thePlace

    I watch the evening fades into yesterday – dimly and inescapably. The fathomless sky is thick with grey clouds, tinges of violet reflected in a small opening. Soon I’ll be covered with total darkness. I watched myself wedged, waiting to see the journey end. I feel my wish to move silently into the impermanence of things, see myself fluxes with the emptiness of things.

    It is as though I have been living in this part of the world for ages and ages, and it seems that I knew every tree outside the Space, in the horizon and beyond. I have watched the new banana leaf shot up from the middle of the trunk, twirled into a straight forceful tube impatiently waiting to unfold, sprang opened into majestic lime green oblong fan, turned into dark green, wafted sideway by the new ones, trampled by the wind and rain, gave way to rutted tatters, turned yellow brown and dwindling off. The past was here, the present was here and I could imagine no other future than the banana tree, the new shoot, the perfect lime green sheet, the broken brown leaf, and again another shoot, the lime green, the brown, over and over again….

    How ordinary everything seems - simple and just is. Life passes, moves on and disappears. Droves of flying ants fluttered in flurry around the light, next day only masses of wings and overfed geckos remain. Next came the scarabs - the little black reddish ones, the big grey ones and the white ones. They horded the bulb for a few days and then noiselessly vanished. Mob of tiny caterpillars invaded the space, lingered for a week and mysteriously left no trace….

    There is no separation between the ‘I’, and the width and breath of the surrounding. Not knowing where ‘I’ end, and another begins – there are no boundaries. There’s only one thing that is certain - it all came to the same thing in the end, death. There is no reality, the essence is all emptiness. What is this ‘me’ that I feel? Who is this ‘I’? Where is it? It sees, it thinks, it feels – so fleetingly seductive, none of it is real. The eyes & thoughts still growing blur from living in confusion; it’s the mind’s perception that has lodged immovably within for eons that is playing the tricks.

    The ‘I’ has floated out, sojourned again and again in the space of boundlessness. It needs to be grounded, to live life. And it is wishing to be united - while work, growth and change consume the ‘me’. Wishing to expose the hidden hypocrisies, for the heart to be opened up, for the space to be cleared up, wishing to surrender, to connect….

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    I just found out that I might have lost my email account – the one and only one since I started yahooing more than 10 years ago. So goes the blissfool one. It’s time to learn detachment again, to let go. It’s time to start anew.

 

    I have lost all contacts so please write me at leenarliew@gmail.com

                 After my first ride on the newly purchased scooter (a 2^nd hand tiny Korean made Kymco automatic 125 for $900) to and from the Place, I fell sick.  The adventure was more than my body could take – the mid-day heat, the billowing dark fumes in my face,  and most of all - the trauma from the real life computer game like hurdles where portholes, sand traps, villagers, chicken, dogs, bikes and cars pop out haphazardly every corner.  To add to the tribulation, the engine kept dying on me while going down the steep hill; its tendency of veering right without shock absorbers utterly froze up every muscle of mine. What's more, the 20 km journey back took thrice longer when I heroically took an unfamiliar quieter street and got misdirected repeatedly.

            I must have looked like a complete retard with my SF baseball cap in a borrowed half-cup battered helmet without straps, wobbling on the scooter, visibly jerking my body instead of shifting the bike to avoid obstacles.  I should have practiced riding the scooter first before taking it on the road.  Of course I wasn’t tested.  I bought the motorbike license from the police like everyone here, except mine is for the tourists and renewable every 3 months with a fees of $20.00, while the locals pay once every 5 years.

            How mistaken I was to have expected owning a motorbike as a high-spirited adventure (I almost bought a Harley many years ago - perhaps it’s a lot different riding a one-seater 899 Sporster in California).  Instead, for the rest of the next 2 days I sneezed uncontrollably and thick phlegm clogs up every pore in my body. I am down with a violent cold.  The exhaustion from the scooter ride still caroms around my psyche like a pinball machine.

            Of course the adventure is not entirely to be blamed on – my body has been stressed from acclimatizing to the excessively hot humid days and cool nights of the monsoon, getting wet in the rain with sweaty shirts, inadequate rest, skipping dinners, etc.  All these and the load from the project contributed to the illness. 

            I still feel like a deflated punctured tire but I’m determined to ride the scooter like one of locals - with a full Darth Veda like helmet and jacket in the heat.  Before long, like them, I (not just dreaming) would dance and skip the scooter about in play like an effortless tango - after I have it serviced, the right-veering tendency corrected and the shock absorber reinstalled. 

            Who knows, as so commonly done here, I might even turn smooth corners heaping up 2 or 3 passengers at the same time, packing in one another airtight without helmets, and with feet tangling off the tiny scooter….