netted

Sometimes I think of my place in the world like a net, strings of connections between people and places and ideas, hovering above a great abyss. At the center, the most number of intersections. Saggy, stable, comfortable. Thats where the fish get caught.

At the edges, fewer connections hold taut. You might even think yourself in a whole new place, might think yourself divorced from that center point you once knew. The edge of the net is in tension, porous, less to hold on to. If you bounce too high, you might just fly off the side. When you're out there, its nice when a strand passes straight through, reminds you that the those two worlds you try to live in are actually just one interconnected fabric of an existence.


My esteemed friend Sam threaded his way through my life this past week, and how glorious it was. 

 

 We saw some temples of old (That Luang), some nightclubs of new (Romeo), and met a few rice farmers who, neither new nor old, persist in spite of it all.  Showing excited interest and stumbling over some Lao words as we rolled by their raised bamboo stilt shack surrounded by rice fields, I slowed the bike to a halt. They beckoned us in, and we ascended the ladder to the patio.  We blabbered away, me attempting to form coherent thoughts and corresponding speech, them thinking of the most simple way to say the most obvious things.  The rice harvest, we found out, will be beginning in a few weeks, as the rains let up and cool dry season begins. We shared some salted crackers we had brought, and they reciprocated with a freshly cut unripened papaya salad, a staple of the Lao diet.

Some of my thoughts on the Mekong are here. Love from this side.