Take Amazing Risks

After Ankara he’d accepted a new adventure in Bursa. This shocked everyone in the capital lower case. They assumed he’d stay with them forever. Students and teachers celebrated his transition with a sparkling cake. Women cried sadness and joy.

“We are not here for a long time, we are here for a good time,” said Sappho the poetess.

One adult student who’d articulated her desire to move to Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire seeking an educational engineering job in a quality control factory school producing obedient robotic idiot children and live with her boyfriend cowered behind her futile quest for independence from over-protective parents. “My father won’t let me.”

“Take control of your life. Get a grip. Let go. Jump. Discover courage and your wings on the way down.”

*

“To do amazing things you have to take amazing risks and suffer greatly,” said Zeynep, his five-year old genius friend in Bursa, Turkey.

 “Here,” she said, “many a-dolts stay with their mothers forever and a day because they are afraid of freedom and accepting responsibility for their lives.

“They eat fear morning noon and night. They are afraid to speak their honest feelings, to express their innate desire for independence.

“They are willing victims of traditional conservative attitudes and values. Free will is a foreign language. They are scared of taking risks, letting go and growing. I may grow old but I’ll never grow up. If I grow up I die.”

“I feel the same way.”

One day while sharing lunch and drawing in notebooks, he said, “When I was 9 I was going on 50. Now I am 50 going on 9. I exist outside adult time.”

“We are passing through,” she said, lighting a candle in darkness.

Weaving A Life (V4)

The Language Company

Northern Laos

Lukas From Holland

A Siem Reap street juggler balanced a flaming stick on his nose.

Tourists owed and awed.

A traveler spread thirty watercolor pens on a table.

“Here.”

“Can I use them,” said Lukas.

“Yes you may. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Color your dreams.”

Lukas drew two blue dragons and some red slashes.

“The top one is the dragon elephant. This one on the bottom can fly. Between them is a dead fish. They are fighting over it.”

“Why are they fighting?”

“They are hungry dragons.”

Lukas drew another fish outside the battle.

“This fish likes hamburgers.”

*

"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%.”

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Writing Is Adventure

“’I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my pride, and remains adamant. Finally memory gives way.” - Nietzsche.

“The interpreter” in the left brain strings experiences into narratives. A novelist in our heads. A novelist called memory ceaselessly redrafting the short story we call “My Life.”

"Writing and telling a story is all about detail and realising the significance of the insignificant." 

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public." -Goethe

...In both Irish and Welsh myth and saga, the art of foretelling the future is an essential part of the story. More often then not, it is to escape their fate, prophesied by the Druid, that leads the protagonists into adventures which inevitably lead them to the fate they seek to avoid. 

...At one point, the narrator irreverently criticizes the author and the book, saying: "You've slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend- like nonsense of your own, and are calling it fiction!" -Soul Mountain by Gao

"I want to know one thing. What is color?" - Picasso

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Shoes For Sale

Cut Ice

Ghosts said, we are nothing but historical history.

Memory agreed. Voices blended with billowing black diesel exhaust and forgotten cultural memory in swirling red dust.

Two barefoot mendicants walked past Rita. One content in a simple white cotton cloth shirt and pants. A red and white-checkered kroma scarf knotted his head. He carried their possessions in three white rice bags suspended on a bamboo pole balanced on a bony shoulder. A tall gaunt man followed his trail of tears.

Man #1. These bags are heavy. I am tired of carrying them. You carry them. Bags and pole crashed on red dirt.

Startled birds flew. A brown river changed course. A woman stopped sweeping dust. A rich man getting out of a black SUV smiled at prosperity. A young boy fondling his fantasy without objection paused. A prone passive girl suffering from eternal hunger in a plywood room waiting for fake love and an easy ten bucks blinked.

An infant dying of malnutrition cried in its sleep. A mother begging for fake medicine at a health clinic holding her child shifted hip weight. A monk in a pagoda turned a page of Sanskrit. An ice girl massaged cold reality with her sharp edge of truth.

The man walked over to a large water cistern. He splashed his weathered face. He drank deep. His friend stooped over, adjusted bamboo through twine, hoisting bamboo and bags onto his bony shoulder.

Where are we going? muttering to his feet wearing red dust. #1 man said, down this endless road.

The Wild West town bigger than a village welcomed smaller. The dexterity and fortitude of millions shuffled along in a flip-flop sandal world filled with joy, opportunity, risk, chance, fate, and destiny.

They devoured French pastries and flavored yoghurt.

Ambiguity, contradictions and paradoxes assumed the inevitable. Assumptions and expectations wearing Blue Zircon saw harlequins.

A boy downstream near Angkor Wat sawed crystals of clarity in his tropical kingdom. He saw but didn’t see standing tall in a blue hyperventilated dump truck holding a rusty trusty bladed saw. Blocks of ice disguised as solidified water were longer than the Mekong feeding Son Le Tap Lake.

He unwrapped blocks. He sawed. He tapped a musical hammer at precise points defining worlds of experience into melting scientific sections.

His co-worker loaded condensation on thin shoulders, carrying melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into an orange plastic box. A smiling woman frying bananas over kindling gave him monetary notes, Thank you for the cold.

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Mandala Meditation

Be a work of art or wear a work of art.

Art is what everything else isn’t.

Lucky survivors composed tongue bone oracles inside Tibetan meditation thangkas creating a Kalachakra ceremony with rainbow sand particles.

Mandala. Center. Release.

Silk weavers fingered golden threads. Miners harvested Blue Zircon near Ice Girl in Banlung.

Read everything backwards. Backwards everything read. Write right left to the imagination sitting on a Metro subway sandwich in Bursa,Turkey as sensations explored labyrinths without a center. Mystic Arabic dervish dancers spinning on the Wheel of Life rejoiced in ecstasy. Angels danced on a pinhead.

Give female orphans sewing machines and training and they’ll change the world with great job opportunities, low population growth, free medicine, clean water and quality education, said The Dream Sweeper. 

Your needle leads thread, said Kairos. I am a compass without a needle, said Lucky.

The heart-mind gift of writing allowed Zeynep to meditate in the present as a stranger to herself: 

 Mindfulness gives me time and time gives me choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. I’m not swept away by my feelings. I can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.

I love the crazies, it’s the fools I can’t tolerate.

A Zen writer is an artist, said Z the younger. They love making a big bright, beautiful mess, cleaning it up and making another mess. You are a Lone Wolf blessed with free your quality of life.

The world is a stage and we are but the players. The play’s the thing. A risk taking adventure using asemic language sensing joy and mystery winds down. A poem begins in wisdom and ends in delight. Visionary mystics blossom radiant beauty.

Water-stone. Yin-Yang.
Wear a star on your forehead.
Small powerful stars sing with their light.

Zeynep, a curious star visited a blue marble hurtling through space. What is Earth like? Are inhabitants gentle and compassionate? Do they share calm heart-minds? Do they create archetype wisdom art using multi-colored pigments on cream-colored paper dreaming with their eyes open spilling rainbows in meditative blissful silence?

What is life? Autonomy. Personal growth. Self-acceptance. Purpose. Environmental mastery. Positive relationships. Eudemonia.

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