Chasing waterfalls

To be thoroughly honest, I’m not sure what I want to say about the wonderment that I have experienced going from nighttime prayers to silent meditations to jungle walks to waterfalls (and I’m not sure what you want to read). Whether it was the reverberations of the chanting and gongs, the vibrations of thunderous water moving past me, or the sensation of being immersed in the green of every shade, at some point, my more personal divisions seemed to soften so that my sense of self was far less defined and my sense of connection to nature, humans and life was far more expansive. Walking the jungle trail with a guide from the local village, I thought of the 250,000 years of human existence on this planet and of the many more years where waterfalls, trees, and jungle habitats existed before us. So many generations of us, in so many ways, seek our connections back to each other, and to ourselves, through nature. With my skin moist from waterfall dew and sweat from the humidity, I felt my senses more alert; to the heat changes walking through a sunray peeking through the jungle canopy, to the coolness of approaching another set of waterfalls, to the blue of the sky filtering through all types of banana leaves, and to the contrast of such solid earth to walk on as the water flowed dynamically past us. My mind kept on busying itself, hearing my sons lovingly tease me for turning yet another experience into a scene out of a novel, for finding another place to say isn’t it amazing, it’s like we’re living in a painting or the best kind of art. I think that’s part of how I process, through a catalogue of the many literary voices I have read about walking through the jungle and wetting your neck with the cool water or the ways to describe the little fluorescent green snakes coiled on some leaves near the wild cinnamon trees. I felt I could walk for a long while in deep contentment, and finally, my mind settled to just drinking it all in as I rolled fresh cinnamon in my fingers.

After a while, we walked into a place where human habitation was apparent. As the sun broke through due to the trees being trimmed back, my guide silently encouraged me forward because I had stopped to absorb the sight of rice paddies as far as I could see. She showed me the different fish moving through the stream and how they used irrigation to channel water for so much rice. Another guide demonstrated how rice was farmed and spoke of the crop changes over the last while. Much like a startling drawback to real human time, he spoke of how the valley we were walking into used to produce opium for as far as we could see and further, but now that was controlled and illegal, they had turned to growing coffee. They again allowed me to walk behind at my own pace, and I mused about how so much of the earth existed before humans did and marvelled at the valleys like this from the time of Sumer, where humans could gather, farm together, live and love together. By the time I arrived at the little village, the coffee had already been poured, and I sat down with other people from tours to have a quiet espresso. Going from the highest point in Thailand, walking through the jungles along the river, passing the waterfalls and the rice and coffee fields, to simply return to the community by sitting down to have a cuppa was quite remarkable. And it was better than any novel I have ever read.