Tag: Buddhism

Leaving your heart behind

Home for the holidays. For my students at least.

For me, 37 years ago, I was feeling on edge. One-way with no return.

Yet, it has been possible for me to return and work here in Vietnam. To see students prepared for studying abroad. But their leaving has a promise of a return (two-way).

Many are leaving for home on this long holiday. Home where we all leave 0ur hearts behind.

If I had known there would someday be a return, I wouldn’t have cried so much. I wouldn’t have turned my back on mother’s land and mother’s tongue.

I wouldn’t have wasted my time taking classes on tangent subjects such as Buddhism in America (Summer) or Radio production (required).

My degree in media was hardly put to use. Now Social Media is taking over.

New generation, new ways to connect.

Oh well. I wouldn’t have taken my heart with me on that fateful trip to America aboard the USS ship.

I would have left my heart behind.

I wouldn’t have short-changed my heritage for bad attitude under the euphemism called assertiveness training.

I would have preserved my core values e.g. filial son of Vietnam. Ironically, I can now reclaim this, only after my parents were buried in Virginia and I, am still alive, in Vietnam. Should have been the other way around. They would have preferred it that way. So while in Vietnam, I miss Virginia. And vice versa. It is to show that the heart is least understood and most abused.

How do I know this? Seeing young people rushing home, while I as an expat got no place to go.

That’s why I know. That’s how I feel. Odd ball on the dance floor. You can travel the thousands miles, but can’t do much with the heart with a fix on a certain place, person and period. That’s what makes us human. That we  miss something or someone. To the point of dying for it. Or feel like it in its absence. I guess that’s what I did some three and a half decade ago: leaving my heart behind on that dock no 5 of the Saigon River.

Jog and blog

The only way to hold a job and still jog and blog is to sacrifice your sleep. You will always find time for things you hold near and dear e.g. texting to ones you care about, reading about Oakland shooting etc….

ROW rest of world could wait. There is only 24 hours in a day.

At this rate (of information explosion), we might need another life.

When fake news are more entertaining than real news, lies more attractive than truth and violence more justified than love, we have a problem. Can’t start all over again, because the world as is, is all that we ‘ve got.

A friend loaned me a copy of past lives and reincarnation.

It documented hypnotic healing sessions conducted in the US by Dr Weiss, himself an agnostic scientist. Catherine, the patient in tow, recalled in full detail her past lives. True or False?

We do seem to feel a special connection with someone, calls it Deja Vu.

Could it be that we had indebted each other in past lives?

How about paying it forward? Will we ever see our ROI?

I just know my experience with earlier and next generation (parents and kids) have been great and rewarding. Nothing has come close to it.

Yes, many ups and downs. Broken pieces and piercing pain. But they count. Making me the man I now am.

Without my parents’ sacrifice, I wouldn’t be here today. Without my kids, I wouldn’t be the one today.

Those who cannot give any more thought they had hit bottom (compassion fatigue). They haven’t understood what giving really is about.

We are nearing the next phase, that of an Empathetic Civilization.

Strangers to strangers, thanks to the internet .

The vices will be followed by the virtues.

I know people are loaning each other money (micro lending) and giving each other money (foundation). One day, it will be direct, without the middle-men.

I need to go jogging now. Enough blogging. Train the muscle and train the mind. Yet the heart of men is unfathomable. Bend it while learning to love and learning to learn.

Trust a little. Then trust a little more. Maybe it (the heart) will get stronger, with muscle memory. The world can use some of that loving.

All you need is love, sing the Beatles. Love heals and succeeds in places we cannot accomplish all by ourselves.

Still inflamed

When I witnessed the monk set fire on himself some forty years ago, the streets of Saigon had less traffic than it does now.

An American photographer got words that there might be something happening’.  By day’s end, morning in Washington,

his shot sent shock waves over the wire, as flammable as the content it carried: a monk set fire on himself in protest against the iron grips of the Diem’s brothers.

My understanding of Buddhism, at least in theory, was that the monks were not supposed to act that aggressively or with open hostility

against the authority, in this case, a very repressive regime (whose leaders were later taken out).

Now, at that same street corner I found an old version and a newer memorial worthy of his protest.

Rage against the machine.

Burning napalm and burning monk.

Ambassador Lodge then must have pulled out his hair.

It’s a long way from his Republican roots, and Wenham, MA home.

I have been at both places to envision how big a PR disaster it must have (nearby Salem, MA was known for burning gothic witches, but that’s a different Puritanical story).

(AP) Wire went wild.

The younger monks and nuns were all chanting, songs for the living and the dead (and in between –  while waiting for the kerosene to soak up his cloak). As soon as the younger monk walked away, barely a few feet, flame started to rise.

The photo captured a young bystander leaning against his bicycle, unable to register the significance of the moment.

Stillness. Heaven and Earth froze.

No survival instinct.

No kicking or screaming.

One way ticket.

Aller sans retour.

Religion against regime.

Turn of event and of public opinion.

How can a just war gave full support to an unjust dictatorship?

It will take a lot more than PR to “spin” this.

We all know the ending to the story, from our vantage point.

The vantage point that has Vietnam on HD.

No matter what kind of technology or lenses viewers can now afford to replay the past, what’s ugly remains ugly.

To view the Vietnam conflict in all its blood and gores on HD lends new meaning to the term ” irony”.

At the memorial for the monk, as soon as I flipped the match to light an incense, I felt chill down my spine.

Someone, perhaps the younger monk, did the same on that fateful day.

After all, it’s just fire and flame.

But this one was for keeps.

It must have crossed the minds of the Diem’s brothers, before they went down, how quickly things had spiraled out of control. Perhaps as quickly as that combustible  flame I saw nearly four decades ago. Time stood still that day, yet its impact reverberates for eternity.