vision

Greetings,

This is my image on SpaceBook, a legendary sight. I live in Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia. 

My brother and I dream of freedom. Are you the hunter or are you the prey?

 

My brother experimented with a filter to perceive the world with new visionary acuity.  

I need my cage cried Finch

Greetings,

I met with Tao at the Chocolate & Baguette early in the morning to discuss the possibility of my doing some volunteer English teaching and hospitality training. She sent my contact information to the director in Ha Noi.

Here’s an example of a story inside a story. Or it could stand alone. 

“Finch's Cage.”

After seeing Tao I wandered downhill and found a “new” side street. I needed some thick cold java and wanted to scribble notes about our conversation. I found a run-down internet cafe and sat outside. Here’s the true story.  It’s about a human-bird.

Finch had a yellow chest, red beak and brown feathers. It was outside the plate glass door. It had escaped from its small yet safe bamboo cage in the main room. Someone; perhaps the young mother worried about her wailing infant or her old mother worried about dying alone or her brother worried about dying of boredom had left the cage open.

Finch was outside. It sang, “Where’s my home? What is this beautiful world?”

I sat fifteen feet away watching it. Finch hugged the ground. It looked at green trees waving across the street. It saw the deep blue sky inhaling clear, clean mountain air. It heard birds singing in the trees but it didn’t understand them. Their songs were about nesting, exploring, flying, clouds, trees, sky, rain, warm sun, rivers, bark, worms, snails, and melodies of freedom.

I wondered if Finch would fly away. I hoped so, then again, I knew it was afraid to go. Perhaps it lacked real flying experience, the kind where you lift off quickly beating your wings furiously to get up and get going to escape the weight of gravity pulling you down and then you can turn and glide and relax and soar. However, Finch being conditioned to the caged world of bamboo with a perch, food and water merely looked and listened to the world.

Finch retreated from the possibility of free flight and pecked at loose seeds in a narrow crevice below the plate glass door. It smelled the dark stale room where the cage hung on a wire. It pecked under the frame. It wanted someone to rescue it.

It sang. “Help! Let me in. I want to come home. I’ve been outside and I’ve seen enough. It’s a big scary place. I promise I’ll never try to escape again. I was curious, that’s all. I’ve seen enough. Let me in!”” 

Finch was amazing in it’s beauty. Yellow, red, brown - bright eyed in it’s aloneness. 

Finally an old woman came out and opened the door allowing Finch back inside the room, trapped Finch in a purple cloth and returned Finch to it’s cage. She closed the bamboo door and snapped the latch shut.

“Did you learn your lesson little bird?” she whispered.

Finch sat on it’s perch, enjoyed a long cool drink of water and sang. “Thank you. Now I am truly happy.” 

The old woman didn’t understand this language, muttered under her breath about inconvenience and shuffled down a long dark hallway to a kitchen where she killed a chicken for lunch.

Metta.

A Chiroptera

I am an Old World bat. The family name is chiroptera. The sub-orders are megachiroptera and microchiroptera.

I am the only, yes! the only mammal in the entire known ecologically diverse animal kingdom that can really fly, sustaining myself on wind currents, up/down drafts and rough drafts of manuscripts and blog entries before they get cut down to size. I am too agile to get cut down. My size is perfect. I am a very valuable, important and productive member of the eco-system. I will explain.

It happened like this.

After a night of flying through amazing black skies illuminated by a faint moon and eating insects with delicious fruit for desert I was resting in a fifty-foot tall coconut palm tree between two squashed together homes in a Ha Noi suburb.

I've been roosting under the long thick leafy branch for awhile now. It's a temporary home until my younger brother gets his wings. Soon I hope because we need to expand our territory. It's a comfortable habitat high away from predators like snakes, cats, and creatures who enjoy tasty bat meat.

Anyway, like I said, I was roosting upside down which is the normal position for bats using my claws to grasp green fibers and I had an itch. I needed to stretch out my voluminous wingspan, my membranes. Natural enough. I rustled around and then, due my superior enhanced audio and visual systems which allow me to navigate, find food and survive, I detected a pair of eyes on me.

Yes me! I'd been seen. Discovered. I shriveled into myself. I pondered this dilemma.

After remaining as quiet as a mouse (easy to catch at night by the way if I'm feeling hyper aggressive) I peeked out from under my wings, through the leaves. Much to my surprise, sitting in his third floor room looking at me was some strange creature.

I hung on for dear life. He seemed harmless enough.

Actually, to tell the truth I am a hybrid bat, or to be really scientific about it, a CHIROPTERA. Write that down. Try and say it fast three times and you can impress your friends at parties.

I am the MEGA and the MICRO in the Bat Kingdom. Kind of like the Alpha and the Omega.

I have the most highly developed combination of DNA characteristics found in bats. The Mega has large eyes, excellent vision and claws on their second digit. The Micro has small eyes and uses echolocation to find nourishing insects. I have amazing visual and hearing genetic traits. 

Twilight's calling.

Metta.