Four Feet

I always thought in the loop of Mind, there would only be one set.  One set to traverse that which is foreign: their canals, streets, escalators, lifts, pathways, harbors, beaches, their stairways, trains, cobblestone footpaths.  Happily I shook out my own raincoat, rolled my own bundles of clothing, put one of everything and none of some in to a rucksack…always just enough like a wrist in its sleeve.

Happily I trained in the way of slight, a penny, a fraction, a hair, walking one foot in front of the other, turning sideways for the squeeze, speaking in whisper, tucking in to a twin sheet.  Everything came in like a dream and manifested itself in subtle hues of grey; not a soul to question my motivations; no one, to put bet on theirs. 

The world my oyster, and I was on hunt for the pearl, slipping around on all the white fleshy waves, losing myself in the crevices and then cresting again, slipping back down and climbing back up.  The game was enough on my own, was enough amusement for one.  Only in the dips did I feel the loneliness of this brand of freedom and in those mere pockets I calculated to exactness the superiority of solitude, the joy in subtle suffer.

But now:

I skip steps in huffing giggles to the sound of another set, knuckle to knuckle.  Our bags, only baby rhinos could match.  The backpack transforms in to proper luggage.  Nothing slim in the way of experience. 

An indulgent sovereign of love

A jeweled goddess for her queenliness

A lotus cushion for the floating

Brow to brow from courtship to consort

Milk and honey dress my tea. 

There is a ‘Beyond Liberation’.  There is a greater than 1.  There is 2.  My innards unfurl, my tissue opens, cells multiply as the bundle expands, and there becomes two of everything and room for all.  Bounty.

The grey becomes the shadow it is meant to be while we unpack the colors endlessly.

This is a golden love.

 We wander temples, walkways and railways, crowned, bellies full of blessings.  The same oyster, the same pearl but there are four feet now instead of two.     

BANGKOK TODAY

Their turbans and haughty stance, large guts, full button down shirts and slacks amidst the Thai heat index, the kind of thing that should stand out as strange but instead blends in like the noisy tuk-tuks fartin’ around the city.  There seems to be nothing out of the ordinary in Bangkok.  Every culture is represented here from the Thai themselves; the obnoxious Americans; the Indians sticking together; the Africans digging in to the pool of Thai girls; the gaunt hookers in spandex mini dresses and their drunken foreign clientele; the taxi drivers in all their quiet dutiful presence; the tourists in their pony-tailed hair, cutoffs and flip flops; lethargic shop keepers wiping away the sweat and fanning themselves with old paper… all just another photo taken in another Japanese SLR on another day in Bangkok.

Bangkok, dependent on its tourists and prostitutes, all while they kick the king from his seat one dismantled large framed picture, in the middle of the intersection, at a time.  Ornate golden temples for touring with proud tigers in pins, sweet bowing hands with smiling eyes and timid giggles: the sifted remains of innocence from the Bangkok of our time.

I close my eyes and imagine away the kitschy retail, modern cars, winding highways and full glass skyscrapers.  Would there have been elephants tracing the canals and small children half dressed running through the palm trees and paradise?  I imagine the undoing of globalization and imperialism.  I cry quietly to myself in the loud internet cafe’.  I watch the decaying generation shuffle in the background from pot to pot and extract bottles of local beer from the electric fridge for the faces behind their bread.  I look upon the representatives of this generation worn out from keeping up with the times, the constant upgrading of knock off mp-3 players and the trickling in and out of trends.  I wipe away the eyes.  What a strange girl to sit and cry about the undo-able, the cream in our alluring cup of joe. 

So this is it.  Here I am 31, soon to be 32 years old, still from the same time and same place and still romanticizing and aching for the sepia tones of a time long before my bones were formed.  How do we find the truth amidst the stampede for more and more in a world that has gambled away its heart?  How do I find the beauty of the human experience in the next manufactured trinket made from another pair of overworked Chinese factory hands?

I finish my last lines on my aching overheated computer, and watch as the streets pick up and drip with humanity, swirl with cigarette smoke, exhaust and babble with hagglers.  In my next life, will the dissatisfaction be just as thick?  Will the suffering of changing landscape hold as much power over my heart and mind?

Bangkok:

So stunning in her chaos;

So loud and fast that she has blurred

 To a silent,

Slow

Motion ballet.