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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Thursday
May302024

Create

The Play Begins

Attention Ladies & Gentlemen!

Civilization is sterilization - an agreement to avoid the abyss. You look into the abyss and the abyss looks back at you.

History is the symptom and people are the disease.

This is a long dream sequence, said Zeynep, author of The Language Company. Mirrors are metaphors like Banlung, Cambodian nill gemstones of the Mind-At-Large. Keep a diamond in your mind, reflecting 10,000 points of light.

We create myths and stories. We build sandcastles.

We used to be someone else and traded them in.

Hold a mirror to the sky reflecting Beauty. Hold a mirror to the ground reflecting a muddy path. Hello Truth. Hello Beauty. See all the beauty without hope or fear. Life is sad & beautiful.

It’s a long walk. Walking makes the road. Nothing more. Nothing less. Less is more. We play with reality, impermanence and illusions of reality.

We cultivate ambiguities, create imaginary identities and play with fact and fiction. We use lies to tell the truth. Fast, short and deadly. In the future more than five words is a run-on sentence. A life sentence ran away.

What’s the next question, said Grave Digger. I love good dirt. I know two things. Look at my hands.

I know the solution and wait for the problem, the opportunity, the big SURPRISE, said Leo, Chief of Cannibals. Can we know death, said Leo.

Good question, said Z. One should die at least once to appreciate life. One must die before they live. Most people are born alive and slowly die. WE are born dead and come to life.

Kill the Buddha. Kill yourself. Suicide is an honorable Asian way of saying goodbye with honor, dignity and respect. Buddha said, I show you sorrow.

A blossoming voice has purity, love and truth. We know illusions of desire, anger, and ignorance. Pain, suffering, fear, loneliness and alienation kills the spirit, said Rita, author of Ice Girl in Banlung. Alienation embraces uncertainty ... Embrace the chaos.

A heartbeat contains a universe of infinite possibilities, said Zeynep.

What is the difference between possibility and probability, asked Tran, polishing his prosthetic left leg.

How do we dissolve monkey mind thought clouds and fleeting sensations to enhance our awareness and potential, said Omar a blind Tuareg Ghostwriter.

What does it mean to be a human being? Are you a human being or a hungry ghost?

The reader completes the work of art.

Yes, said Devina, buy a ticket take the ride.

We are in exile with stealth and cunning.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged


Wednesday
May222024

BOA Unabridged

Yes.

Amazing life!

It's a wandering book. Writing as a way of being. It's got juice.

Creative nonfiction. Literary journalism. System analysis. Social autopsy. Global storytelling.

Five genius kid friends explore, learn, share and have fun.
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A writer is a shaman. They go into the mountains and return with visions for the tribe. Their holy assignment.
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Sunday
May192024

Structure

Trees are the most inspiring structure. - Godel

Sunday
May122024

Tribal Narrator

After they cut out my tongue I started writing script.

I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire. I added a little water to a gray stone surface and placed the ink in the center.

Using my right hand as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me I turned the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid. A drop of water rippled a pond.

I picked up my long heavy brush with pure white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper.

I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, my left palm flat on the table with fingers spread.

I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink then slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess.

I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality character. There are at least 5,000 characters in my written language.

I have much to learn and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth.

I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness.

I centered my unconscious on the paper filled with nothing. My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus.

I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit.

Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.

Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.

 

 

My useless tongue flapped in the cold December Himalayan wind. Stories and songs were birds. I heard children laughing and singing. Playing with strings of word pearls they greeted each other in the babble of nothing.

They dream with eyes open.

When we are asleep we are awake.

I memorize ancient chants with black ink soaking through parchment skin.

I am not of this world.

I sit with a diamond in my mind. It reflects 10,000 things. It is free of the five dusts: greed, anger, pride, hatred, and jealousy.

I sing my tongue-less body electric.

Where do I park this empty vehicle?

I have paintings, poems, stories, translations of oral traditions to finish that I haven’t even started yet.

If I had more time I’d make them shorter.

Saturday
May042024

Anturan Village

The narrow road to the deep north in Bali dropped into tight hairpin turns and thick vegetation. High forests became jungles and green valleys.

Anturan is twenty kilometers west of the bustling port city of Singaraja where the Dutch established a port exporting slaves to grow tulips back home.

150 families lived a simple existence, and unlike many Balinese communities, depended on the sea. The Balinese believe sea demons inhabit waters around their island.

Anturan homes are stone and thatch. Wealthy families live in cold concrete habitats with tiled roofs.

Blue, red and yellow outrigger canoes carve black sand.

Small reed thatched huts near shore provide shelter from a blistering sun. Men repair fishing nets turning nylon into knots. Women tend fires, nurse babies, clean, cook and gossip.

A guesthouse has twelve clean inexpensive rooms. A restaurant provides Nasih Goring: white rice, chilies, egg, thin yellow noodles, cabbage, vegetables and nondescript pieces of meat washed down with water. A local shop sells batik clothing, soap, washing powder and cheap Japanese Zen garden bamboo toothbrushes.

Word machine traces sun as Icarus flies with Phoenix.

Men offer 5 a.m. boat trips out past the reef to watch schools of educated dolphins.

Waterfalls hot springs and a Buddhist temple.

Smoke from cooking fires curl into coconut trees as twilight spreads along the shore. Children talk and play in sand. Men prepare boats and lanterns for night water journeys at 6 p.m. Boats drift into oceans, dancing yellow and white lights against black sky. Women place burning incense sticks in sand praying for a safe return.

Baby chickens follow a mother hen. Piglets slurp boiled rice and water mixed with coconut skins from a trough.

I teach children how to whistle. They teach me basic Bahasa language.

Mumpi is dream.

Gadis chand is beautiful girl.

Anturan is quiet by 9 p.m.

Roosters crow at 5. Pink dresses sky. Gray turns blue water. Thick southern forests and mountains lie hidden in low white clouds. Rice paddies are a dark green. A young girl breaks sticks for a cooking fire before shoveling rice out of a large black pot. She feeds her baby sticky pancake-like bread.

Ten boys haul in a fishing net cast in a wide semi-circle. Hand over hand they draw the net tighter as sweat streams down dark laughing faces and bulging thighs. Fishermen return, women unload fighting sardines into bright plastic buckets overflowing with silver protein.

A man from town buys the fish. Fishermen sit in shade watching women haul fish, stacking buckets onto each other’s head carrying them to trucks and motorcycles for markets.

I wander up the beach to find a clean swimming area and investigate another guesthouse. A woman hauling a heavy bag practices broken English selling cotton fabrics and carved teak demon masks.

“Cheap morning price. Buy from me, slow business, no sell today. Want a watch? Hey! You look at my shop? Sarong? Transport? Tickets to the dance tonight?”

A local man asks where I’m from.

“I am from heaven. Down to have a look at paradise.” He hustles the periphery offering me a prostitute for $22. I decline.

“I have seven wives, one for each day of the week. They wait for me in heaven. I need to save my energy for them.” He intuitively knows the importance of good karma in this life. He doesn’t want to return as a lower life form and disappears.

I escape hot black sand into clear cold water.

Mountains palm trees along shorelines as land arcs east along the coast.

In the afternoon I visit a warung food stall stocked with sweets and meats. The kitchen is a 10’ x 15’ bamboo thatch room in front of a concrete shop-home with an open woven reed kitchen door. In black sand bricks stacked two feet high form a stove. Fuel is broken twigs, small sticks and dried branches. A wok bubbles water, grease and spices cooking a chicken a fine dark brown. Another brick stove holds a pot of boiling fish.

A long flat prep area for cutting, slicing, sitting, talking and meeting is under bamboo shelves with woven thatch holding glasses, pots, pans and a basket of ingredients.

Intense smoke escapes through reed cracks. Kindling is added to cooking fires.

A bundle of sticks outside the door is the forest in micro bits, multiplied by daily requirements of 150 families.

Outside the kitchen two girls pound rice and banana into a powder using heavy round pieces of wood the size of baseball bats. They pummel the mixture in a smooth round large stone pestle in a rhythm of beauty and music maintaining a consistent vertical movement, hands overlapping, rising and descending, pausing to sift grains and add fresh material.

One girl coughs and spits in the sand.

They finish pounding, leave and return with water in five gallon buckets balanced on their heads. The chicken is finished. An old woman arrives for the fish. Bananas are sliced and fried, children buy sweets and people stare at a foreigner.

I practice intricate Bahasa tongues composed of nine levels of usage depending on the status of the person being addressed.

Young boys play with a toy tank and a colored bubble maker improvising group games. Kids do chores and play with brothers and sisters in a microcosm, a community in a world of communities.

As above so below.

Weaving A Life, V1