Take Everything

Grind up the sausage, inner gears grind out a hollow form. Form whom the school bell tolls.

"Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to me an element that makes his music jazz."
- Bill Evans

Naive native girls are overdressed jazz and undersexed blues. Their Confucian grounded modesty is outnumbered by males 16-1. Terrible short and long odds speaking of strange cosmic relationships.

"Text me baby and I will reveal deep secrets of lust and desire," she keyed while masking her public face.

As a Socialist sociologist in a Shanghai university in a perverse universe remarked in an education publication, "In Chinese schools the conventional wisdom is that people shouldn't ask questions, they should simply take. Many, many students can't think for themselves. That's a huge problem."

Year of the Bore

The Chinese locusts have invaded big time.

All of SEA is feeling the effect of their economic power, leverage and appetite for development and profit good, bad or indifferent. They promote and develop the “new” Silk Road. They need ports, railroads, electricity and access to markets while creating monster debt diplomacy.

The Chinese are here to stay with currency exchanges, grocery stores, hotels, tour agencies and casinos.

Many need a refresher course in polite public manners. It’s like Big Brother the zookeeper forgot to lock their cages one day and they all escaped to wreak havoc on unsuspecting citizens in other countries.

When I see them wearing cheap farmer straw hats, talking louder than an exploding volcano, browbeating shopkeepers to lower the price on cheap souvenirs and following the leader down the street like good communist party members I remember sitting with Bozo, an English major at Poetry University in Fujian in 2007.

We’d share noodles on “old” student street. Hundreds of students passed by going or coming from cheap eats.

She turned to me. “See all these people? They are all peasants.”

Confident with marketing and language skills she found work with a multi-national in Beijing or Shanghai joining the rising middle class.

Happy new year!
 

Fresh street food

Draw the dead

How did I get here?

Building A Chinese Wall

English teachers unite in Fujian, China.

Let's get dressed and gather our Moleskine notebook filled with poetry, drawings, dreams, stories and visions. Collect one fountain pen filled with green racing ink.

Remember water. You've gotta have H2O where you go. It's gonna be a hot one. Seven inches from the mid-day sun.

Let's go to a classtomb on the old university campus surrounded by luscious green trees straining to light. They are a canopy of welcome relief.

Rose petals wither on the ground.

Smile and greet your compatriots, your stalwart educational guides. Take a seat. Look around. Engage your senses.

Gaze out the window toward the lake. It shimmers blue.

You hear scraping. What is it? Local workers are building a wall. A new Great Wall. Exciting. History in the making. How do they do it?

It's simple. Materials and raw labor.

Ten local village men and women - who do most of the heavy lifting -  bags of cement, trowels, shovels, plastic buckets, water, piles of gray bricks, empty drums for support, boards, and two wheelbarrows.

Step 1. Build rickety scaffolding using drums and boards. Remove the old steel fence. Discard to side.

Step 2. One team mixes cement and water. Shovel into buckets. Another team puts bricks into a wheelbarrow and pushes it to a dumping area.

Step 3. Men wait for women to hand them bricks and buckets of cement. They slather on the goop and align bricks. Brick by brick the wall goes up. It blocks the green sward, blue lake and wild flowers.

Only the sky is safe.

Step 4. Another team coats the exterior with a bland gray mixture.

It's never going to be finished. Art is like that. It's so beautiful we feel like crying.

Someone steps to the podium and starts speaking - using exquisite language - about the value of education. Cost benefit analysis. Profit and loss statements. How we have a huge responsibility to our shareholders.

Inside a brief silence you hear a shovel, a trowel and laughter. Another day in workers paradise.

Walnut Meditation

A Zen monk related a story.

“Before becoming a monk I was an English teacher in 8th grade at an Experimental School south of Chengdu in Sichuan, China. One day I held up a walnut. What is this?”

They answered in Chinese.

I wrote “walnut” and “metaphor” on the board. “This walnut is like a person I know, very hard on the outside. They are very safe and secure inside their shell. Nothing can happen to them. What is inside this shell?”

“Some food,” said a boy.

“How do you know?”

“My mother told me.”

“Do you believe everything your mother tells you?”

“Yes, my mother always tells the truth.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s good, but I wonder if mothers always tell their children the truth. Why? Mothers and fathers protect their children and keep them safe. Now you are developing as a more complete and mature human being. It’s good to question things and find out the truth for yourself. Do you understand?”

Some said “yes,” others nodded passively.

“This walnut is a metaphor for the self. A symbol. The self that is afraid to take risks because they are “protected” by their shell. Maybe the reality is that the shell is empty. How do we really know what is inside.”

“It’s a mystery,” said a boy.

“That’s right, life is a mystery. How will we find out what’s inside?”

“You have to break it open,” said a boy with poetic aspirations.

“Yes, you or I will have to break open the shell, our shell, break free from the shell to know what is inside. That can be a little scary when we are conditioned and comfortable carrying around the shell every day isn’t it?”

“It’s our self,” whispered a girl in the front row.

“Very good. It’s our self, this shell and the mystery. We have to take risks and know nothing terrible is going to happen, like trying to speak English in class.”

“If we don’t break the shell we’ll never feel anything,” said another boy.

A girl in the back of the room said, “it means it’s hard to open our heart. It’s hard to know another person and what they are thinking, how they are feeling.”

“You got it,” I said. “We’ll never experience all the feelings of joy, love, pain, sorrow, or friendship and miss out on life.”

This idea floated around the room as I juggled the shell in my hand.

“I know people who grow very tired every day from putting on their shell before they leave home. It gets heavier and heavier, day-by-day. Many carry their shell into adulthood. It’s like wearing a mask. They look alive but inside they are dead. But eventually, maybe, something important happens to them at the heart-mind level and they decide to break free from their shell and see what’s inside. They say to themselves, ‘This shell is getting really heavy and I’m so tired of putting it on and carrying it around. I’m going to risk it.’”

I smashed the shell on the table. It splintered into pieces. Students jumped with shock.

“There, I’ve done it! I smashed my shell. Can it be put back together?”

“No.”

“Right, it’s changed forever. The shell is gone.”

I fingered small pieces of shell, removing them from the nut.

“See, it’s ok. Wow. Now it’s just an old useless shell. It doesn’t exist anymore. It’s history. It will take time to remove pieces of my old shell. Maybe it’s fair and accurate to say the old parts represent my old habits, behaviors, and attitudes. It happened. From now on I will make choices using my free will accepting responsibility for my behavior. And, I know nothing terrible will happen to me. I feel lighter. Now I can be real. That’s the walnut story.”

“Well,” mused a sad serious poetic girl named Plath, “I believe every living object; seed, flower, tree, and animal has an anxious soul, a voice, sexual desires, a need for survival, and feels the terror at the prospect of annihilation.”

Language dreams.

Weaving A Life (V4) - paperback and/or Kindle

Blue Eyed Ghost

Shuangliu, south of Chengdu, Sichuan.

Yes my dear friend it is true or at least as real as can be. He returned to the beginning where his small tale begins. 

Rickshaw bells and heavy groaning green and purple pedicabs propelled by thick-legged men prowl through humid air. No one sees him. Everyone stares at the ghost. They are oblivious to his existence.

He walks along a broken cracked sidewalk past hammering men building a six-story high extension at the high school. Cement mixers, bamboo scaffolding, emaciated men haul crumbling red bricks. Dancing immigrants sing in the rain. The developer drives a shiny black Benz.

Streets are congested with yellow bulldozers, lorries loaded with dirt and salvaged steel pig iron, City Boat blaring bus horns, small red cabs and tired students trudging to cold cramped cement caverns where teachers arrive late and leave early after smashing wooden sticks on desks to get their attention threatening them with Re-Education through Labor gulag camps in the Gobi. 

Men pedal carts overflowing with large blue plastic barrels of leftover restaurant slop for village pigs and children splash water. It is all play on the streets of dreams.

Weathered women in dirty white aprons chop vegetables with sharp cleavers on scarred wood. Girls mop cement passageways from dawn to dusk.

Dutiful daughters sweep floors or stare at deaf dumb blind televisions stacked on bags of rice, boxes of detergent, dreaming on hairline fractured straw mattress bedding.

This is the entertainment capital of the world.                   

Retired pensioners slap white marble mahjong pieces into tight manicured rows of strategies as orange vested street cleaning women whisking ornate hard handled bamboo brushes paint the city’s rising dust as a ghost dances by, an apparition in their wide eyed wonder.

He speaks the language of silence and this comforts them.

He articulates passion and suffering because like you he is a witness, a mirror reflecting reality in humanity’s garden - another incarnation where he trusted you to be compassionate.

Meaning of meaning was obscured by cloudy anger, fear, desire, ignorance and attachment as you waved him away.

You cast him into deep water where he replenished his spirit. Solitude is a blessing.

His meditation on motivation and intention was clear as he passed through.

Weaving A Life (V1)