Untouchable

Namaste,

In another dramatic, exciting, heart stopping, palpitating, effervescent, totally complete silence, the entire country of Nepal, (No Electricity Power And Light) decided to have a general strike. Everything is shut down. Locked steel shuttered businesses decorate main street. 

There are 36 castes here. Give or take 100 sub divisions. A caste is a traditional hard core socially cultural belief and practice bestowing style, honor, privilege and status to selected humans born into a specific family. Anthropologist and pathologists consider this invention a specialized branch of the value based Angiosperm.

How do you spell discrimination?

"Muluki Ain (1854) divided Nepalese citizens into two castes "the caste whose water is allowed to remain pure" and "the caste whose water is defiled". Chiefs of the various castes were entrusted with sorting out issues related to their own castes.^[1] The heads of Kamis (blacksmiths) and Sarkis (tanners and cobblers) were called Mijhars. Similarly the head ofDamai (tailors and musicians) was called Nagarchi." Read more.

As Shiva, a female ear hearing specialist explained, "People are striking to abolish the caste system. They want equality."

"Yes, said Vishnu her friend, "They want to be a musical blacksmith cobbling a life. They want to walk empty streets selling hot delicious cinnamon flavored pastries. They want to develop and profit from vast mountainous snow capped high altitude regions of pure air in never-never land. They want to tan their hide or hide their tan. They want to impersonate Elvis after dark.

"They want to be a brick boy in the Kathmandu valley. They want to be a free person in a free country."

Three strikes and you're out.

Metta.

electric

Namaste,

The unemployed Nepalese teacher, hustling 10 million visitors asked, "Do you know what NEPAL means?"

Big business? Economic survival? Mountains? High altitude sickness? Adventure travel? Peak experiences?
Whining, demanding Chinese?
Sitars and raga symphonic structures?
Extensive deep raging rivers?
Riding an elephant looking for extinct tigers?
An old woman collecting and loading cow shit patties into a wicker basket for home fire fuel?
Chakra, crystal healing?
A Chinese woman walking with her Nepalese lover, both measuring the ground with the eyes feeling the inevitable end of a quick painless short term physically satisfying fix?
Stoned out ragged travel casualties? 

Big fat culturally insensitive white Europeans wearing fancy expensive climbing gear as their Sherpa guide in flip flop sandals carrying the world on his back runs up the mountain, leaving them in the dust?

Young Israeli cowboys fresh from mandatory military service staring at a sacred cow shitting in the street? 15 million Nepalese women on their hands and knees mopping floors with a dirty rag because mops are too expensive?

Rolling fuel shortages because a) the government wants to increase demand b) India reduces supply?
Limited daily electricity? Nepalese must pay for electricity they do not receive. 

"Not exactly," said the teacher refreshing his lost hunger for money.
"NEPAL means Never Ending Peace And Love."

"Watch out for the land mine!" yelled a Cambodian orphan in exile.

Metta.

songlines

Namaste,

"Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer." -Martin Heidegger, 'Language'

+

"Have you seen the Indians?" asked the son of the Emir of Adrar.
"I have." 
"Is it a village or what?"
"No," I said. "It is one of the greatest countries in the world."
"Tiens! I always thought it was a village."

+

"Useless to ask a wandering man
Advice on the construction of a house.
The work will never come to completion."

-Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin.

Metta.

rain dance

white clouds dance
inside, around, with
mother mountains
singing
om mani padmi om
rain voices 
consider ethereal 
neurotic human concerns
hard steady tears
wash feathers
lake mirror stars
breathe clouds
stillness

 

note

namaste,

european woman opens her small red and black notebook
tears the himalayas from her map
her trail of tears
white mountain gods

blue sky, eagles, deep gorges, waterfalls, cold wind
raging rivers
presses it all preserving persevering

between lined white crumpled empty sheets
scribbles memory 
down life's little road

with anxious nervous fingers 
she presses a tin foil magic pill free
swallows h2o my
how did i get here?
what if i die here?

metta.