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.

River Music

Greetings,

Three days and 400 kilometers north on the Nam Ou river into Pongsali province between China and Vietnam were magical and marveLaos.

Serene, wild, majestic rapids and calm zones. Pure nature. Rough, steep, verdant. The river is life's highway providing food, electricity, water for crops, bathing and transport. Images are being processed.

One clear mind-at-large image is of six young naked girls sitting on a sand bank in afternoon sun waving, yelling, dancing, running into the river...Hi! Hi!

Here are a three links to web sites to enjoy.

Elaine Ling is a professional photographer based in Toronto. We met here. She does amazing work and it's well worth a look. She uses a large format. Her recent book is Land of the Deer Stone. Mongolia, Cuba, Baobab trees, Tibet, Chile.

Legend and meaning in Lao textile motifs. Fibre2Fabric Gallery.

Literacy is an ongoing need in Laos. When I lived in Indonesia I met a teacher on Gili Air island off Lombok. She'd travelled by train from England across Russia, Mongolia and down to Laos. She mentioned Big Brother Mouse in Luang Prabang. 

It's a well established essential Lao center for local kids and literacy programs in remote villages. 

Metta.

 

Laos

Greetings,

It feels wonderful to be in Luang Prabang with new language, music and energies. Very refreshing cool temps.

It is high season. Luang is on the tour circuit for backpackers, lots of French and the odd super anxious German. Lots of elderly folks exploring their planet using canes. Tribes of noisy young white people walk down streets drinking beer and ride bikes without shirts and many foreign women think they're on a beach.

Camera happy snappers. Similar to all those crazy folks at Angkor feeling the experience with their digital.

Hoards of snapping tourists focus on orange rows of meditative monks at dawn receiving alms from locals and the extensive golden and red hued wats or pagodas. Architecture. Soaring wings.  Lines of small alleys and wooden homes. Plentiful gardens. 

Mix in the reserved Japanese and super rude pushy and arrogant Chinese and everyone's happy. Babble tongues. 

It is a small world heritage city surrounded by mountains and bisected with two rivers. The Mekong flows strong. I move like a river.

Initial impressions: the Lao are more laid back than the Cambodians. They don't speak loud or yell. No whining and crying children. They don't hassle visitors. They smile. They are gentle people with a deep spiritual life. Serene. 

Population density: Lao 6 million, Cambodia 14, Vietnam 85.

The night market rolls with lights, merchandise, food, and souvenirs. People watching.

Textiles are huge in Laos; lovely silks with animistic and natural designs - peacocks, birds, fish, rivers, protector dieties, ancestor worship, woven Buddhist prayer flags. Traditional values and motifs. Visual woven stories.

Hand made paper is an integral part of their life. The art of paper, making paper, using paper, honoring paper, community and family paper, painting and writing. Burning paper, making offerings. 

All the Lao girls and women wear a sarong. Delightful and soft. Art, culture and life. 

Metta.

Traditional Arts & Ethnology Center, Luang Prabang, Laos. http://www.taeclaos.org/

Moon, silk, kids and water

Greetings,

I've been in Cambodia one month. The year is flying by, away, intent on new and completely unknown possibilities. 

New imagination galleries on the sidebar include:  Siem Reap, Artists and Pagodas, A silk farm (included in Bamboo Monkeys Photo Blog) My Grandfather's House rural school project and a floating village Kampong Pluck, presently high and dry.

Here's a sample. Feel free to explore at your leisure.

Metta.

Boiling silkworm cocoons to extract raw yellow silk. It will be separated into soft and fine threads and dyed using natural materials: banana (yellow), Bougainvillea (yellow), almond leaves (black), lac insect nests (red and purple), prohut wood (yellow and green), lychee wood (black and gray), indigo (blue), and coconut (brown and pink). Cambodian weavers also weave Ikat, a technique creating patterns on the silk threads prior to weaving. It is called "HOL" and there are more than 200 motifs. 

Raw silk on loom. 

Kampong Pluck floating village outside Siem Reap in the dry season. The wet season is July-November and the water level will rise 9 meters, (30 feet).

 Children at My Grandfather's House, a rural elementary school supported by volunteers. It will supplement their local Khmer education. Children will begin with basic English classes. Plans include math and basic computer skills.

Inside the floating world of nature, water, and light. Be light. About it.

Music between notes

Lombok images of weavers and temples.

Every feeling waits upon its gesture. Dawn clouds, east wind. 

Every morning before the tropical sun became to burning, before the skiffs deposited white tourists on white sandy beach so they could snork waving coral and eat lunch in bamboo shaded pavilions and well before the cidimo horse cart tinkling bells and weather frayed faded tassels dancing in the wind echoed through intersecting village trail dust, people opened their yawning mouths to wish each other "Happy Holidays!"

Along one trail leading from the coast in a field of grazing oxen and serrated coconut palms were a group of boys. They chattered in Sasak. One boy left the group and began climbing a palm, shimmering his way up, skinny dark arms wrapped around bark, feet at an angle supporting his weight. Push-pull-push-pull. 

He was young, agile and fast. He reached a cluster of yellow coconuts, selected one, pulled it free and dropped it. It thudded among dusty broken palm leaves and shards of wild bird songs. A boy picked it up, punctured it and drank sweet juice.

The climber selected another one. Cradling it like a newborn he returned to earth.

Metta.