Entries in The Language Company (178)
Adapt. DRD4-7R
Adapt, the balloon man lived below the Bursa hammam. Yes mam.
Adapt, Adjust and Evolve collected everything for a fire. One morning he flamed his life below a stone memory hut where someone - he didn’t remember whom - lived, worked and expired.
Internal passions blazed yellow and red.
Sparking a majestic canvas Adapt carried his bouquet of air-filled flowers across spring fields firing dawn with pink, red, green, yellow, and blue. Dreaming purple violets and daffodils spilled balloon imagery into children’s retinas.
His voice sang across time’s river, Create like a God, order like a King and work like a Slave.
Walking through spring with Courage, a personal pronoun, his flowing mind-stream movie flashed into around through a fine unknowing knowing starlight universe. Pure images were diamonds in his mind.
First thought, pure thought.
Sky mind.
Cloud thought.
His flaming life energy sang, “What is life?”
A game of experiences we get to play. Help others.
Expanding energy waves created screaming eagle dancers.
Two Golden Eagles fought in tall grass to dominate a female. Flashing anger with yellow lightning eyes and striking out with a sharp talon she balanced on a strong extended leg. A curving white tip slashed at males circling with desire, cunning and stealth. Pirouetting she danced between them protecting her flank near a fallen tree trunk. Her wings extended over green forests, Uludag mountain, blue shorelines and across oceans.
Nearby trapped behind high voltage fences on a desolate brown hill studded with boulders twenty wolves died of heartbreak.
One wolf’s eyes were a fluorescent emerald green Aurora Borealis retina patina, refracted surreal prisms.
“I am a lone wolf, like you,” said Lucky. “We share an R7 variant dopamine receptor gene DRD4, a chemical brain messenger for learning and reward. R7 is found in 20% of humans.”
“DRD4-R7 increases curiosity and restlessness,” said Lone Wolf. “Humans with R7 seek out new experiences with known pleasures, take more risks and explore new places, ideas, foods, relationships, and sexual opportunities. They embrace movement, change, adventure, migration and a nomadic lifestyle. I am dying here. I was born free.”
“I feel your pain and alienation.”
Wolves needed mountains, valleys and wild rivers. They were hungry to escape an artificial prison.
Lucky knew why midnight welcomed Howling Wolf.
Bursa, Turkey
Defrost Your Imagination
“Today is a good day to be empty. Practice 10,000 breaths until you disappear,” said a Lhasa monk petting a Sumatran tiger facing extinction by Malaysian villagers burning down forests to develop cosmetic palm oil exports.
“Yes, not too detached and not too sentimental,” said Zeynep sitting at a restaurant table creating surrealistic art in her notebook.
She drew stick figures with wild forested hair eating purple paper mache houses beneath a startled orange sun as disoriented Bursa talking animals crammed in spinach, green salad, tomatoes, grilled meat, rice and beans.
Across town on the TLC teachers’ apartment balcony sentry ants alerted the tribe to food. They marched from a drainpipe in single file, climbed over the edge of a plastic pot discovering good dirt. Teams fanned out sensing discarded muesli particles.
A mottled wingless insect living in bamboo detected worker ants approaching. Insect couldn’t fly. It scurried up a thin stalk to a green leaf blending in. Its feelers cleaned dirt off head and shoulders sham poop.
A gravedigger eating a hazelnut and strawberry jam sandwich on whole grain bread with grade A black olives harvested from Mudanya orchards nestled tight against Marmara Sea soil spoke to the insect as ants preparing their final assault gathered below the leaf.
“I need to move you.”
“Thanks. If I’m discovered I’ll perish. What do you suggest?”
“We use a leaf. Climb on it. I will let it go, floating over the garden. It will cushion your fall from grace. You will have a soft landing and better than a 51% chance of survival. Ground zero with better cover, food and dew you understand?”
“Ok. Thanks. 51% is better than zero.”
“You sound like an investment banker. Don’t mention it.”
“I need a new adventure.”
“Don’t we all. Here you go.”
Digger did what he had to do. Found a broad brown leaf. The insect climbed on. He released the vein-lined parachute into thin air. It floated. It landed on a huge exploding yellow sunflower.
“Goodbye,” sang the insect, “you extended my little life. I’ve survived to walk another day.”
The gravedigger sang, “Happy trails...to you...until we meet again.”
Take Amazing Risks
After Ankara he’d accepted a new adventure in Bursa. This shocked everyone in the capital lower case. They assumed he’d stay with them forever. Students and teachers celebrated his transition with a sparkling cake. Women cried sadness and joy.
“We are not here for a long time, we are here for a good time,” said Sappho the poetess.
One adult student who’d articulated her desire to move to Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire seeking an educational engineering job in a quality control factory school producing obedient robotic idiot children and live with her boyfriend cowered behind her futile quest for independence from over-protective parents. “My father won’t let me.”
“Take control of your life. Get a grip. Let go. Jump. Discover courage and your wings on the way down.”
*
“To do amazing things you have to take amazing risks and suffer greatly,” said Zeynep, his five-year old genius friend in Bursa, Turkey.
“Here,” she said, “many a-dolts stay with their mothers forever and a day because they are afraid of freedom and accepting responsibility for their lives.
“They eat fear morning noon and night. They are afraid to speak their honest feelings, to express their innate desire for independence.
“They are willing victims of traditional conservative attitudes and values. Free will is a foreign language. They are scared of taking risks, letting go and growing. I may grow old but I’ll never grow up. If I grow up I die.”
“I feel the same way.”
One day while sharing lunch and drawing in notebooks, he said, “When I was 9 I was going on 50. Now I am 50 going on 9. I exist outside adult time.”
“We are passing through,” she said, lighting a candle in darkness.
Northern Laos
Lukas From Holland
A Siem Reap street juggler balanced a flaming stick on his nose.
Tourists owed and awed.
A traveler spread thirty watercolor pens on a table.
“Here.”
“Can I use them,” said Lukas.
“Yes you may. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Color your dreams.”
Lukas drew two blue dragons and some red slashes.
“The top one is the dragon elephant. This one on the bottom can fly. Between them is a dead fish. They are fighting over it.”
“Why are they fighting?”
“They are hungry dragons.”
Lukas drew another fish outside the battle.
“This fish likes hamburgers.”
*
"What happens to dreams The Sweeper collects?”
“They are sorted by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime scientific symbolic meaning.
Word dreams live in vignettes, jazz poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, blood, bleached human bones,
Sumerian script and 26,000-year old Paleolithic cave paintings near Benaojan, Spain
hearing hollow bells ring high ring low as a Cambodian boy in satori clapping with one hand drags his cart along fractured dusty red roads collecting cardboard. Dawn to dusk.
Composing musical symphonies he squeezes a plastic bottle expelling stale air
attracting garbage contributors and hungry literary agents in a traditional publishing casino wheeling and dealing for their glorious 15%.”