Everyday discoveries

I went for an adventure yesterday after having lunch with some friends from school. I drove out to where I had heard about some "factories", I would call them workshops. Here I got to see a weaver working outside a clothing store. Outside the shop there were about 8 looms set up to make the garments which were for sale inside. They even had pictures of the King and his family wearing their garments!

I also discovered an umbrella workshop. This was one of my favorites.

There was so many different designs!

Here you see one of the many stages an umbrella goes through before completion. I couldn't believe how much work goes into making one umbrella.

Outside the shop.

I also visited the silver factory, but didn't take any pictures...next time. I plan to head back to this area soon, there was also a silk factory that I didn't get to check out!

My friend Yara, who teaches Kindergarten at CMIS, helped me strap my guitar on the back of Perry this week. This is a great discovery for me! I needed to take my guitar to the repair shop.

On Thanksgiving Day I noticed that poinsettia plants have shown up at the flower shops! This made me so happy because my parents always have poinsettia plants around the house during this time of year. These plants remind me of home...I bought one (it was about $1!!!) and planted it in our flower box in front of our house.

Death & Gratitude: Our First Thanksgiving In Thailand

Sometimes clarity hits you when you're not looking for it, and the veils fall away and you see things in a stark and unfiltered light. Today was powerful. Beyond the marvelous Thanksgiving meal we shared with an amazing group of people, we had some realizations that really emphasized what it means to be grateful for the gift of life... It's funny how sometimes the journey to the destination might be more important than the destination itself...

We spent much of the day looking forward to sharing Thanksgiving dinner with friends at the Eubanks home past Mae Jo University. At 5 pm we peeled out of our neighborhood in a caravan, with Sue & Freeman & Aka in the car in front, Lizzie on her motorcycle behind them, and Becky and I on our scooter in the back. We hadn't anticipated anything too exciting, just a 20 minute drive into the country and then a nice Turkey dinner. But the universe sometimes has plans of its own...

On our way to dinner the traffic was horrendous, with cars and scooters driving bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see. We soon saw why, as we happened upon an accident with cops waving us past what looked to be a minor collision between a couple of vehicles that didn't look too serious. It looked like someone got rear-ended pretty hard, which is a common enough occurrence on any well-traveled stretch of road, and no one appeared to be hurt and the vehicles didn't look badly damaged. A couple miles further down the same road, we came across a second accident, and this one left a much deeper impression. Two motorcycles were sitting on their sides in the far left lane, and on the side of the road someone was lying in the gravel, with their arms cradling their skull and their legs splayed out and moving languidly as the torso twisted and writhed on the ground. No blood, but the body twisting on the earth was clearly in serious pain. Damn. Becky kept driving and as we pulled up next to Liz at the next light we exchanged glances. That was scary. It's never a good thing to drive past broken bones and busted rides, and all of us started to feel a creeping sense of unease. Let's get off this highway asap...

Right as we were getting ready to turn off the main highway, the traffic suddenly got a lot worse, with cars clogging every lane and people suddenly appearing on every available stretch of roadside. Something was wrong. Cops were up ahead at the intersection waving cars past with a tangible sense of urgency and irritation, and we noticed right away that they weren't letting us turn where we needed to go. Then we saw it. A huge industrial cargo truck, an 18-wheel behemoth carrying heavy piles of construction material beneath dirty brown tarps had been stopped 50 feet past the intersection. Beneath its front wheels, crumbled into a flat heap of barely recognizable metal, was the chassis and frame of a small scooter. All around it, people were taking pictures.

The cops waved us past, and as we drove past our turn we looked to the right and saw a tattered white sheet sitting in the road covering up something unidentifiable, surrounded by big puddles of liquid. In a second it came into focus. A mangled hand lay under the white sheet, and what looked like a torso ripped to pieces, possibly severed from the lower body. The dark splotches on the pavement weren't oil or water, but a huge pool of fresh blood, scattered over a wide radius. Someone had just died here, in the most violent way imaginable, and we had happened on the scene within minutes of the collision. We saw the remains, the crushed steel, and all the blood, but before the shock could really register, we had driven past the intersection.

As the traffic slowed, we pulled up to a light and took stock of what we'd just passed. "Did you see that?" Lizzie and Becky exchanged a heavy look. Up ahead, Sue was preparing for a U-turn, which means we'd have to drive by the whole mess again. We waited, found a gap in the traffic, and followed Sue as she turned around and headed back to the intersection. As it neared you could see the crowds of shell-shocked college students gathered on the sidewalks, the cars slowing down to rubberneck, and more cops arriving. Thankfully our line of sight was cut off, and we turned left at the intersection and left the whole sordid scene behind us...

...It's not everyday that you see a fresh corpse in front of you, pouring blood out onto the pavement at your feet. The body was probably still warm, maybe even hot from the flesh melting in the collision. Death puts all things in perspective. Life is short, fleeting, and precious, and ultimately we all end up leaving behind these bodies we so briefly inhabit. When you are forced to confront your own mortality, by staring at a human life spread across the street in front of you, you realize how petty and irrelevant so many of our worries really are. Every moment is a gift, and every day is an opportunity to live fully, and this attitude infuses the passage of time with a certain purpose-driven urgency. Why waste a moment when death is looming? Why live your life afraid of anything? Life goes by too quickly to spend it catering to anything but your highest potential. Speak your truth, say your piece, dance with abandon, eat with relish, and cherish the ones who share your journey. We spend so much time worried about things we can't control. We can control how we spend the time we have, and what we do with the blessings we've been given...
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...Dinner at the Eubanks' home was lovely. Sue's parents Allan and Joan have been in Chiang Mai for over 50 years, and are highly respected community elders who have led incredible, impactful lives here. They've done amazing work, they know wonderful people, and they are among the most gracious and loving hosts we've met in the few short months we've been here. We were welcomed into their home with open arms, shared a sublime meal with close to 30 amazing friends of the family, and offered up our gratitude along with a group of people who have a lot to be thankful for. Many of the people we ate with were people doing Christian mission work, a number were teachers, and many were a part of the Free Burma Rangers team, a fantastic organization doing important work with people in Myanmar. It was a joy and an inspiration to share our first Thanksgiving in Thailand with such an amazing group of people, and we are grateful for our new home, our new friends, the communities we are a part of here, and the larger group of people we consider family all over the world....

We are living a charmed life, and we are eternally grateful and humble before all the grace continually bestowed on us everywhere we go. We hope you are too...

Clearing up some misconceptions...

I practice yoga. I have been practicing yoga for about 6 years now and this practice became so important to me that in 2008 I made the commitment to complete a year long rigorous teacher training program at Moksha Yoga Center in Chicago. This year of immersion into the study & teachings of yoga changed my life, I met my husband there, for which I am eternally grateful, but I also acquired knowledge that forever changed my perceptions of the world around me & my interactions with it.

Shortly after arriving here in Chiang Mai I realized that people have misconceptions about this practice, including why it's called "practice", and it's not just people here, it's people back home too, including members of my own family. I've been sitting on this for awhile...because where do you start to describe something so precious to folks who have never experienced it?

I started practicing yoga back in 2005. I went through a transition when I looked in the mirror one day and realized that I had gotten fat. I needed to loose weight and I needed to change my lifestyle & eating habits. I bought a membership to a gym because I figured unless I was paying for it, I wouldn't go. I was borderline obsessed with going to the gym and loosing weight. I was lifting weights, using the stair climber, treadmill and going once a week to an hour long yoga class. I started to really look forward to this weekly class, where I saw the same people attend week after week with the occasional newcomer (which tended to throw everyone off). The group of regulars became casual friends. I was starting to love yoga and after attending for just over a year, I approached the teacher, whose name is Maria, and asked if we could meet for a coffee to talk about yoga teacher training. As someone who chose teaching as my career path, it seemed like the next logical step for me. We met and Maria highly recommended the teacher training program that she completed at Moksha Yoga Center. She communicated that it was a challenging program, that it required a high level of commitment, but that it was one of the best decisions she had made. She recommended that I buy a class package and start practicing there to check it out. I was sold, I went home & looked up the program, budgeted how I would pay for it and bought a class package.

When I started practicing yoga, I did it because it felt good. I liked how I felt while I was in class and I loved how I felt after class.

When I started the teacher training program I started to learn why it felt so good. I also discovered that I had a lot to learn. I felt I was considerably behind my peers in my lack of knowledge regarding the history of yoga, I knew almost no Sanskrit and anatomy was a guessing game...but I did have committment and a strong work ethic (two skills I'm grateful to have learned from my parents). Then slowly with time & dedication, I learned what I needed to learn.

Yoga has so many benefits I cannot possibly list them all here in this blog post. Each asana (pose) has a list of health benefits that range from physical to mental & emotional. Yoga is partly science and you can take yourself through a sequence of poses designed for almost any purpose you may need or desire on any given day.

But for me, a large part of the draw is this; if I take care of my body and my mind I will be able to grow old without pain in my body. I will live a long, healthy & happy life. I will experience a deep connection to how I'm feeling at any given moment because I'm aware of the delicate flow of my breath. This same awareness of my breath helps me to find clarity when I need it, this same awareness of the breath can help me relieve headaches, fatigue, body tension & stress without taking pills or medication. Yoga helps to develop strength of both body & mind, a balanced lifestyle, and flexibility in how you approach life and your body functions.

I have seen too many people suffer. They suffer with poor body image and self medicate by popping pills for aches & pains both large & small. I have seen too many people suffer with addiction to foods & substances that kill their body from the inside out. I have seen the epidemic of obesity in the United States, which is unlike anywhere else in the world because people don't care about what they put in their bodies. I saw my own Mammie suffer tremendously with pain as a result of arthritis that was crippling and as I rubbed the medicated lotion on her knees which were swollen to the size of melons, I vowed to myself that it wouldn't happen to me.

My medicine...I choose yoga.

So let me clear up some of these misconceptions; yoga is not a cult, and it's not a religion, although for some it becomes a spiritual practice. Please, until you've tried it several times with several different teachers, don't call me "one of those people."

Let's go to the movies! (4 months in Thailand!)

I have this habit of singing this tune whenever I go to the movies. If you asked Fuad, he would probably say it's annoying, but lucky for me he never complains.

I got to hum my little tune last night as we went to the movies for the first time in Chiang Mai!

We went with our friend from my school, Sara. She's really good company and she's lived here a long time, so she's a good person to hang out with, she's really considerate that we haven't lived here so long, so we may need some direction with how certain things work (like the movies).

So we headed off to the Central Airport Plaza otherwise known as "Centran" to the locals since the "L" sound is not one used in the Thai language. (This reminds me of this sound they have that we don't "ng" at the beginning of words, like the word for work "thahm-ngaan", really hard to get it just right) Anyway, back to Centran, think megamall...and remember the parking situation I described in a much earlier blog? We ended up parking by Meijers 50 acres (that's a joke only my parents will get...) then headed inside to the theater. There are a few bonuses here, When you buy your ticket, you get to choose your seat, there are multiple price levels, we went for the 180Bht price point ($6.00 per person) which got got us a very cushy recliner, nice!

After getting tickets we had dinner at the mall 800Bht ($30 for 3 people), then back to the theater for the movie, this evenings selection, In Time, but before the movie starts, commercials, pre-views and the Royal Anthem, for which everyone stands. (You may find this interesting, everyday the National Anthem is played at 8:00 am & 6:00 pm, in public spaces as well as on tv. Personally, I find the sense of nationalism here inspiring and at least everyone knows the songs. I've taught many a lesson on the Star Spangled Banner and I can't believe how many kids & adults in the States don't know the words or the true meaning of the song)

Going to the movies was just what I needed! Now that we know the process, I'm sure we'll be back again soon!

Today marks 4 months in Thailand and I'm pleased to report that I'm finally feeling grounded here. I'm finding my way...I'm establishing routines...I'm happy.