Grow Your Soul

Patience is your teacher
Show how you feel - spirited away
You speak every language
Nature is your teacher

You are nature
Nurture vs nature - play experiment

Walking makes the road - red dust, green trees, golden cat o' nine tails, breeze, yellow sun, blue sky, blue lake...mirror

Born to be real
I'd rather be real than right


Posture breath 

Paint with light

Bamboo

Tiger
Blind music
Golden weed fields yellow flowers green stems red dust

Musical language said, when you sit at a java/tea zone

on the edge of the expansive traditional Banlung market,
open a notebook, remove a pen from a pocket,
unscrew the Mont Blanc mountain peak,

turn a page to spill linguistic symbols
a Khmer man
maybe 40 sitting at the round metal table drinking energy liquid
stares at you with deep black eyes.

No expression. Black retina points.
Stranger in a strange land.
How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home, like a rolling stone?

Observing a stranger preparing to scribble.

One true sentence

Grow Your Soul

Laos

Music Cleans Ears

Focus on breathing
Shoulder bladed Saturday
Ice coffee

Fat white lost tourists
Hammer sings stones
Courageous sparrow discovers grains of rice

A bell rings dawn
Woman pedals coconuts
Past Europeans inside the universe bus

Verbal exchanges
No one listens BEING plugged into phones
Too poor to pay attention

Feathered dusk spreads wings composing melody
Kandinsky
Red, blue, yellow
Primary colors engage senses

Dust coffee rice
Home zone bamboo ice
Vocal chords

Language cultures
Eye-heart-hand shadow puppets

Music cleans ears
A professional stranger shows up

Among whisper smiles
Old man with bamboo staff coughs
Walks as voices decipher meaning’s intention

Plainclothes officer cleans glasses
With what they don’t know or understand
White paper

A girl loving geography
Lights four incense sticks with gratitude
Prays for good luck health and wealth

 Dance now think later

Zen meditation
Line shape color

Burma, Laos, Cambodia - verbal and visual stories, imagination, love, play, dreams, intuition, instinct, preparation.

Luck and skill throw a party

Everyone is invited to the play

Banteay Srei renewal
Preah Khan, Ta Som, feeling mystery
1,001 years of passages, light - shadow
Magic

“I have walked through many lives some of them my own, and I am not who I was.” - Stanley Kunitz

Grow Your Soul

Poem

Diamond mind wisdom

Women lay out golden chains
Men yak in phones
Gleaming significance weighs inlaid rubies, sapphires
Black Nil stones harvested from deep Earth
Glitter like 1000 stars
Path leads past mannequins
Wearing fashionable silent plastic splendor 
Unloading facsimiles of threaded prayers flowing from a woman’s mouth
Answer stirs ice
Question stabs ice
Scientific dissolution in liquid’s formless form
Shy beyond description
-    a girl weighs lettuce hills
-    cucumbers whisper adjustments
-    cell phone eliminates an old man's loneliness
-    a sharp hatchet congratulates bloody meat
-    a woman stabs ice memories
-    dead dog’s head rests on a counter
Ice coffee is bitter sweet my sweet
Hammock infant swings high/low
Contemplating an old woman

Stepping through puddles carrying a plastic bag with two tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, daily bread
Eye contact dissolves in the wake up
Sing song chopsticks carry an infant
Wide-eyed catastrophic entropy factoid

Grow Your Soul

Ice Girl

  Red dust Banlung town turned windy.

Swirling quality gem stone particles and degrees of indifference spiraled through air.

Redwood slats covered open sewer drains.

  Locals watched Leo with curiosity and suspicion.

They stared from a deep vacuum.

When he made eye contact they glanced away with fear, uncertainty and doubt.

They didn’t see many strangers here.

They listened at 49% or less saying yeah, yeah with panache.

  Leo's questions were constantly repeated.

  Questions grew tired of repeating themselves.

This is so fucking boring, said one question.

We are abused. We are manipulated and rendered mute. Useless.

It's a test, said another question. Patience is our great teacher.

I’ll try, said another question.

Yes, said a question, these non-listeners

have a distinct tendency to say more

and say it louder when they’re leaving,

when their back’s turned away from eye contact and potential real communication.

I’ve seen that too, said a question, who, until this moment had remained silent.

My theory is that it’s because of the genocide and fear. It’s also a delicate mixture of stupidity or indifference, said another question. Why is the most dangerous quest-ion, said one.

  Can you explain, asked a question.

Sure, people ran away to survive. People started running and others would ask them a question like

why are you running, who’s chasing you, where are you going

or what’s the matter or when

did you become afraid or why don’t you

stay longer and the one running would keep going

trailing abstract question words behind them

like memories or disembodied spirits or molecules of indifferent breath.

I see, said a question.

That explains it. Yes, said a question. Being correct is never the point. Tell me why oh my.

Ice Girl in Banlung

China Street

Here's a passage from an abandoned Moleskine notebook on street life in China.

After a long steady heavy rain

a pregnant woman propped her mop made of discarded rainbows -

as her solemn dispassionate husband shucked peas before removing garlic shells from their protective casing

after sky finished crying

washing student street where parades of disenfranchised youth sought shelter from the storm

open windows released cello notes

as a child sitting rigid practiced tuning their eyes to black notes on white pages

determined to master the instrument to please her parents

another music student hammered piano keys behind locked doors to please his parents

flies gathered around brown sticky paste dripping off a cracked plate

as feelers extended hope toward a thin white butterfly lifting off a green leaf

Type A

Type B