The day after my last blog post I was riding my bike home after working in the kitchen and happened into a monk who is a friend here. He happened to be going up Phu Kradueng (a local mountain and national park) the next day and invited me to come along. Yay! So about five the next morning we were on our way up to the mountain.
The climb up was fairly uneventful and a bit
faster than the Christmas time trip. At this time of year there are almost no
people and most of the stopping places along the way were closed down. When we
went at Christmas there were people everywhere, shops and food places and
things to buy every 500 m or so. Now there were just empty stalls. The tent
city at the top of the mountain was also gone, with just a few tents huddled
under a small copse of trees, and others placed under shed roofs here and
there.
I won’t relate the whole trip, but there are
a couple of images that I wanted to remember – and share with you – before they
fade away into that place where images and memories go when they lose their
clarity and change from experiences lived into stories remembered…
Shortly after our arrival I wandered away from
the small conference building in which the seven of us had set up our bedrolls to search for something sweet to eat. Even on the top of the mountain most of the
stalls were closed down and there wasn’t much to find. I did, however, locate some
coffee candies and an elderly shop keeper who proudly pointed out her variety
of dried vegetarian texturized vegetable protein that she could give me instead
of meat if I wanted. (All without communicated without being able to speak a common language!) I offered her some candy instead, a few other people
happened along, and I ended up being invited along on a walk with them. So, off
we went.
It ended up, after about a km or so of walking,
that we were going to a Buddha statue situated on the edge of a
small clearing of flat limestone, littered with puddles from the recent rain.
Switching to the present tense here, to give the feel of the moment - the statue sits on a raised dais above a small
tiled area on which people can sit or kneel to pay their respects. A railing
pipe on either side of the raised tile floor holds many small bells, and two
larger ones; a few still larger bells hang from supports a short distance from
the tiled area. A large metal bowl full of sand situated above the tiled floor
and below the Buddha holds incense sticks and candles, and there are vases of
wild flowers beside the bowl. Smoke wafts from the incense, brushing past my
nose like wisps of time, birds chirp and cry from the forest all around and the
ever present buzz of jungle insects hums beneath the sound of the whispering breeze.
Silence and stillness hovers beneath the jungle noises, beneath the bird calls
and the insect noises, beneath the sounds of our presence. Like water in the
ocean depths, it is still despite all that is happening above it.
The four elderly women with whom I arrived kneel
before the Buddha and add their incense sticks. One hands me some incense to light and add to the bowl and another gives me flowers to add to a vase. Still another opens what looks like
a school exercise notebook to pages filled with neat Thai lettering. We recite
the opening ritual together and then they begin to chant, partly from memory
and partly from the book. It goes on for quite a while. Every now and then they
forget the words or the wind blows the pages around and they stop, giggling, to
look for the next part of the prayer. It is reverent and simple and OK to make
mistakes here.
They finish the chanting and praying finally and
I need to meet the monks to go and watch the sunset from one of the cliffs. As
I leave the women start banging on the Buddha bells. They are still at it
several minutes later as I walk with the monks, and I hear the sound of the
bells receding into the distance. They are all still there - a statue, a
jungle, and from time to time four elderly women, incense, laughter and the
gonging of bells…
The other image I would like to share is of the “cave”
that Luang por (the teacher here) stayed in for a year. I put “cave” in
quotation marks because it is really just an sheltered place under an overhang
of rock, but it has a richness and presence despite its lack of concavity.
The cave is located in a sheltered curve of stone
cliff where the table top of the mountain drops about twenty feet before
continuing on in rolling undulations of grass, bushes and small trees. The
overhang is about 15 feet wide and is sheltered on all sides by plants – moss and
creepers and one great tree that stands like a guardian in front. Water drips
and flows in droplets down the small hanging roots in front of the overhang and
green dappled forest stretches down and away. Inside there is enough room to
sit without being wet, a small place for a fire, a shetered area to sleep, a
small basin in the stone that catches dripping rain water. Someone has placed
some Buddha statues inside now, made of dark metal that blends with
the stone. I sat for a while, listening to the dripping water and the silence…
There were other things too of course – The rain
has come back and we were treated to daily thunder showers. We spent an afternoon on a 19 Km circuit of forest and cliffs (all walked barefoot - Lisa B you would have liked that). One of the storms drenched us
completely, flashed and thundered and worked itself into a frenzy, then
wandered off to drench other people and leave us with puddles, cooler air, and
a river of cloud flowing mystically through a valley below us.
There was also a full moon, strange frogs croaking “oooom ahhhh” to each other in the night, and a large
burned area where a fire blackened, scorched, burned and transformed the forest. The blackness will not last long though. Already the hopeful and even forceful presence of green is evident everywhere; life is rising again from the ashes.
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