Wide-Eyed Wanderer Adventures

2-24-2011 - Bangkok [day 2]  It feels like the Phase I of my Journey is complete. It's been roughly for months of the "hermitage from the familiar," but feels more like 4 years. I am not the same being that left California. I feel like about 5 tons of onion "layers" have peeled off of me, and what a relief that is. More and more, I am coming home to myself. Everythings is simple, in the flow and there is a general state of bliss underlying every action....it's WONDERFUL.  I have given up so many patterns that have "had me" for many years....even after the devastating "death" that cleared me out pretty well a couple years ago. They have regrew. Well, now I have consciously let go of them. Many had to do with love. Of self. Of others... not that there really is a difference. Shame, guilt, judgement....those instruments of system-enslavement - a software installed in us under the guise tof "morality" during the hypnotic super-dow...

The Killing Fields at Choung Ek extermination camp. Prisoners were brought here from the grim S21 [Toul Sleng] prison to end their lives in mass graves. The memorial tower contains over 8 thousand skulls sorted by age and gender....it is many stories high and bagpipe-like music is playing around it. I shiver remembering my encounter with it. My brain is still struggling to compute how such horror could be brought to a nation by its own leader - one of the very people he executed.. THEIR CROSS BABY-SMASHING TREE MASS GRAVE LOCATIONS DUTCH - THE FORMER HEAD OF S21 - THE ONLY ONE OF THE KHMER ROUGE LEADERS ON TRIAL WHO HAS ADMITTED GUILT AND SHOWED ANY REMORSE.... .

The Phanthoms of the Dark Side of Cambodia written: 2-24-2011 been there: 1-27-2011 Nearly a month has passed since I came face to face with the Dark Side of Cambodia's past - the atrocity of Pol-Pot's genocide. Like Vonnegut, who could only write of the bombing of Dresden in his "Slaughterhouse 5, The Children's Crusade" some 20 years after the fact, I needed some time to digest what I have seen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five To write about it meant to edit the photos, which meant to re-experience the horror that I've seen. After the blissful month in Cambodia, I did not yearn to do that at all. Yet, I wanted to share this before I went to Russia and completed the Phase I of my Journey. As a child, I remember standing before the grim "Apotheosis of War" and being moved to the core that someone could capture so much sadness and cruelty with a few brush strokes. I still shiver thinking of my small body standing before that e...