Wolf meets dog. Freedom vs slavery.
Laugh and keep moving.
Passion & peristence.
Writing like music - rhythm, harmony, improvisation.
Time, effort, patience, cooperation.
Living safely is dangerous.
Dialect of the hands.
Thread music / dancing needle / flying leaves / zone of color art magic / sewing, tea, eggs, chillis, juice /
Writing Book of Amnesia / polish monster / just sitting / rain
Northern Laos
In 1969 he volunteered for the Army, left the world and flew over the pond to Nam.
He walked out 364 days later with his shadow - a bag of bones.
He is a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made of stardust riding a rock floating through space.
Fear Nothing.
Transformed, he experienced free time in the long now.
This is what happened, more or less.
One of his names is Lucky Foot. What does that mean?
He elucidates in simple, clear, precise, concise English the language of savage barbarians.
It means, as an experience junky possessing genetic variant DRD4-R7 addicted to new adventures, he brings prosperity to merchants, rest-a-rant owners and nondescript sad, neglected, abandoned and emotionally well adjusted hot to trot red sheen women among humans struggling to survive life’s labyrinth without a center.
He gifts luck to money changers, manicure girls, beggars, banana women -
Landmine amputee survivors, ice and rice sellers, student-teachers, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies, textile merchants, weavers, artistic genius children -
Orphans, noodle mama, tea and java purveyors, gardeners, gravediggers, literary outlaws and craggy faced Dan, a boat captain in Hoi An who worked as an interpreter at MAC V during the Vietnam War.
Fate and destiny is the same thing.
If he grows up he dies.
Security is an illusion.
He presents good fortune to Rita, author of Ice Girl in Banlung, barbers cleaning his ears, high-heeled sandal ladies, love sock purveyors and rent-a-life companies.
HCE. Here comes everybody.
90% of life is showing up. When he shows up their day, life, fate and glittering fortunes improve. Karmic destiny.
Fate laughed with him in Morocco on 9/11. He was in the Sahara. He did not take possession of that event and perpetual aftermath. Fear sells.
Destiny danced with him on the is-land of Amnesia in Southeast Asia and exploring Turkey, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Before returning to Nam in 2009 he lived on a string of 15,000 archipelago islands between Malaysia and Papa New Genie gathering evidence about the human condition.
Each island is a letter. If you string letters together you create a word. This word depending on your imaginary perception of truth-value may or may not have meaning for you like Beauty - your true reflection in still water.
Beauty needs no tongue.
A small journey expands life’s tapestry. He’s a needle without a compass. His needle leads a thread. Threads weave a conversation.
Move like a river, rest like a mirror, respond like an echo.
Chapter 12.
Across town a sewing woman returned to her Kampot, Cambodia guesthouse.
She splashed water on her face and changed clothes. She spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and went to the sprawling market inside a labyrinth.
At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.
Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling faux-paws silver stars, moons, and small round reflecting balls. Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement for engagements, weddings, and cremations.
She stayed busy with serious fittings and adjustments. Her sewing universal process was selecting fabric, measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections and ironing.
Threads inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as needles danced through cloth in endless conversations. Needles talked about traditional conservative morals and opportunity-value cost. Thread followed their conversation. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number.
All explanations have to end somewhere.
Sky darkened.
Ceremonial drum thunder sang vocal intensity.
Lonely lost suffering foreign tourists in Cambodia shuddered with fear.
What if I die here?
How will my family and friends begin to realize my intention to witness 1200 years of dancing
Angkor laterite stoned history
gnarling jungles revealed by natural strobes?
Lightning flashed skies.
Giant flashbulbs illuminated petrified children
Buried inside cement caverns eyes eating cartoon images on a plasma scream.
Skies opened.
Rain lashed humans. Some laughed, others cried. Tears dissolved fear.
Sweet dreams, baby.
Dawn.
Two arrived. A boy is cutter. He carried rope, ladder, small axe and machete.
Helper friend is coconut palm tree scout.
Here and there, he said, pointing.
Go up.
The boy shinnied up a narrow palm.
Transferring to the towering 2’ diameter palm he climbed higher.
Roping his tools.
How’s the view, asked helper.
Sublime. A wide brown river lined by cauliflower oaks reaches bamboo huts.
Orange sunrise severs cumulus wisps.
A market woman has her nails done in blue glitter.
A boy saws crystalized ice on a red dirt road.
Girls in white cotton pedaled to school.
A woman grilling waffles along a road buys bundled forest kindling.
Saffron orange robed monks sit in meditation at Naga Wat.
One plays a drum. A heartbeat of possibility.
He climbed higher.
He chopped. Long thin heavy branches weighted by freedom danced free.
Helper dragged branches past advertisements for temples, orphanages, river trips.
He chopped.
He dragged.
He chopped.
He dragged.
He secured rope to the top. Blossoming.
He chopped.
Coconuts, leaves, bark danced down.
White interior life dust snowed.
Tree crashed.
Light escaped. 3 hours. $20/2.
Smashing blocks of ice inside a blue plastic bag with a blunt instrument created a symphony outside unspoken words as a homeless man with a pair of brown pants thrown over a thin shoulder sat down to rest.
Shy women waiting for Freedom averted black eyes.
Aggressive women manipulated stacks of government issued denominations trusting an implied perceived value in exchange for meat, fruit, gold and fabric.
Counting and arranging denominations inside broken beams of light, cracked cement, lost mislaid wooden planks, debris, feathers, jungles, and jangled light waves they surveyed commercial landscapes with dispatched dialects near rivers revealing stories with fine stitched embroidery. Needles led thread.
Kairos - threads and looms and Three Fates.
I am afraid, the Swiss girl said, Of becoming the Stranger, the Other.
The Other. I like it, being the Other, the Outsider yet I'm afraid of always being the Other.
Why?
It's the fear I suppose, it's difficult to articulate. It's a sense of feeling apart, separate from people.
I know it, he said, I'm like that, have been for a long time. I live on the edge. I engage. I am vulnerable, open, honest yet I always maintain a sense of detachment.
How is it this sense of outside, she said.
It's objective, he said, feeling her vision escape toward the weaver at her loom, her meditation.
I am the shuttle sliding across threads, she said.
I am smooth aged wood holding two bobbins. One is golden silk thread, the other purple.
As I slide the bobbins spin at the speed of light releasing, ah all the releasing, letting go of myself trailing into, between thin black origins - the essence where I rest.
She cautions me with her fingers - purple and golden desires lie flat. She pulls her emptiness toward me, hands and feet.
I am bound to Others before and after me.
I wait for Others to join me.
I feel connected, she said.
I am part of the whole. Part of the grand design inside her dream.
I pass through. I am here and now.
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