wow, said elf, what an amazing year, all 365 dreams. we celebrated beginning in cambodia.
in march we celebrated snow altitudes in nepal. in cambodia we celebrated summer heat. laos called in fall and wa-la, presto magician, here we is. again.
once upon a whisper paid attention to sensations. a heavy deluge increased density of murmurs. ideal voices sat silent.
it's hyohakusha, said a zen monk named basho. one who moves without direction.
metta.
May this find you celebrating life holidays with friends, family and complete strangers in beauty and mystery. Elf trusts your 2011 was filled with blessings and peace.
A traveling Elf completed 84 days at a private elementary school in Vientiane, Laos.
29 teachers taught Elf how to focus and pay attention.
Kill the television and distracting electronic gadgets, they said. Laughing.
They taught Elf about Character. Trust, fairness, responsibility, citizenship, and respect.
Elf cried and thanked them.
Elf feels great returning to Luang Prabang. He will investigate new teaching ops in the new year.
Funny seeing all the neurotic Europeans dazed and confused. They wander Disneyland. Lost and looking. DOING the Southeast Asian circuit. In-out. Bye bye.
Tourists find. Travelers discover.
Collected the Mystery 21-speed bike from the bus station. Had four months of grime and dirt sprayed off. Oiled.
Spin them wheels. Excellent rolling elevations. Taking his time quickly. Expanding the adventure indeed.
May all your adventures in 2012 be light and love.
I found a temporary room at an expensive private suburban hospital. Clean sheets, a cot and three daily hots. It was an intensive care color spectrum zonal theory filled with young lovers in their emotional zombie reality of lies and uncertainty.
Downhill from the hospital a crying man waiting at the Metro station held a cardboard hospital chart and paper package. An orange paper folder discovered papers from a doctor, a lab, a prognosis, a definite definitive defining medical history. It revealed a story about someone dying, a wife, uncle, someone he loved.
He waited in heavy unconditional silence for a green Metro to collect him and his package of fear, loss and regret transporting him down the line. Home. Where he’d spill the contents on a table surrounded by friends and relatives sharing his tale. Loss and hypodermic needles of pain, pleasure, desire, sloth, envy and assorted fabulous conversations laughed.
A bird pressed itself against a thorn to make herself sing.
A stranger passing the hospital smelled wild roses. A bird sang. He whistled. Bird answered.
The bird’s song were short sharp sounds, a trill, long deep vibrational throated mysteries, harmonic scales, warbling.
“Now I know why the caged bird sings,” whispered an orphan child scrambling across mined fields next to her Cambodian bamboo home.
The man and bird carried on this musical conversation until the bird was satisfied the stranger knew the music. It flew, singing.
In Turkey divorce is seen as a failure. A place where the majority of women know their place and stay in it. A place where mothers control and manipulate their daughter’s behavior, attitudes and imaginary freedom with a heavy dictatorial hand called love. Chains of love.
One was different. She confided in me. I listened. After seven months of marriage she’d decided to leave her husband filing divorce papers.
“I feel so much better,” she said. She opened up. She felt free. She had a lot to say. She’d believed her husband in the beginning.
“He lied to me. He courted me with sweet words and I thought, or believed I thought or thought I believed he had an open mind but I was disappointed because he wasn't honest...so after some time measured in weeks then months I saw his, how do you say, irresponsibility, how he wouldn't contribute his heart to me, to our relationship and then, when I tried to talk to him he was closed to me, he shut down and I was working and trying to keep the flat up and work on our relationship but I saw it was difficult, then really, really impossible to live with everything in my brain and heart.”
She inhaled. “Now, when he saw my action to end the marriage he was filled with remorse and regret and apologies. But it's too late. I told him to move out. He returned to his family. He tries to bother me every day in his childlike whining way but it's over. I can handle it. I am strong and know what I want in my life. My family is very supportive of my decision.”
“In China it’s always about saving face. Appearances. Here, it's about self respect, growth and personal dignity,” I said. “Some get it and some don’t.”
“Yes! I am not living the lie anymore. I feel free.”
“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” said a foreign teacher.
“We know so much and understand so little,” said a bright Chinese girl. One of eighty in a class tomb.
“I want to be a waif when I grow up.”
During a moment of silence they heard an authoritarian female voice yelling in Mandarin from another room. “The bent nail gets hammered down!”
A ghost passed brown faced women in dirty white aprons chopping vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Single girls mopped cement passageways from dawn to dusk. Dutiful daughters swept floors staring at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent and hairline fractured straw mattress bedding.
China is the entertainment capital of the world!
He passed retired pensioners slapping white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured strategic rows as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes painted the city’s rising dust. A ghost they never imagined floated past, an apparition they dreamed in their wide eyed wonder.
A peasant woman collected cow manure in broken reed baskets. She carried her load to a road, spreading it out with a hoe to dry in the sun. Instant organic fertilizer.
Ghost speaks the language of silence. This comforts them. His inability to articulate his passion and suffering illusions witnesses a mirror reflecting reality in humanity’s incarnate garden.
The meaning of meaning was obscured by clouds of anger, fear, desire, jealousy, ignorance, and attachment. They waved him away.
They cast him into deep water. He replenished his spirit. His motivation and intention was clear.
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