Dear Thailand

I am very sorry I cannot bring you any masks ka. We are all sold out due to Pandemic Panic Syndrome. Our local area has one case. He is now resting quietly at home in Santa Clara after recent visit to Wuhan. It is reported that he is not very sick so likely won't die. His chances of dying are only 2% with this virus. Compare to Bird flu 39.90% and SARS 9.6%. 

Please note masks are not effective protection. Not even the prestigious 3M brand respirator (made in China). Masks work best when worn by sick people to prevent fluids spraying onto others. Best protection is to wash your hands. 

I can also recommend a pair of gloves for the germs you might accidentally touch on the BTS, on public stairway banisters and doorknobs everywhere. I can get you two pair per box for only $6.49. 

And to prevent putting your hands to your mouth may I recommend this high fashion cone. Medium size will fit most humans. $19.29, but very satisfying and will increase your personal space to large American size. 

For prevention of the human spit to landing on face I recommend 100% polycarbonate face shield with flip up visor for only $3.99. 

I can also provide full coverage Tyvek suit with hood. Please place your orders by midnight Sunday 2/2/2020 San Francisco time ka.  3 p.m. Monday 3/2/2563 Bangkok time. 

The Man From Kuwait

The day before yesterday I returned from my final trip to Bangkok in this triptych of family land transfer events—first the funeral, then the court appearance (where I made my request to become my grandmother's executor) and now the stepping into ownership.

I was personally moved forward so profoundly by the role I was able to play that it felt as if I was being propelled by a global energy shift. I am not given to sharing new age analysis, but a youtube astrologer’s forecast was sent my way by a pivotal friend I made on the trip. You can watch it yourself here if you are so inclined and would welcome a positive spin on things (plus tips on how to navigate the potential shadow side).

It so captured my take on how I was experiencing the shift from 2017 to 2018 on an emotional level that it inspired me to write the story below about talking to strangers as I moved through the world on my international travels. I posted it to FaceBook where it was warmly received so I thought I would share it here as a sample of my experience.

Love,

Amanda

The Man From Kuwait

I have a story to share from my travels yesterday that expresses the serendipitous experiences I’m enjoying as a solo traveler. So am taking advantage of my awake jet lagged state to write it up.

I was standing in line at passport control in the departures terminal of Bangkok’s international airport. It was going to be a long wait and I was looking around for a possible conversation to pass the time before opening my book. The hall was filled with Asian people and a few sunburned Europeans. Next to me I spy a man in a t-shirt printed with rows of tiny flags of the world. At the top I can see half the wording —CAL Fullerton. I check out the wearer — a black man likely an American around my age staring into the middle distance. His energy is calm and neutral so I decide to risk speaking to him in English. 

“Did you go to CAL Fullerton?” I ask him pointing to his shirt. It takes him a second to tune me in.

“What’s that?” he asks and I repeat the question.

“Oh no my daughter went there,” he said smiling understanding now that I am making conversation (so rare these days). So we soon find out that we’re both going back home to California and he introduces me to his Thai wife who speaks little English so remains focused on the line ahead. He asks me enough questions to find out where I went to college, calculates how old I am (same age as his wife who is from Northern Thailand so I get that she’s from a poor farming family). They’ve had a long journey he says. He asks me if I have children and I tell him about the dogs I share with my ex. “A man I assume,” he says meaning he wouldn’t assume that at all, but he’s given me an opening. I take it. Then he is telling me that he sees a lot of lesbian couples traveling the world these days and was wondering what was up in my community. Not that I had a clue, but I am amused by his curiosity. So we speculate about the travel habits of “my community” before going onto what I do for a living and how he could definitely use a professional organizer. I laugh and give him my business card though he lives in LA.

By this time we have exchanged names. He is named after Ted Williams the baseball player he tells me. Then I notice that the man behind me is leaning forward as if he wants to join the conversation. So I give him my attention and ask if he wants something. He gestures to his ear and I think he might be deaf and half expect him to pull out one of those deaf alphabet cards. Black hair with a beard and light skin, Middle Eastern I’m thinking. He is also stooped over slightly and seems to have a bit of palsy. Ted picks up on his gestures.

“Oh you’re enjoying listening to our conversation,” he says. The Kuwaiti man nods vigorously and gestures for us to continue. At which point I realize that we have become live entertainment as I note the glances of a young blond woman who is not smiling.

“Where are you from?,” my new friend asks the Middle Eastern man.

He pulls out his passport and points to the gold print on the blue cover. 

“Oh Kuwait,” Ted reads and our new friend shakes hands with both of us. Then Ted tells me how he went to fight in Kuwait and noticed that the country was so rich he was asking himself why we were fighting for them when we could be helping some poor country. And the Kuwaiti man turns to him and says “thank-you I love you” and moves to give Ted a hug which he accepts with good humor and continues with his memories of how he really enjoyed being mistaken for a Saudi when he was in Saudi Arabia.

“You Korean?” the Kuwaiti man says to me suddenly.

“Me? No I’m Thai—half Thai and half…” at which point I pull my American passport up from the shirt pocket of my crisply laundered white travel shirt. At the words “I’m Thai,” I feel the attention of the Asian people now that I’m suddenly not a tourist. 

Then a voice calls to us from the next line. “That man is going to be late for his plane” he says and gestures at the clock and our line where Ted’s wife is up next.

“Oh you’re looking out for a fellow traveller,” says Ted, “that is good of you.” I notice that this speaker is also an African American man wearing a tourist t-shirt with a heart in the wording.

“Oh he can go ahead of us,” Ted realizes. Then he takes our Kuwaiti friend by the arm and speaks to his wife who lets the man by. By this time both lines of people are watching and there is a little murmur of appreciation of this act.

“You are an Angel that’s what you are,” says Ted to the black man as if the presence of divinity has just manifested into the room. “And you are an Angel too,” he says turning to me. I smile at his acknowledgement of my part in this story and for a moment I am proud to be an American for we have just displayed the positive side of American public friendliness and a sharing of our personal lives which often seems embarrassingly exposing of ourselves through the eyes of Europeans not to mention the Asian brand of privacy.

As I move through passport control into the terminal I note that the Kuwaiti man has joined a group holding a placard marked Dubai and I feel good about having entered a world full of Angels looking out for each other.

My Canadian Girlfriend

When I told my chiropractor that I was going to Vancouver to meet my Canadian girlfriend for the first time, he chuckled and said that in his guy world, men talked about having a Canadian girlfriend because it was better than saying they didn't have one at all and this way no one would expect them to bring her over for dinner. 

"She must give good e-mail," commented my friend Tian when I announced that I had bought my plane ticket on Facebook. 

"Do you know this woman?" asked my housemate Steve when he saw my trip to Vancouver marked out on the kitchen calendar.

"We've been writing each other for a year and three months," I said.

"Is she in prison?" he asked slyly.

"Good one," I said laughing. The idea of cultivating a romance through letter writing is somewhat antiquated these days. It harks back to a more genteel time of carefully penned missives, days of waiting for the mail, scented paper perhaps with a pressed flower enclosed. But in today's e-mail world, letter writing is taken to a day by day, even hour by hour sharing of each other's lives while at the same time creating a world of our own in words with references back and forth to our word history, our shared narrative.

She found me on OkCupid a cozier, more off-beat dating site than Match dot com. She was reading

profiles for a bedtime story and came across mine. When she saw that I had listed one of her favorite films in my list of favorites she wrote to tell me how rare it was to see that title mentioned. Bagdad Cafe was a quirky independent film about two disparate female characters thrown across each other's paths at a remote truck stop in the Mojave dessert. It holds a place in my heart for it's cross-cultural, cross racial lines, art based collaborative story of an unlikely friendship. I felt compelled to answer her passing comment. And of course I checked out her picture. She had a cute round face with brown collar length hair and big glasses. She was mostly dressed to be outdoors in cargo, shorts and hiking footwear. She was amply curvy, a body type that I enjoyed; given my skinny frame I wanted the luxury of padding. It was her no nonsense take-it or leave it presentation that charmed me for she bore no trace of body image issues. Plus she was three years younger than me and this slight seniority appealed to me. So feeling in a playful mood for story collaboration I asked if she would indulge me in a game to get acquainted.

"Let's pretend I fly in for the weekend. You meet me at the airport as you would a friend from college you haven't seen in 35 years. We were close friends then, but there was an unresolved attraction that was alluded to, but we didn't stay in touch. The first thing you would likely say to me might be "You haven't changed a bit." What would be the first five things you would tell me about your life?"

From her answer I was delighted to learn that she had been in a writing program and had had two short stories published. The detail of having once lived on a nude beach in the Kootenays intrigued me. Her parents were dead and so was her sister from cancer so I knew she had gone through some hard stuff too. She worked odd industrial jobs to keep a roof over her head and her cat's. She currently worked in an herbal vitamin plant. All of these details indicated an unusual person with a taste for the off beat experience. I replied in kind beginning with "I never did run away to the circus…" and we were off and running writing regularly every few days. 

She ordered a copy of my book and discovered my many essays on my blog. So she was way ahead of me in getting to know my opinions on life while I kept a little distance in order to better get to know her. From the start she was solicitous of positive vibes for difficult events of her life so I gave of my support on this astral plane. Her enthusiasm for nick names and references to favorite children's books reminded me of a girlfriend from my '20s and this irked me. She sent me things, cards, the CD with the song from Baghdad Cafe and a calendar that I actually could use, but a map of Vancouver sent my already cluttered desk into overwhelm, plus I knew I wasn't going to send her stuff so felt guilty. She wanted to talk on the phone, but I was way too busy while she lived alone. So we Skyped, but I tried to be dull and slow so as not to encourage her. It was clear though that she had a big heart and once we shed the nicknames we could get real. She expected acknowledgement for her birthday. That wasn't too much to ask though I was lazy in matters of card buying. I made her a card I pretended had been put together by my dogs with photos of me with each dog purposely glued askew to the card. I included also a black feather from one of our dog walks.  "A crow feather just what I always wanted!" she wrote back pleased that I 'got her'. 

Sheilagh, for that is her name, was from a family knee deep in psychiatric nurses, doctors and therapists. I had had my share of the language of analysis from my therapist mother so we understood what each had been up against with being so off beat in a family that judged one's sanity rather too closely.

After a few months she wanted to come to San Francisco to meet me and I told her not to. In fact I was a little harsh about it. I knew that such a visit could not be half hearted for someone to come from so far away just to catch a glimpse of me when we were only newly acquainted. I didn't want the responsibility of showing her a good time for my life was just too full at the time with clients, canoe team practice and all my household duties and meal making at home with my ex and the dogs. That she wasn't phased by me living with my ex counted in her favor, but at the same time maybe that indicated a screw loose on her part. Not everything could be sussed out by words alone.

She drew back at my harshness, but we kept on writing and eventually she forgave me and I apologized for the harshness. I had not had a lot of practice saying no I told her. We followed each other's lives for the better part of a year. She telling me of challenges at work, me telling her about my interesting client situations and household events. She would hear my stories and give them a little literary summation that entertained me and offered insight. While I commented on her work life and tried to be helpful. 

Distance gave her liberty to be affectionate, but it gave me reason to be resistant for the idea of a long distance romance with all it's expense and logistics just didn't seem practical. I continued to discourage her by telling her I no longer cared for sex with anyone save for fantasies about sailors. She sent me a picture of a "sailor" sporting briefs from a gay men's underwear catalog. I had to hand it to her for coming back with such humor. In further discussions I could see that she really did accept my domestic living arrangements as one I had consciously chosen and had no judgement about it. Our friendship thus far was solid. 

Distance Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

When I went to Thailand for my mud hut building workshop I had a sort of epiphany regarding our relationship. I told Sheilagh I would be gone ten days without a wi-fi connection (not having a smart phone). She also followed my frequent posts on Facebook and there was only one; I managed to upload a photo of a new outfit by tapping into a hot spot created by another mud hut builder on her phone. On the tenth day I picked up my e-mail. No one had written me except for Sheilagh. No one had seemed to care except for Sheilagh. 

"My Canadian girlfriend misses me," I told Cheyenne a fellow builder from Australia who was swinging in a hammock looking at her phone.

"Oh that's sweet," she said. She asked me about her and if we had ever met. I appreciated that homophobia no longer existed for the young for she was interested in the details as with any romance being all of 24. I told her no, that Sheilagh had in fact wanted to meet me but I had said no.

"You said 'no'? You bitch!" she exclaimed. I laughed at this youthful response. "I would have been on a plane in a second," she said. This gave me pause. Did young people have so little resistance to borders and distance that they would spontaneously cross thousands of miles to meet an online dating prospect? I had no need of yet another long distance relationship. I had a hard time keeping up with friends in Thailand and the UK plus all those scattered across the US. But my perspective had been jolted from my complacency and I realized that I had grown fond of Sheilagh, had come to count on her presence and interest. And I was further moved that someone who only knew me online would miss me so deeply that an absence of 10 days had made her anxious for my return. Could a love relationship exist on nothing but words? 

That night I bought her a Christmas present — a wallet with many zippered compartments from our representative of a local crafts guild of refugees selling hand sewn bags made from naturally dyed cotton. I also bought a different zippered bag for Catherine whom I still cherished as family and was going home to for Christmas celebrations. I included in my package to Sheilagh a card from Bangkok and soap from another entrepreneurial endeavor of the mud hut builders. She received it with recognition that I had stepped up my appreciation for her.

Meanwhile I continued to meet women on OkCupid hoping for someone more local, but they either never wrote back after the cursory though pleasant coffeehouse meeting or annoyed me by testing me for deal breakers. The whole online dating thing was annoying me. People just didn't seem interested in getting to know me, but in how well I might fit into their parameters and world view. And some were so inept in writing skills I felt compelled to reject them myself. I reported my annoyances to Sheilagh and she reported that she too had found none of her dates interesting enough to pursue. 

I buried myself in a building project of which I sent detailed reports to Sheilagh that would bore most as I described wall building and reported the finding of the dried up corpses of dead rats. She sent me her cat's toy mouse to guard against further intrusion by live rodents. Then she sent me pictures when she was visiting her older brother on Salt Spring Island for Easter. And another of the view from the ferry crossing and one of a chicken from his back yard farm inviting me to visit. Plus a few more of the tiny house her brother rented to transitional types. This Salt Spring Island farm of her brother's was quite the place I thought.

"When's a good time," I wrote back. Then it occurred to me that I could go. Vancouver was not after all very far in terms of my recent world travels. It was only two and a half hours by plane and thankfully did not involve a different time zone for I was having a hard time recovering from jet lag in my old age. She also said she would take a few days off if I came. My unexpected announcement that I would come and see her threw her for a loop. I fixed a date for three weeks out and specified that having only enough to spring for airfare I would have to avail myself of her couch. This sent her into a frenzy of cleaning for she rarely let anyone into her apartment, only those who could appreciate its artistic abundance. Then she called me honey. 

"Does the default endearment really have to be honey?" I asked still prickly about traditional terms of romantic engagement. I suggested Dahling in the manner of the silly British show Absolutely Fabulous. But maybe I was being too British in my reserve. I began to question why my heart was so locked up. There was a time when I threw myself into love with all the obsession that I now reserved for shoemaking and building projects. But those adolescent like obsessions were mostly projected onto women I didn't know and was trying to make into something I longed for. This did not always turn out well. So I was cautious for I did not know what my natural inclinations were with eyes wide open so to speak. And I wished to maintain our creative edge, not take up traditional scripts. She called me Deer. I wrote her back with "My Moose Deer Canadian girlfriend," and signed it "your American girlfriend where the Antelope play". She loved that.

"Dear Honey Bee" she wrote sticking to the animal theme, "auto text just made that Horny Bee". Horny Bee? Auto text innuendoes made me laugh and this one woke something up in me as well. We might as well go for it I thought. With only this one chance we should have no regrets about not having explored every possibility of being in the flesh as it were. This might be our one meeting. At any rate it would only work if we stayed firmly in the present.

"I am not as fit as I was when I was first going to visit you," Sheilagh wrote as the trip grew closer.

"Dear Ms. P., I am hoping you are quite pleasantly plump, the better to pillow with," I responded. She immediately inferred the reference to pillow talk, was delighted by my preferences and proceeded to feast at a buffet she was attending. I was pleased. I could not be with someone who didn't eat regularly and often.

And in telling me how much stuff she would have to rearrange to make me a bed on the floor she asked if I would mind sharing her spacious queen size bed. "I was thinking same," I wrote and we decided we would go directly to her home from the airport and have our way with each other. I told her too of Steve's suggestion that she was living in a prison.

"Yes," she wrote, "we have done the time and now we will do the crime."

Border Crossing Lesbian

When I arrived at the Canadian passport check the immigration officer asked me what was the purpose of my visit.

 "Love," I said with a smile. He laughed and said he hadn't heard that before and proceeded to grill me in a friendly way.

"Are you visiting friends? What will you be doing?"

"Yes and we are going to Salt Spring Island," I said remembering this magical name. This seemed to fit my outfit given my black suade vest over a red checked pirate shirt, my signature Australian leather bush hat on my head and waxed cotton jacket over my arm. He stamped my passport and wished me a pleasant visit. 

I came out of customs from a side door, the special Canadian Airlines door so stood looking for a few moments at the crowd. Soon I saw her coming towards me talking, looking just like herself. I gave her my best lesbian hug, gently squeezing her in a full body massage held for a beat longer than customary. 

"Thank-you," she said and I thought she meant for the hug. "Thank-you for coming". 

"You are smaller than I imagined" I said for she was about my height.

"So are you," she said and we began to walk towards the exit.

"Can I help you carry anything?" she asked. I had just a small bag on a luggage cart and a back pack.

"You can carry my hand," I suggested placing my hand in hers. And so we made our way out to the Sky train. The sun was shining on my afternoon arrival though it had been scheduled to be overcast.

It wasn't far to her stop in one of those transitional city neighborhoods of low rent older buildings and a hipster coffee shop edging in. She had told absolutely everyone of my impending arrival, she said, so when we ran into her friend Al, a friend I had not been scheduled to meet I felt this was a fortuitous occurrence that would carry the weekend.  And he was pleased to meet me too and didn't keep us long. 

Soon she was letting me in the door of her apartment and it was indeed abundant with her things. She had told me how sparseness reduced her to tears in those characterless, artless, bookless homes. I had assured her I liked having lots of things to look at. And she did indeed have most of her walls covered in framed art each chosen for its own merit not just to "go with" anything, plus collections of treasures on table tops and bookcases arranged to make statements of their own. Her many bookcases filled with literary books I recognized and many unknown to me. It was a small apartment for such a life rich in possessions, but I was used to sizing up collector homes and my professional eye soon saw that what many would see as clutter was perfectly functional. The apartment had its own order as her mother had stated when she was young. And it was organized into appropriate living sections with only an overflow of coats on the back of a chair that fell over when I added mine to it. I picked up the chair, rearranged the coats and sat down on her home made couch admiring the rock solid sturdiness of it. There was a box of chocolates tucked against the arm. I opened it.

"Watch out for one's with bites in them," she warned. I picked one of these up, looked at the revealed soft center said "This looks good," and ate it. She laughed and turned her head away slightly in embarrassment perhaps. "That's one of the advantages of living alone", she said. Then said she needed to lie down after all this excitement. So we had a nap and then got to hugging and I kissed her thirstily as though emerging from a long drought. 

"Well that broke the ice," I said as we got ready to go out to dinner and the documentary movie she had picked out for us at the film festival in town. The film was sold out so we came home and had our way with each other and again the next day (in case you were counting). And I would look at her and see the familiar face I knew from pictures, but also the face I didn't know; the face not presented to the camera. She had one that would look at home in another era, a vintage face behind those modern glasses. Her movements too were something to discover, quick and efficient, but leisurely when we were not catching a train. The cadence of her speaking voice fit the voice I knew from her letters, but the pitch and timbre of it I was still getting to know. The novelty of these additional features adding to my pleasure.

Salt Spring Island

In the meantime I enjoyed Vancouver. Canadians struck me as remarkably friendly. It was so odd seeing people who looked like Americans, but were, in fact that wonderfully progressive and sensible northern neighbor.

"I like your hat," people told me, "I like your coat". Those two items that made me look suspicious in my own neighborhood made me feel at home in Vancouver. "Canadians love everyone", Sheilagh assured me. And it was not because they were a homogenous population. I was surprised to see so many Asian people living in this town. 

That night we went on a dance and dinner cruise down the Fraser river which favored us with a lovely sunset. We were joined by her best friend from grade school and ex boyfriend from art school who was now gay. A lesbian couple, older than us, sat down at the next table and when I asked how long they had been together, they said "20 years".

"We've been together two days," I said enjoying the effect of a good romantic story. 

I had also met her middle brother Bob the psychiatrist who rode down to meet us on his bicycle for a coffee after tai chi class. When I mentioned my clients he wanted my professional opinion on his sister's home. This annoyed her intensely when she asked what we talked about for all of two minutes while she was in getting coffee. 

The next day we took the ferry through the Gulf Islands. The sun gracing us in a landscape of such beauty I was in awe. Another smaller ferry took us to Salt Spring Island which had an atmosphere of long summer days by the water's edge with all the wooden piers hanging over the water. 

We were met at the bus stop by Lois, her ex-sister in law who offered us a bag of hot donuts to welcome me. I was feeling like a visiting dignitary. Sheilagh had clearly  been talking about me and was now introducing me to every significant person in her life. Her older brother David came to pick us up in his truck shouting out the window "Hey crazy cat lady" when he saw her. We wandered through the farmer's market filled with stalls of artisan crafts and gourmet foods. I was impressed by the caliber of the goods made by these local artists; it was worthy of a juried show. Clearly Salt Spring Island was something special to draw all this talent. Sheilagh said the island was why she had moved to Vancouver so she could come any time as she had been doing since her brother moved there when he was 19. He had a blasting business blowing up rocks mostly for construction. He commented as we drove through the rural countryside with its roller coaster hills. 

"We are now entering the Tofu curtain," he said. He pointed out a neighbor named Rainbow walking alongside the road. 

"What does she do," asked his 12 year old daughter from the back seat.

"The usual hippie things, massage, herbal remedies."

He took us to Kismet Cafe a coffee shop in the woods to see a sample of local inventiveness. It was full of scavenged architectural details worked into the walls and garden that made me want to look closely to see how things were put together.

David's own home charmed me with its backyard farm and chicken coop plus a glorious tiny building made of rogue logs gathered from the water, runaways from local mills. The logs had been stood upright and caulked together making a square hut. It had a living roof of grasses. This unusual hut was his sauna which we would later make use of, Sheilagh having built a fire in the wood stove as soon as we arrived. David's daughter making us a dinner of quinoa and veggies.

My trip was purposely short so no one would have a chance to get tired of me I reasoned. While waiting for the bus to the ferry which would take me on to the airport the following day, I talked to Sheilagh for quite a long time about how uncertain my future was with all the plans Catherine was making as she visualized different scenarios for her own future as well as options I had for living in Bangkok, or traveling for a bit. This was why I held so firmly to the present to keep the chaos from exploding my head I explained. We had succeeded in not speaking of the future, nor did we make further plans, satisfied that we had wrung out of every moment of our four days together all that we could soak up. But we would, of course, still write. 

We held hands on the Skytrain all the way to the airport no one giving us a second glance those most tolerant Canadians. Then shared one more hug and kiss, before I walked through the gate. 

"Thank-you for coming," she said ever the polite Canadian. 

"Thank-you for having me," I replied. And as we returned to our correspondence I felt my previous prickly resistance and caution drop away now that I had fathomed her realness. 

A few days later she sent me a link to a dating site specifically for Americans who wanted to hook up with Canadians in advance of a Trump presidency. 

"I'm such a trendsetter," I said.

The Mud Hut Building Cure

Details of my trip to Thailand, the political angst therein, my own life path at a crossroads and the all women mud hut building workshop I attended.

To The North

The only people who take the sleeper train to Chiang Mai are tourists, monks and government officials. This Victorian mode of transportation now ranking higher in charm and nostalgia than the faster deluxe motor coaches that ply the new highways or plane for those really in a hurry. I could think of no better way to travel than to be lulled to sleep in my own bunk with panorama window overlooking the rice paddies after enjoying a meal brought to me from the restaurant car. 

On this leg of my journey to Northern Thailand I shared my compartment with a young Czech woman traveling alone. We had so much in common regarding off grid living that I was soon showing her pictures of my homemade composting toilet I kept on my iPod. These days I seemed to have more in common with young people than my own peers. It is the young who realize that our modern Western way of life is no longer tenable.

The women's adobe building workshop I was headed for would draw similar seekers of sustainable living solutions both Thai and foreign. I heard of the workshop through Pun Pun Farms a sustainable outfit I had discovered through the international earthen building network Kleiwerks six years ago. I had already taken an adobe workshop from Peggy and Jo her Thai farmer husband who had brought adobe building techniques to Thailand after viewing the pueblos of Arizona. This cross pollination of interracial couples fit right in with my own world view. Together with the International Women's Partnership for Peace and Justice we would build a house for another non-profit that served to support ethnic minorities students. What I used to know as hill tribe people. Still marginalized by not being granted full Thai citizenship they were also teased by fellow students for their accents and tribal background. And, being far away from home, lacked a supportive living arrangement. It was the aim of this organization to offer such support and thus the house we would build.

In Chieng Mai under the clock tower I was to meet my ride. Beneath the clock two woman sitting at a coffee shop table looked at me expectantly and that was how I met Jeab whose house we would be building. The other woman Nuch, also Thai, was a workshop participant too. Soon we were joined by Tanya, a Russian living in Bangkok and Susanna who arrived by tuk tuk dressed in the traditional clothing of  her home in Malaysia—a tunic over pantaloons—which she would also wear while building topped with a wide brimmed army hat. 

We jumped into the back of one of the ubiquitous red pick-up truck taxis of Chieng Mai and were on our way. Along the way we picked up more Thai women—Noi who had a compassionate face and was retired and Pom a young woman accompanied by her mother who sported a natty pork pie hat. Mother only stayed with us for a day or two, but Pom would throw herself into this workshop with a notable work ethic. Building a mud house was on her "bucket list" she told me later. I soon learned that Susanna was an avid bird watcher as well as a writer. While our Russian companion merely laughed at every question I asked her before finally offering that she was an architect. She would also sleep a great deal. She had not been able to sleep in Bangkok, she said during a meeting at the halfway point of our workshop. Indeed she would soon move to Chieng Mai.

Amidst the Rice Paddies

An hour outside of the city we arrived at a small farm of rice paddies with a humble wooden house on stilts such as my grandmother had lived in, but not quite as big. On the edge of the first rice paddy were two tiny wooden houses built in modified Thai style which appeared to be quite new. It was there that we were to stay and being the first to arrive we had our pick. Without discussion Susanna, Tanya and I settled ourselves in one house and three of the Thai women took the other. The remaining guests would stay in the two houses at the adjoining farm and have a bit of a walk to their meals everyday. 

The farms had been bought by rich Thais from Bangkok, Jeab told me. The flood of 2011 had prompted many city folk to think of investing in both an out-of-town getaway house and a source of organic rice. Now these new houses were no longer occupied as the city people became busy again and did not find time to come so far north. Jeab had arranged with the owners to rent the houses for the duration. She and her crew of Karen hill tribe students had spent many hours cleaning and setting up beds in preparation for our arrival.

Late that afternoon we had our first meeting to learn everyone's name and a little of their story. There was  Lek and I-tim (ice cream in Thai) who were an adorable mother daughter team from the south of Thailand and wore matching outfits everyday. Nodoka from Japan who said this was the nearest mud house building workshop she could find. Sonya from Hong Kong who was a weekend farmer. Ard, a farmer's daughter from Thailand living in the UK and married to a Kiwi. Khin and Wawa two Burmese women. Rung a yoga teacher from Bangkok who would hold our early morning yoga sessions. Non a documentary photo curator living in Chieng Mai. Knot whose good English she attributed to her love of American movies. The quiet but thoughtful Puk. Eh a writer and teacher who taught a class in local self reliance. Lisa an American woman from Chatanooga living in Bangkok and Molly from Sonoma, California whose parents had grown up in Bangkok. We were joined by three Karen girls Om, Pao Chah and Pegk who wore matching brimmed hats of a floral print and our teachers Peggy, Lisa from Scotland who was married to a Karen and spoke a smattering of border languages including Burmese, Jeab, Ginger and her French girlfriend Laetitia. Many of the paying participants spoke of wanting to work with their hands. So immersed were they in modern jobs.

Each morning we would rise for yoga, followed by breakfast, work on the house until lunch, then resume at 2 p.m. after the midday heat. (Later we had to forego yoga in favor of working during the cool part of the day and take a longer lunch.) The first day we learned to make bricks from mud and rice husks with a little sand added mixing it all together in mud pits with our feet. There were already 3,000 bricks ready to go that had been made by Jeab's students so we lost no time making bricks. And were soon laying the first course right on the cement foundation using the mud mortar from the mud pit. Bricks were passed along in a fireman's brigade and mud was carried in sturdy rubber buckets. We all helped each other.

Someone spotted a snake; I saw it too and we chased it into the bamboo grove by the stream. And I realized that I had lost my childhood fear of snakes. That dread that gripped and paralyzed me. Later I remembered the integration work I had done with my soul retrieval. In returning to the land of my childhood in this visceral mud covered way I could now truly inhabit my adult life.

On the second day of wall building, Khin the Burmese woman suggested that I stand on the oil drums to get to the top of

the wall and she would hand me bricks. "I am fat," she said by way of explanation and so I climbed up onto the barrel. On another occasion I worked with Wawa who gamely placed the bricks while I felt compelled to coach her on her technique. And as we worked together we got to know each other.

There were no shirkers. Everyone showed up and did their part. Some with more talent than others, but nothing was so difficult that we couldn't do every part of it. And though I thought that I was working very slowly the walls were going up amazingly fast. At the end of every day we would take pictures of what was accomplished usually with a pair of women in the foreground doing a yoga pose. There was something very feminine about this choice of presentation. And no one had to care how they looked. At the end of the day we washed ourselves and the buckets in the stream using handfuls of straw as a scrubber and then went for a swim in the pond.

Random Angsts of Existence

The temperature got hotter as the week progressed and one day I came to a dead halt halfway down the path to the stream. The 100° heat had leached out every last thought I had and left me with a sort of existential blankness. What exactly was I doing with my life I had been wondering? What could I be doing with my life going forward? But nothing came to me.

Back home the recession had given my business such a pummeling that 2013 was my worse year yet even with the emerging recovery. And my relationship had essentially been stamped expired (though we would continue to make a companionable life together). While some of my long time friends were planning on leaving the Bay Area given that the high cost of living had squeezed out all but the moneyed elite of Silicon Valley. In this atmosphere my life had somehow run out of meaning and my contributions deemed monetarily trivial, nothing more than a series of antiquated analog hobbies i.e. dressmaking, carpentry, bicycle repair, gardening, storytelling in various mediums and now shoemaking. Skills geared towards an obsession with a post-industrialized society that never came. (I had attached myself to this peak oil narrative in order to feel useful until I figured out how to weather old age and die without lingering. Starvation being my choice.) 

Thailand, the country that had given me Buddhist serenity, pride as an uncolonized nation and resourceful self reliance, was in trouble. Some of my contacts in Bangkok used the term "failed nation" in reference to its possible futures. I had come to Thailand to figure out what would emerge from the now five months protests aimed to shut down Bangkok. But the Thais I met had no more clue than I did what would be the outcome. 

The State of Emergency status invoked in February, after some minor violence between opposing sides of the protest, had given me a nice discount on my plane ticket though and the plane from Taipei to Bangkok was only half full, mostly with young Thais. It had been a pleasant time to visit. The traffic in Bangkok was noticeably diminished and the streets devoid of tourists leaving the restaurants and shopping malls half empty. Without the distractions of business, the occupants had been left to themselves to think things over, but seemingly with no words with which to think. 

Graced with the longest ruling monarch in world history—a King so revered that he brought to mind the Dalai Lama—and a political profile largely influenced by royal patronage and marked by military coups, nothing in modern Thai history had prepared the people for the compromises and negotiations of self rule. All that was known was unity under a benevolent King with Buddhism as a moral compass. To be Thai was to be gracious and avoid conflict for karma had determined one's existence and nothing was really worth fighting over—until now. The Thais I knew felt threatened that the Shinawatra family in power  were vying to depose the King as a unifying figurehead while changing the laws to allow ever more concentrated power for the prime minister, currently the sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, who was self-exiled in Dubai to avoid corruption charges incurred during his term as prime minister. In their separate camps the ongoing rhetoric in Thailand was marked by the loud voices of extremists, divisive jokes and insults delivered to each other by a polarized populace favoring different cable TV stations. 

It was in fact not unlike what had become of democracy in America, but at least we had had two centuries of dialogue and history that had offered some sense of what was possible, some agency in this thing called democracy. And we also had state rule which could break down further into city ordinances. The banning of plastic bags from a city was enough to keep its citizens engaged in the democratic process. A process we learn at a young age in the electing of a class president in high school and in the decision making of after school committees. But not in Thailand where such lessons had not existed, at least not in my day, and centralization meant that every last policeman throughout the provinces reported to Bangkok, as did every other government official.

From an economic perspective I saw it as a struggle to transform what was essentially an economy of slavery to that of individual prosperity. For the price of rice on the global market had kept those in the provinces poor. So poor that they had essentially, until the last generation, remained peasants with little hope of upward mobility. This gap between poor peasant and the upwardly mobile city dweller had allowed Thaksin to earn the loyalty of the poor by offering progressive policies (badly executed and straining limited resources). With his ultimate goal being to concentrate power as prime minister so he could further privatize Thailand's resources for his own gain. I was reminded that this ongoing struggle with the pitfalls of democratic capitalism giving over so quickly to corpratocracy was happening all over the world. 

The Hand Made Future

In the heat of our workshop days, I stood on an oil drum looking out into the rice paddies and the hills beyond. All these thoughts of the future pushed to the edge of my mind leaving me with a vague feeling of existential angst. Eh, my building partner for the hour, looked up at me and asked cheerfully in English "What do you need? 

"I'm looking for the meaning of life," I told her. 

"Oh that you can find everywhere," she said with a smile as if it were in the very air we breathed. 

I would soon learn that Eh and I had more in common than I had thought possible—a sense that the solution lay in localized self-sufficiency, a desire to teach others, tarot cards and New Age spirituality. The world having gotten smaller she had just as much access to the same books and ideas as I did. I would continue to be surprised at what many of us had in common—a desire to experience a handmade life, an eco ethic of anti-materialism, a willingness to work together and get along with peoples of all nations. Each day we worked together, ate together and shared living space as we devoted our efforts to this single task of house building. 

Photo by Lisa Thom

By the second day the walls were finished and on the third we installed the doors wedging them in with a cob mixture of mud and straw. Once the windows were installed we could plaster the walls inside and out then apply an earthen paint. All in 8 1/2 days with few tools and the hands and feet of 30 women.

In the evening we would gather in the dining area under the main house where the wifi signal was and log onto Facebook. Facebook had become so ubiquitous that we were all thoroughly addicted, eager to post our updates for the day. It was the only thing about our little community that I questioned. Here we would work together all day, but at night we still wanted to trade comments with people back home. I missed the distance I could get by leaving home. I missed the long discussions I remembered from evenings at previous workshops and the visibility of books everyone was reading and how both created a group understanding of emerging new perspectives. That was only five years ago. 

By the middle of the workshop we had begun to friend each other on Facebook. And with all the tagging and posting pictures of each other, I no longer felt a need to report anything since my friends at home could see me happily posing with all my new mud covered friends. I could wait to report my experience and give it the perspective of time. This skill left largely undeveloped by so much breaking news reporting. Only Susanna with her feminist training and writer's mind could beat me to these bigger perspectives which she now applied to the story of the missing Malaysian airplane duly analyzing all the speculations and conspiracy theories in terms of our own wishful thinking. Some even checked their phones at the building site. When one of my Facebook contacts watching her stream came to realize that a childhood friend from Chatanooga was in fact attending the same workshop as I was I was duly photographed and posted as proof. This coincidence somehow leaving me unimpressed; so often did this happen these days. Facebook, which had been my life for two years, was now somehow an ersatz reality next to our daily immersion in mud. Mud that I spread over my skin instead of sunblock. "Clean dirt" I told Lisa from Chatanooga who did not like getting her feet dirty. Every day I washed the mud from my clothes and dried them on the line.

In the last two days of the workshop we adorned our building with feminine touches. Jeab pressed ceramic medallions into the walls—round tiles painted with floral motifs. In the front bedroom Knot and Rung created vines of cob plaster climbing the walls. And on the curved walls of the exterior Tanya, our Brutal Russian artist as she called herself in a photo caption, fashioned a full size tree out of rocks and colored tile that she labored over to the end when we had all packed our bags. 

In the wrap up at our last meeting it was obvious that people had been profoundly moved by the experience. Awed that we had managed to complete a viable house in so short a time for people we knew who would actually live in it. Wawa said she was surprised to discover her own strength and ability though she had never done such work. Lek commented that she was now confident that her daughter could look after herself in the world. Om, one of the Karen girls, thanked Molly for teaching them to swim. And Molly offered thanks to the earth and the pond, the cooks and everyone who had made the workshop possible. Nodoka was so overcome by emotion she could only offer a syllable then gave up. Khin mentioned that she had worried about her sick puppy at home, but had enjoyed learning to build. Tanya said that she was not normally impressed by non-professional architectural work, but in this case she was. Susanna spoke of how so many of us likely came to this workshop with unresolved problems and issues, but in this community experience together, we would likely go home and find some shift had happened. This prompted me to say that I had already benefited and been filled with hope for Thailand after seeing how so many from disparate classes and levels of experience and education had been able to work together in harmony. I had made many friends with my little dances during the break, my yearning in Thai for barbecued chicken and my confidence at building. 

When I got home to Bangkok I showed my Auntie Ah Pahdt the pictures of the house being built; she already knew of the

coolness offered inside an adobe building and she told me she had bought land in the very same province where the workshop had been. This seemed too serendipitous to be mere coincidence.

"Would you like me to build you a mud house?" I asked her ratherexcitedly. She didn't say anything but she did seem to hear me. My hands, already hardened by a lifetime of making things, were burnished like polished wood from the textured mud; my feet too had benefited. Mud hut building agreed with me. The weight of the bricks and the stickiness of the mud had worked its way into my tactile memory so firmly that I would think of the house as a part of me and I of it when I saw pictures of the roof being put on after we had left. The profound satisfaction of having done something real lingered with me. I could well imagine building more houses. 

Three days after I got home to California I had my Honda wagon loaded up with about ten boxes of books from a client job. Driving home in stop and go traffic I had to slam on the brakes as the SUV in front of me stopped at a light. But my car was so heavy it skidded into her bumper dislodging her muffler and leaving the hood of my car a mess. After we pulled over and exchanged information I wired her muffler back up for her, but I knew my car was toast. It was too old to be worth fixing though I had before gone to great lengths to keep it on the road as part of my frugal stubbornness even after Catherine had offered her Prius to me to drive (after she bought herself the new all electric Leaf). But curiously that little bump seemed to detach me from everything I thought of as my identity and my life. I saw clearly that all aspects of life were temporary and I would benefit from treading lightly. 

Just as Susanna had described I did feel a shift in my personal landscape. A restoration perhaps of the serenity and grace I had grown up with. Somehow the house that was now a part of me and my own labor on it in the climate of my childhood had cured me of an existential homelessness I had felt since I left Thailand at ten. I felt curiously light of being. It no longer seemed important what stories people were telling or the counter stories I told in self defense. My world had expanded and I was able to detach myself from the many narratives I had been wrestling with and replace it with a globe trotting, mud hut building sensibility that restored my self-value and opened up a miriad of possibilities. I returned immediately to my shoemaking and a little gardening. And soon missing my new friends I watched them on Facebook.

Photo by Jeab Sena

Amanda Dances Christmas

As inspired by a year of much transition, healing and recovery I have danced for you in this riveting and unpredictable, masterpiece of spontaneous video shot live today at my home. It could be said that you cannot truly know me until you have seem me at my goofiest.

Amanda Dances Christmas

With much gratitude for the readership, comments and ongoing support found here. I wish you a Happy Christmas and holiday season.

Amanda

Where The Wild Child Lives

In which I learn from my ten year old self, how to stay focused. How I made my first youtube video and how Catherine's illness changed my perspective.

To improve my Shamanic practice I was advised by my Grandmother Spirit to journey every day and write down questions. I was not a very questioning sort of person it turns out. There is an art to asking questions. Most big questions I didn't want to know the answers to; it required a different kind of mind. One that is concerned with shaping the future and I had been raised to allow things to unfold and to pounce when the opportunity presented itself. I wanted to learn to master the art of the question, but meanwhile I could just hang out.

My power animals were very affectionate when I came just to hang out. We moved languidly as if on vacation. On my first hanging out visit, Mongoose and I rode on Bear who made himself as big as an elephant and thus we sat on his back in an elephant chair much like the ones used on Thai elephants. We decided to visit Leopard. I told Mongoose I loved Leopard. "She is your heart", he said. 

We found Leopard sunning herself on her usual rock. She licked my face in greeting and I asked her what to do about Lenore. This was not actually a question on my list, but hey as long as we were hanging out I asked it as one would a friend.

After I wrote about my crush on Lenore I had sent her the link to the story along with all the other stories during those prolific few weeks when I was being reacquainted with my returning soul parts. I wanted to know if she minded being a part of my story. People do not always take kindly to being written about and I was prepared for this. Prepared to walk away. I had an entire flow chart in my head about how many ways I was prepared to walk away, but she gave me a big hug when I saw her next and told me how well I wrote. I did not expect her to follow the writing at all. I was so prepared to be rejected, I had to reorient myself to this warm reception and was not sure how to proceed; how to trust it. 

"Lenore will be there for you as long as you need her," Leopard said. "Stay open for what is offered," she added wisely. And so I let go of my second guessing mind. 

I asked Leopard if we could visit my 10 year old. We all walked down to the River and got in a small dinghy. The River drifted us downstream a little ways and stopped at the opposite bank beaching on a little spit of land bordered by some reeds. We jumped out and the 10 year old emerged from the reeds. She was eager to show us her house, a little round adobe house, whitewashed, with a single window and a thatched roof. I could build one myself from what I learned at a workshop in Northern Thailand. There was nothing inside.  

"It's round," she explained, "because it is more productive; it is the corners that are distracting and catch hold of extraneous stuff." I had to agree with that. Then she ran very fast around and around inside the house to demonstrate. We walked outside again and in the clearing next to the house was a little writing desk. She said she was the one who recorded everything and did the accounting. I had also been a very diligent diarist from the age of eight. I asked her what else kept her focused. She took from her pocket a sling shot with a carved wood handle and gum colored band. It was much like the ones I remembered from childhood. I had not dared own one for my mother was against weapons. I knew these slingshots to be lethal.

"I use it for target practice," she said pointing to the target on a tree 25 yards or so to the left of the camp. I looked at the circles of the red target. (It was much like the logo of the store of the same name.) And suddenly I felt I understood something about having goals and plans for action. It was a brief, but clear message for I was not given to goals or any kind of plans for myself though I admired it intensely in others. 

Before we left, the 10 year old also admitted that she hunted squirrels to eat. Such a wild child, I thought. I mused for a moment how this tale could be told from the point of view of the unincorporated 10 year old soul part hanging around for 44 years watching me live my life and waiting for an opportunity to join in—or not. I was reminded of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. 

I went to e-bay and looked for slingshots. There were lots and one was even from Thailand with a lovely green stained hardwood handle. I was the only one who bid on it. I sent the seller a picture of myself when I was ten. He/she wrote back in a Thai sort of English, a tender note of appreciation.

Slingshot Productions

Meanwhile I returned to my leadership obligations and prompted by my conference team, decided to make a video announcement about the conference and all the great speakers we were having. A quick look at similar videos made by colleagues and others showed that there was much room for improvement. This always inspired me, but my standards were already high. I also wanted it to be memorable and entertaining. I could not pull off a professional business attire thing as others would do, but Jim at ICD headquarters encouraged me to go with the same mountain climber costume schtick I had created for my introduction at our last conference and that was enough to set me off and running.

I had no equipment to speak of. Just my iPod touch. Kids were using it to make their movies so how hard could it be? The only thing needed, said the after school tutorial I found, was something to hold up the iPod. I looked around my room and my eye fell on the movie splicer I had unearthed from the basement for my soul retrieval ceremony. It was now sitting on my desk like a giant talisman. Heavy and sturdy, it had flaps to hold the 35 mm film down on a flat bed. I discovered that the flaps would hold the iPod upright and allow easy installation and removal for downloading. I set the splicer on a stack of books on my sewing table in my room. The repurposing of this old movie technology to support the new, pleased me with its poetic symmetry.

I did not have a backdrop of our conference location in the mountains of Denver as I envisioned, but I had a world map someone gave me. I pinned it to my louvered closet doors which looked so obviously like closet doors it added to the improvisational aspect, plus closets have much significance for organizers. Over the doors was a mask of a whiskered wild cat of some sort. It gave my set an explorer flavor and a spirit protector.

I wrote the piece, did some takes and realized I would have to memorize it so my eyes wouldn't be tracking back and forth reading the words on a page. It was also hard to remember where to look since the camera lens was the size of a pinhead. By the time I was able to remember everything in one take, I was exhausted and it showed. I asked Catherine's opinion. She had owned her own videography company and was a good resource. 

"It drags," she said. It was better before when I was animated, but full of mistakes. Well at least it's done I thought and went to bed. I had already spent most of the weekend on it. 

Done was better than perfect as we say to our clients, but these youtube things were forever, would be who you were after you were dead, as I found out when Hester died and that was what we had to remember her by—a lovely series of videos of her talking about being a professional organizer and how she approached various organizing problems. None of us had any idea she had made them, but she must have had help because they were so warm and personable; someone was on the other side of the camera. Too many videos had that dull look about them from people sitting in a room by themselves talking to their computer. 

When it came down to it I had my pride, people to impress. My friends, my colleagues, my organization, not to mention Lenore—a filmmaker herself—would all see this thing. And some of my internet friends had never heard me speak. At least I could be more lively. Two days later, I decided to try again.

By then I had memorized my two minute piece. To liven it up I added expressions for each of the topics we were offering; I moved the camera back to make room to move so it would be funnier. I had an opening shot and an exit and little bits with props. Now there was a premise, a story. The mountain climber hefting a packed rucksack, heading out the door then stopping to talk about where she was going and who should come with. I worked so hard on this thing it took a total of ten hours to get it right after over 40 plus takes. But at least I had made it look easy. To seem effortless was a good marker of artistic competence. Catherine gave it the thumbs up.

When the video was delivered to members in an e-blast, a colleague who had been a long time president of our much bigger umbrella organization sent me an e-mail. "Cute ICD Video. You're quite the actress, ha ha," he wrote. Awe thanks Barry. I had hit my mark with my first attempt, fulfilled my obligations to my colleagues and left my stamp on something. 

The vision of the target in the10 year old's camp kept appearing to me. The simplicity of the slingshot representing a few well chosen tools. I could feel the satisfying connection of target and slingshot coming together. How a vision pulled energy to it. How the role of projects worked to sharpen my skills and move my thinking forward.

The Harpist

Before Catherine's diagnosis my ongoing project was to make emergency off grid equipment and practice self sufficiency. This entertained me not because I had fantasies of being a survivalist although I did read their blogs and write for peak oil enthusiasts, but because the simplicity of off grid living reminded me of home. Or what was home before it embraced globalization and became the mega-tropolis Bangkok of high end shopping malls emmeshed in grid lock traffic. Sigh.

My interests covered all the bases—tiny hand built homes, small boats, rainwater irrigation techniques, co-housing, vegetable gardening, solar oven cooking and living without electricity. Not that we didn't have electricity fairly reliably on my family compound and we cooked with propane, but it was there amidst the water jars, the ponds and extensive garden backing up against empty lots of high grass where old things were allowed to rust and fall into ruin, that I played and appreciated a life of simple handmade things. I had kept up an equivalent interest in California where orchards had given way to high tech. Building furniture from scrap wood, sewing my own designs and making simple home cooked meals kept me connected to that other life.

A lot of that is still there within our family compound in Bangkok. Tucked away beyond the sterility of the formal parlors of the three Big Houses, in the core of the half acre property, the staff live in one-room apartments adjoining an open air kitchen. Surrounded by a courtyard full of tropical plants kept tidy with borders of upended beer bottles, it was charming and anachronistic. When I visited I hung out there talking to our cook who remembered me as a child and told me what was really going on in Bangkok. Because I had left Thailand at such a young age, I never really gave up my affinity for that back kitchen living that was so full of life and things to do.

When Catherine entered into what would be a nine month cancer treatment schedule, I took up residence with her in the high tech, disposable, single serving world of modern medicine. Assisted by teams of competent, cheerful nurses there was nothing do-it-yourself about it. I would have to make something else—art. I amassed a collection of origami dinosaurs, a dragon, fish, a kangaroo, a space shuttle, two dogs and several traditional Japanese cranes. I particularly enjoyed folding my origami models when the harpist trundled her harp into the infusion lab and sat playing for us. There was something about the symbiosis of making art with our hands that made both of us smile secretly at each other. She was otherwise rather dour and made little eye contact unless someone clapped.

And as I whiled away the afternoon watching the cancer patients sit patiently reading, I came to appreciate  the value of art, music and fiction. Once Catherine felt able to read, she chose those simple, charming stories of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and I was grateful for their ability to comfort and amuse. From the point of view of illness as a personal episode of collapse, the power to entertain and relieve the mind of the angst at hand made the efforts of artists a form of life saving.

After Catherine's treatment was over, I  returned to my off grid projects, but I did not feel as compelled to tell myself the scenarios of technological collapse that supported the reason for my projects. It would always be a good idea to be self sufficient and handy and it would still be cool to have an off grid refrigerator, but the stories I wanted to tell now were very different.

House Retrieval

In the ongoing saga of my rental housing adventure I reclaim my house from another set of failed renters and learn how to do my own shamanic space clearing ceremony with help from my power animal.

The gate was open as I drove up to the mini compound within which our two rental houses were situated one behind the other. I had been in contact with Eliseo who lived in the back house with his family. He had kindly called to let me know that someone had broken in a window in the front house, the cheap vinyl one in the door that opened to the back yard. Someone had also cut the metal tongue of the latch on the padlocked garage door. We needed to get people in here ASAP.

Inside I found the house a mess. Despite my agent having said the departing tenant left the house clean, it was not clean by my estimate at all. Mail littered the floor, the bathroom hadn't been cleaned probably since his girlfriend left. There was stuff left in all the cabinets, hangars in the closets and the garage was a man-cave of beer bottles, cigarette butts and empty boxes. 

I was just glad I hadn't had to evict him as I had Mike before him. Mike took advantage of five months of free rent until the day the sheriff came. (Two months of back rent owed plus three months to get through the eviction process.) Mike's story, to the end, was that he was a victim of his wife who had stolen his disability money and disappeared with their only son leaving him an emotional wreck. 

"What did she do with all the money?" I asked him.

"I have no idea," he said. He was a master at telling me exactly what I wanted to hear every time I called up to see if he had packed up and was moving out. In fact throughout our relationship, he had fed me line after line about what his values were and what he believed in. Over time I could see that, not only did he barely live up to this picture of himself, but he operated within a very limited comfort zone tied to this neighborhood. I chose to believe in him because I felt so comforted that he was taking care of everything and he was so skilled at property maintenance that things worked out to my benefit as far as the house was concerned.

I had little experience of men, so I felt compelled to seek advice. I asked a client who was in the middle of divorcing a husband. She had often been very astute with her insights.

"Are men required by society to be reassuring?" I asked.

"No," she said, "it is their intention to be reassuring. There is a difference." 

"But, then they do exactly what they want," I pointed out. 

"That is also their intention", she replied. Hah.

I had to play along because I knew I had nothing to hold Mike to his word, not even a cleaning deposit. We hadn't asked for one because he was working for us. The rental contract was hardly worth the copy paper it was printed on, because Mike lived under the radar, working freelance on a cash only basis, changing his name regularly to escape any creditors. Only when I had gotten him off the property could I allow myself to tell him I wasn't fooled. I called him on his phone, which he wasn't answering and left him a message about the things he had left undone.

"I know who you are now," I said, unmasking, with this tone of authority, every last unfulfilled promise he had ever laid on me. It was the most satisfying thing I had ever said to him.

Two months later, when I was going through the shed, I found a file box with a file full of notes he wrote to his wife about how they had gambled the rent money away in Vegas, as well as his complaints about their waning sex life and hints of a boyfriend she was set to leave him for. This was such a startlingly different picture of the situation, I was relieved that it had nothing to do with me. There was nothing I had done to deserve how they had treated me. I was confident that Mike knew this about himself too and I no longer feared him.

I had since learned to use a rental contract that would better protect me (one I adapted from what the eviction lawyers offered). I now understood how each clause of it was designed to give me authority to prevent the many scenarios I had put up with. I would not settle for tenants who did not have, at minimum a bank account, and who cared somewhat about their credit rating. (No one ever had terrific credit. If they did they could buy a house.) I also came to understand that being able to pull the eviction trigger was all I had to guard against becoming a doormat and loosing control of the property. I was seasoned now; I would never wait so long before taking action again, in fact I had a late fee. And I had used much firmer language with our departing tenant who was dragging his heels to the final hour. Renting low income housing, I realized, was as much about coaching people to good behavior as it was about property maintenance.

Sweeping Out

I moved about in this world revealing as little about myself as possible, especially anything that might indicate money. My shabby little Honda wagon was perfect camouflage. And I always came in my work clothes of a recognized working class style, carpenter pants, a denim work shirt and old shoes. And if anybody asked, I was doing this as an enterprise financed by a partner who had secured a loan for which we were likely underwater, but we would still do the right thing by keeping the place maintained, unlike every other landlord in town. I could feel good about that and about keeping two manageable little houses from the brink of decay. And with the new plumbing, put in last year, it was backed up from the brink even further. Our financial advisor sanctioned it as a viable cash flow though he thought it was crazy that it was so far away. I liked going there though; it was another world. It reminded me of that other compound of simple houses with complex relationship; the one where my ten year old self had, in her own way, ruled the roost.

I set about with a broom and started to sweep the place out. I found old family photos in the hall cupboard. The kind you don't want to go missing. I put them into my car for safekeeping. That night I wrote an e-mail to the departing girlfriend telling her about the mess I had found, how mad I had been at both her ex and my agent and if she might possibly be able to come back to the house and help me clean it, as she had once offered, despite my asking at the last minute and it being Sunday and all. 

As I thought over my words, I realized that I would not have used any emotional language before and I attributed that to the sensibilities of my returning 19 year old soul part. 

Sunday morning I went out to breakfast at the IHOP (nothing but chains here on Hospitality Lane); had four fried eggs, two bacon strips, two sausages, a tiny bit of hash browns. I also ate the ball of butter in the middle of the stack of pancakes. 

As I was leaving I got a call from the girlfriend. She would be over in an hour. She was eager to see what a mess her ex had left, and would spend the day reassuring herself that she had done the right thing in leaving his lame ass. I knew it would be cathartic for her. And the old family photos turned out to be hers. I was glad for that and she was good company as she happily shared her insights.

She cleaned all day, while I reinstalled the window sash and replaced the latch on the garage with a bigger one. I also visited Eliseo's family, crossing through the gate between the two yards; access granted to me just as it had been when I was a child, to all parts of the compound. They were having their weekly family barbecue with a dining room table set up in the garage. I was charmed by this. It reminded me of the outdoor eating arrangements of my Thai home. Eliseo's brother-in-law, who had his own landscaping business and had cleared the seven foot weeds for me, came to talk to me and we discussed further how he might smooth out the backyard where Mike had left the hole where his pool had been. I hadn't shopped around for a gardner; I liked to keep things in the family. I had already asked if they knew anybody who would rent the front house, but no leads had surfaced in their Hispanic community.

House Clearing

Eliseo told me Leroy, the neighbor across the street had been asking about the house for some relatives of his. He offered to walk me over and introduce me to him. Leroy's house was the smallest in the neighborhood set in the middle of a yard that seemed huge by contrast. I had seen him about and he had always been very polite—an African American man. We rang the doorbell and opened the door when we heard him beckoning us to. Leroy hoisted himself off the couch smiling at us. After I shook his hand, he said that the house I was trying to rent was cursed.

"NOW you tell me," I said laughing. I knew exactly what he was talking about as he mentioned how each couple who went in there came out broken up and before I had bought the place it was even worse. 

"Don't worry," I reassured him, "I will perform an operation," I said, tracing the shape of a window in the air. Eliseo laughed at this. "No really", I said, "I will call in a priest and do an exorcism". They both laughed even more.

But Leroy had reminded me that I would not leave without doing my own brand of space clearing. I wrote down for him my phone number and the $950 rent I was asking on the house, plus $500 for deposit. Then I crossed back over to the empty house. Satisfied that the house was clean and the floors mopped I stood in the middle of the front bedroom. I had not been able to get any sage, so I would have to do without. First I clapped my hands in all the corners using sound to break up the stuck energy. I did this in all the rooms. Then I stood in the middle of the living room, closed my eyes and called for Mongoose.

I had met a woman in England, two years ago, on the tour of sacred sites with all the mystics. She had seen me put my hat over my face and journey at the site of the sacred waters of Cerne, when the German shaman had shown up and offered to drum for us. At lunch, in the pub, she sat next to me in an amiable way and asked me a few questions to determine what caliber of mystic I was. When I told her I worked with hoarders it prompted her to ask if I did space clearings and she had urged me to do so. Later she described her technique to the group. She simply asked St. Michael to send down the Hoover with which she would vacuum whatever space she was concerned with, especially all those old theaters where she plied her trade as an actress. It needed it, she explained, because of all the emotional energy thrown into the space from the enacted drama of a play. Especially into those high ceilings.

So I reminded Mongoose of this conversation and asked him to send me an equivalent to her Hoover. Suddenly over his head a creature hovered in the room with us, his broad wings above me. This, said Mongoose, was the Hoover Pelican. Okay, I thought, I can work with him. And so I walked the room in a spiral from the center going out to the walls, holding the Hoover Pelican in my mind as he sucked up all the dingy energy from the room into his large bill. We went from room to room, bathroom, living room and kitchen repeating the exercise until I got to the kitchen door and he flew off towards the ocean. 

"You know", I thought to myself, "this reminds me a lot of the shamanic extraction workshop" and so I was satisfied that I had done it.

I'm a good landlord, I said to the universe feeling better inside the now freshly Hoovered house, the afternoon sun streaming in the window. There must be good tenants out there who would be pleased to have such a house and such a fine landlord, I said. All you have to do is match us up, I reminded these Forces of Good. They didn't really need reminding because that's what they do best, maneuver people around until they get hooked up and get what they need from each other. They just needed to be asked. I would be patient and wait, keeping the faith that it would work out. 

I left the blinds open in back so thieves could see there was nothing to steal. I left the garage unlocked for the same reason. I closed the gate, after I backed my car out, and locked it closed with the padlock.

The day I drove up down the I-5, I answered calls from my ad in the paper. One of those callers checked out the house and called back later in the week. I felt comfortable with her straight forward presentation. She and her fiance both had jobs they wanted to be closer to and relatives in the area. They had been together a long time and their landlord would be sorry to see them go. They loved the house; it was charming and the workbench in the garage was perfect for his upholstery projects. Their rent would be the same as where they were living now. 

My agent reported that they were nice and seemed to be hippies, she said laughing her valley girl laugh. Hippies with upholstery skills. I was liking this more. He did upholstery for a living, mostly for hotels. She was a caretaker and also had a house cleaning business. Their references checked out. One of the references, a landlord, was very chatty. Asked me how I was doing with my rentals. He said he had been pretty lucky, but added "you sure won't hold on to any religion being in this business". I laughed. 

"Or maybe you get religion being in this business," I said. Yes, my faith in humans had been trashed three times now, but my spiritual strength had been fortified, along with my leadership skills.