Points of Departure

what

are you leaving

are you leaving behind

what is

the point 

of departure

ask yourself

when

you arrive

The Shape of Things

Spring starts with late hours of sunlight that chafe the inward spirit. Then rain. Then heat. Do, more, out, see, world. It is the curse of a temperate, insistent, envied city.









I keep reading the message on today's calendar and it slips from my mind. No focus, no commitment. I wash from one to another project, craving the transcendence of art - strong swathes of color, the rhythm of texture, image, sound. A play of light. A shift of emotion. I crave wordless space. The wordless admixture of faith, aggression, ambition, and love that is the alchemy of a resting heart.

I do not know what this season will bring. I fell asleep this afternoon with palm fronds ripping eastward against the soft gray sky. I woke to a layer of blue slicing through the southward view: holding a space between rooftops and cloud as I stood listless before my kitchen window.








I do not know the shape of things.

What's the sound of your holiday?

I ended my first day in Ha Noi with quiet. After a day of scooters, street vendors and Uncle Ho I joined the Ha Noi Community for Mindful Living for meditation practice and a meal.

I was hungry for sitting still and good company as well as good food after walking 5 or 6 kilometers of Ha Noi's streets and sights. In the rainbow light of a Tibetan vegetarian restaurant near the meditation hall in Ho Tay I leaned back and just listened to the expats chat. 

One guy mentioned that Dengue Fever would be playing in Ha Noi in a week or so. 

My ears perked up. 

Long before I gained the escape velocity necessary to venture outside smalltown Burbank, I was a seasoned armchair traveler. I'd been jarred present by koto music in Japan, rocked my hips in lean-to clubs in West Africa and skipped over reindeer patties in Lapland to follow the darting, birdlike folk melody of a gap-toothed herdsman.

I stacked Smithsonian Folkways and Real World releases on my shelf like so many pins on a map.

One of my favorite discs is the Musicians of the National Dance Company of Cambodia. The traditional orchestra is largely percussive, knocking out the structure of the tune on gongs and xylophones. The oboe adds sinuous melody, and the human voice chant-dances over it all. Not a few listeners have found the warbling Khmer vocals shrill and annoying. To me they are sweet and deeply heartfelt.

Dengue Fever is ostensibly a local band, from Echo Park on the hip east side of Los Angeles. But their vocalist was discovered in a karaoke bar in Cambodia. They blend retro Cambodian pop tunes, akin to sixties psychedelic surf rock, with Chhom Nimol's gorgeous soprano. What I heard when I first heard Dengue Fever was traditional court music that I could really groove to. And with lyrics in both English and Khmer I could sing along in my own shrill falsetto.

Earlier that day I'd watched a traditional Vietnamese ensemble perform, and it brought tears to my eyes. The bending tone of the monochord pulled years of my heart's dreams and my listening-imagining-adventuring fully into the life I live in the present. 


Now again, my worlds collapsed. To hear a band from my home town playing in their neck of the woods on the far side of the globe a few weeks before I set foot in the singer's native country - what beautiful synchrony.

As it turned out, I did not make it to the show. Such is the nature of escape velocity: I'd covered hundreds of miles by the time Chhom hit the Ha Noi stage. But their lyrics played with me long into the trip. In one duet the couple bemoans the distance between she in Phnom Penh and he in New York.

The first thing that I'll do

is throw my arms around you

and never let go

For that moment, my first night in Ha Noi, I embraced the whole world, just as I was held in the world's sweet song.

More on Southeast Asian music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5ke5D-D8lc

See the woman clapping before the bamboo xylophone? The rush of air generated by her hands plays the instrument.

http://www.umbc.edu/eol/cambodia/music_bg.htm

The work of Sam-Ang, an ethnomusicologist at the Royal University in Phnom Penh.

http://www.umbc.edu/eol/cambodia/pinpeat.htm

You can play the instruments of the traditional gong ensemble, called a pinpeat orchestra, here.

Half Light

My first night in Sihanoukville was my introduction to the art of begging in Cambodia. I'd met a trio of other travelers at a food cart en route to the night market, negotiating their own temperaments as the som tam vendor pummeled together hot chilis, savory spices, bright herbs and a whole black crab in the shell (optional) under her pestle.

We sat on blue or red plastic chairs in the half light of the food stalls. All of Southeast Asia swims in the milky pallor of compact fluorescence. Vietnamese shops and larger markets are as bright as an atomic blast, either as a sign of relative wealth or by the intensity of their desire for it. Cambodia, by contrast, is a twilight.

It's like being in an aquarium, or a morgue. And an odd adjustment to a westerner used to incandescents and their primordial association with the glow of candles, the warmth of the sun.

The waitress shouted my companion’s order to a cook clattering in a dim stainless steel cubicle at the back of the stall.

We poured glasses of very weak tea from the pitcher on the table. We waited out the appearance of a number of dishes that were decidedly not the plate of chicken and steamed rice my friend ordered. 

My fellow traveler and the Cambodian proprietress chattered parallel English/Khmer monologues about the order in question. I opened the styrofoam container of som tam I'd taken from the cart at the roundabout and peeled the plastic sheath from my chopsticks.

Every few minutes a child approached, appearing like a wraithe out of the darkness. Disembodied faces floated just above the level of the tabletops. They were like dust devils, their skin, eyes and hair the same muted shade of ochre, liked they’d been rolled in the red earth you see in the country. They slacked their faces and uttered pleas without moving the corners of their mouths. They stayed as far from smiling as they could.

Sometimes a mother would be there, clutching a young child in her arms. You never saw her approach. It was as if she never actually moved, unable to spare the extraneous movement, fatigued beyond compare. But there she was, her face a few feet above you muttering a request for money.

I learned to be stern with these children, leaning in as I said "No", my animation in inverse proportion to their torpor. They would linger, little fingers on table edge, then turn their whole bodies slowly away, as if rotating on an axis.

When we'd had our fill of chicken and rice and spicy papaya and tea we pushed back our chairs, rising into the illumination, closer to the bulbs suspended under the tenting, like we were swimming to the surface of some ocean.

As soon as we were up, the children massed around the table, streaking from the far edges of the market stalls to survey the cast off scraps abandoned at the table. One wrapped a glass with both hands and drained the dregs of tea and melted ice. Another opened the styrofoam box which had contained shredded papaya and peanuts and delight, but was now full of tissues used to catch my nose, streaming from a cold and the unrelenting spice disintegrating in a puddle of spent citrus.

They quickly picked over the site and dispersed, leaving empty plates even emptier of a few grains of rice.

This is hunger. This is ingenuity and life at its most pure.

In the face of bad odds, these children play a part, the simple energy in them bent into the shape of beggary. They find their sustenance through this art, plying a trade of heart strings and pity. 

And we say no, or we give them something, trying to negotiate the formula of fish and fishing poles and wondering at how we got our pockets stuffed in the first place.

This is life at its most simple, which is only ever dimly lit.

Where are your feet planted?

I think a lot about my feet. They are my foundations, after all: the roots to my tree pose in yoga, the vehicle for exploration, a way to connect to the earth ( those long solitary hikes in the canyons north of Malibu), and the key to my mobility (even when it's just those twenty steps I take to get in my car to drive to my next destination).

Longhouse ladder, Northern Vietnam.

I thought a lot about my feet when I was traveling through Southeast Asia. I was backpacking after all, so my foundations were taking on another 15 or so kilograms and an untold number of kilometers.

And I've owned a lot of shoes. Not necessarily the ones that immediately spring to mind when a woman mentions shoes, either. I'm talking about trail runners, cross trainers, MBTs and well-made boots. I'm talking about moccasins, cork-soles, clogs and comfort-engineered flats. Though you might find a pair of patent leather pumps for fancy occasions amongst the Clarks and Danskos, I've invested in lots of different shoes to keep my body in healthy alignment and happily pain free.

I took two pairs of shoes with me on my trip: a brand new pair of light, low top hikers purchased four weeks prior to my trip from the local sporting goods store that was going out of business, and a very old pair of Teva sandals that I purchased the day I started UCLA back in 2001.

Angkored feet. Pre Rup, City of Angkor.

I've hated those sandals for years (about ten years, now that I see the figures in front of me). They are light gray synthetic material with coral accents. In theory, they can take me slipping through rivers, get kicked off by the campfire and be equally supportive pounding the city pavement. In reality, they always made my sensitive right knee ache a bit and my feet kind of stinky from the incubation of sweat and dirt on the plastic petri dish sole for hours at a time. And I guess I was always a little grossed out to see the swirling patterns of dirt crusted into my toe prints at the end of a day and mirrored like a Rorschach blot inside the sandals.

What I noticed in traveling, though, is how my feet toughened up. My first hint of it was on the beach in Nha Trang. There is little else to do in this central Vietnam town except enjoy the waterfront. I woke up, put on my swimsuit, grabbed my towel, and walked across the street to the beach after a quick breakfast of fresh banana, pineapple, dragonfruit and mango and very strong french-style coffee.

I peeled off my sandals to sink into the beach experience, and walked to a high spot on the sand near a pair of European tourists. They were sipping green bottles of Saigon beer and frolicking in and out of the waves. (I checked my watch and it was before 9am. No judgment. I don't usually drink beer at 8 in the morning, but then I don't usually sunbathe that early either.)

Occheuteal Beach, Sihanoukville, Cambodia.

My feet burned on the coarse white grains as I walked. The kind of warm, tingly burn you get when you put your feet in hot bathwater after a day on the ski slopes. I spent a day and a half walking along the turquoise verge of the South China Sea, and eventually I stopped noticing the hot jagged-edged sand.

Other jarring experiences befell these tender feet throughout the trip. After a rainy day of hiking in the hills of Sapa in the far north of Vietnam, right near the border with China, I lost my big toe nails. My feet were water logged and pruney when I finally peeled off my soggy socks. A white ridge ran the width of my big toenails where the top layer of the nail sort of buckled up. Eventually the last quarter inch of the nail simply peeled away.

I got hot spots on my instep and the ball of my left foot. Blisters puffed up on the inside of my pinkie toe, which likes to sneak under the adjacent fourth toe when I'm trekking long distances, much to its disadvantage. Bedbugs and mosquitoes left a constellation of itchy red bites of varying magnitude that it took all my discipline to ignore. And I got used to seeing my feet dirty, powdered with the red dust of Cambodia.

The last day of my trip I stood on the veranda of Wat Mahathat in Bangkok, staring at the feet of a saffron-clad monk in front of me. "Stepping, lifting, forwarding," he instructed us in the mindfulness of walking meditation. I looked at his feet. Callouses lightened the caramelly skin in spots, and a rim of white, dry, cracks defined his heels and big toes. The toenails were craggy. He lifted one foot slowly, where it hovered over the cool pavers momentarily lost in his robes, until the heel softly met the gray stone.

Reclining Buddha. Nha Trang, Vietnam.

By the time I got back to Los Angeles I loved my old sandals. I kept grabbing for them despite the chill winter temperatures that normally bring me chilblains this time of year. I was used to having my feet exposed to the elements, and the skin was thicker, more resilient. My foundations had been transformed.

Last week I got my first pair of five finger shoes, those little split toe sheaths that are as close to barefoot as any urban dweller would sensibly be. I recall I almost broke my toes when I tried on a pair in a sporting goods shop in Hawaii in 2010. I would be hiking through ochre mud up to a waterfall on Kauai and I was sure my Tevas would not hack it. I'd heard how five finger shoes can improve your muscle tone and bring you back into alignment, and my yoga teacher swore by the barefoot lifestyle. "These things have got to be terrible for you. Not enough cushion between me and the world. I'm sure they'll make my knee/back/hip hurt," I thought to myself in that shoe store in Hawaii. My inner skeptic and reluctant consumer battled with the sunshine-and-lollipop part of me that is sure the open market has a fix for anything that ills me.

Walking around town at the weekend in my new shoes I felt like a poster child for REI. But I could feel my feet. I felt light. And I got that there is nothing wrong with any of my shoes. Nor is there anything wrong with me that a pair of shoes will ameliorate. There is nothing wrong with my feet, which erstwhile spent so much time cloistered in Italian leather boots, pumiced to vulnerable smoothness, with toenails painted to a gainly shine. My feet have toughened up. It may hurt a bit when I make contact with the hard surfaces of the world. It may register in my feet, or in a more subtle place in my being. But those hard surfaces become less so the more mindfully I walk. I continue lifting and forwarding and stepping, noticing all the while where my feet are planted.

In Phnom Penh.

Postscript: as soon as my toenails finish growing back in I'm going to get a pedicure!

Worth a Thousand Words

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a smell can leave you speechless. It can take your breath away, reducing expression to phonemes and diphthongs: sigh, grunt, ick. Sounds that would never be spelled were it not for the Sunday comics.


I just returned from a six week journey in Southeast Asia. Yesterday I left Bangkok at 10am, connected in Shanghai, and arrived in Los Angeles around 4pm. All on a very, very long Wednesday. 


There was a hint of autumn in the air and the light, that slight golden crispness of late afternoon that makes my heart float a little. I was glad to be back in LA's embrace.


Tonight I took a walk around my neighborhood in West Hollywood. It was quiet. It is that lovely window between xmas and new year when the city smiles and rests. The evening air had a watery freshness. I strolled by rosemary and lavender bushes and drought resistant yards full of sculptural succulents and agave.


The sidewalk sparkled a bit in the high pressure sodium glow, an even, smooth right angled path washed free of detritus and edged with greenery.


I took hundreds of pictures in Southeast Asia. But in as many moments I just had to stop, glitteringly aware of the swirl around me that a camera can't capture. Sounds. Snippets of conversation. A brief altercation between young lovers on the street that made my heart tighten, or a conversation in sign language on a sidewalk in Bangkok that made me smile for human creativity.


And scents. The tropical heat and bodies and manic pace of life pressure cook everything into nuclear strength in Southeast Asia. As this was the mild season.


As I walked through the cool, simple almost odorless air of Los Angeles, these are some smells I recollect:

Offerings to Ly Thai To, Hanoi.

burning. incense burns constantly in vietnam. a woman lights a single stick and, clasped between flatted palms, she waves it in the air before placing on her fruit cart. small shrines on the street curb in front of a house, or affixed to a telephone pole before a business, hold a flower, a portrait, a few joss sticks poking out of sand. massive censers in public parks push smoke into the air.


burning leaves. gathered garden waste smolders in yards. it is warm and feels like fall. the incense and wood smoke waft in and out of each other, weaving a rich warm tapestry, a hug.


the rainbow of the marketplace. fruit in various state of ripeness or rot, the cold metal smell of blood from open animal carcasses. the tang of drying fish.

this insistent freshness meets the smell of cooked food on the perimeter of the raw goods market. women squat beside cookpots, faces obscured as they watch their work: sweet earthy yams over charcoal; the bright smell of corn in roiling pots of water; the headiness of bubbling cooking oil working springrolls, fresh bricks of tofu or bananas a golden crisp.

Statue of the King of Fruits in Kampot, Cambodia.

the perplexing smell of durian. and the ghost of it. on the east moat road in chiang mai i passed a sidewalk seller with rectangular cello wrapped trays of the golden strips. walking back after dinner and craving a sweet bit of fruit, i looked for the little cello trays. they were gone, but i knew where he had been. i could smell the empty husks that must've been behind darkened metal shutters.

waste. animal, human, raw, rank.


five pots of steaming rainbow-colored rice on a xoi cart: green, pink, deep aubergine, orange, brown. white speckled with cedar-colored raw peanuts. a glutinous pillow of starchy steam caressed passersby.


rain falling and mist rising from the terraced hills in sapa, in the hills of northern vietnam.

Phnom Penh

synthetic perfumes. strawberry hand soap, whatever the local laundry used for my floralized clothes, the rolls of scented toilet paper that ribbon up out of square candy colored dispensers on restaurant tables for napkins, rosy brand wet wipes. i could not wait to get home and wash my clothes with unscented soap.


devilishly black coffee beans steaming on woven trays on a side street in phnom penh.

unfiltered exhaust. fumes so potent they were almost chunky. emissions controls on cars and petrol pumps in california were contemporaneous with my birth, so the rich, cloying backspray from thousands of scooters took some getting used to.

garlands of jasmine that beckon you forward before you even see them, a sensual bath that half closes your eyes. offerings to a thousand buddhas and the buddha in each of us. 

Offering at Angkor Thom

The sense of smell roots you wholly to the present. It's like a moment in architecture: you round a corner and find yourself in perfect relationship with right angles of stone, a decorative flourish, the aspect of the sun's light, the intersection of building and nature and your own fragile life. You are caught in full awareness of yourself in present space, as a rush of chemicals tingles in your blood. And all you can do is stop and take it in.

Invocation

This past August I made my first trip to the Playa. This is the familiar and affectionate term used by attendees of Burning Man to refer to their home away from home.


The whole trip was deeply spiritual. An effigy of a man is the hub of the space, a center in nothing, the middle of desert expanse. He is burned on the final Saturday night. There are fireworks, there is screaming, drums, dancing. Firespinners spin. When the man burns there is chaos. 


There is also a temple built each year. It is a reflective place where people leave their pain, loss and grief to be consumed by the flames. The Temple burns on Sunday night. People are transfixed. This year it was called the Temple of Transition. There is total silence when the Temple burns. Total.


The burn hollows us out, relieves us of wooden weight. We then re-create.


I wrote a poem for a Rite of Passage taken by the women I camped with this year. The poem was a gift I received a few weeks before I left LA for the Playa. It was a moonlit night. From a quiet space, it welled up. 


I share it here as a reminder of the strength and beauty that inspires us to be wholly who we are, newly who we are, wherever we are: gifts, on and off the Playa. 

The Temple of Transition, Tuesday.

Invocation:


We come to the verge, where earth and ocean meet

With the support of our sisters

Beautiful women, all

We invoke the strength of these elements

That hold and embolden us

As we be in the world

Beautiful women, all

This beach

shows no footprints

Not because no one has come before

But as testament to the power

Of the earth,

The air

The water

to hold, absorb, transform

every gesture we make

beautiful women, all

Under the moon and the stars, we close our eyes

Stars bright as a sun, or dim and distant

We turn inwards

And with a vertical gaze

Sense the stillness

Hear the quiet

And be held in the calm darkness

Inside us

Beautiful women, all

We invoke the earth

The air

The water

The safety and strength of what creates us

these elements that hold us

Beautiful women, all

We turn inwards,

Safe to gaze at all that’s inside

With the support of our sisters

The sun moon and stars

We are curious observers

Of the marvels of our selves.

We explore.

Follow the footprints, our traces on this earth:

We acknowledge, we honor, we clearly see

what we’ve done

Who we’ve been

What we’ve created

We discover, in the light of these stars, our sisters

So we can offer it all

To who we are becoming

The best we keep, the rest we release

We invoke the power of

Earth and ocean

It’s immersion, conversion, transmutation, transformation

And humbly seat ourselves

Before ourselves

Before one another

Beautiful women, all

In stillness, peace and trust

For all that we become.
Beautiful women, all.

The Temple of Transition, Sunday.