Grandmaster's Fight Against Colonization, Fulfilled.

Source

"In 1967, Grandmaster Ip Man started the Wing Chun Athletic Association to foster the spirit of Wing Chun with a group of like-minded enthusiasts, fulfilling the most cherished dream of his later years. Until now, Wing Chun has become a world renowned branch of Chinese martial arts. The lineage of Grandmaster Ip Man's disciples has exceeded 2 million people...including the most illustrious action star of all, Bruce Lee." - from "Ip Man" the film  

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A full-scale invasion! Be-feathered helmets and Spaniard tempests swing wildly in the bloody aftermath breeze. The mountain jungle air is chokingly humid. The brayed skin and shattered metal splits and shaves with hairless, painted flesh meeting the clunky spillage of wounded Europe, thirsting to murder unearthed prophecy. Silent, I escape. There is no victor, only the great veil of death and havoc, a clean-swept tide foreboding a colony and its inimitable dry heave of personality into the vile mix of disease and one-sided freedoms.

A vented rise of wood and shale offers solace. I meditate with spirited concentration, removed entirely from the bells swinging into their clapper of my inevitably gruesome end. I’ve escaped this history into another world entirely.

My first visit to East Asia! I ride wealthily and untethered down futuristic main streets in South Korea, eyeing Monasteries doubling as military halls. Tokyo films play in the pavement signage. I hear Cantonese and Vietnamese swimming in my head. No, this is Korea! We dance carelessly over the sweet dell of masterful urbanism. There are people to meet, and eagerly we find our way, personified by withdrawn shelter in the sun world east. By midday, I am alone, a vagrant wanderer looking for likelihood in the exotic sky.    

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Asia

"To dream of visiting Asia is assurance of change, but no material benefits from fortune will follow." (iDream)

________

not leading, trying, attempting,
nor bluntly giving, allowing or assuming,
yet to leave an ear, as offering, sacrificial listening,
to give an ear, affixing a host
who lets their body down to the cured mammal's coat,
whose friendship bore a spiritual communion

- excerpt from "shaped by more hands"

Librotraficante and Biblioburro Meet on the Road to Dreams

"They’ve actually brought so much attention to our community that I think right now we really are on the verge of a Latino Renaissance. It’s beautiful, all around art, because only art can save us."

"They’re scared that we will overhaul the government through voting them out of office. And that’s exactly what’s about to happen, because what’s wrong is they’re sabotaging the American Dream for our young, and for everybody."
- El Librotraficante (as seen on DemocracyNow!)

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The Banned Book List includes around 90 Books, below are a few that caught my eye! 


- Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paolo Freire 
- Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, by B. Bigelow and B. Peterson
- A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present, by H. Zinn
- Occupied America: A History of Chicanos
- Puro Teatro: A Latino Anthology, by A. Sandoval-Sanchez and N. Saporta Sternbach
- Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems, by J.S. Baca
- Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, by J. Kozol
- Mexican American Literature, by C.M. Tatum 
- Civil Disobedience, by H.D. Thoreau

Read these books! Start Banned Book Readings! Honour and Treasure Our Diverse Literature!

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It’s a windy spring day over the artificial green grasses of a New England suburban park. Poet Tree is angles into view through my perspective, as if seen through a filmmaker’s lens. He begins reciting diligent lines with a fascinating edge. Almost as soon as he begins, the piece is ended, though now, the cool breaths of night play over the treetop sunset. The night in this town is a life or death truth. The cut rug of hospitality has its clear lines of disillusion for everyone with bad luck. In and out of the fire escape stairways beside brick fortress alleyways, I push on past the escalating traffic to my space and time. Inside my crooked little haunt, the VCR is malfunctioning. I play classic exploitation films from the 1970s, boom and bust raw in the piercing fire of aloneness. Walking outside from my unlocked door, my surroundings foretell the great epoch of Hong Kong, known in such a film as “In the Mood for Love”. I’m outside in the Chinatown midnight and it’s as lively as mid-day. Food is still hot off the oven. One sticky-mouthed Chinaman near a heated tray of veggie-covered noodles asks about my wife. “She’s not at home?” His lazy English tongue burns upon my already branded aching, any one can see it in my eyes. A love as hot as the sun drains my blood in every instant with a magic touch, changing from burdensome to lightening in every unpredictable way. “She likes to go out, speak Cantonese with her people, be a part of her culture,” I said glowingly, appreciating his kind interest. In our apartment, as I take out the soon-broken VCR tape, my one feels behind my shoulder. “What grace?” I know. The dim, cornered light is perfect, it is her night. 

________

Movie

"If you dream that you are playing a role in the movie, something from your unconscious is about to be revealed. It can also mean you are getting to play a new role in your life and go down a new path." (iDream)

________

poem for the children of the Biblioburro 

ransomed jungles breed aphrodisiacal wonder in a donkey’s emergent and effulgent touch within the heart of a reading child…hearing the pains of their ancestors in the black print façade of their enduring minds…a helpless urge to forsake the painless tree’s shade and reason with the governmental storage of thought on fire…to bring peace to the unwelcoming hoards armed with scales and the sheer brevity of a reptilian dystopia

- excerpt from "Epistrophic Misdirection"

Tara Sadhana for the Anthropomorphic Newborn

Three Bodhisattvas Witness World Compassion Harmonizing by Vi An Diep

Praising Tara by her divine actions of dispelling conflicts and bad dreams

Homage to you who are honoured by the kings of the hosts of gods,
And the gods and the kinnaras.
Through all your joyful and shining pervasive armour
All conflicts and bad dreams are dispelled.

Last stanza from “Offering the Mandala” 

Thus, O Sublime object of refuge,
Please quickly protect all living beings
From fears such as sickness, spirits, obstacles,
Untimely death, bad dreams, and ill omens.


Colophon: This sadhana has been compiled from traditional sources by Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche in response to requests made by students of Tara Centre, and translated under his compassionate guidance. September 1989.

Excerpts from Great Compassionate Mother. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche. Tharpa Publications. 1990, 1993. 

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It's a very ordinary day. It feels like afternoon to early evening. I feel the constant presence of an animal. My albino rabbit, named Salt in life, visited me. His head is in my hands. I pet him. I let him out in the yard. It was snowing heavily, and he, white as the snow, only appears through his beady, red eyes. Then, I notice a child running through the snow. The child came into the house and laid its head next to my lap, and proceeded to nudge into my hand to pet him. It's a boy, a mute boy. He looks at me with colorless eyes. I figured, how wonderful Salt shape-shifted into a young boy. Salt, now a boy, would hop out into the snow around the trees just like a rabbit. Immediately, he shifts back to a rabbit who hops out of my vision. 

A very silvery, glowing white cat with stripes. Upon recognizing the face of this cat, it was evident that it was my deceased cat. All the features of my cat were displayed. His charm and energy radiates. My hands are warm as I pet him. Suddenly, I cradle him in my arms, looking behind my shoulder, I see my husband smiling and laughing. I am speaking to Max, now as a child. He is an infant with the same eyes as a cat, but with the face of a child, staring back at me with such love and affirmation. I speak in English and say, "I want you to learn Chinese because I am your mother. I would like you to preserve my lineage through learning Chinese." My husband, the love of my life, is laughing in the background. In synchronicity my husband and young son speak in English. My husband says laughingly, "he already knows how to speak Chinese." The child says, "Mother, I already know how to speak Chinese." In my surprise I notice my cat turned child changed to four to six months old. Beyond a brick stone ledge, dawn approaches as a beautiful golden sunrise. His dirty blonde hair glistens. His eyes, expressing inquisitive curiosity and a loving recognition, are deep emerald green and brown. Sitting on that ledge, I taught him to say, "eyes (gnan)" in Cantonese. He stuttered, but was able to repeat, the word for eyes in Cantonese. "Gnan" he says. My husband smiles as if to say, why are you trying to teach him what he already intrinsically knows from you, his mother. The child chuckles and says, "eyes, ears, mouth and nose (gnan, yee, hoaw, bae)" I was shocked with such gladness and immense pure unconditional love for this being before me. "Ma" he would exclaim. I already know. He became a toddler and hopped off the sandstone ledge. His head rested next to my thigh as I stroked his beautiful dirty blonde hair, glistening in such glorious light. 

He, in another dream, the third of the sequence, shifts back to a silvery glowing, white, very happy cat. 

________

as her son climbs the dismembered mountain,

trembling with rocks of tragic failure

rolling down to kill my boulder of trash

damming the flood of human night

- excerpt from "My New Bride"

Death of a Beloved Feline

Women with the Cat by Renato Rodyner

1^st Dream

A cold, dark wintry night. I look out my screen window out to a ground level balcony. Consciously, I wanted to see a cat because, as memory would have it, it resembled the balcony of my first apartment. There were a couple of cats around that would visit. I open the window, there is snow all over. There is a shadow of a cat bouncing around. I let the cat in. It huddled next to the heater with its back facing me. I realized right away it was Max, my cat who had passed away a couple of weeks already. As I went down to pet him, he hopped away. I wake.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

2^nd Dream

An open field, prairie setting. Windy, tall grass. Tall fields of wheat, as it appeared, being blown by the wind. Very warm, windy prairie day. No rolling hills, all flat. In some bungalow, rickety, wood house, my mother is there. I speak a lot of Cantonese with her in the dream. I felt something brushing at my ankle and shin, something that I instantly thought was a cat. To my pleasant surprise, I look down and it was exactly the image of Max, his coloration, his distinctive markings on his forehead…his chest. I actually went down and interacted, he let me pet him, and he leaned into my leg very firmly. He went on his back, exposing his white stomach. He is emphatically friendly, in life he was temperamental, though in the dream he is the opposite. There is no voice, I can’t hear his voice. I think he opens his mouth, but I couldn’t hear a meow, I only felt his warmth and the way he feels in my arms; his size and weight. I have his face in my arms, and spoke to my mother in Cantonese that my cat had come back to life. Then I looked at Max, then I told him I would call his Daddy, and have him come out and visit. His Dad would be so pleased to have his best friend back. I kissed Max between the nose and forehead and woke. When I woke up, I looked outside and it was a really windy day. It turned out to be a very warm day too.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

3^rd Dream

Unknown, hazy location. Cloudy, foggy, blurry, with a glow. It was quite quick. I’ve always been thinking about Max in my waking days these past few weeks. I think my consciousness sinks into my dreams, and works with my subconscious in creating Max right away. So Max was in my dreams, but he appeared to be more silvery, more angelic with a glow around him. He is really animated, but in the most friendly way. In life, he was very animated but in a somewhat aggressive way. So, in the dream, his Dad was in the dream, squatted on the ground. Max crawled and stretched up to his right thigh, and I was kneeling behind the Dad on his left shoulder, admiring Max and wondering why he was so wise, glowing and silver, I reached out to Max and he put his right paw on me and his left paw on his Dad’s knee. I picked Max up and I whispered to him “how wise and angel-like you are.” I woke.

Monday, October 3, 2011

These dreams make me question a lot about conscious versus subconscious. What is dream and what is lucid, and what is passive observation within your sleep state. Having these dreams of Max solidifies my own personal insight into the subconscious as being a data-bank which stores our so-called real-life experiences and in the dreams, our subconscious supplies us with the tools to be lucid because it is a reference point. Sometimes, our dreams are random and chaotic and it doesn’t make any sense, and it’s some part of the brain working that I don’t know how to call. When I find in my “lucid” dreams, I find when I wake up that “it makes sense” that my subconscious is a memory bank and of course I would be lucid in those situations when those situations have to do with my cat. I like to entertain the mystery that Max is somehow still with me communicating to me through my lucid dreams of him. I can move on with that. I can never accept his death, but I can move on because I am dreaming of him.