A couple of days at Whispering Seed turned into a week. And what a fabulous week it was! After that, I headed east to Laos, and stopped off at my new friend Jo's farm for a few days. Pretty much all alone with water buffalo wandering past. Thank God for reading, bananas, yoga and meditation! Yeah, it's been an unexpected two weeks.

Other than lounging and strolling through beautiful forest by a river and sleeping in a hammock under a big tamarind tree, lots of other things made me want to never leave Whispering Seed. The people who own the land and the course participants and instructors are fantastic, wonderful, interesting people. We went out drinking one night at a riverside resort (woo-HOO, a night on the town, we're drinkin' Heineken! Literally.)

When we got back, we were all a little peckish, and a couple of us joked about crepes. So crepes were made, along with a pineapple compote and lemon-sugar topping. We stayed up until 11PM, can you believe it? This, a group that typically starting yawning at 7PM. When there's no electricity, one's internal clock resets itself according to daylight hours. The next night we even stayed up late to roasts eggs in the fire. No Doritos when you get the munchies, and soon fire-roasted eggs with salt, chilli peppers and scallions are a mouth-watering treat. Screw Jenny Craig. Spend your money on a trip to a remote village in Thailand. I think I've already dropped 10 pounds just from eating good, fresh food for a month.

Before I left, I helped build a domed mud brick oven, that was then sculpted to look kind of like a weird Mr. Potato Head, with coconut husks for ears and coconut shells for eyes, and a sculpted nose with big round flaring nostrils to act as the chimney. The opening was the mouth. It was even funnier when some of us realized that it looked much like Paw Ti, a quirky old man who would converse in Thai with many of us non-Thai speakers, carrying on a more or less one-way conversation. Sometimes he would wander off and come back with random things to eat that he had found in the forest. Most of them were pretty good. Some were disgusting, but then he would laugh because he had offered an unripe bitter fruit to see if we would eat it. Old coot.

Jo's farm is outside a tiny village in northeastern Thailand, surrounded by other rice farmers. This is all "mountain" rice, so it's not the wet rice paddies we usually see in Natural Geographic or whatever other media happens to be informing our idea of what a rice paddy looks like. Parts of the fields are pond-like, with water hyacinths and lotuses growing in them. Jo has fallen in love with natural building, and has been teaching courses around Thailand. He has a few buildings on his land made of mud, bamboo, and rice husks. They're gorgeous. One of the really cool things is that you can carve on the walls before they dry... the outside wall of his house has figures of dancing monks with big round heads, huge grins, and wobbly earlobes. This is what I'll be learning to do in India. Anyone want a house built? How about a gazebo? I'll be needing work when I get home..... ;)

I was able to practice yoga and meditate on a little shaded structure that was built out over the pond on the farm. Wood flooring on stilts, no walls, thatched roof. It was amazing. The first day I finished my yoga, and then realized that I had practiced at exactly the same time as my class back home in San Francisco, except that I started my yoga at 9AM on Wednesday while they were starting theirs at 6PM the day before! I had thought I heard my teacher's voice counting the breaths, reminding me of my alignment, to rotate my legs inward.

Those three days on the farm were incredibly peaceful. Jo's mom was around a bit, and every now and then someone would come check up on me, make sure I had food. There wasn't anyone to talk to, so I was left to wander, sit, think, breathe, read, and pretty much do whatever.

I figured out how the whole water/left hand thing works. I had toilet paper, but no place to put it. Couldn't flush it down the squatter. Couldn't throw it in the garden. So.... water and left hand came to my rescue. It's actually refreshing and comfortable, especially when there's soap and water to wash your hands with afterward. If there's not..... well, it's a good habit to not eat with one's left hand, just in case!

There was a bookshelf in the house with dozens of books, probably left by other visitors, and I helped myself to 4 of them! Three were less than 100 pages, so reading them in a day was no big thing - The Valkyries by Paulo Coehlo, Interbeing by Thich Naht Han, some crappy love story by Kahlil Gibran (disappointing to no end!) I also finally read The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan. Great stuff. Made me think a lot about my relationship with my mother, and her relationship with her mother.

Do you ever realize how much our inner voices just babble away? Pay attention sometime. There's always a conversation going on in there, some running commentary on all kinds of random things. A train of thought, y'know? I found out how just three days of near-silence cuts so much of that out. No personal relationships to dwell on, no one to impress with how much I know or my opinions, no uncomfortable silences that might mean that I'm not interested in the person sitting next to me or (gasp!) vice versa. Although my family thinks I've turned native, living in San Francisco, and that now I'm some freakazoid tree-hugging New Age hippie.... which is only a tiny bit true.... I'm probably saving a lot on therapy just by doing what I'm doing. Travelling. Sitting quietly. Standing on my head in a shack over a pond with water buffalo grazing nearby. Instead of paying someone $100 an hour so that I can sweep out the emotional cobwebs that have been accumulating since birth, just to find out that more cobwebs have built up since last week's session. Instead I get to be here! (Don't be too jealous Amy.... heh....)

So now some practical itinerary-update stuff. I arrived in Ubon Ratchathani near the eastern border with Laos this afternoon. Tomorrow I'm making a border run, simply to renew my 30-day entry permit. I've given up the idea of spending time outside of Thailand - I'd rather spend some time in a few places rather than running around all the time for 2 months. Sunday, I'll go visit the forest monasteries to the south, founded by Ajan Chah, Jack Kornfeld's teacher, and pay my respects to the place where his ashes are interred. Monday I head back to the Bangkok area to visit Maria and Ludo, two of the participants from the permaculture course at Whispering Seed. They live and work at Wongsanit Ashram, which is an activist training center. I'm curious about the programs that are run out of the ashram, and also to spend a little time chatting more with the two of them, since we seemed to never spend a good chunk of time together at Whispering Seed.

After 2-3 days at the ashram, I plan to head back to Whispering Seed for another 2-3 days, since they started the natural building part of the course two days after I left. I'd like to see what they're doing, and how they've adapted the building to the land so that I have basis of comparison that's not in California when I go to the course in India. Then a slow meander back to CHiang Mai, with possible visits to a paper-making village, hot springs, waterfalls, and mountainclimbing (nothing all that serious, more an extended hike). Anyone else peeing their pants in excitement over the Return of the King?? Yee-HAW!! (Allyn & Jodi, I'm praying that it's opening in Chiang Mai before I leave. Let me know as soon as you do.)