For Hailey and Tanya

So my friends, we have come to a dawn of incision and escarpments have faced us and now the cool, flat, aquatic platitudes face us now as we inch forward into Cardamom territories and leave behind the massive roads and known directions. Leave it for the scrapes of the sky made marvelous by clouds and ruffled instances of awareness. Awareness in every direction and we are comfortable for it, aren’t we, setting off under the hum of boat engine and river shacks plotted like stitches on a canvas, to guide us forward?

We need not huddle together but we want to huddle and comfort and covet the highest of the high and the lowest of the low. No heat. No rain. Just passage. Just balance. Just packaged into one collective. One unity. We of newness but of generations past. We of many eyes and many angles. We are more tree nest. The haunting of the pineapple is back and beyond. Past go the ghastly endeavors and forward go our future arraignments of occupying visages. We will startle ourselves through joy and discovery like the cheeps and chirps of the littlest quacks.

Series of mutual voyages. Series of mutual departures. The escalation of the grave sense of familial clarity. A smile is worth a thousand dagger points carving into stone and root and future feasts through muscle and tendon and flesh. Captured conveniently through the twist of the flicker of the button of the object designed to preserve our phrases and phraseology. I am reminded of tectonics. Mutual moods. I am reminded of the last kiss I blew through the air but only in my mind because I wanted the secret gift to remain secret.

Fair share of scalp and sculpt and the sulking sink of the boat as it coasts forward through the largest array of urgent twists and spurns. I imagine small fires in the homes of the many who I will never see, or see but only casually, as if like a shadow or a flutter of wings by a creature whose name I know not. But less animist. Lest animalistic. Let us call them for who they are: individuals bearing power and the beauty of creativity both within and beyond conscious acts. Let us call them who they are even if we do not know how.

We do not rise. We do not fall. Perhaps in our reactions but not in our intentions. We simply sit. We take in. We cruise forward through the river. We understand and alleviate through the river. We take this body of water and give it a name: river. Shift weight. Shift gaze. Smile. Nod. Let in and let out. Let this space be one of acceptance. Let this space be one of holding of our hands between our legs as the sun sits still and watches us warmly and the river too is warm and pushes us along for we are travelers and the world understands.

And the world is meant to understand. And all of its eruptions of image are meant for us in this moment of ourselves. Just as all these images are meant for those who come after us, or have come before us, or are always here, alive and enriched by the images that surround them. A whirlwind of words made symbolic through imported and exported and ordered value. Sets and systems. Donned astonishment for it is new, so new, to us, and everyone else, each day, even when the same, there is the newness and the surprise is one we come to know as elating.

Honor the sense that there is a world that has achieved so much before it was recognized by you. Uphold the value that there are within systems like this constant arrivals and arousing sensations to be upturned in every direction. Believe and become bold through it. Through the shake and the shift. Through the camaraderie. Through the dance of being in one boat for hours and witnessing an infinite of directions through limitless light. Throngs of water cascade through the currents and lick and splash like exclamation points.

See her sifting, cleaning, cooking, playing, working, studying, resting, repairing, and imagine yourself taking the action in her position. The imagination as the landscape of riches. The broadest strokes as the birth of knowledge. To agree to the terms provided and to flirt with the sense of alternatives, altars, your future or past converted through mystification. Boundless! We know no bounds now. We simply play, muse, tickle our attitudes gently.

Fortress of multitudes. Beings shape their breaths like buildings, don’t they? Exhale in rectangles. The polygon chakra. Sit still. Vibrating back and neck. Hum of the roar. Roar of the hum. Where do the walls come from? Where is their source? Where are the hands that crafted it? Are we all gods then? Beautiful little gods dotting the globe. Making are mark. Creating our permanence. Or impermanence. Calling for longings and we are indeed immortal in our ability to yearn.

Further back or furthest back or perhaps even closest or perhaps closer still. Pocket of light reveals and little shadow of emptiness reveals even more that there is the next something, the next element of grace, that we boaters are bolstering a sense of seeing and understanding and what is it we want if nothing else than to see and know and understand and remember the longest paths before the brightest eyes. We have this moment for ourselves now. Let us bend it and shape it the way fields are bent into being by ox feet.

Mode. Outmoded. Wake up! Wake into your new decay! Forward through decay translated as an okay state of being, as a relic or artifact. Antiquity is beautiful and kind and forgiving and it will wait for you to turn to it, it does not need to turn to you, as you coast by it and imagine yourself through it before it became as such. Of course nostalgia broken open like an egg linked by catharsis does serve as chant and of course there is a certain way to be both in the ancient and the futurist mode of survival but survival can be dynamic. It is allowed. There are a lack of rules right here, right now. Hug that fact.

I was younger once and for example I see this craft sitting there in the water, you know, and it comes to me like a switchblade sticking me up, but the analogy is more about my youth wanting to react, to get in that water and swim over to that empty craft and then just coast, just admit the desire and push forward. That sense of ego. That frolic through the chaos. Chaos fields and charges of light and a distinct antithesis to firmer integrity. But we pass like everything these images and we chuckle invisibly at how things are different now, much smoother, plausible in a way.

The journey and the destination. There will be someone to greet you and you will be greeted so be ready to acknowledge it. We acknowledge everything. Bladed a country gets divided up as carrying value from every stance, every position, perspective. We were right in our visitations. We are right in our ongoing exploration. There is the correct way of doing things. There is the stiff, adamant posture. Tossing around images and catching them back moments later. The shift is that we know they have returned.

What do you do once you’ve found your position? What do you do but grin and splice open the sky with hands made of time? This is the fever of life. This is the fragrance that is carried within a warm core. This is the rupture of kindness that will upload our beings into the atmosphere. Clouds created with bubbles born of children and their journey through curiosity. The presence of the witness of the watchful. What have I written before? What will I write again? How have encounters disrupted and maneuvered us, like mothers, through each route of witnessing?

Stop. Stop and turn. Stop and twist your neck. For a moment. Share the gaze with the farther. Share the gaze with the further on. Share the plot of land. Share the field. Share the sky above. Share the earth below, that crunches under your shoe, stains your shoe red, dampens it a little. Share the rain storm that came last night, that muddied up your paths. Share the rice and other grains sprouting to the left and the right. Center yourself in love.

Wait for your grayest moment to find the grayest guide to bring you through the unknown. Do not confess. Do not admit to being the witness. Simple push forward. Simply push forward. Simply push forward. Toward always the image of the gray guide who follows and leads at once. Who is center that has created your own center, the pattern’s master, the she or he who upholds these ways forward and backward and through and around and there is only this method and it is beautiful.

Did I mention the beauty? Did I mention the latency of beauty? Did I mention the fellowship of beauty? Did I mention that there was beauty before we even started talking? Where did you last see it? Where did you last put it? Remember the raft. Remember the floatation. Remember the encounters we beauty not because of their beauty but because it was a shared beauty for us. Remember with me. Remember together. And know that it is good to do so.

You have followed me as I have followed you and we have encountered together. We have dissected and cherished together. We have walked together. We have cycled and biked and floated together. Through heat as thick as skin and rain as heavy as rooftops we have existed here together. Through water as cold throats we have existed together. Tell me, what have you been alive for on this day? What have you captured in your mind and turned around like a child with bauble and what have you seen glow on this day? And how will you bring it to the next day, together?

Blade of queens. Blade of kings. Blade of ancient empires. Blade of the sun. Blade of water. Blade of boats. Blade of ferns. Blade of palms. Blade of rope. Blade of rust. Blade of tomes. Blade of the Buddha. Blade of garments. Blade of current. Blade of flotation. Blade of rotation. Blade of monkey. Blade of oxen. Blade of cows. Blade of dogs. Blade of chickens. Blade of humans. Sit upon the blades and learn how to create the next masterpiece experience at the height of your days.

Ideas crown other ideas or are put into placements we hold spiritually beneficial. I grab my belly and look at the sky. Or the road. Or the next building that awaits someone who has earned it as shelter. I can hear the wind on the field and I can see the mountains and I can be with you and we can know this all together. We can share this together. We can be: we can be. Activity and action is upon us. We act and take activities to the world. Reciprocity is best through the choir of hammers and machetes around every corner.

Call me by my name. The name you have given me. And I will call you by yours. And we will arrange ourselves in alignment with structures around us. And we will breathe and things will begin to grow around us. And we will say they are growing for us and we will begin to realize we are also growing for them. And we will then be silent and observe while we can, so that we may have something to speak about together when the world is dark and we are exhausted but ready.

I will call you be your name continually until the last door shuts or the last eye blinks. I will give you the arm you need to feel the comfort in the swagging trail that promises to grow more and more difficult. We will be smoke breath and our teeth as ivory as the blind who stared too long at the sun that gave in too quickly. Power surge before banks of electricity even began their swoon. Talismans will be traded. Amulets of companionship will be adorned. The crude phalanx of few will troop through the landscape. I know this: You know this. A flute calls and it is the red of mountain earth.

A lone song calls us forward to the end of the next blink. The next blink has already passed its upward and downward movement by the time we understand the love of being shapeshifters. Our eyes are doppelgangers of the eyes of time. The eyes of mountains blinking over the course of millions of years. This is Cardamom. This is remote behavior entwined with reality understood. I once mentioned a funnel and we have always been within it. Didn’t you know? Didn’t you know by the grace of my hand as it waved to you from a hundred meters ahead?

Swirl of fervor. Chills leaving you chilled. The engorged good. The routed flood of forever. These things last forever. These things pass up overhead. Banners waving. There is a subtle texture. Panels and pixels. Petals and pedals. Blast of chance. Fortune fury. But it is all good. It is all green and blue and gold and good. Imagine the colors that have been good to us as colors that have been good to everyone. These paintings of timelines like veins upon arms and legs and other unknown limbs. It takes us threads and hushes but the uplifting is amazing.

You could turn this and I would still believe you, oh range of mountain. Speak of the voice that lowers or raises the lever. That grants me the prestige of your image before me and before us. Speak, voice, and carry me and carry us into the newest realms of the mind’s diamond shine retinas. Let us climb and let us climb again. This prayer for you. This request for your. And so too for us as we muster and we must muster more. Tremble, oh mountain, tremble if you must, but we are here and we have encountered you and we are staggering. Finally.

You can read the previous parts of Cambodia Bladed here.