A smile from a Thai person
is worth more to me
than every sarcastic British twirl

A bow by a Thai monk
is worth more to me
than the logic of Dawkins

“if you truly knew what a single bow meant,
there wouldn’t be a time when you bowed
without bursting into tears of gratitude and devotion” – Ajahn Chah

Balmy nights in Chiang Rai
Dusty alleyways
fade into sandy huts and houses

Thai heat sinks into flesh and bone
This valley, between orange cliffs, is a warm bath

The heat is a ‘container’
A ‘container’ I could not find in London
A buffer against the bounce, the rip, the fray

The sun has seen it all before

Though I am not sure mothers in Palestine agree

The sun which calms me
Shines down upon destroyed Rafah

War has no heart
It kills you in the sunshine
Or happily in the dark

People in Thai villages with nothing
Supple in spirit and body
Cleansed

At Doi Inthanon are sakura
Cherry blossoms
Explosions of pink

Waterfall’s roar
Breaks me out of prapancha
Snaps me back into what matters

The richness of where the water flows up around, down, through, the world

The world is water

A blessing on our heads, in our veins, in the soil, in the luck, in the stories
In the fear of a storm

Sitting by the pool
Two French men, father and grandad
And the younger man’s daughter

Splashing
Exuberant with life

The French girl, all play and dream
A flash of thought refracts through her father’s sunglasses
Past his daughter’s splashes

Massage bends my back to a place beyond knowledge
A lizard hisses the kundalini hiss

I drank black milk all autumn
I was a grief astronomer
I played cactus well into winter

A dislocating angel
flies between appearance and change
The spirit’s here. Listen and enter

Stillness flowing
It’s flowing now

The heart thaws

Meditation is not bare attention
It is finding the salient feature in awareness,
The salient calm

In a Mandelbrot Set, the same recurring pattern deepens
a fractal process
opening, opening, opening

The salient calm can deepen too

Body revitalized by the heat
By the golden glow

Is this why Thai children have beaming smiles
As they prance by me on country paths?

The open road

Time to recover and be still
I did not realize how hurt I was