Dharma Center, March 2013

Young monks wrapped in blazing orange seemingly float in space. With meticulous care, they diligently sweep sleepiness from their eyes and dirt from steps and floors around the monastery with home made wooden brooms each morning after chanting, before the sun blooms fire petals across the early morning sky.

One moment, we see holy men, murmuring memorized prayers in ancient Pali and meditating in complete utter stillness to the backdrop of the black dawn. The moment chanting is complete, they instantly morph into boys, giggling and revealing lopsided toothy grins as they learn our clapping games and shrieking in delight as they grab a prized silver spoon over a nightly card game on the wood floor, the big golden Buddha sitting peacefully above and presiding over their prayers and play.

Religious, peaceful men.  Young boys.  Refugees.  A quiet green village home gutted red in ethnic war. Land mines, guns, and death poisoned peace, unmercifully piercing lives and slicing the land in two. A bloody border erected between Thailand and Burma is now separated by coiling barbed wire fences and a treacherous ditch riddled with explosives ready to unleash more grief on its own people. Boys ran for their lives and desperately clawed at the dirt walls of the monastery, hiding inside holes in the temple walls. Those that survived crawled out into a shattered life, leaving a tombstone of their childhood behind in the hollowed earth. Hundreds of peaceful protesting monks shot dead. Two young boys taken to the hospital in agony, swollen ulcers screaming through skin the horror of witnessing the murder of their entire family.

On our first night at the dharma center we were each paired with one of the novice monks and given a simple huge white piece of transparent tissue paper which magically bloomed into an illuminated floating lantern, as tall and twice as wide as the tiny robed monk himself.

Boys grinned at us, shadows casting light into their dark eyes peering as us beneath the glow of a lantern about to be released into space.

Together, we held the lantern until it inflated full and tight with hot smoke and counting to three in Thai, released it into the sky and watched it float into a flaming dot, a trail of illuminated winged light gently soaring beyond our grasp, soon enveloped in darkness.

All that exists in our world that we cannot see, cannot know, and cannot hold on to.

Beneath the pond that surrounds the pagoda where we pray, life and death swirls in hidden cycles below. Plump bellies of silver fish hover suspended in thick viscous space, their white eyes peering above the surface like stars in an emerald sky.

Floating water lilies are clustered together like a city of child palms, humbly offering surrender to the sky, pleading for peace and nourishment to the mysterious blue.

The invisible wind’s echo breathes grace to the wispy fronds who lean left and right, stretching every cell of each tall stalk then calmly returning to center. Standing still. Peacefully saluting the bright sun before another day.

Hungry devilish mosquitos mark their numerous victories with raised round tally marks plump with triumph on my skin.

So many layers of life- vegetation rooted below the deep pond, the fish floating between, the erratic frenzy of a fly cutting sound through silent still air. Delicate white butterflies ride on waves of wind and brave ants scurry below the tornado of movement as we monsters tread above, never even considering the creatures we crush below.

In one afternoon, how many lives are lost, how many new beings born?

Buddhism- loving kindness for all sentient, living beings- how many thousands, millions of animals live out their lives and suffer their deaths on these grounds? How do we live so blissfully unaware of the death we breathe around us?

Millions of beings surround us who are so much larger than us, so much more plugged in to the nature rhythms of life and earth where there is no ecological space for human fragility, mercy, and hate.