Husking rice,
a child squints up
to view the moon.
Forming a mantra of sorts, I recite over and over this haiku from Basho. Poetic displacement allows me to deeply ponder how I, a thirty-something year old business woman, am also a third world child. I see myself, a starry eyed child, harvesting the magic of night and imagining how many villages occupy the earth. Scattered grains of rice are glued to the night sky and tell the story of many lives, many moons. Somehow, I am casted – a displaced speck of rice – transplanted across the ocean… to a life busy with business trips, rush hour traffic and the desire to write my memoir.
It is when life gets its busiest, that I think, “I could just as easily be in a rice field.” Then the lens to life brings everything into focus with the right perspective: life is a wondrous journey. Having humble beginnings as a constant backdrop to day-to-day living is a gift. It reminds me that everything relies upon everything else. My present moment is a result of actions and inactions taken by others both known and unknown to me. This is the river of life… past, present and future flow simultaneously in one moment.
I think about my story… almost dying in an impoverished refugee camp to reliving my past with writing retreats in posh zen settings. I think about how I was a one-year old baby among four brothers, one sister and my parents. There were eight of us divided into two canoes on the Mekong River. Under the watchful eye of my aunt, who signaled us to cross when the communist guards were away, we would escape in broad daylight. As rice farmers, we were accustomed to relying on the river for living. However, on that day, it served as our life line.
I have yet to return to Laos. But day-to-day, the desire grows to “go home.”
There is a chapter entitled, “Going Home” in “Writing Down the Bones where Natalie encourages you to “go home” and return to your roots so that you can be free – so that you stop avoiding anything that you are. This doesn’t mean that we become stuck in our past but that we recognize that it has and always will shape our lives. There is oneness in our beginnings, endings, past, future and present. Acknowledging this allows us to understand ourselves, our family and our world.
I recently watched a talk on TED of Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian writer who is my age, on the danger of a single story. She encourages us to delve deeply into our own stories and to see that the story of our lives is very much like a river… filled with many contributers and tributaries. When we recognize this, we have great understanding that the present moment is backed by a rich past and serves as fertile soil for our fateful futures.
With such truth, we can “go home” in each waking moment. With thoughtful breaths, I am the baby crossing the Mekong as much as I am the busy American aching to write her memoir… to study how one soul carries the spirit of both the east and west. Hopefully, I will visit Laos soon.
To view Chimamanda’s video, click here.
