Journeys
Words
Images
Cloud
Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

Amazon Associate
Contact
Tuesday
Apr202010

Ash fallout

Greetings,

As hostage travelers get a grip and get a life discovering the diverse thrills of living in airports, bus and train stations along life's tortuous path Ash flies merrily along, singing a song, Blow Wind Blow.

Humans are learning how to mill around. They are learning how to adapt, adjust and evolve in situations and consequences outside their control. Many practice meditation. They know that suffering is an illusion. They make new international friends in transportation hubs. They learn how to share. Some are grateful. They get married, have kids, get divorced and attend correspondence schools in transit lounges. Some mature. A few are beginning to understand that air travel is not so exciting. After all.

The soul travels at the speed of a camel. Walking is the way.

Such a terrible hard unpleasant fact. Life goes on. Nature loves the drama. Especially at the expense of humans. 

Comments from the ground echo through thin atmosphere. Ash is all ears. 

It's a crying shame how Nature does this to us. 
It's all about money and greed, citing airline, hotel and food suppliers. It's about supply and demand. It's about taking advantage of the situation. It's about PROFIT.
People scream, "I hate the government." People cry, "I want my government to save me, to get me home, to get me out of this horrible mess."

Artists slow down and create masterpieces.
Sue Iceland.
Throw all the bankers into the volcano.

Sam, an African farmer from Kenya believe it, drinks a Bloody Merry in Asia and yaks on his cell phone to friends about his boat and how difficult it is here to live and get decent food and how he's not REALLY interested in the 19-year old bar girls.

He is surrounded by smelly containers filled with rotting fruit and wilting flowers destined for white rich folks in Europa, a brand of Confusion. He leaves messages on answering machines. He orders another bloody drink.

Old frail Sam wobbles away on thin legs thinking, "I don't get home until the 3rd. I'm going to die before I see my boat."

He's one of those terribly sad rich men reading the fine print, NO EXIT. Lost and alone he strums his sad guitar. "I look at the world and see it is sleeping while my guitar gently weeps." Ash understands with empathy. Empathy is a circle. 

The reality on the ground is that international travelers are not starving. They are not homeless. They are not begging in the streets. They are not whining, sniveling idiots. No. They are learning a hard fast lesson about the vagaries of travel. They are learning why it is important to always have a supply of energy bars and a towel.

Lost and alone in a vast empty Departure area is a little girl in a white dress. She wears bright red shoes. She clicks her heels together three times and says, "I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home."

Fly the friendly skies. They call it ADVENTURE TRAVEL. 

Metta.

 

Sunday
Apr182010

Ash China

Greetings,

Ash heard two jokes in Iceland.

After Iceland caused a financial meltdown in 2008 Europeans wanted cash not ash.
Icelandic people don't want their ashes spread all over Europe.

Europeans, rather than accept accountability, escape the responsibility by blaming someone, somewhere, somehow for this beautiful majestic natural mess.

According to Mr. Bisignani of the International Air Transport Association, "This is a European embarrassment and it's a European mess.

"The decision that Europe has made is with no risk assessment, no consultation, no co-ordination, no leadership," he said.

"Europeans are still using a system based on a theoretical model which does not work... instead of using a system and taking decisions on facts and on risk assessment."

Ash currently holds 6.8 million travelers hostage around the world. It is the largest hostage situation in the history of mankind since Red China held 1.6 billion citizens hostage in the spring of 2010. 

Ash flew to China to verify this unpleasant fact. Ash rested inside 1.6 billion pairs of ears.

Easy to say and hard to do, they say in China.
Speaking of China in Mandarin, you can get your ears cleaned there.
What! Really?

Yes. Now it happened at the empty Chinese opera one afternoon in Chengdu, you sit down in a wicker chair and give the girl in a blue uniform 10Y or slightly more than a buck. A group of Chinese men in wicker chairs drinking tea stare and laugh at you. Everyone stares at you in China because it is a zoo and you are an exotic humanoid species of endless speculation.

Look at the funny foreigner! He’s going to get his ears cleaned. Boy is he in for a surprise!

You sit back and close your eyes. She has all the tools; long steel wires, cotton swabs, some ointment, a microscopic spoon on a post and a pair of stainless steel tongs.

She probes into your right ear with the spoon and digs out hard brown wax. She flicks it on the ground where it becomes part of Ear Wax Mountain, a new wonder of the World. She swabs and cleans out your ear with a small cotton ball on a thin wire.

While this is buried in your ear she taps the tongs creating a vibrating frequency. She touches the steel rod in your ear and you hear the WHIRLING BUZZ BUZZ as 1,000 bees and cicadas invade your consciousness with a deafening crescendo.

She has opened your aural chambers big time taps the tongs again, and you receive the echo chamber canyon of sound, the WHIRLING BUZZ like sandpaper being rasped against old fibers of skin or yes, the fast centrifugal centrifuge of heartbeat reactors, roaring rivers inside a galaxy of weightless streams. BUZZ!

So she eases it out, massages your temples and your eyes are closed and you are dreaming you are in a Chinese opera playing the role of an old dramatic hero dying at his post after proclaiming his undying love for family and harmonious social order and stability in the country.

Then she attacks and cleans the other ear and the vibrations take you away.

BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ! Far away. She caresses your ears with something soft, massages your temples, and scalp and when she finishes you no longer have a hearing problem. It’s all in the listening. You’ve been buzzed back to clarity.

Everything that goes in the ear comes out as language. It becomes a tool for emotion and expression.

Metta.

  

 

Sunday
Apr182010

Gypsy Ash

Greetings,

Welcome to Earth.

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It is a spinning rock with a core, mantle and crust. It is cold in the winter and hot in the summer. It's round, wet and crowded. Fortunate humans maybe live 100 years. A blink of the eye. 

The core is 1,800 miles below the surface. It is a dense ball of iron and nickel. The inner core temperature is 6700F. The inner core is 750 miles thick.

The outer core is 1,370 miles thick.

The mantle is above the core. The mantle is 1,800 miles thick.
The crust is 3.14 or apple Pi. Or as a statistical genius said, 'there are lies, damn lies and statistics.'

Deep inside the core fire burns through levels of shifting Teutonic plates, shuddering massive pressure, blathering hot embers, fumes, mixing gases, molten silica, and impatient promiscuous sulphuric acids.

This natural evolutionary pressure creates a gigantic orgasm, spewing, releasing, exploding, melting, through the mantle to the crust, surface and into the atmosphere. My volcano blasts ash and cinder and molten rocks the size of small projectiles into the atmosphere where it flies, floats and dances in wind. 

Nature is a gigantic, sublime, violent experiment. Nature is awesome, beautiful, terrifying and magnificent dramatic lesson in natural laws. Magma at work. Do not disturb.

Nature is a wonderful teacher. Nature informs humans in clear non-negotiable terms, 'you adapt, adjust, evolve or you die. This is natural selection.'

Simple as that. Nature says, 'unfortunately for living species, I have no agenda, flight plan, schedule, meeting, commerce, economy, plan, or boarding pass. My departure gate is the crust.

I have a free pass. I have total power. I am unpredictable. I am violent and I am benign. I am gentle, kind and generous. I giveth and I taketh away. Humans will never completely with their severely limited intelligence control me, manipulate me or own me. I have vast powers. I create and I destroy. That's my Nature.

Some humans call me Shiva, the Auspicious One. I am the destroyer of life. Fire is my source of power.

Another manifestation is Mahakala, the Lord of Time.

Humans are naturally naive. Naivety and stupidity and laziness is their Nature. They don't listen or pay attention to Nature until it, for example, shifts the plates below the Tibetan plateau causing an earthquake. The natural result is loss of life because shoddy buildings built by greedy humans all fall down.

Humans use fire to cremate bodies because there are not enough vultures to eat the remains. So it goes.

Ash, on the other hand, a buy product of Nature goes with the flow.

Metta.

A World Without Planes...read more

 

Friday
Apr162010

Ash alert

Greetings,

One cool reality being pure wind is the stuff you get to get to blow around. Like kites.

Like toxic ash from exploding Icelandic volcanoes. This natural event traps silly humans on planet Earth. They become anxious, distraught and unreasonable. Especially when they prayed in vain to take a plane on vacation. Planes never get to go on vacation. Machines grind it out, 24/7.

Wind plays. Machines, animals and humans work. They trade their time for a handful of dimes.

What people don't see is fascinating.

People don't see the beautiful cumulus clouds of flying, swimming ash. It's 20,000 - 32,000 feet above their tired misaligned necks. Many assume it's a government plot to limit their freedom of escaping villages, towns and cities. They suspect travel and ticket agents, airlines, security screeners, dead relatives and orphans in Cambodia are all conspiring to prevent their freedom.

Humans are full of hot air. Talking heads prove this unpleasant fact. Their hot air contributes to the reality. Desperate scientists want to solve the natural ash conundrum along with other absurd activities to be famous and remembered by history.

History and Wind and Nature laugh. "HA, HA, HA."

Ash has no passport, nationality or identity theory. Ash is a gypsy. Ash is not discriminated by Europeans because they originated in India in the 9th century, speak Roma and love to sing and dance and tell stories.

Ash is an illiterate traveller. Ash does not bore humans with reminiscences.
Ash is free to sing, dance and go wherever they want.

Blow wind blow, blow my baby back to me.

Metta. 

 

 

Wednesday
Apr142010

Voices

Greetings,

A man's voice from magnified speakers echoes down river on new year's day. He talks about what ifs and maybes. Exhortations about the dire need for clean drinking water, sanitation, education and medicine.

What is the significance of new year? Another day, another opportunity for talking animals to discuss, share and elaborate on gaseous topics like:

  • how to mill around without causing damage to the environment
  • how to wear a yellow "HELLO" cell phone t-shirt without a license
  • how laughing orphans fill up a wheelbarrow with lost dreams
  • how perpetually distracted humans face unpleasant facts
  • how loose tongues are required to discuss, share, elaborate or mystify a woman slicing limes
  • how three foreign female educators chew nails and contemplate new programs in circular fashion
  • how humans will never escape 'art'
  • how teams of ants try, try, try to maneuver a large piece of sugar candy up a steep cement mountain
  • how an experienced bicycle traveller from Holland named Harold helps at the grassroots level to improve children's quality of life in Cambodian orphanages and Burmese refugee camps. How he eschews large organizations working directly with the people. 

How bullet points fly to a target.

On new year's day, the woman in her blue pajamas decorates the family altar with cans and bottles of soft drinks, coconuts, durian, perfume, two crystal glasses of milk, candles, candy, bread, rice, oranges, apples, water, incense, photos of dead relatives, cockroaches, howling dogs, baboons, balloons, clouds, clones and clowns.

She turns on the TV. She turns it really LOUD. Her daughters, 4, 6, are entranced and captivated by the visual circus. They never read books. The idiot box allows the kids, servants, tuk-tuk drivers, husband and foreign guests to give up their consciousness. Another diversion, another day, a new year day. April Fools!

New day, new diversion, people pretending to be busy.

Angkor Wat Hindu dancers in gold silk lame dresses with towering headdresses perform ancient dances. Apsara fingers, delicate movements. They celebrate seasons, fertility, rice, fish, nature, courtship, and joy.

She is frail, about 80 with silver hair. She sits in front of her house. Her left hand rests on a cane. She wears a beautiful purple sarong with golden threads and a white lace blouse. Her daughter trims her hair above the left ear with shiny silver scissors. The woman's smile illuminates her tranquil face.

Metta.