The Tao is the Great Mother
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds
It is always present within you.
You can use it any way you want.
Tao te Ching #6
Dream: I am part of a group of people who are collecting to fight for a good cause (?) – sort of guerrilla action against an oppressive government in the distant future. There is a sturdy woman in the group who is from a different dimension in the multiverse. Though she appeared normal she was very heavy and very strong because her ‘strings’ (see quantum string theory) vibrated at a different frequency from ours. In another scene I am coerced into befriending a devious young Fagan. I had been living with two identities. He has ‘killed’ one of them and knows my secret. His knowledge is dangerous to me and by accepting him as a ‘friend’ I confer some sort of status on him. He was persona non grata.
What a difference a day makes. Reasonable night’s sleep and a superb pho in the Nha Trang market for $4.00 for two (apparently depending on how one inflects 'pho' in vietnamese one is asking either for a bowl of soup or a slut - just a word of warning to interested parties), including chocolatey sweet Vietnamese iced coffee. The soup a melange of seafood with rice vermicelli noodles, piles of cilantro mixed with delicate sprouts, mint and opal basil. The cart operator added a bowl of something glossy and translucent white – maybe jellyfish. Later we will swim for the first time in the South China Sea.
There we met a charming old fellow named Peter – Australian national living here. A brown, wrinkled gentleman with a Gandhi-thin body, concave chest, a rubine, scabrous nose and watery sliver-blue eyes. He has married a younger Vietnamese woman named Hyunh. She is silent and demure, quite shy. She has a round face and gentle eyes that speak volumes in a language I don’t understand.
Peter has led a charmed life, working around the world performing his trade. ‘I may sound big-headed but I am a very good cabinet maker’ he declaims with a 87 degree head tilt. He claims to have worked in 20 different countries. From Botswana to Managua he works for hotels and large corporations, doing excellent work from his accounts. He told me his story while we bobbed in the gentle surf. At once gregarious and charmingly shy, he talks in a very animated fashion, blinking rapidly, tilting his head side to side and up and down; sweeping his arms and rotating his wrist and fingers to articulate his tales. Sophie says he reminded her of Wallace from Wallace and Grommit animated features.
I can tell Sophie doesn’t approve of Peter. His wife attends to him - maybe she appears servile but I can tell he adores her and she seems to love him too – who can say. He confides in me that Hyunh cannot travel to Australia with him when he returns to visit because she has had cervical cancer and they won’t admit her into the country. Without that information one might be tempted to write him off as having married a caretaker and servant but I don’t think so. He cares deeply for her. When she makes a small movement with her eyes he knows it is time to go back home .’Ah, ah Hyunh, yes, (to us) it’s time to be going home I think’. He politely bids us goodbye- chuckles when I give his wife a little bec on the cheek and they leave.
Life has crevices and gaps, the inner narratives of even our closest friends and loved ones are opaque to us, even our own lives are filtered and corrupted by our egoic lens .Each of us contains infinite worlds - dimensions unexplored and largely unexplorable.
Peter has recommended the beach just south of Nha Trang called Cam Ranh as being less touristic; excellent seafood with a prettier vista. He has also recommended Vinh Binh instead of Ha Long which is freshwater but, again less touristic and charming. He suggests Sapa is very beautiful too – when I ask him if there are not similar places in Laos he says that he has never been there – he thinks that the Laotians are more dangerous but we have heard just the opposite from other travellers.
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