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Entries in Weaving A Life (V1) (30)

Saturday
Jan112020

Landmines

“We are not here for a long time. We are here for a good time,” laughed Meaning, a twelve-year old survivor wearing a ragged Beware of Land Mines skull and crossbones t-shirt and prosthesis leg scampering a random life pattern across fields near a stilted bamboo home in Cambodia.

“Are you with us?” pleaded a landmine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

It costs $300-$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

*

Expanding her awareness of mankind’s genetic stupidity, Lucky showed Zeynep a Laos map illustrating Never-Never Land.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.         

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

*

Meaning hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg away one fateful day as she played near village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart-mind.

It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy.

She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate.

Fortunately or unfortunately she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

*

Cut the heavy deep and real shit, said a female Banlung shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is blissful ignorance.

Weaving A Life V 1

 

Friday
Aug232019

The Garden #8

I met Omar, a Touareg Berber and ghostwriter in Morocco on 9/11.

We created truth-stories from the future.

Thanks for listening.

Published in: Weaving A Life, Volume 1

Here for the ear.

The Garden #8

Sunday
Aug042019

Cadiz Construction

Satisfying a sublime unexplainable scientific artistic impulse, a curious human exploring Earth loved existing in a perpetual twilight zone of repairs, renovations, chisels, hammers, stone facades and dire classical solemn faced people stirring languages into new creations. 

“It has something to do with his dream,” said Omar. “Process now, product later. Hunting and gathering instincts.”

Cadiz hammer music and gypsy serenades welcomed dawn. One-eyed men roared around industrial revolutionary spirals without a building permit.

“Sound check!” yelled a construction worker waving his tools staring at stoned glazed edges. His partner hammered down morning light easier than breathing. Young boys started 50cc engines. Echoing through cold canyons machines sang like obnoxious chain saws in a forest of buildings.

A sad blond Spanish woman off to make a living juggled guilt, purple books, black purse and a white cigarette. She looked down at her stoned path, a reminder of Roman civilization.

After tearing it up to implant pipes in front of the Cathedral San Francisco, men used a thin string plumb line tied to granite stones to create an intricate stone design. One man dug dirt, another ran a portable cement mixer and another hammered stone edges to achieve the perfect geometric floral pattern.

People at a nearby cafe sat surrounded by fragmented noise. Pigeons filled the air. Pedestrians negotiated rubble. A beggar rested on church steps waiting for charitable parishioners. He had just enough energy left in his thin frame to hold out his hand. The only thing he owned was an empty stomach.

A nervous brown robed Franciscan monk in a Moorish doorway fingering his rosary watched the men slave. Sunlight glistened off a balcony along Rue Cepeda.

The streets were named for saints, explorers and shy women in their destitute languishing remedy of hope. Hope died last.

Sunday light blessings reflected off religious icons in Catholic pews. Trinity angels emerged from shadows melting into flower markets where fishmongers mixed langoustine snails, sliced escargot tourism and Super Tour buses dropped utensils on their heads.

Bowing to market forces on Sunday everyone went to church. They fed bread wafers to their immaculately dressed children. They prepared heirs to meet and greet strangers and relatives in narrow cobblestone streets with sweets for my pretty.

Soiled spoiled children escaped small cramped Spanish flats on narrow slick tiled stairs. Descended from Berber bloodlines they groaned out their childbirth, childhood, a-dolt futures where 10-12% would finish higher degrees.

A minimum return on investment (ROI) strategies in Andalucía, the poorest Spanish province raised interest rates. They were targeted for an infusion of future cash from the European Union along with austerity measures and general strikes.

To greet the mean old street citizens passed through patios filled with copious plants and entrances tiled with Moorish quasi-crystalline tiled designs. They came and went with precise regularity, discipline, stability, structure, and unwavering self control.

They escaped microscopic interior spaces strolling on esplanades and through parks lined with statues of heroes on horseback challenging blue skies with glistening sabers, marble busts, effigies and fountains of boys holding iron fish spouting water.

Off shore, oil tanker ships, military destroyers, container ships full of imported and exported goods, small sailboats, and luxury liners with gleaming white lights bow to aft sailing for Lisbon plied waves.

Waves washed the shore every day. Every morning sun-blocked retired well greased women set up camp on the Cadiz beach, playing bingo, knitting red yarn with quick fingers. Their husbands in bathing suits, clasped hands behind backs walked through surf discussing weighty matters of church and state.

A handicapped swimmer left her crutch in the sand and waded into blue water like a crab.

Old fishermen with long poles threaded small shrimp on hooks before casting from high stonewalls. Lovers in shaded bliss played with cell phones while petting each other out of passionate boredom.

In the countryside a laborer earned 5,000 pesetas a day thrashing trees. Olives fell toward mechanized presses. Virgin oil was the best. Spanish courtship took years if you desired the really good stuff, requiring the fine art of romantic seduction.

Citizens finished their tiled stair-master workout and faced the door. It was a heavy dark brown in two sections. The ground floor was originally for storage, an old warehouse. Depending on the century it was easier to throw hot oil down on Arabic or Christian invaders from a balcony.

A woman pulled her weight open and faced the crooked 3,000 year-old street hearing stones sing historical reference.

Little Wing, a word weaver stood in the shade of the Cadiz Conservatory of Music captivated by a violin, a cello, a piano and a young girl’s melancholy voice.

She was surrounded by musical, flying notes inside the roaring silence.

Silence is the loudest noise.

Invisible musicians played keys and strings. A voice punctuating air wrapped itself around solid gray stones edging liquid. It was all tonal vibration frequencies.

Wing was transformed.

Her neighbor mopped small stone paths, raised her red tool and dumped long universal string theories into dirty water as life’s stew simmered on her eternal stove. She squeezed it out.

Her white apron covered a black dress. Her black hair was pulled back in a skintight bun. She was eighty. She mopped the stone path every day of her life.

Omar the blind, watching from his temporary home was in transit, hanging out in space. He paid meticulous attention to people’s values, attitudes, beliefs, faces and intimate behavior.

He studied their honest soled solid souled shoes.

Worn heel edges indicated external and internal posture.

Weaving A Life (V1)

A Century is Nothing

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.

The Language Company

Weaving A Life (V1)

Bursa, Turkey

Friday
Apr122019

Defrost Your Imagination

“Today is a good day to be empty. Practice 10,000 breaths until you disappear,” said a Lhasa monk petting a Sumatran tiger facing extinction by Malaysian villagers burning down forests to develop cosmetic palm oil exports.

“Yes, not too detached and not too sentimental,” said Zeynep sitting at a restaurant table creating surrealistic art in her notebook.

She drew stick figures with wild forested hair eating purple paper mache houses beneath a startled orange sun as disoriented Bursa talking animals crammed in spinach, green salad, tomatoes, grilled meat, rice and beans.

Across town on the TLC teachers’ apartment balcony sentry ants alerted the tribe to food. They marched from a drainpipe in single file, climbed over the edge of a plastic pot discovering good dirt. Teams fanned out sensing discarded muesli particles.

A mottled wingless insect living in bamboo detected worker ants approaching. Insect couldn’t fly. It scurried up a thin stalk to a green leaf blending in. Its feelers cleaned dirt off head and shoulders sham poop.

A gravedigger eating a hazelnut and strawberry jam sandwich on whole grain bread with grade A black olives harvested from Mudanya orchards nestled tight against Marmara Sea soil spoke to the insect as ants preparing their final assault gathered below the leaf.

“I need to move you.”

“Thanks. If I’m discovered I’ll perish. What do you suggest?”

“We use a leaf. Climb on it. I will let it go, floating over the garden. It will cushion your fall from grace. You will have a soft landing and better than a 51% chance of survival. Ground zero with better cover, food and dew you understand?”

“Ok. Thanks. 51% is better than zero.”

“You sound like an investment banker. Don’t mention it.”

“I need a new adventure.”

“Don’t we all. Here you go.”

Digger did what he had to do. Found a broad brown leaf. The insect climbed on. He released the vein-lined parachute into thin air. It floated. It landed on a huge exploding yellow sunflower.

“Goodbye,” sang the insect, “you extended my little life. I’ve survived to walk another day.”

The gravedigger sang, “Happy trails...to you...until we meet again.”

Weaving A Life V1

The Language Company