SPIRAL

Greetings,

In Hue, Vietnam the Healing The Wounded Heart Shop has colorful woven baskets. Baskets from Nepal are made of recycled plastic food snack wrappers. Brilliant reds, greens, blues, all the hues.

Shop with your heart. Shop to give back.

The Spiral Foundation is a non-profit humanitarian organization working in Nepal and Vietnam.

Spiral. Spinning Potential Into Resources And Love. At the SPIRAL workshop in Hue they make bowls using discarded telephone wires. They work with the Office of Genetics and Disabled Children at Hue Medical College. 

All net proceeds from the handicraft sales are returned to Vietnam and Nepal to fund primary health care, medical and educational projects. Projects employ 1,000 participants with fair hourly salaries not based on piece work. Projects have provided for more than 250 heart surgeries and treatments for children with life threatening diseases.

SPIRAL raised $82,000 in 2010. 

Metta.

it's all mine

She wore a permanent tear imbedded on her left cheek. She is not smiling.

She said, Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt?

Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. My country has 11.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines.

Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don't have medical facilities.

Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground. I'm really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn't like it ;-( They call this denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world. Where do you live?

On the mean old street near the Khmer House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C crying in her heart, a girl stared up at a mirrored skyscraper watching the wheel of life flash prisms into the sky. 

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported Egyptian threaded linen with a 300 count. No lye. The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

Metta.

face dust

Greetings,

Walk outside, feel the dust beneath your feet.  Walking is a luxury.

The street blends into the prayer circuit. Two large chorten furnaces breath fire, sending plumes of gray and black smoke into the sky. Figures of all ages and energies, sellers of juniper and cedar. Buyers collect their offerings, throwing sweet smelling twigs into the roaring fire, finger prayer beads and resume their pilgrimage. They flow and shuffle. Feel the softness being with the ageless way of meditation, a walking meditation.

It is a peaceful manifestation of the eternal now. The sky fills with clear light. 

A Cambodian man sits in his WW I wheelchair. His torso ends with two mid thigh leg stubs. 

A young boy in tattered clothing stands on a log. He throws a large girl doll in the air. It spins, performing somersaults. It crashes in the dust. 

He poises on the log, flexes his muscles and jumps. He lands on the doll's face. He smashes his feet dancing on the face, laughing in rising dust. 

At a different ground zero called Tahir Square a young girl referring to Egypt's backward pubic education system that depends so much on repetition holds a sign urging Mubarak to leave quickly, "Make it short. This is history, and we have to memorize it for school."

Metta.

3 wise men

Greetings,

According to the situation on ground zero in Egypt, A Committee of Wise Men has been appointed by the Director of Intelligence, the acting VP with dubious CIA rendition connections to feed the media stream and poor citizens a low fat diet using advanced bait and switch marketing techniques.

The DOI knows the wise men. They worked together at STATE SECURITY perfecting torture tools. Their budget was $1.5 billion a year from their US big brother. Read the fine print called maintain the status quo. Wear down the masses. Starve them out. Play the extremist fear card.

One wise man is from the Bureau of Shackles & Chains. One is Waiting for Godot. One writes propaganda lyrics for the daily melodrama, This Is Your Life With an 82-year old Senile Dictator.

Wash and rinse. Repeat.

Metta.

The Ministry of Fear

Greetings,

My job is to control the flow of disinformation here in Egypt. Let's be as clear as the day is long. In Egypt GROUND ZERO is a square. Mathematically this is impossible. A zero is a circle, a complete and comprehensive series of events colliding to express totality and unity and harmony in a community.

For 3,000 years give or take a pharaoh, our ministry developed highly scientific methods to restrict, control and in 99% of the cases eliminate people from expressing their opinion, views, frustrations, repressed anger, poverty and related daily abuses to their dignity and self respect. 

Using paid government thugs we harassed, intimatidated, threatened, imprisoned, tortured and often killed the traitors, running capitalistic dogs

(to borrow a phrase from 1.6 billion oppressed Chinese people who have no idea what's happening here because their government restricts media coverage fearing blowback and social unrest, can you imagine)

and devious illiterate yet courageous freedom loving Egyptian people to suit our purposes. We were in past tense very efficient. Everyone was afraid, even Winston Smith.

What was our purpose? To stay in control. To manipulate the system, create chaos, divide and conquer. To get rich. To redeem insurance policies against revolutionary poor marginalized common people for valuable prizes on game shows.

The emperor has no clothes. Now the shoe is not on the other foot. It is in the collective hands of the common people and they are waving it at the dictator, his cronies, his lackeys like me, yelling, Enough, Give us liberty or give us death.

The red emergency light in my steel reinforced bunker is flashing. I've gotta run, run, run.