Losing the anchor

When you spend months traveling with only a backpack to accompany you, strangely intimate connections develop between you and your possessions. So when you suddenly lose all of them, it is uncomfortably uprooting, like losing part of your diminished travel identity. Not to mention the painful pang of knowing that all the sentimental little items and memories you have painstakingly collected over the last three months are gone, vanished.

I guess this is the universe's (or Bangkok Airport's) way of telling me, "You're moving too fast, at a faster pace than your tired old pack could keep up with. Now it's just you kid, no inanimate backpack as a buddy, no comforts to pad your heavy, constant landings. You get to keep your wallet, passport, computer - all the important, costly stuff. But you lose everything you could cuddle up next to."

So this is my newest obstacle on a challenging course. I am being challenged to cut those materials bonds, which only exist because I am privileged in the first place. I can increase my weightlessness and its wisdom, which unifies in solidarity with the possession-less masses I encounter on this assignment. It is out of my hands so I have to figure out how for it to be a blessing, this dangling in the empty-handed from a wire over the middle of the planet.

And wow, oh yeah, damn, I am in Laos. I love this quiet country. 5 million countrypeople now, not 1 billion. The silence confirms the lower number of lives. Here is one of the few non-overpopulated places on the Earth, where one doesn't get the feeling that humans have totally conquered and where drastically beautiful birds, frogs and bugs don't feel quite so endangered. My org's work here focuses on enabling tribal people to protect and manage their precious traditional lands, as greedy Chinese business men and toothless Vietnamese loggers encroach daily to rape some of the still-bountiful resources in vulnerable little southern Laos.

I will visit these places for the next few days and collect stories, information, songs. It hurts that my voice recorder, along with the legends and melodies it has been capturing in so many tongues, is gone. Sorry, but they will have to live in my memory and in the mouths of those who still speak them and keep their flames alive. I'll write to let everyone know how the visit goes. Just me, no junk and no trunk.