spirit caves, we made it

a wild half week of serious traveling. just one day of cave hunting but i'll never forget it: crawling/swimming through 2 ft high cave holes with cave water up to your chin to get to a very dark and loud waterfall. and walking through the most beautiful mountain side of agricultural land with a shan man named ong who knows his local flora. tasting along the way, i became translator for the different things we came upon from wild grazing cows making songs with their harmonious bells (or rather cows delegated with bells according to size) to the bright red sweet and sour flowers, medical herbs, and agricultural crops. we were only a few kilometers from the myanmar border.

i also received a very important book recently which is putting me in my place every time i turn a page. in i six non lectures, e.e. cummings paints the integrity of artists in almost its entire complexity in such a way that i no longer feel lost or confused in the midst of pursuing my calling. As he quotes Rilke from Letters To A Young Poet, he sings the song of my loneliness that has been so present in my life despite the dream i am living- then he reminds me why my curiosity is my compass (and great navigator) through the loneliness i chose:

"Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them." (Rilke)

In my proud and humble opinion, those two sentences are worth all the soi-disant criticism of the arts which has ever exists or will ever exist. Disagree with them as much as you like, but never forget theme; for if you do, you will have forgotten the mystery which you have been, the mystery which you shall be, and the mystery which you are --