heart full.

i don't know what day it is. i do know that it is night time.
i am in a karen village in the northwest of thailand. Mae Way. near Mae Sot. about 50 families live here. family made complete with grandparent, father, mother, babies, children, chickens, hogs, kitties, puppies, lizards, and a wide variety of spiders. As i write this i lay above hogs squealing and scratching, roosters nesting above my head, puppies sleeping at my feet.
some images spring to my mind.
One man hands another a small pile of dead rats, possibly cooked.
I look up and i see a spider the size of my hand.
No privacy. we sleep together, bath and wash clothes together in the river. eat together.
Freshly slaughtered pig, boiling water poured over its skin in preparation of skinning.
We come to a rock cave in the path. there is a snake track wider than the width of my foot.
I am in the jungle.
overflowing with fertile abundance.
the rhythms of life in this village. i sit and watch and listen to them expand and contract throughout the day and night. all with the flow of the river.

we came here to help put in a microhydro system with an organization called BGET.
the result far surpassed electricity.

heart full.
full heart.
i am in love. true as it has been before. on fire. spicy. vibrant. glowing flaming ball of light.
i am in love with life and all that it contains. my emotional capacity is a seemingly endless bundle of wonder. the beauty, the pain, the magic, the humanity that i am able to feel invites me to make noise. scream, yell. shout, squeal. belch. mmmmmm. ooh and aghh and all of the other nameless sounds. those noises so spontaneous that they only exist coming out of me in that moment of feeling.
Feeling what being alive really means. Connections vast and wide. far and near. connections with those that were strangers only days before. now the thought of their voices and faces in this world brings me joy to that of tears. my tears, the intensity of emotion too great, brimming out of my physical body through my window to the world.
oh yes. oh yes. i am in love.
everything seems to make sense amidst the confusion and frustration of governments and border lines who decide who belongs and who does not.
Thai, Canadian, Karen, American, Burmese. Australian-- that is how we have grown to view the world. yet here is this village all the bullshit fades away. i feel that it has. Despite language barriers, ways of living, spiritual beliefs, terrain...we are livings beings who feel, who love, who look into the eyes of their babies with an unrelenting force of powerful love, able to breathe, able to laugh, able to share. I can feel it. we are all drops of water splashing together in the same vast ocean. Let this night, this moment, this time, in this village be the example that you might need to understand. we are one. let the rest fade away. see the other. and know that the other is you. what matters is love.
oh love. i am in love true as before, this time with the feeling of new discovery.