Cremation

Greetings,

The procession of 200 people led by six monks in orange robes followed the rolling wagon carrying the wooden casket inside afternoon's blazing heat along Airport Road. After two kilometers we entered the monastery. A bus of school kids and nuns arrived. 

The casket was carried up the stairs and placed on a metal platform. Her husband led a procession of monks and family members around the tall tapered white and blue building carrying her picture and yellow flowers. They stepped back to allow the team of workers access. They opened the casket so family members could leave something personal inside. 

On a nearby pavilion monks and friends prayed. A man read a final tribute about the woman's life. The family finished expressing their love and men put small logs into the casket. They closed it, rolled it inside and piled more wood around it. They lit the fire and closed the metal door.

People looked up at the top of the tower to four Buddha faces and exhaust pipes. A wisp of black smoke escaped into the clear blue sky, followed by heavier gray and white, now billowing.

People sat in groups talking, drinking water. Everything burned for 2-3 hours. The bones were collected and placed in a family urn and returned to her room. They will be used to create a human figure on banana leaves. In 100 days they will be removed and returned to a family stupa at the monastery.

Metta.

Birth and death

Greetings,

One birth. One death. This is the reality here where it all happens up close and personal. Community.

Jasmine gave birth to a baby boy around 12:30 a.m. 3.9 kilos. It's her and Kunn's third child. I am on the balcony around 6 a.m. and hear him crying. Tears and lungs, breath, release. He's amazing and small. Sleeping after his nine-month water world journey. Every day is a new birth day. 

I walk down the dusty path, across the so-called "Highway of Death" to Jasmine Lodge.

People are gathering to celebrate the passing of Jasmine's grandmother. She was healthy and happy. Sheslipped away during the night after 84 years.

Friends and relatives gather under a pavilion to pay their respects. Some visit the Buddhist monk making a monetary gift, hands in prayer. He ties a small red piece of yarn around their wrist.

The ceremony will last three days. Women teams prepare food, chop vegetables and fruit - cook and simmer huge vats of rice, soup, fish, and meats using logs. Smoke curls through bamboo meeting music and the melodic chants of monks in song.

Tomorrow will be a procession to the monastery for cremation.

Metta.

Make it new

Greetings,

Yes, well, he said, here I am patrolling another planetary manifestation.

It's a random act of kindness to find the "correct" letters to say this.

Some humans take themselves way to seriously. Hang around listening to some of the anxiety and fear and trepidation and...

To express the sensation. How do you express a sensation? Is it an expressed gesture, a fleeting momentarily lapse of reasonable consciousness? Perhaps a main manifestation of the young girl watering the dust. Now as sunlight filters through the palm trees casting long shadows, golden rays.

Did I ever tell you I am a dust collector? It's a fact. Of life. I've collected dust in many places - in Vietnam, in the Sahara, climbing toward Drepung outside Lhasa one brilliantly frozen morning, in Korla, a well known far Western crossroads oasis along along the Silk Road where yellow is the original color produced by the silkworm's saliva.

The swirling red January dust here in Cambodia is a sweet deep rusty red. The path is a watercolor, traced by bike and motorcycle treads, grooving new tributaries of passage. Walk softly as if your eyes are on the bottom of your feet.

Metta.

Amazing New Dream!

Greetings,

Wow, seems like just yesterday we were all cruising into the final lap of a decade's year and here we are approaching a new beginning. Fresh senses, a renewal of heart-mind awareness with clear vision and gratitude.

2000-2009. Just a bunch of numbers times 365. Hmm.

Let's see. In 2000, I was living in Hanford, Washington, teaching tennis and writing. On September 1, 2001, I left the states of confusion for six months to live, travel, collect material and write in Morocco and Spain. Then the 9.11 fiasco, debacle, horror. 

I returned in March 2002 living in Eugene, Oregon, teaching and writing a memoir. I received 50, yes 50 beautiful rejection letters from literary agents. They knew a) they couldn't make 15% flogging it to publishers and b) it wasn't mainstream material, so they passed. Ce' la vie.

I shifted focus and energy to working on A Century Is Nothing and moved to Sichuan, China in 2004 to teaching English. By June 2007 it was in manageable shape and I contacted Iuniverse about self-publishing. I moved to Turkey to teach and work on final revisions. It was published in late October.

It was amazing to see the opus slide out of the brown wrapper. Thud! on the Ankara table with the face of the young Chinese girl on the cover. Her eyes held all the secrets of the world. The stories didn't belong to me anymore. They never did. I was just a conduit to bring them into being. A process of discovery and joy.

An amazing decade.

May everyone dance their love, beauty and inner vision free from desire and attachment.

Metta.

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.