Jan. 2007—"lotus cupped in an outstretched palm"

text & photos by Austin Pick

Happy New Year, friends!

Cupped in an outstretched palm of lotused heat, humid petals veined with the clambering odors of lemongrass and spilled fish blood, propane and dog piss, fornicatory flowers and grill-strung meat, incense and sweat, fruit and dust, coconut milk cradling flavors, dead newspaper and the choking closeness of exhaust, we drift bewitched between buildings of moldering concrete and bodies under umbrellas and awnings in a floating world of food and sun-crushed color, squeezed into bloom and burst along the uneven roads of our retinas as surreptitious spices excavate new rooting caverns along the clung rivers of our palettes and chart by slender fuse the slow spill to colon, all of Bangkok a writhing tongue-to-tail endless epitaph for the tumble from ripe to rot, revolving obvious in the budding fist of a single whiff...

Shauna and I recently returned from three weeks in Thailand, from tropical holidays and a very different asia than our now-familiar Japan. A few days in Bangkok and its markets before heading up north to the ruins of Ayutthaya, ancient capital of the Kingdom of Siam, a quiet, empty husk of slouching stupas, toppled headless buddhas, deteriorating facades and aged stone, lovely in their crumble and settled into an enveloping calm... 

Then a little further north and up into the jungle of Khao Yai, Thailand's first National Park, where we met a wild elephant out awander on the road as he crossed from one wall of tangled green to another, an enormous, light-footed and weirdly grinning phantom...

And despite a few harrowing encounters with Thai chilis —flamethrowers smuggled into soups— charging longhorn cattle along backroads, doorless local buses with big bass systems, enterprising travel agents on the make, box springs for beds and the karaoke hotel super-service dinner from hell, we did manage to locate ourselves at Dhamma Kamala, Thailand's most well-established Vipassana Meditation center, where we sat a ten-day course, Shauna's second.

Another ten days of submersion and space for mind to settle a little into the simple yet somehow illusive peace we find when turning inward, which is also opening outward... Ten monks also sat the course, gliding by in saffron and coloring the periphery of our silent beginning to the new year. If you haven't heard, Doug and Nick did a course around the same time in Massachusetts that was apparently attended by none other than Stephen King. Isn't that something.

I hope this finds you all very well! Japan is a wide plateaued stair on an escalator moving upward. I'll finish my contract in a few months and will be back in the states for the month of August and maybe also September, depending, with an eye on Burning Man. Then it's back to India & Southeast Asia for meditation, participation and investigation. That could go on for a while, but probably not more than a year. I look forward to our paths crossing!  

Stay well, Stay wide, Yours with Love, A

Vipassana meditation: www.dhamma.org

Let not a person revive the past,
Nor on the future build his hopes,
For the past has been left behind,
And the future has not been reached.

Instead, with insight let one see
Each presently arisen state.
Let one know this, and be sure of it,
Invincibly, unshakably.
—Buddha, Bhaddekaratta Sutta

See Austin's Photo Essay of the Ruins of Ayutthaya HERE at FudoMouth: Images.