Fire

Traveling isn't supposed to be fun, said an American father to his whining son sitting on a cafe balcony in Istanbul overlooking the Bosporus. It's an adventure.

I used to be someone else but I traded him in.

Begin this day at dawn.

Pashupatinath Hindu cremation ceremony along Bagmati River.

Shiva is the destroyer and creator.

Wood pyres. A woman kisses her shrouded husband goodbye.

Light his fire.

Fire is the beginning and end.

Fire is your rosé flame.

Stir his bones.

His ashes flutter with death and mortality.

Silence. Solemnity. Serenity. Grounded and transient. Flowers. Offerings.

Glorious color dancing fire.

Return to Source.

A Child Named Magic

Ready! yelled a girl off stage.

Camera! said a boy.

Action! said a stunt person named Altman in the role of director.

Where are we going? asked a child named Magic.

Down a road, counseled a tribal elder. A long and dangerous road. A path filled with adventures, steps, stumbles, waterfalls, clogged rivers, blue sky, and heavily mined paths. We will face detours, tales, diversions, cliffs, fragile rope bridges, animal habitats and playful parallel narratives. We will explore rivers, valleys, mountains, passes, and edges of consciousness beyond anything we’ve known or dared to dream.

We'll learn from extraordinary people, explore distant places, smell new fragrances acknowledging our authenticity, said a woman storyteller.

Burmese writer in exile

*

We'll study 26,000 year old paintings carved on stone walls, travel into children’s voices and become old bleached bones of our ancestors, said a child. We'll live in Spanish crypts with names, dates, family histories chiseled in sharp gray mountain rocks that will cut you like a knife. Our blood will coagulate in time’s river.

You will see the word eternity scrawled with ink on a stained white napkin held up to a forty-watt light bulb in Cafe Paradiso by an old toothless man with a knit cap pulled down over his eyes. He will burn this word, said an elder.

Tribal voices spoke.

Think of it as a small sacrifice, an offering, a form of suffering.

The river of life will wake you up, said an elder. You go up river and reach pools. They are as quiet as your mind in deep meditation. No people. Nada. Zip. Zero Homo Sapiens. You are water, stones, vegetation, soft green moss, animal skulls, blue sky, nature and sound. The sound is water. It is soft. It is all you know.

You sit in the middle of everything pure and simple. It is all you will ever need. Water is the first thing an infant needs and the last thing an adult requests. To satisfy thirst for your dying father you will smash ice with tools. You will inhale his death and exhale his life. He was appointed to have you. You selected him to pay for their sins, to accept the responsibility of their life.

You will memorize every silent sound and carry it with you. It is light and very portable. It will divide and multiply its flowing vibration around rocks in the stream. You are a rock and a stream. Amplification of clear water sound is a single bird throated song. Short immediate. It is heavy deep and real. HDR baby.

It will wake you up, as I said. You pay attention. You fly away and we will never see you again. We know where you are and see you’re safe, blessed by the sound, pulse and flow being part of the river. Its magic spirit is strong. It’s flowing through civilizations, its adventure down, down, down. It’s distributing itself along the way. The stream is never ending, never beginning. As above so below.

It is the stream of life.

Listen to the energies. They will swallow you. You will be absorbed into the flow and you will be still. Stones sing with water. They sing their softness, their wildness, purity unimpeded, reflecting deep pools below open shadows. You are the flow.

We move forward. Living in the past is time consuming. Nothing behind. Everything ahead. We pay attention. The road gives us our fate. Fire begins with one ember.

Funny, said a child. Someone along the way said it wasn’t the mountain they thought was difficult but the pebble in their shoe.

True. We will meet people and establish a mutual form of simple heart-mind language.

Is it paved? asked one, this so called road of language?

With good intentions, phrasal verbs, grammar, and simple present continuous obscure contextual meaning, answered one.

I’ll believe it when I see it, said someone in shadows.

Is that a detour sign up ahead? said a forward observer. He was so far forward it scared some of the tribe. He was out there, testing frequency shifts.

They suspected he had a psychic ability to see stuff that hadn’t happened yet and they were at a loss, trying to figure it out. They had to trust him. They released their fear, healthy doubt and uncertainty. It was beyond, well beyond their comprehension. He mumbled things like, You can’t step in the same river twice, sharing stories, histories, legends myths, dreams, and illusions.

Omar, Ahmed, and tribal survivors didn’t know if he just made the stuff up out of sheer boredom or if it was the truth of history. Much to their amazement while others carried a lot of stuff like emotional baggage, fear and genetic uncertainty, he kept it simple.

His pen sketched and scribbled notes. Pencils and colors danced across Moleskine pages. They noticed in their simplicity and sympathy he carried a kid’s watercolor set. He used river streams and tributaries to mix paints. He splashed pigments left, right and center.

He loved making Fibonacci spirals. They couldn’t figure him out with their subjective abstract sense data perception tools so they relied on trust, instinct, blind faith and a crazy thing called love. Love, a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor drove bus #11.

Passion created and destroyed.

They were blessed by their limitations. He used life to create art and used art to criticize life.

Many adults in the tribe being programmed and conditioned cynical skeptics didn’t get it. Indigo kids were clued in to his natural wild mind and trusted him. Implicitly. Their collective language transcended words. There were 6,912 known living languages on Earth and he spoke every one.

He was cognizant a spoken language on the planet perished every two weeks.

We have a huge responsibility here. No language no culture, whispered Ahmed. Culture is what you are and nature is what you can be.

They sang oral traditions.

They experienced seasons, celebrations, ceremonies, rites, and magic.

They created and exchanged clan and tribal myths. Children heard, memorized, chanted, and recited songs of their ancestors.

Weaving A Life, V4

emotion expression

Everything going in an ear comes out as language.

A tool for emotion and expression.

The greatest sorrow is the death of the heart.

Life is found in a desperate situation. - Chinese proverb.

All you have to do is take out the garbage, said a writer. Separate the cans, glass, plastic, paper products, adverbs, and adjectives. Editors want it short fast and deadly. They want to feel a character facing obstacle(s) and their motivation. They want characters to reveal themselves through dialogue and action. How is the character living and feeling? Focus the lens through the protagonist’s eye. Live forever.

Make it immediate and dramatic. Show their vulnerability, their worries, hopes and fears. Use active verbs. Be specific so we feel the experience. Clarify the narrator's interpretation.

Please continue with your delightful story, Jamie.

Yes, well, it needs a central character, like Omar here, he's a good one with a woven thread and laborious languorous tension to move it along now doesn’t it? As I was saying before you went off a tangent Point, which I see you are prone to do, he understood their wingspan.

See, one of the largest nesting colonies of tawny vultures in Europe was here. While living and hiking in the region he’d seen several species: the golden eagle, Hieraetus fasciatus, Aquila heliaca, Hieratus pennatus, and Circaetus gallicus. Goshawk and the Egyptian vulture also inhabited the Sierras.

Amazing. I once was a screaming eagle in Vietnam, said Point. Strange place for eagles eh? Remind me and I’ll spin you a tale about them.

Ok. A large vulture grabbed air toward the mountain cliffs, sailed along the rocks and it was difficult to keep it in focus because their brown body blended perfectly with trees and mountains. It sailed, banked, disappearing into cover. Breaking through clouds another vulture flew into the sun splashing hillside and peaks in blazing light. It dropped in elevation, turning, showing quick flashes of golden feathers, brown body, in and out colors as the bird played on the air. Really incredible I tell you.

Then it flew near ridges turned toward his position for a moment, just long enough displaying complete wingspan and I’d guess a good 6-8 feet across, then it blended into the foliage finding its mountain perch.

Excellent. Nothing like a little free form flying exercise in the morning I say. Free morning drafts. Gets the blood flowing, lowers the heart rate and strengthens the spirit, said Omar.

Spirit of flight, flight as freedom the vision they must have, said Jamie. Imagine, if you will, how it feels to be rising on air, feeling the slightest push or pull as wind whips past you and you climb into and through clouds flying past you. You circle through endless space able to maneuver, balance, floating higher and higher. He felt good feeding small birds watching big ones fly. Always maintain your awareness.

History is the symptom.

People are the disease.

Language is a virus.

Weaving A Life, V1

Phonsavan

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, Myanmar.

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.

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 a reasonable healthy doubt they were drinking vessels of GIANTS.

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

This is what happened more or less.

A wealthy Lao landowner hired a Burmese management team to build a golf course near the airport.

Golf is good necessary and an important social, cultural and economic improvement in the quality of life when it involves business between two of the most impoverished Asian countries placing a ball on a T.

Factoid. Lao GDP per capita - $2593, Myanmar - $1347

Why drive when you can putt?

They had a meeting. What do we need, asked Mr. Lao? We need a lot of land - grass, trees, sand, water, - irrigation systems, electricity, roads, parking lots, air conditioning, a clubhouse, a driving range rover, range rover can I come over, said the Burmese developer.

We need umbrellas, clubs, balls, toilets, ATM machines, restaurants, capital expenditures for furniture and fixtures, food, napkins, plates, cutlery, lawnmowers and many servants. You build it, said the Lao man and wealthy Asians will come and go.

A ten-year old girl said Laos is divided in two parts. The Chinese own the north and Vietnam owns the south. So it goes.

At the corner he turned into Nham Nham market-street. The U shaped dirt lot market faced 1-D. Tuk-tuk drivers and small pickup trucks waited for passengers to Never-Never Land or distant H’mong villages.

Fifty or more H’mong women selling produce spread out inside the U before dawn. Community.

At 8:30 Mr. Important, an old man in a red coat walked around telling everyone to pack it up and move on. Carts, baskets loaded, wheeled trolleys disappeared. Women unable to rent interior market space stashed baskets of greens near the interior market. They’d set up on stone passageways at 4:30 p.m. for evening business.

The outside edges of the U are lined with shuttered shops.

At a pharmacy he conversed with a happy female doctor who works at the hospital and is pleased to introduce him to her 14-year old daughter who can speak English but is too busy now playing a game on her phone, see you later he said to the pharmacist ... passing wooden shops with sewing men and women, hair salons one in particular where a smiling Vietnamese woman cuts his hair and cleans his ears, rice threshing people working machines, tools and farming essentials before entering twisting narrow cement interior islands of fabric, dresses, shirts, pants, shoes and MSG packaged food stuffs as women converse, watch imported Thai videos and play with curious eyed kids.

The traditional market was covered with rusting PSP sheets and tattered umbrellas along the edge with excellent fruits and vegetables. Carnivores buy buffalo, chicken, beef, grilled bats and fish. Dirt and haphazard cement floor. Watch your step.

How slow can you go?

He never saw foreigners here.

He enjoyed the ambiance, peace and quiet, observing life, mimicking language and eating thick noodle soup with boiled liver slices swimming with ginger, ground red chilies, two boiled eggs. The kind woman gave him a platter of fresh lettuce. $1.25.

An old funny woman doing good business fries small cakes and coconut balls. Early on, after he discovered the noodle place he heard her say loud and clear, I don’t know and I don’t care.

He turned laughing. How and where did she hear and learn this? From my son. Otherwise her English was nonexistent. She badgered him to buy thick sweet milk coffee.

Women chop, cook, chatter in low tones, breastfeed infants, stoke cooking fires with kindling, fry snacks, sell fast food - meat, noodles, vegetables, and fruits to motorcycle helmet shoppers, moms, dads, school kids, shopkeepers from the interior and wandering lookers gossiping, exchanging lives.

H'mong women don’t buy here. They sell on the edge. They grow all the food they need.

Self-sufficient.

A Little BS

Raven

The next day the tribe crossed a plain and reached a raging river. As they knew from their ancestor’s tales, the river was deepest here because deaths upstream created tears as souls migrated on their journey through the Bardo.

What’s the Bardo? asked Jamie.

A place between life and death. A transition zone. Where, after you die, for nine days, you confront ghosts and demons wearing your old masks. We need nine days to take another form and during these nine days we meet all these demons reminding us of our temporal existence.

The tribe dreamed as wood evolved into ashes. Their fire dream consumed itself as sighing sensations tingled through Raven’s body. Night winds played around her heart. She danced with stars. Diamond crystal swallowtails flew from her hands into silent endless space. Her breath released peaceful feelings. She fell awake.

Sunlight streamed through ferns, plants, and roses as a morning breeze delivered petals of a wild rose to her feet. She stretched like a solitary snow leopard feeling freedom’s wildness. She glanced at the fireplace. Her shattered glass lay on the brick floor near a charred pencil and scraps of paper. She gathered word edges, lines, drawings, and blurred prisms of light.

She felt a searing pain in her heart, released the papers and touched her third eye. She went deep inside. A calm feeling blessed her. A warm breeze carried her into the center of a sacred wisdom circle. Her essence was joy, delight and happiness. It was a world of pure being. She recognized the world of appearances was full of suffering, desire and illusion.

Discovering her essence, her spirit energy breath renewed her heart, her passion and vision. People seeking to know their future and wisdom sought her out for guidance. She opened her heart to them finding solace, peace, strength, and dignity in the sacred flames of regeneration through quiet simplicity. She kept her own counsel knowing others would have to find their own way in their personal and collective wilderness.

Her hair caught fire as she gathered flames while lighting a piece of bark in a Paleolithic cave. She mixed volcanic ash with water, creating a thick paste of red ocher, a cosmetic balm to gain entry and passage through the spirit world of ancestors. She walked through fire, dancing in her inner light of pure intention in a magical world realizing childhood’s innocence.

She became an angel of light. Her Jinn emanated fire, life and consciousness. This fire consumed ignorance, and my memory of her became a meditation on the physical process of identifying with higher energies through form, sensation, perception, sense impressions and consciousness.

Her meditation inside the cosmic dance dissolved the self. Fire became her driver, sexual kundalini yoga burned soft and hard wood together. The sleeping serpent coiled at the base of her spine was fed by the energetic fires. The Jinn manifested by the fire of the telling.

Yes, said Omar, Jinn are summoned through spirit ceremonies as the world of men communicate with their world by means of music and dance.

I am a character in my own story, said Omar, a hakaawati, a professional Persian storyteller inside the shadow of my imagination. I manifest an oral way of transmitting khurata, fanciful stories, inside the ocean of stories.

A Century is Nothing