Just Hanging Out

Hi all, I found myself in a mood to write something tonight and so thought I’d put down a word or two before the urge left me…

There has not been a great deal of excitement since the last episode of this saga, although I have been out and about quite a bit. There was an overnight camping trip with a group of monks to a local waterfall that was quite nice. Camping with monks, I have found, generally involves lots of junk food, rice, and “just add hot water” noodles. There’s not a great deal of time spent on menu planning.

It was quite a beautiful spot though, with one large drop fall below us and many small ledges and pools above us. We walked up the river in the afternoon and found a nice pool to swim in – a first for me in Thailand. I’ve generally been a bit nervous about getting in the water here due to (mostly unfounded I think) fears of snakes, tropical diseases, and small very thin fish that swim into private body orifices and get stuck there. Actually, I think the small fish are in the Amazon and not Thailand, and thankfully none appeared in our particular pool anyway. It was quite fun splashing about for a while.

The big falls. Mostly dry right now

Swimming holes and little water falls

Campsite

I also had a couple of day trips to the Koonming area, which is a big limestone mountain/jungle area that looks like a perfect setting for Jurassic Park III (or whatever the next one is, if they happened to make a next one, which I hope they don’t…)  Anyway, one of the trails starts out winding its way through a long cave, then climbs up ladders and walkways to a high lookout place where you can look down and imagine dinosaurs roaming about and trying to eat each other. I really expected to see a pterodactyl fly by, but none deigned to appear.

Out of the cave and into Dinosaur world

Incredibly long roots - great for climbing!

Part of the trail

Part of the cave trail - open ceiling

Other trips included a jaunt through some back roads and fields and up a steep and windy (as opposed to long and windy like in the song) road, to the top of a largish hill with a nice trail through bamboo groves to a scenic lookout on top. One of the things people from the temple like to do is to announce “A-hosee” a lot, kind of proclaiming release and letting go and forgiveness of things and people and the world in general. So, we shouted “A-hosee” from the hilltop into the setting sun, ate oranges, and generally had a pleasant time for a couple of hours. (As a side note, I think it’s kind of interesting that Angels also proclaim something like “A-hosee”, except I think they call it “hosannas” and they do it “on the highest” – which is sort of what we were doing too, since we were on the highest part of the hill. I think the similarities end there though – so really kind of a minimal connection)   J  (No pictures as I didn't have my camera).

Let’s see, what else… oh yes. I went on another overnight trip with some other monks to Phuluang, which is a nature reserve on a mountain top and had a guided tour through some of the trails to see a variety of rare orchids and other plants and flowers. The tour was in Thai, of course, so I kind of followed along and looked at what people seemed to be pointing at and completed the tour unburdened by much more knowledge than I started with. (Which is actually quite in keeping with the teaching here, since they are into letting go of things – including knowledge, rather than gathering more of them, or it). It was a nice walk though and there were some pretty flowers, some of which were edible with a kind of tangy sour flavour. They were quite tasty actually, and plentiful as well, so I ended up eating quite a few of them.

Another mountain top - Phuluang this time

Our tour group with backdrop of edible flowers

Monk on the mountain

One of the monks on this particular trip spent quite a bit of time expounding upon the health virtues of the coffee enema, including adamantly proclaiming that this peculiar practice cured his father of liver cancer. He made rather a good case for his argument, including lots of talk about how we brush our teeth twice a day and they’re nowhere near (hopefully) as much in need of cleaning as the colon – which gets encrusted by all the stuff we’ve been eating for the last however many years we’ve been alive. He went on at length, and supplied a tube and instructions for making the appropriate equipment from a water bottle, so I’ve begun an experiment to see what happens. I’m sure that my mother is cringing in dismay at this point, as the word “enema” is rather anathema to her, despite the somewhat similar look and sound to these two words. To mention it in public no less – oh, the horror of it! However, I think it is somewhat of a philosophical, as well as physical, experiment as the teaching here is all about “letting go”, and after sloshing a liter and a half of coffee around in your colon for a few minutes, you get to find out quite a lot about “letting go”. So, if anyone out there wants to try it, all you need is a 1.5 liter water bottle with the bottom cut off, a small plastic tube, some instant coffee and some warm water…  easy peasy.  J  (No pictures of this either!!)

I've been meaning to put up some pictures of the temple and keep forgetting to do it. It's hard to give an idea of what's here actually, as it's pretty big and there are many styles of buildings. Here is part of my morning walk though:

My room

Trail behind my room

Road that meets the trail. It looks a bit like fall here now - dry leaves falling down

Past the pond

Down the road to the meeting area 

Lining up for breakfast

Finally, I've also been spending some time with the horses that are here at the temple over the past week or so. There are three horses - two ponies neither of which I am terribly fond, and one young horse who has hip problems and doesn't walk very well. The young horse liked to kick and nip and things, but he's quite a nice horse and has stopped doing that now, so I figure I'm on the right track. Round pen work is a bit slow, as we don't get out of walking gear for the most part, but we're both learning a bit so that's good I guess.

On another topic entirely, I’m heading off to Bangkok in a few days (maybe less than a few days, depending on how long it takes me to actually get this posted), and will meet Mom there on the 30^th of Jan. She’ll be here for about two weeks, and we plan to spend a few days at the temple, then travel around Thailand and possibly Laos a bit as well.

So, that’s the news for the moment. Happy almost end of January!  (I generally am quite relieved when January is over as it seems to be a difficult month. I’m sure there must be some people out there who like January – and it is admittedly a much nicer month here than in Vanderhoof. However, I still think that its end is worth celebrating).

On to February we go…   J

Ants, Elephants, and Mountains

This post is a bit overdue I’m afraid. There’s actually quite a lot to tell you about, but lots of it involves pictures and that requires several extra steps, each of which adds to the procrastination factor. It’s kind of like sending a real letter versus an email. A real letter has more tactile effect, but requires all of the steps of finding an envelope, addressing the envelope, finding a stamp, getting the letter to the post office.  It can take weeks…  J Blogs are easier, but blogs with pictures are kinda getting closer to letters...

Speaking of blogs with pictures, by the way, for those of you who don't know about it already, Jeremy has started a blog as well and is pretty artistic about it. You can find it here if you want to look: realitysliding.com  

Anyway, since I last wrote I’ve had several adventures and have spent quite a bit of time practicing the fine art of the pleasantly futile task (Things like sweeping leaves from roads that are directly beneath wind-blown continually leaf dropping trees). I’ve also been sinking a bit more deeply into the “vibrations” of being here, and spending more time in the vicinity of Luang por’s place – there is a peaceful and kind of cooling feeling there.

Yesterday I went on a trip to see a temple that is being built by the mother of a friend of Mae Chee Ning. I went last year, but it wasn’t finished then. Now it’s nearly done and is quite an amazing place really. It is located on top of a small mountain and consists of several comparatively small pagoda buildings and one central very large one which contains a huge stone statue of a reclining Buddha. The statue is made of marble, shipped here from Italy apparently, and is probably 30 meters long. One foot is wider than I am tall by a fair bit. There is a scene in the book (and movie) Cloud Atlas where Somni is hiding in the forest and she sees an ancient statue of a stone Buddha. She wonders who he was and what he was about and he seems to awaken something inside of her. I had the thought that in a thousand years or so the buildings around this statue may all be broken and gone and the jungle grown around it again, but it will still be there. Perhaps someone will happen upon it and wonder what it is for, who made it and why…  If time is an ocean, this statue is kind of a message, floating in a bottle and heading for some unknown distant shore.

Stairs to the main temple area

Main Pagoda

"Small" pagodas

Stone reclining Buddha - marble from Italy

View from the Deck. Model not always available.

 In a monument, built to house relics of the Buddha lower on the mountain, there was a huge geode cut to reveal hundreds of perfect amethyst crystals clustered inside that seemed to emit a very palpable tingling feeling when I put my hands near them. On a higher floor I sat in front of some Buddha statues, and presumably the Buddha relics. For a moment there was a deep sense of stillness and openness in my chest that is difficult to describe – like looking into a small box and discovering that it has the universe sitting quietly inside.

Stairs to the monument

Buddha statues and relics

On the way there one of the things we listened to was a reading of the first sermon of the Buddha after his enlightenment. These are my words and my understanding – not what he said, as I don’t remember it word for word. However, what I understood was that there is birth and death, happiness and love and illness and pain and this is natural. There is also suffering, and this is not natural. Suffering is caused by desire – desire to bring things, feelings, people closer or desire to push them away.  These are the first and second noble truths.

The third noble truth is that there is a state that does not contain desire. We are already in it, but we don’t realize this.

The fourth noble truth, the eightfold noble path, is generally understood to be the way to get out of suffering. As I am learning now though, it is really just the way that one lives once they have realized that they are already “there”. As a monk said to me this morning, we are already at “zero”. We are taught that we always have to do something to get rid of things or to get things, taught that we have to start counting. 1, 2, 3, 4… 9, and back to 0. We have to have these steps to get where we are going. We don’t have to count though. Just stop trying, stop counting. You’re already there.  The noble path is just the way to live while the “engine cools” so to speak. Like an engine that has been working hard and gotten very hot takes time to cool down when it is turned off, we have been working very hard and it takes a while for wider understanding to settle back in.

Of course, there are things to do in the world. These are understandings for the inside world. It doesn’t mean not to do things in the outer world. Right understanding is about how one responds inside, learning to live with less haste, less worry, more inner “coolness” and spaciousness.

As I was writing this a little black ant crawled down my arm and around the rim of the cuff on my sleeve. I have been developing a somewhat grudging and slightly antagonistic fondness for ants of late. They are truly incredible creatures. One of my windows has become a mass of tape around the edges as I keep trying to seal off the routes of ingress and egress for a stream of small black ants that has been determined to find ways past my blockages. I seal it off one day, and the next day they are back again making a small stream across my wall, going I’m not sure where. Sometimes I find little scouting parties heading across the floor, or like yesterday morning, braving the unknown and dangerous territory of my pant leg, hanging from a hanger by the wall. Sometimes I think that ants may understand the idea of just “being” quite a lot better than I do. Another one just crawled out onto my finger, jiggling up and down unconcernedly as I was typing. I tried to blow it off, unsuccessfully and so gave it a flick with my finger. Imagine getting smacked very hard by a speeding mountain and I suppose that is what it would be like to be an ant getting flicked. It probably survived though, and is even now trekking across the wastelands of the floor tiles, lost and alone and not terribly worried about it…

Anyway, it was an impressive temple. I had difficulties deciding if I thought all of this expense and effort was worth it and important because it is a massive finger pointing out beyond the concerns and importance of the world we normally see, or if I thought it was a huge monument to man’s ego and a silly use of money and resources that could have been used to feed and clothe thousands of people. I suppose it is both and we are free to choose which viewpoint we prefer.

The temple was the most recent adventure. Along the way we also went for a walk in a park I’ve visited before that has signs of habitation and use thousands of years old. There are some kind of cool boundary stones set in rings in the bedrock that mark the edges of worship areas (apparently), and huge boulders naturally balanced on small supports in improbable looking ways. We also visited a temple where a footprint of the Buddha is allegedly housed, hidden beneath a hyperbole footprint of monstrous proportions, made of cement.

Big balanced rock

More rocks

Bhudda's footprint monument

Large cement foot covering what is said to be the Bhudda's print

The trip at Christmas time was very interesting and scenic as well. I went with seven other people (mostly friends of Mae Chee Ning’s from Bangkok) hiking to the top of Phu Kra Deung, a large flat topped mountain near the temple. Phu Kra Deung is a very popular Thai vacation location and is therefore quite developed. I have been there once before, but it was at the end of the tourist season when the rains were starting and there was hardly anyone there. This time there were hundreds of people.

I was surprised to discover on arrival that there is a baggage service kind of like at an airport. Check your packs and bags, walk up without them, and when you get there your bags will be waiting for you. The bags are carried in huge bundles tied to a long bamboo pole slung across the shoulders of some very muscular men and women who walk painstakingly up the hill with loads that look about twice as big as they are. It felt rather strange actually, strolling up the hill with my little day pack while the porters staggered along dripping in sweat and carrying all of the heavy stuff. You can even get them to carry you up if you want – and then you don’t have to walk at all!

There are rest stops every few hundred meters with shops selling drinks and food – even ice cream. When I was there last time, elephants had gotten into quite a few of them and torn the bamboo shacks apart. They are all rebuilt each season I guess. Those pesky elephants – always getting in to something!

Tourist season, before Elephants

After Elephants have been through... 

The walk is about 1200 m vertical and 9 km (I believe) in length from the base to the camp area. 6 km involve quite a bit of steep uphill and the other 3 are along the flat top area of the mountain. We rented bikes when we got to the top and rode around the edge of the mountain for a ways, and then followed the slight downhill slope to the camping area.

Biking down the trail toward the camp

Parked on the cliff

Rock overhang

The camping area looks exactly as if a large army has moved in, taken over and pitched their camp there. There are literally hundreds of tents (all in brown desert camouflage colouring) set up in rows across the field. I can’t imagine how they would ever have enough people to use all of those tents. Apparently the New Year’s weekend is even busier than the Christmas one though, so maybe they all got used??

Army camp??

We didn’t stay in a tent though. We had a small cabin, complete with a shower and water heater, so I got to have a couple of hot showers while camping. As a small aside, I’ve been getting used to having cold showers all the time, dipped out of a barrel in the bathroom. I’m still not terribly fond of it, but I’ve found that if I wash my hair first it generally gets the rest of me cold enough that the water isn’t such a shock when it hits. Then, by the time I’m done washing it actually feels pretty good. However, you just can’t beat hot showers, and I’m happy to take them wherever they’re offered!

Home sweet home

There is also a ring of shops and restaurants around the edge of the camping area, so food is always easy to come by. Food is more expensive at the top, but still pretty cheap compared to Canadian prices. Most of the shops are for food and snacks, but there are T-shirts and knick knacks and souvenirs as well.

We had a big celebration dinner and went to bed fairly early the first night (after doing a bit of sampling of a Thai herbal and strongly alcoholic beverage), then spent the next day walking around the top of the mountain. One side has a river and lots of waterfalls (mostly dry due to the dry conditions this year), and the other side has cliffs and scenic views.

As an aside, I’ve glanced at the clock on my computer three times since I started writing this. The first time it was 9:44, the next it was 9:55 and the next was 10:55. I’ve been kind of paying attention to, and looking for, times when I see double or triple 4’s and 5’s and using it as a reminder to have a thankfulness minute. So – three thankfulness minutes have been included in this posting so far…  J

I was kind of disappointed not to see any elephants again this time, despite the signs warning to be on the lookout for them. We did, however, see quite a few very fresh and ample examples of elephant dung attesting to the presence of said denizens somewhere in the vicinity. There were also some very large and very tame deer that hung around the camp area taking handouts from campers. Some of the more animal loving parts of our group spent quite a lot of time feeding them lettuce and slices of cucumber and other greens purchased from the restaurants.

Dangerous but really shy apparently...

The day of walking was quite pleasant, especially as it did not contain any of the land leaches that were there on my last trip. It’s too dry for them at this time of year, which is quite fine with me. 

Leach - when I went the first time. Available anywhere you put your feet...

We went through the waterfall side of things first and then made our way over to the cliff side in time to hang around for quite a while waiting for the sun to go down, and then wave goodbye while taking lots of pictures as it sank beneath the mountains on the horizon. The fireflies aren’t out yet, so the walk back wasn’t lighted by them, but the stars were bright, the air was pleasantly cool, and the darkness was soft in the moonlight.

Waterfall - obviously

Different fall, different time, more water

Thai Maple - leaves have just three points

Stream with maple leaves

Yours truly, by the cliff

Waiting for the sun to set

Still waiting for the sun to set

Sun setting...

Different trip - cliff with low clouds

Big rock overhang - from my last trip

The trip down the next day was quite leisurely and relaxing, except that one of the women twisted her ankle a bit and so had to be extra careful on the rocky and slippery areas. Our bags were carried down for us though, so we didn’t have much extra weight to carry and we made ample use of the rest stops.

The truck that came to pick us up was a bit small for all eight of us and our bags, so half of us found ourselves somewhat buried under bags in the back for the short ride to “Three tips” where we stayed that night. 

Eight people, lots of bags, one very small truck

“Three tips” is a beautiful little valley area encircled on three sides by small mountains and inhabited by a very small and quiet community of a few families who live there part time. Three of the people we travelled with are sisters and their family has a couple of cottages in the area. It is devoid of street lights and is a very peaceful and natural setting with jungle and mountains all around. I slept the night outside on the deck so I could see the stars and watch the sun in the morning as it climbed above the mountains.

View from the deck

Early morning

The trip back was fairly uneventful, and other than a few side trips here and there to go shopping or eat Chinese food and things like that, I’ve been at the temple. One interesting note about said Chinese food is that there is a restaurant that I visit with Mae Chee Ning (and others) sometimes when we go to town to go shopping or to take someone to the airport. It has good food, and waitresses all dressed in similar uniforms – little skirts and aprons and things. Recently they’ve started doing a short synchronized dance every 30 minutes or so. The dance music is short, so they repeat it twice and they all look pretty bored while doing it. It made me think of Somni and Cloud Atlas again. For those of you who don’t know about Cloud Atlas yet, Somni is a clone who originally works in a restaurant as a server and her days are all the same, as are her responses to people. She is one of many who look the same and who work for the restaurant chain. The dance piece seemed to me to be a bit of an attempt to turn the poor girls into clones. We clapped to try to give them a bit of encouragement.

In a conversation recently we were talking about “love”, along with music and love songs and things. A while ago I had a few moments of feeling, or realizing in a bit deeper way than before, that “love” doesn’t need to be tied to an object or person. It just is, like water when you’re swimming under water or air when you’re breathing. The subject came up again with respect to heartbreak. We decided that heartbreak doesn’t really exist. Love doesn’t need an object and doesn’t need to come from anywhere in particular, so if the heart is loving, how can it be broken? What we generally think of as heartbreak is really “expectation break” – we don’t get what we were hoping for. That’s not altogether comforting while one is suffering from heartbreak, unfortunately. (To which I can attest, having had the ailment once or twice). However, there it is…  J Just another thing to agree with or not I guess. Words are just words after all, and we go around swapping ideas with them. Whoever invented language probably had no idea just quite what a mass of babble he or she was getting started!

So, that’s about it I guess. I went to see Luang por (the head monk and teacher here) a couple of days ago about some uncomfortable feelings I was having. He has a very kind way of being and just sitting in the area around his house has a peaceful and comforting feeling. His advice to me was to “Let it be itself”, which is actually his advice about most things. This seems kind of a simple idea and a radical idea at the same time I think. Simple in that, well, what else can it be than itself and why do we need to worry about that, or fix it or try to change it? Radical in that it is my (and many people’s I think) habit to always try to fix, change, alter, or get rid of things when we don’t like or want them. (Like ants for instance. How does one get rid of the little buggers?) J

I’ve found a whole complex of beliefs around the idea that I DO have to do something about the things I don’t like, and that they won’t go away by themselves and then they don’t – which raises the question of how much of belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy? In any case, “let it be itself” seemed comforting at the time. I did, and – interestingly enough – the feelings seem to have changed to something else now, without any meddling or trying on my part.  Maybe things just work that way…

Happy 2013 everyone. I’m kind of happy that the world didn’t blow up like it was supposed to, and that maybe predictions of a new era of peace, kindness, and well-being could be in the offing. I think I’ll go with that last thought anyway – seems like a happier sort of place to put my energy.

Love to you all - May your path be without obstacles and your heart know that however long the path may seem, in truth you have already arrived.

Vientiane Visa Run

The days seem to be sliding one into the next and time is going by surprisingly quickly lately. When I was here last year, it often seemed like days were weeks, weeks were years and the ten weeks of my stay could almost have been a lifetime. It’s been nearly nine weeks since I arrived this time, and it feels like less than that. Certainly not like a lifetime. Time is really a strange thing, and much more subjective than we generally give it credit for. I think we each have our own personal little time system and the universe runs on different clocks for each of us. Why not? It’s an infinite universe after all, so I figure it has room to give everybody their own time experience and still manage to fit it all together somehow… J

There has not been a great deal of adventure or news to write about lately, and I’ve found myself being somewhat disinclined to write much anyway – hence the dearth of postings of late. However, I just returned on Thursday from a trip to Laos to extend my visa and thought that the trip was worthy of a few words at least.

Visas are a big thing for travellers over here and the “visa run” is a something that everyone staying here for more than a couple of months has to get used to. In order to get an extension you have to leave the country, pay for a new visa and then come back again. This means going across the nearest border, hanging out for a couple of days, spending time waiting in lines at the consulate, and things like that. There’s also a whole service business built up around it, I discovered.

In my usual way of not doing a lot of planning beforehand, I looked up (or actually Che Ning looked up for me) some traveler’s posts about visa runs and got the basic outline, as explained above. Thus armed with a minimal idea of where I was going and what I was doing, I caught a lift most of the way to Nhong Kai (Thai city on the Thai side of the Maekong river) and took a bus the rest of the way. I stayed the night in Nhong Kai and had quite a pleasant time walking along the river at dusk and hanging out in a restaurant catering to westerners, eating French fries and listening to “soft rock oldy” sorts of music. 

Nhong Kai side of the river, looking at Laos

A very slow triple wide boat, labouring up the river

I decided I wouldn’t get in too much of a hurry, so I had a relaxing morning and a leisurely breakfast of toast and eggs (what a treat!) and then found a tuk tuk to take me to the border. Tuk tuk drivers pretty much always take you where they think you ought to go, rather than where you actually requested, and my driver stopped off at a visa service place that helps people with their visa runs. I got fixed up with some passport pictures, an application for a Laos visa (which I’m not sure I actually needed) a lift to the border, someone to walk through with me and make sure everything went the way it was supposed to, and a minivan ride to the Thai consulate. All for about 3000 baht, or about $120.  So the trip across the border was pretty simple. I think it would have been fairly simple even without the help (and less expensive), but I wouldn’t have had a picture and it would have been a lot slower. As it was, I breezed through and was at the Thai consulate in no time.

On stepping out of the minivan I was immediately accosted by several people wishing to help me with the Visa application. I went with one of them and for another 3000 baht had an application put together in a jiffy. I was a bit uncertain when he said he’d take my passport and I could come back for it in two days. He was just this guy with a tent and a photocopier on the sidewalk after all. But he gave me his phone number and seemed sincere, so I decided why not. If I lose my passport then it will just be a bit longer adventure, with a few extra twists thrown in.

A tuk tuk driver deposited me at a nearby hotel, which I didn’t like very much as there wasn’t much of interest nearby and it didn’t seem overly clean. I stayed anyway though, as there wasn’t anything else immediately apparent. It was hot and so I spent the afternoon in my room watching TV (kind of a habit in motel rooms I’m afraid), but went for a long walk in the evening.  The next day I went down to the touristy area of Vientiane, which probably covers 10 or 15 square blocks near a wide walking area along the river. The hotel that I decided on here was pretty basic, but much cleaner, and there were many more things to see and do within easy walking distance.

It’s a busy tourist time and there were lots of Europeans around – German and French mostly it seemed, with a few Australians and various others thrown in. I met one Canadian woman from Sqaumish who was there with her husband. He was working on an environmental review project having to do with some thoughts of putting hydro electric dams on the Maekong apparently.

I didn’t talk to many people actually. I found it so easy to meet people when I was travelling in my early twenties, but it seems harder now. There are lots of “older” guys wandering around Thailand and Laos, often with a younger Thai or Laos woman with them, and so I feel kind of like I’m lumped into that general demographic. I don’t really fit in with the youth hostel crowd anymore, and I’m not quite in the “rich and retired” group either, so I didn’t quite know how to fit in. The lady from Squamish had some good advice though – she said you just have to say something immediately when you go into a room, or when you see someone. If you say something right away you can often get a conversation going. If not, it’s like a wall goes up and it’s a lot harder. She’s right actually…

I didn’t really mind the quiet though. I did a lot of walking around looking at shops and restaurants and temples, watching people, walking along the river, watching the sunset, walking through the very large number of booths set up in the evenings on the river walk to sell clothes and paintings, watches and toys and doodads of all sorts, and just practicing enjoying my own company. It seemed to go OK and I got along with myself reasonably well most of the time.  J

Part of the river park and walk area, Laos side

Riverside park area

I also treated myself to a few really good meals. I splurged and went to exclusive, expensive, touristy restaurants – something which I don’t normally do. Splurging in Laos means spending $10.00 for a meal instead of $1 or $2, but it all adds up you know. Anyway, my two favorites were the Balsamic chicken at “Sticky Fingers” – served artistically with mashed potatotoes, vegetables, marinated eggplant and capers and very very good, and a “Salade peasan” with a foundation of soft buttercrunch type lettuce, two softly poached eggs, shredded red cabbage, soft sundried tomatoes, bacon pieces, marinated mushrooms and a dressing that tied it all together. Really tasty!  J

I went for a long walk along in the sand on the river flood plain the morning of the day I was to pick up my passport and found a place where I could get to the water and stick a foot in it. (I seem to have been rewarded for this with a slightly infected toe however – or maybe it was from something else. It’s presently bandaged with antiseptic ointment and getting better I think). Then it was back to the consulate to find William (my passport guy) waiting with the visa all done and a driver to take me back to the border. So, off I went, zoomed through the border, picked up some coffee at the duty free for some people at the temple and was just about to get on the bus to go across the bridge back to the Thai side of the river when someone called out “Todd??”. It turns out some people from the temple had gone over to shop at the duty free store, so I got a ride back to the temple with them. It all went pretty smoothly. Not planning, when done trustingly and flexibly, can work out pretty well!

Sandy cut-bank - Laos side

Small boat, and looking across at Thailand

That’s about it for now. I’ve been doing some minor leaf raking and helping Che Ning work on an English FAQ for the temple website (haven’t gotten very far yet) and enjoying the cooler temperatures. The afternoons are still a bit uncomfortable, but much more bearable and the mornings and evenings are wonderful. December is a great time to be in Thailand actually!

For learning lately, I think a movie I watched the other day kind of sums it up nicely. The movie was “Bolt” – the Walt Disney cartoon about a dog who plays a TV superhero dog and thinks he has all these super powers. He ends up getting lost and finds out he doesn’t actually have the super powers he thought he did, and has to find his way across the country back home again with a reluctant cat. Along the way he discovers it’s kind of fun just being a dog and learns how to do “dog stuff”, like sticking his head out of a car window with his tongue hanging out, chasing sticks, burying bones and things like that. It was kind of a fun message in the ongoing repeated message to myself that it’s really OK to just be who and what I am, how I am. Also, the message – from a couple of rather different sources – that “enlightenment” just is, and it is already. As David Hawkins says, “All you have to do to be enlightened is to stop being unenlightened”.  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcOW6-dHPtc takes you to the short David Hawkins video from which this quote cameth. This one about "surrender" is kind of interesting too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjyVBG3WvdE )  Or, as a person here at the temple said, enlightenment comes before the “path”. First, know you’re already there. Then live as if you were.

Sounds pretty good I guess…

I probably won’t get another post out before Christmas, but I believe I will be spending Christmas camping at the top of Phu Kra deung, a nearby mountain and wildlife reserve area – so I’ll probably have something to tell about when I get back.

Until then, have a wonderful holiday season. Wishing you lightness and ease and being OK with whatever is with you…

Have a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Todd

Make me one with everything...

I had intended to get this posted on Monday, but I’ve been sick for a few days and so haven’t gotten it done. It’s the first time I’ve been stay-in-bed sick in all of my time in Thailand so far, so I guess that’s not too bad. I’m glad to be feeling better though, as it was one of those flues that seems to affect pretty much every part of the body. I spent a bit of time amusing myself at one point with describing my various complaints like Snow White’s dwarves – I had Achy, Dizzy, Crampy, Grumpy, Sweaty, and occasionally Chilly, Shakey and Runny (I won’t go into which end Runny was concerned with). Add to that a few inflamed mosquito bites (Itchy) and a rather discourteous return of a few ants (Crawley) and I had the full complement of 7, plus 3 extra dwarves, all in the same bed. Not a very happy prospect, I can tell you!  Thankfully, things do change and pretty much the entire troupe has now “Hi Ho, Hi Ho’d” off to somewhere else.

It is now Dec. 1 and although I know I shouldn’t be complaining, I’m been having some twinges of missing cooler, drier air that doesn’t make one’s clothes stick to one, and suck the energy out of a person quite so effectively. I think maybe Grumpy is still hanging around actually as he keeps popping up. It’s been raining quite a lot the last few days and the air is very humid. The nights are cooler, but there is so much water in the air that the cool evenings make the dew fall almost like rain. The sun is shining brightly at the moment though.

I had a bit of an adventure last weekend when I went on a trip to visit another “Guru” sort of person, and to attend another Khaiten for a small forest temple. I left the temple here at around 4:00 AM Sat. morning in the company of several monks, nuns and other laypeople in a very full van and drove about six hours to the home of this teacher. I won’t say a great deal about him, as I’m not sure how much he wants to be advertised. It was very interesting to meet another “teacher” with some renown, however, and to see the vast differences in style and way of being that teachers have. I did feel quite honoured though, in that he gave me some special attention, some gifts, and a new name. Kind of cool. J

We stayed at his house on Sat. night and had dinner there, which was also rather an adventure for me. It was “country food” consisting of raw shrimp (cleaned but with tails on and soaked in a sauce of some sort), cooked whole shrimp, something apparently made from pig’s blood or some mushed up inner part of a pig (covered with a bit of blood for sauce – cooked I think), what I believe was cow intestine or stomach, rice, and some sort of soup. I made it through most of the raw shrimp, tripe, cooked shrimp, and rice, but didn’t eat much of the pig stuff. It’s all in what you get used to I guess.

Dinner

The next morning was the Khaetin celebration at the forest temple. The temple was very rustic and basic, but quite a pretty place with a small pond and trees drooping branches over the water. I’m finding that I am not very interested in ceremonial Buddhism at this point, but the monks did a bit of chanting that was quite relaxing to listen to, and I think meant to convey a blessing. There was also a big meal, served first to the monks (far more than they could eat) and then served to everybody else from what was left over – still more than we could eat.

After the meal we made a quick trip back to the house and then headed for home. The drive this time seemed to me to go on and on. We drove through small towns, past rice paddies being readied for new planting, and others with rice still nearing readiness for harvest, shanty-town looking vending stalls by the roadside all empty at this season with their thatched roofs in disarray, lakes and mountains, forests and a small city or two. Our driver was very good, but drove in the thai style of find a tailgate and stick to it until there’s a small opening in the other lane, dash around and jump back onto your own side in the nick of time, dodge the motorcycles, zoom up to the next slower vehicle, and so on. Everyone drives this way and it all works rather well. People make room for each other and I think they are able to bend space kind of like the Night Bus on Harry Potter, getting thinner at just the right moment so that more vehicles than are supposed to fit on a particular stretch of road can pass each other without colliding.

I found myself pondering what makes things ordinary or extraordinary on my way home. Here I was, zooming dangerously down a road in Thailand with a van full of monks after just visiting a guru of some apparent renown, and feeling like it was all fairly normal. Just me, sitting here you know…   J

My brother, Jeremy, and I were going to write a course about “Making the Ordinary Extraordinary”, at one time. I think that most of the time we actually do the opposite – we make the extraordinary world around us and all of our extraordinary experiences into just ordinary life. I suppose that a Buddhist would say that really, nothing is either ordinary or extraordinary. It just is…  There is a difference in experience between the dullness of “ordinary” and the vibrancy of “IS” however, even though they may refer to the same object or experience.

I have had some changing ideas about what it is that makes a “Master” or “Guru” in the sense of teachers of Buddhism, or perhaps teachers of “Truth” regardless of religion – though “truth” is a bit of a loaded word with many different meanings to different people. “Masters” it seems, tend to not fit into molds or stereotypes, not conform to social conventions, and not fit into one’s expectations. People have a tendency to put their teacher(s) up on a shelf and think that there can be no questioning, no disagreeing and the master can do no wrong. They create an illusion of what they expect and drape it over the “master” like a blanket – or perhaps more aptly, project it on him or her as if from a movie projector. Part of a “master’s” job, perhaps, is to sometimes shock people out of this by doing things that don’t fit the picture.

Ajahn Cha, a famous teacher from this area, says that enlightened beings live in the world just like worldy beings. They look like everyone else and you never know if the person you pass on the street is ordinary or extraordinary. The difference is that enlightened people know how to let go of what they feel and experience almost immediately and they have no need to follow the thoughts, feelings and desires so they don’t make them bigger.  They know that they are OK as they are, they don’t need to learn more or be more, so whatever is just IS and they don't make more suffering for themselves with their minds. That’s the only difference between ordinary and extraordinary.  

I've also been thinking about words and explanations, and their relative worth. It can be kind of freeing to consider the possibility that knowledge and thoughts and explanations like I try to give in some of these posts are all wrong anyway, because they are already gone. The words are records of experience that has already happened, in a context that no longer fully exists. They are useful, but only as a flowing part of experience that continues on without them. I hope that if you find things here that cause you to feel upset or to think too much or in other ways bother you that you will just let them go and consider them as unimportant and of no use to you - and accept my apologies...  It is not my intention to cause misunderstandings or difficulties!

A friend (thanks Fraser) sent this Zen poem that I like very much. In typical Zen fashion it has some extra meaning, “hidden” where words can’t go…

A Six line Poem

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.

(Hint – you have to count the lines in order for this poem to have its full meaning)

Ajahn Cha compared learning about the “truth” as he saw it to the way a mango grows. (If you’re interested, here’s a link to the full text: http://www.ajahnchah.org/book/Knowing_World1.php) For those of us from colder climbs, an apple or zucchini would do just as well I suppose. J The point is that the apple or zucchini starts as a seed, grows into a plant, sprouts a blossom, goes through various stages of growing and ripening, and becomes a ripened fruit. In the same way the poem above explains there is a time to know that there is God, there is a time to know that “I am” there is a time to just be and…  For all things there is a season and a time and we each are ripening in our own way and own time. A good teacher, like a good gardener, gives what is needed (not what is expected) at the time that it is needed.

One of the teachings that seems to be in its “time” right now around here is to have and express an intention to let go of expectations in all ways and of all types. Keep giving away expectations and you will eventually begin to automatically act without expectation and to live without expectation. This is a big step in freedom…

Well, I think I’ll stop writing here before my attempts to explain things become even more confusing. I think it’s helpful to not take any of it too seriously, so I’ll end with another little story that I quite like, with thanks to Andrew for sending it to me:

A Zen monk walks into the pizza parlour.

Cook: What do you want to order?

Monk: Make me one with everything

The cook makes the pizza and gives the monk his pie. The monk pays with a fifty and waits to get his change back but no change is offered.

Monk: Hey, where's my change?

Cook: Real change comes from within.

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So that's it for this time.  One note though - apparently making comments is not working very well for some of you. That's OK actually, as I don't get a chance to read them very often anyway. It would be better to send a note to me via email as then I will be more likely to actually see it. If you don't have my email address, it's: stormchild1@gmail.com