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Each morning Gak and I went to have coffee together at an open-air market near the temple. People wandered by from stall to stall, buying produce, meat and dry goods as we sat on stools at a folding table – one of many that looked like it could collapse at a moment’s notice. I tried not to put more weight on it than was absolutely necessary. Gak would order for us, although I am sure I could have mustered the Thai word for coffee. “Song cafe,” he would say to the vendor. Two coffees. We would take a seat in the busy open-air market and warm our hands on the outside of teacups while the coffee was being made.

When it arrived and we took our sips, he would ask, “Dee mai?” Is it good?

“Dee mak,” I would respond. Very good. Gak would slap the table with amusement and laugh. I worried about being covered in scalding liquids, figuring that eventually the table would fall.

This interchange went on every day for almost a week and Gak never tired of the amusement I seemed to bring merely from my attempt to speak his language. Between sips of coffee and the occasional verbal interchange, we sat and read the newspaper. Actually, Gak read the paper while I looked at it, its pages covered in a beautiful yet mystifying script whose meanings and tones I had yet to master. The pictures were interesting and always told stories in their own way. Despite the repetition and rut we must have been in, Gak and I felt comfortable with each other – brothers in faith and coffee, twin Buddhists who sat among the busy market workers, drinking coffee, only yards away from a butcher’s shop, where pig heads, organs and cuts of meat were on prominent, unrefrigerated display.

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We meditated there under a blanket of heat, the air thick with moisture and heavy like wet gauze. The sun drilled into me and I felt the heat intensely. Sweat beaded on my body and my shirt clung, wet and heavy, to my back after only a few minutes.

I sat tall, legs crossed beneath me and focused on the in-out of my breath. Sitting and breathing like that made me think of Jack Kornfield, the meditation master and former monk, who taught about following the breath. He said to inhale and to feel the cool air stream enter through the nose and to exhale, feeling the warm air from the body pass through the same orifice. That guided meditation he delivered was apparently geared toward people who were not sitting in the midday heat of Thailand. What is a person supposed to do when the air coming out of his body is cooler than the air going in?

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So I guess I am handing out literary pink slips. It’s a tough job to make these cuts but ultimately an important one. As good and fun as it seemed when I wrote it, when I was having my mental vomit through my ticky-tappy fingertips, some things had to go.

The flight to Chicago was uneventful, which is often a good thing when it comes to air travel. Boring is good, if annoying. The types of things that make air travel exciting and riveting are the types of things best left handled by professionals and not even thought about – things like safety issues or equipment maintenance concerns. Thank goodness the airlines employ people to keep not only terrorists but also things like snakes and panhandlers away from the friendly skies.

Yeah, editing really is an important step.

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However, I never abandoned this book and have been making slow progress on it for a while. Not long ago I printed out the first two chapters so I could work on editing them in hard copy form and have been slowly chipping away at that rough ashlar and have come a long way. The first chapter is nearly complete, at least as a stand-alone product. Eventually, I will have to see how it fits into the whole and helps to make a unified product, but for now I will consider it done.

This is pretty cool to see – the first part done. Looking at the printout, although I still have a long way to go, it really does look like a book is evolving from all this. Time to get back to the grindstone with this. Time to find a publisher too, now that it is really shaping up well.

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Time to find someone in the publishing world to help me with the next steps.

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From the book:

Jet lag was still haunting me and I woke up to the darkness of my room, shades drawn tight against the outdoor fluorescent lamps. The air conditioner had cooled the room to what felt like almost freezing and had sufficiently cooled my sweat-soaked bedclothes. The air conditioners at Lai Thai Guesthouse have two settings – on and off. At night this meant the difference between a stuffy 85 degrees and a breeze cool enough to freeze your kidneys to the mattress. At least the AC units are efficient, if a little more powerful than necessary. It seemed like the large, industrial size unit you might use to cool a whole suite of offices.

I read the clock. 5:30 a.m. The traffic outside was evident and sounded above the din of the air conditioner. Chiang Mai is a city that knows no rest. All day and night cars, trucks and motorbikes make their loops around the city, feeding the air with smoke and smog, noise and vibration. The appeal of a tropical country, I decided, was not due to its city life. I longed for countryside. It was time to leave.

It was still hours before offices opened, so I could not simply stroll down the street and find a ticket to wherever lie ahead of me. I showered and dressed and left my room at that early hour for a convenience store near my hotel. I bought a couple bags of drinks and snacks, stuffed a couple bottles in my pocket for later and brought the rest to a Buddhist temple across the street.

There I met a monk who was busy sweeping leaves from the temple paths. The other, younger monks must have already gone on their morning alms rounds, as there were no others in sight – a strange thing that early in the day. I greeted him and offered my packages. He took them, set them aside and motioned for me to kneel. I obeyed, kneeling in the fresh-swept dirt, hands pressed together reverently. The monk said some words I recognized as a blessing in the Pali language. As I kneeled there, the monk touched my head and I could practically feel the dirt of the city – and of my life – lift from my being and blow away in the morning breeze. The cleansing of my spirit was more than I had bargained for; I just thought it would be a nice gesture to bring something to the monks.

Progress so far: Working backward through the chapters, currently editing chapter four.

(Holly Burns will be proud of me for using a semicolon in that last paragraph, despite claiming to dislike them previously.)

Technorati Tags: cleansing, redemption, traffic, Chiang Mai, Buddhist temple, monk, dirt

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We both shared the same reaction – it seems like the most unnatural thing you can come into contact with. If you have never used one, count yourself among the blessed. It’s really not a big deal but if you are unprepared for this experience, it can be a bit shocking.

From my book:

Squat toilets really do take a little getting used to. For something as natural as squatting and shitting, most westerners find that squat toilets are quite uncomfortable because of what they are used to. We Americans, anyway, are used to sitting as long as we like, book in hand, or looking like Rodin’s Thinker, taking our time until our feet fall asleep and then slowly making our way out of the chamber. In the rest of the world shitting is a purely utilitarian affair rather than a pastime to be relished as if it were an opera or a fine wine. You go, you leave, you forget about it. Very quick. When you have to squat to make a movement, you will not tarry quite so long and may find it difficult to stay perched long enough to fully contemplate the existential feelings brought on by a madeleine or appreciate the craftsmanship of the latest issue of The New Yorker.

Have you ever had to use a squat toilet? Tell us about it!

Technorati Tags: travel, squat toilet, unnatural

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Phramaha Nattapong walked all the way to the edge of the waterfall, standing atop a boulder. It looked like the end of the earth, where he stood. It was so high that not even jungle was in the background of the picture.

“Carl, come take picture,” he said. I got close enough so that he was more than a speck in the small viewfinder and snapped a picture. I was about six feet from the edge, technically closer than I should be for safety purposes. The concept of edge discipline says that a person should not get closer to a dropoff than he is tall. I would not say that I have a fear of heights or even a fear of death but I certainly have no desire to experience either one up close.

“Come here. Stand here with me,” Phramaha Nattapong said.

“No, thanks. I’m fine here.”

“No, come here,” he insisted. “Beautiful view.”

“No, too high for me,” I said. He shrugged and enjoyed the view. Phra Bi edged out along a ridge over the drop. I chose to remain on firm, solid, dry ground where the only slipping I might do would land me in a river full of parasites and squalor, rather than in a morgue or simply left to scavenging animals out of simple convenience.

I later thought that this could have been an excellent Buddhist teaching Phramaha Nattapong was trying to impart on me. Becoming more aware of one’s own mortality and certain eventual demise is a very Buddhist undertaking. Monks and laypeople do this in different ways to show themselves that they are never far from death and that death is really part of a cycle of existence. Everything arises, exists and stops existing. Climbing on the boulder with Phramaha Nattapong pushed this point home a bit. Cessation and change are the only constants.

Word count so far: 54,690. I think that’s a good length and I am mostly working on editing at this point.

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