dialogue, drama, dreams.

All writing is garbage.

A friend recommends an opportunity. You make contact and get lucky finding a p/t volunteer job at an upscale eco-lodge seven hours by boat up the Nam Ou River helping with management and English practice with fifteen staff. Low season. Husband wife and daughter left for a Thai hospital where she will birth Emil.

Stay two months. Facilitate courage with kitchen, restaurant, and housekeeping staff.

Laughter is an effective elective.

Live next to a wide flowing brown river rushing south for 448 kilometers from China to the sea near Nam. Gardens of butterflies, red hibiscus, looming granite mountains, river, forests.

Dancing cloud thoughts.

Calm wisdom mind meditation.

Everything you do is a meditation.

Culture is what you are.

Nature is what you can be.

Linguistic Semantics. The map is not the territory.

Your visa will expire. No new job no chance to renew.

Return to Seems Ripe. Discover a new adventure. Let's go.

Luang Prabang - exit. Kiss your Lao artist lover good eye. You've known each other three years. In out love dialogue. She has the imagination heart. You've encouraged her skill these years providing her with watercolor paper, inks, and pens. She's created a nice portfolio.

You're not saving anyone.

Modern fancy glass and brass empty new LP international airport. On the second floor among rows of empty seats and shops, three steel accordion passenger tubes wait for big planes. Tourism=money=tourism.

The old squat French style fading yellow airport disintegrates down the road. It has character speaking memories. Remember when?

Heavy rain, clouds obscure mountains. Smiling security man said, nice hat, real style. It's an Akubra Traveler from OZ you say, showing him the sweat stained interior. Twenty rabbits made this hat. Rabbits love making hats when not nibbling in gardens or making baby rabbits. Wearing this hat brings me good luck. I can't be manipulated, fooled, folded, stapled or spindled. He smiles, have a nice trip.

Fifteen people go to Pakse on a prophet. 1:45 airborne. Clouds, blue sky. Clouds should know you by now.

In transit. 30 minutes. You walk out, free as a bird. A Lao man with a gold watch put his black attaché case down, lit a cigarette, made a call. A man pulls up in a black SUV, walks over to the man, talks and picks up the case. They board a flight to Vientiane.

The bag contains top-secret nuclear vision material and contracts with Chinese/Thailand developers to build twelve dams on the Mekong. Signed sealed delivered. COD.

Carlos and his wife from Mexico sit in 14 A/B. He's a government official. Sleek gray black hair and meticulous bushy moustache. You mention Gabo, yes, said Carlos, he was a great man and writer.

100 Years of Solitude

They're going to Angkor Wat for two days. You give them a quick vision - get a tuk-tuk at 5:00 a.m. Have a noodle breakfast on your way out. Enjoy exploding sun over fields. You get to Banteay Srei early. Before Japanese and Chinese locusts. It has the most intricate hand carved designs by women.

See Preh Khan-hall of dancers, Bayon, Ta Prohm, main Angkor temple. Ramayana story in stone. You show them Srei black and white images. Carvings, monkey guardians, stone stories. Did you take them, she said. Yes. They are beautiful.

Explore the jungle. See how you feel. Meet butterflies. They know the way through mysterious passages.

His questions: currency, safety, cost, typical Khmer food, scams, mosquitos. Brief them. I talk to airborne malaria insects. We speak the same language. They don't bother me. You need a hat, water, open heart-mind. Slow steps.

It's all a spiritual journey, said Carlos. Thanks for your help. 

Yin & Yang in China

I have paintings, poems, stories, translations of oral traditions to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

If I had more time I’d make them shorter.

I stepped outside of myself and saw a blind man going down life’s street. Neither of us had seen each other before.

Dressed in rags, he stooped under the weight of a torn shouldered bag. He had no left hand. His right hand stabbed cracked cement with a crooked staff. In the middle of the sidewalk he stumbled into a parked motorcycle, adjusting his way around it. Chinese schoolgirls eating sweet junk food on sharp sticks whispering silent secrets about his stupidity passed me with empty black wide eyes.

I remembered...if a man wants to be sure of his road he must close his eyes and walk in the dark, and a blind man crossing a bridge at night is a perfect example how we should live our lives...the enlightened mind.

I followed him. I sensed a lesson in existence.

He continued scraping his staff against steps leading to shops and worked his way along a long concrete wall.

At the far end sat a beggar in rags made from boiled books. His skeleton supported a battered dirty greasy cap, threadbare jacket, no socks, broken shoes. He struggled to light a fractured cigarette. His cracked begging bowl was empty.

The blind man ran into him.

“Go around” screamed the beggar. “Can’t you see I’m here you idiot!”

“Sorry, I didn’t see you.”

“This is my space. Pay attention. Keep moving you fool.”

“Sorry to bother you. Maybe you’re a little sad, angry or lonely? Maybe I can help you.”

“What! Are you completely crazy as well as blind? I have no wife, no children, no parents, no friends, no home and no job. I live here hoping people will take pity on me.”

“I see. I know the feeling. I’m on my own. Maybe we could work together, be a team.”

The beggar rubbed his stubble. “Hmm. Let me think about it.”

“Take your time. Knowing our destiny means there’s no hurry.”

“Really? How can you be so sure?”

“Call it a hunch. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”

The beggar laughed. School kids passed them. One dropped a coin into the bowl.

“Thanks kid. Good luck on your exams next week.”

“I hate school. Too much homework. It’s so boring and tedious. I’d rather be home playing computer games or chatting online with my friends. I am an only child. I am a little Titan in my universe of want, want, want.”

“Your attitude sucks. Only 5% of the Chinese population has a university degree. Did you know that every June, six million students graduate from a university and 60% will not find work. They will wander the street like us. Your society faces hard cruel lessons, a reality outside your textbooks. Your people have fucked up your environment. Do you sleep where you shit? Sixteen of the most twenty polluted cities in the world are in this beautiful country. You sound like one of those single pampered little emperor kids I see every day. Busy, busy, busy. Get used to it or you’ll be out here with us.”

“A fate worse than death,” said the kid walking away. “My father owns a factory. He is rich man making huge profits off the sweat of poor illiterate fools and idiots like you, you bum. My future is filled with lots of money, a big house and a new car. Thank God for the one-child policy. I will buy a trophy wife. I will give her blood diamonds imported from mines in Africa or Burmese rubies. My country is investing huge amounts of capital all around the world to export raw materials. We feed our machines of consumption 24/7. As you know our country was squeezed, manipulated and exploited for years by big nose foreigners. Now it’s our turn to cash in billions of T-bills and let them dance to our sweet tune. And my family has a multiple-entry visa for Macau so we can leave whenever we feel like it. So, fuck off beggar man.”

“Yeah, begging isn’t a job, it’s an adventure.”

He looked back at the blind man.

“A team, eh? What’s your name?”

“My friends call me Yin. And you?”

“I don’t know my name. What’s a good name for a beggar?”

“How about Yang.”

“Does it mean anything? I’d like my name to mean something.”

“Why does it have to mean anything?”

“Well doesn’t a person’s name mean they have an identity, you know, like it defines their character, personality or something in the abstract?”

“Well, Yang symbolizes many things. For example, it stands for original integrated knowledge that has become buried by mundane conditioning.”

“You don’t say.”

“Real knowledge tends to become submerged in the unconscious.”

“Well, all I know is that my real knowledge says I’m hungry. If I don’t eat soon I’ll be unconscious. So, let’s say I take this Yang name. How will it help me realize my true nature?”

“It will give you dignity. Self-respect. Everything has already happened. We just need to experience it. Experience is the greatest teacher. A name like Yang will give you strength.”

“I need some of that. Ok. From now on you can call me Yang. Shake on it.” He reached out taking Yin’s dirty right hand. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Let’s get some money and buy some food.”

“I’ve been here all morning,” said Yang, “and all I have to show for it are a couple of Yuan. How about you? Any luck today?”

“I’ve been collecting old plastic bottles from trash containers,” said Yin shaking his bag. “I know a man who’ll give us some money for them. He’s not far from here.”

“Ok,” said Yang, “let’s go. Maybe we can get some spare change along the way.” He struggled to his feet and took Yin’s stub.

“What’s across the street?” asked Yin.

“A bunch of cheap restaurants for the high school kids,” said Yang. “Let’s beg there. People are happy to share their change when they have a full belly.”

“Good idea. Life is change. Can you help me get across?”

“Sure. We have to be careful, it’s busy - lots of pedicabs, trucks, buses, bikes. Let’s go.” Yang guided him across the river of traffic dodging bells.

“What fine music!” yelled Yin.

“It’s incomprehensible to me,” hollered Yang.

“It sounds like an angelic orchestra rehearsing for a play.”

“You are one strange animal.”

Yang stationed Yin outside a place filled with tongues and food smells. “This is a good spot. Do you have a begging bowl?”

“Sure. Doesn’t everybody?” He fished it out of his bag. It reflected 10,000 things.

“Wow! It’s beautiful. Where’d you get it?”

“From a kind stranger in Tibet.”

“I’m impressed. Never been there. I wonder how beggars survive at high altitude. May I see it?”

“They practice compassion and meditate on the process of death. Here,” said Yin. “Take it. See if it brings you good fortune.”

Yang accepted the gift and gave Yin his wooden bowl.

“Good magic. You stay here and face this way. I’ll go next door and beg in the kitchen where they sell mutton. See if they’ll give me some scraps.”

“Ok,” said Yin. “Good luck. See you later.”

He stood silent inside the swirling chaos of humanity and took three deep breaths. He meditated on a single breath, a point of awareness. In-out, in-out. The emotional monkey mind loving the circus of sensory entertainment fell asleep.

He felt still, calm, quiet, focused concentration. He returned to The Temple of Complete Reality at Qinchengshan.

It was a clear above the mountain as wisps of white clouds circled the temple. Autumn colors exploded red, orange, and green near turtle and dragon gate guardians. Streams of life danced around rocks.

Feeling balance and harmony he meditated on the root below the surface of appearances.

A coin played in the bowl.

“Thank you very much.” 

we gave them everything

Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative near the Khmer gardener.

Colonizing this hell hole we gave them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination tools, fake NGO bureaucracies, wide boulevards, legal beagle systems, an eye for an eye, corruption potential, designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics, principles, values, faded yellow paint and French architecture.

Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving.

Let’s eat our sorrow and be grateful we don’t live in this depressing country filled with compassionate Buddhist people. I’ll never understand their intention to do nothing with mindfulness.

It’s the hardest thing a person can do.

She was a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover had flabby upper arms. She scribbled serious fiction-memory and sense data entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.

They examined a microscopic map of Angkor Wat filled with unconscious alliterative jungles,

gold lame Apsara dancers,

232 species of black and red butterflies,

2 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry,

Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups,

crying elephants,

super tour buses,

125cc motorcycles,

tuk-tuks,

begging children speaking ten European languages hawking gimcracks

whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education accompanied by miles of flaming plastic garbage,

narrow boned white oxen pulling carts,

14 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment diversionary cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense and 1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu temples stretching across Burma and Thailand into Laos and Vietnam in a circular boomerang dance evolving from the stillness,

letting go of outcomes as the French ladies whispered,

Where have we been,

Where did we go,

What did we see,

Where are we,

How do we feel,

Did we discover the intuitive third eye of enlightenment or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?

They’re trapped in Cambodia.

One described fragments of her short life history with an animist talking stick.

The other cut out brochure glossies, ticket stubs and bleeding hearts to paste in her book. A future visual memory of her ear and snow.

Her attention span was shorter than a tour at the Genocide Museum in Phony Baloney filled with 2,000,000 smiling skulls.

Here we are.

The Language Company 

The Language Company

Creative non-fiction. Journalistic facts. Literary imagination.

Lucky Foot taught English at The Language Company in Turkey in 2008. He returned in 2012. Collecting data. Field notes.

A Vietnam veteran, journalist and facilitator of courage he gifted luck to people in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos beginning in 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 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 and 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, religions and states 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 yourself.

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.

"As a literary outlaw 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 authoritarian figurines."

Leo 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 her 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. 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, humor, gratitude, abundance, and wonder as a free thinking individual. I have my junior philosopher's badge."

"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," Rita said. "It's about people reading it."

Room 317, Yang-en University, Fujian, China

He liked her immediately.

She knew how to wear her sadness with dignity. It was a warm, comfortable security blanket woven in threaded hopes, dreams, lies, beauty and love. He didn’t feel pity for her potential rising like a bird leaves a branch toward higher sky.

Her meditation involved multiple personalities - student, wife, lover, worker, artist, laborer, dancer, commodity broker and teacher. She played an actress pretending to be someone else in her life’s play. Do not break character.

She was all he had at the moment. Time stopped for him swallowing all the tears she’d never cry. Perhaps it was deeply ingrained Confucian cultural modesty masks forbidding her the luxury of being open, real, honest, and human. Hide your true face, said Mask. Your face eats your mask.

She lived in a time warp where emotions were controlled and rationed by parents, Party leaders and invisible social ghosts.

A tight feeling constricted her throat. She wanted to scream, ”Help me please, I am dying of infinite inexorable sadness.”

No one heard her silent scream. Peasants, students and teachers were busy, busy, busy staring at cell phones reading/texting 5,000-year old characters. Word pictures.

Ideograms symbolized the idea of a thing without the sound used to articulate it. A day in the life peering down, down, down at a green ionized electronic glowing screen. Their universe encapsulated screaming screened electrons.

They were auditioning for walk-on roles as student and teacher character actors at a private Chinese business university of 15,000 students.

They needed to stand out, to find the essence of robotic behavior where daring wasn’t fatal. Express their inner emotional state with abject distraction. Where their self-esteem and courage nurtured support, respect and empathy in their longing.

They had latent desire.

Their struggle was for jobs, money and social position.

They’d accept financial filial piety responsibility for aging parents. If married they’d support four parents. The iron rice bowl theory of a guaranteed collective security network collected dust in history’s rubbish bin. It was discarded with state housing, state jobs, and state health care.

She lived in a Brave New World.

She knew this and failed to accept it. Her consciousness shift grasped fragmentary what ifs and maybes.

“If students spent as much time looking forward as they do behind they’d make amazing profound progress,” she thought, approaching old campus.

She inhaled the sweet scent of yellow, pink and red wild roses outside barred windowed classrooms near the stinking W.C. basement where school guards planted green vegetables in trash strewn plots.

She trimmed dead stems with her Tibetan knife, caressed a thorn piercing her heart and severed one fresh rose. She carried it through a gate and up uneven cement stairs evolving into a paradigm shift. She was always early and well prepared.

White chalk dust covered the teacher’s podium in room 317. She lived, breathed, swallowed and spoke white chalk dust. On a broken blue table in the corner was a small green plastic bucket filled with water. Dust floated on the surface.

She opened the window, picked up a torn crumpled rag, soaked it and squeezed it out.

She placed the rose in a cup of water and put it on the podium.

Stubs and nubs of white chalk littered the podium. She collected fragments of academic history, an ancient educational memory scattered by a previous teacher. They always left a mess of exculpatory evidence.

She placed them in a box of discarded chalk next to the water bowl and blew white dust scattering flying powder elements into the air dispersing particles. After wiping down the podium, she rinsed and squeezed out the rag, hanging it to dry on the windowsill. She looked out.

Rolling green Fujian hills and a large blue lake escaped her eyes. An old weather-beaten woman farmer behind a red brick wall tilled soil to plant vegetables. Motorbikes heavy with woven wicker baskets spilling vegetables, toilet paper, apples, gas canister and wide-eyed children chugged along a cracked cement road.

Ancient blue one-cylinder rusty miniature dump trucks loaded with white granite blocks rumbled past fuming diesel exhaust, throwing red clay dust into the air where it collided with white chalk dust escaping room 317.

It was a poor landlocked rural peasant infected paradise.

The Boss died last year. She attended his ceremony in the Great Hall at his campus villa. She wore white as a sign of respect for the dead. Her ghost persona sang a comfortable sadness past rows of flowers to the casket. She bowed. His thin white mustache face reflected glass smudged with fingerprints.

He reminded her of a Tang poet living in solitude inside a long Chinese painting where wind whispered songs with trees, mountains and stars.

After his death and passing tribute, students began holding hands in public. His private army of guards lost their power to intimidate, coerce and extort money from adolescents displaying affection in public. Guards roared around on bikes with flashing red lights looking important and, if motivated to survive, begged for jobs slinging hash, cleaning tables, and peeling vegetables behind student restaurants.

Hundreds of local villagers, officials, educational specialists, farmers, teachers and drones followed the funeral procession to a hill overlooking the campus.

They put him in the ground and exploded fireworks to scare away running capitalist dogs and ghosts. They returned to fields, kitchens, gardens, offices and classrooms.

A year later the school started building a grand tomb for their dead leader on a hill above the computer center building. It cost $261,591,79.

Small change.

Turning away from the window she selected yellow, blue, orange, and green chalk from a seldom-used box.

She wrote on the blackboard:

I hear and I forget.

I see and I remember.

I do and I understand.

She drew a picture of a face with bubble words - “I am an autodidact. You are responsible for your learning.”

She splashed rainbows, suns, faces, laughter's wild memory and imaginary abstract colors on a green canvas, barely scratching the surface of appearances.

An obnoxious loud rusty metal bell clanged for fifteen seconds. She turned and faced 100 university students. They were physically eighteen with the emotional maturity of a thirteen year old. This disparity explained why the university treated them like children to keep them in their childlike space place.

They had “Sports Meetings” on the “Playground.”

They had “Nap” time after lunch.

Maybe twenty-five cared about learning. Most just wanted to pass. Some might ask questions and develop a life long love for learning, knowledge and wisdom.

Anyone asking why was reported by spies to authorities and disappeared. Poof.

A rare one possessed an innate creative playful inquisitive nature. The majority slept with their eyes open. Lights on and no one home paradigm.

She smiled. Her sadness evaporated. She inhaled delicious dust and spoke in tongues.

“What color are your dreams?”

“Stop making sense!” yelled a student. “What’s the context? Critical thinking skills with humor and curiosity are forbidden! ”

They whined in unison, “We are worried about our marks, not learning the material. 60 is heaven. 59 is hello.”

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” she said.

“We know so much and understand so little,” said Curious, a bright star in the universe. "I want to be a waif when I grow up. A real person with dignity and self-respect.”

During meditation they heard an authoritarian Mandarin voice yelling next door.

“The bent nail gets hammered down!”

A Century is Nothing