FULL MOON RUMINATIONS

As always after the immersethrough sessions are done I have a head that’s pretty empty (tiredness) yet also full (of remembered conversations and images from 16 intense days). I loved the participants and both sessions: the six intense food days in Chiang Mai and near Fang; and the food-focussed travel in Burma (Rangoon, Bagan, and settled explorations in the Inle Lake area.)

New energy returned with full moon day yesterday. Full moon days here are always a reminder of time and belief and also of just how intensely felt and deeply important the lunar cycle is to humankind. 

The days around full moon are the time when we can see at night without electricity. That light-at-night marvel surely was an enormous gift to our ancestors. We lose track of it in our overlit electricity-rich lives. But if you find yourself sleeping out where there is no electricity, as a friend of mine did the other night at a Karen refugee camp on the border, you can retrieve the sense of wonder and be in touch with an earlier era of human history.

Speaking of nature's wonders and human history, I have just read a review of New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest book, The Sixth Extinction. Here’s a link to the review: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/the-sixth-extinction-by-elizabeth-kolbert.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20140214&_r=0  From it I gather that she takes us through recent natural history and set out clear explanations of human impact on the planet and the choices that we have before us.

It’s difficult to get hold of these issues I find. We wring our hands about catastrophic natural events, but do not change our daily patterns. Instead we take airplanes, buy cars, in general consume resources and generate waste products (from carbon gasses to garbage). Why isn’t there more concerted action to change? Why don’t I change? Why don’t you? I think it’s because the problem seems so big that we feel powerless as individuals. We don’t trust that others will join us and we feel any effort any individual makes is useless. Are we waiting for some environmental messiah to lead us? We already have plenty of them…

How far along this road will we go before there’s leadership that gets all of us into a more long-term thinking mode? Right now it seems as if corporations and governments and we individuals too, are taking care of only short-term interests and short-term results. But environmental risks require long-term thinking. And so here we are.

But back to the full moon. As she looked down on Chiang Mai she’d have seen a few special sights:

It was Makha Bucha day, a special day in the buddhist calendar. It marks the time, nine months after Buddha’s enlightenment, when he gave teachings to an assembly of followers. At the Pa-O temple across the road from my apartment there was chanting in the morning, longer and more intense than usual, and then in the evening more chanting. I went over to have a look and there was the traditional Makha Bucha day procession, led by monks. The chedi and other buildings were lit with low candles in a row outside. The non-monks, about forty or so people, each carried incense, flowers, and a lit candle. They followed the handful of monks and walked around and around (three times) the chedi, chanting in Pali. The monks gestured to me to come join them and called out an invitation. But somehow I felt better as an outsider than as a participant so I smiled and wai’d my thanks, then stayed an onlooker.

I wonder why I didn’t want to join them.

Later on, in the dark, after getting a bite to eat at a cavernous traditional-style Thai eatery on Chang Moi Road, I saw fire lanterns drifting upward from somewhere nearby. It turned out, and this was the other sight for the full moon’s amusement, that someone had had the idea of making fire lanterns out of red paper and shaped like giant hearts (two bumps on top) for Valentines Day. The Valentines Day concert at Thapae Gate, all love songs, amplified and sentimental, was the sound track to masses of young people sending up heart-shaped fire lanterns.  

I’ll try to insert a photo here (taken with my telephone).

It always seems fraught to me, this combo of paper lanterns and live fire, but somehow it mostly happens without accidents. You unfold the paper, light the gas in the small metal container that is suspended at the bottom of the hollow paper lantern, hold the paper upright, the flame at the bottom, until hot air inflates and fills the lantern, then release it. Up, up it floats, swaying a little perhaps, until it gets caught by a breeze and drifts farther up and away, joining its cousins to make moving shifting constellations in the night sky. “Sanook” (fun) rules here in Thailand.

A similarly unanxious attitude about safety, this time related to food, means that there is great street food and small shophouse resto food here at all hours. The tight-assed approach of North American cities like Toronto, where practically the only streetfood permitted, for safety reasons says the health department, is hotdogs (what’s safe about cow anuses? asked a friend), yields awfulness. Here people keep clean shops and street businesses, and are creative and inventive in what they offer. Many of them have been in business for decades and take good care to maintain their reputation.

But the very word “streetfood” seem to strike fear into the hearts of some people. It’s part of the whole mistrust of the “other” I think. We fear what we don’t know. That’s perhaps reasonable and part of survival of the species. But then we have options: we can stay that way, fearful and tight, which is sterile, or we can try to learn about and experience the unknown and become comfortable with other people’s ways of doing things and of seeing the world.

The choice seems very clear to me! And to many others. But…

TRAVEL REFLECTIONS AFTER AN AIRPORT SLEEPOVER

I slept “rough” last night…no, not out in a field somewhere, but on a row of seats in Bangkok’s Suvanabhumi Airport. My flight from Hong Kong to Bangkok had engine trouble and so we were all put on a later plane that didn’t get into Bangkok until nearly 1 a.m. There was no point in going into town or even in trying to find a hotel near the airport, I reckoned.

And so I joined the motley crew of schedule-refugees who scatter themselves every night on benches around the airport to try to get some rest as they wait for late late planes or early ones, or just for an airline counter to open so they can rearrange a missed flight.

I am starting this post just before 8 in themorning on Sunday, as I sit in the plane that’s supposed to get me to Chiang Mai in just over an hour. I can’t wait.  

In the meantime I want to write down a little about the airport at night. The lights are bright and the air AC-cool, but I covered my face with a layer of dark silk scarf, wrapped the rest of me in my shawl, put my head on my camera bag, tucked my other hand-carry behind my knees, and felt quite comfortably camped. After hours of sitting on the long flight to HongKong, and more sitting in HongKong as the plane issues delayed us, my feet and ankles were swollen. Lying flat was heavenly, even if the seats were bumpy and there were people all around. And I was not worried by passers-by: The rest of the airport felt at a remove because my bench of seats was behind a post, away from the fray. The announcements of flights, very few after 1:30 a.m., were in soft woman’s-Thai. It is musical, doesn’t grate, and makes an agreeable background to thoughts and dreams…

The bench-seats’ sleep was like an extension of the sleeps I’d had on my flights, with periods of day-dreaming that slipped imperceptibly into oblivion and then back out. There were a number of men trying to sleep on other benches of seats near me. Some of them snored or snuffled occasionally, but the sounds were somehow muted in the background noise of fans and ventilation and whatever else it takes to keep an airport functioning.

As I emerged sometime after 4.30 in the morning from my longest deepest bench-sleep, about 45 minutes, the soundscape began changing. (It made me think that it would be interesting to do a 24 hour recording of the airport sounds, as it would of the sounds in other 24-hour environments such as hospitals.) There was a growing murmur and then chatter of voices, mostly women’s voices, accompanied by a light clack-clack-clack of heels as the first of the morning airline workers hurried along to their posts, all soft-voiced and full of morning energy. They must have to leave home at 4 am at the latest to reach the far-from-town airport for their early shift. And then came men and women cleaners pushing rolling carts and replacing lightbulbs and starting to mop and sweep. clean.

From there the day really began, as others like me who had spent the night, stretched, yawned, made their way to the washrooms to get cleaned up, and began purposefully walking to their gates.

The transfer staff guy at the THAI domestic desk was spectacularly clear, composed, and efficient. I met up there with another straggler/refugee from the HongKong flight delays who was also going to Chiang Mai, a pleasant young English guy who was on holiday from teaching English in Korea. And so we proceeded together to formally enter Thailand (having spent the night in the international departures area), then find our gate and put in more waiting time until our flight.

As I reflected on the streams of people in the airports, coming and going, each person with a life story and hopes and fears and ambitions, I felt disoriented, almost drunk at the scale of humanity, and its complexity. We normally deal with the scale problem by generalising and by turning individuals into a kind of amorphous object  in our heads (the words crowd or multitude are very anonymous after all), a creature rather than a huge number of fellow-humans. But in that time of being caught out of the normal expected flow of the trip and spending hours in a kind of no-man’s-land, I had time to take stock.

My conclusions about my normal assumptions were not pretty. I was obliged to acknowledge to myself that my humanity and empathy and general noticing and caring reflexes all get put on the back burner when I am in airports and negotiating the crowds and the queues. It’s as if the soullessness of these large anonymous “functional” modern spaces turns each me into an automaton, renders me somewhat soulless.

Maybe this doesn’t happen to you. But I assume, from the looks on people’s faces and the way they move, that it happens to many others.

My version of it is that, apart from the moments when I am held up in an orderly queue such as the airport security line, or the passport control line (some of those moments are great opportunities for noticing the variety of people – I think especially of the lines in Istanbul Airport), I am always navigating my way through space, threading my way through the crowd, without seeing the people at all. They all become obstacles in my path. I am thinking only of myself and where I want to get to.

I imagine that is true of many people.

And why? Why not take it easy, slow down and stroll? Why do I rush? It’s a reflex from way back, I suppose. It’s about ambition and getting there, wherever “there” is, before the line gets too long, or in case I miss something or get left out of an opportunity. But someone has to be last. And why shouldn’t I be content to take my turn at the back of the line? Why this impulse to speed things up?

Maybe it’s only North Americans and Europeans who behave like this? I wonder. But not really. Perhaps it’s a matter of temperament?

All I know is that after my enforcedly slow overnight “connection” in Bangkok, I have come to realise that my travel habits and patterns need need a thoughtful makeover. I’ll let you know how it goes, after my next long trip, which will be the flight sequence back to Toronto in late February.

Meantime I am breathing in the cool dry-season air of Chiang Mai, seeing friends, eating rice, and wearing sandals as I walk down the street. It’s a fun change after the minus 35 windchill days of early January in Toronto.

THOUGHTS AS WE MARCH INTO MARCH

Here it is already March 1. Lots of birthdays around this time, including my lovely mother-in-law Ann (Feb 28) who died over twelve years ago, and my father Adrian (Feb 29) who died in 1969 at a too-young age. There are lots of still-alive people, close friends and some relatives too, to celebrate as well, but they should probably remain anonymous…a lovely collection.

The turn into March feels momentous every year, perhaps a little like the turn into September. It’s not yet the end of winter, but the promise is there, of springtime and renewal.

Of course I am writing all this with pictures of winter and spring in my mind’s eye that don’t at all match what I see out my window. For I’m in Chiang Mai, where it’s already hot, with a haze from stubble-burning greying the sky and thickening the air. On the other hand, this dry season blending into hot season is also, like winter, a kind of dead-plants time, that will end with the “spring” that early rains bring, greening the ground and the trees.

Meantime the first durians have appeared in the markets, a little stenchy in an inviting way, and mangoes and papayas are showing up too. Yum. Every season has its disadvantages and its compensations. I’m inclined to focus on the compensations, especially the seasonal foods, for they need to be appreciated while they’re available.

And I leave here on Tuesday, so my awareness of the glorious fruit that I’m about to miss is acute!

Toay I dropped by Akha Ama coffee for a cup of some of the best coffee anywhere (no, I know I’m not an expert, but I have to say it…) and there was Lee, the man who started it all. He’s Akha, young and loaded with creative imagination and energy, and some years ago he persuaded his family and his village to start growing coffee commercially. They’re doing very well. I can only imagine the strain and effort it took to persuade the village to embark on all this. After all, the Akha haven’t survived for centuries by being pushovers or flighty adopters of each new thing that comes along. Instead they have been tenacious survivors, brilliant and thoughtful agriculturalists with a rich material culture.

And now here they are growing world class coffee in Northern Thailand.

I wonder what this will all look like in five years…

I stopped in for coffee because I was in the area, having pedalled out to Niemenhamen soi 13 for a meeting at the best Friends Library. They are the sponsors and arrangers of my two BURMA book speaking events tomorrow. The afternoon session is small, at the Library (which has very little space). In the evening there will be more room – it’s at Documentary Arts Asia. Garrett of the Library and I met today to talk about room arrangements, food (he is doing most of the cooking, with help from friends), and the timing of the events.

It was hard for us to get focussed on those details, since we had so much else to talk about, mostly centred around the current crises in Burma – the war in Kachin State and the ongoing Rohingya situation in Rakhine (Arakan) – and the seeming failure of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to be effective or even speak out with any clarity, about either. There seems to be a problem, and perhaps it’s to be expected, that the qualities that made her strong and dynamic as a persecuted opposition leader in a kind of internal exile are not ideal for dealing with the complex realities of ongoing politics. A leader needs people who argue and disagree with her/him, and needs wide-ranging discussion. She also needs a team to deal with the day to day practical details, handlers of various kinds. But Saw Suu apparently refuses to have handlers. And a leader needs to develop sophistication and strength in a team, so other people can carry part of the load and develop necessary skills. This also seems not to be happening.

It is heart-breaking to see how let down by and mistrustful of Daw Suu the non-Bamar peoples of Burma have become. It weakens the country.

Of course there is often let-down after the first euphoria of success or freedom or election. But this is deep distrust and dismay. It makes all of us who worry about Burma feel great concern.

So if you are interested, I suggest that you read news from the Irrawaddy and from Mizzima. Both are independent papers, published outside Burma.

I hadn’t intended to write about all this. It is a subject people talk about amongst

themselves, but not out loud in public much, not yet.

Instead I had intended to write about the people I saw today at the Haw market in Chiang Mai: the older Shan woman who works at the soup place I like, who walks awkwardly on legs a bowed from malnutrition in her childhood and yet works non-stop; the young women of various kinds in their platform shoes teetering through the market; the Muslim woman by the gate with a wooden leg and a baby, waiting for alms from passers-by without asking or even looking up; the mountain-grown vegetables green and bursting with life; the many languages, most opaque to my ear, though I recognise northern Thai, Yunnanese, other Chinese, Shan, Burmese…  It’s a rich brew, every Friday morning, this market opposite the mosque. There are stories and stories, I am sure.

And like most things in life, all I can do is look inquiringly, try to tune in, and know that all I am seeing is the surfaces of things. For each of us has our own story and perspective, and how much of anyone else’s can we hope to understand?

A CLEARING HEAD UNDER A CLEAR BRIGHT-MOON SKY

The waning moon, still bright, fat, and full-looking, has made its way up past my line of sight as I look out my east-facing windows. The sky is clear now: gone the haze and high cloud of this morning and afternoon, swept away by a short torrential rainfall just after sunset this evening. I’ve never seen rain here in January before. It’s almost unheard of. And no complaints, for it has freshened and brightened the air and washed away the dust. I expect tomorrow will be crisp and clear.

What a wonderful prospect, especially since I’m heading north to the countryside not far from Fang, about three hours’ drive from here in Chiang Mai. I’ll be with the people who have joined me for this year’s immersethrough session. It’s a congenial and collegial group of people, so conversations are wide-ranging and interesting. Yes there are food questions and questions relating to what we come across in the markets (the huge wildly lively and crammed-full wholesale market – Muang Mai – this morning for example), but we also end up talking history and politics and travel, finding cross-connections between our interests.

And so the journey north past rice fields (where there’s irrigation) and plots of garlic and shallots (where there’s not), and towering green limestone hills, will have layers of idea and conversation and story too, the landscape of the group travelling through the landscape of northern Thailand. It’s a pleasing idea.

Tonight we walked back from a restaurant on the west side of the old city, after a supper of issaan food that included grilled fish, grilled chicken, greens, som tam, and a brilliant tom yum soup aromatic with fresh herbs. The air was humid and there was the smell of wet pavement. The old city was very quiet, with only a few people walking apart from the seven of us, very little traffic, and a mere scattering of people at various restaurants and cafes. Chiang Mai is so liveable…

I haven’t written here for a disgracefully long time. I’m not sure why that is. I mean, yes, I have been busy with various deadlines and with preparing for the immersethrough session. But that can’t be the whole answer. Somehow my head has been full of details in a way that hasn’t allowed for the thinkng, mostly unconscious, that seems to be what lies behind the posts I usually write, and that I enjoy writing.

This isn’t the first time this subject has come up here. But it is a reminder that we seem to need to catch up to ourselves. What I mean by that is that if we draw too heavily on our resources – not getting enough sleep or downtime or whatever – then eventually the debt, the arrears, will have to be made good. We’ll be forced, by illness or incompetence or whatever, to let our bodies or minds heal or rest or catch up, whatever the appropriate term might be in the circumstances.

And so it is that I think the busy-ness of last fall’s BURMA book tour, plus the lovely intensities of the holiday season, are still reverberating in my head and memory, taking up space if you will, and not allowing fresh and new thoughts to form and create themselves.

I hope this phase is over and that I can return to the easy assumption that there will be time in the coming days for reflection and for generating new thoughts. I sure hope so.

None of this should be read as a complaint, more as an acknowledgemnt of incapacity. It is strange to think that even with the airings-out and exercise that have come with several long energetic bicycle rides with friends recently, I still haven’t managed to find a clear productive head, at least until now.

One of the immersethrough people said to me tonight, “By the end of the day you must have a lot of narratives going round in your head.” Yes, he hit the nail on the head, though I had never thought of it in exactly that way. It’s other peoples stories which I find fascinating. They go on reverberating for me. And I guess when I’m in changing and peopled situations, as I was on book tour, I end up with a lot of stories that reverberate and take up space.

This is why people meditate, or isolate themselves, to get clarity. But I do love the society of others, their stories and ideas and emotional reactions.  And that’s why the idea of sitting and meditating for ten days at a Vipassana retreat, something that a number of friends have done and have urged me to do, just doesn’t appeal.

Does it mean that I am in flight from myself? Are other people’s stories just a way to hide from my own realities and weaknesses? Perhaps. But they’re also an endlessly interesting and warming reminder of the textures of human existence. Nothing beats that!