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. 

  

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

 

The Enlightenment Factory

I drag my mother to impossible places, said Asian daughter #1.

I follow my daughter to impossible places, said her mother, following her daughter's shadow. The slanting afternoon sun in LP is behind and beyond them.

Mother's shadow comforts her daughter's back.

Mother carries water.

Her daughter carries love seeing her husband, a thin bearded memory waiting.

Memory waits.

Patience becomes Memory.

Memory dances with sparrows.

Attention! says frangipani releasing itself, falling.

It landed on a steel PSP roof.

Bang. Thunk. Not hard and not soft enough to create a sounds wave.

It bounced into stillness. Air twirled it, it flew up, away. It floated to the ground. It's floating Beauty penetrated eyes, cones, retinal rods of a man sitting. He picked it up. He inhaled fragrance. Zap.

Beauty has no tongue.

Practice is allowing everything in your life to wake you up.

We gave them everything - TLC 66

Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative near the Khmer gardener.

Colonizing this hell hole we gave them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination tools, fake NGO bureaucracies, wide boulevards, legal beagle systems, an eye for an eye, corruption potential, designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics, principles, values, faded yellow paint and French architecture.

Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving. Let’s eat our sorrow and be grateful we don’t live in this depressing country filled with compassionate Buddhist people. I’ll never understand their intention to do nothing with mindfulness.

It’s the hardest thing a person can do.

She was a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover had flabby upper arms. She scribbled serious fiction-memory and sense data entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.

They examined a microscopic map of Angkor Wat filled with unconscious alliterative jungles, gold lame Apsara dancers, 232 species of black and red butterflies, 1.5 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry, Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups, crying elephants, super tour buses, 125cc motorcycles, tuk-tuks, begging children speaking ten European languages hawking gimcracks and whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education accompanied by miles of flaming plastic garbage, narrow boned white oxen pulling carts, 14 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment diversionary cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense and 1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu temples stretching across Burma and Thailand into Laos and Vietnam in a circular boomerang dance evolving from the stillness, letting go of outcomes as the French ladies whispered, Where have we been, Where did we go, What did we see, Where are we, How do we feel, Did we discover the intuitive third eye of enlightenment or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?

They’re trapped in SEA.

One described fragments of her short life history with an animist talking stick.

The other cut out brochure glossies, ticket stubs and bleeding hearts to paste in her book. A future visual memory of her ear and snow.

Her attention span was shorter than a tour at the Genocide Museum in Phony Baloney filled with 2,000,000 smiling skulls.

Here we are.

be other

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.