China blue

Greetings,

Ah, what a beautful winter in China! I don't make much money as a university teacher you understand, so I use it carefully and wisely. Family is big deal here and to avoid relationship clashes of dynastic proportions, I shelled out roughly $200, or a third of my salary, for a round trip train ticket home.

After paying my totalitarian university an exorbitant rental fee for my drab, empty apartment plus electricity and water, I barely had enough left over for soggy onions, fresh spinach, tofu, rice and fruit.

Home is where, they say, the heart is. Well let me give you a little advice about that. I left my heart in San Francisco, ha. Singing, living and playing the blues, which is life's way of talking, I dutifully lugged my broken suitcase home to hearth and kin.

So much guilt, inherent DNA shame and Duty. I am overwhelmed by the heavy burden of my family's expectations.

After fulfilling all my academic responsibilities meaning pass all the students or face the dire consequences given to me by the University Authorities who, will for the sake of Social Stability and Harmonious Educational Reform Committees, remain faceless, nameless and totally obscure, I escaped from my prison.

It took twenty-two long, boring, tedious endless hours sitting in hard seat with three transfers before I reached my province near North Korea. Coltrane train stations were packed out with millions of homeless migrants, laborers and naked freezing prostitutes looking for a John and some of my favorite things like humans without a wing, hope, prayer or a lay text raincoat. The ancient Oracle predicted this reality.

Mothers and fathers formed concentric protective circles around their children to prevent thieves from stealing them. Stolen kids are a HUGE underground economy here as you may or may know. People will gladly pay large sums for a boy because they have a higher value in our free vibrant economy.

Human life is cheap here. Stealing, Selling, Trading and Buying children is how things work.

Speaking of work, I've gotta run because I must help mother with the cleaning, shopping and endless chores. If I don't perform my filial duties she may threaten to sell me. I'll be returning to my other life as a teacher after I report back for Duty and will file another report using a proxy to evade the Great Wall firewall gremlins and spies.

Metta.

 

Chalk it up to experience in a Chinese classtomb.

2% curiosity

greetings,

2% are awake.
98% are asleep.
this is an unpleasant fact.

today is a happy day in paradise. paradise is a country where genocide survivors are happy. they are ecstatic. they are laughing and running and playing and planting and harvesting and breeding and working and dying.

they blast red, green, gold, yellow and white fireworks into a black sky celebrating the end of the genocide regime. someone sings, the wicked witch is dead!

it's a brave new world. except for four old dying relics on a very expensive show trial for genocide between 1975-1979 when 1.7 million people died. they deny their role. not me! i was only following orders. like the chinese gang of four. how quickly people forget. the media likes this distracting fact.

numbed silence. traumatized and anesthetized.
send in the clowns. send in the politicians and bankers. same-same but different.

paradise survivors are happy because they are alive. they started over after Year Zero. everyone now has food, clean water, medicine and socratic educational opportunities in an NGO world to rebuild their culture. it will take another generation, or 60 years given the average life expectancy to recover, revive and renew life. 

today alice in slumberland, a human pretending to be an (economically) depressed teacher said, you should just blend in. during a genocide people who asked questions disappeared. they vanished. they became extinct. asking questions was not allowed. asking questions now is seen as strange and startling and dangerous. dangerous people ask questions. people who ask WHY are a clear and present threat to intention and incentive and robotic daily comatose existence. 

intention and incentive is rebellious and counter-productive to maintaining the status quo ho, ho.

a priori theory without facts or thought or doubt or wonder or curiosity is a male land mine survivor without legs. they live on ground zero. they sit near a pagoda waiting for random charitable kindness from strangers.

where are the female land mine survivors? maybe they are dead and gone. maybe they live somewhere safe with someone taking care of their needs. 

questions are forbidden said asian teachers, officials and social control mechanisms. ask at your peril. anyone in the 2% group raising their hand to ask a question is shamed or silently beaten into silence. fear is a great motivator, forever and a day. conformity breeds conformity. 

curiosity is fatal. curiosity kills more humans than war and disease, lack of medicine and starvation.

metta.

mediocrity and cold hard survival

laughter and joy

A bubble girl story

Greetings,

A wise traveler named Hugo, the Director of a Life Improbability Research Center near Paris dropped me a comment asking for the story about the Laotian bubble girl. 

Here it is. One day I walked through Luang Prabang and reached a dirt path leading down to the river, a bamboo bridge and distant weaving villages. At the top of the path three young girls were selling, or hoping to sell hand made colorful wrist bands, small wooden beads and bamboo dolls. Same as at Angkor temples.

In the afternoon when I returned they were playing with thin plastic air filled balls. Her eyes held all the secrets of the world.

Like many kids they attend school either in the morning or afternoon.

It's the same universal story, "We need money for our families." 

Keep it in the air.

Metta.

A new gallery of Stung Treng town and area is live. It features the Women's Development Center (Mekong Blue), primary school kids, the wat and flags at Thala Bovivat. Enjoy.

http://tmleonard.squarespace.com/stung-treng-cambodia/

Bubble Life

Greetings from a sleepy little town down south along the mighty Mekong,

After finding a pillow and delicious local cold java swimming in a glass you get a hair cut and your ears cleaned.

It's essential, as we've said previously, from China, Vietnam, Cambodia and now Laos to relax.

Sit back close your eyes hearing the whirling overhead fan rotating like helicopter rotor blades over rapid cobalt rivers inside deep forested green jungles, skimming granite mountains, swooping toward rice valleys allowing a thin man with shiny silver tools to clean, vibrate, scrape, identify, probe, assess, magnify, illustrate and remove old historical debris, leaves, brooms, the click-clack of shuttles, blue and yellow butterflies, children's laughter, language acquisition cycles, tonal frequencies, vibrational shifts and so forth.

A new marveLaos gallery is live.

http://tmleonard.squarespace.com/marvelaos/

It contains clouds, art, design, black & white, wats, paper making, rice threshing, weavers, kids and big serious humans.

The Luang Prabang airport has one simple concrete runway. The control tower needs a coat of paint.

There are two gates. A French tourist is worried because their boarding pass has a big number approaching infinity. "We only have two gates," said the serene and helpful girl behind a desk.

"Oh, my goodness," said the tourist holding a can of white paint and a brown sable hair brush. "I was so worried I wouldn't get home for Christmas. I mean I was feeling so anxious and neurotic and lost and dazed and confused and sullen and tired and suddenly I felt comfortable in a calm way knowing I will realize my vacation dream and paint a control tower at a small airport in Asia." 

"Be a work of art or wear a work of art," said the smiling girl, or, as Picasso asked, "what is color?"

Metta.

Paper is an essential part of Lao life. The art of paper is in the making, using, honoring paper in the community and burning paper to honor ancestors. Artists use white fibers from plant stems to make paper. To soften it they mix it with ash and soak it in wood fired 55 gallon drums. They pound it to a pulp. The woman spreads fibers over a screen. It is dried in the sun and used to create tactile textured paper books, umbrellas, bags, cards, lanterns, envelopes and airport control towers.

Northern Laos

Greetings,

Four new image galleries are in Northern Laos. Live, immediate and direct. A visual river. They transmit sand, waves, tides, fresh air, mountains, communities, dancing light and humans.

For example: 

This boy said, Before dawn follow the woman on the one red dust road to the market. It is small, near a school. Women spread their produce all green and fresh on blue tarps, natural fibers weaving their muted voices inside cool mist mountain air and baskets of chillies wearing happy leather faces.

Across the bridge children climb mountains to harvest wood for home fires.

Somewhere in Laos a child is carrying the world on their back.

Metta.