Travel transience

Yes and thanks for your patience while I was in transit, exploring new visions and shifting my base of exploration. Indonesia is where I sit down now to continue my work.

Transience is the only reality.

I have a lot to share with you, enough for a story, a long prose poem, or an in depth podcast, yes, a verbal sound bite. 

So, would you like the short version or the long version?

A short segment: packaging. Airline tin foil wrapped around hot strange food at 29,000 feet is a challenge. Keep your elbows in so you don't disturb Mr. Sleepy next door. He is a cook on a cruise ship based in Europe and returning home to Jakarta for a brief holiday with family and friends. 

Light sandle wood incense. Step out onto the front porch before dawn and communicate with a trilling bird. Whistle a song. Listen and repeat. Say hello to a large brown meditative frog sitting near a flowering species of tropical plant with red flowers for a hat. 

By now I have been to many gardens and collected 20+ flowering plants with exotic names for indoor and outdoor growth and beauty. I am living in a tropical paradise. Orchids are amazing and reasonably priced. I love the feeling of dirt. It is a hard packed red clay variety. I dig and plant, dig and plant. I water after dark, after a day of blazing heat. The flowers and plants appreciate this kindness.

After a week of teacher training I get a shiatsu massage. A girl walks on my spinal chord. It's a real alignment.

I found a new COSMIC mountain bike, helmet, front and rear lights, lock, and magic bell. The music is crisp and clear. The echo sends a pulse and signal and waves across the universe. The Tibetan bells are answering in their distinctive well calibrated tonal language.

"Maid" girls wash cars and sweep dust. Someone clangs a metal utensil on a wok and roll preparing breakfast. Wild roaming cats climb into curbside trash containers, lose their balance and spill the contents. Suburban people own two cars. They start one and leave it idling. A mosquito whispers, "I need blood." A flickering candle illuminates their probing sensitivity.

You remember a small story Zeynep shared while on the ferry across blue water to Istanbul. "Before we are born we know everything, then, when we are born, after being born, we forget everything because of the pain." 

Should I say something here about all the tourists wearing flip-flops in Istanbul? Perfect for the terrain; old Roman stones, inlaid mosaic tiles and wheelchairs. How, as their day progresses they gradually become worn out, tired, bored and sullen? Perhaps. 

One day at breakfast on the garden terrace overlooking the Bosporus filled with tankers, ferries and sailboats a chemistry teacher from Pittsburgh said, "Our daughter is 15. She says traveling is hard work." His wife, thinking about leaving for Israel to see friends and a seminar in physics added, "Somewhere in India is a man carrying the world on his back."

"Yes," said a linguistic gardener, "We are sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe." 

The Caves of Dunhuang

Greetings,

Here is a marvelous slideshow and NYT article on the caves of Dunhuang along the Silk Road.

Peace.
Follow the little arrow.

Exploring

He is sitting down in Istanbul for a couple of days staring at the Phosphorous blue seesaw. Seagulls cry their symphonies. Italians and Japanese shop.

His journey resumes next week when he shifts toward new realities in Southeast Asia. From Asia Minor to Asia Major, if such nomenclatures are identified.

Peace.

+
Full moon Hokkaido farmer
Ando Tokutaro (1797-1858) - orphan, woodblock artist
Edo period.

Collapsing kitchen utensils, steel reactionaries
fishes in moon reflection

Obstinate tyrant selves dressed as elves
7 dwarves gather delicious apples
secrets of repressed fear, anger, investigate
AIDS collusion secrets
collisions inside wild
stallions with maximum efficiency

monkey mind grasping attachment with desire
shake rattle & roll
noble suffering flaying corpses
for vulture’s lunch meet
spinning clay
eating fire

Sublime paradox

‘It was love & passion that made us suffer.’

“It’s not so much that there is something strange about time....the thing that’s strange is what’s going on inside time. We will understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.”

the writer escapes the tyranny of what really happened
and begins to dream his fictional dream

calculating risk liability cost
estimating benefit analysis cost

loom rivers flow in silence of words

Peace.

Crow Forest

I speak in tongues, in ancient dialects about love. Pentian dialects of ancestors who lived here for 8,000 years before where you are now. In the forest near the river all animal spirits welcome you with their love. They are manifestations of your being.

I am blessed to welcome you here. You have walked along many paths of love to reach me.

My dirt path is narrow and smooth in places, rocky in others. I am the soil under your feet. I feel your weight, your balance - your weakness and your strength. I hear your heart beating as my ancestors pounded their ceremonial drums. I feel the tremendous surging force of your breath extend into my forest. Wind accepts your breath.

I am everything you see, smell, taste, touch and hear. I am the oak, the fir and pine trees spread like dreams upon your outer landscape. I am your inner landscape. I see you stand silent in the forest hearing trees nudge each other. “Look,” they speak, “Someone has returned.”

I love the way you absorb the song of brown body thrush collecting moss for a nest. I am the small brown bird saying hello. I am the sweet throated song you hear without listening. At night two owls sing their distant song and their music fills your ears with mystery and love.

I am warm spring sun on your face filtered through leaves of time. I am the spider’s web dancing with diamond points of light. I am the rough fragile texture of bark you gently remove before connecting the edge of an axe with wood. You carry me through my forest, your flame creates heat of love. I am the taste of pitch on your lips, the odor of forest in your nostrils, filling your lungs. It is sweet.

I am the cold rain and wet snow and hot sun and four seasons. I am the yellow, purple, red, blue, orange flowers from brown earth.

I am old Kalapuya Chemapho and Chelamela tribal language respecting spirit energies. I hear with my eyes and see with my ears. I understand your love for the spirit power guardian. You are the dream and power seeking, finding and following your song.

I am the ancestor speaking 300 languages from our history. Now only 150 dialects remain. Language cannot be separated from who you are and where you live.

I say this so you will remember everything in this forest. I took care of this place and now your love has the responsibility.

Peace.

The Old Poets of China

Whoever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
- Mary Oliver
whiskeyriver