He wandered with Leica and Nikon tools.
Visual experiments.
Shoot through things.
Breathe and squeeze.
Smile and sit still.
Patience.
Dance around your subject.
Focus on spectators at an event.
Move like a ninja.
Geometry.
Spontaneity.
Hunt and trap.
Embrace extreme situations.
Be an invisible non-shadow.
Zeynep in Bursa taught me how to swim with gigantic sea turtles.
We practice a sitting mediation. We practice a walking meditation. When you walk you become nobody. If your legs get heavy walk with your heart, she said. We meditated on our death.
Everything we do is a meditation. Practice 10,000 times until you’ve got it, she said.
Dive deep exploring coral and underwater life below the surface of appearances.
Let’s have a little adventure, I said to Zeynep.
I wove a magic carpet, she said. Let’s go.
We flew to the Temple of Complete Reality on Qinchengshan Mountain in Sichuan. It is a 2,000-year old series of Taoist temples in red orange yellow green autumn foliage.
Taoism’s home in China is balance and harmony in nature. We climbed for 2.5-hour in green hills, mountains, and clouds knowing us by now, feeling strong cold winds on a clear day. We caressed old stone steps and steep angled paths through old growth.
We climbed through primal forests with Mountain Girl, ten. She sold tea near a trail fork. We didn’t ask her to guide us. She attached herself to us. She didn’t want anything. She wasn’t hustling anything. She lived onthe mountain, not below the mountain.
She diverted us away from whining Chinese. She pointed out medicinal plants and herbs in meadows, showing us delicious wild yellow and red berries. She babbled stories about the forest, plants, trees, rivers and animals.
She shared a story about mountain spirits. Three men chased her through the forest. She met a snake.
“Please help me escape from men chasing me.”
“It turned into a slim beautiful woman.”
“Don’t be afraid. I will help you.”
“She took me down the mountain, saving me from the bad men. Then she turned back into a snake and disappeared into the forest.”
We climbed through a series of temples. Statues, incense, prayers and spirit energies. Inner and outer visions extended in four directions.
We shared rice, chicken and bread near the summit.
Twin turtles with dragonheads guarded the entrance. The main temple was a reddish brown ornate rising sculpture. Large crimson incense smoke curled into sky.
Four Chinese characters reflected light.
Clouds circle this temple.
We circumnavigated levels of experience on narrow wooden steps. On the main level was a gigantic gold statue of a Lao Tzu riding a wild ox. Yin/Yang.
An old woman offered medallions of the cosmic symbol on red thread. Mountain girl and Zeynep selected one. They put it around their necks. We descended. Mountain girl fingered her threaded treasure. She was a treasure for us.
We stopped at a temple for tea. A young nun washed teacups. “I’ve been here fifteen years. I clean, pray, read, meditate, talk with monks and travelers, and do my work. I am focused on my goal. My goal is to reach the root below the surface.”
Her awareness is direct with heart-mind intention.
In twilight we bought Mountain Girl food to take home and walked to her bike. I gifted her a white khata scarf from Tibet.
Zeynep gave her a poem by Rumi.
Your love lifts my soul from the body to the sky
And you lift me up out of the two worlds.
I want your sun to reach my raindrops,
So your heat can raise my soul upward like a cloud.
“Thanks,” said Mountain Girl. She smiled and zoomed away.
Every heartbeat is an eternal rhythm of universal possibilities.
“We went up. We went down,” said Zeynep, after we returned to Bursa, breathing through tribal masks.
“What kind of mask? Is it hand carved from memories?”
“Masks are symbolic manifestations in primitive cultures,” she said. “Mask dance is a shamanic ritual, a dance trance. Wearing a mask you become the thing you fear the most, your basic human nature. Masks hide a human’s consciousness of fear.
“Dance is about process, becoming. Destroy Time. Shiva symbolizes the union of space and time and destruction. Dance is an ancient form of magic. People wear masks to hide their transformation, seeking to change their dancer into a god or demon. Dance is the incarnation of eternal energy. You see them everyday, everywhere. Have the courage to be natural with your mask. The entire universe is a vast theatre. The two critical elements of intelligence are humor and curiosity. Do you remember James Joyce, how he went into exile with silence and cunning?”
“Yes. He knew how to put seven little words in order. He was a cunning linguist. He said, ‘everything I do is an experiment.’”
“So it is. Your ability to imagine and scheme and deceive is raw instinct,” she said. “It separates you from lower life forms like apes, plankton and sea enemies-anemone (fish eating animals) and androgynous androids in the deep subconscious. Writers lie for a living. Literature is the best way to make fun of people. They treat their mental illness every day. They say what others are afraid to say. Being a writer is like having homework every day.”
“We are the only animals who laugh,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “and we are the only animals who know we are going to die. We imagine our death, our mortality. This fills some with dread, psychological neurosis, lack of purpose. For others it’s a release, a joy, and a dance. Freedom is unconditional. I was born laughing.”
“I was born dead and slowly came to life. Are you a clown? Perhaps a clown fish?” I asked.
“Look in your dream mask mirror,” she said. “Not all the clowns are in the circus.”
“Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.”
“Let’s dance. Let’s meditate on the process of death.”
My name is Beauty. Death is my mother. I have no tongue.
Your mask eats your face.
I asked the boy beneath the pines
He said ” the Master’s gone alone
Herb-picking somewhere on the mount
cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown”
- Chia Tao
I am a short story.
You are a novel.
It never occurred to Matt to buy indigenous cultural music while traveling.
Martha his girl friend considered it essential.
Music made her edgy and alive.
When she heard music she danced.
She returned to her primitive self.
She danced naked.
Ballet. Flamingo. Tango. Cha-cha. Lambada. Waltz.
He wrote naked verbs. They loved naked. Naked cherished syllable skin music.
They wrote, danced and lived like they were dead.
One day they would be. It's now or never.
They were free. It's the way to be.
Culture is what you are. Culture means you can forget.
Nature is what you can be.
People are nature's tools.
Passing through Body Sat Quiet in Asia on a three week, “Look, don't think” holiday from frozen Europe they happened into an 8th century tourist town music repository.
They smelled music before they saw it. Seeing music is an art form. Synesthesia.
In music like life, the end of the composition is not the point.
A music boy handed Matt an orange book. Write your melodic request here. Matt opened the book. A vignette floated free.
A Cambodian orphan girl popped out of blank pages: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. These are our famous words. Big vocabulary. Tongues speak. Small life. Big chance. Yeah. Yeah.
Hunger Angel watched 24/7 in the big leagues.
Sanitation workers in green environmental vests with broom music swept streets for the New Year. Make it new. Make it new.
We should be so lucky to have crystal clean sheets.
Every day is anew year.
One day is like a minute.
One minute is like a day.
That's relativity. All my relatives are dead.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
When you know what you don't know you realize moral character with social intelligence, integrity, and courage.
Courage is an unknown word in our head and heart. Running away is our way. Everyday I have the blues. No one loves me but my mother and she could've been lying too.
You absolve in the rhythm when you have adequate life experience.
Silence and hunger are identical naked twins.
Fear and Ignorance produced Expectation & Greed.
I am good at two things:
Eating and sleeping.
Fighting and fucking.
Laughing and crying.
Reading and writing? That's for idiots.
The less I do the fewer mistakes I make, said Insecurity.
The fewer mistakes I make the less I am criticized, said Fear.
We know the essence of survival. Keep your fucking mouth shut.
One day, Bliss's part-time lover said, buy me a TV.
NO.
You have a job, a TV, a mother, a 12-year old daughter, two brothers, no father and no husband. I gave you money to buy a bike for your daughter and she lost it, money for clothes, money for medicine, money for food, money for temporary naked lust and currency sobriety. You play me for a sentimental fool. You're fucking crazy.
Her arrival was sporadic at best. She visited randomly at 8:37 for a shower, fucking and another shower.
He explored her lips, thin neck, small ears, crest of skin throat, narrow brown shoulders, pinpoint breasts with tongue talk, flat belles letters, long legs and played his way into her valley of potential.
He loved giving her oral pleasure.
Edging rose lips, long and deep. Slow and sweet.
Little man in a boat sang, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
She reciprocated playing his bone flute.
Riding the pony, priming her G spot grinding hard and fast she exploded with precision and extra ambition whispering, Give me a baby. Give me a baby.
He deferred chromosomes. Fat fucking chance, there's no way under the tropical son I'll give you anything but short time, small money, temporary love and the high hard one in your strike zone with runners in scoring position.
Here's the pitch.
She stayed until 9:45 and left for work at an upscale spa wearing aromatic Grecian urns. He gave her 10 bones. Feed me.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
Get out of my life, said Telepathy. You are subservient and I am stupid to put up with this shit. He creased her indifference into a cumulus cloud. It rained goodbye and good luck.
She sat on the bed with her back to him. Sniffle, sniffle.
Her fake tears formed rivers named Regret and Hopelessness and Indifference.
Fish behind twelve Laotian dams financed with Chinese capital to provide electricity to Thailand fed 60 million Asians downstream in deltas.
His NO created black-eyed daggers. They stabbed him with hatred, loss, self-pity, violence and starvation. Revenge is best served cold with DNA.
They put on death masks.
Your mask eats your face.
They walked out into tropical heat. Separate directions.
Waves of loneliness shuffled down a broken street. Children dying of malnutrition at a health clinic on the coroner of Hope cried as desperate mothers received free blue placebos.
The day after tomorrow belonged to orphans and lucky losers with Wabi-Sabi.
Wabi - the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.
Sabi - to feel one's own sharp existence.
Martha and Tolerance danced through life.
Everything you know is a lie.
Tibetan energies. Joy. Laughter.
This joy - new beginning - transformation.
Empty/full.
At this very moment they look and leave.
Abstract metaphorical language.
Non-attachment.
Ink whispers it's secrets of silent mystery where life is found in a desperate situation.
Balancing precariously.
Young boys stare at a scriptor.
The blind lead the blind.
Everything is Under Construction at the Source.
The vast self.
Existential awareness.
Cessation of sensation and perception.
It's a walking meditation.
Rivers, like people, only know why they were born when they reach the end.
Poverty and illiteracy. I work, I breed, I get slaughtered.
Imagined or invented conversations and episodes.
Fiction is a tool for unveiling, not obscuring the truth.
Literary fiction expounds historical truth.
The necessity of that moral choice.
Bookends of Bhaktapur. In between 90 years/moments. 90 breaths.
Non-attachment.
Sitting.
Awareness of energies.
Fleeting impressions. Images tell visual stories.
Illuminate expand invent.
Passing through.
Light, bell, crow morning. Laughing sparrow. Little wing.
Translations, transitions, transformations.
Zen path. Diamond in mind.
Haiku.
Short, fast and deadly.
Boudhanath, Nepal
Lhasa
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