Homesick on Loy Kratong
It finally happened yesterday. After a month and a half away, I finally got homesick. I knew yesterday was going to be a challenge because it was (would have been?) the one-year anniversary of the first date with my ex-boyfriend. So I had that running in the back of my mind, imagining what we would have been doing in LA. Imagining going to the bar we spent that first night in, having beers, then walking home late down Sunset, talking, holding hands. I got to feeling very lonely and very far away.
I had to distract myself. Unfortunately, I chose to do so by reading a book a friend lent me the day before – Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck. I was pretty much begging to get sad about being away from California, right?
My next distraction was significantly more successful. Since yesterday was Loy Kratong we had a long table set up in the garden for shrine-making. Loy Kratong is a very important festival here in Thailand. For it, each person makes a little round shrine (called a kratong) out of a slice of banana trunk and decorates it with banana leaves, flowers (we mostly used orchids and marigolds), three sticks of incense and a candle. When it’s finished you float it down the river as a thanksgiving for rain and irrigated crops. But you also get to a make a wish!
So yeah, major arts & crafts time in the garden. The Thais made gorgeously complex arrangements of flowers and folded leaves. My kratong was pretty lame in comparison but I had fun making it. After dark, Caroline and I sent ours off from the side of her floating bar. The water seemed calm and happy beneath the full moon. There were dots of candlelight all along the river as the ones sent out further upstream drifted past. Perhaps it was the magic of the moment or the magic of the Mekong – and I know it’s silly – but there is a small part of me that wants very badly to believe that the spirit of the river heard my wish.
Tags: Nong Khai, Thailand
sandra_101
Well, even if you don’t believe, I do. And I will think of you and your wish, whatever it may be, when I meditate this evening. I will *ask* that your wish be granted.
This was beautiful, by the way. I can picture everything.