Differences
Nancy and I have both picked up a stomach flu kind of thing. Mine was a few days ago now, hers came on just last night. Slight fever, stomach distress/pain with nausea, tiredness, mild headache. We tested Nancy for covid last night and she was not surprisingly negative, but knowing made her feel a little better. The symptoms ameliorated for both of us after we vomited, several hours into the thing. I’m into my fourth day since symptom onset on New Year’s Day (here), still a bit tired and off and taking it easy after two days in bed and third day, yesterday, doing a couple of errands and then mostly in bed again. Nancy feels better today, but low energy and enjoying a day of rest also.
Holding in my breath
Nature whispers: Exhale now,
the world is refuge
With this as background I became sharply aware this morning that until now, after more than six weeks here, I had not been able to slow my internal world down to the level I had expected, based on our previous times in Thailand. It feels to me that since we arrived at the Chumphon airport and were graciously picked up by Helen, everything has had a different flavor and feel and energy to it from what it has been like in the past.
There seems to me to be a desperation in the air. Post covid, but not really post covid at all, I imagine (I think I see) that local businesses are floundering, with still not many tourists coming here (well, there are never many tourists coming here, which is one of the reasons we like it), and a sense of trying to make up for lost time and lost money and not succeeding very well. There are some new little coffee shops and eateries for example that don’t seem to me to be doing much business, hopes being dashed perhaps, coffers not being filled as expected. Some places are trying to cash in on the new (temporarily? supposedly? not quite but apparently?) legalized status of ganja to take up the slack. Along with this desperation, as Nancy points out, comes a sense of speed, Thai style of course, which is still magnitudes less than we would see at home, so that things do not feel as relaxed as they used to.
Kind culture greeting
hands folded and gentle bow
we see each other
I feel as though I’ve been in constant motion since we arrived, what with the changes in our friend’s lives, both realized and anticipated, jam band personality discord and drama, the unusually discomfiting weather patterns of first constant rain, now constant wind (which Nancy tells me agitates the liver, according to Chinese medicine), unusual coolness throughout all of this.
This morning, sitting on our balcony overlooking the pond, there were a few minutes of sun and no wind during which I felt the heat that I’m used to here, and that I realized I have been missing. The kind of heat that warms me right into the marrow of my bones. The kind of heat that many people would be happy to avoid. The deep tropical heat that makes you sweat just sitting still, and that has been absent. Nancy has used our AC maybe twice since we’ve arrived, which is unheard of. Some days we don’t even use a fan for much of the time.
Virtually no slow contemplative morning beach walks where even by 8AM it’s hot enough to warrant a dip in the gulf to cool down. I’ve been able to do this just once since we’re here. No drippingly sweaty bike rides, or drippingly sweaty band performances. Not what I had become used to, and what I like.
Looking for magic
just an ordinary day
it’s in my pocket!
All this to say that some essential aspects of what being here has come to mean to me have been gone. Even to the point of not feeling the underlying pervasive Buddhist energy of our Thailand in the way I’m used to. The secular seems to have overtaken the sacred. Maybe because fear has become more prevalent. Nearly three years of covid related shutdowns, catastrophes, hardships, deaths, ruin or near ruin, increased poverty I should guess, has created a new world. On the surface much appears to be the same. Beneath the surface, if you’re sensitive to it, things feel very different.
I suspect this is true around the world. I suspect, and know, this is true in America. I suspect there is a new level of (largely unacknowledged) despair, of injury, of shared trauma that this pandemic has left us with, along with all the other, built in, normal despairs resulting from all the other normal causes of such things. I don’t think I’m making this up. I think I’m experiencing it and noticing it and naming it. If there are questions here I have no answers.
Being in India, being at Sherabling that is, was a very different experience. Of course. It’s a monastery environment. It’s dedicated to spiritual practice and spiritual life. I believe I used to find more of this here in Thailand, just in everyday life. The lazy, laid back, tropical paradise beach life, alone, doesn’t cut it for long. I always said, to whoever might ask, that the thing I loved most about Thailand was the fact that it is a Buddhist culture. The values, the priorities, the world view, the understanding of human nature, 180 degrees opposite from the Christian West, so much more appealing and, dare I say it, so much more healthy.
If the desperation I sense is true, has there been a further turning of mind, subtly, unconsciously, toward the Western model of materialist dominance in hopes of recovering from the devastation of the last three years? Is this the direction of things in the face of the larger global reality of increasing systems collapse?
Well, I won’t ramble on. Change, and it’s inevitability. Keeping the heartmind open. Acknowledging grace. Acknowledging loss. Always gratitude.
Sending love…….
No more words now
no heart songs spill over me
it’s an inside day
