Category Archives: Beyond the Boundaries

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Retirement, Third Phase

On Dying Luminously

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Mabon                                                                              New Moon of the First Snow

Friend Tom Crane wrote this morning:  “Third phase (or whatever the hell it is we are in) is stereotyped as winding down, dealing with fewer issues (because they have all been dealt with already) and generally a slowing down.  Now that we are all really fully into whatever this is it seems to me there is a good bit of the opposite of that energy.  We are dealing with really significant stuff (body and health related, for instance) that never came to us when we were younger and more vital.  There is more change per square minute that we have ever seen before in spite of the stability of key relationships and situations.  And yet it is curious that we seem to be demonstrating greater capability than ever before as we navigate all this with the experience and wisdom(?) gained through decades of experimentation with who we are.”

The third phase notion is my attempt to decouple this period of life from the concept of retirement, an idea that this period of life defines itself as not-doing something. Winding down, dealing with fewer issues, slowing down featured prominently in the finish line model of retirement. We were done with the workaday world, no more 9-5. No longer the buzzing, blooming world of business with its implacable demands. Now we could kick back, put our feet up, pop a PBR and watch football without guilt. Or go fishing. Or golfing. Or quilt. Or spend more time with the grandkids.

And, when work finished up followed by four or five years of leisure, then disability or death, that model, retirement, the time of not-working, probably made sense. That is, it described life post-work for the bulk of retirees.

Lengthening lifespans have caused not-working to become inadequate for understanding life after the second phase of family building and career. In fact for some who enter the third phase they may not have given up their career, though family building is likely behind them. Still, even those still active in work often now see work as much less central, much less definitive for their identity.

If you agree to any degree with this: “I believe that the true norm of the third phase is to wander, to become like a planet to your Self, pulled by the gravitational attractions of its values and its directions. Now is the time, if you have not availed yourself of it earlier, to listen to the voices of your own heart, your own dreams, your own ancientrail.”, then, this time, call it the third phase or aging (though I’ve always found this an odd term since by definition we begin aging at birth) or old age, is qualitatively different from what has gone before.

It no longer focuses on getting somewhere, accomplishing something (though we may get somewhere and things may well be accomplished), but on the journey of your uniqueness. In this way we can arrive at the paradox, the apparent contradiction that Tom identifies: “…there is a good bit of the opposite of that energy.  We are dealing with really significant stuff (body and health related, for instance) that never came to us when we were younger and more vital…There is more change per square minute that we have ever seen before in spite of the stability of key relationships and situations.”

Once we have made or not made our family, stumbled on or victoriously walked the path of work/career, then the shift can be made to a time of self-understanding, self-expression. Perhaps the second phase could be characterized as a “we” phase and the third the “I” phase, in this sense the third phase and the first have much in common. In none of the phases do we exist solely in a we mode or solely in an I mode. I refer to a matter of emphasis, one dictated not so much by personal desire or even cultural norms, but by matters of biology.

How so? In the first phase we are young, inexperienced, naive to the world. As we grow and our bodies change, the emphasis is necessarily on personal learning: socialization, athleticism, school curriculum or skill set development. At some point in our twenties, early or late depending on the amount of schooling undertaken, the idea of family begins to take hold for most of us. This reflects a maturation of the body and an acquiescence to the species imperative for propagation. Work and/or career follows from the learning of the first phase and becomes, again for most of us, intricately entwined with family.

We are not eternal though. The body begins a decline, at first gradual, then more pronounced. At some point the children are launched, either into the workforce or into higher education then the workforce, and our own work/career reaches a peak. Sometime after we begin to contemplate a time when neither work nor family building will be central to our lives. Yes, family will still be important, probably, and even work might continue in some fashion, but neither will be at the center of our lives anymore.

What will be at the center? Individuation. The final process of personal development. Does this mean a collapse of the we and an ascendance of the I? Not at all. Your individuation may well carry you more deeply into the world. Or, it may not. It may carry you into the study, the sewing room, the world of rocks and minerals, even the development of a brand new way of human interaction. Wherever it carries you, if you are true to the defining character of the third phase, that it ends in death, you will become more of who you really are. Because, you see, it is, finally, only you that dies.

So, then, the paradox. When we are at our most authentic, are most keen to explore and liberate our gifts, the body is well into its senescence. So, the signals of mortality come fast and often: cancer, arthritis, glaucoma, weakening, imbalance at the same time the Self, the integration of body/mind, is at its most flourishing.

Though it doesn’t have to make sense, since this is a biological process and has its own timing, it does make sense to me that our most fully evolved person can be the one who faces the physical challenges of aging. By now, hopefully, we have learned of our finitude and understand biological deterioration. What a gift it is to see our frailties for what they are, accidents of our biology, and not determinative of our Self, its worth. In this way our best Self confronts the dangers and agonies that would have terrified, perhaps frozen, our younger Selves, and sees in them not the hand of a cruel fate, but the working out of a truth known since birth. We are mortal.

But, we can die as the flaming aspen does, a brilliant luminosity apparent just before the winter sets in.

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Self-ish

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Mabon                                                                     Elk Rut Moon

 

I’ve had false dawns on this recent journey, thinking the time was right to get back to writing, to Latin, to dreaming, to acting. A flywheel somewhere in my psyche has pulled me back into the day-to-day, letting the sweep of things carry me along like a piece of driftwood on the tide. I pushed against it a couple of times, trying to will myself into a more productive place. I’ve failed.

Now I’m waiting, trying to flow with the direction of my psyche, following the ancientrail of change without attempting to bend it to my own wishes. It’s hard. Perhaps this is the third phase way, a more Taoist one, one where the day-to-day and our Self’s work can merge, then diverge.

There is no clock. No agenda set by others. (other than doctors) No career mountain to climb. No financial aspirations. Those of us in the third phase and out of the work life can be more open to the currents of our inner life. We do not have to cut and shape our day to meet the demands of second phase goals.

Not all who wander are lost. This Tolkien phrase unintentionally captures the problem. If you wander, the second phase life assumes you are lost. Though there are no second phase norms by which to judge your direction in the third phase, no child raising (hopefully), no boss or vocational directives, no 401k to plump up, our long affiliation with these norms often carries them over into the third phase anyway. It is in this sense that wandering in the third phase can make us seem and feel lost.

Yet I believe that the true norm of the third phase is to wander, to become like a planet to your Self, pulled by the gravitational attractions of its values and its directions. Now is the time, if you have not availed yourself of it earlier, to listen to the voices of your own heart, your own dreams, your own ancientrail. You may think or feel that, because second phase norms require us to chop and curtail our own desires to fit the needs of institutions, workplaces, family that this is selfish.

I say yes, it is. Just so. Self-ish. Always the world would have been better off if you had let your own voices guide you. Why? Because you are the only you this universe will ever see and to shortcut your development for what others want is to deny the universe your particular gifts. Now is the chance to give expression to that you hidden by the often crushing world of family and career. Now is the time to become the person the universe needs. You.

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Memories, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

The Now and the Not Yet

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Lughnasa                                                                    Labor Day Moon

A curious bifurcation. Friends comment on how well my life’s going. I’m not feeling it. Kate says look at the big picture. That’s what they’re seeing. Time with grandkids. Settling into the mountains. Healthy dogs. Cancer season mostly over. Loft getting put together.

When Kate suggested I look at the big picture, I replied, “It’s not in my nature.” My comment surprised me. What did that mean? “It’s not in my nature.”

In the moment I meant the larger trajectory of my life always gets swamped by the quotidian. The generator, damn thing. Rigel’s cast. Aimlessness. Sleep. That’s what gets my attention, my focus. It’s the way of generalized anxiety. Yes, I can back off from the day-to-day, know that these things are transient and the bigger things more lasting, but I get dragged right back in. Gotta change our home insurance before October 31st. Like that.

But more to my question, what is my nature? What does that mean? I mentioned a while back I’m reading a book called How Forests Think. In it Eduardo Kohn makes a strong, a remarkable case for animism, identifying animism with the Selfhood of living things. Self, if I understand Kohn right, is the gathered experience of not only an individual tree, dog, human, but of the evolutionary and genetic inheritance each individual bears. In this sense my Self is the culmination of human adaptation over millions of years, specific adaptation in the instance of my particular genetic family and the moments since my birth that have shaped who I have become in dynamic interaction with those genetics.

I’ve always had a strong view of Self, that emergent being/becoming we each are. (BTW: we, in Kohn’s vocabulary, includes all living things) Thanks to many years of Jungian analysis I have tended to articulate Self in relation to Jungian thought as an entity rooted in the collective unconscious, born of the struggle between persona and our genetic tendencies, or, said another way, between our adaptative responses to the world and our animal inheritance.

It is in this sense that I meant it is not in my nature. Over time, thanks to events subtle and gross, I have learned to focus on the thing not finished, the matter with something left to do. That moves attention away from the completed, the resolved. Things like settling into the mountains, presumptively cancer free, time with the grandkids recede, get placed in the room marked o.k. for now.

So my nature is the sum of me, the skin-bound memories (another Kohn term) and the adaptative ancestry from which I descend. Here’s an interesting point about genetics and adaptation that Kohn makes, they are future oriented. That is, the adaptations that stick are, in essence, bets on a future that will require them. So, though they come from the past and manifest in the present, each adaptation represents a subtle reorientation of the species to a time imagined, in the most physical of senses, to have similarity with the near past.

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

No Hurries

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Lughnasa                                                              Labor Day Moon

The Labor Day moon has been full the last couple of nights. From our north facing bedroom window we see its light amongst the lodgepole pines, soft on the intermittently grassy and rocky surface that is our backyard. In Andover our south facing bedroom found the full moon shining, lighting up our bed and the room itself. This mountain experience is more subtle, we see the moon by moonshine only while the moon itself floats across the southern sky toward Black Mountain.

My mood has not lifted. I feel my Self as I see the moon shine. The Self, though hidden for now in my psychic south, still sends out rays of thought and feeling. Its presence is known only by these hints. An inclination toward horror fiction. A surge of interest in images from Rome. Imagining my books spread out on my art cart or me sitting in the now covered with books chair, reading. Looking through notes written on art works remembered. Feeling my way through the mountain, into the mountain. Wandering the trails, climbing on the rocks of Shadow Mountain.

After what I wrote yesterday, I realized this is not an unusual transition for me, though it’s not one I’ve made in a while. Something, perhaps the Self’s phases as it passes through the sky of a new place, perhaps the false winter of the cancer season, perhaps the ongoing adjustment to family and the absence of friends, something, probably a mix of all these, has put my Self in the southern sky, out of my range of vision for now.

The ancientrail through this place must be walked slowly. I’ve been trying to push, to run, to shorten the journey with speed. My inner ear becomes deaf as I hurry. My mind narrows to the dangers of the trail, watching for roots and projecting rocks. Imagination has no role. Yet, on this ancientrail of Self re-discovery listening, imagining, expanding the mind are what is necessary.

Waiting now to see the moonrise.

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase
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Lughnasa                                                                 Labor Day Moon

 

Been trying to feel the mountain. Beneath our house Shadow Mountain extends at least 8,800 feet to sea level and just where a mountain begins and ends after sea level is a mystery to me. That’s a mile and 2/3rds of rock. A lot of rock.

14 years ago I came out to Colorado and camped above Georgetown in the National Forest. Right next to me was a sugarloaf mountain. As darkness fell, the mountain disappeared into the gloom. All that massiveness just disappeared. But I could feel it looming over me. Since then I’ve wondered what the mountain equivalent is to the Shedd Aquarium’s freshwater exhibition tag: The essence of a stream is to flow. What is the essence of a mountain?

Mass seems to be the answer. It is the distinctive feature that draws our eyes when we come in on Interstate 76 from the plains of Nebraska. Suddenly, the plains stop. The essence of the plains is flatness? No more flatness, verticality created by mass intervenes with sight lines. The volume of rock pressed upwards by colliding tectonic plates changes the topography.

So these last couple of mornings, before I got out of bed, I’ve been trying to feel the mass of Shadow Mountain. Trying to extend my Self into the mountain, to feel the mountain as it lies there. Not so successful so far. It occurred to me this morning that this is the opposite of conquering the mountain, of summiting, of climbing. This is diving, deepening, merging. Part of the difficulty is the claustrophobic feeling of having the mountain all round me even in my imagination.

This is not all. I noticed the other day in the east, just above the lodgepoles on our property, Orion. In Minnesota I was a late riser so I don’t know where Orion was at 5 am in August, but his presence here surprised me. I have, until now, counted Orion as a winter companion, first becoming visible in November. He may have risen much earlier even in Minnesota, but I missed him. Orion is a special friend, a constellation with which I’ve had a long relationship and one I view as a companion in the night.

Then, there are the bucks. Mule deer bucks. On Sunday as we drove to Evergreen there were four mule deer bucks with still velveted antlers quietly munching grass along the side of the road. They looked at us; we looked at them. The velvet has a prospective nature, auguring the rut when not yet released. On this morning they were friends, not competitors for breeding rights. And they were in harmony.

Then, yesterday, Kate said, “Look at that!” I turned and over my left shoulder looked down into the grassy valley that extends between Shadow Mountain and Conifer Mountain. In the field of mown alfalfa stood a huge bull elk. His rack was enormous and already cleared of its velvet. It arced out away from his head on both sides, tines extending its reach even further. This was a bull of legend. Seeing him took us into the wild, the world that goes on alongside us here on Shadow Mountain, the lives of our fellow inhabitants of this mountain.

All of this, the essence of the mountain, Orion rising, velveted mule deer, the bull elk, hiking on the Upper Maxwell Falls trail, all of this accelerates becoming native to this place. The Rockies. Our home.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Writing

Having a Moment

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Lughnasa                                                            Labor Day Moon

I’m having a moment. It’s immediate stimulus has been reading How Forests Think, by Eduardo Kohn. Kohn is an anthropologist who has done significant field work in el Oriente, the east of Ecuador where the Andes go down into the tropical rain forests of the Amazon drainage. But this book is something else. Though it draws on his field work with the Runa, its focus is the nature of anthropology as a discipline and, more broadly, how humans fit into the larger world of plants and animals.

Thomas Berry’s little book, The Great Work, influenced a change in my political work from economic justice to environmental politics. Berry said that the great work for our time is creating a sustainable human presence on the earth. In 2008 I began working on the political committee of the Sierra Club with an intent to do my part in an arena I know well. I continued at the Sierra Club until January of 2014 until I resigned, mostly to avoid winter driving into the Twin Cities.

Since then, I’ve been struggling with how I can contribute to the great work. Our garden and the bees were effective, furthering the idea of becoming native to this place. The move to Colorado though has xed them out.

Kohn’s book has helped me see a different contribution I can make. Political work is mostly tactical, dealing in change in the here and now or the near future. In the instance of climate change, tactical work is critical for not only the near future but for the distant future as well. I’ve kept my head down and feet moving forward on the tactical front for a long, long time.

There are though other elements to creating a sustainable human presence on the earth. A key one is imagining what that human presence might be like. Not imagining a world of Teslas and Volts, renewable energy, local farming, water conservation, reduced carbon emissions, though all those are important tactical steps toward that presence; but, reimagining what it means to be human in a sustainable relationship with the earth.

Kohn is reimagining what being human is. His reimagining is a brilliant attempt to reframe who thinks, how they think and how all sentience fits together. He’s not the only one attempting to do this. The movement is loosely called post-humanist, removing humans from the center of the conceptual universe.  A posthuman world would be analogous to the solar system after Galileo and Copernicus removed the earth from the center. Humans, like the earth, would still exist, but their location within the larger order will have shifted significantly.

This fits in so well with my reimagining faith project. It also fits with some economic reimagining I’ve been reading about focused on eudaimonia, human flourishing. It also reminds me of a moment I’ve recounted before, the Iroquois medicine man, a man in a 700 year lineage of medicine men, speaking at the end of a conference on liberation theology. The time was 1974. He prayed over the planting of a small pine tree, a symbol of peace among the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy because those tribes put their weapons in a hole, then planted a pine tree over them.

His prayer was first to the winged ones, then the four-leggeds and those who swim and those who go on water and land, the prayer went on asking for the health and well-being of every living thing. Except the two-leggeds. I noticed this and went up to him after the ceremony and asked him why he hadn’t mention the two-leggeds. “Because,” he said, “we two-leggeds are so fragile. Our lives depend on the health of all the others, so we pray for them. If the rest are healthy, then we will be, too.”

Reimagine faith in a manner consistent with that vision. Reimagine faith in a post-humanist world. Reimagine faith from within and among rather than without and above. This is work I can do. Work my library is already fitted to do. Work I’ve felt in my gut since an evening on Lake Huron, long ago, when the sun set so magnificently that I felt pulled into the world around me, became part of it for a moment. Work that moment I’ve mentioned before when I felt aligned with everything in the universe, that mystical moment, has prepared me for. Yes, work I can do. Here on Shadow Mountain.

 

 

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Feel the Rain On Our Face

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Lughnasa                                                                    Recovery Moon

There are many ways of becoming native to this place. The one that worked for me involved a combination of following an ancient liturgical calendar based on seasonal changes in temperate latitudes: the Great Wheel and gardening. There are many other paths. Chado: the Way of Tea integrates the tea ceremony with a finely divided sensibility to Japanese seasons, some only two weeks long. Hunter/gatherers have to be native to the place where they are or they will not survive. Followers of the Tao, the way, lean into the rhythms of the natural world rather than away from them, flowing through the world as water does in a stream. Hiking and camping and canoeing. Forestry with an emphasis on forest health. Conservation biology.

Oddly though practitioners of modern agriculture are often as estranged from their place as residents of vast urban enclaves. And I recently read, in Foreign Policy magazine’s July/August edition, an intriguing explanation as to what lead current, often corporate, agriculture astray. When the population explosion gained prominence in the mid-1960’s, think Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” a concentrated focus on methods of improving agricultural productivity resulted. And it worked. More acres went under the plow, more chemicals went into the soil and onto crops, antibiotics filled food animals, food production became more sophisticated though not more nutritious, fast cheap restaurants bought and sold fast cheap food. There are real dangers in letting ourselves become strangers to our home world.

Becoming native to this place is analogous to being born again, revivified for the act of belonging to, being part of this planet. Second naiveté, Paul Ricoeur’s wonderful notion, can follow a state of critical distance:

“According to Ricoeur, the rational forces brought to our civilization through modernity have made it difficult to accept religion or scripture in the “first naïveté” sense. Once subjected to rational inspection, the literal meanings of religion really do not hold up…”  exploring spiritual development

Modernity has put the fruits of enlightenment reason and modern technology forward as more significant, more important than the growth of a tomato, than the beauty of a wilderness lake. It has substituted the grace of a soaring condor with the stiff, hard brilliance of an airplane. That tomato, grown soft and juicy on the plant, got replaced by a hard-skinned, pre-ripe picked fruit designed for machine harvesting and long distance transport. Distances that used to require human feet and legs, or the same of horses, now demand only that we sit and wait.

Before you resist this. This is not a screed against airplanes, cars, computers, telephones or grocery stores. It is a recognition of the rupture, the critical distance, modernity has created between our lives and the world that sustains them. Food comes from soil and plants and the animals that eat the plants. Oxygen from the plants at work. Water used to be purified by the very wetlands we fill in or drain to build subdivisions or to plant more acreage of chemically injected crops.

Life, in other words, exists in a delicate balance with the inanimate; that balance is literally billions of years old and one we cannot afford to ignore. Yet we do. And so we must make an effort to again become native to this place, this place which in its wonder gave life a chance.

Following the seasons as they change and following within those changes emergence, growth, life and death became easier for me when I overlaid on spring/summer/fall/winter the four big solar events of equinoxes and solstices, then put between those the cross-quarter holidays of my Celtic ancestors:  Samhain (summer’s end), Imbolc (in the belly), Beltane (the beginning of the growing season) and Lughnasa (the first harvest holiday). When I write the season at the top of this blog, I remember, for example, that we are now in the season of first harvests. And sure enough Kate brought home some wonderful heirloom tomatoes today.

The extensive gardens, both flower and vegetable, plus the orchard that Kate and I installed and nurtured in Andover reinforced the lessons of the Great Wheel. At Halloween, Samhain’s paler descendant, our garden would be finished, the beds covered, foods in jars in the basement, garlic hanging from rafters, onions and apples spread out. We were part of the turning wheel and the turning wheel shaped what we could and could not do. We lived then with the rhythms of the temperate latitudes, in some harmony with them.

Now we are in a new place, a more arid, less fertile place and the way of becoming native to it is still in process. But it will come.

We cannot all go back to the land. Cities dominate the living patterns for most of the world. But we must find ways, whether through community supported agriculture or urban hydroponics or organized trips to the countryside, to help us all feel the rain on our face. We all need to wonder at the slender green shoots that brave their way through the late snows of winter. Or, at the tropical lushness of equatorial jungles. Or the marvel of lives lived fully in the world ocean. Our lives and the lives of our grandchildren depend on our becoming, again, native to this place. To know our spot with a second naiveté so that we will care for, love this rocky, watery wonderful earth.

 

 

 

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Becoming Native to This Place

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Lughnasa                                                                Recovery Moon

The most ancientrail of all is becoming native to this place.

But, why must we become native to mother Earth? Aren’t we native simply because we are thrown onto the planet’s surface at birth? Yes and no. Yes, in that we are an organism designed to live in this gravity, breathe this concentration of oxygen, use plant matter and other animals as food. No, in that those of us thrown into a complex industrial/technology culture are native not to the planet itself, but to adaptations made over centuries by economies and governments. This includes the U.S., Europe, most of Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as residents of urban areas on every continent.

In the U.S.A. we are native to electricity as Kate and I learned just this Monday.  Our typical life ground to a halt along with 4600 others when the power went out. We are native to a night lit not by fire, but by bulbs. We are native to warm houses in winter, cool ones in summer. Our hunting and gathering takes place at King Sooper, Safeway, Lunds, Byerlys. We are native to antibiotics, surgery, dental care.

When we climb the additional 3,600 feet in altitude from Denver to our home on Black Mountain Drive, we sit comfortably in a moving chair powered by the ancient remains of dinosaurs and forests. We are native to telephones, computers, text messages. We are native to machines and carpenters and plumbers. We are, in short, native to almost anything but this planet where we live.

You could reasonably ask whether this matters. Our future lies in the stars anyhow, doesn’t it? Maybe so. Especially if we render the earth uninhabitable for humans. Which, with climate changing drivers still dominant in our world economies, we’re working hard to accomplish.

I believe it matters. Why? The short answer is that becoming native to this planet, again, is our best hope for throttling back those climate change drivers. We can escape to the stars while having a beautiful homeworld as our base of exploration.

The longer answer has to do with the nature of our humanity. Technological and industrial estrangement from the rhythms of the natural world is almost a canard, a cliche. We expect tomatoes in winter. We expect access to any part of the planet within hours. Even the colors of our sunrises and sunsets often have chemical pollutants to thank for their vibrancy.

We need to awaken ourselves to the essential, everyday miracles: photosynthetic conversion of sunlight into food, the transpiration of that same process, oxygen, being a gas we need to survive. And this consciousness that we have. How about that. Or the intricate and interdependent web of living things. The changing of seasons in the temperate zones. Water’s strange characteristics.

In the next post I’ll suggest one way of becoming native to this place.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

The Lure of Yesterday

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Summer                                                                   Recovery Moon

NYT had a video and an article, 36 hours in Siem Reap. This type of article is a regular feature and one that gives a wonderful, quick entré to a particular locale. My visit in 2004 is now 11 years ago and the Siem Reap of this video has many upscale tourist options that didn’t exist when I was there. The Siem Reap of 2004 was a sleepy village though studded with many smaller hotels and one big one, the Hotel D’Angkor. Hostels were as evident as tourist hotels. But the building boom had already begun and the Siem Reap of 2015 had its roots in 2004.

As such articles do, it featured a wide array of things to do from shadow puppetry performed in front of a fire and screen to dining in upscale restaurants, tours on tuk-tuks and shops featuring Cambodian village crafts. I suppose the article does its job as a teaser, a what if I were there, even briefly fantasy, but it glossed over, very lightly, the primary reason Siem Reap has become an international destination. Quite a feat, really, in a country ravaged by years of the Khmer Rouge and corrupt politicians.

Angkor. Angkor is a site containing over 70 temples, each built by a different ruler of the Khmer, and extending over many square miles. It is much more than Angkor wat, the supposedly eponymous temple. In reality Angkor wat just means Angkor temple. That direct translation does not differentiate the best preserved and fascinating temple closest to Siem Reap from all the others. Ta Prohm. Bayon. Banteay Serai. And many, many others.

Angkor is a built space that has carried the Hindu culture of the  Khmer deva-rajas, god-kings, who ruled between 802 a.d. and 1351 a.d., into our time and will carry it far into the future. The intricate bas reliefs, the monumental four-faced sculptures with the classical Bayon smile, the elephants carved in stone, the florid decor of Banteay Serai require time and reading to appreciate. Ta Prohm, an often photographed temple, has been left as the forest has reclaimed it, with kapok trees growing through doorways and over roof tops.

Outside many of the temples small bands of Cambodian musicians play traditional music. My first reaction was oh how wonderful, authentic music played among the temples of this ancient culture. Then I began to look closely at the band. Most were missing a foot or an arm or a leg or carried other scars from the many landmines that continue to plague the Cambodian people.

 

One of my most memorable travel evenings was spent on the outer stone wall of Bayon, watching the living temple across the way as monks clad in saffron and maroon hit gongs, lit incense Bayon and prayed along with passers by who came to worship. The sun set and the shadows changed the expressions of the four-faced sculptures said to be the likeness of Jayavarman VII, the last deva-raja, who converted to Buddhism. The monkeys howled, insects chirped and the deep bass of the temple gong reverberated. Incense scented the air.