DANCING FREEDOM AT MIDSUMMER

This is the first sunny morning for a week I think, maybe more. The birds are singing with pleasure. I feel like June has mostly slipped away in the clouds and rain, instead of sparkling and blooming as it usually does. Egads, here it is already the 26th!

The twenty-fourth of June is "Midsummer" in English tradition and St Jean-Baptiste, the fete nationale in Quebec. It's a day for bonfires and dancing, the solstice-season celebration, just as Saturnalia-turned-Christmas was/is the date to celebrate the returning sun at winter solstice time.

That urge to make a festival and let go cares at these significant turning points in the year is deeply embedded. And so maybe that's why this year we decided to have a dancing party on the 24th. What a great thing, to be able to dance and play with the doors open to the long-bright evening sky, voices soft in the summer air, the lush green of the garden a generous backdrop, enwrapping everyone in the oasis that is our small back yard.

Some people are picky about the music they'll dance to, while others dance to whatever is on.... And it doesn't matter. In fact, when the music's on and I'm dancing, not much else matters: I'm in the bubble and high of moving and feeling free of care and any thought really. I forgot that I'd had hurt in my left foot, I let go of worries about the edits I need to do on the Burma book, and all those others nagging things that can make me bog down and lose track of the big picture. High on endorphins? High on summer?

Maybe the joy of dancing is that we retrieve our freedom. It's freedom in movement, freedom through movement. Young E, now a few months past her fifth birthday, sure felt that freedom. She danced on her own and with others on the wide open floor, and instead of tiring, seemed to get more and more composed and happy, energised in the best way.

There were summer flavours to sustain us, as well as the music. The stars were the snap peas that Brenda brought down from her CSA farm in Grey County. She'd picked them that morning. We put out a huge bowl of them, raw and brilliant green, de-stringed but otherwise as nature (and Brenda!) grew them. They vanished. Other treats were two different boxes of home-made cookies; mountains of organic grapes, red and green ones (OK not local, but a great refresher after a stint of sweaty dancing!); a brilliant hummous topped with pesto; a creamy lush guacamole; three sauces from Burma, such taste hits; and more that I can't remember. Evelyn's Crackers, and lots of sticky rice - white with a little black mixed in for texture- were the backbone that held it all together.

People drink water when they dance, and yes wine or beer, but they're not pouring it back, so the gaiety doesn't get loutish or stupid, or morose! We had six young people sleeping over on Friday night... When I headed to bed at 3.30 most of them were still up and chatting in that comfortable post-party way, reluctant to lose the intimacy of the night. But as I drifted off I heard the first birds chirping: it was already time for the pre-dawn lightening of the sky.

It reminded me of a time in northern Finland long ago when, camped by a lake, a friend and I stayed up through the night to photograph the midnight sun as it made its circuit. It dipped north in the "nighttime" hours but never went below the horizon. The sounds of the forest went on without a pause. When summer is short and winter is dark, there's not a moment to waste.

If that's a metaphor for life, then engaging with it and enjoying what we have in the way of health and friends and meaningful obligations, while we have them, is what the dance of life is all about. We don't need dancing shoes! It just takes an awareness that the music's playing and the invitation is ours to accept...

PEDALLING PLEASURES AND ONWARD MOMENTUM

After the sometimes-grind of riding on rough sandy tracks in Pagan, on a rackety bicycle with an uncomfortable seat, I am finding my bicycling here in Chiang Mai an easy glide. (Don’t get me wrong: I loved riding around in that pastoral landscape dotted with enormous stone chedis and ruins from another time, but the cycling itself was sometimes onerous and uncomfortable.) Here I’m again on a rented one-speed, true, and the seat can’t be raised quite high enough, but still, paved roads and a relatively healthy bicycle make riding the streets feel effortless.

And so it is with many things, right? Hot and cold running water we take for granted until we return from a trip where we were without, and then they feel like a luxury. And in the emotional realm too, we can easily forget and take for granted the love and kindness, and the pleasurable familiarity and acceptance of our friends. The return after a trip out among strangers is the time when we are reminded how much we rely on and appreciate long friendships and family.

But I digress. I wanted to talk about the pleasures of these last days. They include a bicycle ride out the still-beautiful Chiang Mai-Lamphun road. It’s busy with traffic, and very narrow. It can’t be widened, for on either side, like a guard of honour, stand tall tall teak trees. They’re spectacular survivors of an era when most of northern Thailand was covered with forest. Now they mark an old route to the small charming town of Lamphun. People in a hurry take the new big highway farther east, so that eventually, once I’d crossed or passed under three ring roads, the traffic was much lighter: I could raise my eyes from the road to look around, and I could have the luxury of taking off my uncomfortable helmet and feeling the breeze in my hair.

Pedalling a one speed along a flat road, round and round, is kind of mindless, like any repetitive motion (plain knitting and crochet come to mind). But when there’s a pleasant little breeze, and fields of rice stubble, and small houses with cascading pink bougainvillea, and banana trees and papaya trees with green fruit hanging, and gardens with rows of tender greens against the dark soil, and children playing and puppies ambling and small streams and little shops selling simple rice and curry or fried noodles or grilled pork on a stick, then the repetitive motion happens without my thinking about it, for my eyes and imagination are engaged elsewhere.

I reached an intersection about twenty kilometers from Chiang Mai. I was more than halfway to Lamphun, at the edge of a town famous for its basketware called Saraphi. It was time to start looping back towards home, so I turned right to head west toward the river. Another ten K or so, after several small sleepy villages, brought me to a bridge across the Ping River, and from there I headed back north. Now the huge blue bulk of Doi Sutep, the mountain that overlooks Chiang Mai, loomed before me. The day was misty and overcast, so it looked like a mirage, a dream-mountain.

The small road I was on followed the river, bending and winding with it, pausing occasionally for a small cross road and bridge to the other side. The river was green and calm, glowing with reflected light from the bright-overcast sky, sometimes rippling quietly. There was little traffic, little noise of any kind apart from birdsong. I lost all sense of time...

But all good things come to an end, and so eventually I reached the busy-ness of the city. It was time to put my helmet back on and focus on navigating the traffic.

There WAS a bonus to getting back to Chiang Mai. I had begun to dream of lunch somewhere along the way. As the morning wore on my dreams became focussed on the Issaan food at a small place called Toy off Loi Kroh Road. What a great end to a long ride, that meal of perfectly balanced som tam (shredded green papaya pounded with dried shrimp, chiles, garlic, etc and dressed with fish sauce, lime juice, a hit of sugar...), spectacular grilled chicken (guy yang), and sticky rice.

And it was just noon. I still had the rest of the day to look forward to...

POSTSCRIPT: I’m just about to post this, as I sit in the Chiang Mai airport early in the morning, checked in and waiting to fly away to Toronto via Bangkok and Hong Kong. I have a sweater and my wool shawl (they go with me to Burma to keep me wrapped and warm in the chill of the air con busses); there are socks in my handcarry that I can put on in Hong Kong. All of which is to say that the climate change from Chiang Mai to Toronto at this time of year is always a shocker and a little tricky to navigate. Good-bye tee-shirts and casual bicycling around in sandals, and good-bye bowls of broth and rice noodles for breakfast at open-air stalls, at least for the next month. There are lovely compensations though! I am SO looking forward to time with Dom and Tashi, those wonderful guys, and with good friends, in the coming days and weeks. I hope you’re anticipating some holiday time with those you love.

TRAVEL & TRANSFORMATION

I promise this won't become a blow-by-blow of my travels, but I feel I have to write about the feelings of ridiculous lightness and pleasure that have been tickling through me since I reached my neighbourhood in Chiang Mai. It's not just the running into people whom I haven't seen since the spring, nor the softness of the air, nor the loveliness of the apartment with its views of Doi Sutep, the mountain that floats on the western horizon. No, somehow it's the feeling that I am pulling on the familiarity of this place, clothing myself in it like a well worn familiar cardigan that warms and strokes me, and also transforms me in ways I am only occasionally aware of.

The transformations that travel effects in us are special. They take place as we are unmoored from our normal context, so it's hard sometimes to know what is just changed perspective and what is transformation. And perhaps it's a distinction without a difference, because there's a continuum, from the shifting perspective as we move into new places and contexts, and the changes inside us caused by that shifting and uprooting, and then the perhaps more gradual evolutions of our attitudes and thinking as we adapt to a new place and shed some of the anxieties and expectations of the place we left.

Is this too convoluted? It is a complex and interconnected set of issues, but they're intuitively commonsense "insights" I think. And it's fun to have the time to reflect on them at this very moment of transition. There will be more...

I promised last time that there'd be some food in this, my next post. My first Thai food was early this morning, a home-cooked streetfood plate of rice with two dishes on it: stir-fried ground pork with long beans, medium hot and succulent; and beansprouts cooked with slices of firm tofu and some air-dried pork. It was a great start to the day. I sat eating, with the cook's family and a couple of other customers, by a busy lane where children of all shapes and sizes were heading to school in their uniforms, looking shiny-clean and fresh.

But then as I strolled down another lane a little later and reminded myself that I had taxi and airport and a flight to Chiang Mai ahead, I bought a second breakfast: two skewers of grilled pork (moo ping) and a small bag of sticky rice, irresistable. The whole lot came to 15 baht, or about 50 cents (the plate of rice with two dishes had cost the same). The pork was tender and succulent, slightly sweet, and aromatic with a little lemongrass. Now I've really arrived here, I thought as I sat in the sun eating.

And we'll see what comes next, but for now there's a feeling of infinite possibility, and also a contentment with the here and now. So I bask in the transformations of travel.

THE WELCOME OF SOFT AIR AND NEW HORIZONS

The softness of the air is what happens first, an enveloping welcoming softness and warmth, when the plane doors open in Bangkok late in the evening. And so it was last night at around midnight. The rest of arrival, stairs and the bus to the terminal, and queueing up for passport control and waiting for luggage, etc, passes in a kind of dream, partly induced by the dislocation of jetlag and what day is it? tiredness, and partly by that soft air.

I stayed at a small hotel near the new airport. It's in a kind of small village still surrounded by rice fields (I say "still" because probably development will come soon and cement them all over, but for now...), with temples and small street vendors, like a slice of Thailand in the eighties. I strolled out at 7 this morning looking for my first meal of the trip. There were school kids in uniform walking along the village lanes, and women doing early shoppig, and men and women walking out to the main road to catch the bus to work.

I stopped at a street stall where a woman was grilling pork on bamboo skewers to ask if she also had sticky rice and som tam (pounded green papaya salad). With a yes answer, I went and sat down at a table in the back. Soon the pork came, succulent, with a little fat here and there to give it flavour and moisture, and so did the sticky rice.

Meanwhile another woman got the som tam ready. She asked me whether I eat chile heat: "gin pet mai?", and then showed me the three chiles she proposed to add when I answered "gin pet dai" (="I can eat chile-hot"). Other ingredients at the start include peanuts, dried shrimp, garlic, and tomato (they can include small crabs, but I don't like them so asked her to leave them out). Because it was early, she hadn't yet prepared the usual pile of shredded papaya, so she had to start by peeling the fruit, then chopping it with long paralllel cuts, then slicing off the thinly chopped flesh. The result, a handful of long julienne-like shreds, then got added to the large ceramic mortar and pounded with a pestle to soften it and blend flavours.

The salad came mounded on a plate, sweet with palm sugar, hot with chiles, acidic with slices of tomato and the green papaya and lime juice, and salty and pungent with fish sauce and small dried shrimp. What a wonderful opening to a trip to Thailand: sticky rice, moo yang (grilled pork) and som tam!

And it was a great reminder, after my three days of immersion at the Worlds of Flavor conference, which was focussed on world streetfoods, that there is indeed something magical and special about food made on the spot with skill and care, to order.

I want to say one more thing too, about the conference (there are so many things I could be adding here, about great conversations, new poeple met, old friends, new ideas, great energy and creativity...). There was so much going on: sessions about streetfoods and comfort foods from many places, from Peru and Brazil and Mexico (and John T Edge on streetfoods in the USA) to those from the Mediterranean and southeast Asia. But as Jessica Harris emphasised in her talk on Saturday, we are all very ignorant of African food traditions, even though they are the original underpinning of many foodways in the Americas. She's right of course. But as she was talking about acaraje (from Brazil) and other foods of South America, and linking them to west African foods, I realised again how long and slow the process is of getting familiar with new foods new vocabulary.

We take it for granted that most people will know penne from rigatoni from fettucine, but in the sixties all pasta was spaghetti, or maybe lasagna. It took a good while for the new vocabulary and new dishes to penetrate. How much longer and more difficult will it be then to get a handle on the African and Latin American ingredients and dishes? And that means we had better get started!!

It's good to be a beginner, to not-know, to experience the disorientation of not-knowing and the pleasure of slowly coming to new understandings about things that others know well. Outsider status, or beginner status is what keeps us reminded that we are not all-powerful. It keeps us tuned and humble, and hopefully respectful of others too.

So let's make a commitment to start engaging with the unfamiliar, whoever we are, wherever we are, in at least one part of our lives. In the food world, there's a lot to learn everywhere, but Jessica is right to push us to engage with African traditions. We'll be so much more appreciative, and we'll be enormously enriched too, by what we learn...

Now I'm here in Chiang Mai, the sky clear, the hills that rim the valley visible despite a little haze, the light turning golden in the late afternoon. I've already seen a few friends, and hope to catch up on more of the news this evening at supper. But I do want to remember to just be here, breathing it in, looking out for bigger horizons. It's too easy to get caught up in setting targets, in rushing to get the next thing done, the next appointment made and kept, the next plane trip booked. Those things are important. And I agree that ambition and plans are what get us doing things and completing them.

But targets and goals, specific ones, are also limiting. I want to leave room for the serendipitous things, the events and people that I can't anticipate ahead of time. For those, the lovely unplanned in life, are the things that enlarge horizons, extend the possibilties beyond the boundaries that I can imagine right now...