With these roosters, good luck sleeping past 530am. Keep your eyes on the floor or you’ll soon hear a crunch. The crunch means you just killed a millipede. I’ve killed four today. I live amongst millipedes now. I will learn of their ways and I will love them. I don’t know how many times I’ve reached my hand into the pee-filled toilet. I keep forgetting to NOT flush toilet paper. Put it in the little waste bin. Damn it. Again and again my toilet reflexes are proving how well trained they’ve become in America. You don’t even need to use paper. Use the ‘Asian bum gun’ and we wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place. At least the soap in the bathroom smells divine; a floral fragrance I can’t place with any particular flower, just happy comfortable memories.
I am enjoying long slow mornings on the terrance above the bedroom. A hammock, a fan, sun sparkling through lime green leaves and fragrant flowers. DIY Matcha lattes in a wooden bowl and good books I’ve been waiting patiently to read, books that help me feel happy to be a human just as I am. Read with me. I’ve been turning the pages of “Seven Thousand Ways to Listen” by Mark Nepo since October when I lifted it off the bookshelf in an AirBnb in Ubud, Bali. The theme of my last trip was “listen” so naturally, the first book I picked off the shelf was dedicated to this topic. Destiny is sweet sometimes. Today this book led me to “A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough” by Wayne Muller. I read one sentence and clicked “Buy Now”. I’m also reading “The Energy of Prayer” by Thich Nhat Hanh. Prayer has been missing from my life for years. I explored it for the first time when I was sixteen and stuck with it for a few years then dropped it. I sense there is deep value in this mysterious practice. It doesn’t have to make sense to offer a benefit. So I turn to Buddhism to help me walk into something new. It’s a path a trust with my eyes closed. A few pages into this book and it occurs to me that perhaps I can pray through music. It was probably the music, singing with a thousand people in a sanctuary, that attracted me to the church in the first place. After leaving the church, the current kept bringing me through quiet places of sound. I sang in the yoga studios. I fell in love again and again at music festivals. I retreat to the studio vocal booth and the soundscapes I craft in my imaginations, my headphones are the portal to enter into these digital music worlds. I’ve sung in worship before I understood what I understand now about the divine, as medicine through sound healing before anyone who knew what they were doing sang for me, and I’ve sung myself to ease in times of struggle. When these young parts of me are nervous to make sounds, the throat closes up and tension stiffens the limbs, and they feel forced to perform and be perfect. And what happens when it’s not a performance? What happens when it’s just a prayer? Softness.
I feel soft in the water. Upside down, spinning and swirling without weight, suspended in liquid of the perfect temperature I am home, playful energy dances through every cell in my body. I can float and gaze up at the pink clouds and the water tastes like lemons. A new diving mask on my face lets me do summersaults without water going up my nose. This is perhaps the greatest upgrade to water play I’ve ever experienced. I can hold my breath for two minutes now on land and I’ve only lasted one and half minutes under water so far. I haven’t full tested myself. I’ve just been playing around, lightly, gently, easing into the underwater world. I like to move into it without pressure. It’s all soft curiosity. I feel the edge and pull away. Then I go again. I makes me smile easily. Swimming in a prayer too.
Eating Nasi Campur (vegan version with tofu and tempeh) for dinner.
Love & Rainbows,
Cha Wilde