Healing

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.”

ART

 

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Language

I’m broiling on the balcony of my tree house. Getting down and dirty after years away from the typewriter.

Covered in world dust and needing oil it’s a small portable dangerous machine. It transforms life energies by weaving adventures. Thread follow needle.

I am a peripatetic traveler and literary outlaw.

Mandalay, Burma

I’m lucky to get it down now and make sense of it later.

I’m a mirror in the mandala of my labyrinth. I am Labrys, from the Greek for a two-headed axe. I write with passion and vision. Short fast and deadly.

My mirror reflects everything. It absorbs desire, anger, ignorance, passion and suffering.

Beauty has no tongue.

I’m confident and self-reliant exploring the human condition. Human energies, frequencies and vibrations reflect languages, lives and attitudes. Dreams dance reflections.

Mirror reveals emotional trust, wisdom, peace and love with truth and compassion.

Meditate on the process of your death.

Suffering is an illusion.

Your mask eats your face.

My mirror is dust free.

Creativity dances in language.

Language is oral, gestures and graphic.

Oral and gestures dissipate.

Symbolic graphic is constant.

This awareness enlightens you after years of wandering. I have been here for 1,000 years. It's easy to imagine what humans are going through.

Everything you know is a lie.

Keep a diamond in your mind.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Hsipaw, Burma

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

The narrator, a soldier, talks to a priest while serving in Vietnam.

"The histories speak about humans shedding old habits, attitudes, values, and beliefs and loved ones to go on journeys with new opportunities and compassion.

"How they renewed their spirit with pure gratitude and joy. It’s amazing. I mean here I am sacrificing my youth, desire, ignorance and anger to be cleansed, to be made whole, to integrate my unconscious into oneness with the ALL as an authentic being. We are stardust. We are one third the life of the universe.”

“Yes, my son, using religion I sacrificed bodies and souls. I created sorrows and depravity. I wandered through Sumerian, Greek, Roman, and Spanish villages where I administered suffering, pain and death. I burned 12,000 innocent men, women and children at the stake during the Inquisition. Ah, such a time I had condemning heretics to damnation and life everlasting. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

“Did you record these events?”

“I dictated my myths, legends and story-truth to Omar, a blind Touareg scribe. My amanuensis. You’ll meet him in Morocco on 9/11. You will combine stories and adventures in this tale. Anyway, to continue my little saga, I licked civilization’s fire. As a fire-eater in a traveling carnival I blessed sinners with ashes on Palm Sunday. I drove a tank through Middle Eastern deserts converting the heathen with fire and brimstone. I kneeled and prayed in mosques facing Mecca five times a day.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yes. I survived in Afghan caves near destroyed statues of Buddha hearing Taliban confessions. I tended to suicide cases in GITMO. I meditated in Tibetan caves for three centuries, three decades, three years, three months, three weeks, three days, three minutes and three breaths. Ah, the blessed trinity. At Tibetan sky burial ceremonies north of Lhasa after flaying skin off bodies, I ground human bones to mix with blood for vultures so the departed spirit could, would, should be reborn. Karma and reincarnation.”

“You did all that?”

“Yes. I walked the length of the Silk Road from Venice to Guangzhou bringing comfort to the lame, blind and destitute. I traveled with Italo Calvino from Italy a scribe blessed with magical realism insight when he created Invisible Cities in Kublai Khan’s court. Perhaps you know of it?”

“Yes, he and the great Khan played chess.”

“Ah the great game and a metaphor of life. Castle early. Control the center. Divide and conquer.”

“Checkmate,” whispered Death.

ART

Kids Write

“Let’s create a book,” said one, “and we’ll be in it. We can create a quest about love & survival. Like ART, adventure, risk and transformation.”

“Hey it’s a great possibility, with stories or vignettes for word salad dressing.”

“We need stories, water, shelter, food and love.”

“Stories existed before food and shelter. Stories describe hunting for food and social needs. All stories are about forms of hunger.”

“Love is a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor,” said a shadow.

“Will it be a man-u-script or a woman-u-script?”

“Both. If it ain’t on the page it ain’t on the stage.”

“We are authors looking for characters,” said an Italian kid named Pirandello. “I am a plot looking for a character.”

“When someone dies survivors look for a plot,” said a gravedigger.

“It will have characters facing conflict on their quest,” said a young scriptor. “It will have satire, humor, curiosity and courage.”

“Yes,” said a writer. “It will be a labyrinth of desires and obstacles with rising and falling action and resolution as characters take risks, suffer greatly and overcome adversity to realize their authenticity. You will experience what characters sense and imagine through their actions. Socrates subordinated character to action. Get to the verb.”

“Let’s make it dramatic by focusing our spotlight on specifics and floodlight on the general to establish a P.O.V. I’ll play director. Places everyone. Lights. Camera. Action!”

“Our stories contain conscious and unconscious awareness like a maze or a puzzle palace. I need your help with dialogue and action as characters reveal their fears by living forty questions in the dark night of their soul. They trade their soul to the devil down at the crossroads at midnight so they can play the blues, create art and dance. Free from masks they are breathing, laughing and living healers.”

“Let’s act out their fears, dreams and joy.”

“Do your characters discuss moral ambiguities?”

“Yes. They speak with nouns and verbs with choices, actions and consequences. They slay adverbial dragons with an ultra fine red pen.”

“Is a place like this hospital a character?”

“Sure, a place has character? Writers explore environments like Tacoma, Vietnam, Morocco, Spain, caves…”

“It sounds like nature vs human or human vs human or human vs themself. You become the thing you fight the most.”

“Do they playfully deconstruct the human condition with story-truth moving the narrative forward to get to the root of their experience?”

“The roots are below the surface,” said a young nun washing teacups on a Taoist mountain in Sichuan, China. “I mediate on the roots below the surface of appearances.”

“Get is the joker word in English. A lit agent at the Willamette Writer’s Conference said this work is a word farrago photograph, a jazz beat stylistic epic in process. She suggested throwing the narrative out and focus on one geography or one specific time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Rita, 14, an ice seller and independent author of Ice Girl in Banlung in Ratanakiri, Cambodia.

It was a wild-west town of 25,000 with dusty red roads near the River of Darkness and animist cemeteries. “It’s fucking hysterical.”

ART

Bliss

Rose knew it’d be a beautiful decision putting the disability act in their short sweet Ghost Dance - maybe in the rising action leading to an epiphany or in the falling action with heart-breaking catastrophic transformational awareness. Cut. The end. Cue applause.

“How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” said a child with reported speech. Their wheel of life played tag with crazy wisdom.  Mu-shin, their state of “no-mind” blossomed where thought, emotions and expectations did not matter.

Who’s dragging around this bag of bones? Where do I park this empty vehicle? I have poems and stories to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

“To sleep, perchance to dream.”

“A dream is an unfulfilled wish,” said a kid with a Ph.D. in Psychoanalysis from the Jung Institute in Zurich.

“What else did he say?”

“He said, ‘There is no royal road to wisdom. To arrive in the future I must journey to the past. To attain the sanity with the One, I must risk the whirling madness of the possessed. One must confront their shadow or be crushed by it.”

“I like it,” said Rumi. “What else?”

“Well, here’s another cool thing he said. “‘I liken the formation of a character to weaving fabric. You know what happens when you make a mistake? The whole pattern is spoiled. You have a choice. You can finish the garment, however it will always be botched and ugly or you can unravel the weaving back to the mistake and start again. That’s basically what analysis is about. It’s a tedious job. The patient is scared and hostile. The analyst lends patience, honesty and courage.’”

“Excellent,” yelled kids, “here’s to our being patient patients with honesty and courage.”

“Speaking of courage, I’m looking for someone who knows reading and writing,” said Rose.

“I can read and write,” said the children. "We also love drawing, singing and dancing.”

“Reading and writing is power. Dance is life. Perfect. Let’s go together,” said Rose.

Downstairs at Sacred Heart Hospital a translucent mother saw her grief reflected in Beauty’s mirror. “This is my worst nightmare,” whispered her heart-mind.

Rose said, “Afraid to face the truth adults run away. They run away carrying their fear like a heavy bag of bricks. They are afraid to see the beauty, strength and dignity of Death and letting go.”

“Why?” said mother.

“They stay away because they are afraid of saying the wrong thing. The child’s spirit is pure energy. They have the strength to let go. Adults find Death a scary thing so they run away.”

“I see,” said a gardener trimming thorns below a tree house. “I know Death’s beauty and wisdom. Metaphors and mortality exist with initial memories. Memories are figments of our imagination. I am a dreamer in nature, bigger than the universe, in never-never-cuckoo land. I am a witness collecting evidence that tells no lies. The deeper you go the deeper the bliss.”

ART