Moroccan Girl Dances

The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train leaving a white station. 

She sits on her haunches. Her bare feet dig soil gripping small earth pebbles as exposed root structures dance with toes. 

Her toes are extended connections where her shadow lies forgotten. It spreads upon vegetables. They prowl toward late winter light.

She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields where her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought. She is inside green 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 orange seats impatiently waiting for time to deliver them to a desert Red City. 

Her history’s desert reveals potentates sharpening swords, inventing icon free art, alphabets, algebra, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, 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 or consulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur'an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca.

She does not wear stereo earphones listening 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 giving 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 and yellow and green fields where her black eyes penetrate white clouds in blue sky. 

Her open heart hears her breath explore her long shadow, causing it to ripple with her shift. 

Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than eagle feathers in High Atlas Mountains. She smells the Berber tribal fire heating tea for a festival where someone wears a goatskin cape and skull below stars. 

It is cold. Flames leap from branches like shooting stars into her eyes.

Someone plays music. It is the music of her ancestors, her nomadic people. She sways inside the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory. 

She is not on the train. 

She is inside a goat skull moving her hoofs through soil. She dances 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.

Weaving A Life (V4)

Burma

Myths, Legends, Stories

Down in the southern province of Suhag in Egypt where King Scorpion lived 5,300 years ago I worked with archeologists discovering clay tablets.

Humans recorded taxes on oil and linen - a material Egyptians considered ritually pure under the protection of the goddess Tayt. The hieroglyphic line drawings of animals, plants and mountains revealed stories of economies and commodities.

In Nevali Cori we found 9,000 year-old shards of ceramics pottery depicting dancers.

“These images,” said a metaphorical digger, “reveal a common ancestor creating to integrate their community.”

A camelhair brush cleaned shards. “Anything else?”

“Well,” one said sifting dust, “we surmise these images established a collective discipline in their community. See how the figures are holding hands? What do you see now?”

“I see a circle of movement. A connected unity, a language in space.”

“It’s more than that. There are five rhythms in dance. You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth.”

“Earth?”

“Yes, then you have a line from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.”

“Fire is the driver.”

“Chaos is next, a combination of circle and lines where the male and female energies interact. This is the place of transformation.”

“I see. And then?”

“After chaos is the lyrical, a leap, a release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.”

Language dances in space.

Every fourteen days a living language dies on Earth. The last speaker says good-bye.

6,100 and counting.

Storytellers sing oral traditions. They memorize stories, songs, poems, seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies. They create and exchange family, clan, tribal myths and legends. Their children listen, memorize, chant and recite ancestor songs.

An historian’s job is trying to understand what happened through time.

An anthropologist’s job is to understand how people told their creation stories.

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions, said, “Myths tell only of that which really happened.”

Myths suggest that behind the explanation there is a reality that cannot be seen and examined.

A myth is a story of unknown origins.

Myths are sacred stories of religion based on belief, containing archetypical universal truths.

They are in every place and no particular place. The world is sacred.

Myths, legends, stories.

Magic words grow here.

Intensity propels ten claws across twenty-six keys. Reed-like digits reflect use and neglect.

Psychology handles the branches. Mindfulness swims with roots.

Evolution flashes flickering beams of incandescent auras and pulsating electro-magnetic fields evolving character, attitude, values, behaviors and intention.

Intention is karma.

Perpetual transformation.

Weaving A Life (Volume 4) - Kindle Edition

 

Burma

Walnut Meditation

A Zen monk related a story.

“Before becoming a monk I was an English teacher in an Experimental High School near Chengdu in Southwestern 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 in high school and 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. A memory. 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. 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, surviving, feeling the terror at the prospect of annihilation.”

Language dreams.

Weaving a Life Volume 4

We Had An Encounter

(Post coup, July 2016 - Turkey's government solidifies control over military, judiciary, medias, education. Over 120,000 judges, teachers, police and civil servants suspended or dismissed, together with about 40,000 formally arrested.)

On a 5th floor balcony in Ankara, Turkey, Lucky fed wild birds, nurtured roses and played in good dirt.

He collected poetic and photographic evidence.

The rise and decline of Byzantine civilizations heard historians standing on street corners, lost highways or walking arduous mountain paths amid sweet smelling manure with tattered hats in hands pleading, “Give me your wasted hours. Give me your wasted hours.”

Besides helping students discover the courage to speak another tongue with an active voice at The Language Company he got a part-time job driving a taxi-bus.

At 9:11 p.m. he drove a 15-seater minivan to a Soviet-style apartment in a middle class neighborhood. A swarthy man named Pida Pie apple of his mother’s eye opened a sliding door.

A symphony of high heels announced a parade of skintight blond Russians. They purred into the taxi-bus. He smelled cosmetics, lip-gloss and sex. The night was young.

Sly Pide Pie got in.

“Go man go.”

Lucky delivered the ladies to The Kitty Cat Night Club and returned to the apartment for another load. By 10:10 p.m. he’d transported thirty.

“Pick them up at 5:15,” said Pide.

Lucky went home for a catnap with his estranged wife from an arranged marriage. She’d traded her sex for security and knew how to rub a ruble together.

After collecting women smelling of dancing, drinks and cold-blooded sex with diplomats and Turkish tycoons he took them home. High heels and acrylic language laughter faded. Dawn broke bread.

He stopped at a cafe for muddy coffee and aired out the taxi-bus.

Beginning at 7:00 a.m. he picked up kids for their daily dose of force fed feedlot education. They stumbled out of apartments piled in and fell asleep. Weeping mothers on balconies waving soiled red/yellow hammer and sickle cleaning rags sang good-bye to despondent sons and daughters.

A Chinese waif dreaming of autonomy had her eyes wide open. “Patience is my teacher,” she said.

“I remember you from the Fujian university. How did you get here?”

“I graduated with an M.A. in Languages, Humor and Courage. I stowed away on a ship leaving Shanghai. It sailed through the Straits of Malacca, the Suez Canal and into Izmir. I hitched here and got lucky. I discovered a nanny position with a family. I tutor their kids and teach Chinese calligraphy at the school.”

“Great wild future. What happened to your dream about being a waif?”

“No fear. It’s in The Dream Sweeper Machine. The day after tomorrow belongs to me. I am Curious.”

“Nice to meet you. I'm Lucky.”

“Sure you are. May I drive?”

“Why not,” giving her the tantric wheel of life.

“Wow,” she said, shifting gears, “this is fun. Let’s see how slow we can go.”

At 8:15 a.m. he returned home for a shower, good eats and dreams.

At 2 p.m. he walked to The Language Company. Students were doctors, lawyers, health care workers, engineers and university students. He was a guide from the side through etymology, phonology and morphology. The majority had passive verbs down.

“How are you,” he asked.

“So-so,” sang the chorus. “Tired. We need Xanax.”

Finished at 9:00 p.m. he started the Russian roulette acquisition cycle. “Put one in my chamber,” whispered a leggy blond. “My safety is off and I am well lubricated.”

Every morning, working with Omar, a blind Touareg amanuensis from the Sahara, whom Lucky befriended by fate in Morocco two days before 9/11 while on a six-month hiatus from the united states of consumption, they finished polishing a gonzo memoir. A Century Is Nothing. Omar sent it out.

Fifty unemployed suicidal literary agents huddled around a fire in a Benaojan cave south of Ronda, Spain read Omar’s epic.

26,000 year-old Paleolithic paintings and dancing shadows displayed bison, deer, archers, and crude time-comb slashes. Red and black fish were trapped in black cages. Fingerprints whorled hunting stories.

Agents concurred. It isn’t mainstream and too experimental. We can’t realize 15% from this. Thanks but no thanks. Let’s burn it to keep warm.

Omar published it independently in October 2007. He loved the do it yourself process: text, blurb, design, basic marketing and cover image of a Chinese girl.

“Yes,” Omar said, “it’s almost as true as if you can believe it.”

Few read it and fewer understood it.

Lucky shared it with friends and strangers. His best friend buried a copy in an Arizona time capsule.

Omar sent copies to nomadic Blue Men in the Sahara.

Through Constantinople publishing contacts it was available at D&R Books in Ankara, Bursa, Timbuktu and a big river in South America.

They selected the cover photograph. The girl’s image expressed emotional honesty with natural innocence.

She was trapped behind a hard steel grate-full educational reality in Maija, a poor village in Fujian, China.

Her eyes held world secrets and unlimited potential. She’d stared at Lucky, a professional stranger and an aberration in her universe. Her sisters and schoolmates pushed against her. She was trapped against a locked gate. He was on the other side.

He raised a small black machine to his eye. She heard a subtle click. A shutter opened and closed freezing time, capturing her soul on a memory-fiction card. He smiled, thanked her and disappeared. She didn’t know her child eyes would grace a book cover for everyone to see, breathing her immortality in alchemical manifestations.

He’d visited her primary school speaking strange unintelligible words, singing and dancing. His laughter and smiles were a relief from the autocratic, punishing manner of bored illiterate women teachers. They didn’t want to be prisoners any more than the kids.

No one had a choice here. You did what you were told to do in a harmonious society filled with social stability, fear, paranoia and shame ordered from Beijing well removed from a world where farmers struggled behind oxen in rice paddies. Green rice stalks revealed their essence below a blue sky in mud and meadows of reality.

Leo said, “Censorship not only chokes artistic talent but also weakens the Chinese populace who are forced to be less imaginative and less inventive. The crisis in education has been a hot topic for years. Why are so many students good at taking tests but poor at analytical thinking? Besides the commercialization of education, the absence of a free, tolerant environment has stunted the growth of students and teachers.”

Self-censorship, shame, insecurity and humiliation devoured steaming white rice and subversive dreams.

In Ankara with Omar’s blessing Lucky signed copies. It was a strange sensation spilling green racing ink from a Mont Blanc 149 piston driven fountain pen on parchment fibers.

The first copy was for Attila the Hungry, a large bald man with a spectacle business. He sold Omar BanSunRa-Ray glasses on spec-u-lay-shun.

“The future looks brighter than a total eclipse,” said Omar.

In 2012 while living in Cambodia, Lucky and Omar cut the original to shreds, polished it and published the 2nd edition with Create Space on Amazon. Omar selected a new cover image of a serene Nepalese grandmother and granddaughter.

The Language Company 

Weaving A Life (Volume 4)