Little mushroom Big dream

Dreams persist as I exist, but I have lost in the maze of dreams at the same time. That's of course a wonderful happening!

I appreciate my littleness and invisibility, I enjoy the quietness of dreaming. I float from one dream to another, and to another swiftly, from Indiana Jones to Alice, and to Star War. 

I make fun in multi-dreaming. Only improper wake up causes my brain cells to hang frequently.

I enjoy my littleness, but my dreams are always big and are a big mess, because I like to travel. I travel into the darkness of madness, to gain unreal fulfillment beyond daylight.

Dreaming is like breathing: cannot be deleted, even over years.

2017,  a year of continued- dreaming, day-dreaming.

Happy dreaming.

Big-eared Mushroom

So a little yellow mushroom took the initiative. It went around to confirm the story of universities in a mushroom world.

On the way, it met a giant-eared mushroom. This giant ear must have received whatever news lingering in the air.

"Mushrooms in the countryside never talk about universities." The big ear said.

"They only laugh at monkey business, and compete to laugh in a snail's pace."

Yes, there are so many fierce but funny monkeys around.

"I have to wait for many hours before getting to know this is actually the sound of laughing."

"H.............o.............h.............o..........."

"M.....e.....r.....r.....y.....C....h.....r.....i......s....t.....m.....a.....s......"

Mushrooms Gossip

"Having so many nonsensical posts, Rainfield is sure living in its own fantasy."

"He is seeking virtual satisfaction and fulfillment."

I go very near, yes, only so near then I hear gossip.

I talk about mushrooms and mushrooms do likewise. Their oxygen level is low and brain cells are critically inactive after a heavy meal; gossip is the only possible thing to do.

"Keeping Alice the theme of his posts,  Rainfield extends his real world to a borderless Wonderland."

What a tattling in a morning.

Mushrooms, people and many more I assume, are so curious about each other. 

That is why we have universities.

I may discover these universities in a mushroom world one day. I shall share.

Mushrooms From Fantasia

There was a lot of hard work in a busy last week, but I asked, I checked and I reconfirmed: a few of my Wonderland mushrooms are related to those from Fantasia.

I managed to persuade three of the shy coolie-hatted red mushrooms to say hello to you, but that made them turn totally red.

A further request for a legendary Fantasia Chinese Dance might be a bit over, it was turned down. I am still thinking how magnificent it was if they danced when Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite" was playing.

Oh, where was Alice then?

In fact, Wonderland and Disneyland are only a hairline apart. Alices are here and there.

She would like to dance too, or she will get bored reading books without pictures.

Unfounded Wonderland

Mushrooming is an exciting experience. One hardly knows what could be expected and captured.

To my surprise, many types of mushroom awaiting silently at the place where I had not met them before. They must be there, but because of size, these little spirits are long ignored.

It is like choosing between the Hatter's home and the March Hare's place. My choice today lead me to a small piece of unfounded wonderland.

I am not as mad as suggested by the Cheshire cat, but am madly figuring a better angle to present these captivating little beauties.

I am smiling like a Cheshire cat after reading the comments from my previous post.

I'll get promoted tomorrow and become a father-in-law.

Craziness vs Daydreamer

"Alice's sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion."

Dreams restart. One by one mushrooms make their appearance.

Some try in a mysterious manner: darkness, full white costume, miniature, corner of eye, and total quietness.

"Let's have fun in a snakes and ladders game." They invited. Alice must have played this.

But it is very different in a cyber world: Searching for mushrooms, falling back if failed, a few steps closer if successful. Dropping if having shaking hands and climbing a ladder when mushrooms are gorgeously captured.

Alice should feel very glad if she is with me now, for only a crazy man can lead a daydreamer.

** I am leaving for my full marathon now. 

A Cyber Snail To Be

"And how Alice would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long-ago".

But Alice may soon find out that her children do not even bother to get to know what and where Wonderland is, except it is pasted as a cyber world. People nowadays run close by a cyber rabbit in just a click of a mouse. Did I mention mouse? What a i-rodent!

Not too to a slow moving snail who is thinking of a conventional way: popping down a rabbit hole.

It is now virtual reality: people fantasizing without dreaming, and speaking without talking. They travel in a 3D- and HD- space. The Queen simply points her finger right at your nose while shouting "off-with-your-head".

The snail will laugh at itself finally. "I have to go digital like every mushroom does."

Unexplainable

"If any one of them can explain it," said Alice, "I'll give him sixpence. I don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it."

Not everything is explainable, Alice should learn to understand this, especially to those who dream day in and day out, and especially dreaming about mushrooms.

Wandering and wondering in the miniature kingdom of mushrooms worth more than x times of sixpence, and we get connected, knowingly or unknowingly.

Love at first sight with mushrooms may not happen, but the passion of love will keep burning once started. Alice is simply too young to experience this.

You see, she is still keeping that sixpence in exchanging for mushroom soup with butter, leeks, garlic and thyme.

Feeling of being in Love

"So Alice sat on, with closed eyes, and half  believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again and all would change to dull reality."

Wonderland or not, mushrooms continue to mushroom. They do not change to dull reality, especially in the eyes with macro vision.

"You are so beautiful."

I am lost in love.

One of the Alices

“Tut, tut, child !” said the Duchess to Alice. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

Thus I see a mushroom in a crevice. It is reflecting a limited light source. It shines.

Alice should be able to see a caterpillar sitting on the mushroom, smoking hookah and puffing fat smoke rings, the "off-with-your-head" Queen shouting again and again at the top of her voice behind the mushroom, and the whole pack of cards, the King and the Queen all rising up into the air.

I see through Alice's eyes, through those furrows, twist and turn, drop steeply, and move on.

I am one of the Alices. 

I dream.

Call A Fan A Mushroom

"Alice soon found out that the cause of this was the fan she was holding, and she dropped it hastily, just in time to save herself from shrinking away altogether".

When wind flowing past mushrooms, blowing through trees, passing the pool crowded with birds and animals, and guessing the riddle in a mad tea party, the fan left the Wonderland, coming out from a passage camouflaged as a knot on a fallen trunk, and stuck at Cerok Tokun.

The fan lost its power outside the Wonderland. To many things, the same never stop from repeating.

I am always the luckiest one to have discovered many mysteries. Isaac Newton only found an apple and kept the doctor away for a moment.

We can now call this fan a mushroom. 

How queer it is.

Come hither, hither

“ You must be very mad,” said the spider, “ or you wouldn’t have come to my little insignificant world.”

Yes, I should not have noticed you, if not a mushroom living nearby.

There is a built-in hyperlink in it; once click very close-up, I am brought to your net.

Sorry to disturb you. But, just like honey to the bee, I just cannot pretend you are not in my interest.

Listen, eileeninmd is singing in Mary Howitt's way, "Will you walk into my parlor named Saturday Critters? Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy. And I have many pretty things to show when you are there."

Will we see each other again? Go you eat the left side of the mushroom, a bigger you can then made my searching job easier.

Or you prefer to live a normal life, sitting cross legged at one corner, singing "Come hither, hither, pretty fly, with the pearl and silver wing..."

How Queer Everything Was

“ Dear, dear ! How queer everything is today ! Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle !”

A mushroom suddenly found itself in such a dark colour when was being reflected in a puddle. It began exclaiming like Alice.

"No big ant pooed on my body, no caterpillar blew hookah smoke on my face, why am I char-pigmented like having a big scar?"

How queer everything was! This was the first puddle formed; how did the mushroom know who it was right from the beginning?

It thought that everyone is born as beautiful as everyone else, and everyone else, by right, mirrors it own self.

How queer everything was!

Tailorbirds and Dinah

"I wish you were down here with me ! But there are no mice in the air." Alice began to talk again while falling down, to her cat Dinah, this time.

There were no birds in the air too, yet it was still good that Dinah was not around, because I had found two tailorbirds falling asleep on a branch of my Annona muricata tree.

Alice should have difficulty to decide where the heads were. So was I. Or she might think that Dinah had eaten them since Alice believed that "she ’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it !”

The birds smelled me like smelling Dinah when I went nearer and nearer.

One of them looked up at me blankly at first, and off they went one after another hastily, making knocking sound on the windows and on the wall.

On no, I must have mentioned Dinah too often.

A hot and stupid day

A hot day made Alice feel very sleepy and stupid, and so Rainfield, and many Red Spotted Jezebel Butterflies.

Wandering around to "click" handphone amid many who went Pokemon hunting, I stumbled upon butterflies that slept in the early evening.

"How funny to have fallen with a stump after coming to an end of a large rabbit hole!"

"Would these people look up?!" That was how I thought, on behalf of Alice.

"Would the butterflies be awakened, and fly hastily into each other, and laugh out very loud?"

It was then not only Alice who had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen.

Pitcher Plants

I do not wish to get shrunk like in Wonderland this time, and to take closeup pictures of giant pitchers. This is never a good fairy tale.

I shall not know it is a pitcher anyhow if I am so tiny; swimming inside it is unnoticeably fatal, and is forever disappearance.

Size distortion is magical, it twists perception on the other way round.

But adventurous Alice enjoys this and has begun to think that very few things indeed are really impossible.

Mushroom Evolved

In order to foster a strong and good relationship, I moved closer, and further closer, to mushrooms.

For I used to hear that “if your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

Then I heard a mushroom talking to itself in the Wonderland one day.

"What is that?" I asked, thinking that I was already its very closed friend.

This mushroom and I looked at each other for some time in silence; just like the Caterpillar and Alice.

"I am seeking expert advice." It finally  addressed in a slow and low but steady voice.

"Wisdom" of a Crab

"If you are a bird, why would you live on the ground?"

So weird. Sallie prompts me to ask a crab on my way climbing up Penang Hill.

"If you are crab, why wouldn't you stay nearby a creek and go crabbing in the middle of a road instead."

No way you come all the way to greet me. I am not popular in a crab world.

You too, because you are shellfish?

Or is it hungover, a miscalculated effect after a couple of shots of Dutch courage? Oh do I hear you rightly? Alcohol kills weakest brain cells. Regular consumption of alcohol thus helps take us to a new level of smartness.

What a crab.

Life List

I was inside a huge cage watching cages of animals.

Feeling so excited.

I photographed owls and I talked about owls. They were my lifers.

But the owls were bored.

I was only one of the many thousands passersby who came and went. Do they keep a "life list" too?

They closed their eyes, as if to say, "Wait until you are a rat, I shall then have interest in you."

"Mushroom Go"

To his embarrassment, the mushroom master could not capture a single mushroom during his trip to Australia, even in a zoo.

Oh I thought there must be an abundance of mushrooms in a zoo, just like kangaroos (at least they are alike by having two o in them). 

Have kangaroos eaten all of them, and the later formed a colourful world of white, black, brown, orange, red, yellow and green mushrooms inside these kangaroos' stomach?

Though no inside view, here is the non-extraordinary look of a kangaroo.

And of course, a koala too, who is paid to sleep and rest. That is a non-easy job.

Life is good at ten degrees Celsius

"Stop worrying about the world ending today. It's already tomorrow in Australia."  -- Charles M. Schulz

But that is not why we went to Perth last week.

Life is too busy, no room for worry.

Life is very relaxed, yet these birds showed no anxious moments too.

A shag reciprocated by clapping its wings while a smiling foreigner was approaching. 

A gull exhibited ladylike qualities, as ladylike as Audrey Hepburn, and withheld all its noisy scavenger manners.

Life is so good at ten degrees Celsius.

Tailor Birds In Action

This tailor bird nest had to be supported by a paper bag when my wife had mistakenly trimmed off a grapevine at which this nest was built.

The parent birds seemed to have accepted the damage caused and remedy provided; three eggs turned into an equal number of healthy babies finally.

So happy I brought a chair to take some pictures in order to recognise our great effort. The chicks always thought it was their parent wanting to feed them, though that was not my intention, while the real ones were piercing me with their highest pitch, the G10.

Both parties were then busy at making a living in the weekdays.

When weekend returned, the babies were gone.

I should have dressed them up in the first place. A red Super S and a yellow lightning bolt, which one should the bird prefer?

These are my birds I shall shout when these symbols appear.

Beauty is in the eye of a Paranoid

Routine can  blind us, and the day will be filled to the brim with pretty colours when looking from another side- the opposite side of a tree stump this time.

It is not another new perspective offered by little humble mushrooms, just then only a paranoid is capable of intercepting the correct frequency.

The paranoid was once mistaken as a botanist that he would always like to pretend to be. He is a peculiar hiker who never travel without a DSLR. His bows and kneels are a mode of embracing nature up-close.

Mushrooms are weirdly powerful, they  have hypnotized this hiker from the very first day.

"Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock..."  The pendulum is going back and forth.

Pill Millipede

I met a new friend when hiking at Penang Hill. It was thought to be a kind of ball shape of seed initially, but this is its reaction to danger actually.

It is named pill millipede, a not-quite-sweet name. Nobody likes pill.

We were friend finally, because no matter how much I poked or scratched its back, it just kept crawling.

I laid a piece of leaf, wanting it to climb at a small angle aiming to shoot its front view, it always avoided.

Until I had lost my patience, it managed to prove that I did not have the quality of a good photographer.

Only a good friend tells the truth.

A Mushroom in Wonderland

"This here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake." The gardeners told Alice while busily painting the roses red.

This is one mushroom that I have met this morning. I wonder whether it is a brown one that is being painted white.

That is interesting, a white mushroom, as white as Snow White will stand out in the dark forest like a white LED.

Or could brown, the manly brown, be a favourite of the Queen? This Snow White is becoming rugged and down-to-earth.

And no fairy tale to the Queen, for she will scream, "Off with your head! Off----"

Ways to Get Connected

Above the soil, a mushrooms is the fruiting body of a fungus. It serves to spread spores and share local news across oceans. Though short-lived, its spores continue to send radio signals into the air waves.

We get connected.

Below the soil, the vegetative part of a fungus-the mycelium, continues to grow for many years. This branching web, though spread silently and secretly, is as influential as Google.

We get connected again.

We somehow get connected in many ways: in the air, underground or other unnamed channels. 

Life is a weird dream.

Missed Wonders

Life itself is full of wonders, so why stay in a corner waiting for others to come to you?

Oh I am so mistaken not for the first time again. I too believe in my eyes.

My eyes fail to see your spores. They stay afloat in the air and travel high and far.

Until I hike on Sunday morning, your spores have already reached another side of Pacific Ocean.

This is not virtual though a virtual world is not less excited.

Life is full of wonders. We know that. We always miss to intercept them.

Man Complication

Snails act as though they were perceived to follow the instinct of man; same to mushrooms.

Same to man himself.

It is actually no Amazon in snails' Google, mushrooms would never vroom vroom-away and arrive at the galaxy. Behind all these only that one man thinks hikinig, marathon and photography mean everything.

So today mushroom is just an ordinary white fungus that extracts nutrition from its host and provides mineral in return, a simple life only when human complication is absent.

When a snail is a snail, a mushroom is a mushroom, a man can only be a man.

And this one man cannot stop daydreaming until the vessel of his body is shattered.

Funny enough, Google, in the past few years, taught computers how to dream. Computers would then become human being.

Map of Dream

Yesterday builds today's  lush carpet-thick of memory, and the memory extends in tomorrow to become today's dream.

It sounds complicated. This is what has been observed as a waveform of the life of a snail.

A snail moves not in a hurry. Would it travel faster if it knows that the size of Amazon Rainforest is 2.72 million square miles, and there is a river, the Rio Hamza, around 4km underneath the Amazon River?

Everyday is a fascinating eye-opener. A snail would, if it could, it surely would like to aim for a bigger map of dream.

Then, everyday is a full-marathon to the snail.

A little Ant's Inspiration

I shot dairy of little black ants this morning; they spent many hours on moving tonnes of loads, on miles of uphill and downhill, bumpy and slippery jungle trails. Of course, these were all in terms of an ant's units of measurement.

So I kept my eyes wide open because ants age just in a few blinks of human eyes.

These ants seldom stopped for long, which already seemed to be very long to them, to exchange facts and jokes. They continued working hard, learning hard and laughing hard at the same time.

I repeatedly clicked their fast routine. Though I knew none of these pictures could be good, they were a big boost to me.

Because I only have a flat hierarchical pyramid of needs which is as tall as a little ant.

No But Yet So Much

It was a quiet morning in which I spent quiet times taking pictures of quiet mushrooms deep inside a dense quiet forest.

A sense of inner delight and a kind of connection between friends we felt comfortable with.

No talking existed, but yet so much talking occurred.

"I feel your presence." And that's enough. 

"Happy morning, my mushroom."

(Whenever I mention "You are my mushroom", this is an honour.) 

Two Mushrooms

"It's Rumoured that man suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."

"I laughed so loud yesterday."

"How could you be so sad?"

"Life is a thousand times too short; I wanted myself to spin like a ballerina, but it turned up I visualized myself only as a fat top."

"That's a bad reason to laugh."

This creative visualization, in mushroom's terms, is called little daydreams.

Three Dots in Darkness

I have got to think I was lucky.

I did not fall into a mudhole and catch a fish in my back pocket, but I captured three mushrooms in a row which resemble three planets in a dark sky.

Do we have planets other than the shape of a sphere? Do they spin like a ballerina?

Do we have planets that look like a mushroom? To collect them one by one in the galaxy must be as fun as picking them at Cerok Tokun.

Have dream will travel!

Happiness Is ....

Sometimes, happiness means spending a morning together. 

You find me mushrooms, I complete the job by taking their pictures. I check them while winding through vines and roots, you remind me of slippery rocks. I show you what I think are great arts, you appreciate them even without looking at them.

Sometimes, happiness means spending a morning together.  You do the cooking job after a tiring hike, I clean the washroom room, and continue with ironing job.

Sometimes, happiness means spending a morning together in every Sunday.