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.
2 comments:
Nicki, A beautiful post... thank you! Because you have not gambled away your heart, your senses and imagination are not immune to the madness of what human have dreamed-up in their forgetting of who they really are.
In the games of power, scarcity and fictitious paper money, fear is the driver. There is no peace or union with the Beloved that we all seek (and is, in Truth, our Self) in the next electronic gadget or the next king or president.
I do not find it odd that you should cry in the deep ocean of humanity's despair; rather it is sad that all do not. But I trust you will find in many personal encounters the beautiful heart that resides in each being.
Please keep writing what you sense and feel, as it transports us more fully than any travelogue could ever hope to.
Love to you and Dawa,
Aysha
Aysha,
Thank you so much Aysha. Your words, wisdom and heart are a large part of my inspiration and guidance. And it is in the individual encounters that I feel salvation from the sickness. The heart never leaves us, it is simply covered in layers of disconnection.
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