Patience

History, war, and violence screwed us, said Rita. Let’s Make A Deal. Human genocide animals massacred 1.7 million out of 11 million between 1975-1979. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce what they need. They eat, sleep, plant, harvest and meditate.

They are soft and kind. They have a good heart.

As Buddhists they visualize a positive future with good education, health care, quality medicine, job opportunities and community strength.

They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The lesson is to tolerate with kindness and Patience, your great teacher, the empty-eyed star gazing staring humans. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you be. Zap, like a zigzag lightning bolt. Gone. Zap said Rita.

Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. Let’s pretend to be someone else in life’s play.

Stay in character.

Whew what a mouthful, said Tran, an amputee from Vietnam. Yeah spilling sounds and metaphors, the human condition reads history and weeps, time history is a play, create memory history and re-write it.

Your memory is the world, said Omar. The world is a village.

Everything I need is here.

Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it. Question?

What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands? Her hands were all. Her hands were water air soft gentle sensations. Learning sensing and feeling is her physical way. She engaged all her senses. Touch is her essence.

She knew your pressure points. Soft, medium or hard, she said. During her meditation we considered this fragment. We discovered immediate direct experience with structure form and literary vulgarity.

We slow down inside a labyrinth contemplating a lotus growing from mud.

A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive. They write naked, in blood, and in exile.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Focus

Flower whispered, I don’t like sleeping alone.

Easy to remember Flower’s soft deep tactile sensations. Practice the Middle Way  ... The Middle Way is deep breathing and mindfulness  ... The Middle Way is loving kindness. Metta. It is wisdom, patience and gratitude.

Discover harmony between detachment and sentimentality. Eat the world with your blind eyes. Yes, my Flower, yes. Dead or blind, there’s no difference. People who cause you difficulties are valuable teachers. They give you the opportunity to develop patience, said Omar a blind mystic amanuensis.

Q. What else did you experience during the massage?

A. All explanations have to end somewhere. An explanation is a well-dressed mistake.

What is a spotlight focus? A spotlight is on a specific. A breath. A flame. A sound. Pure sensation. Give me an example. Spotlight: the universe reflected and refracted in a single drop of water on a pink lotus flower.

Floodlight is the big general picture: sunlight reflects off a single drop of water on a pink lotus flower petal membrane veined with green umbrella fan leaves caressing cool fresh air growing from a pink lotus in mud below gray clouds near mottled moldy white streaked paint on yellow Khmer walls wearing brown, green, white shards of glittering glass to keep out cunning thieves and devious land pirates as tall singing palm trees dance below white cumulus clouds flying across blue skies above green forested mountains and jungles teeming with beauty, leopards, wolves and 232 species of butterflies.

Question? How much does silence cost? Depends.

Deep silence = deep bliss.

In my silence only my voice is missing, said Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet.

Money buys silent bribes.

Bamboo Nomad said, Open your head, heart and mouth if you want to practice speaking tongues with me, I am a facilitator.

I am a storyteller, said Zeynep from Bursa, Turkey. We communicate telepathically. A-dolts don’t get it.

Q: How many types of people are there in the world? Three: people who make things happen, people who watch people make things happen and people who don’t know what the fuck is going on.

Funny sad true unpleasant facts. Like exploding galaxies, a meaningless universe and orgasms. Reality is the funniest thing happening. It’s difficult to take any of this seriously. People should play more.

How did I grow?

The bigger the fear the bigger the defense. Can you hear yourself think? Yes, it’s important to keep a running monkey mind dialogue going to express emotions, ideas and awareness of illusionary sense details, distractions and existence.

You are critical mass expressing art.

Socrates asked the big question: HOW TO LIVE?

Establish character nuance with emotional honesty and a sense of the fantastic. It’s essential to establish a conte\x/t. Give me an example of compression.

They came, burned, raped, pillaged, trussed up their loot and gone. Excellent.

I know everything and can say nothing.

I know nothing and can say everything.

Tell me about hanging out. Travel writing uses novel techniques. It explores a place, discovers and/or invents characters, selects and tailors experiences and arranges the action to give the narrative shape and motivation.

Time is history.

Space is geography.

Book of Amnesia V1

Laugh

Wolf meets dog. Freedom vs slavery.

Laugh and keep moving.

Passion & peristence.

Writing like music - rhythm, harmony, improvisation.

Time, effort, patience, cooperation.

Living safely is dangerous.

Dialect of the hands.

Thread music / dancing needle / flying leaves / zone of color art magic / sewing, tea, eggs, chillis, juice /

Writing Book of Amnesia / polish monster / just sitting / rain

Northern Laos

Hope Marries Exile

Hope had free choice. She married Exile at the Cathedral of Dreams. They ran through meadows, olive orchards and summited Spanish mountains above the Mediterranean.

“There’s a big world out there,” she said to Exile.

“Yes and that’s only the top of it,” he said. “Shall we share an orange?”

“Yes,” said Hope smiling at real and imaginary worlds past the event horizon, “we will sacrifice the peel to enjoy the fruit. Delicious.”

Hope birthed a girl named Patience. Raising Patience was life’s little test for Hope and Exile. Patience gave them the test first and lessons later.

Exile was a lone wolf and Patience tested his love. She tested his stability, honesty, trust and way of creating worlds inside worlds melding swirling atoms of experience. He was a risk taker not a ticket taker. Patience admired this.

Personality tests revealed their character traits and imperfections. With empathy and gratitude Patience tested Exile’s ability to act and let go. She gave him desire, anger, and ignorance and he created a diamond reflecting 10,000 things. Patience cherished this jewel in the lotus.

Hope was relieved seeing Exile content in this context.

“No one dies. Their spirit evolves,“ said Exile as they chopped and carried wood.

“True,” said Hope. “Patience lives forever. Magic protects her. I felt it before she was born. She was a stream of light floating inside me.”

“She is radiant,” said Exile. “She is beauty, truth and wisdom incarnate. She will master her Jinn spirit energies becoming a fine healer.”

Exile raised Labrys, his double bladed laughing axe. Stream splinters sang twilight. Exile chopped. Hope carried. A yellow moon rose through orange-blue streaks above the Sierras.

“He went to the cemetario today,” said Hope.

“Who?”

“The forcestero, the outsider. Visiting spirit sources.”

“Indeed,” said Exile, “they fly with the full moon.”

Hope and Exile danced in their nets of light. Their floating spirits were free of substance. Free spirits in a free world left temporal bodies floating down to the Rio Guadalete River.

River said, “I wake you up. You follow me and reach pools. Pools are your quiet mind in deep meditation. Deep pools reflect absolute emptiness. No people. Nada. Zip. Zero. You: nature, water, stones, vegetation, trees, animal skulls, blue sky, and sound ...

My music is water. It is soft. It is all you know. You are centered pure and simple. It is all you need. Water is the first thing an infant needs and the last thing an adult requests. To satisfy thirst for your dying father you will smash ice. He was appointed to have you. You selected him to accept responsibility for his life and death ...

You memorize my silent sound and carry it in you. It is light and portable. It multiplies its flowing vibration by streaming. Stones sing with water. They sing their softness, wildness, purity unimpeded. Amplification of clear water is short immediate direct and with you forever. It is heavy deep and real. HDR baby ...

I wake you up. You pay attention. Your spirit flies away and I know you are safe, blessed by my pulse and flow becoming river. Feel the energies. My magic spirit is strong. It flows through your life adventure. I sustain you. My stream is never ending, never beginning. It is the stream of life. Absorbed into the flow you are still. As above, so below.”

Exile and Hope combined their blood with water. The water rushing from dark gray Sierra Mountains through dolomite paths was clear, cold and delicious.

Gathering flowers they savored fresh turned soil, olive and cork trees, pine, evergreen, Pinsapar Fir and trees without a name.

Trees pointed at stars. “Look there,” they said, gesturing thin branches toward sky diamonds, “there, there we are.” Trees identified pulsating white stars.

“Yes,” they sang, “there we are.”

“Look,” sang another, “there we are.”

“And there, and there, everywhere.”

Moonbeam winds heard stars whisper magic star tale secrets of star trails dancing in a vast silent vacuum. Hope and Exile manifested light.

ART - A Memoir

Author Page

Lao kids carry worlds on their back.

Not True

interrupted Omar’s suicidal literary agent speaking through voice snail. It’s impossibly probable.

You make your own truth from embroidered lies.

I know everything and can say nothing about beginnings, arc, tension or sustaining a plot. Something has to happen to move it along with narrative flow, character development and action. Make me cry. Give me emotional honesty so I feel for the protagonist.

Grab me by the throat in the first clear short sentence. Make me pay attention. Give me a sharp emotional marketing hook hanging above a mainstream marketing platform in cheap plywood Asian brothels where evil greedy men with POWER threaten and violently abuse orphaned sex slave girls. Where they buy them or steal them from poor families in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, season them for five years in rooms, use them, abuse them and discard them on the mean old street.

They are commodities like rice. Rich men buy virgins for $5,000 a pop. Open my legs. Plow the fertile soil between my legs. Open my feeble, nonchalant and passive innocent broken heart-mind. Throw in some Asian culture like Chinese opera, gamelan music, 3-act dramas, ballet, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and dancing Apsara dancers on 8th century laterite Angkor Wat ruins being strangled by cotton wood roots.

Show me how superstitious evil men believe fucking a virgin gives them super strength enabling them to leap over tall virgins with a single organismic shudder. Give me a small organic boom-boom death in eight seconds. Just get to the verb.

“Ok, said Rita, an orphan in Cambodia and independent writer/publisher of Ice Girl in Banlung. “Unpleasant facts are littered through this work like lovers, countries, butterflies, natural phenomena, rice and hot sex.

“Cambodians have been screwed by history, war, violence and predatory politicians. Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and rising) of Cambodia has been sold to China. They’ve invested $16.9 billion. They bought the government.

“1,7,000,000 million out of 11m were massacred by human genocide animals. 40% of our land is filled with unexploded ordinance. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce only what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around. Milling around is an art form. Khmer are soft and kind. They have a good heart. They are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The trick is to tolerate bland empty eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers with Patience, your great teacher.

“Bored after five minutes they lose interest. Bye-bye butterfly. Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. The Great Pretenders. Be careful who you pretend to be.”

“Thank you Rita. Whew, what a mouthful,” said the blind literary agent.

“Yeah,” said Rita. I spill sounds and smell metaphors. The human condition reads history and weeps. Create memory, a form of history, re-write history.          

“Your memory is the world, and the world is a village,” said the nerve agent. “Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.”

“I will, will you?” said Rita.

“I have a question for Lucky.”

“He’s here.”

“What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands?”

”Her hands were all,” I said. “Her hands were water, air, earth and fire. Soft gentle sensations. Sensing, feeling her physical sense. Engaging all her senses. Touch is her essence. She knew my body, all the pressure points.”

“Soft, medium or hard?” Flower asked.

“During her therapeutic touch and go I considered this vignette. How I was looking for ideas and structure and formless form and literary vulgarity. I slowed down inside the labyrinth. A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive.”

Flower whispered, “I don’t like sleeping alone. It’s fucking boring.”

It’s easy to remember loving Flower’s soft, deep real tactile sensations. She knew how to please a stranger’s skin. She lived in the middle way. Her middle way is breathing, and awareness. Her middle way is acceptance and loving kindness. It is wisdom, patience and gratitude. Non-attachment. Flower is the essence between detachment and sentimentality.

“Eat the world with your blind eyes,” she whispered.         

“Yes my Flower, yes.”

“Dead or blind, there’s no difference,” Flower said.

“People who cause you difficulties, you should think of them as very valuable teachers because they provide you with the opportunity to develop patience.”