I’m back! I’ll be writing about my Vipassana meditation experience, which took me away from reading and writing and phones and friends and music and talking for ten days, but I’m still processing. That was in Thailand. We now continue our Chinese Spring Festival migrations just to the east, in another of the countries that our nearly five-year residence in the Middle Kingdom has made affordable and reachable. I got lost, twice in twelve hours. Story of my life, but a pretty fortunate tale and an extravagantly lucky existence it’s been, and remains. And how are all of you doing today?
So much has been lost in this country, which is the embattled remainder of a once-mighty medieval Khmer empire. I came here knowing little of that, other than something of the dreadfully crazed policies of the Khmer Rouge political movement, its maniacally destructive leader Pol Pot, and the fierce heat of words like “killing fields”: millions of dead in a country with less than half the population of Canada. We came for the more
An astounding pile of rock. How’d they do it? Stay tuned to this radio station for some of the details!
substantial fruit of an earlier monomania: the astounding Angkor Wat temple complex, the most outstandingly ambitious of the hundreds of tributes to gods and kings and god-kings in the area near the city of Siem Reap. We got lost in merely inconvenient, petty or even amusing ways. Again and still, the moral of the story is right up front: people of my time and place are such privileged people. We can tell stories, like these, where the worst peril is blisters, unmerited indignation, or the story falling flat in my telling. Danger! So, let’s see: