Two Hearts

After detox and affirmations in Tacoma I accepted a new tennis teaching job at a Richland athletic club in the high eastern desert.

I lived between the Hanford Nuclear Reservation leaking toxic waste and a military high-grade uranium destruction site.

Sweet earth. Delicious water.

Glowing in the dark improved my writing visibility at night.

Clean and sober I wrote a small children’s book about trust and love.

Two Hearts On A Grand Precious Adventure has The Prince of Yogurt and the Princess of Chocolate on a quest for the beginning of the ocean. I self published it as an e-book.

I turned my attention to big work. I sifted through worn travel journals, old letters, faded yellow evidence papers, typed manuscripts, stories, fragments, poems, and photographs gathered from wandering Earth.

For two years I wove threads into a non-linear draft of epic adventures entitled A Century is Nothing.

I murdered my darlings and rearranged sentences in the farrago. They were stories about people telling stories about people in stories experiencing courage, transformation and impermanence.

I researched markets. I mailed out the synopsis with query letters. Fifty rejection letters from literary agents sang a refrain. “Sorry, doesn’t meet current mainstream needs. Too edgy. Needs more heavy, deep, real, personal Vietnam insight and growth. Fewer characters. Bottom line: I can’t make my 15% selling this.” Wallpaper. So it goes.

*

One morning I went to the Richland P.O. for stamps.

Taken from the Hubble Space Telescope they were named Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316.

I enjoyed a stimulating discourse with a young unarmed postal woman about the amazing galaxies and how incredible it was to contemplate them living five miles away from fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive waste left over from W.W. II seeping 130 feet down toward water tables along the Columbia River.

“Fascinating,” she said.

Editing material for my book I read a faded yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence.

“It’s called Technetium, TC-99m,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.”

The waste approached 250 feet as corporations vying for energy contracts with D.O.E. discussed containment options and emergency evacuation procedures.

Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. Hanford scientists, wives and children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.

As the postal worker and I talked, a frantic mother yelled at her daughter, “DON’T touch the stamps!” because at her precocious age, curiosity about the expanding universe developed her active imagination.

Holding a Nebula space dust galaxy in my hand I told the postal woman how we are a third the life of a 13.7 billion year-old universe. She handed me change and said, “That’s interesting. I never looked at the stamps before.”

“What happens next?” said Plot.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Ethnology Museum, Hanoi

Economic Terrorism

The 1st International Beggar Conference convened in Toothpick, a wasteland near Bright Hope - a rusting rustic dream of exploratory ways and means with scientific cause and effect and logical rational certainty.

It was chaired by a distinguished group of Cambodian orphans.

NGO Fascists rented 12,000 orphans out to fake humanitarian organizations. Abandoned youth pleaded with ill-informed rich donors for marketing and branding money to feed international guilt and shame.

“Let’s eat,” said a fat banker moments before his yacht hit an iceberg in 2008.

“What you don’t see is fascinating,” said Zeynep, “like roots below the surface of appearances.”

“We have so much ice and they have so little,” said an Icelandic chess player attacking Death.

“Everyone comes to me. My patience is infinite,” said Death. “I make only one move and it’s always the correct one.”

Beggars, landmine victims, genocide survivors and sick and tired dehydrated dying starving neglected humans from 195 countries convened in sequestered committee rooms filled with suits, scholars, academics, UN personnel, CIA analysts, NGO profit-motivated scam reps, IMF bankers and plastic ornamental steering mechanisms.

“We agree to disagree,” said Rich Suit.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Wage Slave.

Orphans, beggars and children spoke about slave labor, hunger, exploitation, corruption, human trafficking, corrupt police states and the terrorism of economic poverty.

“Bad luck,” said a rich slave. “That’s a you problem, not a my problem.”

Children addressing global media held press conferences focusing jaundiced eyes on lenses, recorders and bleeding pens. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Sound bites sang starvation’s misery.

If it bleeds it leads.

Incoming! Bleeding hearts ran for cover.

Orphan motions for adjudication, arbitration, fairness, equality and equity were tabled for further deliberation and discussion nowadays.

The average monthly wage was $37 in a Bangladesh clothing factory.

750,000 Cambodian women making $61/month stitched garments for Korean export companies.

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family.

Let’s Eat.

Weaving A Life (V1)

Widow Remembers

In the United States of Amnesia it was all too clear to Marian sitting on the wooden chair in the kitchen staring out a double reinforced storm window into spring’s garden.

She hadn’t slept well. Again. Last night was difficult with perpetual arthritic sore joints and eternal emptiness next to her in the brass bed. She’d stayed under the comforter reading longer than usual this morning. It was a clean sparse room with a thick Persian carpet.

Closets were crammed with clothing she’d give away.

While she had hardcover nonfiction stacked everywhere in the living room, her bedroom reading were intellectual monthly magazines and estate agent ads.

She sat on the chair where Richard sat for thirty-odd years in his frayed blue terrycloth bathrobe perusing the newspaper. He rose early to feed sparrows, bring her the morning paper and coffee, tease and laugh with her, talk and return to the chair.

She was shifting into another reality.

Sparrows arrived at the rusty bread pan feeder hanging from the split brown patio roof. The structure sagged toward earth. Jackdaws, jays and robins patrolled dew diamonds as light shaved crabapple, cherry, maples and elms. She needed to call the mower man. She needed to check the pressure on the old black pump down near the fence. It was going to be a hot day and it was wise to water early or late.

The hands on a grandfather clock above the yellow cabinet lined with medication bottles were dead just after one. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The key collected dust.

She didn’t know where she wanted to live the rest of her life. She was surrounded by memories and basement stuff.

Tons of tools, collectables and junk: lathes, hammers, chisels, planers, boxes of screws and widgets, papers, books, clothing, boxes of seventy-eight RPM records going back fifty years, canned goods stacked on dusty shelves, sturdy battered suitcases, moth balled suits, boxes of vintage wine, shoes, an old broken pinball machine, photo albums, European and Russian travel guides, a forgotten pool table, lumber, a black Singer sewing machine in working order, a crimson pin cushion, needles and spooled multicolored threads.

And that was just part of the mess down there. She never descended anymore. No need or desire. She’d seen it all, throwing up her hands accepting his passion for collecting stuff and messing around, resigning herself to inevitable destiny and retreated to the sanctuary of erudite literature and domestic tasks above ground zero in light and air. She prospered in the realm of intellectual property in life of the mind.

Thirty years is a long time to be with someone. Nancy, the hospice worker was a big help, her stepsons assisted make arrangements. A retired young brother lived north off I-25. He gave her connection and comfort.

Being Steamboat Springs natives they survived the depression in the 30’s by ranching, coal mining and power plant maintenance in Nucla.

Education formed their character. All of them escaped mountains for city schools. Universities gave them the opportunity to use their intelligence. They became engineers, teachers and geologists.

She was a secretary at ARFC in Denver when she met Richard a year after his wife died. She was a single mother and her son Timothy lived in Steamboat taking care of his grandfather until he passed on.

Timothy was in Mensa, had a degree in geology, built a Harley from scratch and resembled Custer. He was a friendly no-nonsense individual in the spirit of the West.

He worked long tough hours on the Western Slope as a supervisor for a mining operation dealing with poor maintenance records, inept management and the frustrations of trying to keep all the heavy equipment up to standards.

“It’s 8,000 miles to the center of the Earth and we’ve only drilled down 7.5 miles,” he said one afternoon to Geronimo sitting on a plateau as sunset light played across red, brown, golden sediment strata.

She knew everyone would help when she got around to making the decision. This chapter in her journey was letting go by accepting the fact she couldn’t stay here forever. The place was forty years old.

She’d sell it and get an apartment on a bus line near shops, a library and friends. She was only seventy and mobile. She didn’t need assisted living.

She missed knowing he was tinkering with something down there. She missed his dry sense of humor. It was going to be a long hot day.

ART Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Feed Love

“Years ago, I broke a bunch of roses

From the top of his wall

A thorn from that is still in my palm

Working deeper.”

- Rumi

“I almost wish it were true,” said my father in our final visit, April 1999. He was 77.

I opened a bedroom curtain so he could see a radiant blue sky and free birds.

Sitting in the garden I burned incense and fed sparrows as green spring blossoms gestured beginning. Calm non-attachment. No desire. Breathing in – out with diamond mind clarity. Love and letting go.

“May I have more ice please?” he said.

I needed to break it up. In his red tool box under the yellow shelf in the kitchen where I was half-beaten to death by a crazy woman in a wheelchair were steel crescent wrenches.

I selected the heaviest one with the widest aperture. It was well oiled and ready. The small wheel turned slow scraping my fingers down to the bone. I rolled destiny’s wheel closing the vise, narrowing space with bleeding fingers. Rolling The Wheel of Time.

Turning the cold steel wheel I remembered ceremonies in Bali: Painters creating on canvas, wood carvers chipping at unexplored rough textures and a wife weaving an intricate basket of reeds into an offering filled with sweet smelling jasmine flowers surrounding a mountain of rice. Lighting incense, she placed her daily ceremonial devotion in family compound corners to thwart demons and appease gods.

I absorbed daily acts of creativity and love in Bali. Everyday was a celebration in magic light. Twilight faded dark blue below pregnant skies. Rain slashed across jungles blasting calm surfaces of rice paddies. Runoff music exploded soil. A farmer stood in the deluge. His misty figure raised a wooden heirloom hoe into the sky. He released human thunder into wet soil. He turned over an exposed part of the planet. Rain slowed.

Shadow figures evolved from jungles chopping off paddy edges, hoeing soil, gathered dry wood and dead brush. Children sang on a dirt path going home from school.

Across a ravine on a mid-level terrace a farmer trailing oxen yanked iron in an arc turning beasts in a slow slog through mud. Flocks of white herons layered sky.

I dumped ice from a plastic tray on a small towel. I folded cotton threads as if folding a love letter, his bone white dress shirt and monogramed handkerchief. I curled fingers around the cold heavy wrench. I smashed crystals of frozen water into diamonds.

Everything collapsed. My daily celebration felt the heaviness. My heart accepted the doing and being. I hammered down, folded cloth, pulverizing cubes. I wiped blood on cloth streaking red. I funneled ice into a blue ceramic bowl. I put the wrench down and selected a small silver spoon.

I fed my father spoonfuls of clear white ice.

I fed him love. 

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir

Laos

Twinkle

Dive deeper than subterranean unconscious dreams.

Nail girls protected by large floppy hats seeking cuticles needing a trim canvas sand sun lovers.

String theory bracelet girls traverse grains of the universe. Boys ply sunglasses. The future is brilliant.

A girl balancing a bamboo platter of pineapples, mangoes, bananas, paring knife, plastic bags and sharp sticks prowls sand from dawn to dusk.

People watch people watching people. It's the thing - look without understanding.

A narrow blue and white boat arrives on sand. A boy throws out a rusty anchor.

Backpackers from islands unload kilos of memories, dreams and reflections.

Boatman launches five large empty water bottles toward land grab.

Mid-day sun shimmers above shaded tables as massage clients smothered with oil feel muscled women knead bronze skin tone epidermis as children laugh, run and play in surf near extreme serious a-dolts and retirees wondering how they ended up in paradise removed from frozen Europe hearing dulcimer hammers at a nearby five-story Chinese hotel cement project.

Swimmers plunge into H2O covering 70% of Earth.

Couples embrace cold drinks behind mirrored sunglasses.

Fat white Russians slobber UV 30 on skin drink cold beer discussing nuclear options against NATO.

99.9 % of beach people stare at phones.

Strangers accustomed to cement pavement feel sand. Danger.

Watch your step. Cautious sensation.

Babel languages whisper a Sappho wind oracle singing iambic pentameter odes with save face time.

Spit in the ocean.

Restless orange diamond light crashes into sunset.

Red sun white waves blue sky green islands. Floating world.

Silver waves lap shore

White crescent moon hangs by a thread

Stars sing with their light

I am twinkling

Create your life sandcastle

Rinse and repeat

A brown butterfly dances with green waves singing sand

Grow Your Soul