want

We have less than 2 weeks left in Thailand....the countdown has been strange. We realized we only had 2 weeks to go while we were in the forests of Northern Thailand, visiting a hippy backpacker bubble where we easily could have stayed for a week. We left the next day because of how much more we want to do while we're here. There's just not enough time. Whenever one of us says out loud, "only two weeks," there's a mix of nostalgia, sadness, and a touch of relief at the prospect of returning home.

To be home will mean getting to wear more than the same three outfits over and over again. We can reintroduce simple steamed vegetables, Mexican food, and Italian food into our diets. Bike rides and grocery shopping on the weekends. Having weekends. And at some point, I'm going to take a bubble bath again. I'm thinking now of the hand-held shower heads fixed above toilets for showering, but also that cold bucket shower I had in the hills which wasn't honestly all that bad, since I did feel refreshed....but Oh, to have a bubble bath. The word "heaven" comes to mind.

It's easy to get caught up in these kinds of fantasies when I'm sitting in a cold, pale-blue and naked-steel bus station at 4:30 in the morning, after a 6 1/2 hour drive and awaiting the next 5 hours of travel. There's only dark around the silent station. We could be anywhere or nowhere (but hopefully somewhere close to the ferry station--they did tell us to get off the bus). I'm not uncomfortable right now so much as spacey and timelost, turning my thoughts elsewhere, like to how the money I've been saving by cutting corners will ultimately help me out in New York. Having a little extra in New York is worth the grunge in Thailand.

New York in 2 weeks...crazy.

Christmas time in New York, New Year's Eve in New York...I'm so happy we had the insight back in September to know how exciting it would be to end on that kind of note. From genie pants and muddy TOMS, tuk tuks and Thai temples, the smoke and steam of the tropics...there will be scarves and leather boots and my fantastically impractical lace gloves, champagne and the Soho art scene, ice skating and the vintage of Brooklyn...and of course, the people I care about who are spread across the United States and who I'll get to see again first in New York and then eventually in California...

I will miss Thailand, but I am also looking forward to what comes next, both in heading to all those things back home (more than just the small comforts) and to all that I want to start up--and continue--once I am there. The groundedness of appreciating all that I have and can nurture and sustain in my connections to people and education and opportunities for my future. I can't help but think about the future, even living as much as I am in the present moment (but I think my futurethoughts flourish the most when the present is something like this, a bleak bus station).

It is actually in realizing how I miss home and in discovering what can ground me, that makes me realize why this trip has been so important for me, beyond the opportunity to see other ways of living and stretch my perspective through the changing scenery. The missing, itself, is what I'm talking about.

Missing somethings or someones is necessitated by their absence, and--taking a small leap here--what is desire, if not a byproduct of absence? You can only desire what you don't believe you currently have. Desire--thirst and attachment--is an issue I wanted to explore on this trip, which made going to a place like Thailand, where Buddhism is the predominant religion, particularly attractive. As long as I have admired Buddhism, one of the principles I have found most intriguing is the intention to overcome desire. I have tried to wrap my head around that and to embody it in myself, because I believed that it was a higher mode of consciousness. Letting things go, letting go of my attachment, my wants, etc.

Suffering arises when thirst arises. Suffering ceases when thirst ceases. These are the second and third of the Buddhist Noble Truths.

But right now I am in a Buddhist nation, wondering if desire is one of the most important gifts I have in this life.

Longing is the core of mystery.
Longing itself brings the cure.
The only rule is, Suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
and what you want to happen
in time, sacrificed.

--Rumi

Yes, discipline is important for growth, and yes, all things in time are sacrificed, but--can't desire also be productive if you nurture it and think about it in the right way? Missing something, wanting something doesn't have to be frustrating or painful. If I am patient with my desire, if I understand it clearly, it can serve as an empty space for fire to burn: when I desire something, the mindful attention I give it has the potential to lead to action. There is something beautiful about the suffering of thirst...

Think that you're gliding out from the face of a cliff
like an eagle. Think you're walking
like a tiger walks by himself in the forest.

You're most handsome when you're after food.

--Rumi

Before I came on this trip, I was not writing as much as I wanted to, but I desired it. I wanted to practice writing regularly and the craving of something missing from my life motivated me. It's a small example, but my desire gave me the spark I needed to start a blog.

In a truly inspiring example of desire at work, I think of Lek, the creator of the Elephant Nature Park that Emily and I visited in Northern Thailand. She saw the suffering of supposedly holy animals (the brutality that elephants often suffer at the hands of humans is tragic), and her desire for their salvation motivated her to dedicate her life to the cause. She says that she will work on saving elephants until the day she dies. There are so many animals that she cannot save; her desire for their healing and safety is an unquenchable thirst. But it has turned her life into something awesome and beautiful. She has 34 elephants at her sanctuary and that is a staggering number considering how much work goes into their care. First of all, they each eat 200-250 tons of fruits and vegetables a day. They also go through the same issues of illnesses, neuroses, and injuries as humans do, which makes a full-time medical staff necessary.

Yet the interactions between humans and elephants in this lush valley does not feel laborious. It is a place full of love. I could see the evidence of old suffering on the elephants' thick skin, dark scars cutting into their deep wrinkles, some of their eyes long-ago blinded, punctured ears and the marks of hooks that went through the tops of their heads...but here, they finally had their own piece of paradise. They were given a second chance at life and at creating unique little tribes amongst themselves, through the desire of one tiny woman whose happiness depends on their happiness.

Maybe desire is a gift when you see it as a function of the divine quality within us all, love. If your thirst is a heartfelt desire born out of love, then it has a certain energy and truth to it.

Love is the way messengers 
from the mystery tell us things.

Love is the mother. We are her children.
She shines inside us, visible-invisible,

as we lose trust or feel it start to grow again.

--Rumi

Throughout my travels, I have thought just as much about love as I have about desire...the blurred line between desire and love...the way love moves me and moves everyone around me, whether I can see it or not.    

I definitely haven't met a single traveler who hides his or her love for life...there is little room for apathy in exploring the world. Perhaps that is much of its appeal for me. The travelers I have met love trying new things, they love adventure, and even if they don't love all the places that they have seen, they love something about their experiences there. As humans, we are all captivated by whatever in life feeds our cravings and fills our hearts.

It has to be love that has kept me engrossed in the last few days of jungles and elephants and buses and schedules. It is certainly not sleep (I am truly exhausted). I simply love what I am doing. Especially with the time restraints (the urgency of temporal reality is a great motivator as well), I am trying to absorb all that I can from my experiences before they shift yet again.

Lanterns and fireworks and cracked city sidewalks, giant tree canopies laden with vines, soft-footed elephants floating like dark storm clouds over grassy seas...

And the people, the fusion of generosity and greed, of reverent and rude, and everything in between. People really are people wherever you go, but--I don't know, maybe it's because there is a glittering, golden temple on every block, and all the fireworks we have seen, and I can literally taste the spices in the air--living with Thailand's people reminds me of being at a big festival every day of the week. Every day is a carnival. There is just such a raw madness--good or bad--with every interaction, in every facet of daily life. Even getting a taxi leaves me feeling like I've just gone through something...like last night, however many hours ago, just getting a ride to the first bus station was such an event. (Unless you have tried to get a metered taxi in Bangkok on a Friday night, there is really no simple way of explaining this one....it's just mad mad mad.)

That taxi episode was only hours ago...and the bus chaos that followed...here I am, absorbed first in Rumi and now in my writing...I really don't understand how I feel so wide awake and settled here in my seat on the ferry (there was a spacial transition sometime in my entry that did not seem important to note). I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be at the island, Koh Tao, in an hour (or two?) but all I see around us is a flat steel blue ocean and a clear sky on the horizon. Only a moment ago (or was it an hour or two?) I was on a dock watching the world shift into day with the dramatics of a painting. Pink blush on the horizon bleeding into a feathery gray curtain, rising above, and there, jutting at an angle right through the middle of the opposing shades, like a searchlight coming out of the ocean looking for the moon, was a streak of cerulean. Mystical Thai Madness.

There's a strange frenzy in my head,
of birds flying,
each particle circulating on its own.
Is the one I love everywhere?

--Rumi