wealth.

today i moved in to the shanti lodge. (ainsley's suggestion. GOOD call as usual, ainz)...

its like a little rustic vibe, feels like a yoga studio in santa cruz or something... little teak thai walls in itty bitty rooms with fans and a shared bathroom.
downstairs is this beautiful little vegetarian restaurant... shoes all come off at the door.
its definitely MY vibe.

i checked in and sat in the restaurant catching up on emails and eating tom yum soup... loving it already, when i got a call from my friend, Sam asking if i wanted to go to the grand palace and see the emerald buddha.

duh.

Sam is an extremely cool Malaysian guy that Jessica and I met on our mission back from Koh Phangang. We started talking at the coach station in Donsak and carried on for about 24 hours.
He grew up near Kuala Lumpur, to a Chinese mother and Indian father who found him in a rain gutter as a baby and adopted him.
He has traveled all over the world - most recently living in Finland and then hitchiking down through Burma and getting rejected at the Chinese border because he looked to gruff with a beard and long hair and machete.
(i wonder how china will feel about Rugged Barbie?)
He now lives near the Khosan Road in Bangkok.

He speaks very fluently 7 languages - Malaysian, Indonesian, Mandarin, Finish, English, Thai and an Indian language i can't remember)

We go back and forth between Indonesian and English when we are hanging out.

He took Jessica and I shopping to the cheaper, locals areas and we got great deals... well... jessica did seeing as she buys in bulk.
When she loves something she gets one in each color (literally).

Sam's last name is Prem - which means "love"... i LOVE this because i want to change my last name to Love.

See? Obviously meant to be friends, right?

Anyways - I decided to walk to meet him at the Khosan Road eventhough everyone said "no no no... its over 2 kilometers. you cannot walk."

watch me.

i slipped on my new gold havianas -- i retired the hot pink ones finally in Koh Tao after a solid year living in them-- and started walking down Samsen Street, the little gold bell on my anklette jingling with each step i took as i charged it up and over little bridges and rivers, past monks in orange robes, 7elevens, street vendors selling god knows what kind of animals and veggies thrown in a wok on the sidewalk, the huge national library and manicured park grounds and towards Khosan Chaos.

I met Sam at the end of Khosan and we started our walk even further away from my little shanti lodge guest house and towards the Grand Palace.

i didnt know what to expect, which is my favorite way to do pretty much anything. just go into it and get a gut reaction.

As we marched along talking about detachment and loss... traveling and experience... swapping words in Indo and English - i started to see the pointy gold tops of what looked like castles cropping up above trees.


It has been the queen's birthday here in Thailand so lots of people have been celebrating in the streets and there are leftovers from what was clearly a party last night. (Jessica and I definitely almost dove under the table of our pad thai restaurant when we heard the first fireworks going off, instinctively assuming it was a drive by shooting). HA.

It was nice to have a little shade from the tents that were still being broken down on the sidewalks from last night's festivities, because today it was SCORCHING hot, even for me, who is pretty acclimatized after living in indonesia for 5 months.

I intuitively stopped to wrap a sarong around my shoulders before we even crossed the street towards the entrance to the Grand Palace that was swarming with Japanese tourists, recognizing that i would need to practice "menghormati" - like i do in Indonesia... covering the skin up. Sam had an "OH SHIT" moment when he realized he was wearing a tank top and would not be allowed into the temple. Luckily there was a little stand that sold him a blue hawaiian shirt. he laughed at himself, explaining that he only recently cut off all his long long hair and beard, and now was in a hawaiian shirt and sunglasses and felt like such a californian.

We paid our entry fee and started to slowly inch our way in to the temple grounds along with all the other tourists. I was abruptly stopped by a military man who ripped my sarong off my shoulders and demanded that i go into the gift shop and buy a t-shirt because it was not appropriate.
which is INSANE because the sarong covers literally my entire body.
but i obliged and spent the 150 baht on a stupid kid's shirt with a gold elephant that says Thailand.
it hugged my body and in my opinion was WAY less appropriate but whatever.
I respect whatever they are going for here.

The Grand Temple is ostentatious to say the least.

HUGE
GOLD
and GLITTERY

everything was like this.
like a giant confetti explosion.

the walls surrounding the compound had hieroglyphic-style drawings, telling stories i can only imagine are equally over the top and fantastical.
it's like this amazing fantasy dreamworld.

We slipped off our sandles, dipped lotus bulbs in rose water and flicked in on our heads and entered the room with the Emerald Buddha, sitting on the floor before this gigantic structure like a golden pyramid with the green sparkling buddha at the top.



Everyone sat in quiet reverence of this ancient relic and treasured gift of Thailand.

Once again, i felt less vibration then i would have assumed i would have felt.
My guess is that it was the constant turn over in tourist energy coming in and out, gazing and capturing... maybe stealing a little piece of it's energy for themselves.

i was staring up at the buddha in a sort of daze pondering and pondering so many things. my thoughts seemed to leap and dance like the thai characters painted on the walls around me, telling an epic story i couldn't comprehend.

why do we treasure our treasures like this?

it reminded me of a glass jewelry case, locked and sealed, displaying the crown jewels in London... cameras and laserbeams from every possible angle... like the Thai guards with machine guns standing like statues around us at the palace.
I thought about my greatest possessions and how they weren't possessions at all..

They are words, songs, feelings and memories.


i closed my eyes and began to think about my new tattoo on my right ribcage - this 5 pillar blessing that i have decided i want to stand for
Safety
Health
Happiness
Love
& Gratitude...

although as i sat there with eyes closed next to Sam and about 65 japanese people, i rattled off the five decided blessings in my head and somehow combined safety and health into one and at the end, named "wealth" for the 5th.

wealth?

NO!

how weird is that? it came into my mind so naturally... so obviously, as though i had wished for this before.

I feel as though if anything i have done the opposite as of late - giving away my money and renouncing wealth in a weird way.

And yet there i was in front of this insane emerald buddha on a throne of gold and rubies and god knows what else... praying for wealth?
what is going ON inside my HEAD!?

I walked outside and slipped on my gold havianas again.
then i looked at my wrists and noticed the three new bracelets that have joined my arsenal of wrist-wear... all of them have gold in them... (the rest are all pieces of fabric or rope and of course a piece of abby's bandana she wore in venice beach)...
then i thought about my new bikini i bought in the islands... also gold.

this all had to be symbolizing something.

maybe... just maybe... i am beginning to love myself... honor MY temple - this body.

Maybe this is a start to something new in my life where i actually treat myself as a Goddess and adorn this temple with gold and respect it and care for it, instead of being reckless and throwing it around like i have done for so long.

Maybe i am finding the wealth of health... (its only one letter away- so its gotta be close in meaning, right?)

I was just starting to tell Sam all this as we exited the Emerald Buddha temple, but was cut short because it was time for us to do our final blessing prayers...

He went and bought us both our offerings. I didn't know quite what i was doing so i just followed what Sam did. He has been teaching me bits and pieces of what he knows of Theravada Buddhism.
I am supposed to watch a movie called Ong Bak to understand what would happen if the Buddha head was stolen... how Thailand would crumble if they didn't have this iconic saviour here.

We peeled open our white lotus flower bulbs.. one petal at a time until it was blossomed open.

We lay the flower at the feet of a golden statue.

We lit two sticks of incense on a fire burning to the side of the sculpture in a metal pot.

We prayed holding the incense and then placed it in little holes - much like we do in Catholicism.

Then we lit our little candles and did the same... placing them in a water-filled candleabra style thing after closing our eyes and praying again.

And finally we took the little piece of gold fleck from inside a sheet of wax paper and we stuck it onto a little buddha sculpture.

This reminded me of when i didnt want to pay attention in middle school and would scrape the silver off of a gum wrapper and use it to paint something (like a book cover or folder) silver.

We did this with gold... and i chose to put my gold fleck on the Buddha's right rib cage, where my new tattoo is... and finally a little bit on the third eye for consciousness and awareness.

Finally outside i shook off the very serious look on my face and laughed hard.

"SAM! i just realized that i have NO idea what i just did, but i was putting SO much intention into that prayer and blessing ritual."

He giggled and said "that was the prayer for wealth! you didn't know?"

OF course.

He explained to me that we were offering up the fire, the smoke, the gold, flowers to the Buddha so that he would return wealth to us. He said he thought i understood because of what i was telling him about last night.

I was explaining my philosophy about letting go in order to receive...
How the universe cannot give to a closed fist...
so when we are gripping around something that we are afraid of losing, we can never get better, when there is a world of new opportunity and possibility out there.

it's always the way isn't it?

when you let go of your attachments or cravings or desires... everything FLOODS in...

it reminded me of when i was at the Geodong Ghandi Ashram in Candidasa, Bali and i listened to this part of the sunrise puja they would sing/chant in english...
they said:

Thinking about sense objects, attachment to them is formed.
From attachment comes longing, and longing breeds anger.
From anger comes delusion, and from delusion, confused memory.
From confused memory comes the ruin of discrimination; and from the ruin of discrimination, a man perishes.

don't you always hear this kind of thing?

someone loses a bunch of weight and you ask HOW?
they say "i just didn't think about it. i wasn't fixated or obsessed and it just melted away."

or the ever favorite of singles
"it's right when i stopped looking for a guy that he walked into my life."

so maybe because i just ignore money and wealth... something is coming to me?

maybe wealth of a non-monetary sense which is awesome too.

so - i guess the moral of this story is stop stressing, start receiving?
...something like that.

now we're back to that darn "clearing the mind" trick these Buddhists seem to be able to do even with all the glittery gold around them.

don't they know that i have "SOMETHING SHINY DISEASE"!?!?
(this is what i call A.D.D. and why jamie used to compare me to a goldfish regularly.)

...ooh. gotta go. just saw something sparkle outside.