silent love

I am a beautiful deaf mute woman.

I speak sign love, sing, dance and laugh in Cambodia. Spoiled whining children and small adults run around screaming. I can’t hear them. It’s a blessing. I read lips screaming I want food. I want love. I want education. I want medicine.

I had a dream. A grandfather in Laos is an idiot. He runs his truck. It’s his solace. I love the smell of pollution on Sunday morning. His daughter burns plastic trash. Parents and children inhale fumes.

Ancestor worship. In Vietnam it’s incense.

In Laos it’s exhaust and burning plastic. Here it’s cow shit. Youngsters respect their elders. Shut your mouth. Do not say anything to venerable grandfather. Birds sing with hammers. I feel vibrations.

Their traditional silence kills them softly. Truth is a powerful weapon. Most people are afraid of truth. Hearing, speaking, realizing truth entails risk. Daring is not fatal. Truth is a deaf mute seer in Cambodia.

Everything here is a secret. Shhh fingers on my lips. I am secretly married to a false dream of going to Australia with Thorny. He is 50, married with family there. He works for an NGO in Cambodia. He builds fake bamboo homes. He plays my father figure and rescuer. 

I come from a poor rural Cambodian village. I was the last of 11 children. I am 28. I came here with my sister, 32. She got pregnant by a married New Zealand man. She had a daughter. She pretends to be married. It’s all show here. He sends her a monthly handout, pays the electricity. 

My sister set up a hair salon business in a temple tourist town. It fell through. Salons are a dime a dozen. Thousands of undereducated poor passive girls don’t read or dream. They cut. Do their nails. They digit phones.

Staring at mirrors is their fate. Some moonlight as beer girls and hostesses. Where is Mr. ATM? No money, no honey. 

Vietnamese plant rice. Cambodians watch it grow. Laotians listen to it grow.

hyohakusha

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.

Celebrate

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. 

Sing

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. 

divorce integrity

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.”