The Buddhas and the Bats

Reflections.

Looking down.

The riverbanks of Wat Tham Pu Tu.

Phil considers the Buddha.

On the weekends during our time at Hans's farm, we would often rent a room for Saturday night and spend the weekend motorcycling around the countryside. One especially memorable Sunday, we took a lazy morning ride north of Chiang Rai to several caves in the hills dotting the riverbank.

The cold air of a cave takes on a religious quality in the hundred-plus degree heat of the tropics. Thais are not the only people to construct their altars in the insides of mountains, but their climate gives them the most reason to.

By the end of our travels, we would have seen a lot of caves, but these were the first. And for that, they'll always be a little special. We were the only visitors to several of these caves, excepting the scruffy guard dog to the steepest one. But at the largest one, in which the photograph above of the reflected monks was taken, a young family stepped in. There's just something about a small child's voice echoing in a cave, to the background of bats. Oh yes, how there were bats: dripping from the ceiling, clicking and chortling quietly to themselves and very rarely swooping to a new sleeping post.

That photograph of the monks is one of my favorites: the jumble of paintings and posters behind them, like a strip of a 70s living room transposed to the bowels of a mountain. And their faces! They looks so happy, so contented. The blessing they gave the young family sounded so sweet, too.

Even thinking about being there, all these months later, I feel my thoughts going slow, becoming wondering, feeling wondrous. I think of these words, by Jane Hirshfield:

An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.