Bhaktapur, Nepal

Wander Free

Storyteller - Laos

I am big seven said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator in Vientiane.

Your life is a test. Test first lessons later. It isn’t a dress rehearsal. If it’s an actual life your invisible friend will protect you from ignorance and fear. Get to the verb.

My dad’s not very smart. It’s his DNA, a string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It's the rainy season. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

Rain pours like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress dry watchers with his intelligent hose running wealthy water over poor rain. Cleaning. He ignores me mostly.

It’s amazing what people do when they don’t have anything to do. Maybe it’s an innate creative instinct. Like milling around. I’ve learned there are three kinds of people in the world.

people who make things happen

people who watch people make things happen

people who don’t know what’s going on

My grandmother sits on our 1924 austere colonial dark brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony.

Every day is a ceremony.

At dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong and offers wandering Buddhist monks a handful of rice. She earns merit in this life. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

Grandfather sits staring at rain collecting in pools.

Father’s very busy. He disappears for hours. Drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for affection and cash. A poor girl from a poor family needs to make a living, poor thing.

My mom’s also smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever?

After the rain, when it’s dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and yellow flaming candles she burns all the plastic garbage. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

It’s a sweet smell let me tell you. Like that Duvall character said in Apocalypse Now, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Kind of like that smell. What’s the word? Acrid. 

When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby delivery machine. What’s another mouth? In China I’m worth $3-5K on the stolen kid market. My sister would have been aborted.

Mom ignores me mostly. She’s busy doing her humble mother routine. Later, she squawks. She’s a soft kindlater.

People like parents and teachers and lazy humans love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life meaning.

Milling around is an art form with style. Hemingway had style. Fitzgerald had style and class.

Lao people are soft and gentle. We have good hearts. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera.

The trick is to tolerate with kindness and patience, your great teacher, the bland empty-eyed star gazing hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be, zap, like a white zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

The kid continued, for cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity.

This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg.

I used to complain I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.

This fact needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate danger and way of life.

Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, no medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance milling around.

But what do I know? Milling kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease. Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get educated. Cambodia and Lao and Vietnam are alive with ghosts.

A human’s existence is one long perpetual distraction.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to go and finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, grit, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

How do you build self-control and grit, asked a visitor to Earth.

Through failure and hardship, said the boy. There are two kinds of character.

What are they?

Moral character is fairness, generosity, and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence, and perseverance. Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Yeah, it’s trial and error and taking risks.

Thanks for the life lesson, said traveler. You are the future of Laos.

I have my junior philosopher’s badge, said the kid.

fools dance

flocks of floating balloons 

in a floating world

fly up the yangon street 

pasta Buddhist monk 

chanting into a microphone

calm meditation

accompanied by a child's xylophone

high heeled working girls

gyrate in pulsating strobes 

flickering red, yellow, green, blue

singing loss, loneliness, alienation, poverty

deep shadows

languish melancholia

embrace boredom

zen poem

I asked the boy beneath the pines
He said ” the Master’s gone alone
Herb-picking somewhere on the mount
cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown”

- Chia Tao

Zen quotes

Blue eyed ghost

Yes my dear friend it is true, or at least as true as can be for he has returned to the beginning - and this is where his small tale begins.

Rickshaw bells and heavy groaning green and purple pedicabs propelled by thick-legged men prowl through humid traffic air. No one sees him. Everyone stares at the ghost. They are oblivious to his existence.

He walks along a broken cracked sidewalk past hammering men. They build a six-story high extension at the high school. Cement mixers, bamboo scaffolding, emaciated men haul crumbling red bricks. Dancing their future immigrants sing in the rain.. The developer drives a shiny black Benz.

Streets are congested with yellow bulldozers, lorries loaded with dirt and salvaged steel pig iron, City Boat blaring bus horns, small red cabs, and tired students trudging to lessons inside cold cramped cement caverns where teachers arrive late, and leave early after smashing wooden sticks on desks to get their attention; men pedal carts of large blue plastic barrels full of leftover restaurant slop for village pigs and children splash water. It is all play on the streets of dreams.

He passes weathered women in dirty white aprons chopping vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Girls mop cement passageways from dawn to dusk.

Dutiful daughters sweep floors or laconically stare at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent, hairline fractured straw mattress bedding.

This is the entertainment capital of the world.                   

He passes tables of retired pensioners slapping white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured rows of strategies as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes paint the city’s rising dust as a ghost they never imagined dances by, an apparition in their wide eyed wonder.

He speaks the language of silence and this comforts them. His inability to articulate passion and suffering is because, like you, he is a witness, a mirror reflecting reality in humanity’s garden in another incarnation where he trusted you to understand.

Meaning of meaning was obscured by cloudy anger, fear, desire, ignorance and attachment as you waved him away.

You cast him into deep water where he replenished his spirit. His meditation on motivation and intention was clear as he passed through.