My favorite thing about volunteering at the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand’s village countryside was nite time.

My room was a hut and it was made of bamboo. Surely volunteers like myself had built it no more than two years ago. I know because we volunteers were replacing fence constructed of the same bamboo as part of our work/stay. The monsoon season, which we all surrendered sloppily into, really speeds up the life process. Things never dry out and the spider that considered my hut his (and was probably right), was larger than my outstretched hand and housed uncomfortably close no matter where in the room.

My hut was the best. It stood on poles to slow the floor’s rot on the always-wet ground. It had two windows (rather than the other rooms' one) - neither of which had screens or anything factory-made or expensive like that.

So it was me, Arachno-dude, and within 50 feet, just outside of my two windows; eleven elephants all nite long.

What does an elephant do at nite? They chomp big time on the corn stalks we cut in the fields for 5 hours a day (face to the earth / back to the sky). They chomp three at a time for hours, sounding like boards snapping and bones cracking, but no ... they are vegetarian like me. Wait ... they are raw vegan like me. Elephants eat 300 pounds of raw vegan food every day. I wonder where they get their protein from?

Elephant calves play at nite. They hug and tug one another. They practice gentle sparring. And sometimes they get startled by the unseen, like any baby would - maybe a mouse runs behind their feet or something - and they chirp like big birds, kinda squawking and causing a nervous commotion. Until the auntie blasts one resounding trumpet. And they shut up real quick like. When an elephant momma speaks ...

You can't see elephants at nite. I don't know how they do it, but the largest land mammal on earth really can just disappear kinda become invisible. Like a shadow - no, a black hole. Any light that would be in the area of a nite elephant is sucked in towards it with no hope of escaping. The elephant is Whatisdark and the only way you know an elephant is there is a kind of vibration in the air and a few gentle sounds. I listened to them all nite long.

Now, in Hollywood, I close my windows and turn on the fan and sometimes even wear ear plugs I'm not kidding because if the smallest change in air pressure doesn't wake this insomnia-inclined light-sleeper up, then the Hollywood helicopters will.

But I didn't wear ear plugs here. I didn't cover my ears with anything more than a mosquito net. Instead, the sounds of the elephants no matter what they were tasking lulled me into an in between world. They drop the grass on the ground, I fall to the ground. They sigh, I am exhaled as moisture into the air. They snore, one long, everlasting lung full of air and I believe I can hear the earth sleeping. Yes, even elephants sleep. I know they do.

Unless one was inclined to listen all nite, one may never know. For only 4 hours every nite, the sleeping sounds do inebriate. And I was alone, lulled and listening one nite, and I had to see it to prove it. So I wandered without flashlight as close as I could - maybe ten feet away - and I saw what I needed to see: elephants really do lie down to sleep when they feel safe.

And they snore an elephant's snore - the sound of everything all right in the world.

1 comments Links to this post

I'm a changed woman.  

I mean, I am always changing, but some changes are more meaningful than others.  

Life changing.  Perspective changing.  Spirit changing.  Soul changing.  The elephants can't help it.  

Without even seeing them, you sense them.  6 tons of isolated consciousness, breathing, focusing, feeling ... on the grandest scale of all.  Elephants exert a gravitational pull they are so massive.  Like little Earths on Earth.  Even sleeping over 100 yards away, their presence comforts.  A forced meditation for all that surround them.  A lesson in patience just to contemplate them.  A lesson in gentle relations.  A lesson in finely directed intelligence.  

To be near an elephant, these things are unavoidable.   They change anyone who comes into close, compassionate contact with them.  They change the world we walk on.  Even children whom have never seen an elephant in real life, I am convinced, are affected by elephants living somewhere on this Earth.  It is my goal to make sure this endangered species exists in this world. 

This world is a better place with elephants in it.

7 comments Links to this post

Have I mentioned I wither in the tropics?

Maybe all humans didn't originate in the same place. I mean, why is it that all these twenty-something-year-olds mainly from England, but I hear German, Israeli and Italian English accents as well (only the occasional North American English accent) - why is it that every full moon 8,000 to 50,000 of these sexually hopeful international tourists choose Ko Phangan in southern Thailand for holiday?

Today, with the common bacterial infection that affects 50% of travelers' digestive tracts in this never-dry climate and hygienically casual culture, I creep out to the beach, well after 3 p.m., to avoid the oppressive sun and it's most damaging rays, only to find the same 500 folk that I saw this morning during my coconut breakfast still playing volleyball, learning to spin poi, making out on inflatable floats, and mixing pink cocktails in what they consider paradise.

I last a literal 20 minutes before the sweat and heat combined inspire a clausterphopic feeling akin to suffocation. I shake off my beach towel, scratch off the sea lice (for real) and retreat back into my queen-of-the-jungle bungalow to apply another layer of powder to the heat rash that has turned my backside into a horror movie special effect. I feel like an alien in this tropical world. I wonder if everyone here really adores this climate as much as they profess or would they and their pale white skins, now blistering and peeling quite horror-movie-esque too, actually feel more paradisal in Glasgow, San Anchorage, Stockholm or Winnipeg as I would, if they could only admit it.

I was wine tasting in Napa many years ago, just initiating into the sport and asking questions of anyone seemingly more experienced than I. "Which wines do people prefer?" I questioned one particular vineyard's server who pours for hundreds of tasters every week. Her answer opened my eyes to wine and social habit in general, "People say they prefer the heavy reds, but what they request another taste of are the sweet whites time after time." Peer pressure? Social eagerness? Immaturity? It's okay to adore the musky bite of the Merlot or Port, but how many of these lobster skinned, dysentery infected, alcohol dehydrated, heat rash itching, cockroach avoiding, mosquito bitten backpackers would have the self authority to proclaim to the world's travel snobs that they prefer a light Sauvignon Blanc anyway?







(This piece was written in humor. I am in fact enjoying Thailand beyond measure in spite of the climate assault.)

8 comments Links to this post

It's a little death every day. It's a little dying and then one day you are changed. Reborn and grateful for the clarity, the perspective, the motion. During the dying, though, you are faithful for, rather than convinced of; rebirth.

We have faith in the rebirth if we are smart. And we are. We see all around us what blossoms after wither, what sprouts in the ashes, what is the next season. And it doesn't take me long - no, not too long at all - to know: I'm about to wake up and not recognize my reflection either because it looks like someone else or because it looks like me.

Just when the caterpillar thinks the world was over,

she sprouts wings and flies.

5 comments Links to this post

My mom is a small woman in my embrace. She is my mom and yet she is so much smaller than I. She loves being huged and giving hugs and I notice that because it's the most important thing about a relationship to me;

The Embrace: to expose the soft organs of the body completely and flatten the heart specifically against another's heart. To touch the hearts. To smell the odor. To talk to energy. To listen to energy and to simultaneously shout, mandate, offer, suggest, understand, assimilate, resolve, hold, hold, hold, reciprocate.

To hold my mom close in public. It is wonderful. It is obvious. It is me loving my mom. It is no weapons, only open arms.

She is such a special woman. Aloof and dare I say cute. She held me when I was small enough to fit entirely in her embrace and she loved me with all her might. I don't really remember that early on, but I am who I am today and that tells me without a doubt: my mother held me. I live proof of being held.

I hold my mother, too.

2 comments Links to this post