Ash fallout

Greetings,

As hostage travelers get a grip and get a life discovering the diverse thrills of living in airports, bus and train stations along life's tortuous path Ash flies merrily along, singing a song, Blow Wind Blow.

Humans are learning how to mill around. They are learning how to adapt, adjust and evolve in situations and consequences outside their control. Many practice meditation. They know that suffering is an illusion. They make new international friends in transportation hubs. They learn how to share. Some are grateful. They get married, have kids, get divorced and attend correspondence schools in transit lounges. Some mature. A few are beginning to understand that air travel is not so exciting. After all.

The soul travels at the speed of a camel. Walking is the way.

Such a terrible hard unpleasant fact. Life goes on. Nature loves the drama. Especially at the expense of humans. 

Comments from the ground echo through thin atmosphere. Ash is all ears. 

It's a crying shame how Nature does this to us. 
It's all about money and greed, citing airline, hotel and food suppliers. It's about supply and demand. It's about taking advantage of the situation. It's about PROFIT.
People scream, "I hate the government." People cry, "I want my government to save me, to get me home, to get me out of this horrible mess."

Artists slow down and create masterpieces.
Sue Iceland.
Throw all the bankers into the volcano.

Sam, an African farmer from Kenya believe it, drinks a Bloody Merry in Asia and yaks on his cell phone to friends about his boat and how difficult it is here to live and get decent food and how he's not REALLY interested in the 19-year old bar girls.

He is surrounded by smelly containers filled with rotting fruit and wilting flowers destined for white rich folks in Europa, a brand of Confusion. He leaves messages on answering machines. He orders another bloody drink.

Old frail Sam wobbles away on thin legs thinking, "I don't get home until the 3rd. I'm going to die before I see my boat."

He's one of those terribly sad rich men reading the fine print, NO EXIT. Lost and alone he strums his sad guitar. "I look at the world and see it is sleeping while my guitar gently weeps." Ash understands with empathy. Empathy is a circle. 

The reality on the ground is that international travelers are not starving. They are not homeless. They are not begging in the streets. They are not whining, sniveling idiots. No. They are learning a hard fast lesson about the vagaries of travel. They are learning why it is important to always have a supply of energy bars and a towel.

Lost and alone in a vast empty Departure area is a little girl in a white dress. She wears bright red shoes. She clicks her heels together three times and says, "I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home."

Fly the friendly skies. They call it ADVENTURE TRAVEL. 

Metta.

Ash alert

Greetings,

One cool reality being pure wind is the stuff you get to get to blow around. Like kites.

Like toxic ash from exploding Icelandic volcanoes. This natural event traps silly humans on planet Earth. They become anxious, distraught and unreasonable. Especially when they prayed in vain to take a plane on vacation. Planes never get to go on vacation. Machines grind it out, 24/7.

Wind plays. Machines, animals and humans work. They trade their time for a handful of dimes.

What people don't see is fascinating.

People don't see the beautiful cumulus clouds of flying, swimming ash. It's 20,000 - 32,000 feet above their tired misaligned necks. Many assume it's a government plot to limit their freedom of escaping villages, towns and cities. They suspect travel and ticket agents, airlines, security screeners, dead relatives and orphans in Cambodia are all conspiring to prevent their freedom.

Humans are full of hot air. Talking heads prove this unpleasant fact. Their hot air contributes to the reality. Desperate scientists want to solve the natural ash conundrum along with other absurd activities to be famous and remembered by history.

History and Wind and Nature laugh. "HA, HA, HA."

Ash has no passport, nationality or identity theory. Ash is a gypsy. Ash is not discriminated by Europeans because they originated in India in the 9th century, speak Roma and love to sing and dance and tell stories.

Ash is an illiterate traveller. Ash does not bore humans with reminiscences.
Ash is free to sing, dance and go wherever they want.

Blow wind blow, blow my baby back to me.

Metta. 

Mr. Math

Greetings,

Mr. Math took a month off from teaching in Germany. Well traveled. He had much to say.

Austrians have 17 paid government holidays, the most in Europe. By the time you add on extra vacation days they, along with other European countries have almost two months off a year.

I read Marx. It's a fine idea but pure Communism won't work for probably a couple a hundred years. Hitler's longest speech was 23 minutes, he knew the value of propaganda and marketing. Keep it simple and short.

The problem scientists face is trying to find the missing link between Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Other people consider Germans to be too blunt. We like to get to the point. American's say things like, 'This part is good but we need to consider x,' because they don't want to appear too confrontational. It's the politically correct way for them. The Japanese just say, 'We'll consider it. This means no.'

Germans are efficient when it comes to work. This why we have a strong economy. Other countries may not like it, so they find something about the system to criticise. It was like Bush talking about 'Old Europe.'

When Colin Powell addressed the U.N. about weapons of mass destruction our Foreign Minister told him, 'We don't believe you.'

When you think about it, it's amazing what the Spanish and Portuguese explorers did by sheer will alone. It's like the Chinese. They needed an irrigation system deep in the country. What did they do? They carved a mountain in half to divert water south. They did what they needed to do. Sheer will power. 

Once when I was in Australia I talked with an Aborigine chief. He said, 'People only think the English were brutal against the indigenous people here. We had many inter-tribal massacres. We were busy fighting and killing each other. And, had we been in a stronger position we'd have done the same thing to the English.'

Once when I was in America I met a man in St. Paul.  When I told him I was from Germany he asked me, 'Do they have cars there?' He wasn't joking. No, I said. We have donkeys.

And? Be calm. Keep and open mind. See what happens.

Metta.
 

Crossing the border

Greetings,

The title comes from "Travels With Herodotus," by Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist, poet, photographer and travel writer. Herodotus wrote, "The Histories," 2,500 years ago. Ryszard is a student in Poland. It is a repressive time. Stalin is in power. 

He writes, "My route sometimes took me to villages along the border. But this happened infrequently. For the closer one got to the border, the emptier the land and the fewer people one encountered. This emptiness increased the mystery of these regions. I was struck, too, by how silent the border zone was. This mystery and quiet attracted and intrigued me.

"I was tempted to see what lay beyond, on the other side. I wondered what one experiences when one crosses the border. What does one feel? What does one think? It must be a moment of great emotion, agitation, tension. What is it like, on the other side?...I wanted one thing only - the moment, the act, the simple fact of crossing the border. To cross it and come right back - that, I thought, would be entirely sufficient, would satisfy my quite inexplicable yet acute psychological hunger."

Ryszard worked as a journalist for the Polish Press Agency. He wants to go abroad. A year passes. It is 1964. One day his editor-in-chief tells him, "You're going to India." He is astonished. He panics. He knows nothing about India. She gives him a thick book with a stiff cover of yellow cloth, "Here, a present for the road."

It was "The Histories," by Herodotus. 

For the next ten years he is responsible for fifty countries. He reports on wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.  When he returns to Poland he has lived through twenty-seven revolutions and coups, been jailed 40 times and survived four death sentences.

Two more excellent reads by him are: The Shadow of the Sun about Africa and Imperium about Russia. They're listed on Turn The Page, Amazon resource for your reference.

The mystical and transcendent act. Crossing the border.

Metta.

The Careful and Amorous Project

Greetings,

We met a guesthouse one morning. She started talking. "Amorous is my husband. He's sick. Something he ate."

Careful is 31. She was born in Xinjiang, China.

In 1991 while working for Ramada International Hotels in Beijing I traveled to Xinjiang to act in a movie about a hero who dies at his post. They needed a foreigner. My Swiss GM said, "Go for it." For ten days we filmed at the Chinese National Petroleum oil fields deep in the Tarim Basin. I wrote about this little adventure in my traveling novel, A Century Is Nothing.

She remembered the film and famous scientist. He developed a new drilling technique. He died at his isolated post surrounded by test tubes, mathematical scribbles, rusty oil drilling rigs and sand dunes. Then the Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department had to approve film scripts depicting famous heroes. Especially dead scientific-political ones. He's in the Chinese national scientific hall of fame.

She's a freelance magazine editor in Shanghai. Amorous is an engineer from San Detour, California. He designs financial surf boards studying the effects of wave theory using electromagnetic pulse detectors. They met at a house party in Shanghai.

"When he came in I saw a deer," she said. She was the hunter and he was the prey. She is highly talkative. He is brilliant and taciturn. They dated for a year and married last year. First in her home town of Hubai province and then in Tomorrow Land. 

They got her residency card. They returned to China and quit their jobs. They hit life's highway.

Careful remembers everything, especially the long ago past.

"When I was a little girl growing up in Xinjiang, all I wanted was a book. I grew up with mountains and rivers. One day I saw a newspaper floating in the water. I dried it out and tried to read it. I couldn't. Then, when I went to school there was a girl - her father worked with my father as a public servant - and her family was well off. She had books. I didn't like her but I pretended to so I could see her books. That's how I started to read.

"It was a real struggle for me in Shanghai. I had no formal education, but I could write. I forged a C.V. and got on with an advertising company. Good money. I was looking for the perfect love. Then I met Amorous."

"I want a home," she said. "We'll need to make a decison by May," he said. "We either return to the states or find new jobs in China." 

"Look," she said, "I'm in my early 30's. I want to start a family. I need a child."

"First we need a home," he said. "Everything's in storage."

"Ok," she said. "After we're done traveling and doing this project, we'll decided where we want to live."

"Fine."

"It was my idea this project," she said. "Amorous agreed."

The project involves using various masks and props to create mysterious, surreal images around Asia. They plan their shooting schedule, Careful wears the costumes and Amorous makes the images in a raw format.

They won an Oscar this year for:

"Best Supporting Partner While Traveling For A Year in Southeast Asia While Working On A Crazy Yet Meaningful Artistic Project In Diverse Exotic Locations Using Bizarre Masks and Costumes."

Metta.

Careful in Lhasa, Tibet.

Careful in Cambodia.