2025 Cambodia And Vietnam: Street Art III

 More art at the Factory Phnom Penh:

The most important part of any mural:  A rabbit!

Another rabbit! 

The end of our tour included a cocktail at a place that would not have been out place in a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby "Road To..." movie.  My was a lavender concoction that was quite delicious.

Seen in the restroom.  Like other places we have traveled recently, plumbing is a bit of a fragile thing.  This place, at least, had a hilarious take on it:

2025 Cambodia And Vietnam: Street Art II

 A second stop on our Street Art tour was Factory Phnom Penh was a former Levi factory (yes, as in those Levi's) that was converted into a hopeful sort of eclectic open arts and destination location in 2018. 

Entering The Factory gives a real sense of the contrast one can find in Phnom Penh:

The art begins:

Apartments.  Per our guide, a lot of this is funded by Chinese corporations:

Some of the art is pulled from Buddhism:

Grand Canyon 2025: The Return

 Friends, after flying halfway across the country, a total of 18 hours driving, walking around 23 miles with a descent of 8500' (and the corresponding 8500' ascent) 5 blisters and a ripped toenail (ironically not injured on the hike but the day after by slamming into a furniture leg), I have returned more or less intact.  With something like 400 pictures and a great deal to think about, a full accounting will have to wait (inevitably pushing into the Travel in Cambodia and Vietnam series with yet another travel series).

But the Canyon, as always, did not disappoint.

A Year Of Humility (XXXIX): Humor

(Even those on search of humility need to laugh sometimes.)

There Is (No More) Place Like Home

 Earlier this month I set out for my trek to visit The Ranch

These visits are becoming more and more (or less and less) cumbersome in terms of execution.  There is nothing to do at the house but to do a quick walkthrough.  Other than that, it is just a series of visits with my sister and Brother-in-Law, my Aunt and Uncle, my cousins, The Cowboy and The Young Cowboy, and Uisdean Ruadh to see how things are.

I accomplished most of these visits.  I walked down to The Barn to re-examine the things that we had set aside to save - and found out that I had managed to forget where the key was, so I went on a walk.

And then I realized:  for the first time in years, I found myself at a loss for things to do.  This place still had a warm place in my heart, but it was no longer home.

The moment passed after a bit: I  walked back down to see The Cowboy and chatted for a spell, took my pictures, and then walked back up to the house.  Still almost two hours until I needed to meet Uisdean Ruadh for dinner.

It is a strange thing when a thing is no longer a thing.  We all know it, I suppose:  the relationship that grows cold, the restaurant where the food no longer is delicious but just okay, the movies or books that never are quite as good as we remember them at the time.  The thing has passed from the extraordinary to the common place or even to something or someone that we used to know.

The going is silent and slow, until all of a sudden it happens at all at once.

It is wrong to say that The Ranch will never be the equivalent of a restaurant or a failed relationship; the history there is too long.  But neither is it wrong to say that is not "The Place"; it has just become a place, one of a long series in my memory.

I currently have day trips planned monthly between now and February.  Total time on the ground is generally ten to twelve hours.  Which seems sufficient - even more than sufficient, given what there is left to do.

Have I created a separation based on the necessity of the reality of the sale?  Perhaps.  But this is not uncommon with other things in my life where for one reason or another, a time for a change has come.  For better or worse, once I am done, I am done.

Man Out Of Time

(Source)

One of the standing comments that The Ravishing Mrs. TB has about me is that I was born about 200 years too late.  I would have been far happier, she maintains, had I been a 19th Century English Squire, comfortably wealthy enough to not have to work and engage in the serious acts of reading, writing, thinking, and developing small mad hobbies like keeping sheep or growing different varieties of grain.

It is a fair assessment and one that I own up to - after all, that grain is not going to grow itself.  But beyond the gentle poking at my rather esoteric and perhaps not quite modern world useful interests lies an actual truth:  in a meaningful way, I do not belong to this time.

---

If arguably the 20th Century represented a time of transition (which, it could be argued, the 19th Century did as well:  One could have been born in 1700 and died in 1800 and the world would have been very similar while a person born in 1800 and living to 1900 saw a completely different one).  When I grew up, my grandparents' generation was alive with memories back to a rural or agriculture past which for them was not a hobby but a way of life. Even in my parent's generation this was true:  my father and his family picked fruit in orchard or worked in fruit packing sheds and my mother's family still visited ancestral lands where mining had taken place within their lifetime.  I was on the tail end of this, my childhood a mix of the "new" world of technology and convenience and reminders in the form of living people and objects of a time before such technology.

Perhaps as a result, I grew up looking like the Doubleheaded eagle that graced the flags of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Russian Empire, and the Byzantine Empire (and now the Orthodox Church).  They looked both East and West; I looked both to the past and future. 

But one cannot look both ways forever; it is a terrible way to make any sort of forward progress.

---

The more things push forward, the more important it seems to me to keep the elements of what was left behind - The "Old Ways", as the picture above suggests.

There is value in being able to do something yourself:  sew a shirt, grow a garden, plane wood to make cabinets, make cheese, raise livestock.  And there is value in doing things in analog form:  reading books, writing letters, keeping time on non-digital timepieces, playing music.  

The value is not just in the output - honestly, one almost never "makes" any money doing it.  The value is in the skills that are gained and the knowledge that is passed on.

I can use The Tube of You to find out how to do almost anything. What I cannot do is to have the skill that those folks have to do them. Often theirs is earned by years or decades of practice; it cannot be earned by a 20 minute video and three trips to the store for supplies.

The "Old Ways" are also power - the power of independence, the power to think by one's self and act by one's self to complete actions.  One can be interdependent in the exercise of such things, but one is never truly dependent - reliant 100% on the skill and value of another to complete needful or even pleasurable things fueled by our ability to pay for them.

---

The older I get, the more and more these Old Ways matter to me.

I read physical books instead of electronic ones. I make certain foods for myself instead of purchasing them.  I try (not always successfully) to divorce myself from the technology of the age as much as possible, especially given that I spend so much time on it for my work.

Am I wiser or smarter or somehow better off for having done such things?  Not that I can tell - but I have passed aspects of this onto my own children, who each in their own way follow The Old Ways. 

 

And perhaps that, in the end, is the ultimate value of them:  Not that we practice them, but that we pass them on.

The Collapse CCVI: The Third Advent Candle

 14 December 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

The day dawned dark and overcast again with a cruel wind blowing, a reminder that we still have still have not yet arrived at the nadir of daylight for the year.

The Advent wreath bore three candles now, the two purple previously used as well as a pink one (“Rose”, corrected Pompeia Paulina. It still appeared pink to me).

“The Candle of Joy” she said. “It reminds us of the shepherds rejoicing on Christmas Eve.”

The Shepherds.

There was time, Lucilius, that I thought I wanted to be a shepherd. Call this being lured in by the idylls of Hesiod or a burgeoning need to get away from people that never left me, but I have always at some level wanted to be away from people and around animals. That faded over time of course: the reality of shepherds are quite different from the mystical apparitions in my mind and in terms of making a living in the modern world, it was a bit difficult.

But I do still think about them: alone most of the time, coming together periodically as dictated by the sheep and seasons, but always returning back to isolation and wilderness.

And then, something different happens.

In the modern world, we were amazed by the firework shows and bright lights that accompanied modern civilization’s celebrations. Imagine living in a world where (practically speaking) nothing was lit except by sun and fire. The darkness at night was the true darkness that the modern world pushed back so often.

And then, light and sound beyond anything that they could have ever imagined or known. A luminous being announcing to the “Good tidings of great joy”. How could these men not celebrate and rejoice after what they had heard and seen.

Did any of them survive to Christ’s last days? We will never know of course, but it is theoretically possible. What would it have been like when, closing their eyes at death, they meet the one whose life they saw at the beginning and saw the working out of these good tidings: The Resurrection, the Forgiveness of Sin, the New Covenant?

The candles were lit one after the other and we read in Luke of the shepherds and the angels and their coming to Bethlehem.

That joy still remains, Lucilius, if we will but seek it out.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca

2025 Cambodia And Vietnam: Street Art I

 After our tour, we had an afternoon to plan for.  On a whim, The Ravishing Mrs. TB found a tour that covered street art.  Two hours later, we hopped in a Tuk-Tuk (The three wheel motorized transport that seems to be everywhere in Cambodia and Thailand) and headed into town.

The first location was in the area of Phnom Penh known as Boueng Kak.  It used to be (until 2010) the largest urban lake in Phnom Penh.  The lake supported a local community as well as having service industries (houses, restaurants, etc.).  In 2007 the lake was leased to a development company, who began to fill up the lake with sand to develop it. There was a lengthy court battle; over 3500 families were evicted.  The lake was filled in and built up.

The street art here reflected artists both protesting and mourning the situation.

A small Buddhist memorial: