88 seconds in Nepal

Namaste,

Namaste means I salute the light (god) within you.

 

It is the daily Hindu greeting between people with your palms and fingers together raised toward your eyes in a blessing. Smile. 

 

He visited Nepal for 88 seconds. First was Bhaktapur, outside Kathmandu.

No traffic. No pollution. Cool fresh air. Limited electricity access. Daily power outages are the norm. Ironic considering Nepal has the second highest water volume energy source on Earth.

 

It is an ancient town, filled with Hindu temples, daily rituals, ringing bells, flowers and incense offerings, old hand carved wooden windows, brick homes, brick streets, tiled roofs, pottery, yogurt, vegetable and fruit life street market squares, amazing flowing sari and shawl rainbows, gentle people. It's on the old trading route from Tibet to India. 

 

There is no home plumbing. If you need water you go to the community well after dawn and before dusk. You drop your plastic container down brick shafts. You haul it up hand over hand. You pour it into narrow necked brass or copper urns.

 

You drop it again. You haul it up. Repeat until urns are full. You carry them on your hips through narrow brick alleys filled with friends and families. At home you filter it.

You boil it.

You drink it.

You use it for cooking, washing clothes, brushing teeth (a popular outdoor activity) and bathing.

Recycle, reuse, refresh. You return to the well.

Women and girls do all the water hauling, heavy water lifting and daily manual labor. So it goes. 

Metta.

truth has few friends

Namaste,

Take a plane to the airport. Take a taxi across the sky. See Himalayas. Open your window. Breathe deep.

Truth will provide more than 1 billion people with access to safe drinking water.

Truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people worldwide who cannot read.

Woman are 2/3 of this number.

Truth will employ 2.8 billion people surviving on less than $2 a day.

Truth will employ 1.1 billion people existing on less than $1 a day.

Truth will assist 70% of the people in the developing world having no access to electricity in their homes, health clinics and schools. Truth is a fatal disease, like peace, love and blindness.

Truth is a sledgehammer.

This is the Truth Channel. Your eyes lie. You cannot eat technology. Truth has few friends and they are suicides.

Metta.

River Meditations

Greetings,

The recent water journey encompassed long musical boats on the Nam Ou River. The Nam Ou flows south from Yunnan, China and meets the Mekong originating in Tibet, near Luang Prabang, Laos. The Mekong continues through Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam to the South China Sea.

From Luang Prabang its seven hours to Nong Khiaw. The narrow boat and narrow seats held 15 tourists. Nong Khiaw has 4,000 people and is surrounded by mountains, villages, many guesthouses and eco-tourism opportunities for trekking and home stays with local people.

Neurotic foreigners speak of their angst, anxiety, trembling heart stories. Bye-bye tourists.

The timeless Lao river: a woman breastfeeds her baby, smiling, floating clouds in yellow green forest rising above bamboo homes, cooking fires, women washing clothing and their long black hair in the river. Singing. 

In the morning a mother, young boy and husband, with the help of villagers load five bags of cement and 20 sheets of corrugated tin roofing material into a long thin boat for the upriver voyage to Muang Khua. Along the seven hour trip we stop at their small hamlet to unload their building materials.

We are surrounded by rising limestone and karst peaks, diverse vegetation and wild green nature.

Scores of yellow butterflies dance near wet sand. Naked children play, dance and swim in day's heat. Water buffalo wallow in mud. Fishermen cast nets. Bamboo rafts with generators collect rapid wave energy, converting it into electricity through suspended wires to elevated villages.

We ride swirling rapids. The propeller breaks in a series of rapids and we float backwards to a calm area, beaching the boat. The driver strips down, hammers off the bent blade, attaches a spare and fortifies the connection with a nail. We head upstream. Life is but a dream.

Muang Khua is a small river town for tourists arriving or departing by bus from the eastern Vietnam border. 

Three of us find a boat driver with a narrow boat willing to take us to HatSa six hours north. By Jan-Feb this section of the river will be too shallow for navigation.

It's all this slowing down, energies and breath. A reconfirmation of the daily flow with mythic extremities. It is clear flowing water, many turbulent rapids, narrow canyons, wind, clouds, forests, and green eyed dragonflies.

Along the way a local man tells the driver to stop near a wide tributary flowing from the forest. He gets out, puts his bag on stones, washes his hands, waves and walks into the river disappearing into deep forest shade.

He is home.

Metta.

River

Greetings,

I flow a thick deep brown. Heavy wet season rains rinse my desire. I clean the world of perceptions.

I increase my fish productivity and cause havoc for low lying homes, flooding humans out. They swim in the mainstream. My current is strong. It has no boundaries. Water wears down stone. 

Joy is seeing endless green rice paddies waving for miles in every direction. White cumulus clouds dance in a blue sky. The green penetrates my eyes. Green releases me from the stone cold dead glass and brass cities trembling fear. 

Joy is a boy doing a perfect back flip off a hill into my river. Joy escapes gravity. Joy joins his friends laughing and swimming. His father casts a net as serene shimmering strands arch over water sailing into green. My river renews life.

Orange robed monks reflect my calm surface. Turbulent roaming charges may apply in the curious dimension of laughter's gratitude.

My awareness bliss flow is this transience. You can't swim in the same river twice.

Metta.

less is more

the last a thing a fish knows
is water

light bird song
she remembered struggling in Shanghai
with no formal education
searching for the perfect love
writing her story in Chinese
following her heart

after the rush of stimulation orchid
settled down into lassitude 
misfortune wedding children
polite monosyllabic conversations