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Entries in travel (552)

Monday
Feb082016

Ling's Vision

Heart-mind.

Ling's art flourishes.

Draw the future.

Live broadly.

Write boldly.

Today is the day of my dreams. Kindergarten kids all sleepy eyed ramble into alphabets, songs, dances, friends, games, silver slides, swings propelling people into sky.

 

Freedom zooms upward.

He leaves Laos at New Year. Where will you go?

I'm not sure, perhaps Turkey (happens in September) who knows, back to Siem Reap.

I have writing, images, wandering and helping others help their self and Elves.

Facilitate.

 

Thursday
Jan282016

A private Jakarta school - TLC 70

Monday at 6:45 a.m. is formal education tyranny time.

Players call it Stormy Monday. Tuesday is just as bad. Wednesday is kind of rough and Thursday’s oh so sad. The eagle flies on Friday. Saturday I go out to play. On Sunday I go to church get down on my knees and pray. They call it Stormy Monday.

Lucky stood in front of an open rusty iron green gate wearing a pressed green shirt made of palm fronds. He waved an iridescent peacock feather wrapped in a Native American leather braid decorated with rainbow beads welcoming students at a private school.

Parents rule fool. 

Martial Catholic music blared from tinny church loudspeakers at the nearby church of the Immaculate Misconception. Religion was under permanent construction. Empty false hope the greatest evil based on blind faith filled towering grey artificial plastic golden arches with compressed dust.

Air conditioning ducts lay scattered in the vestibule. Purple priest garments hung by a broken thread in a chastity of lotus blossoms. Heaven’s holy light played along a contorted floor jangling cracked tolling bells.

The incomplete church thrived underground. Shadows and illusions named shame, guilt, sin, jealousy, regret, sloth, and lies had enough parking spaces for a choir of angelic forms in the rising Indonesian middle class.

Humans invented religion in their free time. We need meaning and intention sang priests, poets and philosophers. We is educated. Order poor uneducated slaves to get back to work, said a king of dubious origin waving a jeweled mind-sword.

Black tinted SUVs arrived at the gateless gate. Sleepy-eyed kids extricated themselves from air-conditioned nightmares. A green uniformed whistle-blowing male slave directed traffic. Blue clad office boys unloaded suitcases of textbooks, water bottles, lunch baskets, severed cultural connections, identity theories and universal mind maps.

Sleep deprived children waited for a maid, a driver, a mom, a dad, or a perfect stranger to hand them a suitcase handle, a plastic get a life grip. 

Children said good morning to Lucky before dragging cumbersome baggage along slick mopped tile floors down a hall-like crypt. They manipulated life luggage around corners before hoisting it onto little shoulders killing back muscles or pulled it clattering up two flights of stairs. Click-clack-click-clack music echoed through corridors absorbing childhood.

After leaving her vehicle Amanda a 4th grade genius waited in tropical sun. Her right hand was empty. It held everything.

Exhaust from idling cars, vans and flaming plastic bags filled the air. Everyone choked. Feeling exasperated she was angry tired and bored. She opened and closed her empty right hand suffering a desperate spasmodic fever.

She stared straight ahead. Her brown eyes focused beyond green gates. Retinas explored tropical subterranean rain forests. Wild purple orchid aromas permeated shade near a flowing river. Blue-green waterfalls crashing into jungles gave her a cool essential meditation in her heart-mind.

“Give it to me. Give it to me,” shouted her grasping hand. Someone handed her a plastic suitcase handle. She dragged educational baggage into a cave. It would take eight more tedious years to exterminate her innate childhood curiosity and sense of humor.

The Language Company

 

Friday
Jan152016

immediate direct

Curious beginnings determine her artistic sense of form, coloring stories of her village.

Cutting. Planting. Harvesting.

Complete slow rhythm of life. Her skill radiates every new expression. Her heart sings.

Her simple, immediate direct feeling experience.

Art enables her this Beauty.

She describes what she draws.

Her words fly through forests with resplendent peacocks, birds of paradise.

A blind conversation developed a through line.

Turn a blind eye.

Blind heard muted laughter before intuition gestured pink floating word worlds.

Laughter danced with exhaled attachment.

Tuesday
Dec292015

the blind man and his daughter

He wore a felt hat. He gripped a wooden staff. His face was long and sallow.
The girl was 11. Wearing cotton, her face was solemn, shocked.
Both wore plastic flip-flops.
She held his hand.

They came to an intersection. Small buses, bikes, lost fat Europeans, orange robed wandering monks, silver vans. Women carrying bamboo baskets spilling oranges negotiated pavement.

The girl led the man across the street.
Their pace steady, yet hesitant.

She was his eyes. He trusted her implicitly.
A stranger drawing in his notebook watched them.
He pulled a 20 Kip note from his pocket.
He gestured to the girl, Take it.
She froze.

She spoke quick Lao words to her father.
Questioning, doubt, healthy uncertainty in her eyes.
The stranger gestured the 20.
She remained still.

He got up and slowly approached her. His hand extended the money.
His hand said, take it.
Her small hand emerged with caution. Her small fingers accepted the gift.
She smiled placing her hands together.
Her fingertips touched her chin meaning, Thank you.

She whispered to her father, it's 20.
His blind eyes darted back and forth.
He mumbled, Thank you, joining his hands.

His wooden staff hung in the air like a pendulum.
She led him away.

They disappeared. 

  

Saturday
Dec192015

Mindfulness - TLC 67

They met on the Metro. Lucky carried an aromatic red rose through green sliding doors. Z sat in a permanent change of scene.

He inhaled fragrance. He handed her the rose. “Here, for you. Everything we love dies.”

“Infinity is behind us, eternity is in front of us.”

“Nothing behind. Everything ahead.”

The National Director of Barbarian Natives at TLC resigned after pressure from Sister #1. Her father Sir Franchise was King of The Money Tribe.

The National Die Rector was wishy-washy. Making personnel decisions was a stressful heartless job. Native barbarians were transferred to Siberia with Tundra Dragon and his consort Phoenix rising from ashes of self-pity, loathing, shame, guilt and fear to regenerate, reinvent and reincarnate themselves with critical thinking skills, social intelligence, mindfulness, courage, humor, gratitude, curiosity, fairness, integrity, diligence, perseverance and discipline wearing liberal amounts of delicate compassion.

Players wrote themselves into the story. They invented plots. Plots invented players with assignations, fake artifices, palace intrigue and three-act Greek plays featuring desperate insecure and courageous thematic holistic variables.

Greed and betrayal discussed intention and motivation.

A, an, the - old article men in teahouses reading newsprint verbs whispered syllables out loud memorizing lies, myths, Soma mine disasters, political denial, unaccountability, football results and obituaries. One reader said, “Thank God. Death hasn’t found me yet.”

“Don’t worry,” said Death, “I’m busy with others. Patience. I’ll get back to you. You can begin living the rest of your rare days meditating on the process of your death. Impermanence and non-existence.”

“Tell that to the guy selling fire and knives in Ankara.”

“I will,” said Death, “when his time is up and only then.”

Bursa mountain winds seeking plains became strong, sudden and slashing. They flew across thermal bath waters after plumping mist into rain’s arranged marriage. Spirit-winds reached back circling prey without saying anything of value or meaning joining relatives and strangers floating inside fog moisture captured from distant seas like dancing children, circling, spinning out from nothing, evolving from the center of their stillness, caressing flayed onion skinned fragments inside Zeynep’s black book where people didn’t reallylisten know or care in Comabodia  - an imaginary country trapped between Nam, Siam, and Laos  - swimming with 2,000,000 genocide ghosts spreading superstition and repressed violent DNA psychosis while sleeping with wide open eyes struggling with regret, low grade anxiety, big FEAR, swallowing happy Xanax pills, wearing huge magnificent watch this time machine on thin wrists in a witness protection program using a false identity theory.

Hand-me-down my walking stick, said L. Here you are, said Z. Let’s go.

Travelers arrived in a village on the Marmara Sea. Olive orchards dressed hills. A white butterfly skimmed blue sea. It’s wings created a breeze around shadows sitting in shale shade. Feet caressed geology. Waves washing the shore day by day rolled millions of pebbles creating a gentle musical interlude.

Rinse and repeat.

Ocean waves. Earth peoples.

The soft propaganda machine selling media’s tired old lies broke down. Desperate neglected broken-hearted ADD people fingered a remote or mobile.

Tribes in remote jungles created fire with Leo. Spirit-winds sailed smoke signals across oceans, seas, tributaries, rivers, bays, fjords, streams and inlets to Anasazi, Navajo, Apache, Hopi, Tiwa, Cherokee, Ainu and Tibetan ancient ones. Flying clouds acknowledged ethereal messages.

Imaginary fears of poverty and starvation gripped humans.

Beauty dispatched monarch butterflies skimming over a cresting white wave tumbling above blue water lapping land.

The Language Company