Just another day... in paradise.

Some days you wake up and it’s just another ordinary day. And then, sometimes, there are these mornings when you wake up and it’s like the first day you ever lived. As if your eyes had opened for the first time, as if you were wearing a new skin that could feel everything, as if you were a child again, suffused with wonder and drinking it all in.

The other day I took an overnight bus back to Mae Sot from Bangkok. It arrived around 4:30am and I hopped on the back of a motorcycle taxi to go back home. The sky was still dark, but I could see stars in the sky and there was enough moonlight to show my surroundings. We went through fields of green, with palm trees silhouetted against the sky. Perhaps more than anything it was the texture of the air that stirred my soul: the cool freshness that comes after a rain, the pre-dawn stillness that is full of the excitement of a whole blank day still to come, the heaviness of the tropical moisture in the air…

Flying through the night, with the wind in my hair, it wasn’t long before I had a broad smile on my face. I have been here for so long, but it just suddenly occurred to me with a wonderful thrill: Oh my God! I’m in South East Asia!

And I laughed out loud under the stars at the remarkable joy in it. How on earth did I end up here? It’s still a mystery to me, but on that wonderful morning, I was reveling in the mystery instead of sunk in it, skipping along the surface of the glorious waves that bear us places in life so that we wake up one morning and finally open our eyes and notice that where we are is truly remarkable.

I just wanted to share that with you. It’s a cool, wet day here in Thailand and I am spending a quiet Saturday morning with my coffee on the balcony, listening to the sound of the rain falling on the roof, watching the water slide down the sides of the green banana leaves in the garden and I am so happy to be here. So happy to be here.