Tall Tale

"Writers are shamans. We go into the mountains and come back with visions for our tribes. Our holy assignment."

This is a camelo, Spanish for a tall tale.

Hello. May this find you well. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Omar. I am a Touareg Berber nomad from the Sahara desert in Morocco.

I am a blind prescient writer in exile.

This is my story about how I and other tribal members met a strange kind man named Mr. Point immediately after 9/11. He just showed up and the Sahara is a big place.

When others hear this tale they express disbelief.

“How can that be?”

Living Baraka, a supernatural energy and magic power practiced by our people, his appearance was, shall we say, expected. He is a poet, shape shifter, cosmic comic clown and literary outlaw.

Now it happened that we traveled together just like you and I now and we formed a community. We shared many tales and I have taken the liberty of including them here with some of my own stories. We enjoyed amazing adventures together.

I confess this narrative is not linear. In a sense, this is for and about children: innocence, curiosity, empathy, and playful pure intentions. Children love inventing stories and hearing them.

Stories are essential like air and water.

My friend and I love to travel and besides calling the Sahara home I also inhabit a very real magical late Paleolithic Spanish cave in Andalucía. It encompasses 26,000 years of art and history. The word ‘history’ comes from the Greeks. It means story. This explains the title, A Century Is Nothing.

Someone in our tribe said, “Imagine the earth is 24 hours old. To see a perspective of how long humans have been around, imagine they’ve been on the planet for only the last 60 seconds.”

Marco Polo, a famous traveler near death in 1324 at seventy left his famous epitaph for the world. “I have only told the half of what I saw!”

Keep an open mind and fasten your seat belt as we may experience a little turbulence during flights of imagination grounded in invisible particles of reality. In the event of a water landing your heart-mind may be used as a flotation device.

We’ll meet again. May your journey be filled with loving kindness, compassion and authenticity.

 *

Meditating, my head is held by a string. I transfer my delicate weight from cloud to cloud, disengaging from the stimulus. Incense rises from flames. I join my muse spirit in the Department Of Wandering Ghosts.

I sharpen rose thorns for my work. My muse, bless her heart, uses the thorns to make a comb. She weaves on the loom of Time. I feel sorrow and joy seeing two drops of blood on a finger after brushing a rose thorn. I pull my hand away with a thorn embedded in my finger. Old human flesh dissolves.

I’m filled with wild passion. A mind-expanding drug of wonder, delight and freedom increases my awareness of infinity without pushing me into psychosis. My power is a medicine, a sacred connection to Gaia after years of paying attention.

I observe a spider meticulously wrapping a captured insect with thin microfilaments. The spider recycles her old web on the periphery hauling sustenance to the diamond center where it vibrates in a soft breeze. Does the spider intend to create the web to catch an insect? Does the flying insect intend to discover the web? Where does instinct end and intention begin?

One instinct is to create and sit with meditative patience, another instinct is to take risks and move.

My serenity is not bought over the counter with pharmaceutical coupons cut from old magazines. No dust collects on my mirror reflecting Beauty in my heart. I experience myself as a breath of fire, a lightning bolt sacrificing my fear, doubt and uncertainty, shattering myth. Lightning bleeds off the charge. I am an unemployed fortune teller. I am the soft sand of sleep-dream calming a tortured heart.

Abracadabra!

My feminine muse hurls her lightning bolt even unto her death. She is a death deferred. She is on death row with a small short reprieve. Her tranquility is a lethal injection of travel.

A Century is Nothing

Tattoo

Ink Me
Married to a needle
Zen of needle

Tattoo customers wander into studio:
Russian mafia, Indonesian businessmen,
two female Chinese students
Khmer boy has “Lin Forever” tattooed on his forearm
English man has a cover up job done on a red risqué dancing woman replaced by Dali's “Melting Time.”

Mont Blanc ink me
Penetrate my skin using coil and rotary machines...

Feel the pressure

Surgical precision
Process: set up worktable, cover table, pillows and bed with cling wrap,
arrange needle machines and ink. New needles from sealed packages.

Put on black surgical gloves, attach plug into amp meter for needle machine,
tape stencil on client for tracing. Client lies on back with cling wrapped pillow under head.

Artist places arm on pillow and long wrapped table for support. Small talk.

Artist consults sketch, applies pressure to arm with left hand,
puts needle machine on skin, client inhales,
artist turns machine on, zzzzz cutting skin.
Client exhales. Process continues 2 hours.

Focus of tattoo artist
Calm waves early light

Be the ink
Be the needle
Be the skin

Clear heart-mind healing skin
Ibuprofen 800 reduces wrist/hand swelling. Rest. Water.

Deserted beach, wave laughter, dawn light
Floating world islands remember current
Yoga posture
Healing energies

Orange sunset dives into blue green waves
Swim with
Courage laughter joy bliss and gratitude

Grow Your Soul - Prose and Poems from Laos & Cambodia

Luang Prabang, Laos

Heart Wisdom

Mahling Township, Myanmar (Pop: 10,000)

2.5 hours south of Mandalay, another village.

Fog shrouds trees before dawn on a chilly December morning.

Mornings are fraught with mist as an orange burning orb rises over forests and rice paddies. Crows caw sing wing wind songs above monks chanting sutras at a pagoda. A bell reverberates.

Leaves dance free from The Tree of Life.

This raw, direct immediate experience reminds a traveler of Phonsavan, Laos near the Plain of Jars, long ago and far away in the winter of 2013. A Little BS came of it.

Here at 5:45 a.m. below trees with yellow leaves, 100 grade-ten female students with dancing flashlights trace a dirt path. They’ve escaped the comfort of hostel dreams.

They dance toward classrooms and a cavernous dining hall for rice and vegetables. Hot soup if they are lucky. Mumbled voices scatter singing birds.

Thirty-five female student voices reciting scientific lessons at 6:15 a.m. echo from classrooms at the Family Boarding School.

Dystopian rote memorization. Utilitarian. Repetition.
Learning by heart.
It’s not about learning. It’s about passing the exam and marks.
Vomit the material.

Delicious

The wisdom of the heart is deeper and truer than knowledge in the head.

They drone on huddled, hunched over wooden benches in jackets and yarning caps with swinging tassel balls. A bundled teacher scratches white words on a blackboard

 Today is the day of my dreams.

A narrow garden of hanging pink, orange, purple, white orchids reflect shadows before scattered light sings. An office girl sprays H20 diamonds on petals and green leaves.

A distant solitary bell reverberates.
Monks chant sutras at a pagoda.
A thin stick broom sweeping world dust cleans perception.

Mahling

Rural Burma.

Blindfish heads whisper The Sea, The Sea. Silver scales reflect light.

A woman hacks chickens. Blood streams down circular wooden tree rings.
The gravity of thinking sits on a suspended handheld iron pan scale.

A white feather sits in the other pan.
Balance.

Twenty-six varieties of rice mountains peak in round metal containers or scarred wooden boxes.

Horse drawn cart traps unload people and produce. Neck bells tinkle: Star light star bright first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might get the wish I wish tonight. Well. Fed horses paw dirt.

Ancient diesel tractor engines attached to a steel carcass hauling people and produce bellow black smoke.

Old wooden shuttered shops with deep dark interiors display consumables, soap, thread waiting for a conversation, stoic curious dark-eyed women, others laughing at the benign crazy traveler. 

A ghost-self sits in meditative silence, absorbing rainbow sights, sounds, colors, smells, feeling a calm abiding joy.

Wander and wonder.

Two new teachers arrived for three weeks. One tall relaxed American male has serious eyes. His Irish female’s unhappiness confronting the hardship assignment masked emotional distress and deep bitterness.

She lived at the girl's dorm fifteen minutes away by dusty footprints. I feel isolated, she lamented.
Cry me a river, said human nature.

Hardship and deprivation develops character, said an Asian child.
Don’t give me that crap, she said. I have twenty years of teaching experience and this is hell.

Hell is other people, said Sartre.

Be a good Catholic girl and make a confession, said Personal Problem.
It’s life lesson #5, said a child.

Yeah, yeah, said the whining adult eating her frustration and anger garnished with succulent tomatoes.

The world is a village. 

Simplicity

Tattoo decision - Maori tribal arm sleeve
Clear simple clean
Four sessions - 22 hours - 500 bones

Memorize orange sun caressing clouds with brilliant intensifying radiance
Solitary signal before full moon zoomed celestial heartbreak

Soma in the classroom
Daily dosage for students

Writing:

simplicity
brevity
clarity
accuracy
humanity

Floating boats
Flowing waves
Laughing children

Snaking roots
Disappearing shadows

Blue horizon
Radiant clear free pure
Luminous

Grow Your Soul

Prose & Poems from Laos & Cambodia