Refugees
Suffering
Sacrifice
Letting go
Human dignity
Freedom
Brave New World
Memories of WWII
Survival
Beginnings
Life is discovered in a desperate situation
World wakes up from slumber
Heartbreaking nightmare
Humans help humans
Courage
Gratitude
Safety
Bursa, Turkey
the woman on the metro
with a burned leg - you remember her clearly
how she sat after dragging her bad leg
into the compartment
this image of her
alone
cold
scared
in pain
how did it happen? why is she alone?
on a cold night in a flimsy sweater
her skin below the knee
running to her ankle
all burned away
exposing blood red lines
her abstract expression
her sacred scared distracted face
watching night fly past windows
where blue televisions and children eye each other
how she kept going
on the metro past a stop
where the expensive private hospital on a Roman
hill gleamed its extensive intensive pensive care
ward and her treatment was delayed
forgotten useless
here
because she is poor
so she stayed in her seat
anxious now feeling her pain
wondering where she would go
where she would end up this night
as a stranger studied her anxious passive
expression feeling burns, violent burns
inside sensations fire and heat
nerve impulses darting through
along sensory
channels where signals blocked by
neurotransmitters shut down
her chance
Rose, a healing clown, wove her way through Intensive Care pushing a cart of snacks, books and toys.
“One size fits all,” Rose yelled above children’s laughter. “Come and get it.”
Children accepted rabbits, bears, yaks, animist tribal masks, elephants, snow leopards, tigers, panthers, and turtles wearing hexagrams.
Rose gifted wolves, foxes, spiders, eagles, ravens, fire breathing dragons, watercolor brushes, Chimayo blankets, Hopi Kachina Earth spirits, 232 butterfly species from Cambodia and Tibetan prayer wheels.
“Hey,” shouted a child, “what’s your name?”
“Rose. What’s yours?”
“Ash,” smiled the kid, “short for Ashley.”
“Well,” said Rose, “you don’t look so short to me. In fact, you look larger than life, if you know what I mean, jelly bean.”
“That’s funny,” laughed Ash, reaching her thin arm into the space of Rose dancing fingers in a dervish whirl.
“Here, have some colors Ash.” Rose zapped her with a rainbow spilling laughter, prisms and stardust.
“Wow, cool. Thanks Rose.”
Rose shared extra crunchy peanut butter, strawberry jam, green tea, fresh pitta bread, grape juice, bananas, apples, milk, eggs, cheese, tomatoes, rice and toothbrushes. She offered mint-flavored dental and mental floss.
She gifted fragrant soaps, candles, multicolored silk threads, bells, gongs, cymbals, looms, shuttles and bilingual dictionaries.
Rose dispersed gamelan orchestras, watercolors, camelhair brushes, calligraphy ink, Laotian silk, papyrus sheets and illustrated poetry books. Multifaceted mirrors reflected and refracted waves of eternity.
A Lao child carries the world on their back.
“Wow,” said a dreaming child, “this is beautiful,” beaming innocence around the room in a spiral vortex.
“You are beautiful,” said Martha Ann. “Mad and innocent.”
“Make my day,” yelled a boy looking through a telescope into the infinite expanding universe composed of 13.5 billion-year-old stardust. Children swarmed like bees making honey, “Let me see, let me see.”
“Guess what?” said astronomer. “There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on the planet.”
“May I see?” said a kid.
“It’s a see saw,” said a joker, “around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows.”
“Am I this or am I dreaming?” said a child. “I am real. I invent your dream. Tran and I with our Dream Sweeper Machine decipher and reconfigure old dreams to create new memories.”
Voices sang a cold mountain poem. “Am I the soft sand of sleep that calms your tortured heart?”
“What strange mixture of life and death am I?”
“I am a wanderer searching for a Who to What I am.”
“You can indicate everything you see.”
“I am a butterfly dreaming I am a healthy child.”
A rational child said, “Pain is a sickness leaving my body. I feel free.”
“You is what you is,” said a small voice. “My mother was appointed to have me.”
“That must have been terrible.”
“It was her karma. Intention is karma.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s being aware of your actions and how they return in new forms and opportunities in your life. How they manifest your destiny. Today is our destiny. We accept responsibility for our choices and actions. We accept responsibility for our freedom.”
“Are you one with everything?” said one.
“Yes,” said a wise child. “We are a singularity. We are a witness. It’s part of the sacred contract. We are not in this room, we witness it.”
“Is absorbing our parent’s pain and suffering expensive?”
“Can be to be or not to be is the question,” said a kid named Shake Your Sphere.
“My mom says anger is expensive,” said a child.
“That explains why I can’t find the price tag,” said the joker child playing with a full deck. Ace high. Play the hand you get. Run the table. Outside hospitable windows a sparrow seeking crumbs darted from branch to branch on the Tree of Life.
“You betcha,” said Rose, grinning ear-to-ear not fear-to-fear through her Tantric death mask. “You are one third the life of the universe.”
“Like a rolling stone,” sang a child playing a riff on her blues harp in the key of C. “Ain’t it a crying shame. That old feeling is gone.”
“Ain’t nothing but the blues talking sweet thing,” said a sanguine one.
“Sometimes I blow and sometimes I draw. People should talk less and draw more. Ha ha ha.”
Adventure, Risk, Transformation
The screaming Lao man
Thin, late 20's, shorts, flip flops, black hair
Walks away from
Lao Provincial Hospital
Leaving a ward
Leaving someone he loves
Screams [speed of sound]
Broken by silence
Between knowledge and ignorance
He screams, closer
Screams...
He stops near hospital entrance
Frozen in midday sun
Burning pavement
Burning his heart
Throws out his arms
Drops to his knees
Screaming
Folds his head into his arms
Faces ground sobbing
Silent solitude grief
Loss heartbreak
A blind Khmer musician and his daughter.
Broken glittering glass edges reflecting an elegant universe magnified the tears of an Iraqi girl burying her parents in a white shroud of cloth, an old flag of final surrender.
Tree leaves blasted green to deep yellow and brown. They flew into a river. They gathered on boulders clogging the Rio Guadalete and dolomite waterfalls. One leaf did a lot of damage. The river needed cleaning.
"See," said the Grand Inquisitor ringing his broken Spanish bell, "it’s all possible. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted if there is no God."
Everything you know is a lie.
"Let’s invent a God," said a pregnant nun supporting her nose habit. "We need reason and faith to believe in a higher power."
"Reason and faith are incompatible," said a logic board filled with circular flux reactors.
"Look," said Little Nino, "I found a compass and it works. The needle is pointing to magnetic north. This may help us. I am a compass without a needle.”
Ahmed read the instructions. "Great Scott! It says one sharp line of description is better than any number of mundane observations."
"You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams," said a mother. "We need all the direction we can handle."
"Maybe one direction is enough," said a cartographer.
"If you need a helping hand," said another, "look at the end of your wrist."
"O wise one, tell us another," cried a disembodied voice.
"Ok, how about this," someone said. "Our days of instant gratification are a thing of the past."
"Looks like everything is a thing of the past," observed a child sifting dust particles at Ground Zero on 9/11.
"You’re wiser than your years."
"That’s an old saw with a rusty blade cutting through desire, anger, greed, ignorance and suffering."
"Yes," said a child, "there are two kinds of suffering."
"What are they?" asked another orphan.
"There’s suffering you run away from and suffering you face,” said a child arranging leaves on blank pages inside her black book.
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