OPTIMISITC FULL MOON FRIDAY AS IRAQ MELTS INTO A NEW ERA

It’s a full moon day today, and is also a Friday the thirteenth. I read in the internet that the next time Friday the thirteenth will land on a full moon day is in 2045. I doubt I’ll be around by then…And so let’s enjoy this odd combination.

The sun is low in the sky, with puffy humid clouds hanging around filtering its heat and light. The leaves on the trees are still a brilliant optimistic green, and optimism is in full bloom in my neighbourhood, for it’s the season of graduations/convocation at the University of Toronto.

The other day I was pedalling around King’s College Circle in the late afternoon. The large white tent that the university sets up on the lawn for convocation season was alive with slowly moving figures: grads in their black gowns, and profs too, the latter often with wonderfully medieval-looking caps and colour; and proud family members clutching bouquets of flowers and busy with cameras and cel phones. I stopped and asked one grad which group was graduating that afternoon. “Masters and Phd students” she replied. What a select and hard-working group. No wonder the families were looking so proud and the grads as well.

Other reasons for optimism in my household and among my friends include the election in Ontario yesterday. The province elected a woman as premier, a first for Ontario. Her name is Kathleen Wynne and she is also notable because she’s in a long-term domestic partnership with a woman. Her partner was invited up on the platform last night as they all celebrated the results. Bravo to Ontario for not worrying about the sex or sexual orientation of the premier, and also for defeating the hard-right conservative party.

Now we need to push determinedly  for a clean-up of corruption and money-waste. Will it happen? For once I feel a little optimistic that it might. We’ll see.

And another positive: I spent lunch with a friend from Kurdistan named Ayub who is working here in Canada running the English language arm of a Kurdish news organisation called Rudaw. He confirmed that the startling-to-ousiders success of ISIS fighters in capturing the northern part of Iraq this week is a happy thing to the Kurds of the region. They view it as “about-time”, this realignment of borders with the distribution of the very distinctive populations in the region.

“At last” he said, the Kurds control all the areas inhabited by the Kurdish population, in both Iraq and Syria. Until this week they controlled only Kurdistan, but that didn’t include all Kurds. Now that’s changed. And the Kurds are jubilant. And he said, that’s all they want; they aren’t trying to invade or take over any other territory.

Northern Iraq’s Sunni population and southern Iraq’s Shia population are now divided into two zones of control.

This marks the end of the old borders that the European powers agreed to in 1919, following the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire (read Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 for a wonderful review of the whole Peace Conference, and the legacy that we are still living with).  So here we are, almost a century later, and after the spilling of blood by thousands of locals as well as far too many foreign soldiers and civilians, back to a map that corresponds to the cultural/ethnic/religion situation on the ground.

Let’s hope the US government doesn’t try to bomb people insensate, and instead leaves them to sort things out for themselves.

And on the food front, this evening I picked my first batch of garden greens: arugula and various other leaf lettuces, plus basil, and used it to make a coarse pesto with pine nuts and freshly grated pecorino, that went onto some penne. So that’s the first taste of late spring, beyond the dandelions that I stir-fry, and the rhubarb, and into tender fresh greens. Lovely. Another lift of the heart.

Now it’s time to go out and look at that fat full moon.

FULL MOON OF MAY

Full moon last night, how lovely, and everything glowed as I pedalled through Toronto’s late-night streets at about 11. Moon shadows throw different things into relief, and they do that even in the city, especially on side-streets of course. The fruit tree blossoms create a web of shadows on the street, eerie and lovely as I approach, then give a little gust of scent to confirm their friendliness and beauty.

It rained in the night. The maples, plane trees, other deciduous treasures, are all in bloom, some discreetly, others more garishly. And this morning on the rain-darkened ground many trees had a carpet of brilliant green below them, the rain having washed off the delicate bits – pollen? Anthers? Biology was never my strong point.

In the dazzle of fall colours it’s easy to forget that springtime gives us a fore-taste of the same effect: ground carpeted with tree brilliance, tree debris you might say, and what a treasure.

I am delighted to be here for this moment of spring’s unfolding. It’s later than usual yes, and perhaps even more precious as a result.

Happy May moon to you all. I hope the birds and the little frogs are singing to you and that your heart is lifting.

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…

A SENSE OF WONDER & BELIEF

The gecko in the corner of my room high up near the ceiling has just given another chik-chik-chik-chik-chik, loud and percussive in the predawn quiet. He’s interrupted the silence several times in the last hour, as I’ve been lying half-awake here in my corner room in Yaunshwe. When I first woke, it was just after four. I looked out my  window and saw the almost-full moon in the western sky, red from the smoke-haze of the season, like a planet from another world. And then it slipped behind the high hills that rim this valley, and was gone.

Now it’s 6 am and in the distance I can here the putting purr of boats, the early ones heading down the river to Inle Lake. They’re going to pick people up and bring them back to town and dry land. Or  else they’re heading early to Indein, the place where today’s largest five-day-market takes place. Tomorrow the market is here in Yaunshwe. I’m sorry to have to miss it: we leave by plane tomorrow morning to get back to Rangoon.

Yesterday’s market was by the five buddha temple in the lake, so everyone who was there had come by boat: the P-O from their hillside villages (down to the shore by ox-cart or on foot, or in a crowded open-backed truck, then onto long black wooden boats); the Intha from their houses in/on the lake, houses on stilts or on small carefully built islets of hard-earned dirt. The market was large and airy. 

I’d been before, in 1998 with my kids, but at that time part of the market was a “floating market” with people on boats selling soups and snacks and trinkets. There’s a photo in Hot Sour Salty Sweet that I took there, a man’s tattooed hand holding a bowl of soup…  But when I arrived and saw no floating market I started to doubt my memory. Was I losing it? Was this the same place? But then where was the floating market?

When that kind of memory-doubt strikes, it’s always a relief when I learn I am not crazy…things do change after all, and in this case they have. Too bad. The floating market was lovely.

++++

The above was written while I was in Burma, at Inle Lake. Now it’s a couple of days later and I’ve flown, via a night in Rangoon and a last dinner there with my lovely Burma food tour group, back to Chiang Mai. Here there is more reliable internet, and an easy space to get rested and re-organised. Travelling with a group of people, and moving every two or three days, leaves little time for reflection. And so once again there has been a long gap between posts here on my blog, for which I apologise.

Full moon day on Monday ws a big deal in both Rangoon and here in Thailand, maha budjia day. I went to Shwedagon early on Monday morning with three other people, walking east from our hotel for about ten minutes. Our destination gleamed gold in the dawn light high on a hill ahead of us. Up the long set of steep steps we went, after leaving our shoes at the bottom, expecting to find the calm atmosphere of an early Monday morning at the top.

Wrong. It was intense, peopled, celebratory up there. There was a buddha procession all lined up on a red carpet with fantastic musical accompaniment, a sequence of cymbal, deep conch horn, louder blare and drum that was oddly compelling. The buddha was gold and calm looking, being carried on a small palanquin by white-clad young men. Troupes of nuns were standing watching in their pale pink and vivid orange robes, shaved heads smooth and rounded. And monks of all shapes and sizes in dark red were walking or standing, crowds of them.

I crossed through the procession as it stood there, then joined the clutter of people who were walking slowly around the giant gold chedi. Behind me I heard the procession start moving. What a wild morning scene it was.

I stopped at the dragon (Saturday-born people’s) shrine to make offerings of water (pouring cupfuls on the buddha and on the dragon) and to drape onto the buddha the jasmine flower garland I’d bought on the way up. And then I rejoined the crowd, slowly walking on the cool marble, looking and wondering at it all.

Every time I am at Shwedagon I notice at least one new-to-my-eyes thing; the place is so full and complex that one can only take it in a bit at a time. On this last visit I “saw” for the first time a standing buddha, slender, atop a platform. The statue was gold, graceful and very pleasing. But that appreciative response made me pause.

For each thing I look at at Shwedagon I see with my western foreign eyes, not with the eyes of a “believer”. And so my first and primary response is an aesthetic one. I am drawn to a statue or drawing or mural or tilework, or I’m not. But if I were a simple believing buddhist, surely my first reflex on seeing that buddha statue would be one of awe and worship; would aesthetic judgement enter my reaction at all? It’s the same question that arises in Europe, when we see a, say, medieval wooden carving of the Virgin. We make a judgement about its beauty, its line and feel, and are also impressed by its antiquity, however it looks. Surely the peasants and others from the era in which it was created would have had little or no aesthetic response, but instead one of worshipfulness…

And this brings me to the article that came out about a week ago concerning the repair and renovation of a temple/gompa complex in Nepal’s remote Mustang region. There’s a controversy about the work that is being done (funded by foreign donors). The foreigner who is in charge began with an attitude from his training, which was to preserve what was there, in however dilapidated a state. But he changed once he had spent a lot of time with the villagers and monks. They wanted frescoes repainted and brightened, renewed and restored, not just conserved.

There’s been a large dispute. The man in charge said his view had changed because he had come to realise that the villagers’ needs and point of view should come first. He had decided that the western art-conservation approach was not appropriate to the situation, which involved a living much-used place of belief and worship, not a museum piece.

And so when I see bright neon lights sparkling behind a buddha figure at Shwedagon, or garish new paint at Wat Bupparam near my place here in Chiang Mai, I try to put my head in the place of the worshippers, rather than staying locked in my place of aesthetic judgement. It’s especially when the judgement is negative (“why did they make this so ugly?”) that I feel I need to put my imagination elsewhere, to try to understand another point of view, another way of seeing and relating.

When my aesthetic response is positive - that excited appreciation of something lovely - it cannot be repressed, nor should it be I think. It’s the feeling I had when I first saw the charming marble reclining buddha in a temple at Sagar, in southern Inle Lake. There’s a sense of delight and wonder. Time stops. And that response is not far from religious, is it?

LIGHTS IN THE SKY AND ON THE WATER

I’m sitting on the floor up here in my airy ninth floor corner apartment in Chiang Mai. I have sound in three-D here, and what is it? First there’s the rhythmic beating of a gong at the Pa-O wat (buddhist temple) across the street, sometimes with cymbals too, as a clashing under-over note. Then there’s the bang bang, at irregular intervals, of fireworks. Smetimes it’s a “pop” loud and sudden, sometimes there’s a whistle and then a bang. There’s very lttle traffic noise though, for many streets around here have been closed off, for tonight’s big parade. Last year I was down by the parade watching and photographing; this year I’m keeping my distance

All this is Loy Kratong in Chiang Mai. Twenty-three years ago at my first Loy Kratong here, things were smaller...there were some big exploding whooshes of fireworks in the sky, bright bursts of colour, and there were the little scary firework “bomblets”, firecrackers in a string, that people would toss out into the road. But there weren’t many cars and crowds were manageable.  Like so much else in Chiang Mai and Thailand, Loy Kratong  has gotten bigger and more modern in many ways recently.

But up here I’m low-tech: I just have two little ceramic candles, out on the ledge of my little balcony. 

And last night, after making kratongs in the afternoon with two neighbours, using rounds of banana stem as base, then wrapping each round with banana leaf, anchored with pins, and decorating the top with flowers and folded banana leaf and candles, I carried my two to the river. I went with a friend early. We sat at a little restaurant on the far bank, at a table near the water, and watched the sun set and the lights of floating kratongs make their flickering way down the river. Finally it was our turn. I lit the little candles on my kratongs, then launched them, one by one. As I watched them totter away on the dark water, heading downstream, they seemed like little freshly hatched baby turtles, or any fledgling, precariously setting out.

They were like the embodiment of our hopes and fears, fragile, vulnerable, optimistic nonetheless, in fact rather valiant.

That was last night. After watching the scene for a good long while, we made out way through incredibly thick traffic and crowds, oh so grateful to be on foot, over the bridge, past arade, and thence into the relative peace of the lane I live on. 

All this evening the moon has been coy, draping herself in gauzy cloud one minute, then peering out in a silvery gleam, then completely veiling herself in thick cloud the next moment. But now she’s out, the sky is clearing, and the moving golden yellow lights of fire-paper lanterns are sliding upward across the sky. Oh now there are some bursts of red and then sparkling white-silver from fireworks to the east, and here’s a zinging whine of something... But the backdrop is the floating moving constellations of fire-in-the-sky paper lanterns. And if I look closely I can see their ghosts, the blackened husks of expired paper lanterns as they drift slowly, like tired phantoms, back to earth. 

Suddenly, a pair of very loud bangs make me jump. I can’t imagine how people who have been in war of any kind ever tolerate this festival; there are so many explosions large and small, unexpected bangs and pops. 

In the distance I can hear the music that accompanies the various floats in today’s enormous elaborate parade. They pass down Thapae Road, then north along the river. The sound is carrying up to me from the river, born by the breeze in irregular gusts. 

How peaceful I feel up here, not distant, but just at a calm remove, looking out at and listening to the panorama of light and action. Meantime the two ceramic candles are bright on the ledge before me, flickering with a strong golden yellow light. 

Above the moon seems cool and very silvery in comparison to all this man-made yellow flame. She’s got an aureole now, pinkish, the haze caused by the fireworks’ smoke perhaps...or just the remnant of damp air from the quickly disappearing clouds.

The breeze has freshened. I think the wind has changed. Perhaps finally dry season with its clear skies and crisper temperatures and dry air is finally ready to start. Hallelujah! 

And there’s another reason to feel grateful: tomorrow, November 30, my older kid will be twenty-five. To think, speaking of vulnerable fledglings, that he has grown up to be such a strong and capable wonderful person - it seems miraculous to me, another cause for optimism as we light our candles in the dark and admire the glow of the moon above.