Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden.
It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring ... light shadows bamboo leaves ... practice calligraphy ...
Be the brush be the paper be the ink ... Zen.
Content is the payload. The rocket is the story.
We begin new as I, the Invisible Rocket Storyteller - IRS for short - visit Earth. I am looking for lost poets and visual realists.
One dear friend, a retired defense attorney, lives near Flagstaff, Arizona writing poetry about Mountain Wizards while living, laughing and loving under evergreens and firs with mountains, waterfalls, blue skies, clouds and Eagle wing shadows.
He lost sixteen pounds training for a marathon in Norway. Can you imagine running 26 miles and 365 yards in Norwegian rain, sleet and freezing cold? He did it. He’s a warrior of agony and accomplishment.
Originally from Country Claire, Ireland, he is a world-class marathon runner. He’s run in Oslo, Traumas, Stockholm, Dublin, Paris, Kyoto, Shanghai, Lhasa, Boston, Santiago, Tir An Og, Cadiz, Damascus, Rome, Hanoi, Istanbul and one more. You’re only as good as your last marathon, he says. It ain’t about starting it’s about finishing, like writing.
He is an expert fly fisherman. He catches and releases.
A vociferous reader and Fluent in Gaelic, his multi-lingual translations of illuminated manuscripts includes:
The Book of Kells
Hells Bells, Personal Demons
The Book of Sand by Borges
The Unbook of Knowing
A 12-Step Clean Personal Perception Program
The Housekeeper of Reality
What Is Meaning?
Rumi Dances In Trances and the infinitely popular
Book of Gnomes, Trolls, Fairies and Fantastic Creatures Disguised as Humans and
Rock The Metaphor are among the finest academic and literary examples dancing through world paper libraries. Now available on Kindling.
They are sources of wisdom because he is a brilliant source of fascination, delight and he-man activities.
Together with his wife, Sunshine, a famous St. Paul graphic artist, photographer and painter, using ancient platinum and silver developing and printing techniques, they created a wonderful series of soft, muted, diaphanous images displayed in SEE, a Phoenix gallery. They travel Earth. They run. They explore. They hold hands while crossing streets.
He speaks fluent French. This allows them to survive in French-speaking African countries while translating texts in Timbuktu libraries, some of the oldest on terra firma.
Mrs. Sunshine has seen and HEARD Museum orchestras playing skin drums with a nomadic group of Tuareg men in the Sahara.
Omar is the Nomadic Laughter Inspector and Scribe Dude. A Griot, he pounds the skins. The skins are used for utilitarian purposes like drums, writing parchment, artistic canvases, shelter, vessels, clothing, blankets, umbrellas, prophylactics, toys, games, trampolines, birth shrouds, burial shrouds, cloud shrouds and surround around sound.
Skins make wonderful writing parchment, said Leo. Difficult to create, easy to use, portable, durable, and recycle while rolling and unrolling your little calligraphic life.
Punctuation is a nail in agreement with a tool, said Tran driving his point home using his plastic leg as a hammer.
A frozen 5,500-year-old well preserved leather shoe was discovered in Armenia. It was stuffed with grass. The workmanship was superb. Footwear experts determined it to be of the finest craftsmanship.
Walking is the way to travel. The soul is pure white light and travels at the speed of a camel, said Leo.
After completing a one-year English teaching-facilitating job with Devina as my mentor near Jakarta, Indonesia in 2009 I returned to Nam.
Farewell to the tyranny of a private school with dusty clanging Catholic church bells. Devina guided the educational program with unconditional love and compassion.
Omar advised: Travelers need to remember when packing for adventures like going to the grocery store or the eye doctor to see clearly, because eyes lie…or walking across rice paddies to see friends ... break bread, have sex, visit neighbors ... greet strangers, marry aliens and burn or bury relatives whispering GOODBYE ... I’m off to join the circus maybe forever ... because one never knows if they’ll return, to pack their sense of humor.
Why do people look back at their bamboo shack, camp, home, village, invisible city or continent as their stone cold empty lost eyes see & remember with terrible clarity?
They are Visceral Realists.
They need to remember it because they are afraid they’ll never ever see it again.
They need to burn the image into their heart-mind memory in case it’s potentially, probably, possibly their final chance. In other words Don’t Look Back.
Nothing behind, everything ahead.
Are your needs being met, Rita asked Tran.
Yes, I have a prosthetic limb, I get around.
Omar walked the walk and talked the talk. Many travelers forget to pack their sense of humor. Perhaps they don’t consider their sense of humor essential on their super serious adventures into foreign worlds.
Worlds are filled with transcendental borders, beauty, humans, languages, sensations, smells, sights, sounds, dirt, dust, sweat, mirrors, and reflections without a GPS, compass or app.
It’s a long walk.
You’re never lost, there’s only healthy uncertainty about your position, said Rita, speaking of landmines, rice paddies, napalm, orphanages and terrified acid scarred abused girls and women.
Strange, said Omar, You’d think they’d remember to keep it light, stay calm, focused, let go of ego and expectations and enjoy their travails, I mean travels with a sense of humor… packing a sense of humor means less baggage and less fear.
Before you swim past a wand man/woman at airport security you don’t need to put your sense of humor in the plastic box so it can roll through the x-ray machine, said Devina, You don’t see travelers collecting their sense of humor after passing through security, intuitive travelers keep it with them ... Many forgot it at Home Sweet Home where Serious lives.
After you pack everything cut it in half. Caress your sense of humor. After immigration laugh through the Nothing To Declare green zone, said Omar … Walk into freedom.
Before going to Cambodia I lived in Vietnam for seven months. Five months in Hanoi and two months in Saigon. I first went to Vietnam at nineteen and spent a year with the 101st Airborne near Hue.
I put it in a memoir called ART – Adventure, Risk, Transformation. It was self-published in 2019.
I met Tran Van Minh at the 85th Medical Evacuation Hospital in Da Nang in 1970. I came down for hearing tests.
I turned to the traveling tribe of seven storytellers. Tran from Vietnam, Rita from Cambodia, Leo from Tibet, two Zeynep’s from Turkey, Devina from Indonesia and Omar. Survivors. The Magnificent Seven. All of them have poems, stories, and dreams to finish they haven’t started yet.
Tran: I grew up in a village near Da Nang. There was a war in my country. I was five. One day I was playing near my home and stepped on a landmine. It exploded. Someone took me to the hospital. They saved me. I lost my right leg from the knee down. Now I have a plastic leg where my real leg used to be. It was a gift from a kind stranger. I’d like to thank them but I don’t know who they are or where they are. Maybe it was someone who came to the orphanage where I grew up after the war.
Anyway, it’s ok now. At the hospital they fixed me up and gave me crutches so I could get around. I lived on a ward with other Vietnamese kids. One day I was cruising down the hall and saw an American guy. He smiled at me. I smiled back. He followed me to my ward and talked to a nurse. I’d like to be his friend. What is his name? Tran. Ask him if he’d like to be friends. She asked me and I said yes. Yes is one of my favorite English words. The man and I became friends for three days.
He said he had a hearing problem. I’ve met people with a listening problem.
Sometimes he carried me. It was great. We hung out together eating, watching movies on a big white sheet and playing on the beach. Then he gave me a big hug and left. He said he had to go back to his unit. He said he would always remember me. I gave him my picture. I’m smiling, wearing blue hospital clothes and sitting on a bed with my missing leg wrapped in white bandages. I felt sad but I understood when he left. I lost my family in the war and I’m an orphan.
WE accept loss forever. That’s a good story, said Rita, I’m also an orphan. We have loss in common.
I met a happy child with courage and grit. Tran was my teacher and connection with the real world. Be a child. We are one with the world around us. Tran survived with confidence, courage, strength and spirit. He taught me how precious life is. Tran is an essential storyteller because he is a survivor.
Tran - I am Bui Doi. This means children of the dust in Vietnamese. We shine shoes, beg, pickpocket and sell postcards and gum near tourist sites.
Bui Doi. Children of the dust.
Omar said, Down on mean street near the Khmer House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have 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.
Like Tran, she is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one good leg after finding a landmine on her way home from school. She is one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by landmines leftover from ongoing or forgotten conflict.
Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million landmines buried in 45 countries. It costs between $300-$900 to remove a single mine.
It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.
Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, Ukraine, Laos, and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.
40% of all land in Cambodia is unused because of landmines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee. She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from their skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.
The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked through pristine rice paddies near her village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around her.
It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2. She never saw it coming. She didn’t die of shock and blood loss.
A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot her up with morphine. All the strangers and happy ghosts carried morphine. Standard issue. Grateful, she speaks the language of silence.
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