51 Days in Turkey

In 2008 while facilitating English in Bursa, Turkey he worked with Azra, a personal tutor. She told him about Trabzon on the Black Sea near Georgia. “I was born there and it’s beautiful.”

In the summer of 2012 while meditating in Asia he applied for a Teaching English Foreign Language (TEFL) job in Trabzon.

They needed native barbarians with clear pronunciation.

Let’s see the terrain, said Omar, a Touareg Berber ghostwriter friend. Reconnect with Z, the author of The Language Company, meet diverse people, do street photography, write about it and analyze the situation with diamond mind wisdom.

Go on an adventure.

He arrived in September.

Satire and curiosity witnessed the deterioration of educational quality. Rampant commercialism and artificial empowerment. Dystopian reality. Greed is a hungry animal. So it goes.

51 Days in Turkey

Many clowns are not in the circus.

Sunny Side Blood Donation

Pure red life floats to the surface. A drop of blood splatters. A finger smears one drop on skin. Small swift red rivers trickle. Veins release blood volcanoes. Red-hot meteors explode on epidermis.

After Nam I became a regular blood donor every two months. Someone needs it more than I.

“Are you allergic to pain?” said a nurse in a mobile blood unit parked at Sunny Side Beach, south of Tacoma.

“Only to pleasure.”

A needle penetrated a vein drawing A-.

“Writing is easy,” said Hemingway, “just open a vein.” The earnest man wrote clear precise words.

“I wrote seven words today,” James Joyce said to a friend one day in a Paris cafe. “I wish I knew what order they go in.”

Squeezing a rubber ball I bantered with a mother of five. Blood flowed through plastic tubes out of sight out of mind into clear liter bags with an identification number. Sugar cookies and OJ. Hugs from a thank you clown provided emotional wellbeing.

I donated blood into sky.

On the shore four men and a woman stood silent on wet rocks. One man held an urn. He handed it to the woman. It was large and awkward. Death dust is awkward. Cradling it she tipped it toward water.

A river of brown ash flowed over the edge. A fine mist dressed liquid. Her dancing arms scattered a trail of someone’s life. She handed the urn to a companion. He poured ash into miniature tides.

A bouquet of red, yellow and white roses with long green stems flew from the woman’s hand into Puget Sound. The urn was offered to another man. No thanks, shaking his head.

A Vietnam veteran in shadows wearing a faded Boonie hat played a weeping guitar. Seven faltering notes ran through sand past an old couple staring at oceans beyond life’s horizon. A laughing father and son threw seaweed at each other. A crow’s black shadow landed on a dead tree branch.

My blood flow created a cataclysmic flood. Cold mountain poems melting snow fed forest trails and seeped to sleeping roots below the surface of appearances. Lotus petals opened. Earth lava blood carved canyons. Tributaries branched from the Tree of Life.

Blood gouged out rock, cleaning earth, transforming stone to sand, to dust, erasing river bottoms, collapsing banks, overpowering everything in its path, forming new microscopic celestial arrangements.

Finger paints blood on my lips and loom threads.

Luminous light illuminated weavers, gravediggers and writers. Shuttles click clack. Blood dyed threads loomed stories. Diggers cherished cemetery solitude and silence.

Soft brushes exploded seeds into rain. Laughing bones excavated stories. A double-bladed axe split clouds into Alpha, Beta, & Omega.

A thorn embedded in my skin allows a ghost in exile to realize a life principle.

Eudaemonia - human flourishing from the Greek – meaning a love of travel and a love of life.

ART

Kids Talk

“Are you a ticket taker or a risk taker?”

“If you want to do amazing things you need to take amazing risks and suffer greatly.”

“Anybody have any spare change?” asked a panhandling waif on an aspirator with wealthy aspirations.

“Hmm, I see a faint star at the conjunction of the head and heart life lines. Does that mean anything?” said a kid fingering green palms approaching Easter Is-land on a bamboo raft.

“Depends,” ranted a child orator standing on a soapbox. “Do you mean faint as in non-distinguishable or feint meaning to throw one off a socially agreed upon tacit path implied by pretending to understand anything while processing information with a deft movement?”

“Yes,” philosophized a child with the wit of Camus, “it’s a sublime paradox, this absurd metaphorical life theater. We have aspects of knowing. We know so much and understand nothing. We are affected, infected, rejected or injected by how we feel not what we think we understand. Life is short and sweet. Art is long. Our lives are works of art. It’s not so much that there is something strange about time. What’s strange is what’s going on inside time. We will understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.”

“You’re just saying that,” said a voice.

“Sounds like a description of the food they serve here, speaking of strange,” one resident commented to no one in particular.

“No lie flutter by,” sighed a Monarch’s wings in Greek.

“What’s that have to do with the conservation of angular momentum and a parabola?” queried a child spinning wheelchair tires on a tennis court and making a racket while performing real alignments for friends.

“Do I love you because you are beautiful,” said Rose, “or are you beautiful because I love you?”

“Both,” sang the Greek chorus.

“You get what you pay for,” said a kid ironing words with grit, perseverance and discipline.

ART

Every kid needs a bike.

Bliss

Rose knew it’d be a beautiful decision putting the disability act in their short sweet Ghost Dance - maybe in the rising action leading to an epiphany or in the falling action with heart-breaking catastrophic transformational awareness. Cut. The end. Cue applause.

“How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” said a child with reported speech. Their wheel of life played tag with crazy wisdom.  Mu-shin, their state of “no-mind” blossomed where thought, emotions and expectations did not matter.

Who’s dragging around this bag of bones? Where do I park this empty vehicle? I have poems and stories to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

“To sleep, perchance to dream.”

“A dream is an unfulfilled wish,” said a kid with a Ph.D. in Psychoanalysis from the Jung Institute in Zurich.

“What else did he say?”

“He said, ‘There is no royal road to wisdom. To arrive in the future I must journey to the past. To attain the sanity with the One, I must risk the whirling madness of the possessed. One must confront their shadow or be crushed by it.”

“I like it,” said Rumi. “What else?”

“Well, here’s another cool thing he said. “‘I liken the formation of a character to weaving fabric. You know what happens when you make a mistake? The whole pattern is spoiled. You have a choice. You can finish the garment, however it will always be botched and ugly or you can unravel the weaving back to the mistake and start again. That’s basically what analysis is about. It’s a tedious job. The patient is scared and hostile. The analyst lends patience, honesty and courage.’”

“Excellent,” yelled kids, “here’s to our being patient patients with honesty and courage.”

“Speaking of courage, I’m looking for someone who knows reading and writing,” said Rose.

“I can read and write,” said the children. "We also love drawing, singing and dancing.”

“Reading and writing is power. Dance is life. Perfect. Let’s go together,” said Rose.

Downstairs at Sacred Heart Hospital a translucent mother saw her grief reflected in Beauty’s mirror. “This is my worst nightmare,” whispered her heart-mind.

Rose said, “Afraid to face the truth adults run away. They run away carrying their fear like a heavy bag of bricks. They are afraid to see the beauty, strength and dignity of Death and letting go.”

“Why?” said mother.

“They stay away because they are afraid of saying the wrong thing. The child’s spirit is pure energy. They have the strength to let go. Adults find Death a scary thing so they run away.”

“I see,” said a gardener trimming thorns below a tree house. “I know Death’s beauty and wisdom. Metaphors and mortality exist with initial memories. Memories are figments of our imagination. I am a dreamer in nature, bigger than the universe, in never-never-cuckoo land. I am a witness collecting evidence that tells no lies. The deeper you go the deeper the bliss.”

ART

world dust

I’m broiling on the balcony of my Tacoma tree house. Getting down and dirty after years away from the typewriter.

Covered in world dust and needing oil it’s a small portable dangerous machine.  It transforms life energies by weaving adventures. Threads follow needle.

I am a peripatetic traveler and literary outlaw.

I’m lucky to get it down now and make sense of it later.

I’m a mirror in the mandala of my labyrinth. I am Labrys, from the Greek for a two-headed axe. I write with passion and vision. Short fast and deadly.

My mirror reflects everything. It absorbs desire, anger, ignorance, passion and suffering.

Beauty has no tongue.

I’m confident and self-reliant exploring the human condition. Human energies, frequencies and vibrations reflect languages, lives and attitudes. Dreams dance reflections.

Mirror reveals emotional trust, wisdom, peace and love with truth and compassion.

Meditate on the process of your death.

Suffering is an illusion.

Your mask eats your face.

My mirror is dust free.

Creativity dances in language.

Language is oral, gestures and graphic.

Oral and gestures dissipate.

Symbolic graphic is constant.

This awareness enlightens you after years of wandering. I have been here for 1,000 years so I can only imagine what they are going through.

Everything you know is a lie.

Keep a diamond in your mind.

To feel better, clean my heart, purge old fears and improve the quality of life I climbed down to donate a pint at The Blood Bank. Good old hemoglobin.

Suffering from cancer, a hospitalized child I will never meet, know, or love needs platelets more than I do. It’s been sixty-four clicks of Earth’s rotation between donations. It’s the best re-cycling program on the planet.

Give the gift of life that keeps on giving.

My calmness meets a scared mother pacing sterile emergency rooms at Sacred Heart Hospital wondering if her daughter will receive essential ingredients in time. 

A solemn-faced, stressed out cardiovascular lab tech with his personal set of challenges and opportunities, said to her, “At this moment we have no matching donors. We’ve released a global search engine to see what’s available on the market. People are selling short to cut their losses. It’s all about supply, demand and the fear of poverty. Scarcity. There are indications of further interest rate cuts to stimulate consumer confidence. We have no immediate indication of a stimulus. We will keep you informed.”

The mother doesn’t need to hear this prattle from a white lab coat.

Fingering her bone prayer beads, skeleton heads shake, rattle and roll. Fingers caress thorns. Everything happens by accident on purpose in her life, speaking of destiny, fate and chance. Life for her and millions in the land of the free, home of the brave and broke is free will versus random chance.

Everything’s already happened. People need to experience it while confronting their shadow and alienation, loneliness and loving community in a corrupt, cynical, hysterical greed-based world where people try to Control their fear.

Write FEAR & ANGER on a paper napkin.

Burn it.

Let go.

Citizen sheep believed in fear and unsustainable consumption because they were afraid of being lonely and poor.

Happiness is a myth. The wish of desire said so.

Humans were willing victims of their fear, healthy uncertainty, and doubt. Their amygdala, a small almond shaped brain structure creating fear and emotional response fired up. Fight or flight?

Are you the hunter or the prey?

ART