This all together amazing audio signature is coming to you from the ISS. International Space Station. We are 250 miles above the big blue marble.
The Whiner family down in the big Durian struggles to cope with their nanny. She is young, exploited and poor.
She feeds plastic food to a whining child. Welcome to the future!
Happy ears.
Hear MK 67.
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We are in the International Space Station.
We have a very wide screen.
The Earth is a beautiful blue marble. Infinite space surrounds us.
We orbit Earth every 90 minutes. Every 24 hours we see 16 sunrises and sunsets. Amazing.
Feel free to stop by next time you're in the neighborhood and we'll show you around.
Metta.
Whew, what a first week it was for my little existence, my little humanoid welcoming.
I am beginning a new strange scary awkward weird and totally transforming experience in a couple of larger than life human's lives.
Let me begin at the beginning.
I fell out of my mom, a female production company last week. It was a Thursday. She was big and fat and she dropped me out, pushing and pushing and finally exhaled with joy like a baby, and I came slathering, slipping through some universal ectoplasm fluid, like a gusher, whoosh!
Into light, millions of bright shining suns. A crescendo of angels, luminous spirit forms, formless forms, shapes, spinning dancing, swirling like dervishes along light rays. Such amazing splendor. My last nine months did little to prepare me to allow me to know anything.
It was all sensation.
I saw galaxies and spinning particles of hydrogen and oxygen. It was awesome and totally mesmerizing. I saw an Eagle nebula, a gathering of space dust melding, morphing into a solid state, a unified field theory. I was beside meself with wonder and delight. I joined 6 billion others. I am an-other in the stream of life.
Tiny black eyes welcomed light energy into my being.
Metta.
“I know where Monkey Forest is,” she said.
“The bull is placed under a cremation platform (bale pabasmian) constructed of bamboo with a white "sky" cloth and gold tinsel roof. Reeds secure the bull on four corner poles and music stops.
“It’s like a party,” I said. “Women work the crowd selling water and soft drinks in searing heat. Tourists replace film and run videos.”
“Men cut the bull's back open with a large knife under sky pavilion and remove a section. Music starts and the body is lowered from the tower accompanied by cymbals, drums and clanging instruments. Women carry offerings and lead an honor procession three times around the bull.
“All the men are hot, tired, sweaty, and laughing. They lift the body up and pass it to a group along the bull. They place it inside. The widow places family heirlooms on the corpse as forest monkeys swing and chatter through overhead jungles. A black and white butterfly dances.
“A Brahmin priest in black stands on scaffolding with the family singing and chanting prayers over the body. They cut a string binding white cloth, pour holy water from clay pots on the body and pass pots to a family member who smashes them on the ground.
“Then the priest takes a flowering plant and sprinkles soil on the body. Another man adds yellow silk. People hand them family items wrapped in white cloth to be placed inside. Clay pots are emptied and smashed.
“A family member takes a photograph of the body. An effigy of reeds and tinsel is dismantled and placed on the body before the lid is replaced on the bull and secured with a long piece of bamboo lashed diagonally across the corners. Someone lights the fire.
“The bull and flowers burn quickly as wood, bamboo and rattan sends smoke and ash circling into sky. Cloth shells flame away as heat jumps to the tinsel and golden roof.
“Italian and French film crews work close to the fire.
“The crowd evaporates. The ground is littered with plastic water bottles and ashes. The widow sits by a path in the shade eating, drinking and talking quietly with her family and friends about sekala, what is seen, and nisekala, what is unseen.”
“Wow!” Michiyo said when Smith finished. “Amazing!”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s about impermanence and perception. When people change their attitudes they change their perceptions.”
“Is that all that happens?” She wanted to know.
“Well, it’s about connections on many levels, you see. When people change their attitudes it affects their values and changes their belief window.”
“What’s a belief window?”
“How you see things. Some cultures think with their heart instead of their head.”
“I see.” Our laughter shattered the calm silence. Wild cranes lifted from the rice paddies into blue sky slashing their shadows through light. The sky is the same color no matter where you are.
Metta.
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Eight mirrors, eight letters, eight whispers, eight sensations.
Eight breaths, eight emptiness, eight certainties, eight ambiguities, eight naked dancing birds,
eight laughing fools, eight hungry ideas, eight reflections,
eight musical notes, eight encounters, eight degrees.
Eight bells, eight echoes.
Trees burn facts and opinions in spring.
A blind dancer and a deaf dancer compliment each other.
Metta.
Draw, paint, sing, dance, write, disappear.
Tell me a secret, poet. Reveal your wandering verse, your free form exile. There is no salvation.
Not too detached. Not too sentimental. We are surrounded by androids. Give the zombies simple stuff. Let them wrap their minds around artificial entertainment instruments in their operating rooms. Cut them open.
How do we measure their emotional receptivity? How do they establish meaning inside the daily, brutal violence?
Rolling and tumbling. A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned. People take themselves way too serious. The art and elements of a Japanese folding screen - shapes, edges, designs, natural free form.
Tell me why you loved being a campground guard in Costa Brava, Spain. Was it the night, the dark? The ghosts from your childhood? Yes, I imagine it was all the ghost children, all the dead women in Ciudad Juarez. All the unclaimed corpses. All the young girls. Never identified. Never claimed. Forgotten forever.
How you turned to writing fiction to support your family, your children. How you said you would have rather been a detective instead of a writer. How they are related. How you realized your literary life in Spain after Chile, Mexico and lost highways along your way. Wandering. Literature, the abyss.
You created a new novel form before passing on. Thank you. 2666.
Creating literature is a dangerous occupation. Silence, exile and cunning.
Metta.
From Fujian, China to Ankara, Turkey (a kind of fowl) to Bursa along the Silk Road with Doner and Pide, all the sliced and diced tomatoes, all the bamboo baggage filled with laughter and forgetting inside the smashing of utensils and wash and wear drip dry neon holiday flashing factories along metro subway tracks where world weary
pedestrians completing a simple sentence with a full plate of delicious shoppers dancing inside fire breathing ovens stoking love's fires before racing home to mother, father, sister, brother all wearing traditional anxiety values around heavily medicated ma-scared necks handing someone change, your fragile receipt for paying
at the cosmic bowling alley for strikes and spares and did you know the great father liberator has a train car parked forever at the main station, a gift from Adolph, the Further and it was all imaginary, this T place where idle men stood around looking bored and unemployed, uneducated drinking brown tea
after artfully massaging a microscopic silver spoon around the rim, deep into the universe of sugar stars clanging metal against a small glass destroying cubes manufactured in a filthy factory - so an inspection engineer whispered in her strict confidence - don't use the sugar she whispered across a plate of pasta on a chilly Ankara night before they went to a wedding in Ulus, the ancient Roman village, deep in an underground cavern filled with musicians, dancers, and children
gypsies played anvils
far away from shy lovers holding hands under the table inside the rising sun of their desire, their passion for yawning bamboo chairs where two elderly women in multi-hued headscarves smoked exploding drops of water from plummeting icicles onto tiled roofs above the cafe where a ghost scribbled in shadows burning his fingers to see the why eye and the falling water drops were music to his ears
Metta.
A prospective home owner walks into a house with a real estate agent. There are numerous small fires burning.
"I really like this house," she says. "But I'm really concerned about dying in a fire."
"Yes," says the agent, "It's a big decision, how one chooses to die."
Synecdoche, a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman concerns life, choices, dreams, art, relationships and death.
Always making choices.
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Weist, Deirdre O'Connell.
Give a man a match and he's warm for a minute. Set him on fire and he's alive for the rest of his life.
Metta.
Once upon a time there was a voice. It was connected to you and others through electrons, neutrons, atoms and spinning space particles.
It admired a black and green dragonfly closely. The dragonfly was not afraid. It knew the difference between a piano and a clarinet.
There were some children in the audio adventure. They assembled kites and ran on a green field feeling the ground below them. Their kites caught a breeze and lifted off. The children flew high and far, far away.
Middle Kingdom podcast #66 shares this wonderful little secret: "Much learning does not teach wisdom."
Metta.
lured into red sunsets
splitting pure white
dazzling yellow light
from the center
remembering cold january mornings
weaving our way past snow lined adobe
gathering blessed sand,
red chillis
seeing Navajo weave their magic
we purchased magic
rolled it into our passion
ate our dreams
carried it on our journey
toward separation
weft, woof, fibers glistening
sage induced fires
curling new mexico stars
pressing surface of our desires
smoothing out Chimayo
breathing shuttles click clack
memory sizzors escape their way
toward you screaming on fifth floor
suicide watch time
