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/

wisdom Ghosts

Greetings,

Here's a link from World Hum which may interest you. It concerns The Odyssey by Homer.

"Cavafy is hinting at one of his poem’s themes: that life consists of experiences of intrinsic sensory merit, whether or not they’re extraordinary, whether or not they’re linked to success or failure. Only later, when we adopt the conventions pressed upon us and our sense of wonder dulls, do we begin to speak of success or failure, or set up temporal milestones to be reached, lest the quotidian occupation of existing be too tedious to bear."

World Hum...read more

Delicious. The Giants are playing great fall ball. 20 runs in two games.  A group of wild and crazy misfits, low-budget loose and well orchestrated combinations of excellent pitching, timely hitting and orange juice. My mystic lover says they take it in five. No jive. Fear the beard. 

What a long strange trip it's been. So speaketh Homer.

Dancing with The Grateful Dead. 

Spook-speak. 

Metta.

colorado tourists

Greetings,

Once upon a time five tourists from Colorado came to Cambodia for two weeks. 14 daze.

The leader was a dentist from the Rockies. He had been coming here for ten years offering his services in the capital and rural villages. Doing good work, considering the state of dental health care. He also wanted to see his part-time local girlfriend. She ran a dental clinic in the big city.

She was hot. They practiced oral hygiene whenever they could. It was a mutually satisfying orgasm experience with pliable tissue, lots of saliva and swimming body fluids. Drill me baby.

In the group was a female dental hygentist and three dazed and crazed rich high school kids. The woman was in her 50's, lived in a conservative rural mountain town and was new to Asia.

Someone asked her about life in America. "It's a mess. People on welfare have this sense of entitlement. They get cell phones, food stamps and have no incentive to work. The school systems are falling apart. Immigrants from Mexico keep flooding in. Who would have thought that Hispanics would be the majority in Dodge City, Kansas? Immigrants do all the work that other citizens avoid. Plain and simple."

They went to Angkor for a day. They went to health clinics and helped the local staff. They shopped. They left, filled with monumental anxiety about traveling in reverse.

Metta.

bright jupiter

all gas jupiter is close

368 million miles away
swimming with Fishes
rising at 18:49, setting at 5:45
with runners on first and third and no outs

top of the ninth at 74º (under the horizon)
there goes the runner through infinite space passing mercury
as pagodas with broken scratchy speakers chime chorus voices 
monks chant four moons - io, europa, ganymede, callisto
108º

less is more

the last a thing a fish knows
is water

light bird song
she remembered struggling in Shanghai
with no formal education
searching for the perfect love
writing her story in Chinese
following her heart

after the rush of stimulation orchid
settled down into lassitude 
misfortune wedding children
polite monosyllabic conversations