Oct. 25 Camping, being deeply OK, and other stories

I’ve been thinking about stories lately. I watched a trailer for a new movie coming out soon – Cloud Atlas. It apparently has six interwoven stories about different couples over several hundred years, with intimations that they are the same couple sharing different lives with each other. By the makers of The Matrix, and with Tom Hanks in it, it’s pretty main-stream for the reincarnation theme. In any case, I’ve been thinking about stories and the way that we live our lives by the stories we are told as children, by the stories that are believed by our culture, by the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, what we should do, how we should live. They are all stories – fiction because none of the stories are really who we are. They are ways that we try to explain who we are, or act out who we are, justify ourselves, define our purpose, control our lives or other people’s lives – so many uses for stories.

So, why the big kick on stories all of a sudden, you may be asking. I think it’s because stories aren’t quite as serious as “real life”. If I look at myself as a character in a story, then the part I’m playing can be a bit less serious and critical and I can have more fun with it. I think we get stuck in this idea that life is so serious and what we are doing and feeling and thinking is so important. People here keep telling me “not serious!”  Mop the floor or don’t mop the floor, but don’t get serious about it or upset about it or worry if you’re doing it and someone else isn’t or vice versa. Help in the kitchen or the garden or don’t, but don’t get so serious about duty or guilt or “shoulds”.  Let go of the ownership of “your” story and don’t be so attached to doing it “right” all the time.

I was invited on a trip a couple of days ago. Siriluck – an elderly lady who stays here – likes to help support a wildlife conservation project – Toongkamung (sp?) conservation area - and so she took a group of about 15 of us (monks, nuns, Siriluck, Mem – who is an absolutely amazing person in her dedication and ability to manage the kitchen and the feeding of 300 to 500 people daily here at the temple – and me). The workers at the reserve aren’t very well paid, so we took a bunch of rice and other food for them. It’s the largest wildlife reserve in Thailand and covers a huge area of mountains, rivers and grasslands and harbours over 400 species of birds along with elephants, rhinos, a few tigers still apparently, monkeys, crocodiles, several kinds of deer, really big lizards, boa constrictors and other snakes, lots and lots of dry land leaches etc. etc.  (The leaches aren’t really being preserved on purpose I don’t think. They just kind of come with the package. When you walk anywhere in the forest they grab onto your feet, find a bare spot and start sucking. I missed one and later found where it had been. Apparently they get full and drop off, but they leave a little round hole that bleeds slowly for a while.)

In any case, we had a bit of a tour around, and stayed the night in some rustic, but nice, guesthouses set back into the trees at the jungle’s edge. 

Guesthouses in the jungle

Our tour was going to include a 4 km walk down a jungle trail to see whatever was there and go by a giant fig tree on the way. However, because of the above mentioned leaches we decided to cut the walk short after about half a km and went around to the other end of the trail by car instead. We did see some large carnivorous flowers along the way though. They were quite brightly coloured and looked like it would be a real bummer to be small enough (and silly enough) to get caught in. That would be a story with a rather sad ending – unless you were the flower of course. Stories are also rather dependent of the viewpoint of the story teller!

Bug, and small critter, eating flower

We braved the trail again at the other end and wandered along the narrow path through twisted creepers, climbing vines, hanging roots that I wanted to climb to see if you can really swing on them, but didn’t, and other things that one would expect to find in a jungle. Actually, I’m not sure what I expect to find in a jungle. I tend to think of jungles as things that are far away and mysterious and so when I’m in one it doesn’t have exactly the feeling I had expected. Now it’s closer and, sure it’s full of strange plants and animals growing rather thickly and looking different than forests at home, but it’s still pretty much a big piece of land with lots of plants and animals growing on it. Sorry to be driving the botanists out there crazy, but I’m simplifying to make a point. Jungles are stories too – The Jungle book, for instance. It’s not a jungle without Mogli or Bhageera or Bhallou (sp?), or King Louie doing a dance in some old ruins. Jungles conjure up stories of adventures, exotic animals, and Dr. Livingston peering out from behind some banana leaves. Dr. Livingston didn’t show up this time.

The giant fig tree was, indeed, quite a giant. It looked like someone had added on cement buttresses to hold it up. There were big wooden supports as tall as I am that ran 20 or 30 feet from the tree in a couple of directions and other smaller ones all around. On an only slightly related mind wisp, I read, a while back, about fig wasps in a rather interesting book called Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice To All Creation. Fig wasps inhabit pretty much all figs. They are very tiny, provide extra protein for animals that eat the figs (according to the park brochure), and have rather nasty sexual habits that I won’t get into. There weren’t any figs, so no wasps either right now. Eat a dried fig from the grocery store, though, and you’re pretty much certain to be eating dried fig wasps along with it. I’m not quite sure how that connects to the story theme, but it must connect somewhere. All stories connect somewhere…  J

Giant fig tree. No wasps...

We also had a nighttime tour on the back of a truck. We didn’t see very many kinds of animals, but did see a herd of small deer grazing in the darkness and a few large bats flapping about. The night was not as noisy as I expected, but there were a few busy crickets, the occasional calls of gibbons and the cries of what I think was a kind of jackal. Both the gibbons and the jackal reminded me a bit of coyotes. If it wasn’t for the crickets it would have felt pretty much like home. J.

Dawn at Tung Kra Mung

Mist in the morning

Todd and Siriluk 

On the way home we stopped at the lake behind a medium sized dam (the name sounds like Ju-ra-pahn, but I don’t know how to spell it), had lunch on a lookout area with a cool breeze blowing through the bamboo, stopped at a zoo, and stopped at a couple of temples.

View from the lookout. Cool breeze and other aspects of ambiance not included in picture.

 At each stop we went through a lengthy prayer, which I think has a lot to do with asking for forgiveness, but with the meaning or intention of giving a blessing and clearing negative energy from a place. It’s a way of giving a blessing and also clearing the energy so that it can be less tied to the old stories that are still lingering there. In this way it is a lot like the Hawaiian ho’oponopono prayer (please forgive me, I’m sorry, I love you, thank you) that is used as a way of clearing negative connections, energies and feelings and also for promoting positive relations and healing. The monk’s forgiveness prayer is quite a lot longer than the ho’oponopono prayer, however, and two of the monks seemed to be a bit overzealous in their repetition of it. They would pray and pour water (I’ll have to explain water pouring another time) at the slightest provocation, which became slightly tedious to my less dedicated mind.

Monks getting ready to say their forgiveness prayer in the forest

Everyone seems to have decided that I need to learn Thai, so I’m getting lots of tutoring. On a slight tangent, Gan (a friend here) always seems to find interesting new herbal remedies to try and so I’ve been going with her to a small bamboo hut that is the home of a small family (not husband wife family, but related people). They have been making a brew out of roots and trees and things they go into the mountains to gather periodically. This tea is supposed to cure pretty much whatever ails you. I’m not sure about that, but Gan’s been drinking it for two months and says she’s feeling better (as well as suffering no ill side effects), so it seems to be safe enough. It takes a while to drink a hot cup of this stuff, so Nan (one of the house residents) has been using the time to try to get me to pronounce words correctly. It gets a bit hilarious, when it’s not just frustrating. I was proudly showing off my mastery of the phrase “I’m allergic to milk” tonight (useful to be able to say that), but they thought I said “I’m a man” which is hopefully already evident anyway. Kind of disappointing to find out how bad I am at this.

It is pleasant, though, to sit under the stars by candle light and talk and laugh. A monk who stays at (or near?) the house was sprawled across the floor of the “living room” which is just a platform under a roof, the four year old girl was practicing the English alphabet with her older aunt, and Gan, Nan, and someone else whose name I can’t pronounce, talked among themselves and attempted to teach me some words. A few other people drifted by. “Get” – a very sweet young girl came by and said hello, the omnipresent crickets called to each other and the moon drifted serenely overhead.

Tonight’s writing has began as a stream of consciousness sort of thing (though I've eidted a little bit now), so please forgive the loquacious rambling length of it. I started with stories, though, and I’ll come back to that for a minute. It’s all stories. Here is this story that is happening right now in Thailand, each moment passes and is gone and that part of the story is gone too. So many stories and so many possible stories. They say here to “relax” and I’m starting to feel the meaning of that in a different way than I have before. 

I have always felt a need to reach for the next part of the story, the next moment, always thinking that this particular moment isn’t quite good enough – the story needs improving. Or, perhaps more to the point, always thinking that in some way I am not yet quite good enough and I need improving. I am learning more about what Carl Rogers would call unconditional positive regard, but in a deeper and more personal way. 

It is, I think, so easy and simple and yet so against all that we usually learn to just accept that this moment is enough and perfect as it is, and that I am enough and perfect within it. It can be such an amazing thing to just sink into the possibility that all these self improvements I’ve continually added to my list maybe aren’t necessary, or that it’s OK to be the way I am. Imagine the possibility that right now you are completely, wholly, unquestionably, deeply, belovedly “enough”.  It’s kind of an awesome thing to consider, really. Hard to really grasp, but nice to consider. J

Of course, there can be the fear that if I am content or “enough” that it will lead to stagnation or I’ll be stuck with all of these faults and bad things. That’s where a bit of a paradox happens though. Change is automatic. It happens because it is the nature of all things to change. Change doesn’t require our help, and being content or “enough” is not equivalent to stagnation or capitulation. It’s just…  relaxing into being deeply OK.

Such a radical and obvious idea… and I think I’ve explained it badly. J  I hope it gets clearer as time goes on.

So that’s it for this time. I hope that you are able to look up now and then from the stories that your life is weaving, and weaving through, take a breath, and consider the possibility that everything is OK. Just for a moment, release, relax and allow the possibility that you are (and everyone else is) enough.

And then on with the story…