05.31.2011 Namaste,
Fishtail swims in blue
Alone
Cold steep snow regions
Dances along Annapurna spine
Laughing at human's meager
Attempts to summit
Metta.
nepal, photography, travel tales, writing 05.18.2011 Namaste,
As Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, the hero's journey is the space within the heart.
AUM. A - a waking consciousness. U - dream consciousness. M - deep sleep.
The manpower investment training wheels in Nepal is slight to non-existant. Young future immigrants move to rich countries. No manufacturing. Woman manufacture babies for export. Import everything from outside.
A Nepalese man named Thor below a hill station sits in the hot sun. He picks up a medium size stone. He places the stone on a larger stone. He raises his hammer. He smashes the medium size stone into fragments.
He pushes the fragments into a pile. When I have a big pile, he said, smiling, someone will collect them. They will put them on a truck and sell them in India. This is my life.
Teams of starlings wing below fast moving clouds above rolling green hills, farms, rice paddies, snow ranges.
An old woman departed a distant valley. She carries a 40-pound bag of sand on her back up steep ragged slippery slate steps. Step by step. The meshed rope blazes into her forehead. This is my life.
A babbling Chinese tourist walks past the man and woman. This is the best day of my life.
Metta.
nepal, photography, travel tales, writing asia, aum, economics, education, future, investment, labor, meditation, nepal 05.13.2011 Namaste,
In another dramatic, exciting, heart stopping, palpitating, effervescent, totally complete silence, the entire country of Nepal, (No Electricity Power And Light) decided to have a general strike. Everything is shut down. Locked steel shuttered businesses decorate main street.
There are 36 castes here. Give or take 100 sub divisions. A caste is a traditional hard core socially cultural belief and practice bestowing style, honor, privilege and status to selected humans born into a specific family. Anthropologist and pathologists consider this invention a specialized branch of the value based Angiosperm.
How do you spell discrimination?
"Muluki Ain (1854) divided Nepalese citizens into two castes "the caste whose water is allowed to remain pure" and "the caste whose water is defiled". Chiefs of the various castes were entrusted with sorting out issues related to their own castes.[1] The heads of Kamis (blacksmiths) and Sarkis (tanners and cobblers) were called Mijhars. Similarly the head ofDamai (tailors and musicians) was called Nagarchi." Read more.
As Shiva, a female ear hearing specialist explained, "People are striking to abolish the caste system. They want equality."
"Yes, said Vishnu her friend, "They want to be a musical blacksmith cobbling a life. They want to walk empty streets selling hot delicious cinnamon flavored pastries. They want to develop and profit from vast mountainous snow capped high altitude regions of pure air in never-never land. They want to tan their hide or hide their tan. They want to impersonate Elvis after dark.
"They want to be a brick boy in the Kathmandu valley. They want to be a free person in a free country."
Three strikes and you're out.
Metta.
asia, nepal, photography, travel tales, writing 05.9.2011 Namaste,
The Electric Fairy waved her magic wand. All the lights in Nepal went out.
Ha, ha laughed the Electric Fairy.
A business man with an Olive food joint in a small tourist town near a lake below Annapurna crammed with:
18,543 restaurants,
69.306 money changers,
456 trek clothing stores,
283 travel agents,
32 adventure companies,
19 boarding schools,
8,032 comatose, dulled out, dumbed down students
dreaming of better Indian educational/employment futures
27 female Tibetan refugees selling their recycled sidewalk dreams,
401 guesthouses,
8 dance halls,
1 jazz club,
3 supermarkets,
numerous mom & pop shoe string ops,
52 barber/massage shops,
9 bookstores,
6 bakeries,
85 wandering oxen,
3 tailors,
2 shoe repair experts,
1,208 anxious lost tourists
and 50,000 bored residents with very short economic attention spans said,
I will buy a $15,000 gas generator to solve this energy conundrum.
When it ran out of gas the Electric Fairy laughed ha, ha, ha. Now you see it, now you don't.
Metta.
asia, nepal, travel, travel tales, writing 05.6.2011 Namaste,
The unemployed Nepalese teacher, hustling 10 million visitors asked, "Do you know what NEPAL means?"
Big business? Economic survival? Mountains? High altitude sickness? Adventure travel? Peak experiences?
Whining, demanding Chinese?
Sitars and raga symphonic structures?
Extensive deep raging rivers?
Riding an elephant looking for extinct tigers?
An old woman collecting and loading cow shit patties into a wicker basket for home fire fuel?
Chakra, crystal healing?
A Chinese woman walking with her Nepalese lover, both measuring the ground with eyes feeling the inevitable end of a quick painless short term physically satisfying fix?
Stoned out ragged travel casualties?
Big fat culturally insensitive white Europeans wearing fancy expensive climbing gear as their Sherpa guide in flip flop sandals carrying the world on his back runs up the mountain, leaving them in the dust?
Young Israeli cowboys fresh from mandatory military service staring at a sacred cow shitting in the street? 15 million Nepalese women on their hands and knees mopping floors with a dirty rag because mops are too expensive?
Rolling fuel shortages because a) the government wants to increase demand b) India reduces supply?
Limited daily electricity? Nepalese must pay for electricity they do not receive.
"Not exactly," said the teacher refreshing his lost hunger for money.
"NEPAL means Never Ending Peace And Love."
"Watch out for the land mine!" yelled a Cambodian orphan in exile.
Metta.
asia, nepal, photography, travel, travel tales, writing 
