Jumping Cat Monastery

Inle Lake is surrounded by steep mountains, and dozens of traditional Burmese, Shan, and Intha villages that cannot be reached by means other than boat. And pagodas that cannot be reached other than my foot. The lake rises and falls depending upon the season and the grace of the gods, goddesses, and “nats” of water and rain. Some of the village houses stand on stilts in the water whatever the height of the lake. Others are seasonal or on wetland or at the very base of roadless mountains. All trading and travel needs are met with the use of boats. The scenery includes young boys riding water buffalo, men and women washing clothes, field workers and children waving, fishermen with nets, dugout canoes being paddled while standing – using one leg to move the long thin paddle through the water. Harvesting watercress, tomatoes, squashes, and corn being grown on floating islands made of river silt and river muck created over the centuries by people with nothing more than their backs and their shovels who do not greet you by asking, “How are you?” but rather, “Are you happy?” This is a bipedal human aquatic culture practicing aquatic farming with ecological awareness on small footpaths and busy boat lanes with bamboo dams, wonderful woven bamboo retaining walls, bamboo stakes and ties, bamboo houses and fences, And bamboo’s consciousness of strength, flexibility, versatility and utility in a land of earthly industry, of farming, weaving, carving, craft, and of diligent labor.

There is a floating restaurant named “Nice.”

And equally surreal, amazing, and somehow ordinary is this immense floating wooden temple and home for monks whose name translates to “Jumping Cat Monastery” and which actually has jumping cats. You are invited to come here to see and contemplate people who do not walk or run except inside their houses, whose entire terra firma is often only twelve square feet of bamboo flooring filled with mats, bedding, a wood cooking stove, some pots and pans, family photographs, potted plants, posters of soccer teams from England, clothes drying on hooks, and bells ringing.

I had wanted to leave some of my nephew Mile’s ashes with the jumping cats, relatives of whom once lived in his home, but wasn’t sure what the monks would want, so I just eased ashes of him into the lake to become one with the fishes, and the silt, and the floating islands which support the plants that feed the people who grow and live and thrive and die here, and who ask when you enter their waters if you are happy.