Prom Rath Wat

Greetings,

I've been sitting down in Siem Reap for a week and it's delightful after the hysterical hustle of Saigon in particular and Vietnam in general. 

I've been exploring Siem Reap on foot, hearing and speaking with a variety of tourists and travelers and settling into the pace and rhythm. I will visit the Angkor Wat site and multitude of 7th-16th C. history, art and spiritual wonders down the road.

An orphan girl at a Christmas party.

Siem Reap population is about 130,000, a far cry from the 8 million in Saigon so you can appreciate the lack of motorcycles, noise and chaos as previously written. There are also 7.99 million fewer hustlers.

Minus small guesthouses and hostels there are approximately 110 hotels and 10,000 beds. Inflated stats say there is a 60% occupancy rate. Tourism is down due to world economics, tighter travel money, and small yet significant regional internal and border troubles. So it goes.

The Angkor National Museum was amazing. An excellent introduction into the Khmer culture. 

Angkor National Museum...

My first Cambodian photography gallery is of Prom Rath Wat, a serene temple complex in Siem Reap. Enjoy.

Metta.

Joyful holidays

Greetings,

May everyone enjoy seasonal festivities with family, friends, loved ones and dancing light. Every day is a gift day. Tra-la-la!

Metta.

Dancing away

Greetings,

After a wild wonderful educational week with an intense secret friend gathering new material for poems, stories, novels and wild imaginings I leave Saigon and Vietnam tomorrow. My work here is finished. Six months is long enough, or as someone said, 'We haven't been here very long but we've been here long enough.' True.

As some of you know, I was here in the U.S. Army back in 1969 for one solid character defining year. I was based near Hue. While teaching English in Indonesia I decided to return and pay my respects. As I told my 4th graders, 'Congrats, you've graduated to Grade 5 and I've graduated to Vietnam.' Pure and simple motivation.

Return is a strange word. Like making a U-turn or a spinning whirling Dervish dance celebrating Rumi the Sufi poet, seer and mystic. Rumi knew life, transitions, celebrations and expressing the spirit with love and devotion. Joy.

I begin a new chapter in Cambodia. As a ghostwriter said, 'To travel is better than to arrive.'

Metta.

Dream street

Greetings,

I am dancing down the final farewell sing Saigon long gone song. See if you can scribble down 20 words. Write one true sentence. 

Twenty little words. Twenty quick painless mini-stories about the 60-year old man last evening in the BLINKING LIGHT. An American or European, retired, a widower. Smoking, drinking a beer. He wears a drab flower print shirt. Alone. He calls someone.

Ten minutes later a woman arrives on her cycle. Mid 30's, long dark hair, red shirt, attractive. He greets her, grasping both her hands expressing a deep gratitude, welcoming her. Back into his life. She is his lifeline in Saigon, his hope, passion, unrequited love - his salvation from loneliness, sorrow, suffering and the pain of living.

He hands her the wine list.

'Anything you want. It's yours.' He is eternally grateful to know her. Receive her. 

'I want your heart,' she says. She is happy with him. He is her savior. Her love. Her salvation.

After a romantic quiet candlelight dinner they return to his hotel. They will smell and taste and laugh and sing and dance with each other for dessert. She will trace his spine with her fingers. He will rest his head on her breast, listening to her heartbeat. Hearing the thump-thump-thump of the muscle pumping blood through miles of veins and capillaries and arteries. They will hold each other until dawn sweeps dream street.

For one night they know peace inside their healthy loving mutually beneficial addiction.

Metta.

Split the difference

Greetings,

Do you want the short version or the long version? This a perfectly appropriate question in life's chess game of experiences and conversations, especially while traversing the road less traveled on Earth, a spinning rock.

If you flesh out the short version with some immediate specific personal details it becomes longer, growing as threads of character development and destiny as character is destiny inter-twine a kind a rope made of hemp fibers or tightly woven reeds from a river in Mesopotamia which you can employ to hang yourself or pull yourself to safety or easily used by someone in the story before, during or after you finish what erupted as a simple sentence with a line long enough to hang laundry on taking on a life of it's own because you are a conduit, a towering magical volcanic mountain releasing hot molten lava from a highly charged pressurized center. 

A burning ring of fire.

Give someone a match and they'll be warm for a minute. Set them on fire and they'll be warm for the rest of their life.

This molten conglomeration of dust, mud, water, soil, sediment, sandstone, gas, graphite, gypsum, rocks, boulders, pebbles, 24-carat carbon diamonds, fossilized fragments of vegetarian dinosaurs, compressed plankton and every imaginable geological logical particle known to man, woman and child and even others blasts it's way out of the deep red hot core of existence into the atmosphere where it cools, then gravity, the scourge of civilization and it's malcontents, contributes it's force as the dense weight of mass falls, slithers, slides, rumbles, cascades, rolls, strolls, runs, flowing down, down, down engulfing everything in it's path melting the landscape, carving new strata grand canyons gouging out a path for the quickly cooling massive debris reaching it's crescendo before slowing to a mere glowing vein.

Metta.

2-million year old bones in Spain.

Carmen, a famous chef in Eugene, Oregon.