Weave heart

Greetings,

To celebrate your stress free, completely relaxed moment of eternal mindfulness with heart before on and well after the 25th here are some calm meditative images from the Stung Treng Women's Development Center.  

Mekong Blue, as blogged before now in the long now is a UNESCO award winning project noted for superior quality, creativity and originality with silk. The Center improves the standards of living for 50 women and their children. They have vocational training and educational programs. They are employed. They have a future.

Shop with your heart. Shop to give back. 

Metta.

Hammock Heaven

Greetings,

Once upon a time there was a human. They were resourceful and strong. They realized an opportunity. They took a chance. They considered the risk assessment and consequences of acting on their chance. It was one chance. It would never come again. They looked at the world. 

It was sleeping in a hammock.

Give me a hammock and I'll change the world, said the human.

How to live? said Socrates.

Metta.

Update Makeup

Greetings,

Welcome to another edition of This Is Your Little Life. Your little life is taking on pernicious perceptual potential poetic personifications without a preamble. To amble to ramble and gamble enjoying risks with enormous ramifications. Waking up is a risk. Paying attention requires risk analysis and consequences. 

A stranger arrives in town. He wanders around with optical tools.

 

When in doubt, update your life. Put on makeup. Change your appearance. Get a new identity theory. Reinvent a corner cooking operation billowing smoke from cracked charcoal chips harvested from old trees near a woman sawing ice with a rusty see-saw as children play. Numerous forlorn stressed out drivers in huge SUV's negotiate narrow provincial streets singing their Status. Beep-beep.

The Asian Children's Driving School is open for business. Son, his father said, Someday all this will be yours. Gee, dad you're the greatest. Let's go for a spin around the block, down life's little highway and out into the lush expansive rural countryside filled with amazing green rice paddies, our essential food source. Ok, son, Let's roll. Batteries not included.

The smiling boy walks into his future. He works for a collection agency called Consume and Waste and Recycle. He found a life instruction book and put it in his bag. His bodyguard is a girlie-boy. Not too shy to try with tolerance, gratitude, dignity and self respect.

Somewhere in Cambodia a boy is carrying the world on his back.

Metta.

No women in tuk-tuk land

Greetings,

Now here this. The tuk-tuk is leaving in five minutes. Departing for points unknown. A massive celestial event known as YOUR LIFE will depart in five minutes. You are advised to assemble all the necessary documents, certified seals of approval, water, guide books, sunscreen, funny money and so on...you will visit the following areas on your short, fast, easy tour.

Bring your life with you. And a guidebook with heavily creased pages. If you attempt to read while moving at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, you will discover a new sense of perspective.

You may be surprised or traumatized  to realize your experience at Angkor is not about "seeing" the temples. 

Angkor, Bayon and Beyond...

Please conclude various private and group discussions to ascertain your destination. The tuk-tuk driver has his helmet and vest. His vest has a green four-digit number. If he tries to bring you into Angkor without the vest he faces massive problems. For starters he will lose his job and have to return to his small, isolated village where he will plant rice. The biggest dream for many young men is to become a tuk-tuk driver.

If he loses his tuk-tuk job his family will starve to death. This is a common problem here. Death by starvation.

A tuk-tuk river driver has an easy job. An easy life. He drives you to a temple and crashes out. You feed him. He takes you back where you started. He makes $15-20 for the day. The average person's daily wage is $2.03.

Not a single woman in Siem Reap is a tuk-tuk driver. There are 3-4 women tuk-tuk drivers in Phnom Penh. They are as rare as clean drinking water, sanitation, hospitals and schools.

Why? A woman doesn't work as a tuk-tuk driver because: 

1. it's too dangerous
2. it's inappropriate
3. it's foolish
4. they lack the education, intelligence, drive, initiative
5. they haven't broken free of deeply ingrained social and cultural stereotypes: a woman's place is in the home, taking care of kids, washing, cleaning, and cooking.

Thirty years ago a woman was lucky to finish 9th grade. She married and stayed at home. It may take another generation before women become tuk-tuk drivers. So it goes.

Metta.

Lina studies Engineering in Phnom Penh.