4 dec 08
Thanks for gratitude and embracing your unlimited potential. Joyful existence.
The only rule here is to practice compassion.
You have now entered The Center of the Universe. Please set your watches back five minutes.
Jump!
Feel free to dance around at your leisure. You will discover collections of writing, images and podcasts.
"Journeys," celebrates travel, stories, cultures, beauty, diversity, love, passion, art, romance and truth. Why people stay alive.
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Once upon a time there was a traveling teacher and he left Asia Minor after a year of exploring and returned to Southeast Asia.
He began helping 4th graders. As a student he was making new friends and sharing on another very small part of the spinning planet filled with orchids and astonishing butterflies. Ah, the joys of travel, teaching and taking risks!
Meanwhile, back in Bursa, Turnkey, a magical place on a border between Asia and Europe, at the Western end of the Silk Road, Zeynep is a precocious 5-year old.
The front of her t-shirt reads, "Nobody's perfect."
The back reads, "I am Nobody."
She pointed around her restaurant and whispered across the table.
"See these adults? Why do they look so sad and/or angry? Because, when they were young, they were punished for dreaming."
"Yes, fear is a real imaginary way with them, this perpetual adolescence."
"And I'll tell you another thing," said Zeynep. "I experience joy through writing, painting, drawing, singing and dancing."
"Yes," I whispered, "I am happy we met here. You are my best friend in the world. I trust you and love you." We shared a hug and dissolved into tear reflected light.
You can read her story on Blog Slog 8/14 and see her smiling face in the image gallery, July's Memories, #4.
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“Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point."
- Robert Rauschenberg
Theoretical prognostications: The heart is directly connected to the hand.
"You write to explore your sense of self and find out who you feel you are, rather than who you think you should or ought to be." - Sophie Nicholls
...the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing ... but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.” - Jack Kerouac
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My experimental novelistic memoir, A Century Is Nothing is available through Amazon.com and D&R Books in Bursa, Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey.
It's a formula at one with Flaubert's notion of the ideal book - that would be about nothing, one that would rely on its style alone and whose subject would be invisible.
Word of mouth is the best advertising. Speak memory.
I was assisted by a Ghostwriter and they deserve full credit. When you work in the Department of Wandering Ghosts it's another story inside the story.
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Now I am free to drift, float, process new sensations. This transition feels calm and centered. It dances free with the kindness, respect, dignity, gratitude and the mind-fullness it deserves. Out into the stillness, from the center.
There's nothing like holding the weight and smelling the pages.
"...Flowing through the six empty places;
Rising and sinking without fixed law,
Firm and yielding transform each other."
Live broadly, write boldly. Life is short, art is long. Art, like life, follows the creative path of nature, not the values of human society. True education flowers at the point where delight falls in love with responsibility.
He's a peripatetic linguistic ESL gardener in Indonesia. The University of the Street provides evolutionary educational evidence as humans experiment with symbolic English landscapes. He's a Vietnam Veteran, writer and photographer exploring geography, languages and cultural storytelling.
