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! 

ANOTHER FULL MOON, ANOTHER DEPARTURE

“The hustle and bustle of Chiang Mai” is a strange concept, since the town, while busy with traffic and people marketing and eating and enjoying themselves, is not exactly an intense place. But it feels that way to me right now because I have so much on my plate. perhaps also I’m aware that I won’t be here for much longer, and so I am regretting the time I spend in my apartment working away rather than out appreciating the hereness of here.

No complaints, just sayin’!!

The close-work that pins me, with both pain and pleasure, is editing the first galleys of the Burma book. Pinch of Turmeric, Squeeze of Lime is feeling so good as a title, and so in synch with the contents of the book at many levels, that i continue to be delighted with it. ANd the look of the book is feeling good, and will be even better as more photos get placed etc. But in the meantime the pain part is that it’s running long and so I know that in the conversation I’m going to have with my editor Ann Bramson later this week, there will be some hard news. I know there are short pieces of writing that will need to go, and perhaps also a few recipes. Yikes! And I instead of course have a few I’d love to add, things I learned when I was again in Burma last November-December.

It’s always this way. The long geeky explanations that I am fond of, and the rambling stories full of detail, are not always a good fit with the demands of publishing. They’re better suited to conversation or internet blogposts like this one.

Today is full moon day, and an especially holy day for Buddhists here. Last night as we walked back through the old city the moon hung huge over us, waxing still, about to be full. The night was clear, and the stars bright. This morning’s dawn was glowing pink-orange on the horizon, a sign that the haze of late winter has started. No longer are shadows sharp-edged. Instead everything has a rounded softness to it.

I’ve talked about this before, but it seems to me that digital photography, with its ability to hsarpen and over-sharpen images, has affected how we see the every day. And now I find myself in revolt against sharpness, enjoying and seeking out the softer light and rounded contours it gives everything. I feel like I’m swimming against the current though.

And now it’s time to get in a small rented car and drive up to Fang for a couple of days. The light always seems lovelier up in the mountains...

END OF JANUARY GRATITUDE ON THE WAY TO FANG

It's the last day in January, and what a long and full month it's been. I just felt I had to post a brief note now, to mark the passage into February. This evening, in the heart of dry season, it rained hard here in Chiang Mai, clearing the air and leaving us, I hope, with bright sharp-etched light tomorrow.

Early in the morning I'm heading north to Fang with a group of very nice and interesting people who are here to immerse themselves in food. They're taking the immersethrough course that Fern Somraks and I co-ordinate here each year. We've had two days of marketing and cooking and eating in Chiang Mai. The Muang Mai Market was especially intense this morning, with huge trucks loaded with everything from squashes to ginger to coconuts to cabbages inching their way through the crowds, squeezing us all against the vendors' stands with their displays of every kind of herb and stacked shallots and mushrooms and garlic and eggplants of many shapes and colours and...and... But now we head out of town at the crack of dawn to an entirely different world.

We'll drive north through the mountains to Fang, spend hours wondering at and wondering through the weekly market there, and then head to Fern's lychee farm to cook Shan food outdoors in the clear country air. We have a couple of days at the farm (and an overnight at the Pumanee Hotel in Fang, owned and run by Lahu people). Each time fern and I take people up to cook with Jam and Boon-Ma, who are the Shan food teachers, I learn a lot. And there's still such a lot to learn.

Food is one of the basic human artifacts, and as such has many layers, so it's infinitely interesting, at least to me. There's not just the practicalities of how something is made, but the whys and wherefores of the method, and the history of how different dishes or techniques evolved, and the different words for ingredients, etc etc.

And each day all over the world people are making food to feed themselves and others, sometimes as a resented chore and other times with creative energy and pleasure. It's dizzying.

Many of those who come to the weekly Fang market are from the hills, often refugees or the children of refugees who have fled Burma or perhaps from China, over time, and sought safety and more security in Thailand. I look at their faces and know that I don't know and will never know, much about them... We can only ever understand such a small sliver of the life that unfolds before us. So I guess I feel that my task (and pleasure, I admit it) is to appreciate that fact and press on trying to learn and explore as much as possible, and to be grateful for the chance to do so.

Happy end of January everyone.

RUNNING THOUGHTS & CROSS-BORDER ISSUES

There’s a bank of fog on the eastern horizon and some scattered mackeral clouds in the sky, tinted gold against the turquoise blue by the sinking sun to the west. It’s been a lovely day, like its predecessors, clear mostly, bright, and a lot warmer than a week ago, so that I can be in light cottons in the daytime and even into the evening. Running in baggy cotton shalwar-type pants (that date from Udaipur and a nice tailor there, in 2003) and a loose light cotton top before eight in the morning I am running with sweat by the time I’ve done my little two to three mile trot in the morning. The coldest of the cold season seems to be over, is what I’m saying.

Last Friday I headed north in a car with Fern and Noi, who is also from Chiang Mai, and an American friend visiting from Beijing. We stayed two nights at Fern’s lovely farm (checking things out before the immersethrough crew arrives) where the bougainvillea is in bloom, and the garden flourishes. We ate Jam’s wonderful Shan (Tai Yai) food one night and the second night brought home lots of eats from the Fang market and picknicked on it all, sitting by the fire outside.

Up north at the farm the mountains on the Burmese border are right there, dominating the western horizon and making the air cold, especially at night. It was strange and wonderful when I woke up that first morning to see my breath in great puffs and feel chilly when I ventured out from under the covers. There was dense fog in the morning, frequent in cold season up there. Everything becomes mysterious and dew drips from the trees and bushes. Eventually the sun breaks through and drives the mist away, and the world is transformed. Gone the mystery!

As I was running yesterday morning I was thinking about bad sidewalks and the pleasures of running. What makes it so great? There can be cars and exhaust, and hot or cold weather, and bad sidewalks, and yet it is still such a pleasure to just trot down the street. I guess endorphins truly are an addictive drug, and running is the easiest supplier of the drug, so there we go!

Speaking of pleasures, there’s a new Burmese restaurant in town, a place called D-Lo. Went there last Monday with a small crowd, including J and A, who were the ones who told me about the restaurant. By the time we pushed back our chairs, several hours of eating and conversation later, we’d tasted almost every salad on the menu as well as a number of curries. (Burmese salads are just brilliant. Naturally then, the salad chapter of my Burma book (manuscript due in June, book should be out in 2012) threatens to drown the rest. It’s a nice problem to have!)

D-Lo is so good that Fern and I think we’ll take the immersethrough group there next week for supper. Burmese is another piece of the northern Thai culinary landscape, less embedded than Shan/Tai Yai, but definitely connected. The more I learn here and in Burma, the more I know I don’t know, but at least I’m seeing more of the cross-connections, geo-political and cultural and culinary too.

The cross-connections in this complicated endlessly interesting region were the focus of a seminar I went to yesterday at Chiang Mai University. The Social Sciences Faculty is now putting on a series of talks and events relating to Burma, about one every two weeks it seems. The news about the situation in Burma is not common knowledge in Thailand. These seminars are a chance for university students and others to get informed. This one was titled “A Man Made Disaster: Implications for Thailand of Burma’s Health Catastrophe.”

In Burma the government surplus is in the billions of dollars but government spending on health care is less than one dollar per person per year. Most of that spending these days seems to be on buildings, not on services for patients, and most is in Rangoon and Mandalay. The consequence is that people in eastern Burma on the Thai-Burma border area, and also those in other border regions, have no health care at all. In eastern Burma the infant mortality is staggeringly high (30% death rate for children under five), and one woman in twelve dies in pregnancy or childbirth.

The seminar was concentrated not so much on these distressing statistics as on the fact that because of poor health care and lack of preventative medicine in Burma, and because of the war being waged by the Burmese army against the ethnic minorities in the border areas, diseases that have been all but eliminated in Thailand are endemic in the border regions, diseases like tuberculosis, filariasis (elephantiasis is one version of the disease), and malaria.

There are over two million displaced people from Burma in Thailand, and a constant flow of people fleeing across the border. It’s an ongoing humanitarian crisis. But even for those not moved by the plight of others, the situation bears thinking about: like it or not, the dire medical health situation in Burma can and will affect Thailand in a serious way sooner or later.

One group that’s working to try to help border populations is the Backpack Health Worker Team. They use volunteers from the communities that are being helped (Karen people in Karen areas, Mon in Mon areas, etc). The volunteers travel into Burma on foot carrying packpacks full of medical supplies such as vaccines, antibiotics, etc. It’s been going for nearly fifteen years and now serves hundreds of villages.

All this would not be necessary of course if the govenment of Burma were providing services or at least not waging war on the border populations. It’s one thing when there’s a natural disaster or endemic poverty; it’s another thing when the suffering is largely wilfully caused and avoidable.

How do people deal with their rage and anguish in this situation? Many flee to where the living is easier, and who can blame them? But many others become involved in trying to help, as teachers or community activists or Backpack volunteers or...

It’s all another reminder that a lot of the pain in the world is caused by people hurting people intentionally. Those of us not born into that kind of situation cannot imagine it. We can only try to stay aware and find our own individual ways of trying to help.

THE PLEASURE OF LOSING OURSELVES IN PURE DOING

It’s dawn here in Chiang Mai, the sun’s yellow blurred by haze on the horizon, the sky above a pale blue, and the lovely bulk of Doi Sutep that fills the northwest horizon (and the view from my north window) a soft purple-blue. In North America it’s still November 26th and still American Thanksgiving Day, but here it’s already the 27th, Tashi’s birthday. On Monday is Dom’s birthday, so in fact, unencumbered by any need for the exact days to arrive, I have been thinking about birthdays and my (now-grown) kids and spans of time.

For example, Dom turns 22 on Monday. The last time he was divisible by 11 he was in Grade 6, just finding his confidence in school; this time he is in the first year of a PhD. No wonder as we get older life seems less eventful and time seems to fly by. When I think of all that a child or young adult packs into a year, all the growth of new understanding, the learning, the whole-hearted engagement, it is truly astonishing. When we’re inside it, as young people, it’s all we know. That’s what life is. Then as we age into adulthood we’re busy, but we’re mostly managing time rather than living inside it.

Yesterday I sat in the grounds of a wat (temple) and tried to draw a naga, a dragon/snake that makes the railing and frame for one of the temple staircases. My friend Lillian, who is an artist, did some wonderful line drawings of temple details when she was here last year, and I wanted to try. The result of my efforts was a reminder of the place, but not particularly lovely. What was lovely was the experience of engaging, of losing myself in the effort. Every time I sit down to draw something this amazing thing happens. (And similarly, the focussed concentration on getting a word right in a piece of writing, or on shaping a poem, brings the same wonderful loss of self-consciousneess, this headlong plunge into the now.) It’s a gift, available almost any time, and I think it’s available to all. We need only choose to embark.

Focussed concentration, to the exclusion of almost all else, is the pleasure scholars feel as they wrestle with a text or a problem, and musicians, or artists, or anyone engaging single-mindedly or wholeheartedly with a task know it well. Children have a capacity for intently settling to one thing, playing or jumping or whatever. It’s one of the fundamental pleasures of childhood, that we mostly lose as we get distracted with meeting the social expectations of the adult world (“Come along now; we can’t stay here all day!”).

Just DOING without second thoughts or distraction is a great drug and a balm to the spirit too, for it reconnects us with ourselves, it grounds us.

I sat down in the dawn chill to write about being up north of here on a farm near Fang, the cascading bougainvillea, the glowing green wing-beans, the scent of the lychee trees, the complicated wonderfulness of the Fang weekly market, the village house where I finally learned how to make tua nao (the fermented bean paste that underpins northern and Shan cooking), the coming-into-paradise luminousness of the mountain-rimmed landscape to the north. So much for plans. I do love the way that threads of thought, ideas that have occurred to me during the week and that perhaps I have been mulling over subconsciously, surface and insist on expression as I settle to write each week.

I guess I have come full circle here, for it seems clear, as I reflect on the question of getting grounded by committing wholeheartedly to a task, that the process of teasing out these thoughts on the virtual page each week is one of the ways I find that pleasure for myself. I enjoy it so much, and today, in writing this, I’ve come to understand a little more where the pleasure lies.

We’re in highly self-referential territory here! My apologies if it’s irritating!

And for those of you who want something concrete to taste, in your mind’s eye or in fact, here’s a quick descriptive recipe for an issaan dish called moo nam toke (pork in a waterfall, meaning with a wet dressing). The issaan one uses dried chiles. There’s a northern version: just substitute fresh prik ee noo, Thai bird chiles, to taste.

There’s a vendor set up near the huge plant market (see my entry about the place in November-December last year) about a mile north of my apartment here. She sells grilled pork, som tam, sticky rice... Fern and I dropped by there one afternoon early this week after running some errands and asked for moo nam toke: Start with about half a pound of grilled pork, preferably several small pieces that are not too lean (brush it with a little oil and fish sauce, or rub it with fish sauce and ground black pepper if you wish, before grilling) and chop it into large bite-size. Place in a wide shallow bowl. Add a scant half cup of sliced red (Asian) shallot or chopped onion, some coriander leaf, some dried red chiles ground to flakes or powder, (to taste, say a tablespoon to start with), and about two tablespoons of roasted rice powder (dry roast some raw rice in a skillet, then grind to a powder in a coffee grinder or whatever). To make the dressing, combine fish sauce, lime juice, tamarind liquid (soak tamarind pulp briefly in hot water, then press through a sieve to get the liquid), to taste (about 2 tablespoons each should do it, if anything going more lightly on the tamarind and heavier on the fish sauce), then pour over. Toss to blend well, then serve and eat with pleasure...


A POSTSCRIPT: My Burmese visa has come through, hurrah! This trip I'm headed to Moulmein (now in post-colonial times written Mawlamyine), on the coast southeast of Rangoon (now Yangon). That requires a flight on Saturday to Bangkok, then another to Rangoon, then bus or train along the coast. (The land border between Thailand and Burma that is closest to Moulmein, is at Mae Sot, and is still closed to foreigners.) I am due back here late on December 10. Since internet access is unpredictable in Burma, I may not be able to post until I'm back, though last March I was able to, amazingly, from Myitkyina, so we'll see.