River Meditations

Greetings,

The recent water journey encompassed long musical boats on the Nam Ou River. The Nam Ou flows south from Yunnan, China and meets the Mekong originating in Tibet, near Luang Prabang, Laos. The Mekong continues through Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam to the South China Sea.

From Luang Prabang its seven hours to Nong Khiaw. The narrow boat and narrow seats held 15 tourists. Nong Khiaw has 4,000 people and is surrounded by mountains, villages, many guesthouses and eco-tourism opportunities for trekking and home stays with local people.

Neurotic foreigners speak of their angst, anxiety, trembling heart stories. Bye-bye tourists.

The timeless Lao river: a woman breastfeeds her baby, smiling, floating clouds in yellow green forest rising above bamboo homes, cooking fires, women washing clothing and their long black hair in the river. Singing. 

In the morning a mother, young boy and husband, with the help of villagers load five bags of cement and 20 sheets of corrugated tin roofing material into a long thin boat for the upriver voyage to Muang Khua. Along the seven hour trip we stop at their small hamlet to unload their building materials.

We are surrounded by rising limestone and karst peaks, diverse vegetation and wild green nature.

Scores of yellow butterflies dance near wet sand. Naked children play, dance and swim in day's heat. Water buffalo wallow in mud. Fishermen cast nets. Bamboo rafts with generators collect rapid wave energy, converting it into electricity through suspended wires to elevated villages.

We ride swirling rapids. The propeller breaks in a series of rapids and we float backwards to a calm area, beaching the boat. The driver strips down, hammers off the bent blade, attaches a spare and fortifies the connection with a nail. We head upstream. Life is but a dream.

Muang Khua is a small river town for tourists arriving or departing by bus from the eastern Vietnam border. 

Three of us find a boat driver with a narrow boat willing to take us to HatSa six hours north. By Jan-Feb this section of the river will be too shallow for navigation.

It's all this slowing down, energies and breath. A reconfirmation of the daily flow with mythic extremities. It is clear flowing water, many turbulent rapids, narrow canyons, wind, clouds, forests, and green eyed dragonflies.

Along the way a local man tells the driver to stop near a wide tributary flowing from the forest. He gets out, puts his bag on stones, washes his hands, waves and walks into the river disappearing into deep forest shade.

He is home.

Metta.

Northern Laos

Greetings,

Four new image galleries are in Northern Laos. Live, immediate and direct. A visual river. They transmit sand, waves, tides, fresh air, mountains, communities, dancing light and humans.

For example: 

This boy said, Before dawn follow the woman on the one red dust road to the market. It is small, near a school. Women spread their produce all green and fresh on blue tarps, natural fibers weaving their muted voices inside cool mist mountain air and baskets of chillies wearing happy leather faces.

Across the bridge children climb mountains to harvest wood for home fires.

Somewhere in Laos a child is carrying the world on their back.

Metta.

vapor expression

amputee teacher
on his rolling chair
eats noodles

people who may not know
how to write
watch someone scratch lines 
in the breeze of voices
clattering metal pans

laughter silence

a son leads his blind father
beating a drum
by a thread

June's blues

Greetings,

June is leaving. June was so beautiful, soft and kind with temperamental tears. She walked through red dust back to the slum inside the smell of burning rubbish looking for her mama. Her poor heart skipped a beat. Nothing but June blues, living in the space between sharp currency notes, between strangers.

June sleeps with her sisters in a village. Danish soldiers showed up after dark. They were on a serious international peace keeping mission. They were hungry animals wanting real serious action.

Mr. Lonely Denmark found an attractive one playing in his fantasy who was super aggressive. His instinct said no. She’s crazy. A tall thin demure soft one sat down, eating fruit. Great angelic face. She worked for her “mama.” We're short of time, ask mama how much for a few hours, he said to his translator. $50.

Ask her if she wants to escape, said LD. Yes, she said, skipping away to change. The angry one thought it’d be her. She spat angry words and gestures. The fury of a woman scorned. 

LD paid mama and they left. They ate fish, vegetables, rice and went to bed. LD was the fish. Normally her customers were short jobs so he helped her slow down. Take your time. She was flat and flat on her passive back. No hurry, sweet thing, said LD. She had an extensive vocabulary. Boom-boom?

LD needed to get back to his unit. June accepted his unit on a short term lease arrangement. Always on, always connected in her passive universe. All for mama, loving the Danish and doing her best for international relations. Heat and serve. Ready to eat.

Don't you just LOVE the smell of Rubbish in the morning? Yes, you do.

Metta.

Sam and Dave Part 2.5

Greetings,

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown barb wire encircling his domain name, easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter. The Chinese introduced barb wire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. 

The French ate pastries, introduced excellent wines, produced intricate glass mosaics for Dalat eternal spring walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, shards of glittering glass composed of miniscule myopic minimal, musical and colonial architectural ideology. Yellow buildings aged gracefully along Rue this and Rue the Day. 

Eventually the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction, and chaos unleashed their fury on the poor unsuspecting suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels well below the surface of appearances. Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family all the way back to a dynasty encroaching on walls and shrines inside brown temples welcomed the silence. During the day they worked fields before going underground where nightingale arks brought carpet bombing, napalm, agent Orange. Forever. 

‘Quick into the tunnels!’ They sat sweltering, crying, still. Listening to the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They went deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath, their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

The sweet silence, save all the crying, wounded after all the foreign devils packed and left, fleeing in terror as peasants streamed down from the mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking all the oceans in their creation myth, draining lands of blood, forcing them back into the sea. A blue green sea danced in blood.

This easing down of their voice flowing between crumbling sand, crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but the sound of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness at the reality of life’s twisted reality. Their memory was a fiction and this fiction created their memory.

Metta.