Thursday
Aug152019
The Garden #7
Share Article Ah, how sweet it is to explore, laugh, share and love.
Chapter 1 in "The Language Company" is longer than a river.
Here is part of a part of the amazing tale.
Listening for thanks.
Published in:
Entries in Turkey (151)
Sunday
Jul282019
Consumption Dramatics
Shopkeeper in Ankara talks.
Life is filled with inconveniences.
We have millions of idle unemployed here in Turkey. Bankers and politicians stole all the money. Greed is good is their mantra.
Government is organized crime.
Soma Mine disasters with catastrophic loss of life is a fact of life for diggers making $500 a month. My job is to sell stuff.
Treasures to be dusted on archaic mantelpieces. People buy things to make themselves happy - in the short term. They want to impress family and friends. They get bored, forget about it, lose it, throw it away or donate it to charity and buy more stuff.
It’s a never-ending insatiable desire of supply and demand consumption dramatics.
Advertising never dies. Fools are ruled by their emotions. Fear. Enough psycho-social-babble.
What brought you here?
My feet.
Playing with fire in Ulus, Turkey.
Monday
Jul222019
Ambivalent
Bursa, Turkey residents heard, “Woo, woo,” and clip-clop hooves grooving asphalt.
A thin man who’d escaped the Armenian genocide in 1914 by hiding in a mountain cave with Plato’s shadow of illusions hovering over his formless form commanded a rolling wagon filled with shredded silver wire.
A black trash bag on the rear contained cardboard and a draft of The Language Company.
He snapped a long whip at a white horse wearing brown blinders. Red, green, yellow and blue wool tassel tufts waved from its sweat beaded neck. Small copper bells tinkled.
His wife’s thin, happy hungry face was a skeleton of bones. Her senses were accustomed to roots, soil, inhaling damp earth smells and back breaking labor in spring rain, summer heat, cool autumn winds and frozen earth.
Riding next to her husband hearing leather lash skin felt good. A reassuring stimulus snapped air. The horse pranced along cool be-bop jazz cobblestones in time with Monk on piano, Pastorius on bass, Rollins blowing his horn, Blakey pounding percussion and Zeynep's cello complementing the steady clip-clop rhythm.
They were richer than a poor parent’s skin. They owned their stomach’s hunger.
“Here we go,” they sang in Kurdish.
Nearby, a cafe below the TLC teachers’ apartment went broke. A wild garden blossomed.
An old man arrived with his scythe. His well-adjusted eyes surveyed nature's vociferous beauty. He unwrapped a golden yellow scarf from the curving blade of his hand-me-down tool.
The scythe was eight feet long tapering to a sharp point. Sitting on a wooden stool he refined an edge with wet-stone strokes.
Waving, he cut a waving garden.
Death watched. Ambivalent.
At that precise moment a blue monarch butterfly probing nectar of the gods whispered turquoise wing secrets to a red hibiscus in Laos.
Laos
Many adults in the tribe, being programmed cynical skeptics living in fear, didn’t get it. Indigo kids trusted Omar's natural wild mind. Implicitly. Their collective language transcended words. There were 6,912 known living languages on Earth and he spoke every one, including silence.
He was cognizant a spoken language on the planet perished every two weeks.
We have a huge responsibility here. No language no culture, whispered Omar.
Culture is what you are and nature is what you can be.
Singing oral traditions they experienced seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies. They created and exchanged clan and tribal myths. Children moving through history heard, memorized, chanted and recited ancestor songs.
He was a forcestero, a person from outside the pueblo. A blind writer in exile, he loved birds and freedom.
Friday
Jul122019
Understory
“Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. We have storage ability and retrieval capability. Speak memory,” whispered Zeynep in Bursa doodling with magic pens on transparent paper in her elegant universe.
He'd had heard ALL of this before.
“Ha, ha,” he laughed seeing through their world of transparent stupidity temerity fear and never ending sense of confusion and so forth.
He’s seen it in the land of five red star golden Xiamen dragons
spilling black calligraphy ink on parchment and now witnessed it in Asia Minority
where bored tired people ate grilled meat played backgammon
and twiddled retired thumbs as metro cars
carried morose living dead humans dressed in black
mirroring their soul out to industrial wastelands
on the far edge of Ankara, before returning at night
filled with heavy hand carved simple wooden
caskets spilling wasted youth from the PKK war front near Serious on the Iraq border.
Gravediggers and headstone carvers had steady work everyday everywhere.
Emergency crews pried a suicidal man from below Bursa subway engines after being struck by lightning.
He walked through an old expansive cemetery. It was spring. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates, and memories rested below tall pines and thick evergreens.
A woman sat on a grave pulling weeds. Tending soil. Nearby, her friend, sister, mother, aunt and grandmother from Asian Steppes speaking Tamashek whispered to a child, "She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming remembering."
The child sang to the woman on the grave, "Auntie! Auntie," but the woman didn't say anything. She played soil like a drum. She was sad remembering her son, father, husband, uncle and grandfather. Their love and kindness.
Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. A thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair along a path inside a humid rain forest covering 6% of the planet.
Smoke from burning bamboo and coconut leaves circled it's veins through a heart's four clamoring chambers. Smoke and love echoed from the Forest Floor to the Understory, rose to the Canopy and emerged through the Emergent.
Bird of Paradise, Eagles and Macaws lived here.
He passed chiseled stones wearing Arabic script.
There was a quick explosion of metal on stone. A man with a sledgehammer pounded a collection of memories around a grave. He paused, removed fragments and slammed his sledgehammer again.
The sun went into hiding. It rained. A woman played musical notes on Earth.
Kathmandu, Nepal
Sunday
May122019
Adapt. DRD4-7R
Adapt, the balloon man lived below the Bursa hammam. Yes mam.
Adapt, Adjust and Evolve collected everything for a fire. One morning he flamed his life below a stone memory hut where someone - he didn’t remember whom - lived, worked and expired.
Internal passions blazed yellow and red.
Sparking a majestic canvas Adapt carried his bouquet of air-filled flowers across spring fields firing dawn with pink, red, green, yellow, and blue. Dreaming purple violets and daffodils spilled balloon imagery into children’s retinas.
His voice sang across time’s river, Create like a God, order like a King and work like a Slave.
Walking through spring with Courage, a personal pronoun, his flowing mind-stream movie flashed into around through a fine unknowing knowing starlight universe. Pure images were diamonds in his mind.
First thought, pure thought.
Sky mind.
Cloud thought.
His flaming life energy sang, “What is life?”
A game of experiences we get to play. Help others.
Expanding energy waves created screaming eagle dancers.
Two Golden Eagles fought in tall grass to dominate a female. Flashing anger with yellow lightning eyes and striking out with a sharp talon she balanced on a strong extended leg. A curving white tip slashed at males circling with desire, cunning and stealth. Pirouetting she danced between them protecting her flank near a fallen tree trunk. Her wings extended over green forests, Uludag mountain, blue shorelines and across oceans.
Nearby trapped behind high voltage fences on a desolate brown hill studded with boulders twenty wolves died of heartbreak.
One wolf’s eyes were a fluorescent emerald green Aurora Borealis retina patina, refracted surreal prisms.
“I am a lone wolf, like you,” said Lucky. “We share an R7 variant dopamine receptor gene DRD4, a chemical brain messenger for learning and reward. R7 is found in 20% of humans.”
“DRD4-R7 increases curiosity and restlessness,” said Lone Wolf. “Humans with R7 seek out new experiences with known pleasures, take more risks and explore new places, ideas, foods, relationships, and sexual opportunities. They embrace movement, change, adventure, migration and a nomadic lifestyle. I am dying here. I was born free.”
“I feel your pain and alienation.”
Wolves needed mountains, valleys and wild rivers. They were hungry to escape an artificial prison.
Lucky knew why midnight welcomed Howling Wolf.
Bursa, Turkey