waywardcloud

Bangkok Exodus

Late March 2020, Issan

Friday and Saturday were just like any other day, aside from the mounting concerns over the virus seemingly changing the society day by day. Although the previous Tuesday when inklings came in that the language school would be shutting down until the scare passed over, my initial plans for leaving the city and staying at the temple began. Maybe it was delusion or aversion to jumping into the monk lifestyle, but every type of optimism that it wouldn’t be necessary, that they wouldn’t really shut everything down, got entertained. It seemed like it would be okay to continue living this lay lifestyle in the city and wait for everything to pass over.

Sunday morning, however, things changed drastically. The main source of my income, the only way to stay afloat in this expensive city (when compared to the other provinces in the country) originally said that she and her son would be leaving the city for business just for two days and would be back on Sunday. Turns out, she had different plans and just lied about her intentions. After enough badgering she finally admitted that she wasn’t coming back to Bangkok until all of this stuff passed, as she had three homes in various provinces. The worst part isn’t that she needed to get out of the city, but that she lied, and made it really difficult for me to get out of the city at the drop of a hat. It would have been much easier to have started planning all this on the Thursday when she originally told me she was just leaving for business. Shouldn’t be surprised.

So, frantically, phone calls were being made. Mind you, interprovincial travel was quickly shutting down. Couldn’t get a plane or bus ticket. After a few hours of calling, interspersed with packing everything I owned, finally some messages got through to an old host father, now monk. He managed to get some people together to come to Bangkok and transport everything to the temple in Issan. The plan was made around 3 in the afternoon.

The monk, with a friend monk, and two drivers left their temple at 2 am that morning and arrived in Bangkok about 9 am. Everything got packed quickly and the car was on the way out of the city by 10 am. The reason for rushing was that rumors had been floating around that the provinces were going to get shut down any day and access to them would be impossible. Being stuck in Bangkok with no income for an uncertain amount of time would be absolute hell. Getting out of the city was essential. Luckily there are connections around like this to help in times of need. We got into the temple about 5.30 that night. I listened to all my favorite songs on the ride, because after tonight, who knows? I might go straight into monk mode.

The entire world seems to be quarantined at the moment, which makes the situation a little easier here. If it’s necessary to be stuck somewhere, this is probably the best place to be. Out in the woods, focusing on meditation for hours a day and preparing to become a monk whenever it’s possible for monks to gather again without fear of getting the virus. Until then, it’s time to hone in on the practice and acquiesce to temple life.

Retreat on Samui

Early April 2019, Koh Samui, Thailand

Everyone gathered into the large hall for the last time that day. The speaker everyone had gotten to know piecemeal through the self deprecating asides peppered throughout his lectures had said earlier that anyone interested would have a chance to speak for the first time in six days. My expectations didn’t necessarily run amok about how this may be. Not anymore. Expectations used to be a blooming, beautiful flower, growing in abstraction out of the promise of future events. By this time the soil teetered toward lifelessness. Although appealing, these aren’t the kind of flowers meant for cultivation, especially in the present moment, especially at this place.

Right there’s an example of thought teetering toward abstraction, still fighting it off.

Everyone in four groups sat in the accustomed wobbly square shaped groups, rows and columns—boys and girls—a dividing line down the middle. Candlelight gave the hall a cinematic glow. Visions of an abstract Buddhist essence. Outside sounds of crickets and endless amounts of other insects spread across the island’s forest. How many people in this moment are aware of their breaths? Or is this the off time, the time to hang up the practice as if checking out from the office? The focus had to be caught up in some building wave of anticipation. This paltry stimulus was undoubtedly the most entertainment anyone would have had in the last six days, aside from the 4 am bats flying around the barracks as the waking light turned on and the 4 am morning bell rang. The minds deprived of all the pleasures they were used to getting were now mouthwatering at the idea of seeing, hearing, in some cases speaking the individual experiences that went on inside these familiar strangers’ skins. The strangest thing, in hindsight, was that I wasn’t even remotely expecting extreme emotional displays.

A French girl probably in her late 30s walked to the stage first. Just the other day, she had made eye contact and smiled at me because a shirtless Russian looking dude somehow drove his motorbike all the way deep into the retreat’s grounds, stopped near her, looked confused, and turned back the other way. More than likely he was drunk. Mostly everyone on Samui is, outside of this retreat. That day she didn’t seem French, or maybe she did, in hindsight. Funny, the obvious yet elusive things that consideration ignores.

She said a lot of things, most of them unremembered. She did talk about feelings, though, and how she couldn’t experience an identity outside of them.

A lot of the people following her remain in fading memories. One of them, though, that stood out, was the middle aged Indian man, who seemed to have an air of negativity surrounding him since the beginning of the retreat. Overall he seemed to be unaware of how he affected other people, or simply didn’t care. Either way, it resulted in the same, not so pleasant demeanor. The very first night, in the male barracks, someone had snored louder than anything I’d ever experienced. Not only that, but the person did it all night long. I made noise cancelling creations in the dark, deep into the morning hours, MacGyver style. Toilet paper band-aided into earholes, blankets tied tightly around eyes and ears. Even the next afternoon, when everyone tried to catch up on all the sleep that didn’t happen the night before, the same culprit made the same ridiculous noise. It was obvious that he had already slept the whole night. Did he really need more? At the expense of everyone else?

It was the Indian guy. People might have a tendency to find out who is responsible for their misfortune, even if the information will do absolutely nothing to alleviate the ailments in the present or future—no talking was allowed. Perhaps it’s a craving coming from Anger that’s ordered a covert operation to gain fuel for its particular brand of fire. He had money too, as evidenced by the fluffy zafu he’d brought to use, while everyone else used the worn down pillows and wooden mini benches provided by the retreat center to sit on. The personal zafu also doubled as a pillow for the man while everyone else chose to rough it with the provided wooden pillow and thin blanket. Choices make characters, no matter how much they ultimately exist.

He had a very somber attitude going up, but also had a nervous energy about him. It was pretty quick into the story that any anger toward him quickly turned into a pitying compassion, because it was very clear this man was suffering to a great degree, and all because of his own mind. The same boat everyone is in. The make up of his mind was informed by rigid expectations from his traditional Indian family, and the cultural assumptions he couldn’t seem to see as anything other than ‘the way things should be done.’ The gist of his story was that he and his estranged wife were very ambitious people. They moved to the United States from India to make a bunch of money. As money was the priority in their relationship, or so the story suggested, the couple decided to live on the opposing coasts to maximize the moneymaking. One thing led to another and the wife stopped returning calls, eventually informed the guy that she had met someone else and sent him divorce papers. Sounds like the hack drama plot that anyone going into a relationship nowadays should probably expect. The code of conduct must be different in Indian society, but a little bit of America can ruin anything once allowed into any crevice of a tender life. All in all it didn’t feel like it was the worst thing that could have happened. The man, however, told the story with brimming passion and bare earnestness, unable to fight off the weeping, barely able to contain the raging anger from throwing his tightened nerves into a chaotic flail. He asked a lot of questions to the instructors sitting to his side, but they simply looked at him, unresponsive. The beginning of this session started lighthearted enough, with jokes interspersed, but now the aura became dark, and uncertain. Everyone had drabbed themselves in loose fitting clothing, as recommended in the initial instructions to the retreat, but it felt like everyone wanted to uneasily pull the collars of their shirts to air out the stuffiness. It was an odd sensation of compassion and disbelief that someone at his age still acted like this.

After he was finished speaking, the trend from the following speakers seemed to be, again, lighthearted, but a tone of seriousness involving the emotional trauma seeped in to infect all the different people’s stories. A lot of the girls and women that went up to share their experiences spoke of cheating boyfriends, inabilities in being able to cope with fast paced lives and stress. So much of life, spanning across different age groups, is controlled by deep, wild, unfulfilling emotions. Even when people are given simple instruction and guidance on how to deal with them, it still seemed to be an impossibility, at least immediately. Simple instructions but difficult execution. Emotions find ways to disguise themselves and take control of the unmindful mind. If one allowed it to happen, he or she could live in an increasingly powerful emotional hell for the past six days. No writing, no speaking, no reading, no phones, no internet, no nothing. Just silence, the mind, the body. Still, given all this time, the only thing people could do was discover that there’s a raw and ugly open wound inside. The genuine emotions emitted out of those peoples’ beings is not something one sees often anymore. More often than not, it’s all simply done for effect. This was done without intention. It was a rare and powerful sight to see what goes on underneath most social veneers.