Your life is a work of art

Carpe Diem in Ankara, said a reliable narrator, Pluck the day when it is ripe.

Lucky Foot explored a gleaming upscale mercantile atrium filled with bald silver female dummies fronted by glass. Mirrors reflected screaming bored housewives paroled for good behavior pushing pram infants.

He happened into a store with Roman, Ottoman, Egyptian and Middle Aged chess sets - game of Kings. Checkmate, said Mother Death, Beauty’s mother, Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play.

Black jazz statues played sax, trumpet, clarinet, keyboards, drums, and bass. Some of My Favorite Things, said John Coltrane. Blow your cool heart out.

“Good morning. Do you need something?” said the owner.

“Namaste. I salute the light within you. I seek to help others end suffering and misery.”

“Is it a way, a path?”

“It’s the nature of absolute emptiness with compassion. Ultimate truth. Reality.”

“What’s its form? Form an answer. Fill in your form. We live in a world of forms. It’s not the answers we need to know it’s the quest-ions we discover. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Remain curious. Trust authentic fragments. Follow your heart. Grow from it. Anything is possible when you risk everything. Stay open to your true nature as a lotus grows from mud. Form is emptiness and vice a verisimilitude. Would you like some tea?”

“Yes please. The quest-ion is the answer. Practice allows everything to wake you up. When you have taken the impossible into your calculations its possibilities become endless.”

“Today is good day to die. Meditate on your death. Celebrate your journey.” He pushed a buzzer. “Someone will bring tea.”

“Thanks. I like establishing impermanent relationships with compassion, trust, generosity and empathy.”

“You’re a dreamer dreaming the impossible dream. Are your needs being met? I suggest you need more direct immediate experience, observation and imagination. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Words escaping the tyranny of memories composed a jazz poem.

Kind of Blue, 1959 by Miles Davis. Modality.

 “Everything I do is an experiment. Traveling meets my genetic needs. I love weird. It’s a long strange beautiful trip. Life is an amazing beautiful messy test. It gives us the test first and lessons later. In my life I become we: many people. We face opportunities and challenges. We bring luck to people like you. People we meet and never see again. It’s ephemeral. We help strangers help themselves through levels of suffering, hardship, deprivation, letting go and developing courage. 

"Becoming.

"Throw in passion desire thirst and existential bliss with humor. Humor is the key. No shame, guilt or humiliation. No regret or fear. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I am a dreamer with controlled imagination. I see you have knives. I need one to cut through fear and ignorance.”

 “Fear is blissful ignorance. Doubt is healthy. Uncertainty is necessary to grow. Travel allows you deeper penetration. Travel makes you. There are not many things you need to remember during your visit to Earth. Please have a look-see.”

 “Our life is a work of art and life imitates art. Art is easy. Life is difficult. Clouds know me by now.”

“You don’t say.”

A cabinet displayed Swiss Army knives with cool tools for cool fools. 

The Language Company

The Language Company - C 1

“Mother had me before polio condemned her to an iron lung. She had another boy, lived in a wheelchair and produced a daughter with Irish will power. I survived in a dystopian dysfunctional family coping with physical and emotional abuse. Whippings, sadistic beatings, trauma and abandonment, the usual childhood shit. Feeling guilt for her illness I developed stone cold manipulation skills and independent survival skills. Trust in woman was MIA.

"Vietnam is a woman. We fucked them during the day and they fucked us at night. Love them and leave them. Abandoned ones become abandoners. Mother died at forty-two. My sister died of leukemia at thirteen. Only the good die young. She taught me courage. By chance do you have any?”

“It’s rarer than something that doesn’t exist. Courage is an intangible feeling of wellbeing and supreme confidence. You know this from your mind full Tibetan experiences. I sense you are a stream-winner. Sensation, perception, desire, fear, and ignorance ceased. Frequency shifts. Transformations. What happens to dreams The Sweeper collects?”

“They are sorted by type, category, allegory, myth, metaphor, galaxy, nebula, genus, species, phylum, irrationality and coherent sublime scientific symbolic meaning.

“Word dreams live in vignettes, jazz poems, epilogues, prologues, blog slogs, musical incantations, rain drops, beads of sweat, blood, bleached human bones, Sumerian script and 26,000-year old Paleolithic cave paintings near Benaojan, Spain hearing hollow bells ring high ring low as a Cambodian boy in satori clapping with one hand drags his cart along fractured dusty red roads collecting cardboard. Dawn to dusk. Composing musical symphonies he squeezes a plastic bottle expelling stale air attracting garbage contributors and hungry literary agents in a traditional publishing casino wheeling and dealing for their glorious 15%.”

“You are the director, audience and players,” said the owner stirring tea.

Sappho, poetess

TLC - Ankara Knife

“You are the director, audience and players,” said the owner.

Inside another series of interlocking blades was a Cambodian landmine museum. It revealed Geiger counters, radiation blast suits, screwdrivers, shovels, hi-tech metal sensors, fertile green rice paddies, farms, fields, 1,000 Angkor temples built with laterite stones by 300,0000 slaves in the 9th century, 6,000 starving overworked broken hearted pachyderms, topographical satellite survey maps showing extensive ancient agricultural irrigation systems, statistical charts, refugee relocation centers, rehabilitation co-pay deductible insurance policies, cremation ceremonies, and bereaved starving survivors accepting the loss forever of two million genocide family members.

1.5 million lost strangers disguised as tourists talking with full mouths spilled desire, fear, regret, ignorance and superstition while rappelling through nouns and verbs near stilted bamboo shacks inside submerged mangrove forests resembling Monet paintings replete with jungle vine hammocks, floating villages in a floating world, charcoal cooking fires, naked begging children, amputees, short term Australian nurses discovering dehydration in Siem Reap slums, laconic robotic Khmer teachers making $40 a month, 269+ orphanages with 12,000 orphans, a butterfly farm with 232 species and a silk worm weaving center in Stung Treng, Ratanakiri empowering fifty singing women threading thick and thin yellow salvia protein based fibers on spindles and looms near Son Le Tap Lake, the largest in Asia.

TLC - Facilitator of courage

A secret compartment in a unique one-of-a-kind jeweled knife illuminated the Tibetan plateau with antelope, snow leopards and gazelles among wild mountain pashmina underbelly goats knitting high-end sweaters and shawls for couture.

Shaggy yaks tinkled bells as eagles, Golak ravens and Winter Hawk winged free over remote white monasteries, rainbow Lung-Tao prayer flags and meditation halls filled with burgundy clad chanting monks playing gongs and cymbals, blowing silver jallee horns, lighting incense, laughing and reciting sutras in Himalayas near melting glaciers feeding wild torrential rivers flowing through slag scrabble rocky terrain, lush wildflower meadows, past isolated stone homes with yak dung drying on flat roofs, pilgrims studying a traditional herbal chart in the Amdo hospital and walking the Barkhor circuit in Lhasa filled with prostrating joyful people fingering prayer beads, whispering mantras and offering sage and pinion into a burning chorten under the ever-present watchful blind suspicious eye of naked plainclothes Chinese secret police disguised as international human rights observers employed by an NGO scam organization.

“You have some cool tools,” Foot said. “I am a tool of nature.”

“Yes you are and yes I do. Health care is expensive because patients and families incur 90% of the medical cost during the final years of their life. Hospice, home care, nursing homes, drugs, medicine, in & out patient care increases cost, long term debt, poverty and so on.”

“The dead paid sooner and the living paid later. Another unpleasant global fact is uncontrolled population growth, lack of job opportunities, substandard education and no medicine.”

“Life is filled with inconveniences. We have millions of idle unemployed here in Turkey. Bankers and politicians stole all the money. Greed is good is their mantra. Government is organized crime. Soma mine disasters with catastrophic loss of life is a fact of life for diggers making $500 a month. My job is to sell stuff. Treasures to be dusted on archaic mantelpieces. People buy things to make themselves happy - in the short term. They want to impress family and friends. They get bored, forget about it, lose it, throw it away or donate it to charity and buy more stuff. It’s a never-ending insatiable desire of supply and demand consumption dramatics. Advertising never dies. Fools are ruled by their emotions. Fear. Enough psycho-social-babble. What brought you here?”

“My feet. I work at The Language Company. I’m a facilitator of character and courage.”

“I know intestinal fortitude. It’s the most expensive virtuous school here.”

“Education is a business. You pays your money and takes your chances.”

“An open hand holds everything.”

They stirred sugar cubes, drank tea, and made small talk. 

TLC - 5

“A human life in China is worthless,” said Leo, 14, born in a Re-education-Through-Labor Reform Camp in Hubei. His mom worked in the empty university library.

After school exploring forested hills on mountain bikes Lucky and Leo shifted gears where the rubber met the road. One day they stopped in an old quarry to play in dirt.

It was an abandoned country, an abstract concept.

They stood in a deep excavated canyon. High dirt walls bordered by pine, evergreen and blue sky wore sharp deep gashes after machine teeth gouged down dirt. Workers harvested red clay for imperial jade tombs at the university where 15,001 students struggled to survive in a harmonious society. Students hiding from recycled Mao-styled uniformed security guards mastered eating, texting and casual sex.

They stood at the bottom of a bottomless pit.

“Everyone is a spy,” said Leo.

“How did you surmise this theoretical fact?”

“Life is my teacher. It’s our 5,000-year history plain and simple. Their job is to keep an eye on us. Think about it. We have too any people here and so, to monitor our behavior, attitudes and thinking, they recruit students and teachers as spies. Informers. Minders. They’re paid with passing grades or cash. My father was an informer during the Cultural Revolution. It’s Darwinian logic, evolution of the species. Survival.”

“I’m not surprised. This was common through dynasties. Perpetuate control and authority. The Central Party created a climate of fear. Husbands reported wives. Wives reported husbands, sons and daughters. Daughters and sons reported fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles. Concubines reported lovers. An evil cycle.”

“Yes,” said Leo, “evil is a myth. Everyone is a charter member of the Big Ears Sharp Eyes No Mouth Society. Our generation of informers and spies make good money. Knowing their place they keep their mouth shut to survive. Creativity is my meditation. I meditate on the comic, the absurd. Don’t take life seriously. It’s too short. If you laugh you last.”

“Thanks for life lesson #5.”

Lucky shared writing-living suggestions with eight new Chinese teachers. Make your characters want something right away, even if it’s a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of life need water from time to time. It’s your job to create conflict so the characters will say or do surprising and revealing things, educating and entertaining us. Characters change/grow. Kill your darlings. If a writer can’t or won’t do that they should get out of the trade. A writer is a hustler.

Write like you’re dead. Someday you will be.

Ah the drama - the unfolding play observing sensational phenomena. 

Entertainment is alive and well in Asia. It’s the entertainment capital of the world. Keep them stupid and happy. Children of all ages stay amused by cell phones, Lose Face social sites and the idiot box. They surrender their consciousness. Watch TV. Miss the show.

 “Keep your hand moving,” he said to lazy Chinese robots. “The hand is directly connected to the heart. You are pure sensation. Be an anarchist. Take risks. Take a line for a walk.”

As a foreign language barbarian wearing a Tang Dynasty five-clawed red dragon, yin-yang symbol, a rising Phoenix and a crying crane flying through mist covered mountains he witnessed emperors screwing concubines inside Forbidden Cities with red lacquered emotional curiosities where visions of detached ebullient phosphorus streams wove silent abstractions of zither tonal quality in extreme bliss. Manifestations of superior phenomenal detective analysis and forty questions of the soul redlined final exams.

“We know so much and understand so little,” Lucky said.

“I don’t understand a thing. People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” said Leo. “On day one my teacher said, ‘I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears.’” Hear ye, hear ye.