Creating and the Creatures Who Live Here

I arrived in Thailand and plunged into creating Vagabond, my online magazine about Being Free, and Discovering the World as a Global Nomad.

Apple Computer approved it today!

Thank you Steve Jobs, and all those artistic engineers and creatively powerful people who work at 1 Infinity Loop in Cupertino (Apple headquarters.) Talk about creating!

It’s available in the iTunes store for iPads, Vagabond, a free app under newsstand.

Check it out!

Thailand the land of milk, honey, and mangoes gives me creative goosebumps.

I create my way out of any excuse I come up with here – I just do it.

In this tiny hamlet atop a mountain peak, Pai, sings with expression and communication.

Here’s me in my bamboo and coffee office.

I’ve been in Thailand 6 months. It’s not that easy to stay here so long. Why?

Here’s what I was required to do:

• Go on a visa run to Burma by bus ( took the entire day)
• 2 visa extensions after riding over the highest mountain pass in Thailand (twice) on a puny motorbike. I did not die in that ditch I landed in – a kind truck driver pulled me out.
• http://youtu.be/CI74Rgu6law Burma/Myanmar Border Crossing

But it was worth it — I moved into my cottage in the woods here in Northern Thailand in Pai, a breathtaking village that sweeps you off your feet with its astoundingly vibrant scenery, tons of hot springs, and sparkling waterfalls to boot.

You can get a Thai massage here for $7 or less, and eat scrumptious food for a few dollars a meal in a restaurant – serious. 2 reasons I love it here.

So what’s it like to create with the creatures who live here in my home?

Last night I heard a scritch-scratching noise near my actual head and turned around to see the underside of a 12-inch gecko 10 inches from my eyeballs on the other side of the screen window. That’s why it sounded so close; he was hanging out with me but I didn’t know it.

I guess we’re getting to be friends.

Just the other day I was wondering where King Kong gecko had gone – he had not shown up in a few days. Last I saw him he was parked behind my refrigerator making a racket trying to catch bugs. He was shaking the Frigidaire!

A pang of hunger arose and I bolted to my hanging bunch of bananas from the ceiling in the kitchen and there was my abominable gecko just inches from my fingertips staring at me with his bugged out eyes.

He didn’t even flinch when I grabbed the banana from its bunch of 8.

He just stayed there clinging to the top of the wall with his rubber-cupped feet.

I marveled at how I don’t scream any more when I see him.

He stays out of my bedroom and has the full run of the kitchen when I am sleeping. I don’t know what he does in there but he has not eaten anything that I know of.

This is all very colorful for the creative process. I may be editing my writing and hear geckos chirping mixed with crickets singing. Yes geckos like to congregate on my screened windows and get close to the light rays coming from inside.

It’s like the Jacob Javits Convention Center in NYC outside my bedroom door when I go to the bathroom at night; they are surrounding the ceiling light pow-wowing.

I like being inside my screened domain as bugs and lizards cannot find me in there and no one slithers across my computer screen either.

So my creative process goes like this:

Wake up in paradise hearing birds singing their hearts out.

Smile.

Turn over and suggest to my body that it sleep longer.

Most of the time get up and turn on the electric teapot.

Chinese or Thai Tea in hand I am delighted by the light show on the treetops while butterflies flitter around.

Meditate and chant then walk to my yoga pavilion down the dirt driveway. There is no asphalt here and I like that. The dirt driveway is between two rows of frangipani trees. Then I get to the yoga pavilion and I am rewarded. I didn’t ditch yoga I am doing it every day oh yes and I feel like an eagle looking out from its nest.

The mountain scape is intoxicating.

Here is the view from my front porch in Pai:

And a sunset view from the same porch.

Then I do my email, as the yoga pavilion is my home office.

What do I do after yoga? I eat a hearty breakfast in my cottage on stilts.

See me in my kitchen cooking here:

http://you.be/outTblup4CeKv0

After showering I jump on my motorbike to go to my real office to “work.”

A plump pillowed coffee and bamboo covered lounge area in the village – that no one seems to know about but me as now the owner is leaving me there solo while she slips out to do errands.

I lay in a hammock and do my writing/ photography editing/ more email /posting.

I am learning a language that I never knew before. And I’m not talking about Thai.

Internet marketing is another language for me – and its not as sexy as Italian but OK the creative process is not comfortable. I learned that from Billy Wilder that crazy wild amazing director from the 40’s and 50’s who wrote and directed intelligent comedy i.e. Some Like it Hot.

I learned how to use the magazine platform that they said was easy but it was not easy.

I am learning and ding-dang it I needed to learn how to use tools I never knew I needed before.

It isn’t comfortable to stretch past pre-conceived notions but somehow doing it here with the geckos and spiders (I forgot to mention them) and birds and butterflies isn’t so bad. In fact its downright invigorating when I consider that afterwards I can go to the hot springs and wallow in sacred spring water from the earth’s crust healing me with heat and effervescence.

So there were a few times I felt apprehensive but I let myself feel that and my acupuncturist from Morocco noticed. She needled me with an infusion of confidence.

She charges me $10 a session – that is far less than what she charged the people she used to treat when she lived in Manhattan and had clients at the World Trade Center.

When all the online language and things that were supposed to be “easy” to do were actually hard I questioned why I jumped into this ocean of new things. But I kept swimming and now the magazine is done. I created an app!!! And Apple Computer is selling it for me! OMG

I do not have an iPad yet and having recently learned just what an app is I feel like I’m thriving in the right direction. Now the momentum is going and I am letting it take me.

So the moral of the story is (remember that cartoon show about Mr Peabody; they always ended it this way?)

Keep going even when it doesn’t feel so hot. Keep going even when you are treading water and this dang program won’t let you delete text or move something simple in your graphic layout.

Just get up and go outside and say hello to all the critters who may be clinging to your house, notice the spider who is weaving a web under your window, say hello to the baby gecko who lives in the tree trunk post holding up the entryway stairs – notice the large winged insects who bash themselves against the lights and end up kicking their insect legs in the air as they can’t turn over again.

http://youtu.be/oWGLt2zuCGA Spider and Bedroom Chat

I pick them up and send them soaring again. I freed a butterfly from a spiders web today and it swiftly flew off happily. I was elated. So what that the spider missed a meal?

Take a minute and be grateful that you have the moments to make this mountain out of – you know that phrase making a mountain out of a molehill?

Yes I see it as making a mountain out of moments in your life that you want to express to the world, the heavens and the ethers so you do it and let the day become what it will. And the rain and the clouds and the sun shining through rainbows lights up your heart and you keep on.

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Love and Peace, Mary