51,107 Words by 11/30/2007--I'm a winner!

My First Quarter Century Journey:
Searching for Meaning and Purpose in South-East Asia

Climate Change:
Long Beach to Loa; Thailand to Teasdale
An Awesome Adventure
Seeking Enlightenment Abroad in South East Asia

Baby Steps on the Heart's Journey Home

How to be Buddha in the Marketplace
Prologue
Statistically, given enough time, a monkey could write this novel. I've got the month of November. See, it's the NaNoWriMo challenge. Produce 50,000 words (about 175 pages) of original fiction composed between November first and November thirtieth and you win! There are no limits on the number of winners (I like this part), and no one judges the quality of the work (unless you show your manuscript to friends or family or potential publishers, etc.). It's all about volume, baby!
I tried many fits and starts worth of fictional bits. Just randomly whatever came out of my head. But I never got through more than a few sentences or paragraphs, maybe a few pages, before the ideas fizzled out and my energy to continue typing waned. Distraction has been a major problem. I have discovered a latent love of spider solitaire (last indulged in while writing my undergraduate thesis, as I recall). My real interest here is in telling my own story. I want to document and share some of what I've been through in the last few years of traveling back and forth between the states and south-east asia. My spiritual journey from the homeland of my birth in this body (southern California, USA) to Thailand, which I suspect was the homeland of my birth from a former life. The search for meaning in this existence that took me on a 200 mile bicycle journey (six days of sleeping on the side of the road, often in the snow) from about 2500' to 7000' across the state of Utah for a job I didn't get hired for. What a healing community I found there. As the next step on my healing journey, I was guided to go meditate in Thailand. Ultimately, this led me to ordain as a Buddhist nun. I liked ordained life. The simplicity suited me. Many things in the Thai Therevadan teachings didn't make sense to me, though. The intended year in robes became shortened to seven months as I decided to come home for my dad's wedding. It was his third and she's a friend of mine. Who knows if he's got it right this time, but he seems to have done some seriously positive spiritual growth and he is my dad after all. My journey to Thailand began as the fruit of a quest to heal my relationship with my father. Seems like coming home for his wedding was a good way to honor the growth in both of us and to offer us a chance to grow together as adults. This is my story to date, and I want to share it.
Here are a few anecdotes from my life of the last several years. I hope you enjoy it, and maybe decide to embark on a heart's journey of your own. It is impossible to predict what blessings will manifest for you when you follow your heart. Good luck!
Chapter One
“Shut Up!”
“Mom, she's touching me!!”
“Dammit, you two, can't you get along for two minutes? I'm not always gonna be here to rescue you from each other.”

Ah, siblings. I feel so blessed never to have endured such emotional atrocities with my brother. He's seven years older than me and was often out of the house, so I often felt like an only child growing up. I vaguely recall one argument between us looking back over the last 27 years. It happened when I was about 12, but I don't remember what it was about, so it can't have been too traumatic. We quarreled now and then in small ways, as young people do. Testing boundaries, trying on value systems, expanding limits. I mostly settled into the role of subservient, go with the flow little sister. Most of my formative years were spent in his shadow—he was tall, blond, self-confident, popular. He was the first in our family to take martial arts, ride a motorcycle, become an environmentalist, adopt a vegetarian diet. I was on his heels in all these pursuits. It wasn't until I ordained as a Buddhist nun in Thailand that I stepped out into my own.
It's rough being in sixth grade. Not knowing who you are. Not knowing who you can trust. Especially coming from an abusive background. My mom carries a lot of regrets from how I was raised. And true, perhaps it was not the wisest decision to return to work, leaving her three month old newborn in the care of a hopeless, helpless, unreliable blackout drunk with pedophylic tendencies leftover from his own abusive childhood. But hey, we all get dealt issues to resolve in this world. I haven't met anyone without trauma from their childhood. I figure we are in this world to learn. Here's my story.
One example of the cruelty manifested in my sixth grade life: the elementary school playground. One day, walking back in from recess, I divulged a dear heart secret of mine to three girls I thought were my very good friends: I wanted to earn a 4.0 grade point average. They all achieved this feat of scholasticism on a regular basis and met my aspiration with hearty guffaws.
"You? A 4.0? Hahahahaha!"
I felt lower than dirt. Was an A in social studies really such an impossible goal? I wanted to sink into the black top and disappear. My eyes welled up and over flowed. I burst into tears as my heart broke and my body tried to run from the scene. Caught by our teacher on the way back into class, she asked why I was crying. I struggled through sobs and snuffles to explain the source of my trauma.
"I told my friends I wanted to earn a 4.0 and they laughed at me!"
God that sucked. I don't know which was worse: my friend's reactions, my own emotional blow-out, or having to confess my heartbreak to the teacher. She reassured me somehow, planting seeds of the life lesson that living by the opinions of others would only lead me to suffering. I somehow managed to stuff my feelings back into my torso and gain enough control of myself to return to class, but it was a lasting traumatic event in a verily pock-marked childhood.
You know what's funny? These three friends and I all went to the same magnet program in high school and it wasn't until we went our separate ways for college—they to their high end, high price tag private schools, I to my local community college honors program en route to a higher education I could afford—that I earned my first 4.0. When I finally met my sixth grade heart's goal, I was beaming with pride and joy. A few years later, for some college scholarship application, I think, I had to submit all scholastic transcripts, including elementary school. You know what it showed? My last semester at St. Joseph's elementary school—my eighth grade year—I had earned a 4.0! I was flabbergasted. Turns out I carried an emotional chip on my shoulder for nothing for six years. Silliness.
Chapter Two
Fairly early on in life, I began to realize the world is not all soft and fuzzy. Not everyone breathes to be honest and loving. I found quickly that a lot of things I felt are important to quality of life (beauty, freedom of choice, health, prosperity, generosity, peace in the heart) don't even enter into the conscious awareness of many folks. This same year, the dreaded sixth grade, I began to wonder if the world I can sense with my eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and mind is all there is. I was attending a catholic elementary school and got my A in religion every semester, but what I learned in school did not match my view of the world. I mean, when my catholic principal taught us that humans are superior to animals because we are made in God's image and have immortal souls that will one day return to our creator in heaven and animals don't, I said no way! My horse is every bit my spiritual equal—perhaps even my spiritual superior. Chucky knew how to live content with simple things: clean water, fresh hay twice a day, and a simple job in life: take care of a 9 year-old girl. No way could I buy that this magnificent creature was not also made in the image of God.
I mean, come on—humans destroy one another in conflict over natural resources, sexual pursuits, greed (also known as a false belief in the illusion of lack), etc. How many other species engage in such behaviors? Why are these behaviors categorized as superior? Is our violent turbulent world really made in God's image? What Omnipotent loving God would allow such atrocities among his children? Something more must be going on. I began to question a lot of what I was being taught in religion class, and in many of my classes, quite frankly. I felt many questions rooted deep in my soul that went completely unaddressed in school and in my peer groups. Why was I born? What is the point of this life? The sun rises and sets every day. I eat, move around, learn stuff, excrete waste, make friends, breathe, play. But so what?
So what, indeed.
By eighth grade, my best friend and I had devised several alternative models for the structure of the universe than what we were being fed in school. Like, what if we are all just part of a complicated science experiment from an alternative realm? Or worse yet, a simple one! Or what if this world is really just a hologram--nothing is solid nor real; we are all just energy bodies interacting according to certain rules and spatial restrictions. What if we could change these holograms at will?
Would it matter? Back to So what, again.
[This question still perplexes me. At 27, it seems like maybe loving and living in line with honest guidance from my heart makes a lot of sense. Harmonizing with authenticity, as a dear friend put it.]
Chapter Three
In the magnet program at my high school, I met all manner of intelligent kids. I was certainly still a misfit, but at least there were lots of us misfits and we now had a place to be misfits together. The rigorous scholastic program kept us so busy we hardly had time to notice social ineptitude. Somehow, previously consciousness consuming spiritual questions drained to the periphery of my awareness. Many kids in my classes and even many of my teachers were atheists. My tenth grade biology teacher took the cake in this department. A die-hard Darwinian evolutionist, he would often get into red-faced arguments (shouting matches, really) with one particular Christian student, attacking the intolerable ignorance of his Creationist beliefs. This didn't seem right to me—how could my professor be so sure science was right? Science also once believed the Earth was flat and the center of the universe. I was far too shy to speak up with this contrary opinion. I didn't want to get yelled at and, unlike my Christian classmate, I didn't have a religious faith with a large following supporting me in my beliefs. To speak up for the possibility of alternatives was just too scary at the time. Seriously though, what if this world is bigger than what we can see and measure and scientifically quantify?
Feeling so bound in with little room for spiritual expression, I just went with the atheist/agnostic flow at my high school and did my best to keep my head afloat in the turbulent academic waters of Advanced Placement classes, singing in many of the school's award winning choirs, and practicing my sport and physical education replacement: horseback riding. And so passed the high school years. I graduated with honors in the top 10% of my class and achieved the state championship in my division in California's Pacific Coast Horse Show Association, but I still felt this icky and unrelenting sense of lack. By my junior year I was drowning. I felt so lost and alone and pointless. There was so much pain and so much darkness. I pushed everyone away while quietly nursing a deep longing for someone to see through my tough-girl charade, break in, and rescue me from this prison of myself. I contemplated suicide, but even that didn't seem worth the effort. I couldn't imagine inflicting pain on my body—I had enough pain in my mind already. The only end that seemed possible was to jump off something very very high. At least then my last few moments might be thrilling. There were times when I had to keep myself back from ledges and bridges, and high places on hikes for fear I might do something I couldn't later undo. Mostly I kept living and doing what I was told at this point more because obedience was ingrained in me rather than because anything I was doing seemed significant or made any sense.
Chapter Four
Even in college, I was dogged by a desperate sense of lack and longing. Missing a sense of purpose, I kept myself so busy with school and horses and work and club involvement, I barely noticed the years rolling by. My heart longed for more. Where to turn? Sex? Drugs? Rock and Roll? Well, abuse very early in childhood (probably prior to recollection) created a deep sense of distrust and strong feelings of fear and disgust around sexuality, so I was a late bloomer there. Release in that arena did not come till much later in life. Alcoholism runs in my family, so at about 12 my dad had a seminal conversation with me about impairing one's consciousness with intoxicating substances: Any time a person spends with their mind altered by the influence of drugs and alcohol is time that person is not really alive, and that time can never be gotten back. This is a lesson that has stuck with me ever since, so drugs as a spiritual diversion were right out. Music allowed some release for me, but mostly the grunge rock of the 1990's fed my sense of lack and general depression and seemed more useful for commiseration than relief from misery. Several hundred dollars into a Columbia House CD club membership (this was back in the days before mp3s and i-tunes), I realized I might have something of a problem and decided to quit.
But again, back to So what?
I finished college by the skin of my teeth—with honors of course (if one is going to do something, do it right!). But felt no closer to a life of purpose.
Chapter Five
One amazing trial-and-reward-rolled-into-one from my college years was my first and (so far) only serious, long term relationship. He was German. We met at the stable where I kept my horse—he was the barn hand, in charge of feeding and watering the horses, cleaning their stalls, fixing fences, and generally keeping an eye on the place. His English wasn't very good at first, so we didn't have much to say to one another. I was busy with school and he was busy, well, shoveling shit. Turns out he was also babysitting for one of the boarders's kids for spending money. She's a trail-riding buddy of mine, who in turn decided to encourage me to hang out with him. Just as friends, you know. He's such a nice guy and what a sweet heart and he's so lonely so far from home....Etc., etc, and so on. As the only person at the barn anywhere near his age (most of the boarders were women in their 40's-50's), she repeatedly encouraged me to make friends with him. For whatever reason, the opportunity was slow to come up. Then one day about two months into his three month stay, he was biking up the stable's driveway as I was biking out and we stopped to chat a bit. I apologized for not being friendlier sooner, but I've been busy with school and felt a little shy about his language skills and excuse excuse excuse...he said no problem and asked in broken English if I wanted to go to a free show with him over the hill in San Jose that weekend? He was riding the bicycle to save up the gas miles so the barn owner would let him drive her truck. I love music and he was really quite handsome up close and seemed very sweet. I was quickly wishing I had begun talking with him sooner, but such as it was. I accepted his invitation. And so it began.
The show was mediocre, but the drive over and back was fun. He was a punk rocker—he even had his own band back in Germany. I'm not into punk music. It mostly sounds like screaming and noise to me. But as an environmentalist and activist, I appreciated the anti-establishment lyrics and the “straight-edge” philosophy of vegetarianism and clean-living.
Our next friendly adventure was to Point Lobos Marine Reserve—a gorgeous stretch of California's protected coast line just south of Monterey. We brought a picnic to share. He made a strange macaroni salad with mayonnaise and peas and corn, but it was quite good. We visited and hiked around and enjoyed the views and took funny pictures. He taught me how to say “sticky monkey flower” in German. It's one of my favorite California native plants and he found its name infinitely amusing. It became a running joke for the duration of our relationship. We began to preface names and things with “sticky monkey.” Jake became my sticky monkey horse (or more often, sticky monkey poopie, as this is the primary level he related to the horses on). Dreaded classwork became sticky monkey homework. Our favorite place to see shows downtown became the sticky monkey club. It was one of those fun little silly things we laughed about together.
At the end of the night, I ended up in front of my computer doing some homework assignment or other, he went home to his little closet of a room in the back of the barn owner's garage. But then I got a phone call. It was him again. Less than two hours after spending all day together, he called me. In the cutest, sweetest voice, he said: I think I love you. Aw, how sweet is that! I replied that I loved him, too. We spent the next night together and shortly became inseparable.
Well, it was a tearful departure when I dropped him off at the San Francisco airport just a month later. We promised to write and he said he would try to come back soon. That he loved me and didn't want to be apart. We had known each other less than a month, but this life we were creating together sure felt good. I felt loved and appreciated. Able and excited to love and appreciate him. Granted, we got on each other's nerves at times, but we liked so many of the same things. Enjoyed seeing nature together. Walks on the beach. Cooking together. Complaining about the state of our political world. There was a lot of room for beauty between us. And so we tried.
At the end of the summer, he decided to take a semester off of school and came back to the states on a six month visa. About a month in, while living together and working at the same stable together so we could afford rent in this overpriced college town, I noticed we didn't seem to be talking as much. I was no longer entranced by his foreign mystique. His English was a lot better, but somehow our communication seemed to be getting worse. My heart rejoiced in the woods and the mountains. His belonged to the city and the beach. I was a dirty hippie. He was a punk. If he had been American, I would have broken up with him right then. Another sad chalk mark on my litany of one-month relationships. But he was German. He was there for six months. He could not legally work. We were living together and if I broke up with him, he would have no place to go.
So we talked about it. We worked through it. Turns out, he was feeling really sad—estranged from his family and friends and his band and soccer. Neglected by me. He did not understand what it meant to come visit me while I was in school. He thought if he did all the poopie work at the ranch, that I would have more time to spend with him, but there always just seemed to be more school work. We struck a deal: I would get up early and feed so he could sleep in (that was his least favorite part of the job—parting from warm blankets and his warm lover at 6AM in the foggy coastal chill was just adding insult to the injury of also working two hours shoveling shit every day), then he would come up and clean the pastures later, while I was in school, and we would have evenings together. Suddenly, we were talking again. Opening to compromise with this man I loved created space for a happiness I had never known.
We passed the next several months frequenting the beach, hiking and mountain biking on the forest trails north of campus, driving out to punk shows in town and in the city, touristing around San Francisco and the rest of California. We went to Yosemite together (a native Californian, I had never been), drove through northern California's majestic redwoods to Oregon's Crater Lake (in the snow) and back through the desert. He met my parents in LA and my grandparents on a road trip to Las Vegas. He was my first consummate sexual partner and we made sweet love nearly everywhere we went. Numerous cities, all different biomes, even at a hot spring once, though the heat from the water trapped the heat from our bodies and neither of us could finish.
Anyway, when his visa ran out and it was time for him to go home again, we had weathered some pretty intense emotional storms and I had some doubts about us lasting through this next separation. But another tearful departure and further promises to write and stay in touch, and once again, absence set about making the heart grow fonder. I cannot now recall if he returned for a third visit, or if our next reunion was after I finished school and I finally ventured across the pond to meet him on his native land. We'll skip to that part anyway.
I was 23, just weeks clear of finishing my five and a half year bachelor's degree acquisition process, and adrift in a new world. Up to now, most of my life choices had revolved around direction from my parents (especially my mom—a second generation worker's compensation lawyer and the breadwinner for our family) about where to take my next step towards success in this world. I was unhappily trundling along in the upper-middle class white track towards success. You know, excel in school, go to college, get a degree, get a good job. Ok, check, check, and check. That next step into the good job, however, presumed that I had figured out in my college days what a good job might be. This was not the case. I never lacked for money in any serious way in this life. I always had plenty to eat (often too much!), decent clothes on my back, and odd jobs/math tutoring work enough to fund my entertainment and get around in this world. For whatever reason, I therefore decided a simple life of few needs was more “good” than a high paying job that sucked the life out of you, like my mom's 80 hour work weeks often did. I have always enjoyed being of service to others, but most of my experience in this realm was as a volunteer. The idea of a career in that field didn't really cross my mind. The idea of a career in anything was pretty daunting actually. 40 hours a week doing the same thing for years and years and years? Forget it. So I went to Europe.
Chapter Six
This was my first trip over seas. Like many young southern Californians, I had visited Tijuana, Mexico, once, but that was back when I was about eleven on a day trip with my parents. That one rather depressing day walking the streets among vendors, beggars, cheap toys, and dirty streets was the extent of my international travel. I had just gotten my passport earlier in the summer, actually. At 22, I joined the meager 27% of Americans that hold passports. Flying out of Pennsylvania where I had visited an old friend to carry on a Thanksgiving tradition born in our northern California college years, I landed in London unable to walk! Fifteen hours on the plane trapped in the window seat except for two trips to the bathroom, I had underestimated the importance of those little stretching exercises described in the shiny pamphlets located in the seat-back pocket below the tray-table in front of me.
I am so grateful for the eight hour layover in London. I didn't know anyone, but at least my initial foreign travel experience as an adult was in a country where I could read and basically understand the language. My first purchase in London (after the tube ticket to get from Heathrow Airport into town) was about $5 worth of Godiva chocolates...yum! And so my journey began. I wandered the cobblestone streets, explored St. James's park, saw Buckingham Palace, contemplated the meaning of life while sitting to rest beside the polluted Themes River. It was exhilarating. I almost bought an “I Heart London” tee-shirt for 5 pounds (forgetting the currency conversion, I thought this was a great price!), but bought a deli wrap instead. After lunch, I walked to see the equine guards and took the quintessential British tourist photos next to the red phone booth and the double-decker buses. It was generally a very enjoyable stopover and my hopes for the next three months were flying high.
Just three hours after the return tube journey (carefully watching my step off the train and Minding the Gap), another extensive post-9/11 airport security screening, and the last leg of my overseas flight, my boyfriend met me for a joyous reunion at the airport in Cologne (or Koln, on the German maps). It was long past dark and I have no idea what time my body thought it was. I felt a bit bleary and I'm sure I smelled terrible from the journey, but we hugged and kissed and I followed him mindlessly through yet another airport to baggage claim to collect my 100 pounds of stuff (yes, 100 pounds...I had never really traveled much and didn't know what I would need for three months of European winter—I figured I was better off over packing than under. Apologies to the environment for the extra jet fuel burned because I don't know how to pack light...), then out to his car. We drove for about 45 minutes through some rather dark, menacing woods at disappointingly average speeds on the famous German autobahn to his small flat in Essen. Grateful to be firmly planted on solid ground, we climbed the four flights of stairs (did I mention I had brought 100 pounds of stuff? What was I thinking...) to his little room, unpacked my essential belongings, made eager reunion love after many months apart, and went to sleep.
In the morning, or should I say early afternoon by the time I regained consciousness and developed the courage to venture out of the loft bed for a look out the window at my new winter home, my boyfriend gave me the bus/train pass he had bought for me and showed me how to get to his university to use the internet and to the local park to walk around. Unfortunately, Essen is a shit town, really. Primarily industrial and rather old, the whole city is grungy and gray. Top this off with the fact that it was December, my boyfriend was in school most of the time, and he didn't really want to show me around his hometown. Frankly, it didn't interest him. This was a painful role reversal and I quickly developed sympathy for his struggles visiting me while I was in school. But at least in the states, he had the cute college town of Santa Cruz to explore, the beach to enjoy, and he could read and speak the language, sort of. I was essentially illiterate for the first time in as long as I can remember, and my inability to communicate verbally on my own was very frightening. If I went out on my own and wandered somewhere I was not supposed to be or did something accidentally illegal or culturally inappropriate or got lost, what then?
For the first few weeks after my arrival, I mostly slept and ate and occasionally walked my housemate's dog in the local park. The sky was dreary and gray and drizzly. A few days, it actually snowed and carpeted the ugly streets and dingy rooftops with white crystals. I found some solace in the quiet after the snow and my southern California heart rejoiced in the fluffy precipitation associated with family vacations in the Sierra Nevada mountains back home. My house mate thought I was nuts to enjoy the stuff. I just laughed and enjoyed his grumpy company, but grew increasingly disgruntled and short-tempered with my boyfriend. I felt so isolated and sad and far from home. We played board games a lot and that was fun. Most of the German phrases I learned were related to board games (Du bist dran—It's your turn). But that was pretty much the extent of our fun. I found a holiday concert of Handel's Messiah I wanted to see, but he wouldn't be caught dead there. I decided to go anyway and when he told his parents, they drove down and took me. Neither of them speak much English, so that was a bit awkward, yet the language of music transcends. We enjoyed our time together.
For Christmas, my boyfriend and I traveled to his parent's house about 45 minutes away in a cute little town near a huge nature park where we went walking in the crisp winter air. It had a stone castle surrounded by a moat which had been converted to an art museum, but it was closed the day we were there. I got to meet his sister who had come home from the Netherlands and watch their family interact. They were very loving, in a sarcastic joking with one another sort of way. I felt a bit out of place with the language barrier and being so far from home for the holidays, but I enjoyed the welcome they extended to me. Dinner is traditionally a light meal in Germany, but on Christmas eve, they go all out. We shared a hibachi style hotplate and grilled various types of veggie patties my boyfriend had made, as well as marinated vegetables, potatoes, with rolls and soup on the side. They all talked of how unusually stuffed they were. It was tasty, but just a regular dinner by my American standards. Another interesting difference for me was that all the presents get exchanged on Christmas eve, instead of just the one “teaser” gift we got to open back home. His parents included me in the gift giving, presenting me with a real cashmere scarf. I think it is the same one that his father was wearing at the Handel Concert which I admired, but I said nothing. What generosity to give me the scarf off their necks! Later, I wound up losing it somehow between my boyfriend's flat and the pizza place a few blocks down the way. I cried and looked and looked, but to no avail. It was gone. For actual Christmas day, we went to a different park and walked amongst some still occupied Swiss-style houses built in the 1600's. They were in remarkably good shape, with their ancient wooden cross beams still supporting the white plaster over the bricks in between. Christmas night, I went to the Protestant Church with my boyfriend's mom and sister to hear his dad sing in the choir (my boyfriend suspected he might have turned into a toadstool if he set foot in a Church, so he stayed home). It was a very nice evening of traditional holiday music. The choir was only ok, but we all praised the dad for a fabulous evening—much better than the boy's choir we went to watch perform Handel's Messiah.
After the holidays at his parents' house, we went to Berlin—our first major touristy journey together. I was very excited. I am a pretty intense pack-it-all-in kindof traveler and I wanted to see everything. My boyfriend wanted to show me around in a more relaxed fashion, assuring me we would have a good time and I should just trust him. I wanted to know what we were going to see. I was pigheaded and difficult. He retained his laid-back attitude, but began getting frustrated with me. We borrowed bikes from his ex-girlfriend who we were staying with (odd, I know, but they are truly just friends and I actually knew her from the stables in Santa Cruz before I met him) and hit the streets of Berlin. He showed me the Brandenburger Tor, the last remaining of the four gates of Berlin's original city boundaries. We biked through the city's center and saw their town hall and parliament building. He showed me where the German president lived and some sort of Olympic monument. My favorite part of the day was cycling back and forth across the brick-stripe in the road way where the Berlin Wall used to separate East and West Germany. Seeing the parts of the wall that were still standing as a canvas for graffiti art was pretty powerful, too. I can see why people risked their lives to cross from the impoverished communist East to the West. He took me to a beautiful cathedral that housed the most ornate pipe organ I had ever seen. We explored the very creepy royal crypt under ground and saw 400 year old coffins, some were rotting and the lids were caving in! I have a hard time with human death and this was a hard place for me to be. My skin began to crawl and I wanted out of there...The tiny coffin for one of the royal babies nearly made me cry. I found my boyfriend and went back upstairs. We climbed the ancient worn wooden steps to the cuppola for a 360 degree view around the city. It blew my mind. So after all my stress, the day was beautiful just as he planned it. I found lots of other reasons to pick on him, though, and after our fourth fight that week, I broke up with him. At about 11PM. On new year's eve.
And so I began traveling in Europe alone. I ran for solace to another friend's apartment in Munich (she had also been a stable hand in Santa Cruz and we had become very good friends). With her help, the freedom to explore the city alone and for free on her bicycle, and 10 days apart from my first lover in a foreign land, I slowly recovered from the pain of extracting myself from my ex: our union and our conflicts. I came to own my part in our relationship's difficulties and began to see how silly my expectations were. We tried to remain friends. I even stayed a few nights more with him before leaving Berlin and again on a return trip to Essen between touring Eastern and Western Europe in the depths of loneliness and homesickness. Once again, my unrealistic expectations ended in disappointment after colliding with the real world.
I grew a lot on this journey through Europe and the depths of my own heart. With a small, six years out of date guidebook I found in the small English-language section of a used book store in Berlin, I toured many of Europe's most famous cities, visiting cathedrals and exploring new foods like pickled cabbage, dumplings, strange soups (keine fleische, bitte!), and orgasmic Italian gellato (nothing I've had in the states even begins to compare). I walked foreign streets at all hours over cobblestones, concrete, asphalt, and dirt. I rode buses, subways, and trains for hours on end. Simply traveled with one foot placed in front of the other again and again. I went to concerts and plays, ate delicious French pastries and subsisted largely on dense German bread and foreign cheeses, like emmentaller, gauda, jarlsberg, and real swiss. I ate chocolate everywhere I went and made sure to buy a little extra to bring home so I could share a taste of my international experience with friends back home.
There were astonishing views, especially on the train over the Swiss alps on a clear day just after fresh snow—the mountain chalets look just like the ski lodges back home. I wandered the grounds of more ancient castles than I can now name, their austere stone facades still standing hundreds of years after the hostile, feudal political climate that birthed them died away. What of the things we build in our “modern age” will still stand 500 years from now? 200 years? 20 years?
Yet through all these adventures, and after all the emotions I experienced in these exciting, uplifting, disappointing, humbling lands, a hollow place remained in my heart. What am I doing this for? Again, So What? Still nothing seemed fulfilling.
Chapter Seven
Europe wrapped up fairly well. Three months and about $6500 later, I returned to my friend's house in PA to recuperate and plan my next move. One evening not too long after my return, I got a phone call while watching TV with my friend and her husband. It's my dad. Odd, why would he call?
He asks me: Are you sitting down? Um, yeah. Thoughts of what disastrous news might be on the way immediately began to race through my head—could something have happened to my mom's horse? Or perhaps my mom herself? Maybe my grandparents had fallen ill? Or a friend of the family was in trouble? A silence rang on the other end of the line. The answer, when it finally came, was not even on my radar of imagined possibilities. Your mother and I are separated and I'm filing for divorce.
I reeled. Immediately, I thought of my dad's comments about a friend of mine from a few months earlier that seemed boarder-line inappropriate. I had dismissed them as ridiculous. An impossibility. Well, I guess not.
My parents had been married 32 years. Turns out, this “sacred union” began the day before my brother was born (there are no wedding photos) and ended about the time I returned from Europe. I felt partially responsible for the break-up. Like my dad was waiting until I grew up enough to ditch my mom and the family and pursue his own happiness for a change. I did not even realize my parents had problems. There was one occasion when I thought my dad might leave us for a friend of the family who had recently been widowed, but I guess she wouldn't take him, so he stayed.
This final separation felt like such a monumental betrayal. If my parent's marriage can fail after 32 years of what appeared to be happiness, what of my puny disgruntled life? My dad was very matter of fact about it. As gentle and sensitive as possible under the circumstances, he did not mention relations with my friend as the cause of the break-up, but it didn't really matter. I had lots of friends with divorced parents—never a fun experience—but I never thought I would be one of them. A few years back, my mom and her brother were actually writing a book together about how to maintain a long-term marriage in this day and age. Guess there's a reason the project fizzled out.
After the phone call, I spent a few hours crying on my friend's shoulder and a few days moping about their house. Ultimately, I decided to return home and see what was really going on.
It was very strange to return to the house I grew up in. Just back from Europe, I felt more like a foreigner here than in that strange land. This was the home I grew up in, but I felt out of place—no longer welcome. I tried staying with my mom at her new apartment, but she was so emotionally broken, it felt like my presence was only making things worse. I ineffectively sought solace for a few weeks at a friend's house where I had spent most of my high school years and then moved back to Santa Cruz for the summer. I cast about for meaning and purpose by working in fund raising—canvassing door-to-door for Environment California garnering support for legislation to protect California's oceans. I was good at this job and enjoyed it, but it was draining, and again the question of my life: So what? Maybe I can reach 5 or 6 people a night and convince them that giving me $25 to help protect our environment is a worth-while use of their resources. This was not a career for me, though. I turned to the internet for guidance. Perhaps Google can turn my life around? I did a search for "outdoor jobs" and found a bunch of intriguing and fun sounding options, but nothing I felt qualified to apply for. But then I noticed a paid advertisement sidebar for the Aspen Achievement Academy, a company doing wilderness therapy for troubled teens. I can hike, I reasoned. And I can listen. Perhaps this new turn in life will bring me direction? Purpose? A life of service to others—back to a way of being that increases the joy in the world.
I applied on-line, traded e-mails with the recruiter, addressed some logistical concerns I had with the job (safety and warmth in harsh desert weather? vegetarian food options? hiking on bad knees?), and had a one and a half hour phone interview to go over my resume and assess my suitability for the job. On the basis of my paper qualifications and this interview, I was invited to their eight day experiential field interview. I got a $600 Wilderness First Responder certification and added about $1000 in gear to my bicycle for the 220+ mile journey across Utah from the Greyhound station in St. George to the remote town of Loa (population 525) that AAA calls home. Except after crying every day for about 5 days, it became apparent I'm not qualified to guide for wilderness therapy either. Shit. Now what? I biked 220+ miles to be here. I have $1000 in credit card debt and no moving stipend and no job. Shit.
Chapter Eight
After the training, I had to come to grips with my situation. I was homeless, jobless, and alone in the world. Nothing in California I wanted to go back to. Nothing in Utah seemed to provide me a reason to stay. But amidst all the tears and emotional instability I encountered in the days after the training as eight out of eleven of my fellow interviewees completed the hiring process and I tried to figure out what the bleep to do with myself next, I decided I had been called here for a reason. Wilderness therapy might not be it, but I decided to buck up and stick it out. Just over the hill, 4 miles away, was The Aspen Ranch, a residential program for troubled teens run by the same parent company as the wilderness program. The man who ran our training gave me the contact info for the woman in charge of hiring. I interviewed over there and was hired immediately. After a month of training—two weeks with one mentor on one team, and two weeks with another mentor on another team—I was on my own. Single staff with twelve teenage girls to manage. And not just any teenage girls. These young women were alcoholics, crack addicts, meth users, former gang members, prostitutes, adoptees with abandonment issues. Nearly all of them were habitual liars and manipulators and most had very poor emotional skills. I learned a lot and quick. Several nights I would bike home from work in an emotional dither of my own. I could definitely see why I was not hired for the field program, but I did my best to listen and learn. To hold firm boundaries and be fair. To build honest, healthy relationships with these girls and help them function both as individuals in this world and as positive contributors on their team.
It was a good theory, but trying to manage this single-staffed on a team of twelve? It felt physically and emotionally unsafe both for them and for me. After about five months, I hit residential counselor burn-out. I approached my boss and told her I was having trouble managing a full team alone. I told her it did not seem safe to staff twelve professional manipulators with a single rather inexperienced adult. When I was hired, and pretty much continuously ever since, I had heard management talking about how we were short staffed “right now,” as if this were a temporary condition. I offered recruitment suggestions: contact college career centers across the country and get fresh graduates out here to intern. I thought this would make a great introductory job experience, and it would be a good resume builder. My suggestions were essentially brushed aside and my boss ultimately told me they were never going to double staff the teams. They had too hard a time finding and keeping enough good people, and besides there wasn't enough money to keep two staff on all seven teams at all times. In light of this new development, I just didn't have the emotional reserves to continue there, so I slept on it fitfully for one or two more nights and then wrote her a letter giving my two week's notice and conveying my concerns with how the Ranch was being run. I tried substitute teaching there for a while, hoping that the school would be easier to manage than the residential, but I wasn't much better at managing a classroom of 9-15 than I was at managing at team of 12. Shortly I realized I just needed out of that whole toxic environment. My financial debt had long been paid and now I embarked on the next phase of my life. What now?
I had been in therapy over the summer to try to understand my wacked out emotions and sort through the trauma of my childhood, recently compounded by my parent's divorce and some less than attractive aspects of my dad's character that had come to light in the process. This had shaken me to the core because I always felt I related well to my father and thought we had a lot in common. If we really did have a lot in common, and these greedy flaws were at the base of his character, what did that imply about mine?
When my time at the Ranch had come to a close, I decided to embark on a Vision Quest in the desert with my therapist, who was also a skilled wilderness guide. The Westernized version of the Vision Quest is based on a traditional Native American rite of passage where young braves would go forth onto the land to fast for three to five days and pray for guidance from Great Spirit along their passage to adulthood and further journey through life. The process I undertook began about a month in advance of this solo experience with a series of council meetings to talk about the process, learn about Native American spirituality, and establish intentions from each member of the community of co-questers planning to head out onto the land to pray for guidance. We began with five seekers and our guide. As the dates of the Quest approached, schedule conflicts, inner conflicts, and financial conflicts all began to arise. Ultimately, our community was whittled down to a friend, myself, and our guide. We decided to go forth with the process even though there were only the two of us to be guided. I was committed enough to go alone if need be. This absolutely felt like the right thing to do at the right time for me. My friend had some doubts right up until our final council meeting, but ultimately, he was in.
The day before we went out, our guide poured a sweat lodge for us, a very sacred ceremony of purification and prayer, usually performed in three or four rounds, where lava rocks are heated in a bonfire and then brought in to a pit in the center of a light-excluding dome-shaped tent structure that feels much like crawling back into the womb. Another friend joined us for support in this inaugural sweat, and the four of us cried and prayed and steamed and sweated our highest hopes and our deepest fears. We left the lodge bleary eyed, muddy, light-headed, and somewhat physically unbalanced. My friend threw up. What a way to begin. We shared a nourishing meal together and retired to our beds for the last time for the next week. The following morning, refreshed and ready to go, we met at our guide's house for the 60 mile drive over Boulder Mountain to our quest site. We hiked four miles out onto the land together, up a narrow red-rock canyon carrying our lives for the next week on our backs: sleeping bags, ground pads, tarps for shelter, three gallon jugs each for drinking water, extra warm layers (for it was October in the high desert of Utah and bound to get down to freezing at night), rain gear, water purification (I brought a pump), a knife, a bow drill fire set, first aid kit, food for the four days we were allowed to eat, journal and writing implement, sacred items for our altars, and musical instruments. I brought my heavy djembe drum (which I will never carry on a backpacking trip ever again) and my didgereedoo. My friend brought his light-weight frame drum and a cedar flute. For three days on the land, we camped together, held councils, told our life stories, shared inquiry about our deepest hopes, loves, desires, and fears. We scouted the canyon and selected our solo sites. At council on the evening of the third day out, the fast began. The next morning, our guide smudged us off with sage smoke to purify us and protect us from negative energy, to open our hearts to guidance from Great Spirit above who would hear our prayers carried up by the smoke, and sent us forth to begin the three day fast.
This was definitely the hardest thing I had ever done in my life. The first day began simply with much enthusiasm. I gathered some beautiful river stones, including some exquisite olive green and ruby red petrified wood, and created two circles: one at my quest site marking North, East, South, and West, invoking the spirits and the winds from each direction to be with me and protect me on this quest, then additional stones placed at the quarter directions and another set for each of the divisions between that just to fill the circle out a bit better; then I formed a second circle around the hill from my site to communicate with my guide. Every evening, I would place a stone in the circle to tell my guide I had been there and at least that evening, I was ok. Every morning he would come and place a stone in the circle to show he had been there to check on me, and so the three days would pass with some form of safety check without unnecessary human interaction. For the communication circle, I also selected special stones from the river for each of the four directions and the quarter directions. I formed a small bird's nest of juniper bark and placed three juniper berries and a small sage smudge at the base of the circle: South, the direction of summer, heat, fire, and passion. I sieved corn meal through my bare hands to enclose the communication circle and to divide the circle into quadrants. It felt very sacred.
My two circles made, I selected a sleeping site above my ceremony circle, laid out my tarp, ground pad, and sleeping bag, and went to the stream to pump my first three gallons of water. This was no easy task. My pump promises a flow rate of about two minutes a liter, if I recall correctly, so 4 liters times 3 gallons is about 24 minutes minimum pumping time on an empty stomach. It probably took me 40 minutes to complete this very important job. Our guide advised us that the more ritualistic, deliberate, and careful we were with everything we did on the solo portion of this quest, the more meaningful our results would be. I quickly realized each action of preparation was a part of the sacred process I was entering into, so rather than rush the pumping job to get on to the journaling, reflecting, observing and praying “more important” parts of the quest, I remained as present as possible throughout, endeavoring to make every action a prayer of gratitude, smiling ear to ear and reveling in the beauty of that red-rock canyon.
Water prepared, I returned to my site area and began to gather wood for the evening's fire. I walked slowly and carefully around my site nestled amongst a dense stand of baby cottonwoods and backed up to a sage brush thicket on the upper bench of the canyon bottom's carved river bed. I picked up each 1-2” diameter stick with a small prayer of thanks for the warmth it would provide me that night. As part of the ritualization, our guide had recommended we dedicate our fires each night to something we wanted to release or to pray about, and then offer each stick of wood to the fire with an intention. I dedicated my first fire to burning my fears and regrets. I was glad there was a lot of wood at my quest site. I laid out my wood stores near my ceremony circle and entered for the first time, circumambulating three times in honor of the numerous trinities to be unified and celebrated here: the body, mind, soul trinity of myself; the father, son, holy ghost of my rejected Catholic upbringing; the past, present, future illusion of time that caused me so much confusion and stress. I was here to call all these things together, to ask for guidance and wisdom, and to celebrate my individual part of this beautiful process of life. Once inside, I dug my fire pit just north of center so I would have room to lay next to it, if need be. Then I created my alter in the south. On a small natural ledge in the river bed sand, I placed some juniper beads, two small fetishes that were gifts from my mother: a horse and a corn mother. I also added some extra beautiful stones from the river, a piece of wood, and a sage smudge, then encircled it all with corn meal and dripped some water on it to balance the elements.
All these things prepared, I began to observe. I observed my body and its sensations of hunger (still manageable on the first day—I had done several 24 hour fasts in the past, so for this much I was prepared), I observed the ravens flying over head, I observed the shimery way the cottonwood leaves danced in the soft afternoon breeze. I observed my thoughts, beginning to obsess about food. I wondered what my friend's site looked like, how he had prepared his circle, and what experiences he was having. I decided to wander down to the stream and do some yoga. Open my heart to the lessons always whispered by running water.
While I was stretching and rejoicing in this beautiful body, two hikers wandered past from up canyon. They had met my guide at our base camp near Water Spring and so knew that I was on my quest. They asked how it went, and I said it's just starting, and now you're part of it! They looked apologetic for intruding, quickly said their goodbyes and hiked off on their way. From my perspective, interpersonal communication and participation in human society is one of my most long-standing difficulties and probably a major blockage in my relationship with my dad. I was overjoyed to have had these human visitors during my quest. Alone again, I did a few more poses, meandered back to my site and decided to journal a bit and sing a few songs. Back home in Torrey, UT, this would be kirtan night. Kirtan is a spiritual singing practice in the sufi tradition, and I am part of a community of people who gather one evening per week to sing songs of love, praise, and peace from all spiritual traditions. I decided to release my soul through my voice and softly sang a few of my favorites in camaraderie with my fellows back home, in honor of the tradition, and to call in the strength and support of my community back home. I sang “Oh Great Wave, wipe away...Wipe away my false face. Awaken from my sleep the radiant light. Touch me. Touch me. I am once again beyond the beyond. I am that I am.” This song became the dominant theme of my quest. We sang it in our inaugural sweat lodge, we sang it in the preparatory councils, and now I was singing it on my quest. Fitting. I also sang a sweat song inspired by someone on a vision quest: “Here on the mountain, I am not alone. All the lives I have lived are here with me. What they are sayin' is now I've come home. I have come home. I have come home.”
Evening drew close, the sun cast a shadow from one canyon wall across to the other and the temperature dropped very quickly. I decided to start my fire before dusk properly settled in. I used my fire set and busted an ember on the second or third try. Not bad, considering this can be an arduous, frustrating process for the out of practice, as I was at the time. Again, this fire was dedicated to burning my fears and regrets—releasing them from the dark corners of my heart into the transforming heat of the fire, offering them up to the heavens as smoke particles. Let go. Let God. I prayed to release my fear of success, of failure, of judgement from others, of judgement from myself. I prayed to be forgiven for all the stupid arguments I had participated in amongst friends, for all the living beings I had ever hurt, for all the times I had stolen or cheated, for all the abuse I heaped upon others because I did not know better than to pass on what I had been given. There were many more, and at the end, when I was getting sleepy and feeling ready to retire, I placed two additional sticks on the fire, dedicated to burning any fears and regrets I had forgotten and any fears and regrets I would come across in the future, that they may all be released to heaven.
That first night was cold. I slept away from my circle because I thought it would be nice to keep the circle for ceremony during my waking hours, and to sleep out in the open. I was visited by a small mammal that night. I suspect it may have been a skunk, but after staring into the fire for so many hours, it was difficult to see. I did not want to shine my headlamp on it and ruin its night vision or scare it (especially if my species suspicion was correct!). There were definitely vivid dreams dutifully recorded in my journal. The first night held a dream that I witnessed a friend's very bad car accident, but was unable to help him. I woke several times in the night to go pee from drinking nearly a gallon of water the day before, and also to try to rub my feet together for some frictional warmth. Poor circulation is a serious hindrance in freezing back-country weather, especially under a clear star-filled sky. Beautiful to watch, but terrible for warmth retention.
I was awake with the first lilac light of dawn the second day, but even my complaining bowels and bladder could not get me up out of my warm bag into that frosty morning. As on most of the council preparation nights back at base camp, there was a crust of ice crystals at the top inside my water bottle. No wonder my feet were so cold. Finally, when the sun climbed high enough into the sky to breach the canyon walls, the temperature climbed with it and I felt brave enough to venture out of my bag. My legs didn't quite work, though, and I nearly pitched onto my face trying to take my first few steps. My mind was out of sync with my body and my balance was suffering. I felt dehydrated, but found that so hard to believe. Perhaps this was some challenge from the second day of the fast. My body had probably never gone this long without food and it didn't know how to regulate itself, it seemed. Eventually, I gathered my wits and my patience enough to struggle over to the sagebrush, dig a cathole, and deposit the last of my bowel's contents for the next two days. One bonus of fasting is the poop factor is basically removed from bodily existence, temporarily at least.
The second day was probably a thousand times more difficult than the first. I had burned all my fears and regrets, so that was very helpful, but food obsessed thoughts ran through my head endlessly with more vigor and conviction than I realized my mind possessed. I invented all sorts of intricate sounding meals, like vegetarian burritos with the works, salmon fettuccine alfredo, and this scrambled egg, hash brown, and cheddar cheese casserole my aunt makes every year for the family Christmas gathering. Man, that stuff is good. Granted, upon deliverance from the quest and a review of my journal, these hunger induced meal-plans weren't exactly 5-star gourmet fare, but a hungry mind can become fixated on the funniest things. This second day, I nearly gave up. Somewhere around 3 or 4PM, I was crying uncontrollably in fits and sobs and thought very seriously about abandoning my circle and returning to base camp. I felt driven to this by the hunger, but I didn't necessarily want to eat. It felt like I mostly wanted a fellow human being to commiserate with. A shoulder to cry on besides my own. 98% of me had given up, but somewhere in the recesses of my heart, 2% held strong to the commitment I had made to stay out here no matter what (within reasonable margins of safety)—I was not in real physical danger, just mental and emotional stress. I did my best to maintain my observations and journal entries and try not to fixate on returning to base camp. I think this struggle lasted for 45 of the longest minutes of my life, but I hung in and I made it. Dominant among my food thoughts that day were meals I could not get in the small town of Loa, Utah where I had been living for most of the last year. I desperately missed good cheap California mexican food, but two of my favorite ethnic foods really stood out: sushi and Thai food. I had gotten to eat these foods while visiting my landlord at his place in Salt Lake, but that was a rare treat, indeed. Ultimately, I realized I could eat a lot of sushi and Thai food if I went to those countries, and I knew I didn't want to visit the busy crowded cities of Japan, so the idea to travel to Thailand popped into my calorie starved brain. What?!?! Thailand??? Well, that would be an enriching experience. I had several friends who had traveled there and said it was absolutely gorgeous and they had a wonderful time. The country was very safe, the people were very friendly, and everything was supposedly mind-bogglingly cheap if you were a good negotiator. I could not believe I was having these thoughts, but there they were, and quite insistent, too. I also knew a woman here in Utah who had taught English in Thailand for 6 months and spoke of what a wonderful time she had had. So I decided going to Thailand to teach English for 6 months would be my next move, as soon as I survived the next 36 hours without food or companionship.
My energy was too low, my concentration too weak, and my persistence was shot, so I failed to bust my bowdrill fire the second night. When frustration levels had nearly reached the screaming, throwing, and breaking things level, I decided to just swallow my pride and break out the “thumb-drill” (aka a lighter) and just ignite the nesting with plastic encased butane. Ah, warmth through modern technology. The second night, I dedicated my fire to love and gratitude. I had survived the second day of this fast and my energy was beginning to rebound as the flames released heat energy from the carbon rings in the sagebrush and juniper branches. I sent love individually to my family and friends for all their support over the years throughout my life. I offered up gratitude to all my teachers and mentors, counselors and guides. I felt so grateful to be alive on that beautiful red-rock land in this thin biotic film of living soils, vegetation, and animal communities under our breathable, climate regulated atmosphere on this special, remote planet Earth. And again, the final two sticks of wood before succumbing to sleep that night (within my circle this time, with my sleeping bag and the soil I laid on warmed by the fire, and a 1.5 liter bottle of hot water boiled one cup-full at a time wrapped in my fleece vest and placed in my bag at my feet—I was a much happier camper under the starry sky my second night) were dedicated to love and gratitude I had forgotten to specifically name and to any love and gratitude I would encounter in the future, that I may remember to turn it over to my higher power in the search for truth, instead of getting wrapped up and attached within my small-self ego's interpretation of the situation.
The third day, I awoke with unexpected and surprising strength. I had crossed the hardest hurdle and the rewards were great. My emotional and physical balance was largely restored, my thoughts were released from food obsession-land, and the tears flowed now from joy instead of from pain. Today, I ventured forth from my circle for a walk in the dense baby cottonwood grove to see what was on the other side. I was careful to take a full water bottle with me, and to walk mindfully and slowly. I did not want to come this far only to over-estimate myself and have to hobble four miles out of here injured. I had to rest frequently and I do not know how people can do multi-day fasts without suspending their normal daily activities. The walk was worth the effort, though. I seemed to be seeing the world through new eyes. Tiny insects lives seemed more significant and interesting. Each grain of sand cemented into the canyon's sedimentary walls held a geologic secret, and every stone on the riverbed floor seemed to tell a story to anyone patient enough to listen. Most of the wildlife I saw during the day were birds. I have long felt kinship with the winged beings of this planet. I was so grateful to have so many to watch on my quest. I even had a conversation with an owl one night—hooting in call and response fashion as best I could. With my newfound strength, I was able to gather extra wood, for this third day was the last of my fast, and our guide recommended we keep it as a sleepless vigil, facing East and awaiting the rising sun that would mark the end of our quest and call us back to base camp and our first meal in three and a half days. This last fire, I dedicated to acceptance of the longings and desires of my soul. Somewhere around what I guess was 11PM, I decided keeping the vigil was not a necessity for me and took a cat nap. I did this three times during the night, awakening the last time to my fires dying embers, Orion the warrior just cresting the eastern horizon, the red planet Mars, my Aries sun-sign's guide planet, high in the sky. I had dreamed of stained glass and relationships. Of letting go and feeling free. Unburdening myself by unburdening my expectations of others. I also dreamed of discovering a diamond in the gizzard of a bird that had hopped into my vision quest fire, making it into a beautiful wire-wrap sunflower pendant, and selling it for five times what someone offered me for it at a party. I scattered the last of the unburned wood, buried some and spread the rest of the cooled ashes from my fire pit, packed up my alter, returned my ceremonial circle's stones to the river, packed up my bed and belongings, and returned to base camp with a surprising spring in my step for not having eaten for three days to break the fast and celebrate a successful quest.
My quest had clearly born fruit: Go to Thailand for six months and teach English, though the teaching English felt more like an excuse so I would believe it was possible to go. My belly seemed to think the important thing was just to show up and eat a lot. I would be guided from there.
Chapter Break
So nearly two years after my three month trip to Europe and I again face a travel experience. Memories of the pain and anger and fear endured on that journey arise more prominently than the beautiful sights and growth experiences I had. I wonder if I really have to go to Thailand. Friends that have actually been there say it is a wonderful country with kind, helpful people and delicious cheap food. My heart fears it is an under-developed disease pool of tourist sharks. I worry about being so far from home, about having to get all sorts of strange vaccinations, about diseases I cannot protect myself against, about sexual temptation, about how long my money will last, about my ability to communicate, to get a job if need be and to fundamentally survive there for up to six very long sounding months. I wonder if perhaps working on an organic farm in Costa Rica would be an acceptable travel substitute? Airfare is considerably cheaper to this destination much closer to home. And at least I have some Spanish language background, even if it was only one ten-week university term which I mostly slept through since the only beginning Spanish I seemed able to fit in my science-heavy schedule was at 8AM. Grrrrrr. Or should I say, zzzzzzzz.
Well, as the universe so often does, it was made clear to me that this was not an appropriate substitute—Thailand or bust. And so the travel odyssey continues.
I booked myself a six month open return flight and two nights at a Bangkok youth hostel in early January, just in time to escape the worst of Utah's winter. Arriving at my terminal at LAX, I see that I finally get to fly on a double-decker 747(?). I'm just in the economy seats, of course, and remain curious about what flying upstairs is like, but I have long watched these huge planes destined for far-away exotic locations while waiting to board tiny domestic planes to cross California or travel to Utah or Pennsylvania. This time, I'm in the air with the big boys and it feels amazing. This trip, I remember to stretch and manage to land in Bangkok with ambulatory abilities intact. Stepping off the plane at midnight into Bangkok's thick smog, draped in a blanket woven of 95% humidity and 90 degree heat was intense. I take my carry-on backpack and breeze past the crowds waiting for checked bags into the foreign night. My meager Thai language skills help negotiate a slightly less price-gouged taxi fare into the city, though it turns out I have no seat belt and about five minutes down the western-style free-way I see two people climbing out of an over-turned Mercedes. How they flipped that vehicle I'll never know, but I held my breath for the rest of the 30 minute ride. After hunting several of Bangkok's small side streets trying to locate my hostel, I finally figure out from my map that I'm just a block down the street, pay my taxi driver, and walk safely through the late night, check in, and crash out under a thin blanket on the thin mattress on the only remaining bed space—a top bunk in the six-person air-conditioned room. Noisy and too cold, what a blessing and a relief from the hot smoggy world outside.
About four hours later, the streets begin to buzz with noisy morning traffic and I am up, smelly from my journey and eager to shower and begin to explore. I had heard about Asian squat toilets and the absence of toilet paper (bring your own and put it in the bin if the built in kitchen faucet-sprayer bidet is not clean enough for you—I preferred to use a pocket bandanna for pee wipes, and thus averaged about 4-6 squares of toilet paper per day), but I was unprepared for Thai showers: there is no separate shower stall. Their bathrooms are tiled all the way around and the shower head just sprouts randomly from the wall. I was grateful for my Chacos river sandals. Who knows what kind of grossness I was standing in.
Cleaned up and dressed, I stepped out into the busy morning at about 7AM. Street vendors hawked fresh fruits, barbecued animal flesh, rice and curry. I saw men repairing sandals (Thailand's national footwear, apparently) and women diligently sewing. In front of a huge bank building, I saw my first lotus pond and stood in awe at its beauty. Locals brushed past me, wondering what I was so taken in by, but the newness of it all was enough that I didn't care.
I found a cheap food stall near my hostel and bought some rice and eggs and veggie stir-fry. I asked how much? (Tao-rai, ka?) and the man answered 40 Baht (about a dollar at the time). I meant to say it was a little to expensive and could he give me a discount (mostly just for the bargaining practice), but I accidentally said it was a cheap price! Oops. I paid, took a fork and sat down to my breakfast. I soon realized he was looking at me kinda funny. I looked up and he offered me a spoon. Oh yeah, I remembered I had read that Thais use a spoon and fork at each meal, and took the proffered additional utensil with a shy foreign chuckle. I proceeded to push my food onto my fork with the spoon, eating the delicious breakfast quite happily, until another man sat down at another portable plastic table near mine and used his utensils the other way around. Oops, I'll get the hang of this yet. The spoon goes in the mouth, the fork shovels morsels around. Got it. I later learned that chopsticks are only used for noodle soup in Thailand.
A full day of exploring began with a walk through the bustling financial district along Silom Road where my hostel was located. The noise and traffic and smelly exhaust was enough to make me sick. I was so grateful for the respite of exploring Lumpini Park. It happened to be International Children's day and they were having a free film festival screening of short films made by children. There were some really well-done pieces and I very much enjoyed the glimpse into their culture and into the minds of the children. One piece explored the super hero role in a bullied child's life. [be more specific: what did I learn from the films? Describe feelings...] and the free air-conditioning in the auditorium where the screening was held provided a delicious respite from the 90+ degree and humidity weather outside.
After wandering the park and watching Thai families interact with each other, the children playing, laughing, and screaming in delight; the teenage couples holding hands and cuddling (public displays of affection are much more discrete here than in America); adults having picnics; and the men working out in a little fenced off outdoor weight-lifting area that reminded me of Muscle Beach in Venice, CA. One of the bench presses had tractor tires instead of iron weights. Would have been an awesome photo opportunity, but no one was using those as I walked by, and many Thai people seemed shy about being photographed. I had just arrived in their country and I wanted to be respectful. There was a beautiful lake in the park with swan shaped paddle boats people were pedaling around for fun. At the edge of the water, a group of children was pointing and shrieking excitedly, trying to get their parent's attention—a giant lizard about five feet long and nearly a foot in diameter was sunning itself on the lake's shoreline. After it realized it had been spotted, it slowly crawl-slithered its way down the bank and disappeared into what looked like a drain pipe. Perhaps there really are alligators in the sewers in Thailand! Or gila monsters or something...I never did figure out what that black and yellow beast was.
After about 3 or 4 hours walking around in the park, alternately baking in the sun and reveling in the shade of the many mature trees (most of which I did not recognize),
My day at the park complete, I took the sky train (also deliciously air conditioned) to Victory Monument, an obelisk form with a trumpeter on top in the center of a 4 lane traffic circle ringed by bus stops clogged with Bangkok's various forms of transportation: full-size jointed air conditioned rigs, single length buses with air conditioning and without, and little short jalopy numbers with open doors and windows painted a garish kelly green that zip and dart through Bangkok's messy traffic with reckless abandon. I'm not sure driver's licenses are a requiste for the job. In this maze of hundreds of buses, I had to ask around until I was directed to a bus to the Royal Palace where I paid an exorbitant 250 Baht (about $6.50) foreigner's entrance fee to explore the Palace and see Thailand's most prized Buddha image: The Emerald Buddha. About three feet tall, this Buddha is carved out of a solid Emerald and stands on an ornate shrine pedestal surrounded by numerous gold Buddhas high up and far away from the numerous devout worshipers and curious tourists come to pay respect or at least to gawk at its beauty. I waited politely while many crowded in front of me—Thais are not so keen on lining up for things. This was difficult for me to adjust to, but I did my best to go with the flow. The temple building that houses this image is ornately painted, but ultimately just a big rectangle. It reminded me a lot of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
Outside the temple, I got offered a free Tuk-tuk ride around many of Bangkok's central sights and temples and shopping opportunities. I have no interest in shoping, really, but this quintessentially Thai tourist experience (plus a day's free transportation!) interested me. Ok, I figure. What difference does a little extraneous shop-looking make. Time, I've got. Money? Not so much. At the end of this day of sight-seeing and exhaust breathing, again I check in with my confused mind and the question resurfaces: So what? What am I doing here 9000 miles around the world? A tiny insignificant being on a tiny blue and green and (increasingly) brown planet circling an insignificant sun in the corner of one galaxy among trillions (accurate?). What am I doing, yo? My “free” tuk-tuk ride takes me to a Tourism Authority of Thailand office (the infamous TAT, professional ignorant tourist rip-off establishments) and I book a package deal for my first three weeks in Thailand, as well as my visas to visit Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Well, ready or not, here I come.
I saw the beautiful beaches of Krabi and some of the smaller islands in the Andaman sea. Went snorkeling amongst the slowly recovering coral reefs decimated by the 2004 tsunami. Saw more temple ruins than I can now differentiate amongst in the ancient capitals of Ayuttaya and Sukothai. Sampled my first Thai massage and experienced several night markets. Got lost in the labyrinthine alley-streets surrounding the old city of Chiang Mai in the north. Did a five-day trek to see Northern Thailand's remote (yet highly commercialized) hill tribes, including an elephant ride (probably the saddest experience on my journey as our elephant driver kept harshly striking our poor animal's skull and hooking him in the ear to steer. I felt bad for both the animal and his keeper. Neither seemed to be getting much love or compassion from this world) and a bamboo rafting trip which prove a refreshing and fun experience to cap the journey.
I crossed the boarder into Laos via a two day boat trip along the Mekong River. What a memorable journey. The forty tourists on our boat spent six to eight hours together for two days. Many fast friendships were made over card games, photos from home, stories shared by those longer on the road than I, attempts at learning essential phrases in Laotian just as my brain was acclimating to Thai. I was grateful for the many similarities between the two languages, but I still got a funny headache for the first few days as my brain literally rewired itself to function in the new language. Numerous bottles of Beer Lao were consumed by others (I don't drink), often purchased out of drink and snack baskets proffered at sporadic village stops by teenagers who looked like they barely weighed more than the baskets they carried.
Landing in Laos's capital, Luang Prabang, I clamored off the boat and waded up the steep sandy river bank through the crowd of tourist sharks—my own term for the locals hired by guest houses and hotels to convince travelers without prior reservations (and there were many of us) to stay at their places. I glanced with casual interest at a few of their shiny photo-laden brochures, checked prices with a few of them, was appalled by the $10 price tags (I'd been paying about $3-4 per night in Thailand), and asked how far it was into the city center. Oh, very far (standard response from south-east asian taxi drivers)—maybe five kilometers? Well, the Lonely Planets I had borrowed from a few boat friends said it was more like two km. I elected my usual mode of transportation and set off on foot in the direction my heart led me.
I passed the usual evening scenes—bustling markets selling locals their evening meals, children out of school playing ball games in the streets, motorbike drivers relaxing in clusters on street corners offering rides with the usual catcall: “motorbike, madam?” No thanks, just walking, was my usual reply. I found a temple grounds and walked through to admire the architecture and watch the novice boys playing, but stopping short at the sight of my tall, white, female form. I wondered if I was allowed there, but no one told me to leave, so I continued on. Part of me remembered a fellow traveler who had stayed at a temple in Laos when he was sick, but I did not quite have the courage to ask permission to stay here. I was also acutely aware of my gender and the difficulties that could cause. If they did not have nuns at the temple, I would not be able to stay, and I did not see any women in my brief visit. I passed many touristy restaurants and upper-end hotels. Turning down some of the smaller alley-ways, I finally found some establishments with potential to meet my financial standards. A few were full, but they directed me down another street where I finally settled on a place with beautiful teak wood floors and walls, an open veranda upstairs for relaxing and reading in. The room I was shown smelled of raid and had no windows, but I negotiated a $4 price (down from $5—perhaps my tiredness interfered with my negotiating abilities, or perhaps Laotians are used to less competition and therefor being able to set their prices more firmly than in Thailand), set down my bag to relieve my tired sweaty shoulders, and went back out to explore the town.
My overwhelming desire was to get out of the city. I found the local handi-craft market and saw some pants and pillow cases with spirals sewn on them—a friend back home loves spirals, but this is only February on a journey hopefully lasting until July. I refuse to begin purchasing souvenirs yet. I cross paths with a few boat buddies and share pleasantries, compare room rates, compare future travel plans.
To my vegetarian chagrin, fare seems entirely geared towards carnivores. Upper-end tourist restaurants have some vegetarian options, but I mostly choose not to afford to eat in these places. I generally prefer to eat off the streets like the locals, but given that food hygiene is pretty much deplorable and most street food is cold noodles and questionably handled meat curries, soups with a base of various animal's entrails, snouts, and hooves, I prepare myself to subsist for the next three weeks primarily on sticky rice and fruit. Fortunately, I love sticky rice and the selection of fruit in Laos is broad and delicious.
By evening, I had walked most of the main streets in Laos. I had seen the hand-forged machetes for sale by the dozens in the markets which my friend had shown me in his photos from last year. I almost neglected to photograph a lot of the more stunning experiences here because I had already seen them in his photos. I tried not to fall into this trap too much and did remember to take a few beautiful and shocking photos for myself. After nightfall, my feet guided me to an expansive one-story building where it turned out they were having English class. I stood shyly outside the window and watched the grammar lesson on making plurals. I wondered if they could use a teacher, but not quite strongly enough to overcome my shyness. When a few of the teen-age students noticed me, and began jabbing their neighbors in the ribs with shy giggles of their own, I disappeared. I found the main office and inquired whether they needed teachers. They said it was possible that with a one-month commitment I could volunteer there, but that they didn't have money to pay me and it would probably be more of a disruption than a help to teach for a shorter time. I was a little disappointed, but appreciated his honesty. We exchanged e-mails and I said I would contact him again if I was back in Luang Prabang in the future.
Well, this city felt much like the other south-east asian cities I'd been in so far and I wanted out. I had read in Lonely Planet that it should be possible to hire a guide or maybe even just buy a boat and continue down the Mekong river to Vientianne (or maybe even Cambodia?). I retired to my little poisonous room with the intent to pack up and leave first thing in the morning.
The next day, I left my bag at the front desk and walked back to the river to see what I could find. It took some negotiating, but I found a few people possibly willing to sell me a small wooden fishing boat. I of course knew nothing about driving one with a motor, so I just wanted a cheap one with a paddle. Apparently, there are some pretty substantial waterfalls between Luang Prabang and Cambodia and the people thinking about selling me a boat warned me against taking the trip solo, especially without an engine. I took this advice and moved on to keep asking around. I found a very friendly young boat guide who was willing to take me down river, but he was rather shy about naming his price. He claimed he had just guided a man on this same trip and they had a great time. He described him as a tall blond guy with a big open face and easy laugh. I wondered if this was my friend Matt who I knew I was following by a few weeks. We planned to meet up in northern Vietnam in a few months and I thought it was rather auspicious that I had found the boat guide he had used not long before. Finally, I got him to give me a price and we agreed on $150, most of which would be used to buy “petrol” for his boat. The plan was to take three or four days on the river, camping on the beach, cooking our own food and maybe even catching some fish out of the river. He said we should be able to visit some local villages and see a more traditional rural way of life in the Laotian country side.
I was a little sketched out taking a male guide as a woman alone and wasn't sure how to deal. I was comforted by the idea that he had just taken my friend on this same trip, but an email exchange revealed my friend had been on no such trip. Either my guide was bold-faced lying about having done this a few weeks before, or it was a case of mistaken identity. Well, I went to a bank, withdrew $100 (about 700,000 Laotian Kip at the time...I was nearly a millionaire for a moment) as a down-payment towards the gas and food for the journey. My guide bought lots of cooked sticky rice, fresh vegetables, a few fish, and five gallons of filtered water and we were off.
My hackles were raised momentarily as at the beginning of the journey we headed up-river instead of down. Confused, I turned to my guide and tried to ask what was going on. He asuaged my fears with a confident gesture (the motor was too loud to talk over), and soon we pulled up along side his family's property where his dad came out and handed him some money. I suspect this was mostly a ploy on his part for his father to meet me before we embarked down-river. My guide was only 24, after all. I suppose his father wanted to know what he was getting into. It seemed I met with his approval as he grinned a big grin and waved heartily as we turned and motored slowly away, traveling just faster than the current, my heart lightening with every stroke of the engine as we began to put distance between our little boat and the congested ugly city. Our first stop was about 40 minutes down river, and I thought this might be a place we were sleeping already, but it did not seem we had come far enough. My guide explained we had stopped just to buy charcoal and the simply dressed dark-skinned local people greeted us shyly with what I read as consternation. I sat quietly on the wooden plank seat, thoughtfully padded with pillows, and waited while my guide talked to the people from this village and bought a 3' long sack of charcoal. He loaded it into the bow near the cooking gear and food and we returned to the river, motoring on.
A few hours later, towards dusk, we made camp quietly, shutting off the engine and using paddles for the last stretch approaching the bank. I had never done anything like this, so I mostly stood by and watched as my guide unloaded the removable floor of his boat, some long sticks he drove into the sand and then wove into a lean-to style shelter frame, a few plastic rice bags he tucked into the shelter frame like flexible shingles, then tied a mosquito net underneath and laid down our pillows and two blankets—one to lay on, one to lay under. I was a bit concerned, for it appeared he intended us to share this rather narrow looking sleeping space—it was somewhat bigger than a full, but smaller than a queen by American bedding standards. Well, this is what we had, so I said nothing. For dinner, he used a candle to light a charcoal fire in the kiln-like portable stove that reminded me of an overgrown crucible from chemistry class in college. Once the fire was going, he stir-fried some vegetables in a big wok and seasoned them with a sweet chili sauce, salt, and MSG (which is in just about everything in Laotian cuisine). He also warmed up one of the fish he had bought in the market in Luang Prabang which his mother had cleaned and stuffed and precooked for us. What a delicious meal. My instincts told me that cooking about ten feet from our sleeping spot was probably not the best back-country kitchen placement I'd ever seen, but when I tried to explain this to my guide, he seemed not to understand and dismissed my concerns. He portioned out the fish and vegetables into four sections: one plate for me, one plate for him, and two smaller portions, one he laid out on a rock near the river bank, and the other he placed on the bow of his boat. I initially began eating as soon as he handed me my plate, but soon realized he was praying and stopped respectfully. When he had finished his offerings and joined me again, I asked what he was doing. He said it was important to put out food for the protective spirits of our campsite and the boat so we would have a safe journey. I laughed a bit at his superstitions, but respected the idea of reserving and offering some of what we have for those in the spirit-world. It shows we have enough to share, if nothing else. Dinner was delicious. After the meal, we washed our dishes and the wok in the river and he told me the Laotian mythology of the constellation my guide called Chicken Stars (the pliades) as the stars came out. Conversation flowed well between us and I was thoroughly enjoying my investment in this journey rather than paying a standard (and much less expensive) bus fare to reach Vientiane by the now more conventional route over land since the road had been re-paved.
Still a bit innocent, when we went to bed and he offered me a massage (beginnings of concern about my guide's intent on this journey creeping in at the edges), I accepted. Who doesn't love a good massage, eh? It was nice. Just the back. Respectable. His next question concerned me a bit more as h asked why I was “sleeping so far away” from him, but I just played dumb, rolled over and went to sleep under the beautiful starry sky.
That night, drawn by the smells of our cooked fish and uneaten spirit-food, we were awakened by the insistent meows of a cat. I thought it was just a ferile cat that had wandered away from someone's house in a nearby village. It was solid black and stood at the ridge of the river's high-water mark about 75 feet from our river-side camp. Size was difficult to judge from that distance, but it did not seem much bigger than a large house-cat. My guide woke up and shined a flashlight on it. He sounded a bit nervous, but I was just observing in awe. Eventually, the cat gave up, deciding the smells of the fish were not tempting enough to chance an encounter with the wielder of a flashlight and it wandered back to the jungle. We spoke no more about it and went back to sleep in the chilling dewy air beside the river. The next morning, my guide revealed that he had a gun under his pillow (eep.). It had a loop of spring steel for a hollow handle and looked hand made, but I was not to keen to see if it worked or not. He said that was a wild jungle cat that had come to the edge of our camp last night, not just a ferile pet from a village, and he was going to shoot it, except he thought since I was a vegetarian I would not like that. Darn skippy! I told him I liked my animals alive and well, thanks very much. What have I gotten myself into...
The next day on the river was as scenic and beautiful as the first. I convinced my guide to turn off the motor for most of the day so we could just float in silence and save some gas. [describe some scenery, the farms, the forests, the clear-cutting/slash and burn, the fact that my guide was studying agriculture in school and did not think Laos had erosion problems from the way they farmed. I pointed to the chocolate color of many of the Mekong's tributaries we passed as evidence to the contrary, but I'm not sure it got through to him; the direct proposition in camp the next night about whether I “want try Laos” and his statement that he's a virgin and had condoms...yikes!; my explaining that sleeping with him was not at all my intent for this journey; his nervousness the next day because my refusal to copulate meant bad luck; his rush to drop me off in Park Lay, my anger at his rush and unrealistic expectations and superstitions, his relief at cutting himself that night in camp because that meant the bad luck was all done; my observations about his superstitions and fears (and then reflecting on my own as I fingered the Utah ghost-bead necklace around my neck); the evolution of our friendship once intimacy was out of the way]
Arriving in Park Lay, my guide sent me into the market to buy him some sticky rice and curry for dinner tonight and his journey home tomorrow. [sensory impressions walking up the hill next to the beautiful densely planted terraced river bank gardens people were endlessly watering a few crop rows at a time by walking down to the river, filling two buckets or watering cans suspended by string from the ends of a stick across their shoulders, then returning to their gardens; through the narrow trash-strewn alleyways, through what felt like someone's back yards, seeing the gold smith, ducks, chickens (bird flu! yikes...), trying to find sticky rice in the market, getting led around by the hand by buoyant laughing women entranced by my attempts to speak Laos, using their limited pooled English skills to assertain where I'm from, what I'm doing there, where I'm going, etc] Rice mission successfully completed, my guide pointed me to the cheapest guest house in town and sent me up with his cell phone to plug in and charge. After I had unpacked, settled in, and showered, his phone was ready, so I brought it down to his boat where we shared one last meal together. We snuggled in his boat together for a few minutes, but I promptly realized that meant more to him than to me and I got uncomfortable real quick...I got up shortly and said my goodbyes. He retired to his boat for the night, afraid to sleep apart from it in case someone came to steal his petrol, and was gone before dawn the next morning for the long trip up-river back to Luang Prabang. I wonder what he told his family upon his return. Given his propensity towards convenient lies, I suspect we are lovers in his reality. Part of saving face, I suppose, though this is only conjecture. I can hope he told the truth and believe it hardly matters to me, since I will probably never see him again. We occasionally exchange e-mails, but they are not very substantial, I doubt he will ever come to America and I doubt I will return to Laos. If I do, it would probably be with a friend or boyfriend to share the place with them. I don't feel called back there on another solo journey.
I got the distinct impression Park Lay did not see many foreign tourists. They had two or three guest houses and there were signs posted in English, but the proprietor didn't speak much. In the morning, I went for a walk and found their temple. Laotian women were sitting on the floor below a raised stage where about a dozen monks and maybe twenty novices sat partaking of their morning meal. It was too beautiful a moment to pass up, but I was too shy to photograph it and too ignorant to know how to participate. I stood and watched for a few minutes until the women all began to giggle and the novices started standing up from their meals to get a better look at me. Expressions of awe and wonder dawned on them. The monks mostly seemed surprised or non-plussed. Before I became too much of a spectacle (too late?) I backed away and wandered back out the naga-lined staircase I had come in through. I continued my random foot tour through the dirt alley ways among the traditional teak homes on four to ten foot post stilts—flooding protection from the mighty Mekong and Laotian monsoons, I assumed. I saw many babies being rocked in hand-woven bamboo cradles or fabric hammocks, their mothers cooking the morning meal or perhaps mending something. This was a truly subsistence way of life. I was greeted almost universally with smiles, shy laughter, and people shying away from my camera lens. I took a few good photos, but missed many more in the interest of respecting this culture hosting me as a passing guest. Back to the main road, children had created a stream of uniforms on foot and bicycles and occasionally (for the really lucky ones) motorbikes flowing in opposite directions towards the schools for their appropriate ages.
I found a small cluster of old men and women around a large boiling pot of who knows what. It smelled delicious and I gestured to the noodles and vegetables, trying to indicate vegetarianism. For some reason, people looked at me funny when I tried to say the word for vegetarian. It was probably a tonal thing. English uses word stress to supplement syllabic meaning, but Laotian is a tonal language: if you say something with a high, middle, low, rising, or falling tone, it may well have a different meaning (or it may mean nothing at all). I had a terrible time with this, and mostly just relied on gestures for communication. It was more fun, anyway. Well, when the woman began ladling soup broth over my bag of noodles and veggies, I saw all sorts of animal parts suspended in her coconut spoon and exclaimed Wait! with a hand gesture I hoped meant stop, stop! (for you never could tell—their way of beckoning someone to come over looked a lot like our gesture to wave someone away) I pointed to the chunks and gestured no. She looked confused for a minute, but eventually figured out to pour in only liquid. We had a good laugh together, and I took my breakfast in a bag and a straw to eat it with and headed back to the guest house to retrieve my things and get my boat ticket for the last of my eventful journey to Vientiane.
I didn't have much Kip left after I paid the balance of my guide fee to my guide from Luang Prabang, but he had assured me it would be enough to get me boat fare for the rest of the journey. Unfortunately, he had not accounted for the foreigner's price. I gulped and swallowed as the ticket lady showed me on the calculator what my price should be. I did my best to negotiate, but was only able to lower the price by 10,000 Kip. Yikes. I pooled all my cash and had barely enough for the 100,000 Kip fare (locals paid about 17,000 for the same journey, as I recall). I was very grateful I had not been more extravagant with my breakfast choice.
I struggled down the slippery clay river bank amongst the locals making the trip with ease, wobbled across the steep narrow plank from bank to boat, and ducked under the awning to enter the 40 person ferry boat much like the one I had ridden from the Thai boarder into Luang Prabang. There was something remarkably comforting about travel on this river and continuing all the way down its length drew greater and greater appeal. I settled into a seat on my own and pulled out my J. Krishnamurti to bury myself into the book. I felt like the only white person in the world, until, a few minutes later, a couple of nordic-looking foreigners climbed aboard. The man immediately began playing with the children. I gawked in admiration at his ease with them and took mental notes on the simple magic tricks he did with his hands to engage and entertain them. Eventually, the couple noticed they weren't the only foreigners on board and I introduced myself. We commented on the beauty of simple little Park Lay and its absence of Pepsi banners and white people. Turns out, the woman is from Sweden and the man from South Africa. They have been to over 42 countries and do consulting work six months a year and travel for the other six. Amazing. Though most of the travelers I met in Laos were really cool. I think you have to be to want to visit this minimally infrastructured, maximally impoverished country.
[my initial negative impressions, then ultimate enjoyment in Vientiane, exploring the south of Laos, meeting Pierre from Switzerland who'd been on the road for thirteen years doing massage therapy and healing work and occasional English teaching or farm labor to support his journey, crossing into Vietnam in spite of my screaming heart and various technical difficulties, meeting Phoung who became my guide and guardian angel on the harrowing 22 hour bus trip to Hanoi, flirting with the Vietnamese boarder guard who was shyly looking for an English teacher (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) and being uncertain whether flirting back would ease the situation or make things worse, the initial healing tingly feeling sweeping over me in waves on the Vietnamese side of the boarder, the hard working farmers and their beautiful terraced fields of rice, corn, and soy, Vietnamese roads, the time with Smaus in Sapa, esp the motorbike journey to Ba Ca market, meeting Tani, exploring the cave with Orie and Hong, the few days with Hong's family on the DMZ and her family's feast day to honor her deceased grandparents, hitch-hiking from there to Hue, the rip-off pedicab ride, prolific art galleries, amazing embroidery, Eddie Murphy and the Easy Rider adventure, the effects of Agent Orange and chemical defoliants from the war 30 years ago still apparent today, my English students in Ho Chi Minh and our vocabulary conversation about homosexuality and the difference between transvestites who just wore the clothes of the other gender (lady-boys) and people who have had sex changes and become transgender individuals, crossing into Cambodia with some fear, but ultimately loving it, the best meal ever at the Friend's restaurant in Phenom Penh run by street kids learning a marketable skill with the walls covered by student's amazing art, meeting Caitlyn by chance at my guest house and getting my Thai teaching job, meeting the French woman on the beach and being reminded about Goenka and learning about his centers in Thailand, getting inspired on the beach, experiencing true awe in Siem Reap, the joyful reunion with Tani, falling in love with Ti...Thailand stuff, going home, selling stuff, helping mom move, moving myself back and forth to Utah (twice), the bike journey around highway 12 the “wrong way” that turned out ok, repeated difficulties with buying my return plane ticket, the occurrence of the military coup and its ultimately negligible impact on what would become my daily life as a tourist and as a nun, except the visa regulation changes, the boarder guards at province boarder crossings, and the convoys of military trucks trundling down Chom Tong's main street full of soldiers and the fighter planes practicing overhead near the temple (Chom Tong is not far from the Burmese boarder where poverty and domestic unrest abound, so I hear), finally returning to Thailand via Taiwan (90 minutes in the airport), cush retreat at Suan Mokk a la hot springs yoga and unlimited evening hot chocolate (though wooden pillows, concrete beds...), back to Wat Phradhat, finish basic course, ordain!]
Chapter Break
After my heart breaking, mending, and warming experience in Cambodia, crossing the boarder back into Thailand was a tearful event. I definitely noticed I was the only one experiencing my emotions. I felt like a piece of driftwood alone at sea. It's always hard to part with a lover. The tenderness and intensity of that connection is unmatched in my experience on this planet. Knowing I may never see him again, I left his country just before Khmer New Year. I had applied to sit a ten day meditation course at a Goenka center in Prachin Buri, Thailand near Bangkok and felt compelled to honor this commitment.
I was not sure how long the bus ride from Thailand's capital to the center would take, so I arrived about two hours early (directions on the internet specifically requested we not arrive early, but I figured better early than late). I walked alone, bag over one shoulder, through the hot tropical sun 1.5 km from the bus stop on the main road along a well-paved asphalt road between rice fields and tropical gardens of bananas, papayas, taro, and vegetables. The center was beautiful. The simple architecture of the dining hall and the separate men's and women's dormitories seemed planted squatly amongst the teak forest. Ringed by a lotus filled moat, and split down the middle by a path to the main meditation pagoda, the grounds exuded peace and tranquility.
Upon my early arrival, I was greeted by a slightly surprised, yet supremely calm, brightly smiling, and very friendly Thai woman who asked in decent English if I was a new or an old student. New student, I replied. She handed me the appropriate paperwork and gestured to one of the small, individual fold-out tables facing the dining hall windows where we were to take our meals in isolation and silence for the next ten days. I set about filling out the paperwork. Name, age, address at home, how did I learn about the Goenka center, previous meditation experience if any, history of medical issues—mental and physical. It was quite an application.
Once this novel was finished, the friendly assistant (called a Dharma Worker—she would be one of the few people the practitioners would be allowed to speak with over the next ten days) showed me to my room where I was allowed to rest until the 5PM orientation at the main hall. I began unpacking my clothes and arranging my simple room—one desk, one small plastic stool, two inch thick twin mattress on a simple ply-wood platform, two shelves at the foot of my bed. I hung my sarong over my window for some privacy and laid down to rest. A few minutes later, the Dharma Worker came back again and asked me to please turn in my cell phone for the duration of the course. I replied that I did not own one, and so had nothing to turn in. She looked at me with shock and I laughed. Am I really the only person in this country without one of these electronic leashes? Oh well, she asked again to be sure, recovered her composure and bustled back down the hall to attend to the other 100+ guests in her charge. I went back to resting, trying to recover in mind and body from the long, traumatic journey from Seam Reap to here. Unfortunately, I fell asleep and did not hear the bell calling us to orientation. Crap, I kicked myself, looking out the window into the darkening evening sky. Everyone was lined up and waiting for me so we could enter the meditation hall as a group. I hurriedly smoothed my shoulder length hair, straightened my clothes, and tried to look a little less like I had just been sleeping for the last several hours. I tried to brighten up my face en route to meet the others. I passed a dharma worker in the hall who had come back to the dorms looking for me. What a way to begin.
Finding my place toward the back of the line of women meditators, I felt a shift in my energy. Noble silence had begun. The time of internal reflection was upon us all. For better or worse, for the next ten days, we would venture together into the recesses of our individual minds. A supremely unique endeavor for each being present, it was somehow extremely comforting to be embarking on this journey with company and support. The golden stuppa glowed under modern illumination in the soft tropical evening light as we walked up the staircase to the group hall for our first meditation instructions. Crickets began their song and cicadas buzzed along with them. The occasional farmer on a motorbike would buzz by periodically, reminding us this quiet oasis was just an island in the midst of civilization. Annoying at times, it was also a comfort to realize we were not so far from the comfortable developed world. That this space of peace and asceticism, like all experiences, was transient. Make the most of it, our teacher implored us from his audio tapes and DVD lectures. Bring your attention to the triangle beneath the nostrils. Watch the breath flowing in and out past this point. Does it pass through both nostrils? Or the left more? Perhaps the right? Can you feel a sensation in this small triangular space? The movement of air? Tension and release as the breath flows in and out? Perhaps a temperature difference—a slight warming of the outbreath compared to the in? Just sit, alone. In Noble Silence. Direct the mind to this small triangle and breathe in. Direct the mind to this small triangle and breathe out. Just this. For an hour.
Right.
After about half-a-breath, my mind is off to the races. Complaining about the pains in my legs, knees, back, arms, shoulders. Wondering what's going on at home in the states. What my previous lovers might be up to. No, mind! Cut it out! Hold still!! Just this breath. Right. The sensation at the nostrils. Just this small triangle...I wonder what that sound was. I wish everyone would stop sneezing and coughing so I can get some peace and quiet around here...argh! Mind, come back here. Just this breath. Sensation at the nostrils. Why does my breath only flow through the left nostril? I never noticed that! Dang it, mind, no judging (wait, that's a judgement!)—just this breath. God, will this hour ever end? It's probably been about 2 minutes. This is what I signed up to do for the next ten days? What was I thinking...
And so it went. The second day, I really thought I was losing my mind. Watching my thoughts all day and squirming around in agony after hours and hours of just sitting, I began to see how little sense my thoughts made. This was very disconcerting. I also realized I had to sit on the inside tables in the dining hall. Sitting at the windows facing the street was too big a temptation to run. Run where? I had no where better to be. Nothing better to be doing. I knew that if I left the center, this restless mind would just come right along with me. The meditation was not causing this restlessness, it was just allowing me to see it for the first time. Painful to see the monkey mind, swinging here and there at a whim of seemingly random design (if any). Even though running made no sense and we were free to go at any time except for the personal commitment we had each made to complete the retreat (ie no one would hold us there or retain our passports if we tried to leave), the pain still drove me towards it. I suddenly had a lot more sympathy for the girls I worked with at the Aspen Ranch back in Utah. It was ludicrous to try to run from the ranch—the nearest town was four miles away and everyone there would recognize a ranch student and just turn them back in. Two kids actually managed to get out once—they hiked through the desert about twelve miles to the Bicknell Airport where they jump started someone's car and drove it to Arizona, where they ditched it and managed to hitchhike to southern California. I think those boys are both serving time now. They got out of the ranch, but just into deeper trouble. Might as well just stay here at the center and keep watching my mind.
By the end of the second day, I really thought I was going insane. I wanted to cry. I didn't want to see anymore. I just wanted it to stop. But I figured I had made a promise to stick it out. This was only day two. Perhaps something in the next ten days would help it get better. Perhaps this process so many of my friends highly recommended might have something to offer after all. I had heard there was a lot of peace to be discovered and developed using this technique. From good friends that I trusted, not just random testimonials on the internet that could easily have been written by diabolical sadists that just liked to see people suffer...Real people I had spoken with in person, who I knew had real problems in this world, had found solace in this technique. Problems of aimlessness and restlessness and general dissatisfaction, depression, and angst, just like me. These people had been through this process and came out lighter. Freer. Happier. I stuck it out. What did I have to lose?
The third day was worse than the second. I was beginning to feel accustomed to the pains in my body from hours of motionlessness, but they still seemed to be getting worse. The aimlessness of my mind seemed only increasing. At least the beginnings of indifference were dulling the emotional pain of failure to master the simple task of watching the breath at the nostrils. I just resigned myself that I was a meditation failure and it didn't matter. Seven days to go. If I could make it through three, surely another few wouldn't matter?
The fourth day, Goenka said all the work we had done the first three days were like homework. It was anapanasati meditation to calm the mind enough that Vipassana could work.. He introduced this new technique of taking the concentration we had developed by watching for sensation at the triangle below our nostrils and sweeping our bodies for sensation all over. My mind liked this very much. Finally, I had something to do! Goenka spoke in the evening dharma talk about the difficulties many meditators have on the second day. Turns out, all my feelings were normal! He said that on his first meditation course he had wanted to run away the second day. Argh! Why didn't he tell us this before we began?? But then I wondered if maybe he did during the orientation I slept through? Oops. Or perhaps there's a method to the struggle—let us all be with whatever comes up in the mind. Maybe it's not a struggle for everyone? Maybe a warning would be setting us up for more difficulties? Oh well, here it was, day four, and we finally begin Vipassana Meditation. Turns out watching the breath at the nostrils is a form of anapanasati—developing rudimentary concentration of the mind in preparation for the Vipassana practice. Like prep-work. Once we began the actual technique of Vipassana, sweeping the body for sensations and refining our awareness, I felt much better. Don't get me wrong, there were still tough sitting sessions (especially the 4:30-6:30AM two-hour marathon sit in our mediation cells...when you are just beginning and managing concentration for one-half-breath is a tremendous success, sitting alone in stillness for 2 hours might as well be eternity, especially in the cool darkness of the tropical pre-dawn on an empty belly). Sometimes it would seem all the sits sucked and entire days would be tough, but at least my mind had something to do during the sessions, now. At first, it was like Goenka told us to stop playing with the past and the future and just dwell in the present. This is like taking all the toys away from a two-year-old and telling them to be still and quiet. Yeah right! My whole life, I've been able to either sit still or be quiet, but not both. Now, at 26 years old, I am supposed to be developing this skill out of thin air. Well, I like being in my body, so at least the sweeping technique made sense to me.
The ten day retreat came to a close, we learned loving-kindness mediation to close each session by sending open-hearted, compassionate thoughts to all beings, Noble Silence was broken and we were finally able to talk to one another. It was very interesting to hear what people sounded like and what their real life stories were, for without prior knowledge, I had made up histories and character traits for many of my fellow meditators. We chatted together over a delicious feast of green veggie curry, stir-fry vegetables, and a full dessert bar, including a three foot tall column of coconut ice cream in a stainless steel container with a buffet of toppings like sweet sticky rice, sweet beans, green tapioca noodley things, and condensed sweetened milk. As conversations unfolded, how quickly the mind returns to judging and past-future games. I found myself irritated with people gabbing about their experiences during the retreat, then laughed at myself when I began doing the same thing.
Goenka encouraged us to make a strong commitment: meditate with this technique for an hour in the morning and an hour at night every day for the next year. Then come back and do another course. He advised us that those who made and honored this commitment walked farther much faster along the path to liberation and enjoyed a life of more peace, happiness, and tranquility than their aimless minded-fellows. Good luck! Persevere! May all beings be well. May all beings be happy. May all beings dwell in peace.
So this was my introduction to Vipassana Meditation. The present moment awareness technique to help people see things as they really are taught 2500 years ago by Gautama the Buddha, the enlightened one, the perfectly self-awakened one, and passed down for generations, protected in its pristine purity by lineage holding monks in temples in Burma. When I left the center and went back to regular touristy traveling, I shared a hostel room with a meditation buddy from Holland and we sat together most mornings and evenings for the first few days. Then I moved on to WWOOF and got a little lazier with my practice, but for the most part I kept it up. It helped that the owner or the WWOOF farm I went to work on was a meditator and a Buddhist, too. We talked about the dhamma (Thai spelling) and supported one another in trying to live in this world, take care of ourselves and our families, and still be honest, compassionate, and kind to one another.
Chapter Break
To this day, I am not certain where I was at the WWOOF farm. Somewhere in northern Issan, the eastern most province in Thailand bordering Laos. This was by far the most impoverished area of Thailand. My job, according to the WWOOF description, was to help take care of the host's two children—boys, one five and one seven years old. I was to be their English teacher and to help learn Earth-house construction. The owner happened to be in Bangkok the day I was planning to travel to their farm, so I was able to catch a ride with them. It was about a six hour drive. Seeing Thailand from the windows of a speeding pick-up truck was a rather new experience. Up till then, it had been train windows or elevated bus windows.
Arriving at their home, I unpacked my few belongings into one of the tents under thatch patios on the owner's property. It seemed to me they had enough room to house up to six or even ten people comfortably, and I did not understand why their WWOOF listing said they could only accommodate one WWOOFer at a time. Maybe because they had a subsistence lifestyle and could not afford to feed more people? Or perhaps because there was not enough work to do? The organic garden had fallen into disrepair—it was more of a tropical weed patch at this point. There were some mature jackfruit trees, so I had fun butchering a few of the ripe fruits which weighed 20-40 pounds a piece.
That weekend, there was a workshop to teach people from the community how to construct houses by mixing clay soil, rice hulls, and water, sun drying the bricks for a few weeks, then mortaring them together with the same mixture, plastering the walls with more of the same, then making bookshelves and furniture with more bricks. The home we were working on was inside the temple of the small farming town where my WWOOF host lived. It was to be a gift for the abbot who was currently in the hospital. It seemed a bit strange to me to be constructing a new home for a man who was very probably dying of cancer, but who knows I guess. I suppose the temple would be able to use it for the next abbot. It would not go to waste. At the end of the day, when the volunteers all went home, the walls we had worked on together had begun to lean and the skies darkened with an impending rain storm. We braced the walls as well as we could with two by fours and spare branches, but to no avail. When I went back the next day to see if I could help again, the walls the volunteers had worked to assemble had all been torn down and rebuilding was in process. It was rather sad to see that the efforts of the community members had gone to waste, but I guess we had a good time working together and hopefully some of us learned something that day.
There was a second meditation hut much closer to completion in the back of the temple. We all worked together to help paint this one. The “paint” was a mixture of equal parts boiling water, tapioca starch, sand, and gypsum for pigment. These were mixed in 20 or 30 gallon metal pans by two people stirring in opposite directions with sticks. When an even consistency was reached, volunteers came and filled smaller pails and carried them over to the walls where it was smeared on in what I felt was the biggest, funnest finger-painting project I had ever participated in. Being one of the tallest people there, I chose to sit on a scaffold, lean back against the wall with the back of my head and paint under the eves of the house's adobe roof. Unfortunately, this resulted in a pressure headache and I awoke the next day terrified that I had contracted Japanese B Encephalitis from one of the zillions of mosquito bites I'd gotten that day. It was not until I went back to the same job the next day and realized it was just leaning back against the wall that had caused my headache. Phew!
Most of my time teaching the children was spent helping the older son to play Jurassic Park on the computer. The goal was to learn business skills by designing a dinosaur theme park. You had to build the right kind of fences for the right kind of dinosaurs, make sure the pens were big enough and filled with compatible animals, make sure there were well placed pathways, concession stands, souvenir shops, restrooms, janitors. Once the park opened, you could adjust the prices for everything as more customers came to increase your profit margins or raise money for more attractions, like viewing towers, hot air balloon rides, and Hummer safari tours. The game gave you feedback from the “people” who visited your park about whether it was fun or boring, if there were enough bathrooms (my “student” kept forgetting to build bathrooms, so there were a lot of people walking around his park with stressed looking expression bubbles over their heads), and if it was well-priced or too expensive. I am not sure how much he was really learning from the game, but he seemed to enjoy it and his dad seemed happy that I was interacting with him.
I tried to teach them a little capoeira, the Brazilian martial art I was training at the time, but I was unable to teach them about respecting personal space as part of the game and I accidentally knocked the wind out of the younger boy with a spin kick...that was the end of that.
WWOOFing was fun and I am glad I did it, but this visit was a hard part of my journey. All sorts of insecurities about how I could best contribute to the world around me came up, as well as my issues around communication difficulties. The father and his ex-wife both spoke very good English (I didn't understand why they didn't just teach their kids themselves, in fact!), but most of their neighbors and workers and friends did not, so when it came time to socialize in the evenings, they would gather and drink and sing terrible Thai pop karaoke or play their guitars and make jokes and I felt very left out. I often went back to my tent shortly after dark to do some yoga and meditate to the songs of the ten inch geckos, the cicadas, and my drunken Thai hosts. I wished they would go to bed before 11PM, but it never seemed to happen. One day, we went to the reservoir together and I went swimming with the boys. This was pretty fun, but again, I did not feel very effective as a teacher.
Chapter Break
After the WWOOF farm, I interviewed and was hired to teach English to affluent Thai children at a small private school in Central Thailand. With my meditation practice continuing, I wondered if I could visit the local temple in town and maybe even live there to experience monastic life. The British man who ran the school was married to a Thai woman. He was a scientist at heart and had a hard time with the Buddha's core teaching about equanimity. We talked about it a lot. The Buddha taught detachment from self, giving up identification with form, forgoing the comforts and pleasures of this transitory world in the interest of realizing eternal truth and getting liberated into nirvana—ultimate bliss, pure happiness beyond any human emotion possible in this sensory world. My boss seemed more interested in keeping the joy and bliss he knew in this realm, thank-you-very-much, rather than enduring hardships that made little sense to his highly rational mind. He tried to discourage me from living at the temple. I'm not really sure why. Fear, perhaps, that I would get too involved in temple life and not fulfill my duties as a teacher? On the contrary, I felt the continued meditation training helped my mind work much more quickly and efficiently. I had about seven years experience tutoring math one-on-one and in small groups, but I had very little experience managing a classroom. I made my share of mistakes, but I feel I helped a lot of those students and even after only six weeks, I could already see improvement in their language skills, self-confidence, and teamwork. It was a really fun job, and getting to live at the temple was like icing on the cake.
In spite of my boss's reservations, his wife was gung-ho in support of my practicing the dhamma. She took me to the temple and introduced me to the abbot. We brought two packs of soy milk from her little shop as an offering to the monks, and she asked his permission for me to visit the nuns, meditate, and possibly to stay there. They had never had a foreigner there, so I think I caused them some confusion. They appreciated my interest, certainly, but I think initially the abbot questioned if my heart was pure or if I was just looking for free housing or something. After a day of meditating there, the head nun decided to give me a chance and gave me a little room of my own to stay in if I wanted. I was very excited. One of my hopes before I left the states was to live in a temple for a month and experience monastic living. Here was my chance! I became a part of the temple community. I got up at 4:30AM regularly and tried to learn the Pali chanting (thanks to an English language book the meditation teacher gave me), did a daily chore—most often sweeping the grounds or mopping the stone floor of the meditation hall. Many people in the markets were very impressed at my tall foreign form, dressed all in white, being led around by the hand by the head nun. On some of our outings, I felt like an exotic pet. Many native Thai people are no longer interested in practicing meditation—it's just too hard, many told me. I figured life without practice was pretty damn hard, too. Seems like the discipline could only help.
I loved the temple life. The head nun was very kind and funny, and I became fast friends with some of the other visiting Thai meditators. We would have Thai-English charades-style language exchange while hand washing the dishes after meals. Early rising was not always easy, and many mornings I was late to the 4:30AM chanting, but chanting and meditating to greet the sun every day was such a beautiful ritual. And then to clean the temple all together—some nuns swept and mopped the mediation hall, some swept the walk-ways between our small simple sleeping rooms (think concrete box, about nine feet by nine feet, ceiling fan, overhead light, and a small toilet room in the back with a scooping basin and a drain hole in the wall for the shower), some swept the grounds just outside the nun's quarters where the monks would walk by every morning to go out on their alms rounds, while still others prepared the morning meal. We ate rice and curry and stir-fry vegetables with fruit for dessert. Sometimes there would be soup. Sometimes they would go out to the vegetarian restaurant to buy something special for me. Sometimes they would make pad-see-ew, fried wide rice noodles, because they knew it was my favorite Thai dish. The meals were served family-style and breakfast leftovers became lunch. Boy could I eat! My body was so happy on the rice-based diet (I am among the many humans with a mild wheat intolerance, so typical carb-heavy American fare does not sit well with me). The head nun often teased me about how if I stayed at the temple a long time, I would get “fat, fat, fat!” She always used hand gestures to demonstrate a growing waistline and puffed out her cheeks with a laugh for emphasis. I just laughed right along with her and said I rode my bicycle to work teaching everyday, I was not worried about getting fat. It was not until much later that I realized these little jokes were her Thai-style indirect way of trying to correct my inappropriate eating habits. Oops. Live and learn. It was hard for me to grasp that the polite thing to do was leave some food on your plate to show you had had enough. In America, cleaning your plate shows you enjoyed the meal. Leaving food behind has always felt wasteful to me. I do not like waste on general principal, so seeing so much food bagged up into plastic and thrown away every day was really difficult emotionally for me. Eventually, I learned to swallow my culture and conform to their way of life. As my mom has often told me, it's more of a waste to eat food you don't need or that would not be nourishing to the body than to just throw it out.
My biggest challenge at the temple was the meditation itself. I arrived at the temple with my Goenka practice intact—sitting, well, religiously, for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. I felt like I was making good head-way towards peace and equanimity through the practice. Emotional trauma and psychologically stored regrets came up in the practice, I could just sit and observe the sensations in my body and return relatively quickly to a state of peace. However, when I arrived at the temple, they taught me my practice was all wrong. They said that what Goenka teaches is a good beginning meditation, observing bodily sensation is just samatha, or concentration, meditation. They said that too much sitting was not good. That I must learn walking meditation and always balance the concentration of sitting with the effort of walking. I felt very confused. Goenka says he teaches Vipassana in its ancient, pure form. The monks I met said this was not Vipassana at all—that Vipassana was acknowledging. They yanked my hour morning and evening sits and began re-training me to observe the rising and falling of the abdomen (which Goenka taught was a very crude meditation object, by the way, in case my confused mind needed more to be divided about), to slow down my movements throughout the day, to be aware of the mental intention to perform any act before doing so, the sensation in the body of each motion, the consciousness at each sense door whenever I became aware of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, or thinking. Just acknowledge. No reaction. Train in morality. Develop concentration and neutrality. Create space for wisdom to arise on its own. It was quite a shock to my mind to have to undergo such a harsh training reversal. Since most of what I knew about Buddhism I had learned in Thailand, I decided to take these monks' words over Goenka's (a lay person), believe that this was the “correct” teaching for the most direct way to get out of suffering, and give it a shot. One problem, though. The monk in charge of meditation teachings at the temple in Phitchit did not speak enough English to teach me, and the head nun did not speak enough to translate for me. It's a far cry from the simple Thai phrases of daily communication about food and chores and travels I had learned to being able to report internal experiences of the mind and emotions in meditation practice.
Fortunately, the era of cellular phones is raging in Thailand, and for pennies a minute, I was able to call another monk—a friend of the teacher—at another temple in northern Thailand for about twenty minutes each day to report my progress, ask my many beginner's questions, and receive new instructions. I really dislike cell phones on general principal, and most of them give me a headache, but my commitment to continue meditation studies out-weighed my commitment against cell phones, and so my progress continued. What a trip.
One of my favorite experiences living at the temple in Phitchit was leading an English class for two monks and one of the teachers at the temple's school for novices. The motivation for the class was one monk who wanted to improve his language skills so he could travel and study in India. Since he was a monk and I was a woman, I could not teach him alone, so he recruited the other two. We practiced basic conversations from a book my boss gave us. Some days we talked about how to get around in a bus or train station. Another lesson was about birthday parties, which really seemed a silly lesson since birthdays are focused on honoring the parents in Thai culture, not honoring the birthday person themselves as is the custom in American culture. It especially seemed out of line with monastic living, but it was in the book, so we plodded right through. One day, we set the book aside and I just asked him questions about Thai funeral and cremation traditions. He got very animated this day and our hour together felt especially short. I think the freedom to express himself outside the book's conversation structure was empowering, and he was learning vocabulary that would more likely be useful to him than knowing how to make small talk at a birthday party, I suppose. It was pretty confidence building for me to be of service to the temple by teaching their little class. The nuns kept trying to encourage me to teach the novices English, since they had no English teacher, but I was too shy. It was one thing to teach the kids at the private school where I was working. As their elder, the cultural respect flowed from them to me; but at the temple, there was the added complication of their precepts: novices keep ten precepts (moral training rules) and meditators keep only eight. Since they keep more precepts, I owed them a certain degree of respect. I was also very aware and had figured out many of the cultural taboos around monks (especially as a woman), and I was sure there were similar rules for relating to novices, but I couldn't find anyone who could adequately explain them to me, so I was shy about taking on the role of their teacher. I figured I would just stick with my little study group of three. That, plus my regular teaching hours and daily chores at the temple, was enough to keep me busy.
After a few weeks of studying Vipassana in this new style and reporting my progress by cell phone, I asked for a few days off work so I could go to the temple near Chiang Mai and meet my teacher in person. My boss granted me the time, so I canceled my three weekday evening classes, asked my teacher to reserve a room for me at his temple for 4 days, and prepared to travel north for the second time in this South-East Asian odyssey I was experiencing.
It was a long night on the bus from Phitchit to Chiang Mai. What would be about a four to five hour drive in a private car spanned from 9PM to 3:30AM with the extra stops at small towns along the way. There was also the usual half-way point rest stop, where everyone unloaded from the bus around midnight or 1AM to consume fried noodles, curry, stir fried vegetables, or fried rice being kept at questionable temperatures behind glass cases. On first class or VIP buses, this meal was free—one of the perks of “high end” bus travel. Second or third class buses? You were usually on your own. As I was still keeping the eight precepts and this was definitely a case of solid food between noon and dawn, I traded my meal coupon for a carton of milk to drink at breakfast, then stretched my weary legs by wandering in the maze of isles of brightly colored, plastic wrapped dried fruit and candy. All sorts of sweet goodies, like sesame molasses bars, peanut toffee, coconut and banana taffy, strange gelatinous concoctions, and sticky buns waited as gifts or snacks for later on the bus. Puffed rice cakes drizzled with sugary glaze, plain roasted cashews, and banana chips were my favorite snacks, but they were relatively pricey, so I often bought nothing. Tonight I just looked and wondered about the new temple I was venturing to visit.
Arriving at the bus stop at about 3:30AM, I met a monk and struck up a conversation. I noticed he traveled with a relatively large bag for a monk. Mostly, they carried their alms bowls and maybe their umbrella tents or a set of spare robes or maybe some books. This monk had a saffron back-pack that looked worthy to carry gear for ten days in the wilderness. He was moving to Chiang Rai to meditate and study in the forest. I told him I was traveling to Wat Phradhat Sri Chomtong and he said it was too much in the city. Too noisy. I should come visit him in Chiang Rai. Meditate where it was quiet. I had already made arrangements to be where I was going, but I thanked him for the invitation. He gave me a wallet-size photo of himself which I accepted and put in my pocket calender. He helped me find the right songtau (a converted pick-up truck with bench seats along both sides of the truck bed and a raised camper shell with a steel frame surrounded by fiberglass or fabric that doubled as shelter from the rain and sun, as well as a platform for cargo that could then be strapped onto the roof. It's one of the most common forms of local public transportation in northern Thailand) to get into old town Chiang Mai from the bus station and explained to the driver where I needed to go. This was probably not necessary, as most of the drivers in Thailand speak reasonable English (except the taxis in Bangkok, for some reason), but I appreciated his help. As a farang (western foreigner), it was always assumed I was ridiculously affluent and it was rare to get a fair price without some hard bargaining. With a monk as a guide, I had a slightly better chance. The driver we met offered to take me into town immediately, but I felt it was too early and decided to wait a few hours in the safety of the bus station. I chatted with another taxi driver who hit on me playfully, then wandered over to the 24-hour 7-11 (surprisingly common all over South-East Asia) in the bus station and looked around for no reason other than something to do, then came back and sat by myself near the monk who had become my friend and meditated with him until the sun began to rise. I watched this glorious event unfold over the roof-tops of Chiang Mai's grungy old skyline and then my monk friend announced it was time to go, ushered me back to the songtau area, and left for his bus north to Chiang Rai. I waied respectfully with hands pressed together in front of my face and thanked him for his help. “Good bye, dhamma sister! Buddha bless you!” were his parting words.
After about 15 minutes, this songtau dropped me at the south gate of Chiang Mai's old city, where I paid him the equivalent of 50 cents, walked over to the busy morning market to buy some sticky rice for breakfast and some lotus flowers to offer the temple and my new teacher, and returned to the gate to catch another songtau which would drive me 44 km east to the temple in Chomtong for about seventy-five cents. Bless Thailand!
Having never been to Chomtong before, I was a bit nervous the whole ride out. I had told the driver where I wanted to stop, but I didn't know what I was looking for or how long it would take to get there For most of the 90 minute ride, I was besieged by nervousness about missing my stop and winding up who knows where...When we finally arrived in Chomtong, the songtau pulled into a gravel parking lot just off the main road in front of a high white wall. He stopped and looked at me expectantly. I pointed down and he nodded, this was my stop. I hoisted my heavy daypack and two liter water bottle to my shoulder, disembarked from the back of the truck, paid the driver, and took a moment to look around.
It was about 8AM Monday morning by the time I arrived in Chomtong. The main street in town was very busy with cargo trucks, passenger cars, 125cc motorbikes, bicycles, songtaus full of uniformed children on their way to school. The street was lined with shops: little privately owned mini-marts, a motorbike repair shop, of course a 7-11, a pharmacy, temple shops selling monk's robes, alms bowls, sacred yellow candles often ornately carved for the Buddha shrines, and tiny keepsake Buddha images in wood or marble or brass or gold-plate. A tourist shop with hill-tribe crafts and clothes advertised Arabica Coffee and Internet access stood right across from the temple's entrance. I made a mental note of this, and turned to enter my new home for the next four days.
Once inside the high white walls, the noise and haste of the town outside fell away and I relaxed into Eden. Dominating my view just inside the temple gate was the central gold-plated stuppa, about 40' tall and currently hidden by a massive patchwork of tarps for renovation work. To the left was the ordination hall, surrounded by some 10” diameter and 15' tall gnarled plumeria trees, and encircled by its own separate white wall with signs on the gates stating Forbidden to women. To the right was a smaller very old white-washed stone stuppa, about 25 ' tall built hundreds of years ago when the temple was first founded. Farther to the right as I wandered a bit farther into the cobble stone courtyard, I saw a Bodhi tree (the same species the Buddha sat under in Bodh Ghaya India 2500 years ago when he attained enlightenment) about 40' tall and nearly as big around with five or six trunks at three feet in girth a piece. The structure of this tree was fascinating. Draping from many of the branches were hundreds of tendrily root hopefuls, some of which had actually reached the soil and established themselves as new sources of nutrients and support for the tree. Many of the heavy outer branches of the Bodhi tree were supported by man-made wooden crutches ornately carved and carefully painted in honor of the sacred tree. It looked as if many of the larger crutch supports must have been cut from trees nearly the size of the branches of this tree they were now being used to support. This seemed a bit ironic to me, but who am I to judge. A Stone Buddha image just larger than life size sat peacefully at the base of the tree, wrapped in a sash of saffron orange cloth and surrounded by offerings of flowers, candles, and incense. Behind the golden stuppa was the central Buddha shrine hall, with its steeply peaked tiered roofs and ornately carved eves, also undergoing renovation.
I did not know where to sign in and there were not many people around, so I just proceeded past the central hall, through another wrought iron gate, and down a beautiful brick path through a garden of tropical foliage. Birds scurried about over head and under foot, and butterflies flitted here and there tasting the nectar of the delicious plumes. The path lead over an arched bridge across a four foot wide natural stream-style drainage canal and past a four seat round stone picnic table under a wooden gazebo grown over with bougainvillea. I then found myself on a driveway covered high overhead with a green mesh tarp and more bougainvillea. I instinctively turned right and in about 50', I found myself in front of the main office. I set down my pack outside, took off my sandals and left them with the others in a pile at the door, and let myself in as quietly as I could. It just seemed the right thing to do. An older Thai woman wearing all white and with a shaved head sat behind the desk and smiled at me warmly. “Can I help you?” she asked. “Um, yes. I'm here to meet Phra Chai. He made a room reservation for me. My name is Mare.” After a few minutes of searching her complicated looked appointment book, she looked a little confused. “Mare, right? You are sure he made a reservation for you?” “Yes, he said he did. I even confirmed with him on the phone.” She screwed up her face for a moment, then picked up the phone. After a short conversation with Phra Chai in Thai, she located my room, handed me my key, gave me directions, showed me where to pick up my bedding, told me lunch was at 11AM and I should go and help myself, breakfast would be served tomorrow at 6AM, and she concluded by asking that I return at 5PM that evening for the opening ceremony. I had officially arrived.
That evening, I sat in a room with about eight other people dressed all in white and offered four trays of flowers, candles, and incense to the Buddha and to the monk conducting the ceremony to request meditation instruction. I took the meditator's eight precepts to train to abstain from killing, stealing, all sexual activity (of body and mind), lying and harsh speech, intoxication of the mind with drugs and alcohol, eating solid food between noon and dawn, entertaining or beautifying myself, and using high and luxurious beds and seats. After the ceremony, I met with my teacher for the first time, and he informed me that he would like me to report to the abbot. This was quite an honor for me, as the abbot was 84 years old and was very highly respected as one of the most skilled meditation teachers in Thailand. For the next four days, I would follow this temple's schedule, forgo daily chores, and meditate as much as I could without the distraction of reading or writing or email. Just this body and mind. Observing, observing, observing; acknowledging, acknowledging, acknowledging.
The energy at this temple was very different from my home temple in Phitchit. Very busy. There were large opening and closing ceremonies every day as meditators were always coming and going; monks, nuns, and novices were everywhere, busy with their daily chores, teaching, studying, and learning work. An air of calm pervaded the meditation halls and the kuti areas where the meditators lived, but there was also a sense of busyness and quite a lot of chatter near the kitchen and dining hall. Construction on a new building hear the meditation hall was constantly irritating me. I reported this to my teacher and he responded with his usual question: “Did you acknowledge?” Well, I tried, but it was hard! Construction noise has been a bane of my existence for many years. Even in college, my first year living on campus at the University of California Santa Cruz, construction noise reigned from about 7am to 7pm what seemed like 7 days a week! It grated on my nerves. I tried to be present, but ultimately, I decided to do most of my meditation work in my room so I would not have to deal with the construction distraction.
The purpose of the Vipassana work is to just acknowledge the sensations coming in through the body's six sense doors. If there is construction noise, just know it: hearing, hearing, hearing. Watch the mind as it reacts with feelings of liking or disliking (strong disliking in my case), see how this leads to grasping and clinging at stimuli that result in pleasurable feelings and hatred and aversion towards stimuli that result in painful or negative feelings. And know that each stimuli is replaced anew every moment. It may seem like the construction noise is constant, but is it really? Each hammer strike is different, the sound of a drill or a saw grating on whatever material it was drilling or cutting into was not the same moment to moment. Worker's voices shouting instructions to one another changed moment to moment, moment to moment. There was no constancy anywhere. So why be so continuously irritated by it? It was there for a while, but it would eventually go away. Cultivate patience and dwell in peace in all conditions. Extrapolate this awareness to other cases in daily life outside the meditation work. Maintain equanimity. Be empty and happy, regardless of external circumstances. This is a lot easier to write in hindsight. At the time, I was able to separate the noises a bit, but it was generally still very noisy and very irritating.
One Thai nun there had lived in Germany for five years and so spoke pretty good English. She took me up to the main Buddha hall one day while it was open to the construction workers to show me the Buddha image. To my shock and amazement, it was the same Buddha image as at my temple in Phitchit! Not the same basic style or a similar form—it was the exact same image! There are many copies of the most beautiful Buddha image in Thailand, the enormous original in a temple in Phitsanulok about 40 km north of Phitchit, but I did not know there were copies of Long Pho Phet (the name of the Phitchit image). Turns out, the original statue is now housed in Phitchit, but it was originally the Buddha image up here in Chom Tong. At some point hundreds of years ago, the ruler of the Chom Tong area was under attack and sent a messenger down river to call the ruler of Phitchit for military support. Phitchit sent troops and helped successfully defend Chom Tong. As a reward for their aide, the head of Chom Tong offered that the ruler of Phitchit anything he wanted from the kingdom, since it all would have been lost without their help. The ruler of Phitchit said he wanted their Buddha image, Long Pho Phet. I think the ruler of Chom Tong was taken aback by this bold request, but to avoid losing face, he could not rescind his offer. Long Pho Phet was carefully crated up and placed on a barge and floated down the river to Phitchit, about 400 km away, where it has been enshrined ever since. Sometime in the last 20 years, an artist was commissioned from Bangkok to duplicate the statue, so that although the original could not return, at least a copy would remain at its original location. The remarkable coincidence (though I do not believe in coincidences) of this same Buddha image appearing in the two temples I chose to live at out of all the possible places to study meditation in Thailand felt like a confirmation from the universe that I had been led by my heart to the right place to deepen my practice.
For four days, I reported to the very kind, yet somewhat intimidating abbot. Sitting before him felt like placing one's self under x-ray. He had been a monk for 64 years and had done a lot of hours of meditation. One of the fruits of his meditation work was that he could clearly see into the mind of the meditator sitting before him. When I first felt him scanning my mind, I said an internal “Hello, abbot!” and he looked a bit startled. We don't speak the same external language and have to communicate through Phra Chai, the English speaking Thai monk who had been my cell phone correspondent teacher, but the abbot could see more than I was communicating through spoken words. It was almost a relief, because some of the experiences that were coming up for me in the meditation work and some of the cultural differences causing doubt and inner conflict in my mind were very difficult to articulate. At the end of the four days, I had made much progress. I still had some doubts about how constant acknowledging would help me see the highest truth of my existence, but the time had come to return to Phitchit and continue teaching my English classes until their full-term teacher could arrive from Britain and to continue life at the temple studying the process of consciousness as it manifests in my own mind throughout the day.
After six weeks of teaching English and about a month of living at the temple in Phitchit, the British teacher arrived and it was time to move on. I was still a beginner after only two months of meditation, still struggling with doubts about the Vipassana technique I was studying at the temple. I wanted to revisit the Goenka technique and see which seemed to suit me best. I looked online and found another ten-day retreat at another Goenka center not far from Phitchit that claimed to be a bit more forested and remote. This was very appealing to me, so I applied and was accepted. I arrived at their center alone, in spite of the fears for my safety of the nuns at Phitchit—the head nun even offered to travel with me to be sure I was safe, but then she would have to travel home alone and that did not feel right to me. We had already gone to the boarder of Burma together so I could renew my visa with basically disasterous results. Nothing bad happened to either of us, but I am totally comfortable traveling alone. She is not. My independent and frugal nature did not sit well with her. We wound up in an 800 Baht per night hotel room with separate beds, air conditioning, and TV, where I would have happily shared a queen bed in a 50 Baht per night hostel room with a fan and plywood for walls. My jaw dropped when the woman at the hotel desk stated the price of the room, but the head nun just rolled out a wad of cash and paid it. I tried not to be too obvious with my flabergastation, but I don't think I was very successful. After we checked in and unpacked, I went for a walk that evening, hoping to catch the evening chanting at a temple I knew nearby in town while she rested. When I returned, she was watching TV with the air con blasting so cold we had to cozy up under our blankets all night to stay comfortable! Expending this energy made no sense to me. The next morning, we traveled to the boarder together so she could go shopping at the cheap market while I renewed my visa, but my paranoia about timing meant we were too early and the market was not yet open. We agreed she would wait at this little restaurant near the boarder since she could not cross with me, and we would meet again after my visa paperwork was processed and I had gone shopping on the Burmese side for a little bit. I estimated my boarder run would take about an hour, but I was stymied by the same timing issue she was: the Burmese market wasn't open yet either! I was back across the boarder in probably about twenty minutes, but my friend had gotten nervous and just taken a songtau back to our hotel room. Oops. We arrived back at our home temple with plenty of time, so my haste was totally unnecessary. This experience taught me it was better if I just travel alone.
The second Goenka course was a beautiful experience. I learned some new techniques as an “old student” who had previously completed a ten-day course. I was also able to help maintain the center by cleaning two bathroom stalls each day. It felt good to have a chore to do during the long stretch of personal free-time after lunch and to be able to contribute to the dhamma community I was benefiting from. One serious hindrance, though, was that after nearly six weeks of acknowledging and mentally noting all the prominent contacts at my sense doors, it was really difficult to quiet this inner dialog and return to the technique of sweeping bare attention over my body looking for subtle sensations. Again, I appreciated Goenka's approach and the technique made more sense to me, but it was too hard to return to after I had begun training my mind in the acknowledging approach.
I knew I was not finished studying meditation in Thailand, but my six-month plane ticket was about to expire. I had to decide whether to take the ticket home with the plan and hope to return at some point in the uncertain future, or stay on in Thailand indefinitely, doing monthly visa runs and either continuing to teach English, or move to the temple full-time. A few things conspired to help shape my decision: my mom told me she was planning to move that fall and she was not too keen to move my stuff (I don't blame her—it was occupying half of her rather large 10' by 20' storage unit, and most of it I had not seen in five years and probably did not even remember I owned at this point), my boss at the English school in Phitchit said that he would not need me to stay on as a teacher since the British man had arrived and settled in, so if I wanted to keep working, I would have to find a different teaching job, and I realized that whether I used my return plane ticket now or not, at some point in the future I would be buying another plane ticket. Ultimately, I realized if I was going to wind up on the end of a one-way plane ticket, I wanted to be on the South-East Asian end of it instead of the American end, so I decided to take the ticket home for now, sell off my stuff, help my mom move, see my friends and family, have some adventures, and return to Thailand later in the fall ready to buckle down and meditate. This left me with about six days to play with after my second Goenka course before it was time to return to the states. Since my mind was so ingrained into the acknowledging practice, I decided to return to my teacher's temple in Chom Tong for one more short intensive visit. I wanted to get re-established in that practice before taking my plane ticket home to take care of business and return with the intent to continue my studies and possibly even ordain, an idea inspired by meeting a Canadian monk at Wat Phradhat Sri Chom Tong. He had been in robes for five years when I met him and said it was an excellent learning experience to ordain. He also said that it can be tricky to get an ordination visa in Thailand, but since the abbot of Chom Tong was so well respected and famous, they did not usually have problems helping people to stay there.
During this second short visit, the abbot was again perplexed by my desire to study for only four or five days (the basic course in this tradition is 21 days long), but he again granted me permission to stay and graciously and patiently heard my meditation reports and offered guidance and instruction to my beginner's mind with the same care and attentiveness he gave to his longer-term and ordained students who had been studying under him for years. I was so grateful, and I worked very diligently, walking and sitting in alteration for 10-12 hours every day, maintaining noble silence and mostly keeping to myself as best as I could. As a person progresses through this process of meditation training, there are certain predictable phases of growth everyone goes through. Each of these growth phases is characterized by certain signs, such as heat rising up in the body, restlessness during sitting meditation, the feeling like you're being pricked by needles, or nodding off. Not everyone experiences all the signs of each phase, but during most phases of the meditation course, I was experiencing most of the signs of progress—rare, apparently, as my teacher was shocked at how quickly I progressed. The end of the basic course is a 72-hour marathon meditation called “determination” where the meditator does walking and sitting meditation for an hour each in alteration as constantly as possible for three straight days. There is no showering, no sleeping, and no leaving their private rooms except to report to their teachers. Food for each day's two meals is delivered from the kitchen in little stacked metal containers that fit together on a metal handle forming a segregated columnar lunch box—very handy for Thai meals of rice, curry, vegetables and soup that would not mix well in one big box. My progress was so quick that my English speaking teacher (Phra Chai) hoped I could complete this determination before going home, but my mind took too long to prepare. When the abbot asked if I could stay three more days to do the determination, it was a day too late. My flight date could not be pushed back any further and I wanted to return to Phitchit for one more day to say good bye to all the wonderful people that had been my guides, hosts, teachers, and community for so much of the last six weeks (an eternity for me, given that I usually stay in one place no more than two or three days while traveling). But I promised to return and finish the basic course, possibly even to ordain and study meditation full time. The Canadian monk had inspired me to at least seriously contemplate taking on the holy life, at least for a short time. Any time ordained is beneficial, he assured me. And as long as I was a diligent student, there should be no problems remaining as long as it felt right—years even, following his example. With this food for thought, I wrapped up my meditation practice at Wat Phradhat, received my instructions for how to continue practicing at home (much less rigorous than Goenka, my teacher just said to do what I could—even ten minutes walking and ten minutes sitting once per day would help, though of course more would be better), said good bye to my friends in Phitchit, and flew home via Osaka, Japan.
Chapter Break
[discuss layover in Japan?]
The return home was a very important part of my heart's unfolding on this journey. Seeing my friends and family in my home country after six months abroad and all the intense experiences I had had there opened my heart to a depth of self-less loving I had forgotten since I was a very small child. An innocence was restored to my nature after having so much I was so attached to rubbed off by the friction of third-world travels.
[then adventures back in the states: the beautiful yet equanimous hike over the High Sierra Crest Trail (beginning on a slightly sprained ankle, very grateful for my Thai reflexology massage skills), the hitch-hiking adventure, the saddening felt sense of loss upon revisiting my “friends” in Santa Cruz and realizing the only person I really wanted to talk to and spend time with there was a beautiful woman I'd met traveling in Vietnam, touching base with family in Cali, friends in Utah, biking another 200 miles over six days alone, the difficulties with booking my return flight to Thailand, reconnecting with my vision quest buddy, the military coup in Thailand, the heart-rending departure from my Utah home and VQ buddy, helping my mom move, helping her horse readjust, meeting my horse trainer for the first time in about six years, glossing over hurt feelings residual from conflicts when I was a teenager, finally booking my one-way flight back to Thailand, returning to Utah (again), reconnecting with my VQ buddy (again), sadly parting from him (again), and returning to Thailand post-military coup with a 3 month visa and two letters of permission to ordain, one from each of my parents]
Chapter Break
Like Christianity, people have messed up the teachings of the Buddha over the years, but the good news is it appears that careful study of the human heart is actually all we need to get liberated from suffering in this world. I decided to give it a try. Through the confusing study of multiple meditation techniques, including two versions of Vipassana meditation which both stipulated that mixing techniques could be dangerous, I began an inquiry into the workings of this body-mind. Interestingly enough, it was only though ordination as a Buddhist nun at a northern Thai temple that I came back around to curiosity about the teachings of Christ. I was baptized into Catholicism at about two or three—it is one of my earliest memories, though I had little idea what was going on and the ceremony felt mostly scary and confusing rather than spiritually significant. I attended mass for many years and took religion class from kindergarten till eighth grade, but I do not believe any of this imparted to me an honest sense of Christ's true teachings.
Failible human that I am, I entered my Buddhist ordination experience with expectations. I thought becoming a holy person would entail a very pure way of life in a community of like-minded individuals. I thought I would rise easily every morning with the 4AM bell, efficiently and mindfully fold my bedding, straighten my room, take care of the morning needs of the body, and attend morning prayer and meditation. 6AM breakfast would always be satisfactory and filling, whatever food was offered. Morning chores would be completed daily and with ease. Many hours each day would be devoted to walking and sitting meditation so that I might realize my true essence. My true nature. Wearing the simple nun's robes, keeping the eight training rules, behaving well in accord with the temple's code of conduct, shaving my head and eyebrows each full moon to more easily see my original face. All these trainings I expected to guide me down a straight and narrow path to truth and liberation from suffering.
Expectations are shit. What I found was that women are second class citizens in Thailand, and in Thai temples especially. The sangha was not a family of dhamma brothers and sisters, it was a group of people in funny outfits professing to follow a pure lifestyle while maintaining habitual vices and rich business affairs. The women did most of the work running the temple, served the monks, and hardly had time to mediate. It often felt to me that after the bhikkuni (full female monk) lineage died out in Thailand, the status of Maechee (nun) was invented so monks would have someone to keep up the temples without the temptation of morally unrestricted lay women around. The many social outings to “make merit” were fun, but very distracting and reminded me of the historical Catholic procedure of donating money to the church to appease one's sins before God. Devout Buddhists came to our temple once a week to prostrate to the Buddha, listen to the monks' teachings, offer flowers, candles, and incense, and pay homage to a truly great man and spiritual teacher who lived 2500 years ago and taught morality, virtue, concentration, and wisdom as the foundations of realization and ultimate freedom. But then they would cross back out of the temple walls and return to their daily lives and whatever degree of morality seemed fitting to sustain their survival. Even within the temple, gossip reigned supreme. People were afraid to do the right thing if it might make someone angry. The motive to do the right thing often arose out of desire to avoid gossip and ridicule rather than a desire to do the right thing for its own intrinsic good.
Probably the most important thing I learned at the temple was all these expectations were contrived in my own mind, and that I am the creator of my entire world. When I suffered, it was because I had made a wrong choice. If there was chaos at the temple (groups of noisy school children running around, playing games, or splashing in the showers between meditation instruction sessions), it did not take much introspection to find chaos in my own mind. When I consistently cultivated calm, peace, and tranquility through loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity with my thoughts and surroundings, the temple miraculously enjoyed a respite of peace and quiet. As I grew and changed the patterns of my mind, the temple construction projects banged and hammered away. During rest periods between cycles of growth, construction would often stop. Synchronicities abounded. I learned that my degree of engagement in the holy life was up to me. Habits of laziness would not automatically stop on their own, it required practice and effort. Just because others didn't want to meditate in their spare time did not prevent me from doing so. Temple outings were not required—I could easily choose to stay home and work rather than go sight seeing and distract the mind.
Many of the teachings grated on my western mind, such as socially ingrained gender inequality, the absence of a creator God, and idolization of the Buddha images, to name a few. It seemed to me the Thai Theravadan teaching of developing equanimity in all situations as a way to dwell peacefully in the present moment as just one tiny step that we can make in this lifetime on the incredibly long journey towards distant liberation just doesn't seem right. The Buddha taught that bliss and rapture were factors of enlightenment. My teacher told me they are finer fetters that will keep one's mind attached to this world. Ok, maybe that's true, but before the ultimate release, rapture is to be developed, not shunned! The Buddha taught that through present moment awareness in every moment for 7 years, 7 months, or 7 days, anyone can attain enlightenment. To me, this means we can all realize our true unborn nature embodying equanimous joy in all circumstances at any moment. I don't think it has to be a long painful slog up a steep rocky road of toil and hardship and deprivation. Self-restraint and discipline are useful tools to break old habits of reaction and molds of fear. But they are just tools. They are guides along the path, not the goal itself. Joy in the present moment at each step on the path is the goal!
While ordained, I attended a large Dharma talk given by the acclaimed Vietnamese monk and peace activist, Thich Naht Hanh, or Thay (pronounced “tie”), as his respectful students affectionately address him by the Vietnamese title for teacher. He sat stone still and spoke patiently and kindly for three long hours. I tried to be patient and still and attentive, but I was far less successful. Pains in my knees and back from sitting in the polite Thai so-called angel posture with your feet tucked behind you to one side. I did a lot of switching back and forth. Sometime during the second hour, I realized it made little difference how I sat or if I shifted. The pains were there anyway. It was just the habit of my restless mind to keep trying to alleviate the pain. Much of Thay's speech was not well received, for his teaching is one of joy. Two concepts from his talk stuck with me, and helped me grow in confidence that the way I was studying was not the only way to see the truth of this experience. He said if there is not joy on the path, there is a problem and the path needs to be adjusted. And he spoke one specific line that struck me: There is no path to enlightenment; Enlightenment is the path. To a group of Theravadan monks who believe austerity and pure equanimity are the way to purify the mind of its ancient ingrained defilements of greed, anger and delusion, this man exalting loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy as the keys to the way was not well received.
This evening only fueled my fire that Thailand's teachings were not guiding me on the path to liberation, but only entrenching me more deeply into subservience and pain. It's funny, really. I fought so hard for so much of the journey through my ordination, yet I continued to be the best nun I could be. I hated the meditation practice—rising, falling, sitting, touching for hours and hours every day was so boring! Why does release from attachment have to come through realization of pain, fear, terror, and desire for deliverance from the prison of this body-mind? What about attainment of endless joy as a motivation to get liberated from suffering? Why is the ultimate meditation experience one of cessation—essentially controlled physical death—so consciousness can be free? Many aspects of the teaching bothered me, but I could see development of increased compassion for myself and my fellow suffering beings on this planet the more that I meditated. I felt less emotionally volatile and better able to dwell peacefully in the present moment with each additional meditation course. As my spiritual insight grew, my physical and emotional vision cleared and I could more easily see the true nature of other beings. I gained insight that death is not the end of this cycle—changing bodies does not end suffering any more than changing geography does. The only way to get free from suffering is to align consciousness with the objective observer. Create some space between my small ego self and her habitual wants and desires and sufferings and observe how I interact with my world. To see how the choices I make in each conscious moment every day impact my environment, both internal, external, and relational. To see the way I move and transfer energy in this world and how that impacts the bigger picture. The meditation work was frustrating to the hilt at times. I often crumpled to the floor in fits of rage, sorrow, and/or fear. Many times during walking meditation I had to stop and lay down to avoid punching the walls or screaming in anger. I had no idea so much fear was pent up in my being.
I lost about 30 pounds during the course of my ordination. I was the thinnest I have been in my adult life (skipping dinner in accordance with the Buddha's training rules to live simply, eating only until I was full, counting the number of bites I took and paying attention to the flavors, textures, temperatures, and smells associated with each morsel helped tremendously to release old habits of greed and self-medication with food). I had long over-eaten to avoid feelings of pain and lack and sorrow. Now I was learning to just be with these feelings. Use mindfulness in the present moment to watch and observe as these feelings arose, stayed for a while, and, without the fuel of conscious reaction, always passed away. My analytical mind wonders if some of the emotions I released and processed in Thailand were stored in the body fat I burned, and that is why I went through so much pain and anger and suffering there. Perhaps the “problems” I encountered at the temple were only manifestations of past thought patterns bearing fruit and finally withering away. I am ultimately very grateful for the safe space the temple granted me to explore the depths of my being. To explore and release what I found there that was no longer serving me. I am especially grateful for the unending patience of my teacher, regardless of how brash, frustrated, angry, sad, or irrational I was being in any given phase of my meditation practice.
During my ordination, I felt very aware that it was temporary. This is a fact that often surprises people: In the Thai tradition, ordination is not necessarily for life. In Thai culture, before marriage, men are expected to ordain as a monk for at least one rain's retreat—the three month period between the full moon of July and the full moon of October when Thailand is barraged by the monsoon rains. As Thailand grows increasingly modernized and westernized and more people are making their livings in business and working desk jobs instead of making a subsistence living from their lands, this expectation has become more lax. Men come to the temples to ordain with whatever time they have. I even met one man who had only nine days to live at the temple and study meditation, but he was granted permission to ordain and learn to live the life of a monk. Any time a person can dedicate to studying meditation full time and living the holy life will be beneficial to purifying their minds. Even short-term ordination was seen as a great opportunity to make merit for one's spiritual advancement and for the benefit of one's family and ultimately all sentient beings. Sometimes, it was actually more inspiring to watch the rains monks, because they knew they had a limited time to study and meditate and live the holy life and make merit for themselves and their families, so they took their studies more seriously. It seemed that after a while of ordination, most people stopped following the rules so closely. Perhaps this was another source of my irritation? I was among the short-termers, and thus wanted to make the most of my limited time, but felt stymied by the less serious and less dedicated holy people who enjoyed the prestige (for it is considered a difficult and honorable thing to ordain) but were not whole-heartedly invested in the work. They were a distraction and their peer-pressure offered temptation to skimp on rule-following myself.
Part of my short-term status included a desire to incorporate sight-seeing into my life at the temple. This is a somewhat sticky situation. As ordained people, we have gone forth from the home life, and we therefor (theoretically) strive to forgo the pleasures of this sensory world in seeking the highest bliss of release from all attachment. Wanting to go sight-seeing pretty much flies in the face of this practice. Fortunately, it is acceptable to go visit other temples for a change of environment to practice in. One place I went to practice for a week was Wat Doi Sutep, one of the most famous temples Thailand. It is located near the top of a mountain just outside Chiang Mai (Thailand's second largest city, located in the northern part of the country). In approximately 1390, the king at the time placed a very famous and highly prized Buddha relic (bone fragment—they looked more like little pebbles to me, but I guess when you finally attain full enlightenment and become an arahant, you become so pure, parts of your skeleton crystallize and when your body is cremated, these little crystally pebbles are often left behind) on the back of a sacred white elephant and let it loose. An entourage of royalty and holy men followed the elephant as it wandered 11 km up the side of this mountain (Doi Sutep). On the place where it stopped, this temple was constructed to house the relic. It was a beautiful temple, with many large ornate Buddha images and a gold-plated stuppa (an architectural formation that looks kinda like a gynormous contoured bell of a building with a spire on top, reaching up to the heavens) about 30 feet tall to house the Buddha relic itself.
One woman I met there was a British nun. She had been ordained for about two years and we became fast friends. She began her meditation studies with the Canadian monk at Wat Phradhat Sri Chomtong whom I respected very much. I had talked to him while I was still a beginning meditator in 2006 and he convinced me it was both very possible and beneficial to return to Wat Phradhat Sri Chomtong and ordain. She also had her share of doubts and although she ran the international center at Wat Doi Sutep and gave the basic instructions to new students, by the time I was getting to know her, she had largely chucked the practice for herself. She had turned instead to studying The Secret and the universal law of attraction for an explanation of the workings of this universe. She was also attuned to give Reiki energy healing and ultimately introduced me to her teacher, who gave me my first and second level attunements. We also discussed A Course In Miracles and watched David Hoffmeister on video google. He travels the world and speaks about the truths he has learned through studying ACIM. He exudes joy. When I looked at the photos of the revered Thai masters in their shrunken, shriveled bodies with their hardened expressions and piercing beady eyes, and then I looked at David Hoffmeister with his strong, healthy body, open face, and clear loving eyes, there was no contest. This man had what I wanted, not those monks.
As I was visiting her, this 40 year-old woman was in the process of leaving—she asked her abbot for permission to disrobe and go home while I was there. He seemed surprised at her request, but ultimately understood and granter her permission. He hoped she could help find someone to replace her in the international office and that she was taking the cats and dogs with her that she had been feeding and caring for. She had been at Wat Doi Suttep for about nine months now, and the International Center largely depended on her. She had a Thai office assistant she figured would fare alright until they could find a second person. She also briefly considered trying to ship the animals home to Britain with her, but realized this was not realistic and probably not fair to them. The six days I spent with this British nun were pivotal in my own decision to disrobe and go home. It was kinda funny, because while I was there with her, I was still trying to hang on to the practice I had learned. I found myself arguing with her in support of the Thai interpretation of Vipassana practice, offering the growth I had experienced as evidence of the possibilities that this method is a viable approach to truth, in spite of the pain we both encountered en route (maybe that pain was already there?), all our doubts about the often boring methodology, and our cultural criticisms of the inequalities among monks, nuns, and lay people of both genders. After we shared some quotes from Eckhart Tolle and spent a day on Video Google watching The Secret and David Hoffmeister's commentaries from his experiences learning with A Course In Miracles, she pretty much won out. The philosophy of pure joy as a way of life in the present moment seemed a lot more appealing than equanimity with all conditioned phenomena and sensory stimulation reactions, regardless of how pleasurable or painful they are.
I returned to my home temple and she made her final preparations to fly home for her parent's fiftieth wedding anniversary. Once back at my temple, while meditating in the main hall with the most ornate Buddha altar-shrine, I heard a directive in my heart. It was a very quiet, steady, firm voice. It said, “Get Out of Here.” I was surprised and felt very confused. It was not immediately clear whether “Here” referred to Wat Phradhat Sri Chomtong, Thailand, Theravadan Buddhism, or just my negative fault-finding state of mind. The message was very clear and repeated itself: “Get Out of Here.” It was a very strong compulsion and made me want to go back to my kuti that minute, pack up my few belongings, book a flight, and get home to the states the next morning. But I had an inkling that such a spurious reaction might be over-doing it. I did get up and leave the hall with the promise to wait three days and see if the “here” question would be clarified. It was. Three days later, the same voice came back to me and spoke simply, from the same very centered place in my heart: “Get out of here. Japan.” Japan? I did visit Osaka for a few hours during my Bangkok-Los Angeles layover last year and it was so beautiful and the food was so nourishing and good. But how could I possibly afford to live there? And what would I do there? My sense was to go and meditate. Try the Zen path. I had read some koans in a Buddhist magazine my Taiwanese Maechee neighbor gave me, and it was very clear my mind did not process on that level. I totally didn't get it, and I wanted to. It seemed the more neutral I got and the more practiced I became in the Theravadan Vipassana practice, the harder it was for my mind to remember things. This was a very frustrating development for me, as I have always been a quick learner and had a good memory.
Another draw to Japan is that it would complete the second half of my vision quest directive to unfold the process of healing my relationship with my dad. Ultimately, I discovered and joined the organization WWOOF Japan (the Japanese chapter of the international concept World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) for $55. I had WWOOFed in Thailand in 2006 for ten days and had a wonderful time. This took care of what I would do in Japan and how I would afford it, as WWOOF connects organic farms and organically minded businesses and hostels with willing workers from all over the world. They even had a few listings for temples people could stay at, and some hosts were devout meditators and Zen priests willing to teach interested WWOOFers meditation practice. So now I just had to get permission from my abbot to travel, and hopefully to get permission to disrobe and go home for my dad's wedding.
I naively expected this would be a simple process. Permission to ordain had been reasonably simple—I just had to bring my abbot written permission from my parents and show him I had a sincere heart and a desire to contribute to the temple and to grow in dhamma as a meditation practitioner. However, the reason I had to bring permission from my parents was that as an ordained person, the abbot became like my father. He took on responsibility for my safety and well-being. If I wanted to travel somewhere over night, I had to ask his permission and preferably travel with another female companion. As an independent American, used to traveling the world alone, this was quite a shock. But this is just a safety precaution following the Buddha's directive from 2500 years ago after one of the nuns in his sangha was raped and killed while living alone. Permission to disrobe, however, proved a bit more difficult to obtain. I had to ask three times, in fact. The first two times I went to his kuti to ask permission to disrobe, huge mountains of doubt rose up in my mind as to whether leaving was the right thing. I mean, this heart directive felt the same as the directive that brought me to Thailand in the first place. It was the same voice that had tried to get me to go back to Thailand last year when I was in the south of Laos. When I defied this voice and traveled on to Vietnam and Cambodia, I encountered numerous problems and challenges, and by the time I returned to Thailand, I realized I didn't have half the time to experience everything I wanted to experience before my plane ticket ran out: more meditation, learning about organic farming and small community living through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) which is an organization that links organic farms willing to host people that want to work in exchange for room and board and cultural exchange all over the world, exploring the more remote areas of Thailand especially in the north around Chiang Rai and in the forested western Kanchanaburi area, I have always loved swimming and snorkeling and PADI SCUBA diving certification was pretty much dirt cheap on many of the beautiful islands in the south, which were worth more time in their own right, I wanted to study Thai reflexology massage, I wanted to experience teaching English for more than six weeks, and take a Thai cooking course. I missed out on many of these experiences because I did not follow my inner guidance last year. What would happen if I did not follow this voice this time? And what if I did follow it and it turned out to be a rash decision spawned by temptation? My original intent for this journey was to ordain for a year and then travel to Myanmar (formerly Burma), India, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Nepal over the course of the next 3-5 years. Explore Buddhism across these cultures and compare the experiences. Was this returning home happening too soon? So many doubts reared their ugly heads, and then my teacher's guidance was so off the charts from what I expected, I didn't know what to do!
When I asked permission to disrobe and go home for my dad's wedding the first time, my abbot told me that marriage leads to grasping and clinging in this suffering world and that as an ordained person I should not condone such things. He also pointed out that I should consider the emotional impact it would have on my mom for me to support my dad's new marriage. This was such a shock to me. Although I can see his point, and I believe successful marriages are extremely rare in this world these days, weddings are still cause for much celebration in my culture, and it seemed like a good opportunity to spend some time with my family. I wanted to be there. And whether I supported my dad or not, this was the decision he was making. My presence or absence would not change his mind. So why not just be real and present with the situation at hand and go attend the event and be supportive? Anything else seemed like living in denial to me. My abbot also said the voice in my heart was still deluded by greed, anger, and confusion and that I should not follow it. That it would only lead me to pain and suffering. That I would be better off staying at the temple and continuing to practice. His advice threw me for such a loop, I became willing to bow to my doubts about leaving and stay on at the temple to contemplate what he had taught me and to continue to mediate and practice present moment awareness to try to purify the greed, anger, and delusion out of my mind. For I admit, I fought the growth process nearly every step of the way, but the results were obvious. My pendulous emotions were not in the driver's seat of my life experience nearly as much these days. Given my past tendency towards rather severe mood swings across the board from joyous bliss to suicidal thoughts born of depression and perception of the futility of all possible efforts in this life, the equanimity that was developing in me was definitely a welcome respite. Wisdom came to me much more easily and I more often knew what to say when trying to console a friend or advise an acquaintance.
But I still had a nagging sense that this journey to Japan would complete my Vision Quest directive as a path to healing my relationship with my father. A dear friend from back home was willing to donate her frequent flier miles to me so the airfare would be free. I had already joined WWOOF Japan, so my lodging and food would be bartered by labor. The only expenses to go at this time would be domestic travel. So many things about the timing of this journey felt right. When I tried to explain my sense to the timing and my desire to complete my Vision Quest directive to my English speaking teacher, Phra Chai responded with an inquiry into my background: You're not Native American, are you? My reply was no, but I'm not from a Buddhist background, either. I feel open and welcoming of wisdom in any form, Native American, Theravadan Buddhist, and maybe at some soon time in the future Zen.
I waited patiently while the abbot was in and out of the hospital in Bangkok to ask permission again to disrobe and go home. I watched my mind get tense about potentially missing this opportunity. I began to wonder if the stress I was feeling was purposeful? Fruitful? Certainly didn't seem to be affecting my situation. And the universe works in greater ways than my small consciousness can necessarily grasp at any given time. During this waiting period, my Russian alcoholic neighbor had another drunken relapse. If I had disrobed and gone to Japan, I would not have been there to witness her struggle with this intoxicant and its literal death grip on her life. I was able to be supportive to her. To share a bit of the message of Alcoholics Anonymous with her. I watched as she experienced emotions she could not cope with. I watched as she turned to alcohol. I watched as she drank herself stupid and disfunctional over the course of seven to ten days, then listened through ridiculously sound-permeable walls as her body rejected the poison and she threw-up almost constantly for three days. What a powerful experience to meditate through that. She was one of my most important teachers at the temple. Eventually, I was able to help her understand that as alcoholics, we could not drink like normal people. I gave her a Big Book (in English, unfortunately...the Chiang Mai meeting did not have literature in Russian) and eventually convinced her that Whiskey and wine and champagne and beer were all the same toxic substance and that as an alcoholic, they were all poison to us. My support combined with her own self-observations finally showed her that she really could not drink and expect to live much longer. Her alcohol nearly cost her her ordination and her visa to stay in Thailand. Her son lived in the south as a real estate agent. She had no family to go home to in Russia. She had been arrested and deported from Korea two years ago. I never completely understood why, but I believe it was connected to her alcoholism. Thailand was her only home right now. I learned a lot from her. She had a journalist's eye and was an excellent student of life, and her example made her an excellent teacher.
Finally at the end of my time, I saw how this path of constant present moment awareness through sensory acknowledging is a tool to cultivate virtue (for while one is constantly acknowledging, it is impossible to conceive harmful or non-virtuous thoughts), concentration (for a mind that is attentive only to the presently arisen sensory experience is concentrated), and wisdom (for when the body-mind cultivates virtue and compassion, wisdom in the form of knowing the right things to say and do (or not say and not do) in all circumstances will arise naturally). Through increased virtue, concentration, and wisdom, the individual naturally develops equanimity, compassion, sympathetic joy, and loving kindness towards the self and towards all beings. This path feels like a long isolated slog through painful emotions, but it may be one that could liberate one from suffering. Realizing this, I felt it was time to return to the states not to depart from spiritual growth, but just to take another step on the path. I promised to continue practicing (even if I was wanting to find a more joyful form of meditation, now that I could more clearly see the benefits of this practice and until I found something better, I would stay on with this one), and ultimately left the temple on good terms with an open door to return in case Thai Therevadan Buddhism is the path I choose to return to at some point in the future.
Chapter Break
Upon my third request, my abbot finally granted me permission to disrobe and go home. I found a website specializing in cheap airfare from Bangkok to destinations all over the world. The cheapest flight I could find on orbitz and travelocity was about $800 one way. This is about all the money I had in the world at this point, it was enough money to support me for another year as a nun, and it did not seem worth-while to blow it all on a plane ticket for my dad's third wedding. I mean, what if he decides later that this wasn't the right one either? Well, the future will reveal itself in time. The Bangkok specialist booking agent found me a flight for the exact date I wanted with a fourteen hour layover in Seoul (plenty of time to go into the city and get a taste of Korea) for only $567 with tax. This was still a fair bit more expensive than my one-way flight out here for $450, but it seemed a reasonable expense. I booked it. Wow, I had finally committed. I was going home.
The next step was to approach my abbot to ask for an auspicious date to disrobe. By disrobing, my one-year non-immigrant visa would be automatically canceled and I would have six days to leave the country. By the time I was able to ask my abbot, I had only three days left before I needed to leave the temple, and two of them were holidays: Wan Phra, a Buddhist Holy Day, and Wan Goon, the day before which is very busy with preparations for Wan Phra. So the abbot took this in, reflected on the date, and asked me if I had time to do it now. It was about 7 PM. Yes, of course. This was the ideal time from my perspective, though I was aware of needing to hurry since the abbot was once again forgoing evening chanting to make this time for me. Four other monks needed to be present for the ceremony and three were already in the room listening to the abbot teach, so they agreed to stay. I went and found Phra Chai in his reporting room and asked if he would join the ceremony. He still had a few students' reports to hear, but he was willing. I hurried back to my room and asked my neighbors for some money, since I did not have the cash on hand to make the disrobing ceremony offerings. Unfortunately, most of them were broke, too! One woman who was there only for the rains retreat happened to have enough and I put 100 Baht (about $3) in each of five envelopes, then another 300 Baht in two envelopes—one for the Buddha and one for the abbot. I rushed back to the abbot's kuti where the English speaking Thai nun was preparing the flower trays. I had forgotten my meditator's scarf, but did not want to keep everyone waiting the extra time it would take me to walk back to my kuti again to get it.
We entered the abbot's kuti in the traditionally respectful kneeling position. I added my offering envelopes to the trays of flowers, candles, and incense, and approached the abbot behind my translator, mentor, and friend. We both prostrated three times each to the Buddha images enshrined in the abbot's corner, the abbot himself, and to the four attending monks (my teacher had finished hearing his reports just in time). My mentor led me in chanting some Pali phrases to open the ceremony and I offered the first tray to the Buddha. Then I raised the second tray to my forehead, chanted some more, and offered this tray to the abbot. Next, I chanted a statement in Pali three times to the effect that I was renouncing the holy life training and the Buddhist sangha was to regard me as a lay person from this day forward. Up to this point, I was doing pretty well. It felt a bit surreal to be “renouncing the holy life” after only seven months when I had originally intended to be here a year. I also felt sad to be leaving this quirky community that had taught me so much and become one of my many homes. At some point during this part of the ceremony, one of the monks attending leaned over to my teacher, pointed at me, made a comment and laughed. I was afraid I had done something wrong and I looked over in confusion. Phra Chai said I was doing fine and just to continue, but I started to cry. I struggled to get myself back together and finished the chanting in a choked voice. My mentor nun then pulled me aside and took off my outer robe. We returned to the monks with apologies that I had forgotten my meditator's scarf. I didn't think it would matter before I came in to begin the ceremony, but even with my long skirt and high necked long sleeved nun's shirt, I felt naked in front of them without the over scarf. Too late to change it now. I went to each of the attending monks in turn and offered them their envelopes, placing it carefully on their orange satin receiving scarves which they extended for the purpose (a man would just be able to hand the monks the envelopes, but the prohibition against women touching monks meant I could not hand them something directly). I went back before the abbot and took the five precepts of a Buddhist lay person: abstain from killing, stealing, adultery, false and harsh speech, and intoxicants. This basically concluded the ceremony.
The abbot gave me a chance to ask any last questions and I did my best to thank him through choked back tears. I said thank you for welcoming me to the temple's community. I know it must be hard to open the temple's doors to foreigners because some people do not have pure intentions. I knew I had made some mistakes and I expressed gratitude for everyone's patience as I learned patience myself. I said the tears I shed during my ceremony showed that I still had work to do (everyone laughed at this observation), but explained how I finally saw how the acknowledging process worked and I would continue to practice. I asked for final instructions to follow when I returned home. He said to keep acknowledging as much as I could and to practice at least ten minutes walking, ten minutes sitting every day. Maybe I could become like Yasodara, who attained stream-entry (the first stage of enlightenment) as a lay person. I think she is also the woman who was raped and died while meditating in the forest alone. Given my tendencies to backpack and cycle alone over long distances, I didn't think this was a very good person to set an example for me, but I said nothing at the time.
I thanked the abbot again, thanked the attending monks again, thanked my teacher Phra Chai again, thanked my nun mentor, and made one last offering to the abbot's attendent monk. He and I had clashed a few times during my ordination, from the very beginning, in fact. He was out of town when I was granted permission to ordain and so the process was underway before he was consulted. This chafed him a bit. The timing of processing my visa conversion was a bit tight due to a big ceremony at the temple the attending monk was organizing and shortly thereafter the abbot and 89 people from the temple traveled to India, so I was impatient about the paperwork I needed him to help me get. This short-notice disrobing was about the last straw and his temper was boiling. My teacher and mentor both advised me to just steer clear of him until he cooled down, but it felt like the right thing to offer him this last envelope. When I approached him on my knees, offered him the envelop, prostrated three times and started to cry again, he softened. I thanked him for all he had taught me, for truly I had learned a lot about trusting the universe and about diplomacy, patience, and timing by working with him. I felt like such an open channel of joy after the ceremony. I prostrated again three times to the Buddha, the abbot, and the attending monks. I felt so free.
Chapter Break
After I disrobed, my life at the temple changed. I still dwelled in the same body-mind with the same shaved head and the same basic white clothing, except I exchanged the outer robe of a nun for the smaller wrap scarf meditators wear. I was no longer allowed to go out on alms round to beg for my daily meals. I continued to go to chanting sporadically, but often felt there was more pressing work to do. Leaving the temple was more than just packing my bag and walking out. I had to sort through my Dhamma book library to see what would come home with me and what I should give to specific people and what I should donate to the temple's international center library. I had to find gifts for my neighbors and everyone who had helped me during my ordination (this was a lot of people). I brought home lots of gifts from my last trip to South-East Asia and had promised myself I would not this time, but ultimately I did a little shopping for close friends and family back home. I continued to meditate a few hours a day.
It was interesting to observe as my interactions with my former fellow nuns became a bit more distant. Detached. At first it was disappointing, but ultimately it was refreshing to realize that none of the Thai people seemed particularly plussed over my departure. It maybe wasn't the best timing from their perspective, as the abbot's birthday celebration was in about two weeks, and thousands of monks and lay people from all over Thailand would be coming to pay respect to him, needing to be fed and provided with coffee, tea, and water. I was generally a good worker, so for that reason I would be missed. But mostly, people understood that I had family stuff to attend to back in the states, and my departure was just another manifestation of the Buddha's law of impermanence: every conditioned thing in this life changes. Nothing is constant. People come to the temple, stay a while, and they go. People come into this world, stay a while, and they go. Life is just like this. No reason to get emotional or upset. What a beautiful perspective. They all wished me well and asked when I would be returning and hoped that would be soon, and to ordain for longer next time. My sense was this is a standard speech they give everyone when they leave. As personally indifferent as people seemed to be fundamentally, it's funny how disappointed the sangha members were when someone decided to disrobe and leave. What a pity, they would say, like it was the end of their spiritual growth when they left the temple.
The day after I disrobed, I went to report to my teacher on my meditation practice, as I did many days throughout my stay at the temple, as well as to ask some last minute questions before I went home. I sat outside his reporting room, quietly and patiently waiting my turn to report. The traditional polite posture was to sit kneeling with feet tucked behind and hidden under my white skirt on the cool tile floor of the patio—I spent many hours in this posture during my time as a nun. In front of my teacher's room, a small oscillating electric fan blew the air around attempting to disrupt the flight pattern of the mosquitoes enough that they would not land and bite. It helped, but I missed the extra protective layer of fabric in my forsaken outer robe. One bonus of wearing two or three layers of fabric over my body from the neck to the wrists and ankles was the mosquito protection.
When it was my turn to come in, he said in a slightly surprised but very cheery voice: “Oh, Mare. Come on in.” Something sounded very odd about his greeting. Something was missing. Then it struck me: I'm just Mare again. I had lost my title. For seven and a half months, I had been Maechee Mare. But now I had disrobed. Maechee Mare no longer exists, except as a phantom in some photographs and in the memories of the nuns and monks that have come to know me, though I rather suspect I will shortly be reduced to Maechee Farang, the foreign nun from America, since most people at the temple remember the foreign ordainees by their nationalities rather than their given names. Too bad we can't all just be dhamma brothers and sisters, but I guess that's a bit too socialist for this part of the world. Now I am just Mare again.
There were a few days between my disrobing and my leaving the temple. There were a few odd experiences on the day of my departure. I decided it might not look right for me to wear all white once leaving, since some lay people might mistake me for a nun still, and I would be traveling alone and potentially eating dinner or singing little songs to myself and generally not being very nun-like anymore, so I donned a blue long-sleeve button down shirt with one of my white skirts. I had donated my robes to a twenty-four year old Italian woman who was nearly my height and planning to ordain that fall. But a fellow meditator from Ireland who had become another fast friend had just left, and she gave me her meditator's clothes. I was very grateful. These extra white articles helped ease my transition back to life outside the protection of the temple and the people doing their best to follow the Buddha's teachings. Before I walked out the temple gate for the last time on this visit to Thailand, I decided to go to the main Buddha shrine and prostrate three times (to the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha) to pay respect, offer gratitude for all that I learned there, and make a wish for a safe journey home. Making wishes before a Buddha image is basically the Buddhist substitute for prayers in deity-based religions. Inside the main Temple Hall, I saw some of the older lay men who were caretakers of the temple. When they saw me in my colored shirt and realized I was no longer a nun, they immediately began exclaiming, “Very Beautiful! Very Beautiful!” I think this pretty much maxed out their English skills. I appreciated the compliments, but oy, I was not even departed from the temple grounds and I was already faced with sexual energy and men hitting on me! It was quite a shock to hear such things from men in their 40's and 50's (maybe even 60's?) who had kept a respectful distance and just joked around politely with me for most of the last seven months.
Ultimately, in the process of leaving, waves of immense gratitude washed over me for all I learned there, for all the support I had received from my teachers, mentors, and neighbors at the temple, as well as the fellow foreign meditators and nuns I met on my journey, and of course the bedrock of my friends and family following my journey via blog and mass email back home. The conflicts that I had griped about for so long seemed so insignificant now that I was nearing the end of this experience. I was about to be liberated from the Thai cultural bondage, yet I found I had largely grown accustomed to it. This experience certainly awarded me with increased neutrality upon the return home, but I had not stayed away long enough to break many of my old habits of mind, such as over-eating, obsessing about mistakes of the past and projecting into my possible futures. I played out old roles with friends rather than being my most present compassionate self moment to moment. It was hard to watch myself slip back into these behaviors. But I suppose two steps forward and one step back is still one step forward.
Chapter Break
After a chance meeting with an old friend from community college, we agreed to hang out for a day and share photos and travel stories. I hadn't seen him in about six years, but I put him on my mass-email list and he responded now and then with amazement and encouragement. Ultimately, he had taken a solo journey among the ruins of his home country, Mexico, because of my inspiring example. That was quite a compliment. Looking through his amazing photos reminded me of my times in Cambodia traipsing around the temples of Ankor Wat with a slightly different cultural spin. He also happened to be a writer. We had met all those years ago because he was writing a story for our Community College newspaper about the Equestrian Club I had founded. Ultimately, he got involved in the club and thus began his extra-curricular college involvement. I did not really realize how much I had touched his life. Coming full circle and sitting with him long after our respective dinners were finished to talk about stories and how to write this novel, I could see the spark in his being.
These bodily cravings were long forgotten. Buried by a promise of celibacy, in body and mind, I had totally forgotten what a crush feels like. It was so intense. There were several moments on a walk we took together where it would have been very easy to propose a kiss or at least to hold hands or hug...something. I realized how so many of my friends got into trouble following these emotions. I realized how acknowledging gave me a little distance from these overwhelming feelings to see how it might not make sense in the long run to throw myself into the arms of this man I had just seen for the first time in a very long time, especially since I was leaving in two days to visit my grandparents in Las Vegas en route to my small community home in Utah. I would probably not be back for a long time.
How silly to seek fulfillment in relationships for the vast scary spaces within myself where I perceived the emptiness to be a lack, rather than a beautiful spaciousness where the divine dwells and where the possibilities remain endless.
I have just returned from eight months living in a Thai Theravadan Buddhist temple. How quickly old habits resurface. Old patterns of being unfold in the presence of old friends. There is a still, quiet undercurrent of love and patience that was not there in my past confused fractured ego-centered lifestyle. I dwell more consistently in a space of compassion for myself and others. Forgiveness comes more naturally. This progress was not won easily, but I am so grateful. Many intense feelings were processed in the safety of the monastic setting—anger, fear, rapture, joy, hatred, attachment, callous indifference. However, lust-objects were few and far between in that environment. There were a couple very beautiful and potentially crush-worthy monks, I will admit, but the sheer lunacy of craving intimacy with a monk (especially while living as a nun!) was often enough to curb crush-y feelings. However, now I have renounced my monastic vows and I'm back “in the game” as they say. Back in my home culture—over-sexed America, in the company of friends that share my culture. In the company of some friends I once shared a bed with. New friends I share intense interests with. Keeping a healthy physical distance and good emotional boundaries would nurture health and love, but the mind wants to break through so badly.
I recall a former lover. There are no words for the extacy I experience during fantasies of his touch after a year of celibacy. This mind manifests a deep urge to find fulfillment in a partner. Joy wells up with a noticeable shadow of shame, sorrow, selfishness, and ancient neglect. Does this mean our partnership is invalid? Incomplete? Inappropriate? Primal urges take over, wrenching self-control from the socialized ego and plunging me into reckless abandon. I become the seductress I have so often longed to be. You are putty in my presence (at least that's how the fantasy goes). Is this taking advantage? Who over who?
Chapter Break(thisbelongsmuchearlierinthestory)
The internet cafe. More of a street-side patio, really. Three small computer stations next to a tourist shop that always seemed closed. During meditation retreats, this place was off limits, but after 10 days couped up with just myself in my little kuti, I would be ready for a little outside world connection. Often to the tune of 5 hours straight. Looking back, this probably didn't look so good—The internet obsessed American nun. How can one pursue a holy life in seclusion while spending hours and hours e-mailing friends and family back home? These machines felt like a life-line for me sometimes. Unreliable as the media can be, it gave me some context of the unfolding of world events. Some explanation for the truck loads of soldiers I sometimes saw rolling down the street, caravan-style. For the military fighter jets flying in formation overhead. I would occasionally mention news tidbits to my teacher during reporting. He was generally non-plussed. If he couldn't see it with his own eyes or hear it with his own ears, it did not seem to matter to him. I often wondered what it would be like to live in such a small world. Would it be more peaceful? Carefree? Mostly, it seemed like it would be maddening to lose all sense of context.
Chapter Break
The return to Wayne County is complete. I have moved into my friend's beautiful adobe home. Not unpacked just yet, but I've been living a transient's life out of my backpack for most of the last two years, so this does not make me feel much less at home. Tonight was a dance party to celebrate thanksgiving and the tradition of the fall harvest. To offer thanks for the abundance always surrounding and supporting us. It was a beautiful gathering. A bit of an overwhelming emotional experience and I awoke the next day feeling like I'd been hit by a Mack Truck. This is my opinion of what a friend of mine may have been thinking as we interacted tonight.
She tromps in from the cold, shedding her down jacket and heavy winter boots, warmly greeting those in the entry way. She's been away long enough, she introduces herself to someone she already knows, neither recognizing the other. She is stunning, dressed in white head to toe. I don't think she recognizes me, but the only empty seat in the room is beside me, as fate would have it. This is more than the familiar crowd for this house and she scans the room with minimal recognition. Her long flowing skirt swishes from her hips down her long legs to her ankles as she approaches the big leather couch. Taking the seat beside me, a flash of recognition finally illuminates her face. A brief knee touch gestures familiarity—“I thought you were gone already!” She exclaims. An, I'm really happy to see you, is implied.
“Nah, tomorrow.”
Idle chatter about the usual. I have an unusually high tolerance for this conversation tonight. Perhaps the Thanksgiving occasion and the air of gratitude encompasses gratefulness for banalities among unusual acquaintances.
See, I've known this woman off and on for about two years now, I guess. We've had only a handful of conversations, but there's a strong sense of kinship between us. Wounded hearts? Probing minds? Some deeper connection.
The evening unfolds. The potluck feast is blessed and enjoyed. An ear of blue corn descended from traditional Native American harvest becomes a talking staff for a gratitude speaking circle. The room echoes with thanks for community, growth, support, abundance, friends, brothers, parents, partners. The circle complete, the stereo comes to life and a dance party blows out. Glow sticks adorn, poi spinning and baton twirling light up the Wayne County evening. My friend in white wears a glow-necklace halo. Truly an angel.
The evening grows into night and the energy winds down. There has been much dancing and much to celebrate. A few remain on the floor, bodies expressing the music each in their own way. I return to the corner seat on the couch, entranced by the chartreuse glow stick tracing a ghostly circle at the end of a string in my hand. She sits next to me again, perhaps closer than necessary or socially conventional, but it's not uncomfortable. More conversation. Mostly shallow words, yet a deeper kinship is felt. This woman longs to make connections. She brings up an old friend I hadn't thought of in years. Didn't know he was still around, in fact. A recluse like me, I wish him well, but leave it at that. She asks about some other friends dear to my heart where conflict has created distance. That's not yet been healed. I don't even know where to begin, but appreciate her check-in. Again, under these words, there's a deeper sense of connection. A longing for one soul to join another. Or perhaps, like she said—we feel one another across space and time because everything and everyone is God and there is no separation.
A comfortable tension wells up—there is an unspoken question in her eyes and body language, but the departures have begun and another dear friend comes to say goodbye. I may not see these folks again for a while and my attention shifts to saying goodbyes.
When it comes my time to part, I circle around to this woman. Well wishes are exchanged. I am leaving this healing red-rock desert of solitude to re-enter scholasticism and hone my writing. Seven years off and on here, I feel like a grandfather to these wilderness therapy programs. I've done my solitary time. Now it's time to resocialize and earn that all-important piece of paper that turns the key to many locks in our business society: the college degree. She went the other route: paper first, healing second. She has returned to this desert from an intense year of introspection as a Buddhist nun in Thailand, seeking here quiet, solitude, and rest. Fitting that we cross paths again trading places.
We hug goodbye. The depth of our connection surfaces as energy flows between our bodies. Standing close, we fit well together physically, but the more noticeable fit is between our spirits. We stand together well beyond the realm of a normal acquaintance's exchange. Neither of us are eager to let go. It's a long one. Pure. Gentle. Loving? Rare to find such an exchange and I tell her so. I wonder if she sees the shift in my eyes. A few more comments, but the words feel pale compared to that embrace.
I say my goodbyes to others. She hovers behind me, swaying almost shyly to the last shreds of music (in great contrast to her movin' and shakin' and holdin' nothin' back style from earlier in the night).
In the entryway, I put on my coat and shoes in the dark. She materializes again, extending open arms. “I'd like to give you another hug—it may be a long time before the next one.” I think even a fool would not pass up such an opportunity. This embrace is as close and tender as the last. “I love you,” she says. “I love you, too.” I am surprised to hear this reply in my own voice, but it feels right. A few more endless moments in the safety of her arms, then I tell her I'd like to see her beautiful space for the winter, but I'm feeling the timing of my departure may preclude it. This rush to leave suddenly seems so arbitrary. The original plan was to be around till December. Ah well, tomorrow will take care of itself. For now, it is time to step out into the cold November night, truly grateful for this community and this strange dance party exchange.
Chapter Break
For some reason, I don't feel like writing my story. I am fresh back from the journey, and nanowrimo sounds like a great excuse to begin spinning my tale. I have committed and despite the hiccup in motivation, and I will finish this thing I have started.
Chapter Break(thisbelongsearlierinthestory)
In January, shortly after my ordination, a Thai-born monk came to visit Wat Phradhat Scri Chom Tong, for the abbot was his teacher, too, and he was filming a DVD to serve as an instructional video for his Vipassana Meditation center in Hawaii. He did not look very old, but he was addressed with the respectful title of Luang Paw, meaning Grandfather. He spoke very good English and it turns out he is an American citizen and has been living in Hawaii for fifteen years. His hometown is Uttaradit, about half-way between Chiang Mai and my former home in Phitchit. He was having an opening ceremony for his forest meditation center there, and he invited me. Forest meditation? Count me in! I asked my teacher and my abbot's permission and as long as I could find a travel companion (pesky hang-up...), I could go. Fortunately, a Thai meditator over-heard the Thai-American monk invite me to Uttaradit and asked if she could go with me. Brilliant! Travel companion complication solved. Neither of us had much money, so we decided to take the third class train.
It was a long, hot, miserable journey by physical comfort standards. I love train travel, so it did not bother me, so much. The clackety-clack of the steel wheels over the expansion joints in the iron rails is always immensely comforting to me. I loved gazing at the mountainous terrain around us, periodically speckled with rice paddies and tropical orchards and tiny hill-side villages. I waved to the children playing and the simple shepherds watching their cattle in the dry fields and the women washing their clothes in the rivers. They waved back and our hearts smiled together. I waved to some of the people in the larger towns—the ones with paved roads and motorbikes and cars. They waved back less frequently. In the cities, I was mostly too shy and contracted to wave at all. Sometimes I mustered the courage to make eye contact and share a smile, but it was very shallow. It seemed the closer a people live to their land, the happier they are. The more open their hearts and the freer they are with their curiosity and generosity.
Six long hot hours later, we arrived in Uttaradit, and my friend and I met our monk host at the train station. He lead us to his friend's car (for monks are not allowed to operate motor vehicles), and she drove us to her family's home for some refreshment. Our monk host sat on a cushion on a teak bench and I began to sit on the tile floor as I had become accustomed to when in the presence of a monk, but he gestured me to a bench across from where he was sitting. I was surprised by this, but I guess as an ordained person, if I sat on the floor it would be rude for our women host's to sit in chairs and one of them was an elderly woman who looked as though she would not be able to get up if she tried to sit on the floor. So we all sat together on beautiful hand-carved teak furniture and looked at photos of her home from the big floods last year—the area where we were now sitting (about three feet above the ground outside) was about a foot deep in water. Their cars outside were submerged up to their roofs and the washing machine and small refrigerator out back were barely visible in the brown muck. The photo series continued to document the waters recession, striation mud smears marking the successive high water lines both inside the house and out.
The kindness of these people flooded my heart as they brought us each glasses of ice water and then offered us all the lemon-honey-soda water they had. This is usually a drink reserved for monks, but he spoke in Thai and gestured that it should be shared with us, too. I felt very honored that my friend and I were included in the offering. I commented how hot and sweaty the long train ride was, and they offered to let me shower at their house, since there was little water at the meditation center. I wondered about the lack of water and hoped our presence at the center was not an imposition on this community's limited resources, but the monk assured me there was enough water and we were more than welcome. He had built this center for people to use—come use it! Welcome, welcome! It did not feel quite right to shower as a guest in this house while everyone waited for me (especially since my friend was probably as sweaty and uncomfortable as I was), so I did my best to politely decline and wait until we got to the center to wash the train stink off me—polite declinations are a delicate art in Thai culture. Direct communication is generally frowned upon and I'm not sure I ever got the hang of talking around issues. My nature is to be direct. It feels the simplest in the long run to just be up-front and honest with your feelings. Maybe not the easiest in a given moment, but I find it pays off in simplicity later on.
After enjoying the cool drinks and the photos and some small talk, we got back into the truck and drove the last 50 km from the city of Uttaradit to the meditation center in the small town where our host was born. Workers were still installing the tile walkway, but the inside was finished. The building was a long narrow single-story rectangle. Our monk host showed us around the beautiful building that would be our home for the next five days. The wide sliding front doors opened onto a tile meditation space about 40' by 40' with oscillating fans mounted on each of six square pillars lining the space. At the far end of the open room was a carpeted space where the monks could sit slightly raised above the tile floor the meditators would sit on. Above the monks' seating area was the Buddha shrine. In the traditional East-facing placement, a golden image of Gautama the Buddha sat cross-legged in the half-lotus position with his right hand on his right knee and his left hand raised in the subduing Mara posture. The golden form was framed by an ornate peaked arch, a simplified style similar in form to that of the most beautiful image in Thailand. Behind the Buddha shrine were two rooms reserved for monk's use only. Along the left side of the building were three rooms about ten feet by fourteen feet, plus another smaller meditation room that was ten feet by thirty feet. One of these was a storage room for meditation cushions and blankets and pillows for sleeping, the others were available to serve as dormitory space for female meditators. Along the right side of the building was a similar floor plan, but one room formed a simple tea-room and breakfast/lunch nook for the monks, the next was an office with a computer and some paperwork storage, and finally a dormitory room and meditation space for male meditators. Behind the shrine and the elevated monk's quarters was a full kitchen and four bathrooms with western toilets and forty gallon trash cans for water storage. These seemed rather large and excessive in the mornings when the water pump was operational and water flowed from the taps, but when it was turned off mid-day, the large storage made a lot of sense for flushing and showering and laundry purposes. It was very sad to turn on the tap in the evenings and hear a sad, struggling dry sucking sound pour forth instead of liquid. What a different world. I wondered what would happen if water taps in LA just went dry one day (as they rightfully should given the naturally arid climate of the region). No one I know has more than a few gallons of water stored in their homes, if that.
Our monk host's living quarters were at the forest center about 1.5 km down the road, so once we were shown around and settled in, he went to the other center to settle in himself and see how preparations for the opening ceremony were progressing. Before departing, he instructed me to lead the evening chanting and the meditation rounds for the next three days. I began to object: I had only been a Buddhist for a few months and I barely had the chantings memorized—these women he was asking me to lead had been Buddhist their whole lives and surely knew the chants better than I. But my concerns fell on deaf ears. I was ordained. They were not. Leadership fell to me. A nervous look crossed my face and the monk responded with compassion—don't worry. You'll be fine. And I was. [more here—my experience sitting front and center in the chanting for the center opening, eating first at community meal time, electing to walk sometimes between the two centers, walking at the head of the crowd in the statue installation ceremony, witnessing the sign blessing, the pork breakfast event, my growing self-confidence as my leadership unfolded over the five days, meeting the monk from Bangkok again and conversing with him about Goenka and meditation in general...]
I really liked our monk host. He talked about having visited a spiritual medium when he was youner, and how she told him that a woman from America would come to help him spread the Dhamma. He felt that I could be this woman and he invited me to come help him at his center in Hawaii. I told him I needed seven years. He said that was too long! Maybe two or three he could wait. He said we were brother and sister in past lives and that I had lived on this land. He said this land was my home and I was always welcome here. I felt a strong connection to the place—there was a distinct sacredness to the whole area.
After the opening ceremony, we drove around and did a little exploring. The province was also home to some very special iron mines where centuries ago, a certain type of iron deposit was discovered that contained trace minerals which made the metal much harder and stronger than most types of iron. An especially hot smelting technique had to be developed to extract the iron from the ore, as well as to forge the steel. The pits the iron was dug out off, known as Iron Wells, rather than tunnel mines, were off limits to the public. This iron was reserved for making the weapons of royalty only. Infractions by people stealing and trying to use the sacred iron for themselves were punishable by death. Now, they have magnets on the end of long strings tied to bamboo poles and you can “fish” in the iron wells for remnant pieces. My friend and I had great fun casting across the surface of the well. I came up with several tiny shards, but nothing I felt was worth keeping. My friend retrieved a sizeable chunk, but threw it back. We were there for the experience, not to hunt souveniers.
After visiting the wells, we drove out into the teak forest where the presence of devas (Buddhist angels) was palpable. I could feel why so many Thai people had such strong superstitious beliefs in ghosts. In this forest was the oldest teak tree in the world—believed to be over 1500 years old, she was dying, but the people were trying to prolong its life. There were pvc pipes dug into the ground in a wide network over about 100 square feet around the huge tree's base with drip irrigation with the intent to give the tree additional water. It felt like last-ditch life support measures. It was kinda funny to see all this fuss put into saving the life of this ancient being. I guess the Thai reverence for the elderly was overcoming their Buddhist inclinations to allow all conditioned phenomena to arise and pass away. It was magnificent to stand in the presence of this tree, but I had a clear sense that she was dying. I did not feel stress from the tree—in fact I felt the message in my heart that she would live on through her children and it did not matter if her life continued anymore or not. I imagined all the monsoon seasons and all the lashing winds and rain this living being had witnessed from this spot in the forest. How humbling to stand in the presence of such a being.
Before leaving the forest meditation center via a fortunate truck ride with some monks from Phitchit who had come to pay respect for the center's opening, our host monk gave us both a string of sacred prayer beads made of ceramic coated iron from the wells. I admit, the beads do not look like they are made of iron, but I tested them with the magnet from my meditation timer once I got back to my room in Chom Tong and they responded. I was impressed. I felt so blessed to have been a part of this ceremony and his gift still often encircles my neck for protection in uncertain circumstances or just my daily life.
Chapter Break(thisbelongsearlierinthestory)
Wan Phra, the Buddhist Holy Days. Every new, full, and both quarter moons, people from all walks of Thai society come to the temple to offer food to the monks and listen to the dhamma. Everyone dons their best clothes, which is rather sad to see for some of the rice farmer's “best” are threadbare button down cotton shirts over faded and worn dark slacks. From their chapped chocolate brown bare feet and gnarled toes from wearing sandals their whole lives, on up through their usually skeleton-invoking boney, wirey bodies, to their smiling wrinkled faces, these people are no strangers to hard labor under the tropical sun. It seemed mostly the elders of the families attended Wan Phra. Perhaps the middle generation was too busy working and the younger ones had too short an attention span? It was quite a few weeks into my ordination when I finally realized the Wan Phra celebrations were the equivalent of the Christian Sunday Mass tradition. People come out from their communities once per week to take rest, perform rituals of honor and respect, hear wisdom and social guidance from the Church's leaders and holy people. Somehow, the ritual was easier to accept once I paralleled it to and experience I recognized in my own culture.
In addition to my daily sweeping, it is my chore to help clean the community hall for Wan Phra. I feel proud to have helped dust and vacuum to prepare the temple for the community visitors.
When I went out on alms round, it was mostly the middle generation sitting outside their front gates, or waiting by their porch stoops for the passing monks at 6AM. This is the beginning of their day. From 6 to 7 AM, these devout Buddhists, certainly not every house, and not everyone who gave was there every day, but many of those that did made it their daily morning practice to bring out some extra steamed or sticky rice, fried eggs, barbecued pork or chicken, stir-fried vegetables, curry, sweets, or fruit to place in the alms bowls of the holy people in their community. It was truly a beautiful practice for me, and I think it was pretty special for them to see such a happy serene foreign nun following their country's ancient practices. For I truly was—alms round was by far my favorite time of day. It gave me an excuse to have some alone time—a rarity under the scrutinizing eyes of the temple's community (granted, we looked out for each other, and it was nice to know that if you didn't show up for some reason, someone at the temple would notice, and most of the time it felt like Big Brother's eyes were always upon you). I felt so light, happy, and free in those first hours of the dawning day. It was liberating to my heart to explore the back corners of Chom Tong village, meet more of its lay people, and offer them blessings. These I would never have seen if I had just stayed in the temple. It was improper for a nun to go out alone, but for some reason, on alms round, I was allowed. I suspect I was allowed out alone primarily because monks and nuns are generally not to consort, so villagers would complain to the temple if I was out on alms round with just one other monk. A few times, I followed in the bare foot steps of a few different groups of monks, to learn the paths I could walk and where the regular alms givers lived so I would not return to the temple empty handed, to copy their customs and make sure I was not doing anything wrong. But mostly, I walked alone.
It was kinda funny, though: most of the Thai nuns were afraid to come with me. This made me suspect I was doing something culturally beyond their comprehension, but I knew the female novices who kept ten precepts went on alms round each morning, and my neighbor nun from Taiwan went out on alms round. It's not like I was the first. I always returned with more than a full bowl and a huge smile on my face. I felt like there is an enormous degree of safety in the tight-knit temple community watched over by the boundless compassion of the abbot. To venture beyond those walls each morning as a humble beggar walking barefoot in the streets when there was always enough food prepared at the temple's kitchen was beyond their comfort zone.
I believe the people were especially impressed by me both for my height (I'm about 5'10” in a 4'8”-5'6” world) and fair skin, my quiet, mindful disposition, and also because I could chant the traditional blessing the monks offer after receiving alms food. My abbot was even surprised that I could when he gave me permission to go out (for of course, I had to have his permission). After I had been going out for a few days, I would wander farther afield than most monks from my temple. Many people in the back alleys were surprised to see me, and overjoyed at the rare opportunity to offer alms food. In our community in America, feeding the poor and hungry beggars of the lower echelons of our society is generally considered a burden. In Thailand, where the beggars are monks that have gone forth from the house-holders' life and are striving to live in moral purity, it is considered an honor to have the opportunity to feed and support them. It is believed that generosity offered to a holy person (especially one who has attained one of the four levels of enlightenment) will multiply and make merit for the giver and his or her family. Not that all giving is looked upon as a tit for tat operation. Giving is generally done for giving's sake, or sometimes to honor a deceased family member, but the return on one's generosity is a reality and it doesn't hurt. It often helps people be more willing to part with their very best, instead of offering only what they no longer need or want, as is often the case with thrift store generosity in America. A few times, people would see me walking by before they had anything prepared to offer. They would either call me to stop and then take as much as a few minutes of digging through their kitchens to find a suitable offering—perhaps slicing and bagging some fruit, waiting the last few minutes for the morning's rice to cook, or selecting the best of their sweets—while I stood barefoot, patiently, in the dirty street, wondering sometimes if I had misheard them and they were just too embarrassed to come out and shoo me away. But eventually, they always returned. Some people even chased me down on their little 125cc scooters (which often did the work of an SUV in south-east asia, carrying unbelievably large loads, like dozens of chickens, bushels of vegetables, multiple family members (3-4 people on a scooter was not an uncommon sight), even a litter of piglets or a full grown sow) to offer me food.
One older woman who saw me passing through the dirt pathway between her and her neighbor's house (as occasionally happened when the paved roads ran out and I didn't feel like turning back, or perhaps the pavement veered off in the wrong direction and I wanted a short cut back towards the temple) called me over, “Nimon, ka!” In Thai, there are many layers to the language and you do not speak in the same way to a child as you would to a peer as you would to an elder. Nimon is a respectful way to say Come here, Come here! reserved only for addressing monks and nuns. When my teacher was explaining the process for receiving almsfood and he said people would call me over with Nimon, I was honored. That felt good.
This woman from the back alleys was probably in her 60's, though it was difficult to gage age in this country, for the kids seem to develop much more slowly and the adults seem to age more quickly. This woman was hunchbacked, and bowlegged. She walked with a very crooked limp, arms all askew to keep her balance as her froggy hips swayed back and forth. I smiled broadly at her call (probably a no-no, as we are supposed to maintain total emotional equanimity at all times, but especially on alms round), turned mindfully to face her traditional teakwood house, and waited in silence, eyes fixed on my alms bowl cover while she hobbled over to fetch her offering. She returned a few moments later with a small woven basket, about four inches in diameter and six inches tall, with a fitted lid and a thin woven handle to hold it together. I recognized this as a sticky rice basket. It probably held most of her day's ration of food. She walked over to me as well as she could, head held high and expression light as air, with all the ease and grace her 60 year-old hunch-backed, gnarled, work-bent frame could manage, kicked off her sandals to stand with me on the dirt and gravel in bare feet, and lifted the rice basket to her forehead with closed eyes in the traditional pre-offering blessing gesture to make a silent wish for whatever was in her heart (perhaps well being and good fortune for herself and her family?). She then lowered the basket from her forehead, removed a double-golf ball sized clump of sticky rice and placed it in my bowl with her bare hands. The hygiene of this practice was just overlooked for the sake of honoring her gift. Most offerings came in individual plastic bags and I had plenty of other more sanitary offerings to sustain me that day. Her rice would probably be mixed with the extras and much of the meat I received to be fed to the cats and dogs at the end of the day. There is a truly appalling number of plastic bags involved in the feeding of monks every day all over Thailand. But the wrapping of her open heart more than made up for the potential germs on her offering. I lifted my alms bowl cover and accepted in silence, eyes still lowered reverently and fixed on my alms bowl as is the custom, but with a huge smile still across my face. I waited patiently while she struggled into the kneeling position to receive my blessing, and then I chanted the Saba Roga in Pali (the ancient and extinct language spoken during the Buddha's time—corollary to Aramaic as Jesus's language):
Sabitiyo vivajantu, saba rogo vinassantu
Ma te bavantvantariyo suki diga yogo pava
abivadana silisa, nicham vuda pachayino
chatarro damma vadanti
ayu, vanno, sukkham, bhalam.
May you be free from illness and disease.
May all calamity avoid you.
May you always be well.
For those who keep the moral precepts, honor the elders,
and give their best in offerings to the Buddha's sangha
these four qualities increase:
long-life, beauty, happiness, and strength.
After the blessing, the woman looked up from her head bowed, eyes closed, and palms folded posture to receive my blessing and smiled at me, like that was about the funniest and most joy inducing thing that had ever happened to her this lifetime. I was honored to bring a little light to her life this day. I turned in silence, one foot at a time, paused for a moment, and resumed my mindful walking—right goes thus, left goes thus; right goes thus, left goes thus, every step. What a beautiful practice. What a blessing.
One last thing about alms practice that I loved. Before going out, I would kneel in front of my little alter in my kuti, raise my alms bowl to my forehead, and make this wish in my heart (as my abbot taught me): As the Buddha went forth from the home life so many years ago out of compassion for all suffering beings, so also I go forth in his footsteps today. May all beings be well, be happy, be peaceful.
Chapter Break
One day that made me feel both honored, sad, and confused was when a younger couple came to the temple to make an offering of clothes and food to some of the nuns. There were probably 30 nuns and 50 monks living full time at Wat Phradhat Sri Chom Tong temple, and I was honored when I was selected to come and receive the offering along with 9 other longer-term Thai nuns. I of course and per usual sat at the back according to seniority. The couple looked a bit sad and I tried to ask my neighbor what the offering was for. She said their children were dead. Car accident. For some reason, this did not immediately sink in. It didn't hit me until the end of the ceremony when they had offered the traditional flowers, candles, incense, and food to the Buddha, then the clothes and food to each of us nuns in turn, and then we chanted a different blessing than the usual offering acceptance chant (the Saba Roga). This blessing made the wish that these offerings might benefit the dead. I had to ask another nun whose English was a little better what had happened. The couple's only two children—9 and 13—had been killed in a car accident. What a pity, eh? So sad for the parents. But there was an equanimous overtone to the nun's sympathy. A certainty that this event was the fruit of some kamma they had done in the past, and that now it was paid back and done with, and the offerings they made here at the temple would help the children to attain a more fortunate rebirth in their next lives. Perhaps even in the deva realm where they would live as angels and dwell for a very long time surrounded by celestial pleasures in a life of ease.
There are so many paradoxes in the Buddhist religion from the perspective of my western mind. It seemed to me the Buddha taught that everything in this conditioned world is ephemeral and that we should all strive to release our attachments to it. That especially those of us striving to perfect the holy life should forgo worldly pleasures and fanciful things, for they indulge the six senses, intoxicate the consciousness and distract one from our highest purpose, which is meditation on the true nature of the present moment. But then the religious ceremonies were always full of flowers and beautiful things. Thai temples constructed to honor the Buddha and his teachings are some of the most expensive and ornate holy buildings I have ever seen—gold plate, ornate teak carvings, marble statues, intricate paintings depicting scenes from the Buddha's life. The Buddha taught us to go forth from the home life, live simply in small communities in the forest, and wander from town to town, owning only our robes, alms bowls, and simple shelters. Teaching the people the truth of the dhamma—that our experiences in this world are just conditioned by our past sensory reactions out of ignorance. All conditioned things are impermanent, suffering, and non-self. Realize this, and be free!
Chapter Break
If there is a way to be in this world and be happy, joyous, and free, that is what I want. After meditating nearly full time for the better part of seven months, I feel closer to an approximation of a generally happy life than I have experienced in as long as I can remember (at least in this human body—when I am swimming in the open ocean, I have the distinct sense I had a fairly happy past life as a dolphin, but I'm not sure how useful it is to believe that).
This heart directed me to Thailand. I went, and it was beautiful. Challenging, painful, sometimes so full of angst and suffering that I wanted out of this body-mind and to express myself through violence: punching walls, hitting the floor, screaming in rage and in pain. None of this is ultimately productive. But I wonder: is productivity the ultimate goal? It seems to me that so much energy is wasted in this world by people busy being productive and totally missing out on opportunities to love. To love themselves, the land they live on, their families, their friends, their animal companions, wildlife they may contact on a daily basis but not appreciate. This heart is increasingly convinced that opening is the highest purpose of this existence. Just take this breath. Then let it out. Then take the next.
There is so much freedom and liberation from this way of being. It is so much more easeful to be mindful in the present moment than to suffer along a path laid out for you by another—even if that “other” is a version of you operating on old wisdom.
I can sense that my own wisdom is still developing. I am so grateful for the practice of meditation and all the time I have given it over the last year and a half. I suspect this is the most valuable of all the ways I have chosen to spend my time. Just breathing. Watching the mind. Observing this life as it arises and passes away. Moment to moment. Moment to moment.
There are many practices I engage in to try to assist myself in opening (and many habits I continue to indulge in to stuff this soul back inside where it feels safe on some levels, but which I know just causes festering...): yoga, heart-to-heart conversations with dear friends and family, mindfulness in each moment. Loving kindness meditation for myself. Loving kindness meditation for all beings. Fundamentally, we are all energy. These bodies are made of energy. This mind is a network of energy. Our entire world is fundamentally energy, whirling, whirling, whirling faster than the conscious mind can perceive. Even our perceptions are energy: stimulus from energy bodies in our world. Response from the condensed energy in our own minute and complex physical bodies. What a relief to see these stimuli and habitual responses for what they are: fleeting phenomena that arise to pass away.
The mind seems to have tremendous influence over these processes. I have seen The Secret and I have intentionally worked with The Universal Law of Attraction. Focus the mind and the energy in the mind on what I want in this world. Be open and loving to receive what I have requested from whatever source the universe deems appropriate. Example: I was in Thailand last April. I was feeling a little tight on money, so I made a wish to receive 10,000 Baht (about $330 US Dollars at the time) from an unexpected source so I would know the universe supported me in my meditation process. So I could believe I was in the right place at the right time doing the right thing (not to mention paying for my health care and travel expenses). I felt guided shortly after making this wish to e-mail my friends and family with gratitude for all their emotional support and to request support on a financial level, explaining just how far even the smallest of donations would go (ie 50 cents for a decent meal or an evening drink, a dollar for the 45 km ride one-way into Chiang Mai, and for the big spenders, $25 would cover the monthly donation I made to the temple for allowing me to stay and study meditation and to help cover the temple's costs for food, water and electricity, and finally (my biggest expense) $33 to cover my health insurance. I wrote that $50 would show me the universe supported what I was doing. My aunt and grandparents each gave me $100, two or three friends sent $50, and my brother, who turns out to win the angel of the universe prize, sent me $400, unsolicited (or at least, not any more solicited than anyone else...I certainly did not directly ask him for that much money). He thus delivered what I had requested from the universe: 10,000 Baht from an unexpected source. What a blessing. I dwell now in this world with a greater sense of trust in abundance. Knowing that as long as I am following my heart and doing my best to do good work in this world, the universe will support my physical needs, or reduce them so that I may get by.
In Thailand, I learned that the body needs only one or two small meals a day for subsistence. I learned that when meditating full time, the mind needs only 4-6 hours of sleep per night to feel rested. I learned that restlessness in body can be overcome by patience in mind.
Chapter Break(thisbelongsmuchearlierinthestory)
My Taiwanese neighbor took it upon herself to care for the temple cats. These animals were largely dumped at the temple as unwanted kittens, mothers nearing their time to give birth, or after being maimed or getting sick in their homes or in the streets of Chom Tong. Sometimes people would bring the animals directly to her for care, but mostly they would just show up on her doorstep, meowing for medical care or food. She took them in, nursed their wounds, calmed their fears, and fed them. Her reward for these efforts was a lot of flak from her neighbors for the nasty smell and all the poo they made everywhere that everyone else had to clean up. She also used to cook rice and fish for them in the evenings, which either made everyone nearby hungry (since we are not allowed to eat solid food in the evenings, the smells were often a temptation) or disgusted (depending on how fresh the fish was that my neighbor was able to afford that day).
As her neighbor and friend, my neighbor often asked me to help her medicate the animals. Some days it was an anti-mite shots to help the dogs with their skin disease. Another series of days I held down the kittens while she gave them sub-cutaneous fluids with B-vitamins from an IV bag to help keep them hydrated and improve their health and energy. A few times I had to hold cats with wounds from fighting (usually the males) while she squirted and swabbed them with peroxide, iodine, and some strange purple fluid medicine that stained everything it touched. This job kindof sucked since we wear white from neck to ankle. The one that sucked the worst, though, was the cat with the ear infection. We did not know what was wrong with it, but it kept shaking it's head and scratching at its ear and crying in pain sporadically day and night. This went on for two or three days and my friend decided to try to help it, which of course meant I was supposed to hold it. Now my friend used to be a nurse in Taiwan, so her medical knowledge was pretty good, but he did not exactly have a gentle touch. In the process of trying to wipe out this cat's infected (or mite infested?) ear, the cat was crying and crying in pain, asking her to be more gentle. I don't think my friend understood, or perhaps she was incapable of a gentler touch. Either way, on the third wipe attempt, the cat broke free of my grasp, bit both of us in quick succession and ran away. Bitten by a cat in Thailand. This is not a good thing. I looked at the blood welling up on my knuckle joint and thought, Shit, rabies. I went inside and washed it thoroughly with soap and water. The bleeding did not last long, but the cat had broken the skin and rabies is not something to be messed with. It's a series of five vaccinations over the course of a month and I wasn't really looking forward to this treatment. I had planned to do my sweeping and meditate that day, but it looked like I was going to the hospital instead.
I went to the internet cafe to look up rabies on wikipedia and see if the shots were really necessary. Turns out, yes. It seemed that although the percentage of cats that carry rabies in Thailand was fairly low, if rabies is contracted, there's about a 99% chance of fatality. The only known case of survival involved a child that went into an induced coma until their immune system could fight off the nervous system's infection. Other than that, rabies was a certain death sentence. I decided to just suck it up and go get the shots. Fortunately, due to some arrangement I didn't quite understand, medical care at the local hospital was free to monastics, so I just had to show up, communicate my sickness (no easy task with medical terminology and most of the staff with minimal to zero English skills), receive treatment, say thank you, send metta to all the ill patients and their caretakers in the hospital, and go home. At least it was a reasonably enjoyable two kilometer walk. I think some of the shop keepers along the highway thought I was batty or something, walking to the hospital and back every week for five weeks, plus a tetanus booster two weeks after my last rabies shot, but I didn't care. It was nice to see the rice fields and watch as the longan orchards bore fruit, ripened, and were harvested during the course of my treatment. I also had some concern about the cat having bitten both my friend and I, as I did not know who got bitten first (it happened so fast) and whether that would constitute a risk for blood-borne illness transmission. I am fairly certain I am clear of any such sickness, but when I asked my neighbor if she wanted to come donate blood with me, she said years ago when she tried to donate, she had tested positive for some form of hepatitis. She said that with all the meditation she had done since, all the sickness had been cleared from her body, but the blood-bank would still refuse her donation rather than risk contaminating their supplies. What a mess. All because I agreed to help treat a sick cat.
Chapter Break
My layover in Seoul on the way home was beautiful. I ate a sushi breakfast for a dollar! Astounding. I attended my first Mahayana Buddhist chanting ceremony—a lot of work! They do prostration meditation going from standing to kneeling, to face flat on the ground with palms open and facing up, then back to kneeling and standing. The 40-60 year old women I was praying with just knelt and prostrated and popped right back up again and again. I think the idea was to do 108 prostrations. I did about a dozen and collapsed onto my face to rest. I felt like such a wuss. At 26, 5'9” and 155 pounds, I considered myself a fairly healthy and fit person, but here I was being smoked by women twice my age. I wanted to be able to walk the next day, but I also wanted to participate as fully as possible in this prayer ceremony I had been welcomed into. I did my best to keep going. It seemed after a few more, most of the fatigue was in my mind. My legs began to burn and my skin misted and then beaded with sweat all over, but I kept going. I can see now how this practice would be beneficial. Burn off impurities. Exert effort to experience more meaningful surrender. I contemplated incorporating this prostration meditation into my daily practice, but that's future projection. I tried to return to the present moment. To focus on the bass drone of the gray-robed Korean monk leading the 30 women in their mid-day prayers. To allow the rhythm of his wooden drum beat to guide my practice and let go of dis-harmonious thoughts. It still felt very foreign, but so did many of the practices I became accustomed to in Thailand. I could get used to this, too, I supposed.
After prayers, the women cleaned the meditation hall and I tried to help. They seemed to have it all mastered and worked together like a well-oiled machine. I felt in the way, and so smiled and bowed my thanks, wandering off to explore the rest of the grounds. I wanted to smell the lotuses and go for a hike up the hill behind the temple. Koreans seem very health-conscious and love the outdoors. The little mountain was swarming with locals clothed in nylon and gortex. I must have been a bit of a sight in my cotton shirt and mid-calf length white skirt (I still felt more comfortable wearing at least one item of white clothing), shaved head, Chacos river sandals, carrying my compact teal umbrella for shade. The view over the city was beautiful, as city views go. At the top of the mountain, I asked a Korean man to take my picture next to the old stone signal fire. Dense high-rise apartments, crowded streets, and smoggy air spread out in the valley crevices between Korea's sharp karst topography and forested hill slopes. I knew many people who were very happy living and teaching English here, but it did not strike me as a city I longed to dwell in. From what I read about life at the temples, especially their simple vegetarian approach to nourishment, it seemed Korea might be a possibility for meditation study in the future for me, but Japan was calling me more strongly, and besides, present moment meant I was here now as a tourist, and going home for a rest as my next steps.
Chapter Break
After returning to the airport about an hour early, I discovered Samsung has a free-internet lounge in the airport—sweet! I checked my email to see if anyone was meeting me at the airport (no such luck—the timing was too close for my dad to come meet me on his wedding rehearsal day and the other friend I had asked had to work). No worries, I charted a route home on the metro website and everything went smoothly. The last leg of the flight was great, the food was quite good, the juice and water plentiful (dehydration is a problem for me on long flights). I arrived in LAX in a bit of shock at being home so early (again, this journey was supposed to be a three to five year odyssey overseas. To be back in only nine months felt premature), but safe and content. Remarkably equanimous to be back, unlike my return from Germany when I wanted to kiss the ground of the San Jose airport I was so relieved to be back in my home state of California.
Getting off the plane in LAX, I took a bus to the metro light rail green line, to the metro light rail blue line, then walked half a mile to another bus. I stopped off at the restaurant where my dad's rehearsal dinner was going to be held to check the reservation time. It was a Thai restaurant, ironically, and one we had attended often as a family in the days before the divorce. Well, I had arrived about an hour too early for dinner, so I walked the last mile or so home, showered, changed, and caught a ride back with my father, seeing him for the first time in about a year on the eve of his wedding to my friend. What a day.
I was very grateful for the meditation practice I had done and it's associated equanimity. I was also very glad to have some time just with my dad before having to face him with my friend and her family. They had been together for almost three years now, so I had accepted the idea of it. But it's one thing to have a mid-life crisis, realize your wife of 32 years isn't so attractive any more and the personality conflicts and day to day boredom of the married routine no longer seems like such a great way to spend one's life. It's another to start dating one of your daughter's slightly older friend (who is four years younger than your son). Even these concepts I had come to terms with, but there was certainly part of me who hoped my dad might come to his senses, realize this had all been a huge mistake and go back to my mom, who had taken care of him on so many levels for so many years. But I guess the piece I could not see is that he felt he was finally awakening from the long bad dream that his marriage to my mom had been. He had made a lot of spiritual growth in this new relationship with my friend. He was in a new Christian Church, they read the bible and prayed together every morning. It was one thing to trade emails from 9000 miles away, to occasionally connect on a skype call, to hear and support this growth. It was entirely another to be home with them. To see this relationship spanning a 27 year age gap. To see them kiss and still remain supportive of their daily reality.
I did my best to put on my big girl panties and deal with the reality before me as it was. After the rehearsal dinner, I came home with my dad, his fiancée went home to her apartment for one last night alone, and I helped my dad find an mp3 file of the wedding march and processional. I was grateful to be able to contribute to their ceremony. I was truly happy for the joy and growth they seemed to find in union with one another. The part of me that remains attached to my family as it was (or at least as I thought it was, which turns out not to have had much to do with reality) had a bit of a struggle being present. I looked at this as a holistic opportunity to realign my relationship with my dad. To begin to develop a healthy adult friendship instead of a parent-child control/obedience dynamic. There would always be the blood-relative factor, but it felt mature to be able to relate to my dad as a friend, too. Our trust had been broken pretty badly during my parent's divorce process as I took my mom's side and didn't speak to him for eight months. A lot of anger welled up at my dad's choices which caused so much pain to my mom and I. But ultimately, I realized my anger was only really burning myself. Since I had no idea what I would find in Thailand on my first journey, I wanted to leave with our relationship on more functional terms. At the end of our estrangement, I decided to lower the barriers and open the lines of communication again. Now, nearly a year and a half later, we seemed able to relate as adults and it felt right.
One of the things I feel most grateful for these days is my relationship with my parents. Ironically, they had to split up and flip our family's lives upside down before it seemed we could relate to one another as adults. It seems to be part of my heart's journey to unfold this adult relationship with my parents. A large part of my ability to explore both the outer and inner worlds so freely is because I know my parents support me. One of the most popular questions I fielded in Thailand (after Where are you from? You travel alone? Very brave! Why are you here?) was Do your parents support you in your Buddhist ordination? The answer was always Yes, without hesitation. I may not come from a Buddhist background, but my Christian/Catholic parents support honest spiritual seeking. I imagine they were happy to see me returning to some form of spirituality after so many years floundering in misery and loneliness and sporadic depression.
The wedding itself was beautiful. Full white dress, my dad in a suit, I caught the bouquet and gave my friend a hug saying “Thanks, mom”—I'd waited till the right moment to say it and we laughed together. They cut the cake and shared a bite lovingly. It was a festive occasion. I got to see my brother and his girlfriend, my uncle and his family. Chatting with them was a bit difficult. My seven year old cousin was a bit antsy to get home and out of his fancy clothes and so kept hanging on my aunt as she tried to ask me how my experience was and what I was planning next. I had been home less than 48 hours and truly didn't know yet what was next. This uncertainty didn't bother me, for I knew I had come home for the wedding and that seemed to be unfolding well. I trusted that the next step would unfold in its own perfect time. Made for a rather clipped conversation, though. My aunt was trying to get a feel for my plans. Trying to place me in a social context I just didn't fit in at the moment. Oh well. Let that one go.
My family went to my dad's church that night. That was an overwhelming sensory experience. There was a Christian rock band that opened the service and the pastor stood up on a stage in front of a full auditorium with padded movie-theater seats and delivered his rapid-fire sermon in jeans and a button down striped shirt. This was definitely not the austere Catholic service I grew up with. The message was good: What are you doing with your life that goes beyond just taking up space? Turn to your neighbor in the church community and tell them three things you're doing right now to be of service and give life meaning. I don't know quite what I was expecting from the sermon, but such a challenge was not one of them. I was thankful for it, but having just returned from a spiritual culture that expounds being nobody and going nowhere—embodying emptiness—as its ultimate goal, reflecting on how my choices in this life do more than “take up space” was a bit painful. I hoped meditating for hours and hours and hours to try to see the deepest truth of my being and the way my consciousness worked was useful. It felt like my quest to follow my heart had inspired many on my email list, so I hoped that helped me do more than take up space.
After church, my brother and his girlfriend went out to dinner and retired to their hotel room at the Queen Mary for they had an early flight out the next day. My dad and his new wife went to pack for their honeymoon, and I went home to crash for a bit. I wanted to spend some more time with my brother, but I was reeling from the day's sensory input, my sleep debt was catching up to me (between an overnight bus journey from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, an overnight flight to Seoul, a day sight-seeing, another overnight flight to LA, about three hours sleep after reuniting with my dad and helping him pick wedding music, I'd had about eleven hours of cumulative sleep in the last six days), and my body was still habituated to skipping dinner, so I opted to rest. That night, I went home with an old friend who had driven up for the wedding and spent two weeks house-sitting at her mom's place in Ramona, CA and playing with her horses. It felt very grounding to return to the states and be back in a pair of riding boots and wranglers. I'd grown up from eight to eighteen on the back of a horse, and although I sold my last horse to a friend about five years ago so I could afford to finish college and he could have a home with someone who had time to care for him, there was still a great deal of comfort in returning to an equine relationship.
Chapter Break
Back in the Utah desert, the Earth rotates and begins to obscure the light of the sun from view. Another day draws to a close. The shadow of Boulder Mountain stretches across the cattle ranching valley I call home and climbs up the red-rock canyon walls that frame my eastern view. The perfectly round disk of the full moon spotlights the eastern sky and casts a soft reflected glow over the desert landscape. I am so grateful to be here. My mom says I sound better than she has heard me sound in years—since High School, even. Well, I don't recall feeling too good in High School, so she retracts that comparison. I sound as good as I did the last time I returned to Utah. Or perhaps (her best observation yet), I sound as good as I sound right now. I am so grateful for my mom and for our open honest relationship. Such freedom is rare in relationships in general, let alone parental relationships. I am so grateful.
I have been home to the states for three months now. Some confusion is returning to my mind, especially on days when I don't meditate. It has been a strange process to re-assimilate into my home culture. Redefining my spirituality and my relationship with God/higher power as I understand it (a universal energy that animates all things) has been my biggest internal struggle. Having just spent nine months immersed in a culture that teaches we are alive because of choices we've made in the past (including countless past lives) and the habitual choices we continue to make in the present, being alive is just sensory perception and attachment, and the highest goal one can strive towards in this precious human life is equanimity so that you no longer suffer and then you can ultimately get out of the cycle of attached rebirth and don't have to be alive anymore. Returning to a predominantly Christian culture where living beings are created by God, an omniscient and omnipotent power who set all things in the universe in motion with an ultimate plan is a shock. I'm not sure what to believe. What rings true in my own heart is to keep meditating. Keep waking up early and loving every living moment, every breath, as fully as possible. Keep up my morality and concentration. Pray, certainly! Laugh more. Love everyone. Dwell in compassion for myself, my family, friends, and all living beings. I guess I still slant towards Buddhism—the idea that there is more to this life than material gain and continuing the cycle of re-birth is heartening, for I have found little in this world that feels satisfying on the sensory level.
This has not stopped me from seeking physical pleasures, though. I continue to overeat (especially chocolate and sweets and processed junk food—totally unnecessary for nourishment). I have returned to the bed of a former lover (much warmer than sleeping alone in the cold Utah winters). I wonder about the morality of this choice since I could just as easily share the bed of another of my former lovers, except he's no longer living in Utah and I'm not sure when I'll next be in New York... I continue to not smoke and drink, which is the same as before I went to meditate, but the desire of my lover for tobacco and alcohol brings up a desire to drink in me that I haven't felt since college. Peer pressure. yikes. Why do I pursue this connection that just leads me back to toxicity? Meditation helps me rise above these bodily desires, but it's so much easier to just stay in my warm bed in the mornings, watch the sky turn colors outside my windows, then rise only after about 9AM when the chill has been taken out of the air to begin my active day without yoga or sitting practice. At least this feels easier until about 11 AM when the urge to overeat overwhelms me and I remember why yoga and sitting practice are so important to my health.
Chapter Break
On the plane from my dad's house in Long Beach up north to visit my family there, I was overwhelmed by the experience of flying again—how in this day and age we can fly through the air in a matter of hours and cover distances that once would have taken days or months of grueling overland travel by foot or horse or ox-cart. As the coast of California sped by outside my window, I was gripped by a desire to pray. Awkwardly, I began: Lord God, universal life energy, thank you for this beautiful capable body and intelligent mind. I am so happy and grateful to be alive and able to love. Help me to be at peace in this heart and in this world. Help me to give as I would like to receive. Help me to know and do only your will and cultivate compassion and loving-kindness in my relationships. Lord, may I serve you in co-creating a peaceful way of life on this planet. May I lead with a thoughtful example. Sometimes I feel lost, though Lord. Sometimes I cannot see or hear your loving light energy nor feel your guidance. Help me, Lord to know your will. I am so grateful for the angels that travel with me and keep me safe. Send me a sign of my purpose in this world. Show me how to live well and be happy. Thank you, God. Amen. A-ho.
I looked longingly out the window, wondering if peace in my spirit might manifest in a vision out there somewhere when I felt compelled to look down around my feet. The two seats next to me were empty and the carpet was clean. Only my bag rested under the seat in front of me, my kicked-off sandals stacked next to them. At first, I saw nothing exceptional, but a few moments further examination and I saw a very small item. Just at the edge of my vision, almost tucked under the seat I was sitting in, was a small gold-colored object. I picked it up.
It was an angel.
A one-inch tall gold-plated angel with wings, a halo, a small harp, a flowing gown and everything. It had been a pin, but had lost its backing. The message revealed in my heart upon finding this treasure was this: Be an Angel unto others. This is enough. I felt so blessed. God is always answering prayers for our greater good. It is up to us to see and receive his grace. Amen. Thank you to the person who lost this pin that I might find direction in my life this day. What grace.
Chapter Break
What's so great about sex, anyway? It's such a messy process. Sweat and vaginal lube and cum; sometimes even blood and tears. Such exertion. Two animal bodies writhing together in rhythm, struggling towards one of the greatest surges of life energy. It's a process designed to bring new life into this world. For two persons (cats, horses, dolphins, aphids...) to merge their DNA and begin the replication process. To bring a new form and vessel of consciousness into the world, but to many people, sex is for pleasure and procreation is often an unwelcome or at best accidental byproduct. I have many friends (my parents included) who joined in “holy matrimony” because a night of hot fun resulted in conception, rather than joining their hearts in love and then allowing a new being to grow out of that union. How does this approach to sex effect our consciousnesses today? So much fear can be involved in a sex life. From past trauma, from failed contraceptives, from unwelcome violence in the bedroom, from late periods, from failed erections, from premature ejaculation, from an inability to climax, from failed conception for a couple trying to get pregnant. An act biologically designed to create more of us has been thwarted in our culture so that we can benefit from the pleasure of union with a loved one (or just a hot package, or perhaps a gentle soul). But there is so much fear...
Right now, I'm feeling so vulnerable. Alone. Divided. My heart just wants to be quiet. Or perhaps my heart wants me to be quiet so I can hear her speak. I didn't realize how close I was to falling apart until I sat down next to my therapist last night at a community gathering and he asked how I was. Pretty well, I said. So you're feeling really lonely? Phew, yeah...man, yeah. I didn't even realize it until I sat with him.
When I practice a few hours of meditation every day, I remain more equanimous with my feelings. There is a strong sense that meditation is lacking in my daily discipline right now. I don't have much of a daily discipline at all, to be honest. I know meditation is a heart-opening tool and I am so grateful for the peace it brings. Sometimes the restlessness or the lure of something else to do usurps my will to sit and days go by with but a few minutes of cumulative internal reflection. It shows. In my attitude towards others and in the way I take care of myself—or fail to take care of myself, really.
Journal stuff:
This final chapter is the return. I have come home. Or at least, found a new, familiar place to breathe. The story pieces itself together, rehashing, refreshing, editing. I do not know where to begin, so those with the most astute questions get the juiciest answers. Integrity is paramount to me. I breathe only to tell an honest story, yet I desire a life of innocence. To speak only kindness. Some of the events I witnessed, characters I met, emotions I felt, and foods I ate in Thailand were not kind. Such as it is when one embarks on a journey to a foreign destination. Eight months in a Thai temple—Maechee Farang, the western foreign nun.
Epilogue
My intention in participating in NaNoWriMo this year has been to begin to tell my story. To lay the framework for the polished tale that will convey my heart's journey through this life in this body-mind. I know beginning to write my life's storyy at 27 is perhaps a bit early, but part of spinning this tale is to trace the process of unfolding maturity in my life. Even before germination, a seed contains the possibilities for the mature plant and all of its fruit. After germination, in the initial stages of growth, the structure of that living being's flowers are already unfolding. And so, in my own young life, lie the seeds of maturity. All the fruit of my highest self are already within. Just time, patience, and cultivation are needed to bring it forth.
It has been a really fun process just to sit with discipline and write a little every day. It has been a joy watch the word-count build and very therapeutic to see patterns in my life as I tell my own tale. Very healing. I started a NaNoWriMo novel five years ago, but after one day's typing stream of consciousness and sharing this with a friend, I lost interest. This time around, I have finished the task and it feels so glorious. I know the NaNo intent is to produce original fiction, so I suppose that 50,000 words of my own life story is sortof cheating the heart of the project, but I decided telling my own travel story was more interesting than any fictional tale I could make up on my own, so that's what I have written. It is accurate to the best of my recollectional abilities. The degree of fictionalization inherent in memory is up for debate. My hope is that in reading this book, you have glimpsed into my heart and maybe seen a few of the longings of your own. That in reading some of the things I've done with my life energy in these 27 years, that you may find the courage to break out of habitual self-depreciation and fear-bondage and strive to actualize your highest self. Welcome to the real world, big girl panties and all.
Acknowledgments
I have written much of this novel in the company of my good friend, Che. She is my friend's blue heeler and one of the most loving dogs I have ever met. I am so grateful for her company, just softly breathing beside me on the bed, shedding her long black hairs into my keyboard. Oh yes, this is a writer's life. Thank you for your company, Che, and thank you, Adam, for giving me temporary custody of this being I've watched grow from puppy to loving adult that I've known almost as long as I've known you. I know she's the love of your life. Thank you for your trust and for allowing my connection with her. Blessings!