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After The News
After news of the tragedy arrived
The Tibetan prayer flags waved in the breeze
As they always do
And a hummingbird came to hover
Inches from my face
Reminding me – as if I needed further evidence –
of the need to prepare
for the long journey
by feeding on the sweetness of life
whenever and wherever we can,
always aware,
like the hummingbird,
that we are mere hours from starvation or death,
grateful we can store enough energy
to respond when our houses need cleaning
and when it is time to move on.
The fact is that doors have closed,
and will close.
The question is,
where will we find the strength
to explore the doors now opened.
Poetry

Long ago, perhaps yesterday
Long ago, perhaps yesterday
Her visit exposes the soft underbelly
of the large, terrified animal
who rolls over on his back
like an infant in a crib
to let her rub him.
Long ago,
perhaps yesterday.
A man still at war
with himself,
his feelings,
neediness,
his country.
This close to losing
and this close to winning.
Maybe even having won.
Either way it’s a gift to be playing
and a privilege to be sharing
Poetry

Willow
She loved the sea
to sail on skin of ocean
to skid the surface
in quiet ripples
moving with aid of wind
no fish or bird
more buoyant.
He loved the dark of woods
trees young and old
to bend or lean upon
rustle of leaves
hint of other creatures
of mystery
without horizon.
She liked the silence
solitude
the play of elements
the heart of sun
colors brightened
fall of day
a peaceful harbor
to lie upon.
He liked the beach
stone and shell
the warmth of sand
beneath his feet
connected from solid to solid
to float and not to sink
to drift but not to drown.
As tide and shore
they lost their sense
of edges and beginnings
as each the other touched.
Not ship nor gull
they glide and wait
willow to starboard, mate.
B R Taub – June 1980
Poetry
Thinking About Doing
In addition to whatever actions I’ve taken to serve my self interests as I perceived them from time to time, I have historically acted and made choices out of some sense of desire and obligation to be of service, to save the planet and protect future generations, to end suffering, to end war, to protect threatened ethnic and cultural minorities, to seek justice, to make sure “Never Again” meant Never Again for all. Now, at 70, I see my most significant self interest as being to act in a manner that is of service to my highest self, that really “goes for it” for myself. What the planet needs from me may be no more than that.
As you know, I have historically protected myself from my fears and feelings of rage, from my abuse and humiliation, from my almost complete absence of safety and comfort, with a “who gives a shit” attitude, which while protecting me, was also part of what stood in the way of my caring fully about myself, and, because I was imbued with the sense that I could more or less be anything I wanted to be or get anything I wanted to get, I believed that for whatever loss I might experience there was always another more or less equally good option available behind it. And there was. But what is it “I” really want to make me happy, given that I know at 70 that every option, every woman, and every situation will always have its disappointing aspects built in. And what do I do when the hot love dies? And how do I sustain my excitement. And most of all, who is this “I” who thinks about these things?
So while I will no doubt “act,” and do, and make personally significant choices, there is another dimension that has entered “my” consciousness and that has assumed as much importance for me in realizing/attaining my goal of world and personal peace, of world and personal enlightenment, and that is an intense awareness, beyond anything I have known before, of the potential impact of what I actually “feel” (as opposed to what I do) as one who both emanates and receives/absorbs “feelings.” Now I suspect you will laugh and say, “Feel? You feel all the time and are very sensitive to your feelings. What are you talking about?” And I agree that on an “emotional/mental/psychological/gut” level I have always been aware of my feelings, and occasionally aware of their impact on others, but I have had no awareness of what I would call the energetic and spiritual impact of my feelings, no awareness of what I absorb and what I radiate out on an energetic and spiritual level. And that subconscious energetic and spiritual impact has come to have immense importance to me.
I believe for example that if you seek peace with hatred in your heart you are assured of failure. So too lack of compassion, rage, self righteousness …
So what will I do in light of that? Much less PDA, although not none. Much more yoga. Much more communing with nature, feeling it, even more so. “September 1, 1939”: “The windiest militant trash/ Important Persons shout/ Is not so crude as our wish:/ What mad Nijinsky wrote/ About Diaghilev/ Is true of the normal heart;/ For the error bred in the bone/ Of each woman and each man/ Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love/ But to be loved alone.”
Circa 2010
MISCELLANEOUS

Night Market
After leaving the very comfortable mall in Margapatta I grab a rickshaw for the ride back to Burning Ghat Road. On our way the driver takes a short cut that brings us into a teeming night market I had not seen before. I ask the driver to stop, saying I want to get out and briefly explore the market. He tells me it is “wery dangerous, not good place, good sir.” But in my ongoing euphorically distorted state I say I don’t care, that I want to walk around and see it for ten or fifteen minutes, that he can wait for me if he chooses, or he can go on and I will pay him for this portion of the ride. “No, sir, I not vait here,” he tells me, “wery dangerous place. No good place. No vait, Sir.” “Okay,” I say, “but what can be dangerous, look at all the people, the lights, just stop and let me off.” So he stops, I get out, I reach into my pocket for my money and he says, “I vait.” “Ten minutes,” I yell skipping off, “fifteen at the most,” as I implement my now well practiced Indian street crossing maneuver of attaching myself to a group of people already in the roadway, trusting that if they don’t get hit by a motorcycle or a car, I won’t get hit either.
Once in the market I am swept up in its festive air. It is crowded beyond a 42nd street merchant’s dream. Loud fast Indian music is being blasted from speakers throughout. There are vendors everywhere, kids’ rides, men blowing and selling bubble blowing devices, balloons, cooking fires, phosphorescent lights that people have on and are twirling, and even one darkly dressed Indian woman wearing a pair of lit up red devil’s horns on her head that make her into a very eerie visage and signal a change in aura of the scene, because no sooner have I seen the woman with the horns than I am surrounded by a pack of eight or nine hyperactive boys who I gauge to be ten to fourteen years old and who want to shake my hand, hold my hands, touch me, and are saying things in English that make no sense, and in Hindi that I obviously don’t understand, but are all extremely animated (and a little too close and intimate), and … it slowly dawns on me … are asking for or demanding money, I can’t tell which. But I just keep smiling, giving them high fives, shaking hands, laughing, saying “no, no, no,” and moving deeper into the market. And soon they are gone.
I am reminded here of a sweet note I got recently from my high school friend Susan Levine who said she would never do what I am doing on this trip, but perhaps, she speculates, I get away with it, or think I can get away with it, because of my size. Who knows? In short order I’ve explored all I want to explore of the market, have really enjoyed my little foray, and am headed back out through the crowd when I encounter the crowd of young boys again, still screaming, still a little too frenzied and bold, only now swollen to a pack of about fifteen or twenty youths. An event I witnessed in the Bronx 60 years ago, which I have not thought about for decades, flashes with remarkable detail as I recall a pack of kids I knew of the same age as this group of boys attack a much larger nineteen or twenty year old man.
As I saw the event then, and even as I think about it now, my initial inclination would be to bet on the far bigger stronger man, not believing then, or even now that I have been proven wrong, than the pack of much smaller young boys could beat and bring down the bigger man. But they did, and I see it with great clarity. Maybe the man was adverse to the fight, or maybe the boys drew blood early and it scared him, or maybe at first he didn’t take it seriously, or didn’t want to hurt kids smaller and younger than himself, and clearly in hindsight he shouldn’t have backed up to the parked car as he did, thinking perhaps that he was protecting his rear flank when in fact the car provided a launching pad for the younger boys to climb on and jump on him, and take away his height advantage, and deny him room to move and swing freely and turn. I really don’t know. But I do know the younger boys won that fight, and bloodied him badly, and dropped him to the ground, and kicked him until he was curled in a ball crying for mercy, and no one intervened to save him until then, speaking of indifference.
And it is here in my reverie that I also make a mistake in the night market, because, still acting as if we are all just having a jolly old time, I impulsively reach into my pocket, take out a Kit Kat bar I had purchased earlier, and hand it to the kid I perceive as the leader of the pack, saying at the same time, in what I intended to be a joking manner, “Now show some respect to an older man.” And the boy yells loudly, “Now show some respect to an older man.” And the throng of boys chants responsively, “Now show some respect to an older man,” and the leader calls again, and the boys respond again, and have started touching me, and grabbing my ass, and pressing on the small back pack I’m wearing, and in my pockets, all the while as I move toward the entrance, waving at the vendors who care to look at the unfolding event, swatting boys’ hands away, holding on to my wallet, passport, and cash in my left front pocket with my left hand, waving and swatting with my right. And smiling, of course. And trying to keep the mood jocular. And hoping the rickshaw driver is still there as I use the throng of boys to move blindly forward into the roadway, reaching the rickshaw, getting into the rickshaw while five or six of the boys try to get into the rickshaw with me, each saying words akin to, “Take me home with you,” as the driver starts to move forward, easing into the roadway, where the boys are forced to peel away, and the driver shakes his head and scolds me, saying, “I tell Sir wery bad place.” And after putting what he considers to be an adequate distance between us and the market says, “Sir check money and bag,” and I say, “No, no, it’s all good,” and am really feeling good. And even as I write this I cannot tell you whether it was all in fun, or threat, or something else we will ever know. And while it may be “odd” to say this, from my perspective I mostly enjoyed the overall experience – that’s mostly – and was mostly comfortable in it, and I would do it again.
Margapattaville
I visit the shopping center, a mall I suppose you might call it, that services the Margapatta community in which the yoga studio I’ve been going to is located: green grocers, little shops selling kitchenware, ice cream and pizza shops, Indian fast food joints, restaurants, cyber cafes. It is Sunday night after 9 PM and the place is alive with people: teens, younger people, clusters of men and women in their twenties, gatherings of women chatting, of men chatting, young couples, young families, young women in jeans, men in shorts, it is all very familiar except for the fact everyone here is Indian, everyone is eating with their fingers and then licking their hands clean, all the signs are in Hindi, the lighting is not quite what we are used to, and I am the only non Indian person there … and very comfortable.
Baggage Claim
I go to baggage claim a few days early
To wait for you
I check the message board
But your day of arrival
Is not yet listed
Although your flight number appears
So I practice
My song of meeting and greeting.
A vast array of old
And sculpted
Infantile and exhausted
Gather at the carousel
To listen to the music
And watch the spinning containers
In all their many mesmerizing shapes and colors.
People reunite with their belongings
Loved ones come to greet them
Anxiety is resolved
Hope and trust renewed
I witness this
Strangers lifting stranger’s luggage
Faces scanned
In the hopes of recognition
And look for you
But no one is as beautiful
And no one runs to greet me
So I study well how it is done
What happens to the eyes
When luggage or a loved one is recognized
The use of the hands
In waving and greeting
In pointing and grasping
How lips part and join
The sight of folks leaving together
A sense of mission accomplished
And lives to be lived
Good things happen at baggage claim
I have witnessed this
And in that joy
I await you.
Poetry
Self Love
When I love myself
I am small and thoughtful
And don’t use much space
Or oxygen.
I am a man who listens well
When I love myself
And then am critical of my narcissism,
My need for attention and affirmation,
The immense amount of work it takes me
Just to keep this tall, fumbling man with bad manners
And nose hair
Alive and safe.
The impact of truths exposed
Will not always be pleasant or good.
Appraising one’s self-criticality
Is not always pretty
All of which makes self-love a challenge
But commends the object of the man’s affections
To high self-regard for his honesty.
Poetry

One Day in Mandalay
December 12, 2013
Alice, the innkeeper of Peacock Lodge, in Mandalay offers me the option of staying an additional day and I accept … one of the advantages of having flexible time and believing in guides. I also alter my travel plans on Alice’s suggestion to break up the long slow train ride to Lashio, so I am only doing the viaduct leg by train. I’m eager to go to these places, but for today just cruising around this city I almost feel familiar with seems the perfect thing to do. And doing yoga, reading, relaxing, writing, and getting onto the Internet, are all so much more acceptable on the road than at home. Mark that revealing fact, Mr. B.
Anyhow, from the time I step out the door of the Peacock my day is just enchanted, beautiful, wondrous, and, yes, even divine. I snag a ride in a pick up on a side road outside the guesthouse where I’m staying and somehow actually find myself where I wanted to go, the pagoda at the top of Mandalay Hills. Interestingly, I remember nothing about the pagoda or the hilltop although I was here w Joy less than a year ago, but each encounter I have with the physical environment evokes a pleasant memory and a warm feeling in me.
I’m sincerely invited to join a luncheon picnic with a half dozen young men and women seated on a sheet on the tile floor outside the pagoda that looks delicious but which I decline. Then, on a wooden bench working a poem, a robed monk in his late thirties sits down next to me, asks in broken English where I am from, and wants to know about my travels in and impressions of Myanmar. So there we are just chatting away fabulously, his English is actually not that bad, he’s simultaneously helping me with my Burmese, and I’m being as frank and probing as I normally am, given the restrictions imposed by the language impediments. Turns out learning English is one of his ambitions, he’s a serious student of the language, has read some Shakespeare and Dickens and a number of monks at his monastery in central Mandalay are studying English together. When I ask if I can visit his monastery with him, he asks what day I had in mind, I say today, and just like that we’re in a little blue pickup truck taxi on our way to the ShweYaye Sung Monastery compound behind the big Maha Mani Buddha statue in the middle of town.
When we get to the monastery U Ke Tu, for that is his name, insists on paying my 4$ taxi fare, but relents when I remind him he is a poor monk living on alms he collects begging in the morning and the grace of his parents. He takes me to his room inside the monastery. He introduces me to monks we encounter saying, “This is my friend.” He lives in a room with three other monks on a straw pallet on the floor. The room is cluttered with mostly books. We sit on his mat and practice English and Burmese. A half a dozen other monks join us. We laugh a lot. One of the monks asks what my “ambition” is, but it turns out he meant what was my work. I say that at twenty I was a soldier, at twenty-five an anthropologist, at thirty a farmer, at thirty-five a hospital administrator, and at forty-five a lawyer, which I still am today although mostly retired. We try to define retired, and “mostly retired.” I correct their pronunciation. We spent a lot of time on the “sm” sound of smart, and on differentiating between p and b, between d and t. Ke Tu, to test out his language skills, sings a beautiful pop love song in English that I am vaguely familiar with and that I understand about half of what he is saying. (“I am sailing, I am sailing, cross the ocean, passed high seas. I am flying …”). I play them Joy singing her song about her mother, and then play Jimmy Durante from music I’ve downloaded on my laptop singing “Make Someone Happy.” The words seem particularly apt, even profound in a Buddhist monastery. We try to talk about Buddhism but it is impossible. I say something about my spiritual “ambitions.” We try to talk about the difference between religion and “spirituality,” but the word “spirituality” doesn’t even appear in the English to Burmese dictionary we refer to, and its definition of “spirit” is more confusing than helpful. I am invited to dinner and decline. I’m also a bit unsure about this, but I think I was also invited to bathe, which I also declined.
We’ve been sitting on the mat at least two hours. I say I have to go. Ke Tu tells me it was his “lucky” day that we met. I say it was “magical,” and “exceptional,” and that it has made me very happy. As we are leaving the monastery we run into the head abbot who I am introduced to and to whom I say in pretty poor Burmese, “It is a pleasure to meet you (tweiya da wan thaba de), which evokes a huge laugh. The abbot just laughs and laughs. It is contagious. I have a few photos of him. He is the most Buddha look a like person you have ever seen. Ever. (See photo above)).
Ke Tu and I continue toward the street. Young monks are bathing with buckets of cold water pulled up from a well. Naturally, they are laughing. Ke Tu takes may hand and we walk hand and hand together. He intertwines the fingers of his right hand with those of my left. We are both aware something out of the ordinary has been shared between us and while our separation and my departure are the most ordinary and familiar of human experiences, there is a poignancy that makes it very hard for me to separate, knowing as I do, that like many of my experiences on these travels and towards the end of my life, they are not likely to be repeated or reencountered, that they exist only in the present and in memory.
Ke Tu insists I ride back into town on the back of a motorcycle “taxi,” which I do without helmet and aware of the risks, but when in Mandalay … The taxi deposits me after dusk at a downtown market. Men are playing some kind of board game I have never seen before. I am asked if I play. I say, “No, I play checkers,” as I pull out my traveling checker set to show them what I mean. An older man in the crowd says with a big smile and good humor, “Ha! I am checker champion. You play? Winner get one thousand chat?” And there we are playing Burmese checkers (far more interesting than the American checkers I grew up with) right on the sidewalk under a streetlight as a decent sized crowd of men gathers. When I am forced to jump a piece of his he says, “You eat!”
In the first game I make a rookie move and it is all over. In the second game we agree to a draw. And in the third game, in a moment of checker brilliance I’d like to repeat some day soon, I see a number of moves down the board and force him into a fatal position that neither he nor the kibitzing crowd of more than twenty onlookers sees until it is too late, and when I make my penultimate move which forces him into an obviously fatal position I pump my fist once up in the air and the crowd literally cheers and claps, good naturedly teasing the “champion” on his defeat at the hands of this foreigner.
At times I feel as though I can only take so much more pleasure, have rarely been this ecstatic, am really enjoying my travels, all in part a tribute to my truly favorite guide, Sacajawea Joy, the prophetess of the notion that it can and will just keep getting better, that we can attain and tolerate more and more pleasure and a feeling of excitement and delight as a dominant state of mind and being. The word Joy uses is euphoria, by which she means a utopian ideal of emotional bliss. I’m in favor of that. It’s just a little exhausting without practice. But you just had to see this monk laughing.
MYANMAR
TRAVEL DIARIES