The Goddess Cannot Eat Our Plastic Offerings

What is the point of having holidays in the era of post truth?

In Thailand, like everywhere in the world, there are special days set aside to honor That Which Gives Us Life. However, in these strange days of self absorption and scientific obsession few among us remember what and whom our holidays are actually honoring. Moreover, if we do remember we forget how to honor. And how we go about doing things is far more important than the overlords of efficiency and convenience would have us believe. Good intentions are seldom truly enough. Mere “thoughts and prayers”, as we know, are rarely all that helpful. True prayer, true honoring, which is at the root of all Holy Days, requires great skill and precise communal orchestration that is artistically profound yet able to dissolve quickly. You can’t simply buy a card, pop a bottle of champagne, light a candle and call it good. What is asked of a Holy Day participant is genuine participation and sacrifice, for the the benefit of something beyond ones own needs. At their core, holidays are not parties, they are meaning-filled rituals.

Loy Krathong (ลอยกระทง) was celebrated this week. It takes place on the evening of the full moon of the 12th month as recognized by the traditional Thai lunar calendar. Originally it was a day set aside by primarily South Western Tai cultures (Laos, Shan, Mon, Taninthari, Kelantan, Kedah, Xishuangbanna. etc.) who knew that their survival was utterly dependent on the wellbeing of great “mother rivers” that made their rice grow (November is the time of rice harvest in this region). However, as images of krathongs (the delicate and ornate boat-like offerings which historically were made to carry prayers to the Goddess Khonkha (พระแม่คงคา)) can be found carved upon the walls of the great Bayon temple complex in Cambodia, a magnificent Hindu structure built under the rule of King Jayavaram VII in the 12th century, it is clear that this tradition can trace its origins back to India.

Yet, like so many other rituals that have, over time, turned into commercial holidays, few here in the “Land of Smiles” can speak of the ritual origins of this day with a strait face. If they remember what the holiday is for at all, than they speak of it as if it was some silly superstition as they take another sip of Chang beer and light another string of firecrackers to ignite an exciting 10 second blast that results in countless animals being filled with horror for the duration of the night. The sincere relationship between humans, i.e. “eaters of rice” and the “mother waters” has been lost to time by the commercial interests of modernity who have, like most other holidays the world over been dumbed down to yet another reason to party, distract ourselves and consume things we don’t need.

Loy Krathong has become one of the largest festivals in Thailand. Scores of tourists from around the globe rush to waters’ edges alongside Thai nationals to place styrofoam baskets filled with processed foods and wax candles into already polluted rivers. Though a faint recollection as to the true meaning of this act is felt, rarely are any actual prayers still made. At best, a pretend bow is enacted before the krathong, just long enough for the tour guide to snap a quick photo of the tourist so they can show their friends on social media how spiritual they are, and then it’s back to drinking whiskey and blowing things up.

In addition to placing foam boats in rivers that will inevitably end up in massive trash piles throughout the country, people also like to light lanterns on fire and send them into the heavens. Though now little more than a good photo op, all of this was once a well thought out, heavily ritualized affair overlooked by shaman and initiated elders who could articulate the details of every gesture, every organic offering delicately placed in appropriate places. It was understood that ones thoughts, ones gestures, the way one approached the River, indeed, the ways in which families approached the slow, long affair of gathering the flowers, making the incense, the candles, etc. well before ever even beginning to approach said river, was all a deliberate prayer in and of itself, all deeply important acts of mythically embodying a necessary conversation between humans and the unseen realms. Yet today, those old enough to recall such bygone times, tend to remain silent, their wisdom drowned out by the deafening sounds of bad speakers blasting karaoke into the wee hours of the would-be holy morning.

The Goddess of the Waters cannot eat our processed, pre-made, conveniently purchased bullshit. You can’t take a selfie of yourself making a prayer. It kills the prayer instantly. It’s like posting yourself having sex with your beloved on Instagram. Ritual must be done secretly, sincerely, slowly, and with reverence. Great care and deliberate effort must be made before the elemental forces will even consider accepting our offerings. Yet all one need do is take a wee stroll to any waters edge in Thailand. There the layers of trash and chemical-saturated water will make clear than there is little, if any genuine respect remaining for the once revered Goddess of Water anymore. Modernity has successfully managed to creep its vile view into even the most remote parts of the world and devour even the most holy of days. Yet it is not the goddess who ultimately suffers from this amnesiatic mess, it is us.

My wife and I do what we can to keep alive the memory of this dying relationship based ritual-holiday. We do this for our children. It’s sad that even our closest friends, and even ourselves at times, feel tinges of awkwardness when we bow before something modernity has taught us to be unreal. We don’t see the goddess in human form so we don’t really believe She is there. We like the idea of a greater-than-human force underlying all things but the arrogant noise of civilization has most of us convinced it’s all make believe. But then we see our forests scorched, our watersheds unfit for children to swim in, not a single organic fruit stand to be found for miles upon miles… something deep inside us yearns to again be in right relationship with Her. So we do what we can. We fail. We make mistakes. We try again…

So quick the progressive ones among us are to learn scientific, technological ways to regenerate soil and sea. Yet how do we regenerate the heart, the dreams, the views that once allowed us to fall in love with the beauty all around us so truly and deeply that our calendars were packed with days set aside purely for the ritual maintaining of the sacred relational modalities that make manifest the power of this holy love affair? Is it too late to save this relationship from being severed forever? Have we broken our mothers heart for the last time? I wonder…

I wonder…

Its hard not to wonder why we even have holidays anymore. What once served as masterfully designed passages for realigning humans with celestial rhythms, orchestrating us into a symphonic dialogue with the more-than-human realms now has become, in most places, merely another opportunity to get shitfaced, which for many devotees of Capitalism happens every happy hour anyway. Hmm… Could it be the goddess Herself has cleverly renamed holidays…Christianized them… Islamized them… Jewdaified and Buddhafied them… TaylorSwifted and SuperBowled and Hallmark-Carded them all in order to hide their auspicious origins deep within our subconscious to be rediscovered for what they truly are in a more suitable, less ignorant time. I wonder…

We think Christmas is about the birth of Jesus. We think Halloween in about dressing in costumes and carving pumpkins. We think Easter is about bunnies and the resurrection of a Palestinian man. Yet if we look deeper into the origins of these holidays, the origins nearly always trace back to a time when a deep love affair between humans and non-humans resulted in an animate world of constant ritual feeding for the Spiritual Forces of Nature. Such acts not only made for festive occasions that made community bonds grow stronger but they served as powerful ecological educations, reinforcing our deep understanding of what actually gives us life (i.e. Water, Soil, Fire, Air, Ether and Love).

Modernities culture crushing armies were quick to ban all books and songs and languages and artifacts and foods and fashion statements and holidays, etc. that kept alive this universally recognized relational feasting. And once civilization became sick with greed (was civilization ever not sick with greed?), BAM! the creation of religion took hold and with it the rise of the beginning of the end of clean rivers, clean air, healthy soil, true elders, initiated youth, content people, right view, reciprocity, etc.

I don’t mean to make simple something so complex. There are many very large books that have been written that articulate in great detail what was just briefly mentioned here. They can and should be dutifully sought out and studied with care. Yet, those books barely scratch the surface of this curious conundrum either. Modernity has an incredibly short memory and with this a very low capacity for holding big thoughts, not to mention any honest ability whatsoever for holding multiple truths at once.

Memory cannot be memed. Look at how much mad bickering about who has rights to which land is vomiting over all our newsfeeds of late. Split second snippets retelling how this guy from over there is legit from here and that place was actually this place before it was what is was then, before now. All in TikTok summary. Not just some of the time, instantly. And on and on it goes. Memory has increasingly little to do with facts and much more to do with Dreams it seems.

Neoliberal podcast debates aren’t going to straighten any of this out. Now don’t get all weird about this. It isn’t that facts aren’t important. Or keeping an open mind, being open to opposing views, etc. That is not what is being said here at all. In fact, if facts are in fact facts, they must be recognized factually as the facts they have been proven to be. Thats a fact! But facts don’t make you fall in love. This is the point. And what we need now is a collective weakening in the knees. We need to be drunk on the beauty of Life again. Not saturated with watered down holidays and cultural memes… but elevated by Dreams…

Poetry and art can jolt an ancestral, somatic recollection in ways modernities predominant thinking cannot. This is far more essential to humankind than more “information”. This is what Holidays, when done right seem to best embody; the regeneration of a collective memory beyond time, space and intellect. No matter how much I try to get my neighbors to stop drenching their rice fields in agrochemicals, no matter how much I try to explain why I don’t side with the Israeli Government any more than I do with Hamas, no matter how much I attempt to convince my fellow countrymen that Democrats are essentially little different than Republicans, no one is going to change their view unless they are emotionally transformed. Facts aren’t enough in this regard. We need art. We need ritual. We need to fall in love.

We can’t do this alone. The Goddess must be properly fed again.

.

((((…I pause...))))

.

.

.

This week I celebrate another special day. It was this week one year ago that I published my first essay here on Substack. It has been a great time of learning (and unlearning) for me to share amongst this virtual village vulnerable reflections from a, shall we say, less-than-ordinary life. Originally I thought I would simply share here insights into life as lived from within a multicultural eco-village, with hopes that some might benefit from the simple knowing that a way of living away from the normal nine-to-five, hyper modern existence is not only possible but not all that farfetched. I figured I’d might share a few of the nuts and bolts as to how to build a successful community with the wild notion that modern man has become less socially adept than I remember, more solitary than I recall as a child and dare I say, more easily offended.

Yet, as it goes when surrendering to a vision bigger than ones orbiting around our own desires, the tides ebb and flow. Man makes plans and gods laugh. The web slowly reveals its enormous interconnectedness and we see clearly that one cannot talk about, say, the way land is managed without talking about race, class and gender nor can one speak of community without exploring the world of cultural cross-pollination, multiple origins and the marriage of opposing forces, one cannot yap on about the magical qualities of air without speaking first of the sea, of trees, of frogs and snail juice, the memory of dinosaurs and the sounds of instruments no longer played, etc. We all art this way because of all that. We inter-are and to speak of one thing, by nature, is to speak of all else.

Community, as is often mentioned here is messy and unpredictable. It is intertwined with so many things not generally associated with community. Of course a deep dive into the realms of tricky human to human relations is essential. But so too must a childless man with no aspirations of becoming a father learn a great deal about parenthood should he hope to understand community. The same underlying phenomena holds true for one who hopes to learn about how to nourish happiness within a community. One must first know grief. To know truth we must embrace mystery. To experience the power of good memory we must come to terms with what we have forgotten. To create a relationship of depth with order, we must befriend Chaos and Chance. It has as much to do with inclusivity and dedication as with bold boundary setting and the ability to let go. Post-activism requires a heightened form of patience, where unlearning and a profoundly mature ability to carry many seemingly opposing views at once is paramount.

The further down the rabbit hold I go it becomes ever more obvious to me that in our collective search for home, for finding deep relations with others and with a Place, none of this can be easily learned. There is no single way and real risk is always at bay. Genuine learning must be surrendered to slowly. Furthermore, a mere intellectual understanding of systems won’t do much. No matter how progressive our education may be, how “woke” we think we are after attending permaculture courses, workshops on trauma and plant medicine, no matter how many classes we take on how to be good allies or how to smash the patriarchy, none of this matters if we can’t first… fall in love… with, what my beloved teacher Martin Prechtel refers to, as… The Holy in Nature.

We have to fall in love with Gaia again.

I want to thank all of you who have joined me thus far. In these strange times we need to feel safe to share with each other and you all have not only made me feel safe but many of you have even made regular financial contributions to me throughout this process in order to help sustain my ability to look more deeply, to live more deeply and to try to offer a voice for the voiceless in meaningful ways. I bow in gratitude to you. And, in looking forward, I want to do what I can not only to feed you all, but feed the Holy as I do so.

As stated above, I increasingly feel that only Beauty can do this. Only ART. As the Gregorian New Year approaches, I have some new ideas as to how to do this using this platform as a vehicle for initiating such acts. For starters, I want to offer here more art, more poetry and more song. I want to do what I can to support the great thinkers of this time, the all too often overlooked quiet ones who carry great courage, the all too often neglected yet powerful youth, the inspirational visionary artists of not only this era but times now forgotten, the post-activists, the noble organic farmers, cultural seed keepers and of course the heroic mothers and fathers who won’t settle for the shit educational boxes modernity is forcing us all to shove our kids into, etc…

Yes, it is certainly a goal of mine to make enough income from this Substack experiment to make generous financial contributions to these people. So many of us, myself included, receive free educations from people who do a tremendous amount of work to get information that matters out to everyone, free of charge. Few pay them for the work they do. My goal is to help compensate these people and do so with cold hard cash, but also with a spirit of reciprocity and love not unlike that which I believe once served as the foundation of all Holy Days (holidays).

The unseen world, the forgotten Goddess of the Water, heck, even Jesus Christ Himself, they all need us to think bigger thoughts now, to remember what this is really all about. I don’t want this page to be yet another opportunity to merely consume information. I pray that in some way it can touch something deeper in us that will make us again come alive, make us fall in love again and that in doing so we fall effortlessly into ritual acts of feeding again That Which Allows Us To Live.

May it be so.

»»»»»

Stay tuned. In the coming weeks, a slow trickle of new offerings will be released.

May the Great Unseen Beings That Dwell in the Waters of the World be re-membered and may all beings everywhere be happy and free.

All blessings, no misfortune.

gp

---

---

This week we delve into the much loved Thailand molam group, Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band.

Featuring Chris Menist on percussion, Kammao Perdtanon performing the traditional phin lute and the legendary Sawai Kaewsombat on the khaen (a large harmonica like instrument constructed from bamboo pipes), Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band offers a fresh take on the old school Molam sound. These tracks mix traditional Thai styles with folk-rock, blues and dub offering a driving, hypnotic improvisation that soars effortlessly over solid western influenced bass riffs, but the tastiest tracks are those recorded without the rhythm section.

enjoy.

---

#MAYALLBEINGSBEHAPPYANDFREE