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Ice Girl in Banlung Chp. 12
Across town a sewing woman returned to her Kampot guesthouse. She splashed water on her face, changed clothes and spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and went to the market inside a labyrinth.
At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.
Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling faux-paws silver stars, moons, and small round reflecting balls. Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement for engagements, weddings, and cremations.
She stayed busy with serious fittings and adjustments. Her sewing universe process was selecting fabric, measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections, and ironing.
Threads inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as needles danced through cloth in endless conversations. Needles talked about traditional conservative morals and opportunity-value cost. Thread followed their conversation. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number. All explanations have to end somewhere.
Sky darkened.
Ceremonial drum thunder sang vocal intensity.
Lonely lost suffering foreign tourists in Cambodia shuddered with fear.
What if I die here?
How will my family and friends begin to
realize my intention
to witness 1200 years of dancing
Angkor laterite stoned history
gnarling jungles revealed by natural strobes?
Lightning flashed skies.
Giant flashbulbs illuminated petrified children
Buried inside cement caverns
eyes eating cartoon images on a plasma scream.
Skies opened.
Rain lashed humans. Some laughed, others cried. Tears dissolved fear.
Sweet dreams, baby.
Dawn.
Two arrived. The boy is cutter. He carried rope, ladder, small axe and machete.
Helper friend is coconut palm tree scout.
Here and there, he said, pointing.
Go up.
The boy shinnied up a narrow palm.
Transferring to the towering 2’ diameter palm he climbed higher.
Roping his tools.
How’s the view, asked helper.
Sublime. A wide brown river lined by cauliflower oaks reaches bamboo huts.
Orange sunrise severs cumulus wisps.
A market woman has her nails done in blue glitter.
A boy saws crystalized ice on a red dirt road.
Girls in white cotton pedaled to school.
A woman grilling waffles along a road buys bundled forest kindling.
Saffron orange robed monks sit in meditation at Naga Wat.
One plays a drum.
He climbed higher.
He chopped. Long thin heavy branches weighted by freedom danced free.
Helper dragged branches past advertisements for temples, orphanages, river trips.
He chopped.
He dragged.
He chopped.
He dragged.
He secured rope to the top. Blossoming.
He chopped.
Coconuts, leaves, bark danced down.
White interior life dust snowed.
Tree crashed.
Light escaped. 3 hours. $20.
Smashing blocks of ice inside a blue plastic bag with a blunt instrument created a symphony outside unspoken words as a homeless man with a pair of brown pants thrown over a thin shoulder sat down to rest. Shy women waiting for Freedom averted black eyes.
Aggressive women manipulated stacks of government issued denominations trusting an implied perceived value in exchange for meat, fruit, gold, and fabric. Counting and arranging denominations inside broken beams of light, cracked cement, lost mislaid wooden planks, debris, feathers, jungles, and jangled light waves they surveyed commercial landscapes with dispatched dialects near rivers revealing stories with fine stitched embroidery. Needles led thread.
Your life is a work of art
Editor's note: Chapter 1 excerpt. The Language Company. Enjoy the ride.
Carpe Diem in Ankara, said a reliable narrator, Pluck the day when it is ripe.
Lucky Foot explored a gleaming upscale mercantile atrium filled with bald silver female dummies fronted by glass. Mirrors reflected screaming bored housewives paroled for good behavior pushing pram infants.
He happened into a store with Roman, Ottoman, Egyptian and Middle Aged chess sets - game of Kings. Checkmate, said Mother Death, Beauty’s mother, Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play.
Black jazz statues played sax, trumpet, clarinet, keyboards, drums, and bass. Some of My Favorite Things, said John Coltrane. Blow your cool heart out.
“Good morning. Do you need something?” said the owner.
“Namaste. I salute the light within you. I seek to help others end suffering and misery.”
“Is it a way, a path?”
“It’s the nature of absolute emptiness with compassion. Ultimate truth. Reality.”
“What’s its form? Form an answer. Fill in your form. We live in a world of forms. It’s not the answers we need to know it’s the quest-ions we discover. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Remain curious. Trust authentic fragments. Follow your heart. Grow from it. Anything is possible when you risk everything. Stay open to your true nature as a lotus grows from mud. Form is emptiness and vice a verisimilitude. Would you like some tea?”
“Yes please. The quest-ion is the answer. Practice allows everything to wake you up. When you have taken the impossible into your calculations its possibilities become endless.”
“Today is good day to die. Meditate on your death. Celebrate your journey.” He pushed a buzzer. “Someone will bring tea.”
“Thanks. I like establishing impermanent relationships with compassion, trust, generosity and empathy.”
“You’re a dreamer dreaming the impossible dream. Are your needs being met? I suggest you need more direct immediate experience, observation and imagination. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Words escaping the tyranny of memories composed a jazz poem.
Kind of Blue, 1959 by Miles Davis. Modality.
“Everything I do is an experiment. Traveling meets my genetic needs. I love weird. It’s a long strange beautiful trip. Life is an amazing beautiful messy test. It gives us the test first and lessons later. In my life I become we: many people. We face opportunities and challenges. We bring luck to people like you. People we meet and never see again. It’s ephemeral. We help strangers help themselves through levels of suffering, hardship, deprivation, letting go and developing courage.
"Becoming. Throw in passion desire thirst and existential bliss with humor. Humor is the key. No shame, guilt or humiliation. No regret or fear. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I am a dreamer with controlled imagination. I see you have knives. I need one to cut through fear and ignorance.”
“Fear is blissful ignorance. Doubt is healthy. Uncertainty is necessary to grow. Travel allows you deeper penetration. Travel makes you. There are not many things you need to remember during your visit to Earth. Please have a look-see.”
“Our life is a work of art and life imitates art. Art is easy. Life is difficult. Clouds know me by now.”
“You don’t say.”
A cabinet displayed Swiss Army knives with cool tools for cool fools.
new direction
Keep staring. I might do a trick.
Three days in BK on a visa run.
Have you ever seen a visa run?
They are fast.
Escaping predators. Visa eaters are hungry.
Then, the slow steady ten hour train from Yangon to eastern Mawlamyine in Mon State. Orwell served as a policeman here when he wrote "Shooting an Elephant."
Original rock and roll, up and down, see-saw, rolling rusty stock. Bliss.
Ride the rails.
Delightful flat farmland, harvests, fields, rice paddies shimmer green, white oxen pulling wooden carts loaded with hay, elevations, golden pagodas, rivers.
A slow gentle rhythm. Choo-choo.
Circle Train
The Circle Train goes around Yangon.
$1 - three hours.
Kindness of strangers - ticket man points out track.
Wait there. The train is red. Thank you.
Slow, steady, easy smiles.
Ride the rails. Move.
Families on a Sunday picnic with straw mats and bags - food, beverages.
Wide eyed kids hang out windows watching people, places, things.
Old cement structures, time warp - long ago.
Roll past corregated heaven, bamboo homes, rice paddies.
Shy smiles, hey it's a stranger!
Let's have an adventure.
