I work at Angkor Wat. I've been here 1,000 years.
poetry holds things that ordinary language cannot ...
history ... social change ... wisdom & insight ...
awareness we are human beings ... roots of poetry are oral ...
diversity of experience goes into making one solid whole ...
poetry speaks to universal need ...
reminds people to the diversity of experience that makes life so rich ...
Photography allows us to look into the mirror for clues
suggestions / warnings / about who, what and how we are
memorable / elastic / unwavering
express your emotions - music, poetry, painting,
dancing, singing, laughing, loving, living
creation & reception of art
establishes dialogue with mirror neurons - sensory stimuli...
art is self discovery
a good artist creates what they are
art has a sacred status -
raises us to higher moral & spiritual plane
shared experiences w/art emotional connections
active dialouge b/t artist & spectator & universal
Laos
Plain of Jars - 500 BC to AD 500 - Drinking vessels of giants. I was there.
Once upon a time in a green garden of light speckled green, shadows danced on silent red flagstones.
A bird in a mango tree sang about freedom, sky, friendship and dreams of peace.
A brown leaf departed the tree of life fluttering, singing, dancing down all the days ... reaching earth.
A green brown lizard sat quiet and calm.
A woman in yellow sitting on a cement bench stared through the quadrant of stone slats toward the law offices.
She has no concrete idea what goes on in there other than people paper and conversations about issues and matters she doesn't understand or comprehend because she showed up on the back of a motorcycle from an obliterated distant village and perhaps it's a member of her surviving family in there or a stranger from another galaxy - a time traveller disguised as a homo sapien wearing a tie ...
Another leaf leaves the tree of life in a wild flight of confusion and joy ...
Discussing Ukrainian war crimes, a slow genocide as 4,000,000 refugees struggle forward with babies and the elderly whispering, singing, telling stories about new futures all bright and beautiful in their lives after leaving everything behind, all the fear nourished by desperation and fate.
The woman on the bench feels a soft breeze and hears a small bell ringing as a woman pushes her ice cream cart along pavement. Both women smell the fragrance of purple yellow white orchids and they know everything will be peaceful. One day.
The bell's melancholy echo is long ago and far away.
Ukraine light, strength, courage, humanity, peace.
A month later Omar returned to the caves to wait for me. He had a dream.
“I’m afraid you will have take your boots off,” said a soldier wearing a 45-caliber sidearm with an M-16 slung over his shoulder when he saw my scarred climbing boots at SeaTac airport in March 2002. They had steel rivets.
“Anything interesting happen while I was away since September 1, 2001?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Do you mean the half before the shift or the half after the shift?”
The G.I. answered with a dull blank stare.
A retired homeless bag lady approached security. “It’s good to know that 450 airports in early 2002 hired more than 45,000 workers. Maybe I can get a screener job here.”
“Why not?” said a T.S.A. official standing near an X-ray machine. “Each month, screeners take from passengers about a half-million things, including 160,000 knives, 2,000 box cutters, seventy guns.”
“Look like things have improved since I’ve been gone,” she said, pushing her grocery cart down the discount aisle. “Now I feel really safe.”
Along the concourse I studied glossy high definition pixel posters of airplanes slamming into towers with the admonition:
Beware!
This could happen to you.
Live in fear.
Report any and all suspicious activity.
Do not trust anyone.
Spy on neighbors and report them to the Secret Police.
Do your civic duty.
Be a Patriot Act.
Big Brother Is Watching 24/7
I’d created this reality with precise clarity.
Returning to the United States of Amnesia after centuries on the ground in Morocco and Spain I sat in my Tacoma tree house. I worked in a room bathed in light.
I had a maul, a hatchet, and a double bladed axe named Laughter.
Inside shifting forest tides, I was buried beneath 150- foot tall Douglas firs waving in wind.
A blade’s swinging, singing weight edge sliced through old growth tree time rings with ferns, moss, and rain.
I sat down spinning out tales, weaving spider webs on a loom of time. My mirrors reflected everything.
I carried Omar’s palimpsest through the forest. It was a bird song trill and spring music with owls, ravens, crows, eagles and vultures circling on thermals offering shamanic visions of clarity, insight and ancient wisdom.
I established a refuge from the storm with simplicity, serenity and sanctuary.
Living on the edge I savored shelter in a bird’s song. Trimmed cuticles spiraled into spring. It snowed flowers.
I looked deep into the forest of the mysterious manuscript. It was true and filled with sensory details. I connected new narratives with Omar’s animal skins revealing adventures, quests, dreams, conversations and awareness blended with joy, delight, courage and healing energies.
People wondered and wandered, chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of their eyes. We see through our eyes not with our eyes.
I resumed my Spanish exile.
ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir
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