It was waiting on a bedroom wall. A Navajo cloth, gently.
It walks up a fold and rests. Big black eyes, soft brown speckled wings.
Slowly carry it out of the room, across bamboo floor mats toward night, into an open garden under half moon, shadowed morning glories, papayas trimmed in darkness.
The moth feels this air, a sound of humming night below the surface, adjusts its antenna and lifts off into a shadow, silent wing flight free.
Metta.
After watching emergency crews pry a suicidial man from below Asian Minor subway engines after being struck by lightening, I walked through an old expansive cemetery. It was spring. Wild flowers, white headstones, names, dates, and memories rested below tall pines and thick evergreens.
A woman sat on a grave pulling weeds. Tending soil. Nearby, her friend, her sister, her mother, aunt and grandmother from Asian Steppes speaking Tamashek whispered to a child, "She is cleaning the spirit entry. She is drumming, remembering."
The child sang to the woman on the grave, "Auntie! Auntie!" but the woman didn't say anything. She played the soil like a drum. She was sad and remembering her son, father, husband, uncle and grandfather. Their love and kindness.
Her tears watered red, yellow and white roses. A thorn pushed a white haired woman in a wheelchair along a path inside a humid rain forest covering 6% of the planet.
Smoke from a fire created by bamboo and coconut leaves circled it's veins through a heart's four clamoring chambers. Smoke and love echoed from the Forest Floor to the Understory, rose to the Canopy and emerged through the Emergent.
This is where the Bird of Paradise, Eagles and Macaws live.
I walked on, passing chiseled stones wearing Arabic script.
Suddenly there was a quick explosion of metal on stone. An old man with a sledgehammer pounded a collection of memories around a grave. He paused, removed fragments and slammed his sledgehammer again.
The sun went into hiding. It rained. A woman played musical notes.
Metta.
As a Japanese monk said, "You are always a fool whether you dance or not. So you might as well dance."
The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied
back is not on the train as it leaves a white station.
She sits on her haunches. Her bare feet
dig soil, grip small earth pebbles as exposed root structures dance with her toes.
Her toes are her extended connection where her shadow lies forgotten. It spreads upon vegetables. They wait below her. They prowl toward late winter light.
She is not on the red and brown train that zooms past green fields where her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two year drought.
She is inside green the girl with her wild brown hair pulled tight. She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover.
She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in their orange seats impatiently waiting for time to deliver them to a Red City in the desert.
Her history’s desert is full of potentates sharpening their swords, inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam and navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building tiled adobe fortresses, selling spices, writing language.
She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea orconsulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur'an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca in the east.
She does not wear stereo earphones or listen to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where controlling time is their passion for being prompt and responsible citizens to give their lives meaning.
She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with her wild brown hair tied back with straw or leather or stems of wild flowers surrounding her with fragrances.
She is surrounded by orange blossom perfume beyond rolling hills, cut by wet canyons along yellow and green fields, where her black eyes penetrate white clouds in her blue sky.
In her open heart she hears her breath explore her long shadow, causing it to ripple with her shift. Her toes caress soil and she is lighter than air, lighter than a feather of a wild bird in the High Atlas mountains far away.
She smells the Berber tribal fire heating tea for the festival where someone wears a goatskin cape and skull below the stars.
It is cold outside. Flames leap from branches like shooting stars into her eyes and someone plays music. It is the music of her ancestors, her nomadic people and she sways inside the gradual hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.
She is not on the train. She is inside a goat skull moving her hoofs through soil. She moves through fields where she danced as a child seeing red and yellow fire calling all the stars to her dance and she is not on the train.
Metta.
Here's April Fool's early warning system alert:
Focus on structure, concrete, sequential. Clear simple instructions.
Develop and allow for critical thinking skills. Make intelligent choices.
Cross artistic approach - draw the sound.
Practice visualization skills and meditation techniques. Personalize it.
What speaks to you from your heart?
Metta.
From Fujian, China to Ankara, Turkey (a kind of fowl) to Bursa along the Silk Road with Doner and Pide, all the sliced and diced tomatoes, all the bamboo baggage filled with laughter and forgetting inside the smashing of utensils and wash and wear drip dry neon holiday flashing factories along metro subway tracks where world weary
pedestrians completing a simple sentence with a full plate of delicious shoppers dancing inside fire breathing ovens stoking love's fires before racing home to mother, father, sister, brother all wearing traditional anxiety values around heavily medicated ma-scared necks handing someone change, your fragile receipt for paying
at the cosmic bowling alley for strikes and spares and did you know the great father liberator has a train car parked forever at the main station, a gift from Adolph, the Further and it was all imaginary, this T place where idle men stood around looking bored and unemployed, uneducated drinking brown tea
after artfully massaging a microscopic silver spoon around the rim, deep into the universe of sugar stars clanging metal against a small glass destroying cubes manufactured in a filthy factory - so an inspection engineer whispered in her strict confidence - don't use the sugar she whispered across a plate of pasta on a chilly Ankara night before they went to a wedding in Ulus, the ancient Roman village, deep in an underground cavern filled with musicians, dancers, and children
gypsies played anvils
far away from shy lovers holding hands under the table inside the rising sun of their desire, their passion for yawning bamboo chairs where two elderly women in multi-hued headscarves smoked exploding drops of water from plummeting icicles onto tiled roofs above the cafe where a ghost scribbled in shadows burning his fingers to see the why eye and the falling water drops were music to his ears
Metta.
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