New Garden - TLC 78

Lucky shifted to a serene garden zone after sharing a house for two months with a sad young Filipino math teacher in the gated community of Alam Sutra.

The boy/man fathered a five-year old girl and left her with her mom in Manila Vanilla. His favorite expression was, “Let's Eat.”

Truth is powerful. You don’t have to remember what you said. Lucky mentioned choices and consequences. Math man didn’t hear, listen or care. Being a calculating teacher he figured a job with a decent salary in Amnesia was worth the emotional compromise cost.

A Hanoi survivor yelled, “Any fool can have a kid. It takes courage to raise them as independent free thinking individuals.”

In the new garden Lucky planted thirty flowers, red and pink roses, apple trees, deciduous shrubs, watercress, dill, oregano, parsley and thyme.

He refocused healing energies an hour west of Joke & Choke plus trolls tolls by taxi nightmare traffic due to poor urban highway planning. City pollution was a killer. It blasted throat and eyes. All east-west traffic passed through the city center. No ring roads. Duh.

“The center cannot hold,” said W.B. Yeats.

Air quality was refreshing in walled estates with tropical flora. Butterflies, songbirds, cockroaches, big brown beady-eyed rats and contemplative speckled frogs existed with copious little people.

Some homes were Mac Mansions. Greek and Roman columns with Ironic and Corinthian spiral decorations shouted, Look at my huge monster home. I made it. Empty palatial rooms collected dust as in China where it was all external appearances. Goes to show ya. Most homes in the gated communities were a bland 1-2 story cookie-cutter style. 

Everyone had a maid in Java jive some older than spoiled offspring. They cleaned two cars, swept dust, watered stone passages, cooked, scrubbed clothes and fed kiddies while parents were making money. It’s a job. 

Making money is a job. You need plates, ink, paper, press, a paper cutter, distribution system and government backed IOUs.

Illiterate slaves supported families surviving in a no-name village memory. A never-ending human supply system on an archipelago swarmed with 230 million hungry worker bees.

Food was cheap. Medicine and education were expensive.

Keep them poor barefoot and happy.

Favorite Jakarta sports were: 1) Driving huge 4x4s. Gas was $2.40 a gallon. Sitting in endless long traffic jams. Paying parking fees to paramilitary uniformed men blowing stainless steel whistles.

2) Wandering around enormous prosperous numerous say it fast three times vast shopping centers, huge playgrounds for brats.

Out-of-control kiddies expended spoiled energy. Families enjoyed A/C climate controlled conditions admiring Ankara-like dummies behind glass in a museum quality of artificial life filled with diversionary stimuli and unsatisfied desire.

The private Alam Sutra School named for a fictitious beatific saint had 1,800 students from kindergarten through high school. It began in 1993 when a Catholic priest from Yoga Posture escaping Interpol child molestation charges joined community leaders using a fake I.D. to promote formal educational tyranny and religious intolerance.

Five barbarian elementary English teachers complemented friendly local teachers. Oh, I just love your hairstyle. Your diamond-soled shoes are divine. Your handbag woven from creeper vines is elegant and eco-friendly.

Native teachers had seen colonial invaders come and go for centuries. Lip service.

The English supervisor was an anthropologist from New Hamster, Nova Scotia. Formerly a tenured professor in Malta, she left the job, house, marriage, mortgage, cars, airplanes and yachts for a meditative life. Her resume extolled extensive international educational administrative experience with time and space.

 

Storyteller - Laos

I am big seven said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator in Vientiane.

Your life is a test. Test first lessons later. It isn’t a dress rehearsal. If it’s an actual life your invisible friend will protect you from ignorance and fear. Get to the verb.

My dad’s not very smart. It’s his DNA, a string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It's the rainy season. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

Rain pours like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress dry watchers with his intelligent hose running wealthy water over poor rain. Cleaning. He ignores me mostly.

It’s amazing what people do when they don’t have anything to do. Maybe it’s an innate creative instinct. Like milling around. I’ve learned there are three kinds of people in the world.

people who make things happen

people who watch people make things happen

people who don’t know what’s going on

My grandmother sits on our 1924 austere colonial dark brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony.

Every day is a ceremony.

At dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong and offers wandering Buddhist monks a handful of rice. She earns merit in this life. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

Grandfather sits staring at rain collecting in pools.

Father’s very busy. He disappears for hours. Drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for affection and cash. A poor girl from a poor family needs to make a living, poor thing.

My mom’s also smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever?

After the rain, when it’s dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and yellow flaming candles she burns all the plastic garbage. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

It’s a sweet smell let me tell you. Like that Duvall character said in Apocalypse Now, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Kind of like that smell. What’s the word? Acrid. 

When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby delivery machine. What’s another mouth? In China I’m worth $3-5K on the stolen kid market. My sister would have been aborted.

Mom ignores me mostly. She’s busy doing her humble mother routine. Later, she squawks. She’s a soft kindlater.

People like parents and teachers and lazy humans love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life meaning.

Milling around is an art form with style. Hemingway had style. Fitzgerald had style and class.

Lao people are soft and gentle. We have good hearts. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera.

The trick is to tolerate with kindness and patience, your great teacher, the bland empty-eyed star gazing hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be, zap, like a white zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

The kid continued, for cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity.

This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg.

I used to complain I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.

This fact needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate danger and way of life.

Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, no medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance milling around.

But what do I know? Milling kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease. Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get educated. Cambodia and Lao and Vietnam are alive with ghosts.

A human’s existence is one long perpetual distraction.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to go and finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, grit, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

How do you build self-control and grit, asked a visitor to Earth.

Through failure and hardship, said the boy. There are two kinds of character.

What are they?

Moral character is fairness, generosity, and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence, and perseverance. Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Yeah, it’s trial and error and taking risks.

Thanks for the life lesson, said traveler. You are the future of Laos.

I have my junior philosopher’s badge, said the kid.

cheap food

Food is cheap here in Asia.

Medicine and education are expensive. Favorite sports are: 

1) driving huge 4x4s. gas costs $2.40 a gallon. sitting in endless long traffic jams. paying parking fees to para-military type uniformed men blowing stainless steel whistles.

2) wandering around enormous prosperous numerous say it fast three times shopping centers. a huge playground for brats. where out-of-control rascals expend spoiled energy. where families enjoy A/C and stuff behind glass. museum quality of life. diversionary influences.

3) whining. students know and understand this behavior is boring and useless. some know without understanding.

4) producing more babies.

Bye-bye said the orphan.

Metro Woman

Namaste,

He saw her through a window when the metro pulled in.

Alone and cold, she waited for the green metro door to open.

It was late. She wore a thin black sweater and long gray skirt.

She was slight...olive pale skin, black hair pulled back, around 45. 

She limped into the car dragging her right foot. Her left foot was normal. Her right foot looked like a case of elephantiasis. She sat twenty feet away. 

She bent over and slowly raised her skirt from around her ankles. The burned and bloody skin damage ran three inches across and ten inches high. Either first or second degree burns. A layer of skin was exposed, red, lined with white. Bare and exposed. She needed medical attention.

Two men across from her stared and diverted their eyes.

She sat, fingered a phone and grimaced. No tears, just a stoic face. 

The metro rolled through night. It passed a river, a neon bright Everest furniture store, fast food emptiness and an expensive private hospital filled with antiseptics, bandages, lotions and potions and patients with money.

She inspected her ankle, touching an edge of fried skin with a white tissue. Clear cold air sent shivers through her central nervous system shutting down pain receptors. 

Metta.

SPIRAL

Greetings,

In Hue, Vietnam the Healing The Wounded Heart Shop has colorful woven baskets. Baskets from Nepal are made of recycled plastic food snack wrappers. Brilliant reds, greens, blues, all the hues.

Shop with your heart. Shop to give back.

The Spiral Foundation is a non-profit humanitarian organization working in Nepal and Vietnam.

Spiral. Spinning Potential Into Resources And Love. At the SPIRAL workshop in Hue they make bowls using discarded telephone wires. They work with the Office of Genetics and Disabled Children at Hue Medical College. 

All net proceeds from the handicraft sales are returned to Vietnam and Nepal to fund primary health care, medical and educational projects. Projects employ 1,000 participants with fair hourly salaries not based on piece work. Projects have provided for more than 250 heart surgeries and treatments for children with life threatening diseases.

SPIRAL raised $82,000 in 2010. 

Metta.