13.01.09
Luang Prabang – These stories were waiting here. You just need to get here to set them free. If you’d ask, I’d say they were in the river. Talking about this ancient city where last night I dined at the Indochina restaurant, situated prominently on a corner, the former residence of the personal physician to the king, with Luang Prabang already an empire capital for 800 years.
There was live music, seven musicians, all old men, youngest guy in his late sixties, four on Oh-ee, one on balaphone or xylophone, another man on a stringed instrument we’d call a Chinese dulcimer, and a drum. And off on the side, an old lady was playing little hand cymbals, going chinggggg…chink, chinnnng…chink, setting a slow, foot-tapping beat.
They were playing for a group of forty retired Thai teachers from the teacher’s union, all dressed in their finest, having dinner out on a trip to northern Laos. They were from Udon Thani, one of them told me, a short, chubby lady with too much makeup, who had just come off a solo performance to a Traditional Thai melody. She was a pro, and gave her colleagues a beautiful show, the arch of her hand evidencing her many years of practice.
Could her work, like Mozart’s, stand eternal? Would her dance be remembered by her children? Could her art form be appreciated by her grandchildren or those who followed, or was it just for the moment, for her aging colleagues, and me sitting off to the side, watching her slowly trace a precise line through the air with her arched hand, the other hand with thumb and index finger forming a circle, as if on a string, the disciplined and measured step, the bend of her knee in a curtsied dip, her studied grace and synchronized elegance, her beauty.
Those girls start training young, ten, eleven years old, and continue Traditional dance throughout their lives. Not all of them. Some of them turn out to be bar girl whores, trying to hook up with a farang* before they turn thirty, before that magical window of opportunity closes.
In the restaurant, the old ladies and men, too, later, got up and danced a most polished and graceful dance to one of their traditional songs. Their movements were so careful, sweet and beautiful that it brought tears to my eyes. I drained the contents of the wine glass in its entirety.
The Indochina restaurant. That might sound fancy. Not really. Five bucks, and they provided a great table off to the side in the courtyard, where there was a direct view of the band, except for all the asshole photographers from another party of about twenty, a tour group, who kept coming up and obscuring the show, shooting what looked like the best they could do from that perspective, but inadvertently had me looking at the backsides of Europeans periodically throughout the performances.
There was no end to them and their recorders. I tried to focus on my food, which incidentally, wasn’t bad for eating alone. I shared the shrimp with a cat.
The waitress was particularly efficient, but cruel. A grimness that set her firmly within the human race. She too, was doing the best she could do. I made it a point not to provoke her, or to be too demanding. She appeared as though I and the other customers, were annoying to the extreme, and that she could snap at any moment.
Down on the corner of the roundabout that leads to the night market, in front of the tourist information building, there was a group of thirty teens in a circle taking turns throwin’ moves, break dancing on the concrete parking lot surface, throwing incredible moves of strength and balance like you see on TV, to Lao rap music on a small player you could barely hear for all the other noise going on.
‘Trippy,’ I thought, standing there, watching an eleven-year old spin upside down on his shoulders, his hands, the back of his neck, back to his hands, doing some wildass splits moves with his legs, then popped back to his feet and strutted off to the roar of circle. Another kid jumps out.
I saw another kid throwing himself around like that earlier on the smooth concrete surface of the pavilion basketball court, and wondered if that is what the young people in Luang Prabang were doing. Evidently, he wasn’t the only one.
____
This river is amazing.
Like anywhere, if you live there, you take your environment for granted, but maybe not all the time. Maybe that's an overstatement. People come from all over to see where you live. That’s why they say if you’re going to do photography, to do your shooting right after your arrival in a new place, before from your perspective, the unique becomes commonplace.
You don’t see that many Thai at the beach. You don’t see many Lao hanging out down here on the riverfront wall for sunset. After dark, you may see a few couples here and there, another small group, three or four near parked motorbikes, a face aglow from a cell phone display.
You don’t see that many Indians hanging out in the badlands.
One of you wrote back, quoting someone else, a zen philosopher, about eternal gratitude to the past, eternal service to the present, and eternal responsibility to the future. That’s a nice attitude to keep in mind, and a flow like this river. Thank you.
__
‘Standing meditation’, duh…that was the fourth. Standing, sitting, walking, and dreaming.
__
All the farang men here are wearing cargo pants. Almost all. Yeah. It’s the look, I guess, and the comfort, but all those pockets are useless, and it adds unneeded weight to your luggage. I’ve got a pair. The Lao guys wear slacks or blue jeans. The Lao women all wear the traditional black skirt with the big band of colored embroidery at the bottom. Young and old.
You see a few Lao women in blue jeans, but not many. The government has encouraged them to dress 'tradish', as we say on the rez, traditional. The farang women will fall out on the street any old kinda way, and you know it.
I watched one go down the street, thinking, ‘You ought to cover that up, honey.’ Like those European broads going topless down the beaches of Thailand, like they’re in Europe or something. They have no idea of how offensive to Thai culture that is. The Thai men, they love it, sure. The Lao taxi drivers stand in their clusters and stare. You catch them staring, and they just smile.
To go into the temples, you’ve got to cover it all up.
-end
*This may have already been explained. A farang is any non-Asian, used like ‘Wasicu’ in Indian Country. The word derived from Asians trying to say, ‘France’, fuh-rahn-ceh, and so Frenchmen and thereafter, all Europeans and Americans and Australians and everybody white and round-eyed, are farang.
Africans are Aff-ree-kah.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Giving Up The Boat, Giving Up The River
12.01.09
Luang Prabang, Laos- Maybe you’ve heard me talk about my ‘To Do’ list of about a dozen items I carry around in my wallet, encouraging you to do the same, by actually taking the time to sit down, think, and write down the things you hope to accomplish in the next year, or three, or five, including your wildest dreams.
Ten years ago when out of desperation I made my first list, there were some reasonably obtainable immediate short-term objectives, some long-term goals, and some wild-ass dreams, including a winter home in Thailand, a trip to Laos, a motorcycle, and a boat.
From Pine Ridge Indian reservation, ha, it looked like pure fantasy.
Two years after making that list, I had forgotten about it, and removed it from my wallet one day for examination. I was stunned. With the exception of the boat, I had achieved every one of my goals, insignificant as they may be to someone else, but for me…the passport…the VA dental work…taking son to Africa…going to see Laos, the ‘other side of the mountain’ from Vietnam…establishing a winter home on the reservation. Even the motorcycle!
This isn’t a boast. Like everything in life, I had the help of others, but I was amazed that I had done them all, and their attainment required construction of a new universe, the creation of a new list, with ‘continue sun dancing’ at the top.
Words have power, like you already know, especially if you’ve ever had to eat them, and like it says in the Good Book, Genesis, I think…‘In the beginning, there was the Word,’and God spoke the heavens and the earth into existence, if I was paying half-attention in that frightening church that everybody said could fall down on us, but I might have been sleeping.
And like they often say in Indian Country and elsewhere, ‘You have to watch what you pray for – you just might get it.’
But please allow me to encourage you to pull your goals from the ether, the abstract, and your mind, and begin the process of actualizing them by bringing them to earth, first in written form in your purse or wallet, and then by carrying them out, right here in the real 3DWorld.
The very process of writing helps to formulate and construct your goals, or perhaps to discover that you have none. Can we go through life without any?
It’s magical! It works! See for yourself. I’m working on my fourth list, with a little carry-over, like ‘UXO story’, and scratching off a couple items that were no longer applicable, or desired, like the boat, something I had dreamed about for years.
I always thought it would be nice to own a boat, a big boat, but not too big, something I could manage by myself if I had to, big enough to live on, big enough to house three or four couples, and big enough to handle the ocean, but not too big. I see…two sails…one big one…one little one.
Not so big you’d need a crew, and not so big I couldn’t afford it. Something like fifty or sixty feet, maybe a hurricane-damaged fixer-upper insurance company write-off, something short of Noah’s Ark.
That’s what I saw as a possibility in my mind…going in and out of ports around the world, taking a evening stroll on streets in Italy, south of France, Port Au Prince, the islands, dining at fine restaurants.
And then you could sit around with a whole new group of people at dinner, with the right look about yourself, a small fish when-it-comes-to-sailing crowd, and talk yourself up, do one-upmanship, about the ports you’d entered, and the oceans you’d sailed, and the scenes and seas you’d seen, your ego swelled with pride in a self-delusional satisfaction, as good as the wine. Burying your inferiority, you’d become a member of the club.
After taking a short Andaman Sea cruise with a group of tsunami volunteers and the four-man crew who operated the sailboat and had been on the Indian Ocean for five years, I relinquished my desire to become a sailor.
First of all, it costs a fortune to purchase, and another fortune to operate. “Just like a house,” said the captain of the vessel. “Constant maintenance.”
Well, there is a reason we have legs and lungs, and not fins and gills. And can you imagine being at sea with someone you couldn’t tolerate? If not your mate, then, another member of the party.
“I’m going forward.”
“Then I’ll go aft.”
You go above, I’ll stay below. Christ. Why put yourself through something like that?
‘Well, when they left the harbor, they were…’ fill in the blank…best friends, best mates, in love, married, laughing, engaged, enraged, on their honeymoon, latent homocidal.
In an intense situation like that, a person could get to know themselves pretty quickly, if self growth is what you were after, but such is often not the case. Nooo. To the contrary. They were expecting a fun-filled two-week getaway in the Canaries.
When I asked if they occasionally put into port and take a room in a hotel, the owner simply said, “No. The boat is our home.”
That brief trip on the sea taught me one thing; maybe I didn’t need a boat, after all, and two; when you go to sea, do so with an experienced crew, and three, know your traveling companions well.
‘That Captain Ahab is getting’ on my LAST nerve.’
There’s going to be at least one asshole on board, you can bet. Maybe two. Maybe the whole fucking crew. Ever see a pirate movie?
Rong Po Thuot can protect you from a fatal accident, but he cannot protect you from your own negligence or stupidity.
And besides that, why?
Well, why not? Look at what people spend on a house! And a car. Why not a boat?
I think it was somebody on the reservation in South Dakota who asked, “Where you going to sail it, bro?”
After a long pause, I finally blurted, “In the WATER!”
___
Well, maybe you wouldn’t have to sail it ANYWHERE. Maybe you could park it. Say it isn’t a sailboat, going to ports all over the world. Say it’s a houseboat, parked somewhere. You could be a boat people, a boat person. You’d be boat people.
Not like refugees, but you know, like, people who live on a boat, a houseboat.
___
The other item on my long-term list, being transferred over from one list to the next, was a trip down the Mekong River. I envisioned getting on board somewhere on the Tibetan plateau and drifting with the flow downriver through six countries to the delta in Vietnam.
Wouldn’t that be cool? I thought so, too, but after going upriver for just a couple of hours, and after hearing people talk of their two-day trip out of Thailand to here, has caused me to re-think the whole plan. After about twenty minutes, the trip becomes terribly monotonous, even going with the flow.
The guy who made the trip and wrote a book about it, I can’t remember his name…the book was tedious, and in small print, besides, and he said the trip was, too.
Even the half-hour visa run trip across the water to Myanmar is a drag after you’ve made it twice. People say, “I’ve got a visa run tomorrow,” like it was a trip to the dentist for a wisdom tooth extraction.
Down below this riverfront restaurant, boatmen are at work with saws and planers, refurbishing a houseboat, piles of lumber at the water’s edge. Sawdust all over the place, a narrow wooden plank from the mud to the ‘gunwhale’? shit, I don’t know…to the side of the boat. Can you see it, or not?
The noise they’re making with that planer are just like the guys with the power saws across the street, and more, on up the street at three different locations, and all over town, like someone is getting ready for something. Next year, and thereafter. Whatsthis? Year of the ox.
__
Just downriver, on the sea wall, awaiting the sunset, following a private session and tuning of my newly purchased ‘Oh-ee’ by the old man, who told me he’d be playing at the Indo-china restaurant tonight. 12 US dollars at the antique musical instruments shop.
Well, sure, they’re probably not antiques…but they are authentic hill tribes instruments, nonetheless. I had been reluctant to purchase one on two previous trips, wondering how I was going to get it home without having it destroyed in transit.
Three fishermen in a fifteen-foot flat bottom boat drifted by and vanished for a few seconds, cutting into the laser glare reflection of a late afternoon sun hovering just above the mountains, glistening brilliantly in a diagonal streak across the water. A couple seconds later, they emerged on the other side, enveloped in a glowing corona, trailing a golden wake, my pupils white hot and constricted.
The sun drops behind the mountain.
-end
Luang Prabang, Laos- Maybe you’ve heard me talk about my ‘To Do’ list of about a dozen items I carry around in my wallet, encouraging you to do the same, by actually taking the time to sit down, think, and write down the things you hope to accomplish in the next year, or three, or five, including your wildest dreams.
Ten years ago when out of desperation I made my first list, there were some reasonably obtainable immediate short-term objectives, some long-term goals, and some wild-ass dreams, including a winter home in Thailand, a trip to Laos, a motorcycle, and a boat.
From Pine Ridge Indian reservation, ha, it looked like pure fantasy.
Two years after making that list, I had forgotten about it, and removed it from my wallet one day for examination. I was stunned. With the exception of the boat, I had achieved every one of my goals, insignificant as they may be to someone else, but for me…the passport…the VA dental work…taking son to Africa…going to see Laos, the ‘other side of the mountain’ from Vietnam…establishing a winter home on the reservation. Even the motorcycle!
This isn’t a boast. Like everything in life, I had the help of others, but I was amazed that I had done them all, and their attainment required construction of a new universe, the creation of a new list, with ‘continue sun dancing’ at the top.
Words have power, like you already know, especially if you’ve ever had to eat them, and like it says in the Good Book, Genesis, I think…‘In the beginning, there was the Word,’and God spoke the heavens and the earth into existence, if I was paying half-attention in that frightening church that everybody said could fall down on us, but I might have been sleeping.
And like they often say in Indian Country and elsewhere, ‘You have to watch what you pray for – you just might get it.’
But please allow me to encourage you to pull your goals from the ether, the abstract, and your mind, and begin the process of actualizing them by bringing them to earth, first in written form in your purse or wallet, and then by carrying them out, right here in the real 3DWorld.
The very process of writing helps to formulate and construct your goals, or perhaps to discover that you have none. Can we go through life without any?
It’s magical! It works! See for yourself. I’m working on my fourth list, with a little carry-over, like ‘UXO story’, and scratching off a couple items that were no longer applicable, or desired, like the boat, something I had dreamed about for years.
I always thought it would be nice to own a boat, a big boat, but not too big, something I could manage by myself if I had to, big enough to live on, big enough to house three or four couples, and big enough to handle the ocean, but not too big. I see…two sails…one big one…one little one.
Not so big you’d need a crew, and not so big I couldn’t afford it. Something like fifty or sixty feet, maybe a hurricane-damaged fixer-upper insurance company write-off, something short of Noah’s Ark.
That’s what I saw as a possibility in my mind…going in and out of ports around the world, taking a evening stroll on streets in Italy, south of France, Port Au Prince, the islands, dining at fine restaurants.
And then you could sit around with a whole new group of people at dinner, with the right look about yourself, a small fish when-it-comes-to-sailing crowd, and talk yourself up, do one-upmanship, about the ports you’d entered, and the oceans you’d sailed, and the scenes and seas you’d seen, your ego swelled with pride in a self-delusional satisfaction, as good as the wine. Burying your inferiority, you’d become a member of the club.
After taking a short Andaman Sea cruise with a group of tsunami volunteers and the four-man crew who operated the sailboat and had been on the Indian Ocean for five years, I relinquished my desire to become a sailor.
First of all, it costs a fortune to purchase, and another fortune to operate. “Just like a house,” said the captain of the vessel. “Constant maintenance.”
Well, there is a reason we have legs and lungs, and not fins and gills. And can you imagine being at sea with someone you couldn’t tolerate? If not your mate, then, another member of the party.
“I’m going forward.”
“Then I’ll go aft.”
You go above, I’ll stay below. Christ. Why put yourself through something like that?
‘Well, when they left the harbor, they were…’ fill in the blank…best friends, best mates, in love, married, laughing, engaged, enraged, on their honeymoon, latent homocidal.
In an intense situation like that, a person could get to know themselves pretty quickly, if self growth is what you were after, but such is often not the case. Nooo. To the contrary. They were expecting a fun-filled two-week getaway in the Canaries.
When I asked if they occasionally put into port and take a room in a hotel, the owner simply said, “No. The boat is our home.”
That brief trip on the sea taught me one thing; maybe I didn’t need a boat, after all, and two; when you go to sea, do so with an experienced crew, and three, know your traveling companions well.
‘That Captain Ahab is getting’ on my LAST nerve.’
There’s going to be at least one asshole on board, you can bet. Maybe two. Maybe the whole fucking crew. Ever see a pirate movie?
Rong Po Thuot can protect you from a fatal accident, but he cannot protect you from your own negligence or stupidity.
And besides that, why?
Well, why not? Look at what people spend on a house! And a car. Why not a boat?
I think it was somebody on the reservation in South Dakota who asked, “Where you going to sail it, bro?”
After a long pause, I finally blurted, “In the WATER!”
___
Well, maybe you wouldn’t have to sail it ANYWHERE. Maybe you could park it. Say it isn’t a sailboat, going to ports all over the world. Say it’s a houseboat, parked somewhere. You could be a boat people, a boat person. You’d be boat people.
Not like refugees, but you know, like, people who live on a boat, a houseboat.
___
The other item on my long-term list, being transferred over from one list to the next, was a trip down the Mekong River. I envisioned getting on board somewhere on the Tibetan plateau and drifting with the flow downriver through six countries to the delta in Vietnam.
Wouldn’t that be cool? I thought so, too, but after going upriver for just a couple of hours, and after hearing people talk of their two-day trip out of Thailand to here, has caused me to re-think the whole plan. After about twenty minutes, the trip becomes terribly monotonous, even going with the flow.
The guy who made the trip and wrote a book about it, I can’t remember his name…the book was tedious, and in small print, besides, and he said the trip was, too.
Even the half-hour visa run trip across the water to Myanmar is a drag after you’ve made it twice. People say, “I’ve got a visa run tomorrow,” like it was a trip to the dentist for a wisdom tooth extraction.
Down below this riverfront restaurant, boatmen are at work with saws and planers, refurbishing a houseboat, piles of lumber at the water’s edge. Sawdust all over the place, a narrow wooden plank from the mud to the ‘gunwhale’? shit, I don’t know…to the side of the boat. Can you see it, or not?
The noise they’re making with that planer are just like the guys with the power saws across the street, and more, on up the street at three different locations, and all over town, like someone is getting ready for something. Next year, and thereafter. Whatsthis? Year of the ox.
__
Just downriver, on the sea wall, awaiting the sunset, following a private session and tuning of my newly purchased ‘Oh-ee’ by the old man, who told me he’d be playing at the Indo-china restaurant tonight. 12 US dollars at the antique musical instruments shop.
Well, sure, they’re probably not antiques…but they are authentic hill tribes instruments, nonetheless. I had been reluctant to purchase one on two previous trips, wondering how I was going to get it home without having it destroyed in transit.
Three fishermen in a fifteen-foot flat bottom boat drifted by and vanished for a few seconds, cutting into the laser glare reflection of a late afternoon sun hovering just above the mountains, glistening brilliantly in a diagonal streak across the water. A couple seconds later, they emerged on the other side, enveloped in a glowing corona, trailing a golden wake, my pupils white hot and constricted.
The sun drops behind the mountain.
-end
Monday, January 12, 2009
Moon Over Mekong
12.01.09
Luang Prabang, Laos - The full moon was lighting up the Mekong, hazy in the cool mountain air, so bright you could easily see the short fishing boats at the bank, and shapes and outlines of houseboats moored downriver, distant lights on down there, civilization carved out of mountainous jungle.
An imposing black mass silhouette of a mountain sloping down to the river is directly across the river. The distant view to the north, and downriver and to the west are misty shades of gradations of gray, with outlines of successive mountain ridges folding into one another, reminding one of the remote inaccessibility of this city and the people here.
One of the things that was drawing me to this place was the search for the ‘Oh-ee’ player, the old man playing outside the high whitewashed wall of the national gallery. As we sat on the Mt. Phousi plaza a year ago, high above the street, he played a haunting folk melody on the two-stringed Lao instrument that I wanted to hear again.
Tonight, as I was walking home, I heard someone playing short strains and a few scattered notes, and followed the sound. I stood outside his house while he practiced for a few minutes, then played a four or five minute traditional song, a private unspoken request from a one-person audience, standing quietly out on the street.
There, Bryan. I found him.
Found the silversmiths, too. It’s like a factory down there.
____
Noi On The Court
It was the motivation of a rematch, after the drubbing with the Canadian team at the hands of Noi and her Lao all-girl teammates, average height about, I don’t know, five foot two?..four foot eight?...they come up to about…here…on me…they’re short.
Really short. But nonetheless, they whipped us, they said, 10-9 in the first game, and more soundly in the second. 10 and they didn’t say, something like 10-6 or 10-5, maybe 10-4. It was bad, embarrassing.
A couple days ago I suggested maybe half-court, something like 3 on 3, so today we went to a concrete court inside a big pavilion, but there were a bunch of guys there who wanted to use it for soccer, or ‘football’ to them and the rest of the world, so we went to another outdoor court…of course she would know where all the courts were…
Anyway, I just learned on the court today, shooting around, Noi, the ace Luang Prabang Women’s team point guard, turns out to be the tournament MVP, she said, probably the best woman player in all of Laos, playing against ‘the guys’ all her life, she said, cashing ‘em from behind the three point line…a couple feet behind the three point line, as I fed rebounds and shot around with her and her teammate, whose name I just never got.
My shit was rusty, rreallly rusty after two years on the comedy tour, thinking, ‘Shut down her right, overplay the right. Make her use her left hand. Don’t give her the outside shot. Make her put it on the floor and throw up that circus shit down in the paint,’ and then thinking…especially after attempting a lay up, maybe on these knees I’d better forget all about one-on-one.
The girl was phenomenal, and so was her teammate, the wing guard in a 1-2-2 offense.
She said there were six teams in the tournament They won the championship in 2005, and again this year. The tournament was just last week. She was at the top of her game. I was glad they were content with just shooting around with an old man in flip flops.
___
Jacques, who I ran into coincidentally for the third time, said at the streetside vegetarian buffet, where we sat together, “They (the Lao) are so simple. They don’t bother with…the…with the…”
“Philosophy,” I interjected.
“Yes, yes,” he laughed. They are not complex.”
“That’s why they’re always smiling and laughing,” I added.
“Yes!” said Jacques. “They are happy.”
I had asked Olay if he knew what was happening in Gaza, with the Israelis, and he said no.
DAMN! Someone should kick my ass off this seawall. Sat here absorbed into those last couple of graphs of dialogue, eyes affixed to the keyboard, and MISSED THE SUNSET!
It is still nice, but I wanted to catch it going down over the edge of the mountain.
Sitting on the seawall.
Many people in Asia smoke. Everybody but R.J. Renolds and Phillip Morris says it’s a problem. I met a little kid, about seven, on the bamboo bridge yesterday, and HE was smoking. I gave him hell…but in a good way…even though I had a pack in my pocket. Hypocritical, right? Sure, but he’s just a kid, and I’m old man, raised when Lucky Strikes were fine tobacco.
It was New Year’s Eve and they had a party for the staff and guests in the lobby. The husband of the wife running the place was in the lobby, firing one up. She said something to him, then turned to me shaking her head, expressing, ‘He’s a hopeless case.”
He turned, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, laughing and said, “Smoking – and drinking - It’s good for your health.”
Man, it gets quiet fast here. They roll up the streets at 8 p.m., retiring with the monks, then getting up to feed them. It’s quite simple.
You don’t need eyes in the back of your head to know what is going on behind you. You can pick it up in reflections. You can see it in the eyes of others.
___
It wasn’t St. Peter at the gate, but a scoundrel dog. “Do you recognize me?” he asked. “Do you remember me?”
“You sat with your plate heaped full, and I approached you pitifully, ribs showing, begging warily, uncertain of you. Would you toss me a rib bone?
“Did you ever wonder why they always said I was your best friend? I was beside you during your darkest hour, in your lowest moment. I was your best listener, your only confidant. Did you ever wonder why, in your language, that dog spelled backwards, is ‘god’? Do you remember that God can work in mysterious ways?”
“I approached you without certainty, your plate overflowing. Would you toss me a bone? Your plate overflowing. Would you shoo me away?”
-end
Luang Prabang, Laos - The full moon was lighting up the Mekong, hazy in the cool mountain air, so bright you could easily see the short fishing boats at the bank, and shapes and outlines of houseboats moored downriver, distant lights on down there, civilization carved out of mountainous jungle.
An imposing black mass silhouette of a mountain sloping down to the river is directly across the river. The distant view to the north, and downriver and to the west are misty shades of gradations of gray, with outlines of successive mountain ridges folding into one another, reminding one of the remote inaccessibility of this city and the people here.
One of the things that was drawing me to this place was the search for the ‘Oh-ee’ player, the old man playing outside the high whitewashed wall of the national gallery. As we sat on the Mt. Phousi plaza a year ago, high above the street, he played a haunting folk melody on the two-stringed Lao instrument that I wanted to hear again.
Tonight, as I was walking home, I heard someone playing short strains and a few scattered notes, and followed the sound. I stood outside his house while he practiced for a few minutes, then played a four or five minute traditional song, a private unspoken request from a one-person audience, standing quietly out on the street.
There, Bryan. I found him.
Found the silversmiths, too. It’s like a factory down there.
____
Noi On The Court
It was the motivation of a rematch, after the drubbing with the Canadian team at the hands of Noi and her Lao all-girl teammates, average height about, I don’t know, five foot two?..four foot eight?...they come up to about…here…on me…they’re short.
Really short. But nonetheless, they whipped us, they said, 10-9 in the first game, and more soundly in the second. 10 and they didn’t say, something like 10-6 or 10-5, maybe 10-4. It was bad, embarrassing.
A couple days ago I suggested maybe half-court, something like 3 on 3, so today we went to a concrete court inside a big pavilion, but there were a bunch of guys there who wanted to use it for soccer, or ‘football’ to them and the rest of the world, so we went to another outdoor court…of course she would know where all the courts were…
Anyway, I just learned on the court today, shooting around, Noi, the ace Luang Prabang Women’s team point guard, turns out to be the tournament MVP, she said, probably the best woman player in all of Laos, playing against ‘the guys’ all her life, she said, cashing ‘em from behind the three point line…a couple feet behind the three point line, as I fed rebounds and shot around with her and her teammate, whose name I just never got.
My shit was rusty, rreallly rusty after two years on the comedy tour, thinking, ‘Shut down her right, overplay the right. Make her use her left hand. Don’t give her the outside shot. Make her put it on the floor and throw up that circus shit down in the paint,’ and then thinking…especially after attempting a lay up, maybe on these knees I’d better forget all about one-on-one.
The girl was phenomenal, and so was her teammate, the wing guard in a 1-2-2 offense.
She said there were six teams in the tournament They won the championship in 2005, and again this year. The tournament was just last week. She was at the top of her game. I was glad they were content with just shooting around with an old man in flip flops.
___
Jacques, who I ran into coincidentally for the third time, said at the streetside vegetarian buffet, where we sat together, “They (the Lao) are so simple. They don’t bother with…the…with the…”
“Philosophy,” I interjected.
“Yes, yes,” he laughed. They are not complex.”
“That’s why they’re always smiling and laughing,” I added.
“Yes!” said Jacques. “They are happy.”
I had asked Olay if he knew what was happening in Gaza, with the Israelis, and he said no.
DAMN! Someone should kick my ass off this seawall. Sat here absorbed into those last couple of graphs of dialogue, eyes affixed to the keyboard, and MISSED THE SUNSET!
It is still nice, but I wanted to catch it going down over the edge of the mountain.
Sitting on the seawall.
Many people in Asia smoke. Everybody but R.J. Renolds and Phillip Morris says it’s a problem. I met a little kid, about seven, on the bamboo bridge yesterday, and HE was smoking. I gave him hell…but in a good way…even though I had a pack in my pocket. Hypocritical, right? Sure, but he’s just a kid, and I’m old man, raised when Lucky Strikes were fine tobacco.
It was New Year’s Eve and they had a party for the staff and guests in the lobby. The husband of the wife running the place was in the lobby, firing one up. She said something to him, then turned to me shaking her head, expressing, ‘He’s a hopeless case.”
He turned, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, laughing and said, “Smoking – and drinking - It’s good for your health.”
Man, it gets quiet fast here. They roll up the streets at 8 p.m., retiring with the monks, then getting up to feed them. It’s quite simple.
You don’t need eyes in the back of your head to know what is going on behind you. You can pick it up in reflections. You can see it in the eyes of others.
___
It wasn’t St. Peter at the gate, but a scoundrel dog. “Do you recognize me?” he asked. “Do you remember me?”
“You sat with your plate heaped full, and I approached you pitifully, ribs showing, begging warily, uncertain of you. Would you toss me a rib bone?
“Did you ever wonder why they always said I was your best friend? I was beside you during your darkest hour, in your lowest moment. I was your best listener, your only confidant. Did you ever wonder why, in your language, that dog spelled backwards, is ‘god’? Do you remember that God can work in mysterious ways?”
“I approached you without certainty, your plate overflowing. Would you toss me a bone? Your plate overflowing. Would you shoo me away?”
-end
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Just By Coincidence
08.01.09
Luang Prabang, Laos - Just by coincidence, Olay, my monk friend appeared across the street just as I was leaving my dinner table last night, magically materializing just as he had the previous day, just by coincidence, as I was leaving the coffee shop, and yet again as he coincidentally had last night, standing at the top of the temple stairs with a group of fellow monks, awaiting an evening English lesson. Nobody set any times for these encounters.
“I was just thinking about you,” I said, crossing the market intersection.
Today is a Buddhist holiday, and they will all have their heads shaved. “How will I be able to recognize you?” I asked as we sat on concrete benches around a concrete table, and they all laughed. At the end of our class, I asked them if they liked life at the temple, and the said they did.
In this city, there are 48 temples, putting a distinctive imprint, the Buddha’s if you will,* upon the city and its atmosphere, and putting a lot of monks out on the street. Monks are everywhere. The place is thick with them.
Luang Prabang is a city with a rich and deep spiritual tradition, sitting here on the Mekong, nestled within the mountains carved out by the river. It is breathtakingly beautiful, and I have been here several times, and never brought a camera.
As a photographer, as everybody in the world with a cell phone these days is…as a photographer for forty years, it is wonderful to capture an image and share it with others as a visual art or memory, but sometimes you go into places such as here and the rez, and it’s best to leave the cameras at home.
Learning to capture an image through a viewfinder, reducing three dimensions to two, can foster paying attention to the world, but it can also be reductive and constrictive in a way of viewing the world.
Whereas the photo is an opportunity to seize a moment in time, it can also hamper one’s ability to fully experience that moment in its entirety, making instead the photographer the captive, seized by the image.
I stopped carrying cameras, as a daily habit, about fifteen years ago, maybe going on twenty. They can be terribly intrusive, and sometimes serve to impede, rather than aid communication and perception, seeing the world through a viewfinder.
You’ll just have to capture that sunset in your mind. Like, really pay attention to all that is there, fully engaged and absorbed by the moment in time.
At the New Year’s fireworks in Vientiane, which is a big show, given that it is the nation’s capital, and the birth of gunpowder is just up the street, dozens of people with a grand view from a second floor balcony across the street stood, arms extended with cell phone cameras, transmitting the dazzling show to families in the sticks, while I stood empty handed, engrossed with awe.
____
I’m sitting here on a low seawall running the length of the riverfront, overlooking the river. Except for this and a few other open stretches of one hundred yards, the parallel street is full of riverside restaurants on stilts, across from mostly guesthouses, and a few personal properties, a few vacant lots, and a few lots of rubble. There are boatmen selling tours up and down the river in small boats, longer covered boats with deck seating, and big houseboats.
On the street, dozens of vendors sell oranges on the ground in large quantities, their scales right there. A man had a truckload of goats he was trying to sell. Tuk tuks seem to have blossomed a hundred-fold in two years. Mini van shuttles to the airport work from dawn until arrivals of the last flights of the day, then return to the hotels and guesthouses.
I’m amazed at how tourism has swamped this place. UNESCO declared the entire city a heritage site, thus all the new construction everywhere, in a distinctively traditional Lao, but sadly repetitious architectural boredom. They’ve been fully booked for weeks. Solid with tourists. People are making their money while they can, because there’s a low season, as well, for sure.
A guy just made arrangements for personal tutoring tomorrow at five, and four young Lao, two guys and two girls, about, oh, sixteen, are sitting just here to my right, talking and laughing. They’ve all got bicycles.
There’s trash and plastic strewn around, leading downhill to a pole bean patch, and on down to the river and a half dozen flat bottom fishing boats, about twelve feet long. I should find out what these guys catch.
There’s six Lao men in a twenty-foot boat with a large basket puttering by, downstream, close to the shore. I should ask these kids…they don’t speak English.
A Frenchman, an old one, like the one who sat across from me at the intersection buffet, would tell a different story. “I was here twenty years ago, and it’s not the same. I don’t like the cit-tie any more,” he said. You can hear his French accent.
“Nothing is the same as it was twenty years ago,” I responded. “You’re not the same man you were twenty years ago. Want to arm wrestle?”
We all had a good laugh, him and the two from New York, just outside the city, they said, sitting just at the next table. She had to know everything, and quickly told her story, their story, while he pretty much just sat there with his arms folded across his chest, and let her do the talking. Most of it.
He did, engage the Frenchman, however. They had been to France a couple of times, and enjoyed excitedly talking about a shared familiarity and the cities he knew. Butofcourse.
Wow. Those kids, law students, they said, just left, after a very limited conversation. They used what little English they knew, and what little Thai I know to tell me the fishermen are catching little fish. And the one who approached me, stood here over my shoulder during the composition of the last two graphs, then his friends came over.
They are studying basic conversational English, no doubt from a Lao teacher, using the same Lao/English grammar book that I told Olay he should throw away. I took one look at it, and it already gave me a headache.
“Learn to communicate first,” I suggested, then add reading and writing, and then the complex rules of grammar.” Maybe that’s not right, but it seems like it, at street level.
How about you? Did you find joy in grammar class?
Like one of my last classes, at Digger’s suggestion, I employed art, and Mickey Mouse stickers for completion of a simple assignment, using conversational English. That’s what they wanted. ‘How can I communicate with the farang?’
‘Where are you from? How long will you stay? Where are you going? What is your name?’And enunciation, mostly.
____
Baby Balance
The reason you never see Asian people in motorbike accidents is because they’ve been riding them all their lives.
You see the mom or dad, driving one-handed with the baby in their lap in a one-armed hug, baby can’t even hold its head up yet. Trying, but cannot.
From there, they go to sitting on the seat itself, in front of the parent, between the parent’s knees, and then, learning to stand on the frame and grasp the mirrors as soon as they are old enough to stand, but still unable to walk.
As soon as they can hold on without falling off, about the time they are walking, they sit behind the parent, tightly grasping the parent’s clothing, and from there, they go to riding to school with three other bigger kids, and from there, to driving the bike itself. So, by the time they gain control of the bike, they’ve already had a lifetime in the saddle.
____
10.01.09
Just by coincidence, I ran into the Frenchman, Jacques, last night, where the 78 year-old man was in an animated conversation with one of the Lao staff there. I just wanted to sit riverside, watch a full moon come up, and for reason to be there, ordered a beer Lao I didn’t want and took a seat at one of the tables.
Jacques broke off his conversation, approached, and we both said, “I had dinner with you last night.”
For the next hour, and I finally had to break it off because I needed to go find a place to piss, I listened to Jacques pretty much berate America for over-consumption, pollution, producing worthless consumer products, pursuing a war for control of oil, torture, and general debasement of water and the environment.
I wanted to have a smoke, too, but he was against that, too.
Yeah, at one point it seemed his criticism of my country was a bit over the top, and during a pause I softly asked, “Jacques, where did they develop the internal combustion engine?” y’know, just to put the breaks on a runaway train, but I couldn’t really argue with him, for two reasons; one, because what he was saying was true; and two, I couldn’t knock him out because after all, he was a 78-year old man.
I just sat there, listening, mostly, although he was a good listener as well, and two thirds of the way through one of those Beer Lao bigs, I had to excuse myself for the evening. To his credit, he was concerned primarily about the environment, and what kind of earth we are leaving to our grandchildren.
___
I’m sitting in the dirt, just above a washout, ten feet above the Nam Khan River, just upriver from its intersection with the Mekong, the junction of which is the foundation for this ancient city. I’m on the far side, having paid the nickel to cross the bamboo footbridge. The two New Yorkers said it was a worthwhile trip.
Four kids came running down the embankment, terraced with private plots of corn and greens, leading right down to the water. One of them could say ‘Hello, how are you?’ grinning, shaking my hand. Today is the second day of the Buddhist holiday, of which there are four a month, following lunar cycles, so there’s no sa-kool, no school.
Sitting here along the footpath, I’m almost in their way. Two, then three fishermen came through here, each grinning a greeting, and I had to make sure my big feet weren’t in the way. Yeah…there’s a washout RIGHT HERE…but these guys in their flip-flops are as sure-footed as mountain goats.
A five-man crew, using only long bamboo poles for steering, just floated by in a rudderless 60 ft. flat bottom boat, carrying three Lao passengers, one of the men wearing a green pith helmet, going with the flow. They’re going to hit big water, right around the bend. There is a fisherman just below me, bailing water from his short boat. He said something to them as they floated by. He grins and we exchange greetings as he comes up the footpath. I’m making sure my big feet aren’t in the way.
Regular flights roar in and out of the airstrip, cascading a wave of momentarily overwhelming twin-turboprop noise. Lao Airlines. You can be from the airport and at your accommodations in ten minutes, maybe five. All kinds of Air America and Royal Lao Air Force guys crashed into these mountains back in the day, where the fog doesn’t lift until ten, sometimes noon, sometimes not at all, some days. This is peak season. The place is packed with farang. Blue skies.
You really have to resist not buying a beautiful hand-woven scarf for a sun dance sister for five bucks, especially if you’re the first customer of the day and they’d sell it for four.
___
Went over to the wat last night at the invitation of Olay, who said he’d be playing the drum at 4 pm, first watching the bigger boys hitting the drum at the adjacent wat, Huongxieng, which is right there on the same grounds, then over at wat That Noy where Olay and some of my English class were hitting the big booming drum, sending the sound out over the city, each novice taking a turn until their arms could no longer keep up the beat. Some of them could switch hands, hitting the drum twice on a downswing, and a light brush stroke on the upswing, accompanied by a guy standing there playing large hand cymbals, keeping the beat.
Afterward, we met for an hour of class, just talking mostly, but stopping them on their pronunciation, getting them to use what they knew, and to continue to develop their vocabulary, like two of them already were, like the quiet guy, intellectual type, who has mastered ‘R’, and showed me his incredible list of words, many of which we were using.
The young boys had only been at the wat for two or three months, the older guys, two, three, four years. I encouraged the older guys to encourage the younger guys, in their English development, and life, like big brother.
I enjoy being English teacher with monk. Those guys are amazing in their discipline, open hearts, and clarity.
“Any luck? Any luck today? Chok dee wan ni mai?”
Just now, those two fishermen came up the embankment, grinning and showing me their catch of small silver river fish, in a small woven basket with a conical lid. There you have it. Little fish.
-end
*One of several Bhuddas footprints, atop Mt. Phousi temple, overlooking the city. More like, on the way up…or way down. I think there’s more than one, like, his relics are said to be in stupas everywhere. In any case, there’s some promotion about it…’see Bhudda’s footprint.’ I checked it out, and…gee, it’s anybody’s guess…like looking at a cloud and saying, ‘I see an eagle.’
I asked the Lao guy, a tour guide I think, with a farang customer, sitting here at the restaurant where I’m now editing the above essay, a tour guide I think, with a farang, “Buddha didn’t climb Mt. Phousi, did he?” and he just laughed.
Luang Prabang, Laos - Just by coincidence, Olay, my monk friend appeared across the street just as I was leaving my dinner table last night, magically materializing just as he had the previous day, just by coincidence, as I was leaving the coffee shop, and yet again as he coincidentally had last night, standing at the top of the temple stairs with a group of fellow monks, awaiting an evening English lesson. Nobody set any times for these encounters.
“I was just thinking about you,” I said, crossing the market intersection.
Today is a Buddhist holiday, and they will all have their heads shaved. “How will I be able to recognize you?” I asked as we sat on concrete benches around a concrete table, and they all laughed. At the end of our class, I asked them if they liked life at the temple, and the said they did.
In this city, there are 48 temples, putting a distinctive imprint, the Buddha’s if you will,* upon the city and its atmosphere, and putting a lot of monks out on the street. Monks are everywhere. The place is thick with them.
Luang Prabang is a city with a rich and deep spiritual tradition, sitting here on the Mekong, nestled within the mountains carved out by the river. It is breathtakingly beautiful, and I have been here several times, and never brought a camera.
As a photographer, as everybody in the world with a cell phone these days is…as a photographer for forty years, it is wonderful to capture an image and share it with others as a visual art or memory, but sometimes you go into places such as here and the rez, and it’s best to leave the cameras at home.
Learning to capture an image through a viewfinder, reducing three dimensions to two, can foster paying attention to the world, but it can also be reductive and constrictive in a way of viewing the world.
Whereas the photo is an opportunity to seize a moment in time, it can also hamper one’s ability to fully experience that moment in its entirety, making instead the photographer the captive, seized by the image.
I stopped carrying cameras, as a daily habit, about fifteen years ago, maybe going on twenty. They can be terribly intrusive, and sometimes serve to impede, rather than aid communication and perception, seeing the world through a viewfinder.
You’ll just have to capture that sunset in your mind. Like, really pay attention to all that is there, fully engaged and absorbed by the moment in time.
At the New Year’s fireworks in Vientiane, which is a big show, given that it is the nation’s capital, and the birth of gunpowder is just up the street, dozens of people with a grand view from a second floor balcony across the street stood, arms extended with cell phone cameras, transmitting the dazzling show to families in the sticks, while I stood empty handed, engrossed with awe.
____
I’m sitting here on a low seawall running the length of the riverfront, overlooking the river. Except for this and a few other open stretches of one hundred yards, the parallel street is full of riverside restaurants on stilts, across from mostly guesthouses, and a few personal properties, a few vacant lots, and a few lots of rubble. There are boatmen selling tours up and down the river in small boats, longer covered boats with deck seating, and big houseboats.
On the street, dozens of vendors sell oranges on the ground in large quantities, their scales right there. A man had a truckload of goats he was trying to sell. Tuk tuks seem to have blossomed a hundred-fold in two years. Mini van shuttles to the airport work from dawn until arrivals of the last flights of the day, then return to the hotels and guesthouses.
I’m amazed at how tourism has swamped this place. UNESCO declared the entire city a heritage site, thus all the new construction everywhere, in a distinctively traditional Lao, but sadly repetitious architectural boredom. They’ve been fully booked for weeks. Solid with tourists. People are making their money while they can, because there’s a low season, as well, for sure.
A guy just made arrangements for personal tutoring tomorrow at five, and four young Lao, two guys and two girls, about, oh, sixteen, are sitting just here to my right, talking and laughing. They’ve all got bicycles.
There’s trash and plastic strewn around, leading downhill to a pole bean patch, and on down to the river and a half dozen flat bottom fishing boats, about twelve feet long. I should find out what these guys catch.
There’s six Lao men in a twenty-foot boat with a large basket puttering by, downstream, close to the shore. I should ask these kids…they don’t speak English.
A Frenchman, an old one, like the one who sat across from me at the intersection buffet, would tell a different story. “I was here twenty years ago, and it’s not the same. I don’t like the cit-tie any more,” he said. You can hear his French accent.
“Nothing is the same as it was twenty years ago,” I responded. “You’re not the same man you were twenty years ago. Want to arm wrestle?”
We all had a good laugh, him and the two from New York, just outside the city, they said, sitting just at the next table. She had to know everything, and quickly told her story, their story, while he pretty much just sat there with his arms folded across his chest, and let her do the talking. Most of it.
He did, engage the Frenchman, however. They had been to France a couple of times, and enjoyed excitedly talking about a shared familiarity and the cities he knew. Butofcourse.
Wow. Those kids, law students, they said, just left, after a very limited conversation. They used what little English they knew, and what little Thai I know to tell me the fishermen are catching little fish. And the one who approached me, stood here over my shoulder during the composition of the last two graphs, then his friends came over.
They are studying basic conversational English, no doubt from a Lao teacher, using the same Lao/English grammar book that I told Olay he should throw away. I took one look at it, and it already gave me a headache.
“Learn to communicate first,” I suggested, then add reading and writing, and then the complex rules of grammar.” Maybe that’s not right, but it seems like it, at street level.
How about you? Did you find joy in grammar class?
Like one of my last classes, at Digger’s suggestion, I employed art, and Mickey Mouse stickers for completion of a simple assignment, using conversational English. That’s what they wanted. ‘How can I communicate with the farang?’
‘Where are you from? How long will you stay? Where are you going? What is your name?’And enunciation, mostly.
____
Baby Balance
The reason you never see Asian people in motorbike accidents is because they’ve been riding them all their lives.
You see the mom or dad, driving one-handed with the baby in their lap in a one-armed hug, baby can’t even hold its head up yet. Trying, but cannot.
From there, they go to sitting on the seat itself, in front of the parent, between the parent’s knees, and then, learning to stand on the frame and grasp the mirrors as soon as they are old enough to stand, but still unable to walk.
As soon as they can hold on without falling off, about the time they are walking, they sit behind the parent, tightly grasping the parent’s clothing, and from there, they go to riding to school with three other bigger kids, and from there, to driving the bike itself. So, by the time they gain control of the bike, they’ve already had a lifetime in the saddle.
____
10.01.09
Just by coincidence, I ran into the Frenchman, Jacques, last night, where the 78 year-old man was in an animated conversation with one of the Lao staff there. I just wanted to sit riverside, watch a full moon come up, and for reason to be there, ordered a beer Lao I didn’t want and took a seat at one of the tables.
Jacques broke off his conversation, approached, and we both said, “I had dinner with you last night.”
For the next hour, and I finally had to break it off because I needed to go find a place to piss, I listened to Jacques pretty much berate America for over-consumption, pollution, producing worthless consumer products, pursuing a war for control of oil, torture, and general debasement of water and the environment.
I wanted to have a smoke, too, but he was against that, too.
Yeah, at one point it seemed his criticism of my country was a bit over the top, and during a pause I softly asked, “Jacques, where did they develop the internal combustion engine?” y’know, just to put the breaks on a runaway train, but I couldn’t really argue with him, for two reasons; one, because what he was saying was true; and two, I couldn’t knock him out because after all, he was a 78-year old man.
I just sat there, listening, mostly, although he was a good listener as well, and two thirds of the way through one of those Beer Lao bigs, I had to excuse myself for the evening. To his credit, he was concerned primarily about the environment, and what kind of earth we are leaving to our grandchildren.
___
I’m sitting in the dirt, just above a washout, ten feet above the Nam Khan River, just upriver from its intersection with the Mekong, the junction of which is the foundation for this ancient city. I’m on the far side, having paid the nickel to cross the bamboo footbridge. The two New Yorkers said it was a worthwhile trip.
Four kids came running down the embankment, terraced with private plots of corn and greens, leading right down to the water. One of them could say ‘Hello, how are you?’ grinning, shaking my hand. Today is the second day of the Buddhist holiday, of which there are four a month, following lunar cycles, so there’s no sa-kool, no school.
Sitting here along the footpath, I’m almost in their way. Two, then three fishermen came through here, each grinning a greeting, and I had to make sure my big feet weren’t in the way. Yeah…there’s a washout RIGHT HERE…but these guys in their flip-flops are as sure-footed as mountain goats.
A five-man crew, using only long bamboo poles for steering, just floated by in a rudderless 60 ft. flat bottom boat, carrying three Lao passengers, one of the men wearing a green pith helmet, going with the flow. They’re going to hit big water, right around the bend. There is a fisherman just below me, bailing water from his short boat. He said something to them as they floated by. He grins and we exchange greetings as he comes up the footpath. I’m making sure my big feet aren’t in the way.
Regular flights roar in and out of the airstrip, cascading a wave of momentarily overwhelming twin-turboprop noise. Lao Airlines. You can be from the airport and at your accommodations in ten minutes, maybe five. All kinds of Air America and Royal Lao Air Force guys crashed into these mountains back in the day, where the fog doesn’t lift until ten, sometimes noon, sometimes not at all, some days. This is peak season. The place is packed with farang. Blue skies.
You really have to resist not buying a beautiful hand-woven scarf for a sun dance sister for five bucks, especially if you’re the first customer of the day and they’d sell it for four.
___
Went over to the wat last night at the invitation of Olay, who said he’d be playing the drum at 4 pm, first watching the bigger boys hitting the drum at the adjacent wat, Huongxieng, which is right there on the same grounds, then over at wat That Noy where Olay and some of my English class were hitting the big booming drum, sending the sound out over the city, each novice taking a turn until their arms could no longer keep up the beat. Some of them could switch hands, hitting the drum twice on a downswing, and a light brush stroke on the upswing, accompanied by a guy standing there playing large hand cymbals, keeping the beat.
Afterward, we met for an hour of class, just talking mostly, but stopping them on their pronunciation, getting them to use what they knew, and to continue to develop their vocabulary, like two of them already were, like the quiet guy, intellectual type, who has mastered ‘R’, and showed me his incredible list of words, many of which we were using.
The young boys had only been at the wat for two or three months, the older guys, two, three, four years. I encouraged the older guys to encourage the younger guys, in their English development, and life, like big brother.
I enjoy being English teacher with monk. Those guys are amazing in their discipline, open hearts, and clarity.
“Any luck? Any luck today? Chok dee wan ni mai?”
Just now, those two fishermen came up the embankment, grinning and showing me their catch of small silver river fish, in a small woven basket with a conical lid. There you have it. Little fish.
-end
*One of several Bhuddas footprints, atop Mt. Phousi temple, overlooking the city. More like, on the way up…or way down. I think there’s more than one, like, his relics are said to be in stupas everywhere. In any case, there’s some promotion about it…’see Bhudda’s footprint.’ I checked it out, and…gee, it’s anybody’s guess…like looking at a cloud and saying, ‘I see an eagle.’
I asked the Lao guy, a tour guide I think, with a farang customer, sitting here at the restaurant where I’m now editing the above essay, a tour guide I think, with a farang, “Buddha didn’t climb Mt. Phousi, did he?” and he just laughed.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Laptop My Companion
07.01.09
Luang Prabang, Laos - Big moon on the Mekong tonight. Big, wide, silent water.
Thanks, Tom. Thank you again, bro, for this machine. I asked why he gave it to me, and he said, “To get the tools in the field. To keep people working.” Here, it has been my constant good friend to take along on this trip.
One of my fears, and I’ve tried to extinguish them one by one, is running out of ideas, running out of things to say, losing one’s purpose, running out of a care to communicate with loved ones, my friends and family, like Hunter Thompson, sucking on…what was it…a .45 caliber round?...making certain he’d do the job, one evening when that realization hit him. What is a writer who no longer writes, an artist who doesn’t produce, a teacher who doesn’t teach, a plumber who doesn’t plumb?
Well, you go into something else, like real estate.
Or maybe take night courses to become somebody else.
I presented a night course up at the temple tonight, being invited into the room of one of the monks, drawing his two roommates and three others for a 90 minute English lesson. They had an erasable board, which they quickly cleaned of its notes, but not before I read, ‘I don’t know why I am attracted to her’, scrawled at the bottom in English. I read it aloud and said, “OHHH?” and they laughed. Monk cannot have girlfriend, from what they say.
We focused on conversational English phrases and consonant enunciation, of ‘Ch’, ‘H’, ‘L’, ‘R’, the neary impossible, “Excuse me, please,” and ‘Th’, on which we spent an inordinate amount of time, and to which they had a peculiar resistance. They don’t want to stick their tongues out. They are however, remarkably singularly focused, as opposed to multi-tasking, for which we in the west pride ourselves in being able to perform multiple chores half-assed.
“THE…,” I said. “We use ‘THE’ all THE time. THE Chair, THE book, THE monk…this, these, those, that, them, there..thank you…fa-ther, mo-ther, bro-ther, sis…no…nevva mind…o-ther.”
Except for one young kid, the ‘old man/boy’, who was absorbed in a book he was flipping through, they were rapt and eager, sitting forward on the beds and floor in their barren, gray, and dispiriting, to me, environment, try to wrap their tongues around ‘Alive’ and ‘Around’.
There were three of them living in an elevated, wooden 12x12 ft. space. A few pictures on the walls. Not much else.
Earlier in the day, until the battery gave out, a dozen of them were huddled around this raptop under a large shade tree at the temple after their noon and last meal of the day, watching Chinese taekondo on You Tube while I stretched in the sun bouncing off the whitewashed walls of That Noy temple.
“I don’t know much about computers,” said Olay, working the touch pad.
“You just have to get on it,” I replied, walking away. “If you need help, go to, ‘help’, another word they cannot say. ‘May I hair-up you, prease.’ They needed hair-up with pronunciation.
One of his buddies coached over his shoulder, talking in Lao, instructing him on what to do. They checked their email and did some surfing, then when the battery went flat, they sat there looking at the black screen until I closed it up. It was funny.
“Why do you need locks on the doors?” I asked as I headed out tonight.
“Because sometime we have teef,” said Olay.
“You have thief in the temple?” I asked, incredulously.
“Yes,” he said.
“Thief monk?”
“No,” he replied. “Sometime Lao people come and steal from monk.”
“UNNNNbereavaber!”
To get anywhere, they would need repetition and multiple lessons, as everybody knows who has ever tried to grasp a second language. They were effusive in their thanks, as was I, expressing the belief of giving what you have to others, and thanked them for the opportunity to do so. What is a teacher if you have no students?
____
Walking in Flip-flops
You see many Asian people walking with that same taxi-driver walk, that boatman walk, that everyperson walk, and it’s because of their footwear.
Flip-flops have no heels, and so that’s lowering everything and shifting your center of gravity, and your pelvis, and your spine and your shoulders and your neck and head. In essence, you’re not who you used to be.
And just who was that? Well, that was the guy walking around in cowboy boots or heavyass work boots or enclosed leather wingtips, or the woman wearing any kind of heels.
On the beach, in flip-flops, you become somebody else.
____
They’ve got no smoking all over the place here at the guesthouse, because the owner is a doctor and her daughter is the ace women’s basketball player, right? Noi, the Team Lao gold medalist who kicked Canadian ass on the court the other day.
I just sneaked my first cigarette in the bathroom, only because there is a direct fan venting to the outside, and at this hour, I don’t want to disturb the other guests by going through two creaky doors.
____
Haven’t said much about the Lao people, though I’ve described their two major cities. The Lao are probably among the friendliest and most peaceful people on earth. If you observe their interactions, even if you don’t understand what they’re saying, you can tell it’s mostly joking and teasing around. They are always laughing with one another.
There are do doubt friendly people in other remote places as well, like Ecuador, and Bolivia, and Lukens Lake, Indiana, and Tennessee, and San Francisco, too, but the absence of stress, irritability, and anger is apparent in these folk that Digger once described, ‘they’re like little kids.’
You don’t hear raised voices, you don’t hear angry words, and you seldom hear babies crying. Tonight I heard a baby crying at the night market, and it caught my attention, the mother rocking and talking to it soothingly, glancing up, catching my eye.
Maybe it’s the temples, and Buddha, because they eat meat. Too much pork. Even the doctor agreed. Noodles and pork. This is not to say they haven’t had their fights. They fought with Siam back in the day, the 14th century, losing the emerald Buddha, and Myanmar, too, way back.
More recently, forty years ago, the Pathet Lao fought against the royal government, backed surreptitiously by the U.S. and a few aligned hill tribes, infiltrated by the CIA in a diplomatic farce that supposedly held the country neutral during our neighboring war in Vietnam. We pounded the hell out of Laos, saturating the country north to south with B52 carpet bombing and agent orange along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Hey, didn’t want to go there (bringing Vietnam into the story), but that’s what happened. They (the U.S. gov’t) just kept it from the public.
Since they, the PDR, the People’s Democratic Republic took over in 1975, it was tight and restrictive for awhile, then they (they still have the red star on a green background, and a yellow hammer and sickle on a red field hanging around) loosened up to capitalism and have been playing catch up to their Asian neighbors ever since. A sign said, ‘We can provide what you have expect.’
You know what I expect? I’d like to see an account balance on a receipt from an ATM.
Sorry. No hab.
Chinese communists to the north. Military dictatorship in Myanmar to the west. Vietnamese communists to the east, Post-Pol Pot Khmer Rouge Cambodian communists and a free Democratic Thailand underneath, although the government there is in perpetual upheaval, messing up Bryan’s and a whole lot of other people’s Christmas holiday plans by closing down the airport and toppling the Prime Minister.
So it’s more of a landlocked situation here, more than being backward. The Mekong has determined the country’s lifeline, with all the major cities situated along it. And what can you say? The river runs slowly.
At night, the people sit around and drink Lao beer, and the men play petanque…we call it ‘bocce ball’ in the west, using iron balls, throwing an underhand backspin toss toward a small target ball, or knocking the opponent’s ball away. Over at the wat at night, you can see a few young novice monks, whisking around in the shadows, moving between the living quarters.
The people are openly friendly, but shy, slowly embracing the west, more reserved than their Thai cousins. You don’t see open prostitution, although the taxi drivers here and Vientiane will offer ladies, ganja and opium. They roll up the streets at 8 p.m. with a few farang and Lao sitting around quietly drinking in coffee shops and restaurants. No karaoke that I’ve seen. It gets quiet after nine o’clock, and really quiet at this hour. As quiet as the river.
-end
Luang Prabang, Laos - Big moon on the Mekong tonight. Big, wide, silent water.
Thanks, Tom. Thank you again, bro, for this machine. I asked why he gave it to me, and he said, “To get the tools in the field. To keep people working.” Here, it has been my constant good friend to take along on this trip.
One of my fears, and I’ve tried to extinguish them one by one, is running out of ideas, running out of things to say, losing one’s purpose, running out of a care to communicate with loved ones, my friends and family, like Hunter Thompson, sucking on…what was it…a .45 caliber round?...making certain he’d do the job, one evening when that realization hit him. What is a writer who no longer writes, an artist who doesn’t produce, a teacher who doesn’t teach, a plumber who doesn’t plumb?
Well, you go into something else, like real estate.
Or maybe take night courses to become somebody else.
I presented a night course up at the temple tonight, being invited into the room of one of the monks, drawing his two roommates and three others for a 90 minute English lesson. They had an erasable board, which they quickly cleaned of its notes, but not before I read, ‘I don’t know why I am attracted to her’, scrawled at the bottom in English. I read it aloud and said, “OHHH?” and they laughed. Monk cannot have girlfriend, from what they say.
We focused on conversational English phrases and consonant enunciation, of ‘Ch’, ‘H’, ‘L’, ‘R’, the neary impossible, “Excuse me, please,” and ‘Th’, on which we spent an inordinate amount of time, and to which they had a peculiar resistance. They don’t want to stick their tongues out. They are however, remarkably singularly focused, as opposed to multi-tasking, for which we in the west pride ourselves in being able to perform multiple chores half-assed.
“THE…,” I said. “We use ‘THE’ all THE time. THE Chair, THE book, THE monk…this, these, those, that, them, there..thank you…fa-ther, mo-ther, bro-ther, sis…no…nevva mind…o-ther.”
Except for one young kid, the ‘old man/boy’, who was absorbed in a book he was flipping through, they were rapt and eager, sitting forward on the beds and floor in their barren, gray, and dispiriting, to me, environment, try to wrap their tongues around ‘Alive’ and ‘Around’.
There were three of them living in an elevated, wooden 12x12 ft. space. A few pictures on the walls. Not much else.
Earlier in the day, until the battery gave out, a dozen of them were huddled around this raptop under a large shade tree at the temple after their noon and last meal of the day, watching Chinese taekondo on You Tube while I stretched in the sun bouncing off the whitewashed walls of That Noy temple.
“I don’t know much about computers,” said Olay, working the touch pad.
“You just have to get on it,” I replied, walking away. “If you need help, go to, ‘help’, another word they cannot say. ‘May I hair-up you, prease.’ They needed hair-up with pronunciation.
One of his buddies coached over his shoulder, talking in Lao, instructing him on what to do. They checked their email and did some surfing, then when the battery went flat, they sat there looking at the black screen until I closed it up. It was funny.
“Why do you need locks on the doors?” I asked as I headed out tonight.
“Because sometime we have teef,” said Olay.
“You have thief in the temple?” I asked, incredulously.
“Yes,” he said.
“Thief monk?”
“No,” he replied. “Sometime Lao people come and steal from monk.”
“UNNNNbereavaber!”
To get anywhere, they would need repetition and multiple lessons, as everybody knows who has ever tried to grasp a second language. They were effusive in their thanks, as was I, expressing the belief of giving what you have to others, and thanked them for the opportunity to do so. What is a teacher if you have no students?
____
Walking in Flip-flops
You see many Asian people walking with that same taxi-driver walk, that boatman walk, that everyperson walk, and it’s because of their footwear.
Flip-flops have no heels, and so that’s lowering everything and shifting your center of gravity, and your pelvis, and your spine and your shoulders and your neck and head. In essence, you’re not who you used to be.
And just who was that? Well, that was the guy walking around in cowboy boots or heavyass work boots or enclosed leather wingtips, or the woman wearing any kind of heels.
On the beach, in flip-flops, you become somebody else.
____
They’ve got no smoking all over the place here at the guesthouse, because the owner is a doctor and her daughter is the ace women’s basketball player, right? Noi, the Team Lao gold medalist who kicked Canadian ass on the court the other day.
I just sneaked my first cigarette in the bathroom, only because there is a direct fan venting to the outside, and at this hour, I don’t want to disturb the other guests by going through two creaky doors.
____
Haven’t said much about the Lao people, though I’ve described their two major cities. The Lao are probably among the friendliest and most peaceful people on earth. If you observe their interactions, even if you don’t understand what they’re saying, you can tell it’s mostly joking and teasing around. They are always laughing with one another.
There are do doubt friendly people in other remote places as well, like Ecuador, and Bolivia, and Lukens Lake, Indiana, and Tennessee, and San Francisco, too, but the absence of stress, irritability, and anger is apparent in these folk that Digger once described, ‘they’re like little kids.’
You don’t hear raised voices, you don’t hear angry words, and you seldom hear babies crying. Tonight I heard a baby crying at the night market, and it caught my attention, the mother rocking and talking to it soothingly, glancing up, catching my eye.
Maybe it’s the temples, and Buddha, because they eat meat. Too much pork. Even the doctor agreed. Noodles and pork. This is not to say they haven’t had their fights. They fought with Siam back in the day, the 14th century, losing the emerald Buddha, and Myanmar, too, way back.
More recently, forty years ago, the Pathet Lao fought against the royal government, backed surreptitiously by the U.S. and a few aligned hill tribes, infiltrated by the CIA in a diplomatic farce that supposedly held the country neutral during our neighboring war in Vietnam. We pounded the hell out of Laos, saturating the country north to south with B52 carpet bombing and agent orange along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Hey, didn’t want to go there (bringing Vietnam into the story), but that’s what happened. They (the U.S. gov’t) just kept it from the public.
Since they, the PDR, the People’s Democratic Republic took over in 1975, it was tight and restrictive for awhile, then they (they still have the red star on a green background, and a yellow hammer and sickle on a red field hanging around) loosened up to capitalism and have been playing catch up to their Asian neighbors ever since. A sign said, ‘We can provide what you have expect.’
You know what I expect? I’d like to see an account balance on a receipt from an ATM.
Sorry. No hab.
Chinese communists to the north. Military dictatorship in Myanmar to the west. Vietnamese communists to the east, Post-Pol Pot Khmer Rouge Cambodian communists and a free Democratic Thailand underneath, although the government there is in perpetual upheaval, messing up Bryan’s and a whole lot of other people’s Christmas holiday plans by closing down the airport and toppling the Prime Minister.
So it’s more of a landlocked situation here, more than being backward. The Mekong has determined the country’s lifeline, with all the major cities situated along it. And what can you say? The river runs slowly.
At night, the people sit around and drink Lao beer, and the men play petanque…we call it ‘bocce ball’ in the west, using iron balls, throwing an underhand backspin toss toward a small target ball, or knocking the opponent’s ball away. Over at the wat at night, you can see a few young novice monks, whisking around in the shadows, moving between the living quarters.
The people are openly friendly, but shy, slowly embracing the west, more reserved than their Thai cousins. You don’t see open prostitution, although the taxi drivers here and Vientiane will offer ladies, ganja and opium. They roll up the streets at 8 p.m. with a few farang and Lao sitting around quietly drinking in coffee shops and restaurants. No karaoke that I’ve seen. It gets quiet after nine o’clock, and really quiet at this hour. As quiet as the river.
-end
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Fall From Sky
Fall From Sky
01.06.09
Luang Prabang, Laos – You have to admit, sometimes things just fall from the sky. And often, it isn’t as expected, although not altogether unexpected. Am I talking in riddles, or does it sound like it makes any sense to you.*
After a mandatory afternoon nap, I went down to the corner intersection, a focal point of pedestrian activity and Lao food vendors, the entrance to the utterly fascinating night market, looking to eat again at the same vegetarian…mostly, because there’s chicken on a stick there…outdoor eatery, where she was serving a buffet of white and yellow noodles, rice, boiled potatoes, yams, greens, yellow bean, green beans, pasta, grilled fish, fried potatoes, spring rolls, pineapple, steamed cauliflower with mushrooms, and a couple other items in large bowls and trays. 5,000 kip per bowl, about fifty cents.
To the left is an identical place to the one just described. Directly across the street are two booths of CD sales, blaring Lao pop music. Diagonally across the street are fruit shake vendors, a lady selling large knive blades of all shapes and sizes, next to a traditional herb vendor, next to a Lao coffee vendor, and the beginning of an endless sea of humanity stretching for about a mile, overwhelming the farang tourists with a repetition of Lao fabric, silver, and everything else under the sun.
The booths are so closely set, five feet of walking space, that by design, traffic cannot move in two directions without turning sideways to allow people to pass. The couple squatting with their backpacks, negotiating over a scarf, brought traffic to a complete standstill. The Japanese couple finally realized they couldn’t walk shoulder to shoulder. It’s single file here, sir.
Back at the intersection, tuk tuk and motorbike traffic form a steady flow around a roundabout with a large brightly lit cone-shaped Christmas tree, I guess, in the middle of it. There are maybe a couple hundred people milling around right there in the immediate vicinity.
I know it’s lengthy, almost to the point of boredom, but I’m trying to set the scene, y’know, put you there with me. It’s dark. It’s getting cool. You’ll want a jacket.
On the way down to this press of high season mainline infusion into the local economy, I tried to remember the sun dancer’s ethos, refusing nearly everything the tuk tuk drivers had to offer, respond to critical mass, and above all, keep your eyes peeled for what might fall from the heavens.
You just never know.
So I’m sitting there, bowl piled not too high, because I already planned to return for seconds, and swallowed my pride and mustered enough gumption to ask Tomo, the Japanese girl from Yakamoto who was sitting alone at an adjacent table, to join me, since I detest eating alone.
To my shock, she came over and sat down, and we ate together, mostly not understanding one another at all in the ensuing conversation, but it seemed like the food was excellent. She had a nice laugh, happy eyes, and a pleasant smile.
It was the fourth time since November that I had dinner company; once with Ashley in Bangkok, whom I met in the smoking room at the airport in Japan; twice in Vientiane at a Lao birthday party, and later, New Years dinner with the guesthouse staff; and this time. That’s eating a lot of meals alone much of the time, so I can appreciate sitting across from a smile. The food is always better.
If you stay here long enough, two things are bound to happen; you’re going to get pretty good with chopsticks, and you’ll at some point, have an Asian person on the back of your motorbike.
If you stay here really long, you can end up with an Asian person on the back, and a bi-racial child sitting up front between your knees. You see it all the time. Lucky for me that my motorbike is parked inside my house in Khuk Khak, because cross-cultural relationships can be intriguing, but extremely problematic.
And if at times it seems like the material is disconnected, that’s because the lines form inside my head while I’m walking down the street. That’s the way it always happens, and behind the wheel of a chevy truck. I can’t help it. They just form. What more can I say? Doesn’t happen anywhere else. Except, like, right now.
So after that dinner, I was experiencing a general sense of blissful well-being and just sort of drifting down the sidewalk and sort of got pulled magnetically up the stairs to the temple, with those big dragons coming down either side of the step entrance, and got up on the plaza, and there amongst the smaller stupas and relics, and bell and drum, and prayer room, I thought of meandering around the larger wat, wat That Noy. Half moon directly overhead. It was peaceful up there, away from all the hectivity down on the street.
I know it’s not a word, but it sure fits, doesn’t it?
About halfway through a circumvention of the temple, I saw a shadow in the form of a monk approaching me from behind, and thought, ‘This guy is going to mug me,’ but that wasn’t the case at all. He wanted to talk.
We walked around the temple, then stood until my knees could no longer take it, then sat on the temple steps, then went over to the table and benches, then finally said good night at the top of the steps leading down to the sidewalk after a two-hour discussion about karma.
Oh yes, there was much more, but I needed to wrap up that sentence. Generally, it was about karma, and suffering in the world, and orphans and cripples and refugees and everybody with their personal experience with suffering, all attributable to karma.
"Do you know what goes around, comes around?" he asked.
"Yes," I replied. "But sometimes you love, and love no come back."
He grew silent at that point, then told me about his past. We also had an English lesson, a dharma lesson, a personal history exchange, talk of fortune tellers, purification of heart and mind, awakening, rebirth, and amazingly open self-disclosure.
He told me his age, and when I expressed shock and disbelief, he laughed and told me another. “I can do that,” he said, “because I can stand the truth. When people do bad, they cannot stand the truth.”
He also told me what a monk can and cannot do (can’t dance, can’t play basketball or tennis, can’t eat after 12 noon, among many other cannots; and the four meditations; sitting, dreaming, walking, and…..and….I’ll have to get back to you on that fourth one…and a discussion about how sometimes love does not come back in the way we want it or expect it, but sometimes comes to us in ways that we sometimes cannot see.
I wanted to tell him that we dance our prayer, then try to walk our prayer, but it would have required a lengthy explanation involving feathers and eagle bone whistles, and I was more interested in his story than telling mine.
He said he’d come from the northeast, and had been there at the temple for five years. A fortune teller just today had told him he’d be there for another seven. For the last ten minutes of our conversation, while exchanging email addresses, we were joined by a young kid, probably about eight years old, a little ‘old man/boy,’ I told him, who just sat there grinning and setting his alarm clock for 4 a.m., when they awake for morning meditation.
“Sometimes the monk do not want to wake up,” said my friend.
And sometimes the farang does not want to wake up, either. I thought of rising early this morning to 'feed the monks' and look for my two friends in the procession, making eye-contact and a warm smile, but instead, I slept in.
-end
* Well…the reason is, because sometimes you don’t need question marks with an interrogatory in a lead.
01.06.09
Luang Prabang, Laos – You have to admit, sometimes things just fall from the sky. And often, it isn’t as expected, although not altogether unexpected. Am I talking in riddles, or does it sound like it makes any sense to you.*
After a mandatory afternoon nap, I went down to the corner intersection, a focal point of pedestrian activity and Lao food vendors, the entrance to the utterly fascinating night market, looking to eat again at the same vegetarian…mostly, because there’s chicken on a stick there…outdoor eatery, where she was serving a buffet of white and yellow noodles, rice, boiled potatoes, yams, greens, yellow bean, green beans, pasta, grilled fish, fried potatoes, spring rolls, pineapple, steamed cauliflower with mushrooms, and a couple other items in large bowls and trays. 5,000 kip per bowl, about fifty cents.
To the left is an identical place to the one just described. Directly across the street are two booths of CD sales, blaring Lao pop music. Diagonally across the street are fruit shake vendors, a lady selling large knive blades of all shapes and sizes, next to a traditional herb vendor, next to a Lao coffee vendor, and the beginning of an endless sea of humanity stretching for about a mile, overwhelming the farang tourists with a repetition of Lao fabric, silver, and everything else under the sun.
The booths are so closely set, five feet of walking space, that by design, traffic cannot move in two directions without turning sideways to allow people to pass. The couple squatting with their backpacks, negotiating over a scarf, brought traffic to a complete standstill. The Japanese couple finally realized they couldn’t walk shoulder to shoulder. It’s single file here, sir.
Back at the intersection, tuk tuk and motorbike traffic form a steady flow around a roundabout with a large brightly lit cone-shaped Christmas tree, I guess, in the middle of it. There are maybe a couple hundred people milling around right there in the immediate vicinity.
I know it’s lengthy, almost to the point of boredom, but I’m trying to set the scene, y’know, put you there with me. It’s dark. It’s getting cool. You’ll want a jacket.
On the way down to this press of high season mainline infusion into the local economy, I tried to remember the sun dancer’s ethos, refusing nearly everything the tuk tuk drivers had to offer, respond to critical mass, and above all, keep your eyes peeled for what might fall from the heavens.
You just never know.
So I’m sitting there, bowl piled not too high, because I already planned to return for seconds, and swallowed my pride and mustered enough gumption to ask Tomo, the Japanese girl from Yakamoto who was sitting alone at an adjacent table, to join me, since I detest eating alone.
To my shock, she came over and sat down, and we ate together, mostly not understanding one another at all in the ensuing conversation, but it seemed like the food was excellent. She had a nice laugh, happy eyes, and a pleasant smile.
It was the fourth time since November that I had dinner company; once with Ashley in Bangkok, whom I met in the smoking room at the airport in Japan; twice in Vientiane at a Lao birthday party, and later, New Years dinner with the guesthouse staff; and this time. That’s eating a lot of meals alone much of the time, so I can appreciate sitting across from a smile. The food is always better.
If you stay here long enough, two things are bound to happen; you’re going to get pretty good with chopsticks, and you’ll at some point, have an Asian person on the back of your motorbike.
If you stay here really long, you can end up with an Asian person on the back, and a bi-racial child sitting up front between your knees. You see it all the time. Lucky for me that my motorbike is parked inside my house in Khuk Khak, because cross-cultural relationships can be intriguing, but extremely problematic.
And if at times it seems like the material is disconnected, that’s because the lines form inside my head while I’m walking down the street. That’s the way it always happens, and behind the wheel of a chevy truck. I can’t help it. They just form. What more can I say? Doesn’t happen anywhere else. Except, like, right now.
So after that dinner, I was experiencing a general sense of blissful well-being and just sort of drifting down the sidewalk and sort of got pulled magnetically up the stairs to the temple, with those big dragons coming down either side of the step entrance, and got up on the plaza, and there amongst the smaller stupas and relics, and bell and drum, and prayer room, I thought of meandering around the larger wat, wat That Noy. Half moon directly overhead. It was peaceful up there, away from all the hectivity down on the street.
I know it’s not a word, but it sure fits, doesn’t it?
About halfway through a circumvention of the temple, I saw a shadow in the form of a monk approaching me from behind, and thought, ‘This guy is going to mug me,’ but that wasn’t the case at all. He wanted to talk.
We walked around the temple, then stood until my knees could no longer take it, then sat on the temple steps, then went over to the table and benches, then finally said good night at the top of the steps leading down to the sidewalk after a two-hour discussion about karma.
Oh yes, there was much more, but I needed to wrap up that sentence. Generally, it was about karma, and suffering in the world, and orphans and cripples and refugees and everybody with their personal experience with suffering, all attributable to karma.
"Do you know what goes around, comes around?" he asked.
"Yes," I replied. "But sometimes you love, and love no come back."
He grew silent at that point, then told me about his past. We also had an English lesson, a dharma lesson, a personal history exchange, talk of fortune tellers, purification of heart and mind, awakening, rebirth, and amazingly open self-disclosure.
He told me his age, and when I expressed shock and disbelief, he laughed and told me another. “I can do that,” he said, “because I can stand the truth. When people do bad, they cannot stand the truth.”
He also told me what a monk can and cannot do (can’t dance, can’t play basketball or tennis, can’t eat after 12 noon, among many other cannots; and the four meditations; sitting, dreaming, walking, and…..and….I’ll have to get back to you on that fourth one…and a discussion about how sometimes love does not come back in the way we want it or expect it, but sometimes comes to us in ways that we sometimes cannot see.
I wanted to tell him that we dance our prayer, then try to walk our prayer, but it would have required a lengthy explanation involving feathers and eagle bone whistles, and I was more interested in his story than telling mine.
He said he’d come from the northeast, and had been there at the temple for five years. A fortune teller just today had told him he’d be there for another seven. For the last ten minutes of our conversation, while exchanging email addresses, we were joined by a young kid, probably about eight years old, a little ‘old man/boy,’ I told him, who just sat there grinning and setting his alarm clock for 4 a.m., when they awake for morning meditation.
“Sometimes the monk do not want to wake up,” said my friend.
And sometimes the farang does not want to wake up, either. I thought of rising early this morning to 'feed the monks' and look for my two friends in the procession, making eye-contact and a warm smile, but instead, I slept in.
-end
* Well…the reason is, because sometimes you don’t need question marks with an interrogatory in a lead.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Saffron Hue
05.01.09
Luang Prabang, Laos – Don’t you just love that dateline? I do. Check it out on the map. I know several of you are intimately aware of exactly where I am, while others haven’t the vaguest idea. I hope you’re prompted to look.
This is the place Kennedy said was a hotspot for the red scare, and Mad Magazine made jokes about gorillas marching on the Plain of Jars.
Some of you could name several of the 49 ethnic hill tribes, lovely folks, and their provinces and rivers. But the mother of all rivers in this region, the Mekong, third largest in the world (after the Amazon and the Nile), is the reason this city is here, nestled in a mountainous valley, accessible by water, air, and horrendous winding overland passage.
This ancient imperial capital of the whatchamacallit empire…Khmer empire, and then Lan Xang, has the look and feel of a worn down has-been prize fighter meeting up against the reigning champ, with weary wooden dilapidated houses and faded pastel French colonial buildings smeared with black mold, clashing into digital, cellular, gourmet, brand spanking new hundred bucks a night stay, party of eight for dinner.
This place is hopping, a beehive of economic growth and activity. If there’s something wrong with global financial markets, it isn’t in evidence here. Accordingly, it is losing much of its charm, but that can be found. You just have to get off the tourist track.
___
Just so turns out that the daughter of the lady who runs this guesthouse is the ace point guard for the Luang Prabang women’s basketball team, thus the gold medals up there on the wall. She scored about half her team’s points, grabbed some boards and had three or four or five steals in two games against a Canadian team and me, full court, over at the high school outdoor court.
Our team had four girls from a high school in Canada, just graduated, their brother, the red head kid from Ireland last night, except he’s from Canada, two other guys whose main interests were hockey and lacrosse, and the dad of the red head and his sister, Arnie, all of whom have an interest in a local orphanage, and connections in some kind of international exchange.
I sat with Arnie having coffee (he'd gotten up early to feed the monks), openly wondering why governments such as the Thai and the Lao, must depend on NGOs and high school kids from Canada to accomplish a mission, like foreign organizations and individuals taking more interest in Native Americans than their own people and government.
Arnie said, ‘yeah,’ and that it was the same in Canada, and somehow the conversation flipped over into basketball, and one coincidence led to another, and we ended up in a challenge match with Noi, who materialized while we were talking about her.
Two games to ten. I forget the scoring system and didn’t care…they had some little girl keeping score on the sideline with a small piece of white chalk…I got to start, but quickly called for a sub the first few times up and down the court, wearing flip-flops as well, and praying my knees wouldn’t buckle out there, a full 90 ft. regulation court...I couldn’t even see the other end.
Since we had a nine-person team, so I didn't want to bogard the court time, but the real reason I yanked myself out of the game was because of the absence of air in my lungs, and my oxygen-starved thighs.
They didn’t blow us out. It was close. I cuffed a girl’s shot down in the paint at one point early in the game, hollering, “NO! GET THAT SHIT OUTTA HERE!”, or, it was more like under my breath…out loud it came out as, “Sorry, Honey!” after she snatched an offensive board and tried to put it back up in my face. I had to laugh. She was about 4 ft. 2".
One of the remarkable things about the game…perhaps the first time in my life…there were only two fouls in two games. Not one curse. A game without anger. Not one dispute or argument. Pure joy and exhilaration.
Which reminds me of one of the best all-time lines on a basketball court: “We don’t call no fouls down here. We call a ambulance,” spoken by a brother on a court in Memphis, TN, 1977.
Everybody shook hands (after the customary wai) and was laughing after the game, their player/coach feeling satisfied with her team’s performance, grinning over there, saving face. They all had green uniforms with numbers, and shoes. I think we could take them in a rematch. We had a lot of passing turnovers and never shut down their shooters.
But we looked good on the fast break, getting several 3 on 2, and 2 on 1 opportunities that we never could finish, blowing the layup, missing the baby shot, looking bad, losing face. We could’ve used some practice.
Like many of my teachers said of me throughout my education, we didn’t perform up to our potential. I shot one for one, no boards, one assist, no steals, one block, no turnovers. Pretty much a non-factor out there, but the most enthusiastic.
In the van on the way to the court, Noi in uniform and smiling at the wheel, loaded with Canadian teens, I told Arnie as I massaged my knees, “I hope we’re playing half-court.”
___
Ooops. This was supposed to be a story about the monks and the temples, not a basketball game with a bunch of vertically challenged Lao girls.
There are several famous temples in this city. Mt. Phousi, Wat That Noy, Wat Huoaxieng, just here in the neighborhood. There are several more. Guys come here from all over the country to become novices, monks-in-training; the younger ones, walking midday with their umbrellas, appearing self-conscious in their new saffron robe attire, some of the teenagers still eyeing the girls or being overly serious and self-absorbed, the older monks disregarding the foreigner entirely, while others will meet your gaze and return the smile.
And what would have a young man feel a calling to ‘go to the temple’, after being born in such a place as predilected by the state of his spiritual development, to be called to prayer twice a day to send out a spiritual blanket upon this city, its inhabitants, and the world.
If that’s what they do. Who knows what’s going on inside a person’s head, meditation or not? But with the training, whatever it is, it’s supposed to be focused. And over there at the wat, it’s collectively focused, like at the tree at sun dance, or in your church. We can’t assume that we’re all praying for the same things, like the end of an administration, or the return of Jesus or something.
But because all of the wats and the omnipresent monks, since the beginning of time here, despite the frenetic mercantilism, the city has maintained a quiet contemplative atmosphere, a saffron hue cast across the city, as quiet as the river, as subdued as the Buddha’s gaze.
-end
Luang Prabang, Laos – Don’t you just love that dateline? I do. Check it out on the map. I know several of you are intimately aware of exactly where I am, while others haven’t the vaguest idea. I hope you’re prompted to look.
This is the place Kennedy said was a hotspot for the red scare, and Mad Magazine made jokes about gorillas marching on the Plain of Jars.
Some of you could name several of the 49 ethnic hill tribes, lovely folks, and their provinces and rivers. But the mother of all rivers in this region, the Mekong, third largest in the world (after the Amazon and the Nile), is the reason this city is here, nestled in a mountainous valley, accessible by water, air, and horrendous winding overland passage.
This ancient imperial capital of the whatchamacallit empire…Khmer empire, and then Lan Xang, has the look and feel of a worn down has-been prize fighter meeting up against the reigning champ, with weary wooden dilapidated houses and faded pastel French colonial buildings smeared with black mold, clashing into digital, cellular, gourmet, brand spanking new hundred bucks a night stay, party of eight for dinner.
This place is hopping, a beehive of economic growth and activity. If there’s something wrong with global financial markets, it isn’t in evidence here. Accordingly, it is losing much of its charm, but that can be found. You just have to get off the tourist track.
___
Just so turns out that the daughter of the lady who runs this guesthouse is the ace point guard for the Luang Prabang women’s basketball team, thus the gold medals up there on the wall. She scored about half her team’s points, grabbed some boards and had three or four or five steals in two games against a Canadian team and me, full court, over at the high school outdoor court.
Our team had four girls from a high school in Canada, just graduated, their brother, the red head kid from Ireland last night, except he’s from Canada, two other guys whose main interests were hockey and lacrosse, and the dad of the red head and his sister, Arnie, all of whom have an interest in a local orphanage, and connections in some kind of international exchange.
I sat with Arnie having coffee (he'd gotten up early to feed the monks), openly wondering why governments such as the Thai and the Lao, must depend on NGOs and high school kids from Canada to accomplish a mission, like foreign organizations and individuals taking more interest in Native Americans than their own people and government.
Arnie said, ‘yeah,’ and that it was the same in Canada, and somehow the conversation flipped over into basketball, and one coincidence led to another, and we ended up in a challenge match with Noi, who materialized while we were talking about her.
Two games to ten. I forget the scoring system and didn’t care…they had some little girl keeping score on the sideline with a small piece of white chalk…I got to start, but quickly called for a sub the first few times up and down the court, wearing flip-flops as well, and praying my knees wouldn’t buckle out there, a full 90 ft. regulation court...I couldn’t even see the other end.
Since we had a nine-person team, so I didn't want to bogard the court time, but the real reason I yanked myself out of the game was because of the absence of air in my lungs, and my oxygen-starved thighs.
They didn’t blow us out. It was close. I cuffed a girl’s shot down in the paint at one point early in the game, hollering, “NO! GET THAT SHIT OUTTA HERE!”, or, it was more like under my breath…out loud it came out as, “Sorry, Honey!” after she snatched an offensive board and tried to put it back up in my face. I had to laugh. She was about 4 ft. 2".
One of the remarkable things about the game…perhaps the first time in my life…there were only two fouls in two games. Not one curse. A game without anger. Not one dispute or argument. Pure joy and exhilaration.
Which reminds me of one of the best all-time lines on a basketball court: “We don’t call no fouls down here. We call a ambulance,” spoken by a brother on a court in Memphis, TN, 1977.
Everybody shook hands (after the customary wai) and was laughing after the game, their player/coach feeling satisfied with her team’s performance, grinning over there, saving face. They all had green uniforms with numbers, and shoes. I think we could take them in a rematch. We had a lot of passing turnovers and never shut down their shooters.
But we looked good on the fast break, getting several 3 on 2, and 2 on 1 opportunities that we never could finish, blowing the layup, missing the baby shot, looking bad, losing face. We could’ve used some practice.
Like many of my teachers said of me throughout my education, we didn’t perform up to our potential. I shot one for one, no boards, one assist, no steals, one block, no turnovers. Pretty much a non-factor out there, but the most enthusiastic.
In the van on the way to the court, Noi in uniform and smiling at the wheel, loaded with Canadian teens, I told Arnie as I massaged my knees, “I hope we’re playing half-court.”
___
Ooops. This was supposed to be a story about the monks and the temples, not a basketball game with a bunch of vertically challenged Lao girls.
There are several famous temples in this city. Mt. Phousi, Wat That Noy, Wat Huoaxieng, just here in the neighborhood. There are several more. Guys come here from all over the country to become novices, monks-in-training; the younger ones, walking midday with their umbrellas, appearing self-conscious in their new saffron robe attire, some of the teenagers still eyeing the girls or being overly serious and self-absorbed, the older monks disregarding the foreigner entirely, while others will meet your gaze and return the smile.
And what would have a young man feel a calling to ‘go to the temple’, after being born in such a place as predilected by the state of his spiritual development, to be called to prayer twice a day to send out a spiritual blanket upon this city, its inhabitants, and the world.
If that’s what they do. Who knows what’s going on inside a person’s head, meditation or not? But with the training, whatever it is, it’s supposed to be focused. And over there at the wat, it’s collectively focused, like at the tree at sun dance, or in your church. We can’t assume that we’re all praying for the same things, like the end of an administration, or the return of Jesus or something.
But because all of the wats and the omnipresent monks, since the beginning of time here, despite the frenetic mercantilism, the city has maintained a quiet contemplative atmosphere, a saffron hue cast across the city, as quiet as the river, as subdued as the Buddha’s gaze.
-end
Monday, January 05, 2009
Land of a Million Elephants
04.01.09
Luang Prabang, Laos – There seems to be a persistent smell of sewage wafting throughout this upriver city of nearly a half million inhabitants. There are no streetlights. But much has changed here. Three years ago, many of the side streets leading from the main street to the river were dirt. Today they are all concrete, lined with guest houses and red brick curbs, smartly lined on edge, landscaped, and gutters leading downhill to the Mekong.
New lodging construction is going up on the former debris-cluttered empty lots, with carpenters and stone masons literally working around the guest house tenants. Every place of accommodation is full, with late flight arrivals humping huge backpacks down the street, looking for a room. Tuk tuk drivers line the streets, hawking city tours and riverboat passage to the waterfalls and Buddha caves to the coffee shop and eatery patrons.
Everything seems to accommodate your money, just like capitalistic societies.
Among the many restaurants and Lao handicraft shops on the central avenue are two new ATMs and a host of ticketing agencies offering bus and plane tickets to Vientiane, Chiang Mai, Hanoi, and all points south. There are no trains in this mountainous country, and never have been since the French attempted it one hundred years ago, laying narrow gauge track into the Plain of Jars. It was never completed, nor attempted again.
The city is packed with pulpy foreigners, mostly French, Italians, Canadians, Russians, and Australians, and each night the main street is blocked off from motorized traffic for five blocks, filled elbow-to-elbow with vendors lining both sides of the street, selling goods on plastic tarps and quilts under florescent lights connected to a common electrical line. There are row upon row of amazingly beautiful hand-woven hill tribe productions, the women stitching skirts, scarves and wall hangings of all sizes as we speak.
They produce anything you can make from cloth, from tiny little newborn slippers and dazzling handbags, to wall hangings, bedspreads, tablecloths and quilts, all in the distinctive hill tribe style. All for dirt cheap. You give me ten thousand dollars, we could turn it into fifty, easy, maybe a hundred. Is there a Lao hill tribe store in your town yet?
There is silver, silver everywhere. Wooden carvings of elephants and everything imaginable. Lao trinkets and t-shirts. Antique bone carvings, buddhas, baskets of all sizes, music CDs and souvenirs. Everything is geared for the onslaught of tourists. There’s a lady squatting in the street, selling fresh roasted squid on a stick from a portable charcoal-filled barbeque pot.
At the end of the exhaustive and repetitious pedestrian mall, where five streets meet and traffic resumes, there is a used clothing bazaar selling exclusively to Lao, and an all night fruit and food vending market stretching two blocks to the river.
Let’s see…it’s January 4th…I had to ask today. That would make it the Christmas and New Year’s holiday for everyone here. It could be any time for me, sitting up here on the raised stone plaza surrounding Mt. Phousi temple, twenty feet above the street, looking down on everything, a good view for looking up and down the block.
Nobody sees me, except for the guy who came up to take a piss in the shadows, and another two girls who came up later for the same reason. There’s another five or six hundred steps to the top, where you can obtain a grand view of the entire city, but I’m not interested in the climb tonight, despite the vista it promises.
We sat out here last year, when the activity was considerably slower. The night market has expanded by a factor of ten. It was much quieter, and an old man played classical Lao folk music on a two-stringed instrument…like a violin…I just sent a guy from Ireland, a young man, thick head of red hair to go find out.
Here he comes. A ‘So-o’…it’s called. And just now, I had the most intense déjà vu experience.
___
Just up the street, a monk pounds a bell at Wat Thatnoy, marking the late afternoon call for the novices to come pray.
A vendor lady wipes the face of her new infant, cooing to the child, their warmth and closeness oblivious to the thousands on the street. The lady turns the squid on the charcoal burner. The vendor smiles a greeting to another customer. The weaver threads another stitch.
-end
Luang Prabang, Laos – There seems to be a persistent smell of sewage wafting throughout this upriver city of nearly a half million inhabitants. There are no streetlights. But much has changed here. Three years ago, many of the side streets leading from the main street to the river were dirt. Today they are all concrete, lined with guest houses and red brick curbs, smartly lined on edge, landscaped, and gutters leading downhill to the Mekong.
New lodging construction is going up on the former debris-cluttered empty lots, with carpenters and stone masons literally working around the guest house tenants. Every place of accommodation is full, with late flight arrivals humping huge backpacks down the street, looking for a room. Tuk tuk drivers line the streets, hawking city tours and riverboat passage to the waterfalls and Buddha caves to the coffee shop and eatery patrons.
Everything seems to accommodate your money, just like capitalistic societies.
Among the many restaurants and Lao handicraft shops on the central avenue are two new ATMs and a host of ticketing agencies offering bus and plane tickets to Vientiane, Chiang Mai, Hanoi, and all points south. There are no trains in this mountainous country, and never have been since the French attempted it one hundred years ago, laying narrow gauge track into the Plain of Jars. It was never completed, nor attempted again.
The city is packed with pulpy foreigners, mostly French, Italians, Canadians, Russians, and Australians, and each night the main street is blocked off from motorized traffic for five blocks, filled elbow-to-elbow with vendors lining both sides of the street, selling goods on plastic tarps and quilts under florescent lights connected to a common electrical line. There are row upon row of amazingly beautiful hand-woven hill tribe productions, the women stitching skirts, scarves and wall hangings of all sizes as we speak.
They produce anything you can make from cloth, from tiny little newborn slippers and dazzling handbags, to wall hangings, bedspreads, tablecloths and quilts, all in the distinctive hill tribe style. All for dirt cheap. You give me ten thousand dollars, we could turn it into fifty, easy, maybe a hundred. Is there a Lao hill tribe store in your town yet?
There is silver, silver everywhere. Wooden carvings of elephants and everything imaginable. Lao trinkets and t-shirts. Antique bone carvings, buddhas, baskets of all sizes, music CDs and souvenirs. Everything is geared for the onslaught of tourists. There’s a lady squatting in the street, selling fresh roasted squid on a stick from a portable charcoal-filled barbeque pot.
At the end of the exhaustive and repetitious pedestrian mall, where five streets meet and traffic resumes, there is a used clothing bazaar selling exclusively to Lao, and an all night fruit and food vending market stretching two blocks to the river.
Let’s see…it’s January 4th…I had to ask today. That would make it the Christmas and New Year’s holiday for everyone here. It could be any time for me, sitting up here on the raised stone plaza surrounding Mt. Phousi temple, twenty feet above the street, looking down on everything, a good view for looking up and down the block.
Nobody sees me, except for the guy who came up to take a piss in the shadows, and another two girls who came up later for the same reason. There’s another five or six hundred steps to the top, where you can obtain a grand view of the entire city, but I’m not interested in the climb tonight, despite the vista it promises.
We sat out here last year, when the activity was considerably slower. The night market has expanded by a factor of ten. It was much quieter, and an old man played classical Lao folk music on a two-stringed instrument…like a violin…I just sent a guy from Ireland, a young man, thick head of red hair to go find out.
Here he comes. A ‘So-o’…it’s called. And just now, I had the most intense déjà vu experience.
___
Just up the street, a monk pounds a bell at Wat Thatnoy, marking the late afternoon call for the novices to come pray.
A vendor lady wipes the face of her new infant, cooing to the child, their warmth and closeness oblivious to the thousands on the street. The lady turns the squid on the charcoal burner. The vendor smiles a greeting to another customer. The weaver threads another stitch.
-end
No I.E.D.s Allowed On Aircraft
04.01.09
Luang Prabang, Laos – At Wattay International Airport in Vientiane, you can smoke inside the terminal. There are several ashcans there for the smokers.
On the wall just outside baggage screening, there was a poster declaring what goods cannot be taken on the flight, along with encircled pictures with the red diagonal slash, the universal depiction of ‘cannot’.
‘No Weapons or Firearms,’ with a picture of a .45 automatic.
‘No Accelerants or Flammables,’ such as this can of gasoline.*
‘No I.E.D.s (Improvised Explosive Devices) Allowed Onboard Aircraft,’ with an illustration of a bundle of dynamite, some wires, and a clock.
As we stood waiting for our flight, I pointed to the poster and asked the young Australian if he had removed the I.E.D.s from his backpack. He laughed and said he had.
*Two years ago, at Wattay airport in Vientiane I saw an old Lao man with his family and their belongings attempting to board a Lao Airline plane with two gallons of gas in a container with a rag stuffed in the opening for the lost cap. He made it through the non-existent security, through the gate and out to the tarmac, and was about to board when they stopped him, telling him he couldn’t take his gas on board.
The old man seemed perplexed, but offered no argument.
-end
Luang Prabang, Laos – At Wattay International Airport in Vientiane, you can smoke inside the terminal. There are several ashcans there for the smokers.
On the wall just outside baggage screening, there was a poster declaring what goods cannot be taken on the flight, along with encircled pictures with the red diagonal slash, the universal depiction of ‘cannot’.
‘No Weapons or Firearms,’ with a picture of a .45 automatic.
‘No Accelerants or Flammables,’ such as this can of gasoline.*
‘No I.E.D.s (Improvised Explosive Devices) Allowed Onboard Aircraft,’ with an illustration of a bundle of dynamite, some wires, and a clock.
As we stood waiting for our flight, I pointed to the poster and asked the young Australian if he had removed the I.E.D.s from his backpack. He laughed and said he had.
*Two years ago, at Wattay airport in Vientiane I saw an old Lao man with his family and their belongings attempting to board a Lao Airline plane with two gallons of gas in a container with a rag stuffed in the opening for the lost cap. He made it through the non-existent security, through the gate and out to the tarmac, and was about to board when they stopped him, telling him he couldn’t take his gas on board.
The old man seemed perplexed, but offered no argument.
-end
Carry On Baggage
1.01.09
Vientiane, Laos – Your carry on. Does that go into the overhead bin, under the seat, or in the lap, with a person throughout all their relationships? The passenger on the aisle in row 37 drifted off into a reverie.
But if we could be as clear and open as a child, their eyes full of trust and wonder, devoid of the muddle of scars, fear, injury, numbing, self-delusion and emotion that constrict the adult light and sight, later finding it necessary to ‘undo’ or somehow retrace pathways, to re-connect through therapy or latest snake oil promise.
Where is the stage? What is the setting, and what kind of background? Who is the audience? What kind of shirt, and shoe should I wear? Does this tie go with this jacket? What would the neighbors think?
Small children carry no baggage. It’s the adults who pack the unnecessary cargo. For instance, what does it take to get out the door? What do you carry onto the streets? What would you take on a trek to Nepal? What would you carry to a castle in the woods?
And at the end of the journey, they learned they didn’t need the baggage they were carrying, nor the walls of defense they were maintaining, and now, just enough familiarity to identify themselves within the four walls of a nursing home. A scrapbook. The first thing we would grab in a house fire.
Didn’t need the farm, didn’t need the house, didn’t need all its contents. They convinced her during one of her more lucid moments, then took what they wanted, and auctioned off the rest.
There was a large and horrific dinner table fight among the siblings, all adults, sowing bitterness that changed the nature of their relationships with one another. The old man rolled in his grave.
Even on a long trip, like a lifetime, it’s best to travel light. A person can overload themselves, they can traverse sensibly, or they can go light. Like a tour in the ‘Nam, there’d be a guy humping a .60 and ammo belts, another guy with a grenade launcher, and another dude with just a radio. In the end, everyone carried their own load.
Baggage Check
It was to expedite the travel, they said, but it sounded like some kind of a scheme. That can work at a domestic airport, but you couldn’t pull that off going through customs.
Pt. 2
One of the things I noticed, particularly on the reservation, is that people talk about what is on their minds. Just by listening.
Joyfully In The Sorrow
Perhaps they knew when they began the journey that it would be difficult, when those in the assembly all agreed to go together. With absolute and certain clarity, a glimmer in a star, they witnessed their interwoven destinies, the interludes, the miniscule, the déjà vu reminders, premonitions and affirmations along that winding trail in human form.
They had been in that place before, planted deep in ancestral memory. There, karmic pact etched into dna code, a collective mutual agreement in an orchestra groping its way back to that distant place, suffering weight and mercy.
And all the while amidst the joys and suffering, they were given all that was necessary at every instance, and all the tools toward fulfillment, playing the God game.
Their journey would be difficult
A glimmer in a star
along that trail of destiny
in human form.
They had seen that place before
planted in ancestral memory
a karmic pact
in an orchestra
groping to that distant place
suffering weight and mercy
their hearts swollen
then wrung
Within joy and suffering
they had all that was necessary
toward fulfillment
playing the God Game
-end
.
Vientiane, Laos – Your carry on. Does that go into the overhead bin, under the seat, or in the lap, with a person throughout all their relationships? The passenger on the aisle in row 37 drifted off into a reverie.
But if we could be as clear and open as a child, their eyes full of trust and wonder, devoid of the muddle of scars, fear, injury, numbing, self-delusion and emotion that constrict the adult light and sight, later finding it necessary to ‘undo’ or somehow retrace pathways, to re-connect through therapy or latest snake oil promise.
Where is the stage? What is the setting, and what kind of background? Who is the audience? What kind of shirt, and shoe should I wear? Does this tie go with this jacket? What would the neighbors think?
Small children carry no baggage. It’s the adults who pack the unnecessary cargo. For instance, what does it take to get out the door? What do you carry onto the streets? What would you take on a trek to Nepal? What would you carry to a castle in the woods?
And at the end of the journey, they learned they didn’t need the baggage they were carrying, nor the walls of defense they were maintaining, and now, just enough familiarity to identify themselves within the four walls of a nursing home. A scrapbook. The first thing we would grab in a house fire.
Didn’t need the farm, didn’t need the house, didn’t need all its contents. They convinced her during one of her more lucid moments, then took what they wanted, and auctioned off the rest.
There was a large and horrific dinner table fight among the siblings, all adults, sowing bitterness that changed the nature of their relationships with one another. The old man rolled in his grave.
Even on a long trip, like a lifetime, it’s best to travel light. A person can overload themselves, they can traverse sensibly, or they can go light. Like a tour in the ‘Nam, there’d be a guy humping a .60 and ammo belts, another guy with a grenade launcher, and another dude with just a radio. In the end, everyone carried their own load.
Baggage Check
It was to expedite the travel, they said, but it sounded like some kind of a scheme. That can work at a domestic airport, but you couldn’t pull that off going through customs.
Pt. 2
One of the things I noticed, particularly on the reservation, is that people talk about what is on their minds. Just by listening.
Joyfully In The Sorrow
Perhaps they knew when they began the journey that it would be difficult, when those in the assembly all agreed to go together. With absolute and certain clarity, a glimmer in a star, they witnessed their interwoven destinies, the interludes, the miniscule, the déjà vu reminders, premonitions and affirmations along that winding trail in human form.
They had been in that place before, planted deep in ancestral memory. There, karmic pact etched into dna code, a collective mutual agreement in an orchestra groping its way back to that distant place, suffering weight and mercy.
And all the while amidst the joys and suffering, they were given all that was necessary at every instance, and all the tools toward fulfillment, playing the God game.
Their journey would be difficult
A glimmer in a star
along that trail of destiny
in human form.
They had seen that place before
planted in ancestral memory
a karmic pact
in an orchestra
groping to that distant place
suffering weight and mercy
their hearts swollen
then wrung
Within joy and suffering
they had all that was necessary
toward fulfillment
playing the God Game
-end
.
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