13: From Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow, Russia

Beloved friends,

The hottest part of the day in the desert by the Ayerarwaddy where the smooth curve of the horizon is punctured by thousands of stupas is around 2PM. I left the hostel around 1:30, soon after waking up from a post-sunrise-and-breakfast nap. In the sunrise, the plains are covered by a mist whose provenance remained mysterious to me — it wasn’t quite the smoke that envelops the rest of Myanmar in the dry season. As day approaches, the darkness transmutes gently into a pastel rainbow and eventually the orb of the sun appears in the distance, big and brilliant red and pleasantly warm. In the afternoon, all pleasantness is gone from the sun — you can feel the its merciless radiation battering your skin; as you temple-hop on your electric scooter the dust sweeps up and seeps into your very pores. And as you drive, you may not know where you are going, so you turn here and there and eventually get lost in this land of palms and shrubs and dust and bricks, and then you find something you didn’t know you were looking for. Or maybe it’s something you didn’t think could be found…

That morning, I had watched the sunrise from a balloon (a beautiful splurge on my unemployed man’s travel budget). After landing, the ground crew escorted us to a stringed perimeter they set up nearby for the sake of our light breakfast of croissants and champagne. Around the perimeter there appeared a ragtag mass of vendors peddling their wares — Thai-style pants, traditional lacquerware, paintings made of powdered stone, postcards handcrafted by children to tug at your heartstrings. A young boy with piercing black eyes asked me for a hat (we had gotten hats as part of our ballooning kit). I gave him the hat I had been wearing and bought a painting and hoped that would assuage the guilt throbbing in my chest. That balloon ride would have bought more than 850 local meals. It felt like that string perimeter was a chasm I could not cross.

During second breakfast at the hostel, I began to plan my trip away from Bagan, via Yangon, Bangkok, and Moscow to eventually reach that other sacred desert, the one of Moses and Miriam et al. I intended to take a night bus from Bagan to Yangon, then a plane to Yangon, a night in Bangkok, a plane to Moscow, a nine-hour layover, and thence to Tel Aviv. That felt like a lot, and I was still weak from my last bout of food poisoning and a lingering sinus infection, and I wanted to be nice to myself. I began to weigh the possibility of spending an extra night in Bagan and flying to Yangon. In conjunction with the balloon trip, this luxury weighed on my conscience, even if I’d recently donated approximately the cost of the balloon trip to the International Rescue Committee. 

So it was with this weight in my heart, the sun on my head, and the temples in my sights that I rode into the archaeological zone that afternoon, heading straight into an insight: money is just money. It comes and it goes and I can use it to buy things that make me and other people happy. This 100 dollar flight will not break my bank. Nor will spending approximately as much money buying gifts the main purpose of which is to leave money in this place. More importantly, holding on to this money will not buy me certainty or existential security. I had ascribed to money the role of stable ship upon which to navigate the chaotic and uncertain seas of life — the more money, the sturdier the ship, I thought. But what dawned on me at that moment was that, while this is true at a practical level (having money means I can buy food and pay for shelter, and occasionally for balloon rides or airplanes, as well as for gifts for friends), it is not true existentially. Life will continue to be uncertain, regardless of how much money I have in the bank. I can’t buy existential security. That must come from elsewhere, from a different source of confidence and self-worth. 

So there’s the rub. I mentioned in one of my previous emails that, during my period of retreat I touched the deep unworthiness that underlies a great deal of my experience of the world. This unworthiness is part and parcel of my fear of uncertainty, and of my subsequent hoarding of cash, and also of my complicated relationship to body image that sometimes manifests as a hard-edged obsession with nutrition or exercise. And it’s still there, comfortably wedged inside my chest cavity, accessible on occasion from the equanimous platform of my meditation. And sometimes known post-facto by the fruit it leaves behind: guilt at eating too many cookies and ice cream and not exercising, the nasty self-talk and endless self-judgement, the fear of being unloved and unloveable… I see it now, and I know that my job is to kill it with kindness and unconditional love. 

Reading Victor Tan Chen's "The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy" in one of my many recent legs of transit, I was struck by the fact that this work is not just important at a personal level. Deep, unexamined sentiments of unworthiness breed fear, anger and resentment. On a political scale, this is fuel for dangerous work. To paraphrase Shinzen Young, the endless cycle of suffering is caused by people reacting unthinkingly to pain and hurt in ways that likely generate more pain and suffering. The place to intervene is in between stimulus and response, using kind-eyed attention to replace reactivity with possibility. This work is relevant at all levels from the personal through the interpersonal to the international, and as my friend Joan reminded me recently, there’s a reason on airplanes they say you should put on your oxygen mask before helping others. 

As I land in Israel I begin the period I have set aside to think about what to do after my travel plans end in June, and in these strange times I have been thinking a lot about how to maintain the integrity and intensity of my self-work practice and reflection while contributing wholeheartedly to the work the world needs. I have come to believe both are indispensable and must walk hand in hand. It is not a question of which or whether, but of how.

And here’s one from the road and for the road: In the shuttle between airports in Bangkok there was a flashing LED display that read: “On days when you don’t feel loved at all, remember that there is always someone who will love you unconditionally. Happy mother’s day.”

With unconditional, motherly love,

Rafa

PS: Hat tip to my new friends Lu and Kiko, with whom I shared a lovely meal the night before the events described in this missive. Their generosity and big-hearted reflections on class and money greatly inspired my newfound freedom.

PPS: I am noticing that there are many other thoughts that I wanted to share as I wrap up the Southeast Asian portion of my travels — about traveling v. tourism v. something else more relational, about language barriers and kindness and the power (and limitations) of charades, about transit time and liminal spaces and in-betweenness, about meeting random strangers like the wine experts and writers/editors I just had dinner with. And I am glad I am utilizing my power of restraint and keeping this a little more focused. Sometimes less is more (I hope :-P)