Tales from Joy – 2024 #2
Hello again, dear readers. Thanks for your heartfelt response to the first Tales, dears. Some of you will probably receive duplicate copies, since my readership file is a glitch-filled rat’s-nest and seems to have lost or omitted about half of the original recipients… let me know if you receive several copies, please. A couple of you shared your own bobcat and panther tales, and of having your experience denied (especially regarding the panther), by local experts.. I have to wonder if these officials are concerned about igniting the...
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Hello again, dear readers. It’s been an extraordinarily long time since the last installment, hasn’t it? This is because I dropped the ball last year, after about four Tales…I was pretending that no one really had time to read them, and that I was just too busy to write them. However, an astounding number of you have mentioned to me, without rancor but with an irrefutable intensity, that you do indeed WAIT to hear the next installment. My apologies to those of you who relate to that. An additional excuse for my lapse is the ever-quirky and...
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Hello again, dear readers. I don’t know if I can describe the way that I am greeted here, all day long…like a beloved auntie who has finally returned… I am the oldest member of this community and therefore Pa Joy**, which means Auntie Joy, to all. Some of these relationships go back decades. We traveled Thailand together with Khun Mae and shared some challenges, too. It was my birthday last week…and I tend to be a curmudgeon about holidays. So I wanted it to be low-key. I consider every day as a holy day… and sense a...
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Sawadhi kha, 🙏dear readers. My first day in Thailand felt quite significant, for myself and for the entire community. Some of you may recall from last year’s Tales: I reported a sense of physical and energetic deterioration in the S.D.S. (Bangkok) center’s vitality level.For one thing, Ajahn Chom’s work crew was spending all their time in the southern center, creating fantastic new water features and landscaping miracles every day. Meanwhile, the monsoons, pollution and extreme heat up in Bangkok take a rapid and unrelenting toll on...
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Hello again, dear readers. You all have reminded me why I write these Tales. Every year I experience prolonged labor and difficulty with Tales #1. My primary symptom is a sense of over-exposure… like I’m on YouTube giving birth. Then your responses come rolling in, almost immediately, bursting with the enthusiasm of shared confessions, and relief (this year) to be “not the only one” who is so damn crazy and strung out on watching the news, the whiskey cocaine of cellphone usage or whatever your hit parade happened to encompass in 2022....
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Hola, my dear readers. Harvesting veggies in the community garden I like to imagine each year is totally different from the one preceding it…. But I do seem to recall that the exact same thing occurred last year …hmmmm: I arrived here in the lovely town of La Paz (Baja Sur) and sloughed into a pleasantly vegetative state, setting up my little 1950’s kitchen, getting my drinking water, renting a bicycle…. And revisiting my favorite sacred spots… And same as last year, it took a few weeks and several sweet but persistent inquiries from...
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Heading south to SDS II, known as Bodhisattva Valley, we began to feel lighter and lighter. Nawng Joy, Aey and I have a way of sparking each other into silly happiness. Here we are at a lunch stop along the way. Yes, rice paddies are really that green. I packed pillows and extra towels and bedding into my luggage, in order to survive a week of sleeping directly on the cement floor like I did two years ago. And ear plugs, to drown out the snoring nuns in the next room, and barking dogs. And sheets of seaweed, cashews and supplements, cause...
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Hello, dear readers, or sawadhi kha. I’m here at the center now, in Bangkok. My dearest friends Nawng Joy and Aey picked me up at the fancy hotel where I was quarantined. They had spent all day, like many other days, in conferences about the future of S.D.S. now that Khun Mae is gone. Nawng Joy explained that my home here had been uninhabitable until VERY recently: i.e. just before I arrived. She had appealed to a young and wealthy Thai entrepreneur who is a passionate volunteer here at Sathien Dhamma Sathan, explaining that Pa Joy (Auntie...
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Greetings, dear readers…. From 30,000 feet up in the air! I realized, in the middle of this 11-hour flight, that there is another Tale to be told, between the Baja and Thailand (where I’ll be, in eighteen more hours en sh’allah). And this is my only chance to write it. Maria, wife of Odin, at the bird sanctuary I said goodbye to my sacred spots, took a couple outings with my host family, and taught a few more yoga classes to my “roomies” at the hacienda, After one final sunrise meditation, Maria drove me to the bus station. And later at...
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Hello again, dear readers. This will be, I suspect, my last Tale from the Baja. As is often the case with liminal experiences, (the frontier between two perceived phenomenon – e.g. sunrise, sunset, birth or “death,” as we like to call it) …my senses are heightened today, especially with the fullness of the moon and the prospect of leaving Mexico very soon. Visiting with the whales seems to have filled a deep longing that has been en utero for almost fifty years…since my husband Merlin and I forlornly released our dream of...
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Hello again, dear readers. Having shared the beauty of my landlord Clemente in the last Tale, I thought it would be fair to also feature Carmen and her family. The mom (Rosa, in pink) teaches ancient history at the university here. Dad tinkers with his enormous collection of antique clocks and watches. Yesterday, we all sat in the patio and I shared pranayama and yoga for a couple hours, while they took turns entertaining the indefatigable Alba Maria. I am writing this from Puerto Adolfo Lopez de Mateo, a town to the north of La Paz near...
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Hello again, dears. In case some of you looked at, but didn’t actually “see” my landlord Clemente, in Tales #3…. I wanted to give y’all another opportunity. … to understand the nature of my home here, a personal Museo Folklorico that he has created: Each corner has a theme, not unlike Wattle Hollow.left, music…to the right, social consciousness. I originally had plans to stay here in the Baja for a month. Obviously, that “plan” (5555; the word “five” in Thai is pronounced “ha”) fell by the wayside, because Thailand locked...
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Wattle Hollow is a relatively small retreat center (40 acres of woodlands on a mountainside in Northwest Arkansas) with capacity for 20 - 25 folks.