The Garden #9

Yes, poetic words from Grow Your Soul, a self-published book of poems, ramblings and journal notes from Laos.

You can hear a taste of wisdom.

Thanks for listening.

The Garden #9

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

Fragrance

Khmer woman 70 in wheelchair

Dances her smile
Extends worn plastic basket

Grateful for .50

Her smile a fragrance

Beauty remembers graciousness
Facial treatment waxes poetic
Edges of bi-lingual tongues express calligraphy

Older now a Khmer woman
Still carries a bathroom weight scale

Around Siem Reap
Step on it
Small money enough for rice

Strangers destined to wait
Confront their deepest fears
At the intersection of Courage & Creativity

The menu is not the meal

Grow Your Soul

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.

The Language Company

Playing with fire in Ulus, Turkey.

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.