thailand: cultural explosions

i'm starting this new season of life, this portion of my personal life narrative, in media res, which in literary terminology means in the middle. i'm not quite sure what this chapter in my story is called. its somewhere in between student and adult, child and professional, listener and leader. becoming an adult means realizing and taking responsibility for the paradoxical nature of life and taking action for what moves you. having just traveled halfway across the world to spend time volunteering in Thailand, i think i am just now coming to terms with this notion, just finally arriving at some minuscule understanding of what it is that moves me, and where that movement is focused now...

i'm not sure the best way to go about recording my experiences from this trip, which is why this story will be disorganized and maybe completely illogical. but there's a delicious ambiguity to it. ...some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. my story is long underway, constantly being improvised, altered, constantly catching me off guard and teaching me in more ways than i would ever have expected...


if you think about it, culture is truly derived from a certain group of people's relationship to the land they inhabit. how they use its resources, how they survive together, how they express themselves and enjoy life in whichever manner comes naturally. at first, thailand the country and especially thai culture seemed to be something absolutely foreign to me, something that i would never quite understand or be able in any major way to take part. but after spending the last three weeks immersed in thai culture, surrounded by the most majestic, lush forests i have ever seen, befriending small, beautiful children with whom i can just get by communicating, and experiencing a surpassing degree of self reflection and inspiration, i'm getting more and more familiar with the word, culture...

thailand is all about ceremony, about respect, tradition, taking life slowly and savoring everything. my initial perceptions of this country were of a somewhat impoverished nation simply trying to survive, using food stands, markets, cell phone booths and other miscellaneous business and community centers as a means to creating and maintaining an economy. i wasn't attuned to the beauty of the culture, of the more subtle efforts at pursuing education, the arts, spirituality.

i didn't realize that these are a people who do still have some sort of relationship with the earth-their lifestyles and means of making money mostly revolve around the tending of the rice fields, the harvesting of fruit and vegetables, making fiber paper out of washed and dried elephant dung, using the plants and trees and natural resources to make housing, clothing, cookware, entertainment, hardware.

culture comes from relationships and i'm beginning to examine the idea of a one world culture, where we embrace unity rather than uniformity and begin to share with one another these various cultures, practices, understandings. its not something to differentiate humans from one another but rather to celebrate the beauty of our diverse race, our different needs and talents and habits and our creativity and dependency on the earth...