Word Sketch, April 15: Snippets from the Butterfly Garden (The Weekend of April 13, 2013)

1

Movement and death and fathers. The theme arises again and again and again. A butterfly flits past. It is the father image, D has told me. It is the father. She sees her father in the winged beauty. "Life is a bitch," says the French, melancholic existentialist with a dripping "Rock'n'Roll" tattoo heart on his chest. "C'est la vie," reads his arm, and he tells us of the moment he awoke to dreams of his father and rushed to the parlor to make permanent his acceptance, to solidify his words before he had to leave that home on the next boat to his next home. Another backpacker with thick softball-player arms speaks of dancing with her father. Luther Vandross drifts up in the back of my mind. She misses him. She misses him. Movement and death and fathers.

2
We walk through a butterfly garden. Colorful wings flit around, spots in the corner of my eye. I focus on one, stop, breathe, keep my legs still beneath me and my breath focused on the black mottled with white spots, the antennae that are the only body part moving, swaying like it feels a breeze I cannot sense.

1
Our French friend tells us of his archival project, his compilation of stories and images and thoughts on his father's life. It echoes my own. I see the mirror arise and feel his words within my chest. I hear his words like a wire through a complex, multi-layered garden of images and sensations and concepts, his side and mine separated by a thin bubble wall, and the wire pierces through to my heart and ear which are, here, inseparable, which are, here, one. I see him from across the water of experience and feel him, this stranger aching in a shared room. He takes my number and email. "Maybe I can come visit you. We will cook and speak of our fathers. We can share our books." I simply nod. I simply feel the want to nod. I feel back deep within and the surface sensation is a nod. Eye contact and a nod. For a split second, we see each other.

2
I walk. Another at my toes, now. I bend down. It is black, with a surface whose texture looks like velvet. I do not dare to touch its delicate wings. A green flush runs its upper edge, spots of blue, small and delicate, emerging after concentrated attention, after a slow sweep of the eyes takes in its full wingspan. It is the length of my hand, middle finger to bottom curve of palm. A red and gray depth is visible along the right edge of its bumpy caterpillar body, and I can see it is dead, crushed beneath the toes of some imprecise foot that did not follow through but pulled away, quick, when the owner had seen its error, or perhaps instead by the full, tiny foot of a quick-legged toddler. An ant approaches, slowly, breaking away from the mess of others navigating the floor. It places its front legs on those of the butterfly, and I watch its antennae reach up, wave back and forth. Its body curls back. A fifteen-second interaction, and then it is off, away, back into the crowd of others where I lose sight of its individual lines, seeing only the mass of crawling bodies. The butterfly's antennae stay, still.

1
I remember aged young in the front yard of my father's house, a butterfly landing on his arm.

2
A Malaysian Mottled Emigrant, thick-veined and powdery green, flies past my right ear.  I stop and breathe, watching as it careens through the hot, tropical air.

Word Sketch, April 15: Portrait of a Traveler, An Impressionistic View (The Weekend of April 13, 2013)

"I don't mean to butt in with my two sense but it sounds like it's all in your head.  I work with athletes, and one of my areas of interest is performance anxiety.  They're usually not looking at you, and if they are, it's because you're good and they want to be like you."

She was an anxious soul, clamoring to stay on the surface, in the space of human connection.  She sought and sought and sought, displaying herself with word pictures that she felt strongly portrayed who she was or who she wanted herself to be.  She was in her words, in her attachment to who she wanted others to see her as.  And so she returned, again and again, to stories and impressions that she wanted to leave, trying to draw our eyes there again and again until we fully saw that image in her mind and acknowledged such with words, too.  She wanted us to see her goodness and tell her it was goodness.  Then she wanted us to see her liveliness and warmth and tell her it was warmth.  Then she wanted us to feel the richness of her life and affirm to her that it was, in fact, richness, not the emptiness of a constantly shifting life that she fears, deep down, her world has become--that she fears, more, that others perceive.  She fears that others can see the thing she's fleeing from, can see the thing she thinks others are free from, others who judge, who see, who smile but harbor inner animals who grin slyly.  She thinks others are elsewhere and so she requires them to see her elsewhere, too.

"My father taught me to dance.  He was a great dancer, but I wasn't interested enough.  I wish I had been more interested.  I wish I had learned more from him."

Two years of moving.  She breaks down the time scheme for us.  Three months here, playing pirate.  Four months there, walking through landmines.  One month there, becoming the pilgram.  A week home.  Ten days home.  Two months home, but not home, rolling away from home.  Three months here, with us, with her, with a them who lingers in the distance.  She reaches for our eyes and our ears. She is still reaching, reaches toward us, through us, to the mirage she always watches.  It is ahead, she is ahead, always ahead.

Dancing, dancing, her eyes alight.  It bubbles through the surface—father is dead.  Two years, father is dead.

Moving, moving, she demonstrates the incorrect salsa step, her eyes dance as she tells of herself, her body moving alongside her father's, correct, in place.  Correct, in line, feet moving in line.  In lines she can see and comprehend, now.  Moving in sync with a sensical order to the world.

J reminds me that sometimes people say the thing they most need to hear; they clothe it in advice, but it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit, there is no context and it doesn't fit.  She wants to hear herself say the things she wants to be true for herself.  Performance anxiety.  She wants to be seen, but she is afraid of being seen.  She wants to live as though no one is watching, but she wants to get good at life so everyone will watch.  She wants the paradox to resolve.  She wants life to resolve.

She moves, away from us, scanning and asking and looking, her stride solid, shoulders bent forward heavy.  She does not know what is next, she says.  She steps past us and I watch her walk away.

Word Sketch, April 1: From the Indonesian Borneo Rainforest—They Move and I Move Too (Spring Break, March 27-28)

It is dark beneath the green, beside the green, above the green-spattered creamy brown. The river is the color of canned Nescafé, cream superseding the dark of grinds. My feet sink satisfyingly into the mud, wrapped against the leeches and the earth by polka dot low-top Vans whose lines of circles seem a foil to the entropic leech mottle in the ground. My thick navy Dickies tuck into black socks, a makeshift tent against sneaky little vampires. Still, two break through the fortifications, and I drip red down my leg.

Light here, here, soft and sweet against my skin, gentle as it pushes open my eyes. The air breathes like a cloud, full of clean, warm water. My ears buzz with the call of sakatas. The sound is piercing but begins to flow and fade after a few minutes of trekking.

I bite into the pale green tube our guide pulls from the center of the broadleaf evergreen, the name of which I hear repeated, but which won't stick in my mind. It is light and aqueous, like the white tip of celery but more homogenous in texture—no vertical strings to crunch through—and crisp like a green bean. It refreshes the mouth, reminding me of something Americans would pay too much for in an overly air-conditioned health foods shop. I peel back the outermost layer to find it is structured like a newspaper rolled for swatting, layer upon layer, tighter at the bottom, hollow at the top. An edible straw growing in the rainforest. A food of the orangutans.

The guide (age 36, married 7 years ago, a wife and children aged 2 and 6 at home, living in the rainforest 10 days at a time) stops, reverses, unsheathes his machete, swings his right arm toward a hanging, brown-trunked vine. "Root water." He remembers my request to learn about edible elements of the rainforest. He demonstrates. I let the liquid drip onto my tongue. It is light and sweet, like the sun, like the air, like the food of the orangutan.

We come upon the first half of our group staring at a nest positioned halfway up a tree. The lowest one yet. This time the orangutan is preparing for sleep, and she is alone. No child to feed or watch. Her elasticity does not show, now. There is no moving orange to follow far below on the rainforest floor, neck strained back in an impossible C. There are no vibrations to feel when I place my hands against the trunk that reaches to where she is. She is barely visible by the time I arrive, and she is immobile.

The next morning we see her counterpart, a mother and two small replicas swinging from branch to branch. I lean into the trees despite our guide's warnings against getting too close. "Very danger. She might throw things." I can't resist wanting to feel again the movements of the orangutan. I remember yesterday morning. I remember the chase through the thick underbrush after another mother and her child both made eye contact, then turned to live away from our gaze.  I remember that first increase of the pulse, the thrill of the morning air, the heart and eyes and everything reaching up to touch the fascinating creature above. I feel this now, too.  I interlock my hands to support my leaning head. She sups on leaves and unseen fruit. Her child swings, and swings, and swings. Orange and elastic.

The orangutans. They are like us, except that the function of their bodies as a medium for feeling and navigating the world has not been disrupted by conscious self-aestheticization. People of the forest. They use their limbs fully and without thought. This, this is clear. They are naught but shadows against the sun, blended into the tree branches and leaves, until they move in this pre-conscious way. Their movement is what draws the eye, makes visible their orange tint and hairy bodies.  They feel.  They feel like long-lost cousins.  Contact being made for the first time.  Images coming to life from my fourth-grade books.  They move and I move too, following, watching, climbing, trekking, straining to see.

The mother and child are closer to the sun than we are. We stare up from the shadows.

The dappled light begins to wane, now. We turn, heading back through the mottle of the forest floor.

Word Sketch, March 21: A Horn Honks in the Distance

In my right hand are two plastic-wrapped pieces of roti naan, heated from frozen in vegetable oil and spread thinly with palm-oil free, sugar-free, nothing-but-nuts-and-salt peanut butter, a rarity in these parts and a delicacy whose value I can't but acknowledge.  This is the last bit of my dinner, the follow-up to an egg-vegetable-garlic scramble that I pulled together from the remainders of last week's grocery trip; in an effort to conserve money and clean out the fridge before my upcoming trip to Indonesia, I've landed on creativity and breakfast for dinner.  I walk with speed but full alertness, circumventing the holes in the sidewalk that drop precipitously to the dark, murky waters of the open sewage system, sidestepping the occasional metal cover that my sandals, I know, won't quite grip, pausing just before the tree whose roots hide a red ants nest to wait for passing and parking traffic to settle, pinpointing the men I know cat-call and picking a jalan jalan path that considers both road danger and personal dignity.  I feel eyes peeling from my body as I slip through a crowded patch.  Young Chinese** teenagers pull at each other, wide-eyed.  One nearly collides with me, and I hear the giggles bubble from behind as the sounds of evening call to prayer begin to rise in front.  It's a soothing, gentle sound, the call to prayer, and it calms the jostling air around me.  I scan to the left—a blind corner and a thin sidewalk.  There is less traffic, though.  Safer than the following turn, constant host of cars that bear down, and down, and down.  I make the call, but pause between two parked cars for a brief moment.  I see a headlight.  I know the speed with which people often park here.  I know the road logic, now.  I am small; I am not to be looked for; I am to do the looking, all.  I wait between the fender and the bumper.  The two protect me; none can park here.

I'm right.  She speeds into the open spot.

The sky blinks white light.  The whole sky.  It just blinks, quickly, like a wink.  The flash startles me, but in a pleasant way.  No clear bolts tonight, just a dissolved energy and a saturated atmosphere, then nothing.  Blackness polluted by soft yellow street lights, sharp rising lampu-lampu restoran.  Two turns more and I am inside.

I watch from the corner of my eye as the woman with fat red caterpillars on her slippers (they sit where the strap makes a Y whose stem is grounded in the sole of the shoe) watches me.  Her eyes are burning my side as I try to write, and I turn to look her in the eyes.  "Hello," I say.  She has an asymmetrical haircut—a bob with a chunk on the front of the right side, about one-quarter of her total haircut, that is two inches longer than the rest, cut diagonally so that the longest strand curves to meet her chin.  The hair is a dyed auburn red, like an old, oxidized penny.  She blinks away an embarrassed gleam and a quick smile runs over her lips before she drops her eyes to the blinking screen in her hand.

I turn back to my writing of memories from earlier in the day:

I have successfully taught my action song kids the difference between a half step and a whole step, and they seem to understand both conceptually and in practice.  After practice, we make a team huddle, their first, it seems.  I can feel the energy purify.  Joy, simple and unfiltered.  They fall into giggles afterward.   "Again, again!"  During our goodbyes, they insist on salaaming me, making me hold my high-five until they have done so.  One person yells, "I love you, Miss Sara!," and they're off, all shouting confessions of love, without a trace of a giggle.  It feels pure, too.  Their eyes are clear and happy.  They leave.

My choral speakers, the third that shows up, are sitting in a circle when I return from the bathroom.  They're practicing.  I hear them before I see them, and my heart lights up.  They sound wonderful.  I watch, now; I do not think to interrupt.  It's perfect, this moment, as I watch them lead each other, collaborate, seamlessly fill in solos for those absent, point to each other to take over bits that need taken over.  Fluid, seamless, no need for a director.  Beautiful.

The medical assistant emerges from behind a light-brown door and nods in my direction. "Sara Lynn." I walk through and lay down and grit my teeth for the wound cleaning. I focus my mind on the texture of the day and let the pain just be pain, a sensation I do not own. The doctor asks about my travel plans and teaches me how to take care of the wound, myself. I note his words carefully.

I exit the room, nodding to the woman who now nods in return. She rises, brushing past me as I walk to the next door and reach for the knob. This one connects to the outside world. I scan, right, left, and step, one foot after the other into the night. A horn honks in the distance.


*Note: My word sketches are brief portraits from daily life, brief attempts at describing the textures of my day-to-day in Malaysia/abroad.
**Society in Malaysia is incredibly racialized, and ethnic background is deeply tied to religious culture, which in turn (and in combination with other cultural markers) heavily dictates how people interact with one another, dress, speak, and even eat.  It also influences where people live and play, and most people here conceptualize themselves and one another in very explicit ethnic/religious terms.  Sociologically fascinating.  FMI, send me an email.  :)

Zen and the Art of Motorbike-Injury Maintenance

There was the road.  There was the green car.  There was the wordless realization that there was not enough time to stop and the thought, "Well this is happening."  There was the sound of metal colliding with metal.

My nose was bleeding profusely.  I stood up and walked to a patch of grass next to the Shell station, told myself to breathe and not to panic and to lay down right away, noted my motorbike sideways in the street behind me and my papers and bags strewn... everywhere, took my helmet and glasses off, and laid down and let my first aid training go into high gear.  I called for my canvas bag, used it as a compress.  I yelled for my phone, told the English-speaking man by my ear who to call.  I was grateful for their help.  They moved me inside.  I told them—carefully, move more slowly.  I knew I shouldn't move too much before I was in the hands of professionals.  I told myself I wasn't allowed to sleep, conversed, let myself laugh, made sure I was speaking okay and recalling okay.  I was grateful when the English-speaking man asked me the series Malaysians always ask upon meeting me: "What is your name?  Why are you here?  What school do you teach at?  Where do you live?  How long have you been here, and how long will you stay?  Are you single or married?  What do you eat?  Isn't Malaysian food too spicy for you?"  My recall was fine.  All my memorized answers were there, and I played a bit, varied them a bit.  I insisted on speaking BM to the others nearby.  I remembered my vocabulary.  I knew I was in shock, but I was doing okay.


****

I'm told that the car was a gray Honda, and that I flipped multiple times.  I'm told that my helmet and my thick, cushy Swiss Army backpack saved me.

Fauzi was the Muslim man who helped me—a neighbor of one of the English teachers at SK Tanjong Gading who was excited to find out who I was. "I'm going to tell Ezadin that I was the one who assisted you!"  A sweet man who helped me hold my nose compress in place as I cleaned my stomach wound, despite his obvious hesitation to do so.  I thanked him profusely and watched him mutter a soft prayer to God.  I told him that, if he needed, he could turn his head as I cleaned off the blood.  The soft-spoken, shy woman to my right handed me tissues dipped in warm water and directed the others to get me ice when I asked.

I wrapped my stomach in gauze and washed my hands in the basin, keeping my head on my backpack-turned-pillow.  I switched out gauze for my bag and held my new nose compress in place.  I asked for a mirror.  I wanted to wipe the blood from my face to minimize my mentors' worry—they had been nervous about me being on a bike from the start, as last year's ETA had been in an accident, too.  I asked the folks assisting me if they thought my nose was broken.  A crooked nose?  I couldn't help it.  I told them I wanted to make sure I didn't have a concussion.  They agreed that that was a good idea.

"Ambulances sometimes take hours to arrive in Malaysia," Fauzi informed me.  I was lucky, then.  My ambulance arrived before my mentors did.


****

Friday, March 8, 11:05 am.

Taste of palm oil residue in my mouth, slick around my lips.  I wipe and wipe but it doesn't come off.  My hands stay dry from the heat and my lips stay slick.  My mouth feels smooth, coated, and I can still taste the dull strange underbite of the cold vanilla-with-chocolate-stripe ice cream I just consumed.  Today is relatively cool, and the fans in the meeting hall circulate the sweet, light breeze already caressing my back.  I listen to local celebrity Azamuddin, Islamic lecturer galore, clearly accomplished performer with his own show on TV 3 (Saturdays at 6 pm), fabulously engaging speaker (students and teachers [!] alike are engaged), clearly intelligent comparative religion scholar and Islam expert speak on religious tolerance (and point to me as an example of a non-Muslim we all respect), prayer, his show, and various other things—all attended to carefully by the students, all in BM, some of which I understand, some of which Liza translates for me in my right ear, some of which passes over my head, incomprehensible.  Deep breath in, life is full and good.  My mouth feels smooth and tastes like my own again.  I unsuccessfully wipe the palm oil from my lips one more time, then rise and salaam everyone quietly before slipping to my motorbike and off to my home, Pangsapuri Intan near Econsave in Muar Town, to finish packing up my camping gear for the weekend and head to the bus station via taxi.  KL next, Cameron Highlands by nightfall.  Weekend with lovely friend Julia, here I come.

And as I walk away, I hear the words "orang putih" come from my new friend up front.  A palm-oil-laced burp rises to my lips.


****

At 3:30 pm, I check my watch.  The face is completely smashed, but the hands are still ticking.  The letters "didas" are all in place; the "A," which lodged itself on the opposite side of my watch eight days ago, when it fell maybe a foot from my arm to my desk, is the only letter missing.  My laughter is filling the air before I remember that I'm on a bed in the ER, surrounded by people wrapped in bandages and hooked to machines.  I check myself.  There is a momentary break in time where I feel the full sensation of my body, what feels like every cell moving and living.  I feel my aliveness.  I feel the tenderness in my head, the blood pooling on my nose, the sting rising from my side.

I know that 3:30 pm can't be right, though.  My fifteen ringgit watch may be holding up okay, but I can feel time passing around me.  I know it hasn't been three hours and forty minutes since I was hit.  I ask the doctor.  It's two hours, fifteen minutes ahead.  I watch the second hand tick on.


****

"Stick at it--fresh resolve with every breath cycle, tiny units of time.  Observe each breath with care and precision, taking it one split second on top of another, with fresh resolve piled one on top of the other.  In this way, continuous and unbroken awareness will eventually result.

Mindfulness of breathing is a present-time awareness.  When you are doing it properly, you are aware only of what is occurring in the present.  You don't look back and you don't look forward.  You forget about the last breath, and you don't anticipate the next one."


****

Time in Malaysia moves slowly everywhere but on the road.  Everyone rushing to get to the same nowhere on the road, to the same imagined spot beyond the vehicle just ahead.  Everyone rushing to get to the destination that never comes; the next time they are on the road, they are chasing it again.  It runs incessantly further and further away, and people respond by picking up time, hurtling it along in a metal box or atop a plastic frame, moving at speeds the human body was not built to handle.

There is something about the metal engine that must dehumanize time, that must strip it of its function as a lubricant between people and how they relate to one another.  I watch drivers honk incessantly, angry at the slow-moving vehicles around them.  I watch cars cut motorbikes off and motorbikes nearly mow over pedestrians.  I watch some of the sweetest, gentlest friends I've made turn into irritated bulls behind the wheel.

I didn't see, but I'm told that the driver of the gray Honda watched from a distance as I limped to the side of the road, then got in his car and drove away.


****

Sunday, March 10, 9:45 pm.

I am breathing.  I feel the air transition from not-me to part-of-me via the tip of my nose.  I feel it expand my chest.  I feel it deflate my chest.  I feel my oneness with my environment.  I feel the interconnectivity of everything, everything that breathes, everything that exists.   I lose myself to the breath and time stops.  I roll forward like I sometimes do when practicing, but the sting in my side straightens me back up.  I am breathing.


****

"The essence of our experience is change.  Change is incessant.  Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same.  Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe.  A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone.  In comes another one, and that is gone too.  A sound strikes your ears and then silence.  Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone.  People come into your life and they leave again.  Friends go, relatives die.  Your fortunes go up and they go down.  Sometimes you win and just as often you lose.  It is incessant: change, change, change.  No two moments ever the same."

I am thinking of time and change and how perspectives shift when we break the clock.  The system we've devised for dividing and measuring time, an intangible, uncapturable concept if ever there was one, is actually a failing system from the vantage point of Romantics and those invested in the psychoemotional landscapes of our lives.  It doesn't quite work as a system for describing lived experiences of time.  It abstracts things.  It says, "This thing took this many increments of this designated measurement of this chosen atom's radiation periodicity"—which, of course, means nothing to most people in this world.  It removes the present-tense sensations of the world in an effort to standardize our conceptualization of how one experience relates to another.  It says, "This thing took this many increments of time which is more or less than this other thing that took this other many increments of time."  And that, in turn, usually invites value judgments.  This thing SHOULD have only taken this many increments of time because this other thing is more valuable and thus should take more of the time available.

And so we regulate our lives according to some ticking machine whose mechanics are based on a system that is far abstracted from most of our daily lives.

Of course, this system is necessary, and it benefits the function of our world.  It makes things smoother, and it has the potential to minimize human frustration and maximize human engagement in the world when managed properly.

But in moments like those that surround a motorbike accident, the clock does not always do time justice.  Moments like those force you to be in the present.  To really be in the present.  You cannot obsess over a moving second hand.  Nor do you really need to.  You feel the passage of time.  You feel time as a living, breathing entity with complex psychoemotional realities.  You are fully present.  You are there, cleaning your body, checking your head, thinking of loved ones.  I was there, and I am here, remembering how important it is to be genuine and loving with everyone.  Remembering how important real connection is, and remembering how little substantial, lasting meaning the petty, surface stuff—which can become all when we let the clock do all of our regulating for us—really is.

Still, I insisted on the traffic investigations officers getting it right in their report.  The accident did not happen at 12:40 pm, like they argued it did.  It happened at 11:50 am, five minutes after I last looked at my watch, one minute before I had Fauzi call Hasliza, two minutes before he called Jenny.  I know exactly when it happened.  I know exactly when my watch jumped forward by two hours and fifteen minutes.  I know exactly when time moved differently.

And I know—I should probably still get a new watch.









(Quotes taken from "Mindfulness in Plain English" by Venerable H. Gunaratana Mahathera, a book that I picked up for free at the gorgeous Kek Lok Si Temple, the largest temple in Southeast Asia.  Photos to come.)