Beginning BS

There was a traveller. He was invisible.

IT - Invisible Traveller not Internet Technology.

He wandered Earth helping people discover their English courage, doing street photography and writing.

In April 2013 while polishing a new book, The Language Company in Seems Ripe, Cambodia with eagle-eyed daily discipline from 6-10 a.m. to be independently published in late 2014, he applied for a volunteer teaching position with Buffalo Strange (BS) an English school and Cuban charity in NE Laos.

He communicated with Dark, the co-founder.

The traveller first visited Laos in 2010 for a month, sailing north up the Nam Ou River for three days from Luang Prabang to Phongsali in the wilderness bordering China and Vietnam before wandering south to Pakse and entering Ratanakiri, Cambodia.

By 2019 Chinese financed damns block the flow. Electricity is sold to Thailand. 60 million people downstream in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam suffer from the economic and environmental impact.

In Cambodia he met Rita, author of Ice Girl in Banlung. They collaborated life stories forming the frame of a self-published novella.

He returned in 2011 helping grades 6 & 7 develop character and critical-thinking skills with curiosity and humor at a private school in Vientiane before graduating to a Montessori School in Luang Prabang to practice ABCs with new young friends.

In May 2013, before going to BS he went to Mandalay, Myanmar for ten weeks with Montessori kids at a private school. Ineffective management.

It didn’t meet his psychic needs. Burmese children taught him see say understand I am a miracle.

He learned. He wrote it down. He did documentary photography work. He left. He returned to Seems Ripe.

Dark contacted him in June 2013 in the off chance he was still available and interested. They talked specifics. IT went to Never-Never Land, Laos in August.

19 degrees 27’ 36” N, 103 degrees 10’48” E

A Little BS

A Little BS

“To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.”- Celine

*

I facilitate English, the language of barbarians in Yangon, Burma.

Ah bliss. I salute the sun every morning from the 8^th floor balcony with twinkling stars, flocks of crows and silent burgundy monks clanging gongs.

Wing song.

Bamboo grows strong. Resilient.

Laundry dries faster than a speeding sparrow.

*

One small life chapter began in Phonsavan, Laos a sleepy, dusty enclave near Vietnam. Laos is the most heavily bombed country on Earth. A planeload of bombs were dropped every eight minutes, 24-hours a day for nine years.

The Secret War in Laos

The Plain of Jars wars and scars.

Survivors and archeologists say the jars were funeral containers holding bones of relatives. Jarring fact.

Truth is beyond a shadow of reasonable healthy doubt they were drinking vessels of GIANTS.

I know. I was there 4,000 years ago.

A book entitled A Little BS is what happened more or less.

A Little BS 

Lashio, Burma

You are the sky. Everything else is the weather.

Painting with light shadow sky sunset excellent relationship based in market. 

Wonder and wander free-spirited in free world. Absorbing the energies. Innocent. Child-like play.

See with soft eyes. Gratitude. Abracadabra.

Sitting inside the sun
street morning
surrounded by voices of women
asking who is the stranger? 

Noodle mama. Voices of laughter roses smell fragrance.

People stare smile forget.

Spider web sparkles diamond radiance from the center.

Process Tibetan - Burmese language.

I am a rainbow.

I am twinkling.

Lashio, Burma

Source Material

Way back when I smiled to the Irish women on a Donegal provincial bus.

I was heading for Tra-na-Rossen, an isolated northern youth hostel to work as the warden in dead winter.

I use yellow legal paper called Evidence. It’s perfect for this kind of adventure.

It collects source material because we, the royal I, remain open. We acknowledge we are from the source, in a sense, beyond sense data, we are a fundamental vibration, each of us possesses the innate capability to create and embrace Metta the loving kindness permeating throughmeridians, we tap into the source, we transmute through fields of energy, resolving, flowing from the source, the infinite vibrations of love. 

Many writers prefer using these yellow papers to capture their stories, characters, intention and motivation from scene to scene. It flows.

I write with a cloud pen nib on mirrors. Creating amnesia. The clouds should know me by now. It’s a strange mixture of life and death, so it is. 

I was on fire. I showed them a notebook. Yes, it’s tight, flat, hard rough paper parchment, badly stitched and while it is useful and shaking in laughter it is not quite as free as this evidence. Two more Moleskine are filled. One sits empty and blank. I am empty and blank.

The women stared in amazed silence. Asleep with eyes wide open. Stoned dolmens. 

*

In Vietnam Tran hobbles into the ancient citadel in Hue. Children tune violins, cellos, flutes and recorders in bomb craters and shadows of demolished brick walls. Humid sunlight filters through banana leaves. He relaxes against a crumbling wall hearing his melancholy music language. 

Storytellers re-calibrated their true compass bearing on a dirt road in a third world country thumbing open a useful ragged egalitarian existential foreign dictionary.

It spilled myths
creation stories
symbols
forms
sensations
perceptions
images
ideographs
pictographs
virus inoculations
musical interludes
sonatas
vibratos
journey notes
bleeding tomatoes
broken hearts
haiku
khata scarves
poetry and type-A negative blood donor manifests.

A Century is Nothing

Blue Eyed Ghost

Shuangliu, south of Chengdu, Sichuan.

Yes my dear friend it is true or at least as real as can be. He returned to the beginning where his small tale begins. 

Rickshaw bells and heavy groaning green and purple pedicabs propelled by thick-legged men prowl through humid air. No one sees him. Everyone stares at the ghost. They are oblivious to his existence.

He walks along a broken cracked sidewalk past hammering men building a six-story high extension at the high school. Cement mixers, bamboo scaffolding, emaciated men haul crumbling red bricks. Dancing immigrants sing in the rain. The developer drives a shiny black Benz.

Streets are congested with yellow bulldozers, lorries loaded with dirt and salvaged steel pig iron, City Boat blaring bus horns, small red cabs and tired students trudging to cold cramped cement caverns where teachers arrive late and leave early after smashing wooden sticks on desks to get their attention threatening them with Re-Education through Labor gulag camps in the Gobi. 

Men pedal carts overflowing with large blue plastic barrels of leftover restaurant slop for village pigs and children splash water. It is all play on the streets of dreams.

Weathered women in dirty white aprons chop vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Girls mop cement passageways from dawn to dusk.

Dutiful daughters sweep floors or stare at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent, dreaming on hairline fractured straw mattress bedding.

This is the entertainment capital of the world.                   

Retired pensioners slap white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured rows of strategies as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes paint the city’s rising dust as a ghost dances by, an apparition in their wide eyed wonder.

He speaks the language of silence and this comforts them.

He articulates passion and suffering because like you he is a witness, a mirror reflecting reality in humanity’s garden - another incarnation where he trusted you to be compassionate.

Meaning of meaning was obscured by cloudy anger, fear, desire, ignorance and attachment as you waved him away.

You cast him into deep water where he replenished his spirit. Solitude is a blessing.

His meditation on motivation and intention was clear as he passed through.

Weaving A Life (V1)