ch-ch-ch-changes

Thanks to David Bowie for the title. Thank God or someone that almost no one reads my blog. One last word on "miracles" before I go on. I know the dictionary definition of a miracle and I know how A Course in Miracles defines a miracle. I was musing on what a miracle means to me. Now back to "earth" and a post that may be of interest to someone besides myself.

Back in Feb I sent some photos to a friend who no longer lives here. He wanted to know if SV had changed. The answer was yes - development continued unabated. I sent him an update the other day. As these photos from Feb. and August show, SV continues to grow at an alarming rate. If this continues, in a few years, it will have lost its rainy season village feel and have become a metropolitan showcase city for Cambodia.

Besides buildings, there has been a population explosion and it has become a favorite weekend destination for middle class Cambodians from Phnom Penh. This has resulted in an exponential increase in traffic. We now have 5 sets of traffic lights vs none 1 year ago. In an effort to get people to actually stop at the lights, the police regularly patrol random areas. They have become very clever about this. At first, anybody who didn't want to stop when they were flagged down just speeded up and went on their way. Now they can't get away with this, since the police are on both sides of the lights: if someone races past the police on one side, they just block their progress on the other.

Personally, I'm in favor of stopping at lights, having to wear helmets, etc., but when the govt. imposed a very expensive registration fee amounting to several months pay for most motodops and laborers, they protested. I wish I had photos of that. At least 500 motorbikes convened at the municipal court and staged a peaceful protest. The riot police came, but to their credit did nothing because nothing needed to be done. The protesters made their point and then departed.

I'll let the photos speak for themselves, except for these last couple. Luna and I had a great time riding around town on our motorbike taking pictures. I was having trouble finding a good view of the new bungalows at Sokha resort, so we stopped and went exploring and found this wonderful, tranquil spot. We spent some time there exploring until we went home via the now big road that leads to what will be possibly Sihanoukville's biggest development - Pearl City. Back in Feb. I was still riding my bike down the narrow track that was my shortcut to the beach and was wondering why they were making a solitary building on the nearby land. Well, only six months later, what looked like it was going to be a home is the showroom for the development and work on the shopping center is flying along. This last picture is the billboard for the project.

Expect a Miracle - a 'miraculous' update

About 2 minutes after I published my last entry, I thought about deleting it. The only reason I didn't is because it would've been contrary to the spirit of my blog, which is to relate my experiences and thoughts as they occur with as little filtering or second-guessing my imagined readers as possible. I'm glad I didn't delete it, because a "miracle" occurred 3 days later.

My final paragraph read, in part: "Maybe the house will sell and I'll call it a miracle or maybe it won't and my knee will start to bother me again and I'll get depressed and think, 'there's no such thing.' But maybe, just maybe, now that I've written these words, I'll remember the glowing truth that there's nothing that's not miraculous." Strangely, something I feared the most but failed to mention did happen - I lost my job. No 2 weeks notice, no severance pay, just a curt email saying, "thanks, but we don't need you any more." I did have one more payroll coming, but that was it. In 3 weeks we would be flat broke, with nothing to fall back on.

I was so worried, I had diarrhea for a week. I'd wake up in the morning and my first thought would be about our dilemma. My stomach would begin to churn and I'd start thinking about ways to make a living. Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, I was able to take the first step towards finding employment online and actually managed to get a small commission, but my problems were far from over.

We became so broke that I cut down to 1 cup of coffee in the morning. We were so broke that when I decided to try to sell our car, the 2000 riel (about 50 cents) it cost to print my ad in black and white seemed like a major expense. Thankfully, I did, though my posters had never yielded results before.

Within an hour I got a call and the car was sold a couple of days later.

A few weeks later, when the money from the car was getting low (we didn't get much, though the price was fair), I got an email from my former employer asking me if I wanted to work again. I'm working for him again, I'm happy to say, and it looks like we'll be OK.

What's all this got to do with miracles? Well, to my perhaps demented mind at least, a lot. In that sequence of events, where's the miracle? Was it losing my job? Was it selling my car so soon after putting my ad on the Samudera wall? Was it getting my job back? I think it was all 3, but especially the first and this is why ...

Like I said, I had diarrhea for a week. I'd pulled out all the stops and used all the "voodoo" at my disposal to try to keep from falling apart. And it worked, at least a little. I was taking practical steps towards trying to make money and for the most part was successfully avoiding taking my plight out on Sopheak or anyone else. I did a couple of "crazy" things like have a big birthday party for Luna and then another one for Sopheak, but I couldn't help myself. A couple of hundred dollars hoarded wasn't going to do us much good, while having a party would at least spread a little cheer.

For her part, Sopheak was being fantastic - loving and supportive and not once did she blame me for the fix we were in. She tried to reassure me, saying, "don't worry darling. Can eat. Not dead." In a strange way those words and her sweetness made me grateful for our poverty, because I've always wondered what she would do if I couldn't support her anymore. Well, I found out, but I was still scared.

Then one afternoon while I was sitting out on the upstairs balcony smoking a cigarette and worrying, a BIG PEACE washed over me like a wave. The first words that came to my mind were words I hadn't thought about in so long I'm not sure whether they're from the 23rd Psalm or the Lord's prayer. They go like this: "surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." The wave of peace was so profound that my mind's attempts to argue with its complete irrationality were silenced. Whatever excuses I came up with, it would silence with yet another wave of peace. So finally I gratefully yielded and got on with my life.

I got my job back as quickly and unexpectedly as I'd lost it and received my first paycheck before the money from the sale of the car ran out. We're doing OK now and some people have shown an interest in buying our house. I'm working on my website and trying to take steps towards becoming less dependent on one source of income. I believe in miracles more than ever, but I also believe in trying one's best. As far as I can tell, life was meant to be lived and sitting around waiting for miracles isn't really living.

"Expect a Miracle"

I have a bookmark that says "Expect a Miracle." Recently, Luna took the long-forgotten bookmark out of the book it was marking and waved it around in the air. I was pretty depressed at the time and, grasping at a metaphysical straw, I took it as a "sign" that our financial problems would soon be over. But then my more pragmatic (cynical?) self took over and examined it again. "Expect a Miracle" implies that a miracle will occur sometime in the future. Doesn't that mean it will be always just outside one's grasp? I decided to do a little experiment and mentally deleted the word "expect" and the words "A Miracle" remained. I looked again at Luna. Her grinning face was a here-and-now miracle. I thought about my circumstances. The job that fell out of the cyberspace sky and into my lap was a miracle. Some might argue that it was just "luck," but if you knew how close to the edge I was when it was offered to me out of the blue, you'd forgive me for calling it a miracle.

I continued to contemplate those words and it seemed like the whole chronicle of my life was a miracle if looked at from a certain perspective. Even "bad luck" was good luck in retrospect: lessons learned, worn-out beliefs, prejudices and patterns of behaviour shaken off and new opportunities and challenges arose. And then there were the spooky "coincidences." One of them is begging to be shared. Way back in 1983 I was in a similar situation to the one I was in when Luna reminded me about miracles. I had a new family, new responsibilities and no money. I had started up a woodworking business in San Francisco, but after a promising beginning, the commissions dried up. I was sitting at an island bench in my kitchen feeling heartsick and scared when the phone rang.

"Hello," I said, without the slightest hope that it would be a client.

"Hello. Is this Robert Schneider?"

"It is."

"My name is Lawrence Ferlinghetti," the voice on the other end informed me.

"I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number," I replied. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of one of my favorite books of poetry, "A Coney Island of the Mind" and proprietor of one of the best bookshops in the world - City Lights Books - couldn't possibly want to talk to me. It was simply impossible. But he did. He'd gotten my number from another bookshop proprietor I'd done a little work for and he needed someone to do a "little" work for him, too. As it turned out, I ended up building new bookcases for his entire 2 storey shop over the course of the next 2 years. Lawrence wasn't in a hurry and was more than happy for me to take my time and fit the bookcases in whenever I didn't have any other jobs to do. In time, my business picked up and I got commissions for some more challenging, creative projects, but the City Lights work was my bread and butter work until we migrated to Australia in 1985.

Flash forward to December 2008. I'm almost broke and and trying to get work teaching English. That was always the Plan. I had a CELTA certificate, experience teaching ESL and I was a permanent resident. I should be in demand, right? Wrong. I went to every school in town. They all took my CV, but no one gave me a job. At $3 an hour, teaching wasn't a very exciting prospect, but it was the only paying job in town.

I sent an email to my friend Sam - the only person I knew who had managed to land a teaching job. He was offered one hour a day and decided to move back to America instead. "Sam," I asked, "how'd you get your teaching job?" He wrote back and told me that you just had to go every day with a new copy of your CV until you happened to go on a day when they needed someone. THEN and ONLY THEN would you get an interview and you'd probably get the job, qualified or not. Then he added a simple sentence that shined like the sun: "Why don't you do what I'm doing?" He briefly described the role - basically adding web content online - and offered to approach his employer on my behalf. His employer agreed to hire me if Sam trained me, which he graciously agreed to do. And I've been doing it ever since. I'm not getting rich, but I'm not starving, either. In Cambodia that's saying something.

About 6 months ago, my right knee began to ache. Gradually, it ached more until I was no longer able to walk to work and I was only able to ride my bicycle on a flat surface in low gears. If I tried to stand up over bumps, my knee screamed in protest. Until a week ago I was a virtual couch potato: I rode my motorbike to work and sat at a computer terminal all day. It was a struggle just to walk up the street to buy a Coke. An x-ray convinced me that I needed knee reconstruction, but for that I needed money - lots of it. But my wages were only enough for our monthly expenses, so the surgery would have to wait until the house sold - and after six months on the market and not one potential buyer, the prospect of selling was slim.

Sopheak, who has her own reasons for wanting to sell the house, consulted some neighbours and they decided that our house must be haunted and the ghost didn't want us to leave. They recommended the services of a local woman - a very devout Chinese Buddhist/Taoist. She came over and confirmed that yes, we had a ghost (Sopheak's pretty sure it's Terry, the ghost in "A Cambodian Ghost Story") and that if we gave him an offering, he would go. So a ceremony was arranged. While she was there, the woman noticed that I was limping and asked if I wanted to try the remedy she had used on her bad leg. Why not?

She came back the next day and gave me 2 bottles of pills. Both of them had mostly Vietnamese text, but one bottle said, "Vine Essence Pill." The other one, I assume, is also an herbal remedy. I don't really care what it is. I just care that it works. Three days later, I set off for the beach on my bike. I started slowly, in low gear, but then I realized that my leg wasn't hurting! I pushed it a little and set off down my favorite dirt track. I had to ride hard through a muddy patch and there was a twinge of pain, but that was all - a twinge. I picked up the pace and stood up over a bumpy stretch and let my legs take the shock instead of my butt. Again, a twinge, but no agonizing pain. The pills worked!

It's now my 8th day and there are times when I don't even think about my leg. I climb up and down the stairs with both legs, whereas before I was only able to get up the stairs by leading with my left leg and hauling myself up on the handrail. I carry Luna to the little shop up the road. 9 days ago, I couldn't carry her more than a few steps unless she was crying - and then I wanted to cry every time I took a step.

The Chinese Taoist (I'm not sure she is Taoist, but it has a nice ring to it) told us our house would be sold within 10 days after the exorcism. Well, it hasn't sold yet, but we've had 5 or 6 people look at it and one even made an offer. This in the rainy season after six months of complete failure.

"Expect a Miracle." Miracles happen. Outside of time. In their own time. I reckon they happen all the time. It's just that we miss them because we want them to be something else. Maybe the house will sell and I'll call it a miracle or maybe it won't and my knee will start to bother me again and I'll get depressed and think, "there's no such thing." But maybe, just maybe, now that I've written these words, I'll remember the glowing truth that there's nothing that's not miraculous.

Psychic Oranges

In 2004 and 2005 I was living in Netherland: not the Netherlands - Netherland. Netherland is my own mythological country - it's neither here nor there, but someplace else. In Netherland I was living a life-between-lives, neither married nor not and with money in the bank, but only a part-time job, I was neither needy nor not. I hadn't a clue what the future held in store for me, but was unable to go out and find one for myself, so I explored the only terrain that was open to me - myself. I went to workshops and seminars, psychics and tarot readers.

In spite of all the extraordinary experiences I'd had on San Juan Ridge, in India and in Bali, I remained skeptical. I knew what was possible, but remained convinced that things like spiritual healing and "second sight" were gifts accessible to only a few rare individuals. With as open a mind as possible I wanted to find out more. I wanted to find out if I could do it, too. If not that, I wanted to find out how it was done. But where was I to look and who was I to trust? I decided that for once in my life I was going to trust my instincts or intuition. And so my search began.

My search began rather mundanely: I googled "psychics" and clicked the "search Australia only" button, since I was neither curious nor confident enough to take a chance on an overseas experiment. It's amazing how many people claim to be psychics. Some are, I've discovered, some are some of the time and some only think they are. So far, I've never met a complete charlatan, though I'm sure they exist as well. Of all the "psychics" in Australia, one caught my attention: it was a website called "Psychic Oranges." I liked the title so I had a look. As it turned out, the reason the author gave his website that name is because the smell of oranges was his first psychic experience.

Intrigued, I decided to see how much the workshops cost. To my amazement and delight, I found that one was coming up soon, it wasn't expensive and, incredibly, it was going to be held just up the road from where I lived - a 10 minute drive away! I called the number and signed up immediately.

The presenter, Michael Wheeler, was a tall, lean young man who didn't come across as mystical or spiritual in any way. He started off by telling us what his website had already told me: how he became psychic and how it was not a special "gift" but something that was already within us if we knew how to tap into it. This was what we were going to do that day. He didn't waste a lot of time with the preliminaries. After explaining to us what we were going to do, we began with a guided meditation. He was going to take us through the chakras and help us induce a theta brain wave state, in which we would be receptive to psychic images. Then, while we were still in that state of deep relaxation, we would sit at tables outside opposite a partner and see what happened. The partners were chosen before the meditation so that our minds would not become disturbed afterwards.

He was an effective guide: it was a very nice meditation, not unlike the one I was practicing at home at the time, so I had little trouble following him. My first partner was the young woman I happened to be sitting next to. The psychic exercise we were to do was for one of us to take a piece of jewelry - a watch, a ring, anything - hold it in the palm of our hand, close our eyes and go with whatever thoughts and/or images came into our mind. Michael Wheeler called it "psychometry." If you want to know more about it, google it or click this link on "About.com"

She gave me her watch. I held it between my palms, closed my eyes and waited. As instructed, I made no attempt to filter my thoughts or the images that arose in my consciousness. I simply waited and as the images arose, I told her what they were. Her only job was to listen and not comment until I was done.

As clear as a bell, the first thing I saw was a sailboat - a beautiful, old-fashioned teak sailboat. Don't ask me how I knew it was teak. It was painted white, yet I was certain it was teak. I got the distinct impression that it was solid and reliable.

The next thing I knew, I was looking at the mast and sail from the sailor's point of view. My conscious, critical mind jumped in momentarily when the mast mysteriously morphed into a golden lance like the ones used by medieval knights. "Wait a minute," it said, "that's not what I'm supposed to be seeing." As instructed, I let go of those thoughts and let my imagination take over again.

All by itself, my perspective changed and I found myself looking at the lance from a distance. It was being proudly held aloft by a handsome knight in shining golden armour riding a pure white stallion. Strangely and a little disconcertingly, I felt like I was falling in love with him.

Perhaps it was that discomfort that made the image fade. At any rate, it faded. I opened my eyes and asked my partner what she thought about my psychic journey.

It had made no sense to me and I still felt a little uncomfortable about having a romantic fantasy about another man, but it made perfect sense to her. Her fiance was an accomplished sailor and when they went out sailing together, she felt safe and secure when he was at the helm. And he was very much her "knight in shining armour" - she was deeply in love and looking forward to their wedding day, a few short months away. In short - I was a psychic!

If I was a psychic, the young woman's fiance turned out to be a "super-psychic," though it didn't seem so at the time. Like mine, the images and words that came to his mind made little sense to him, but like me, he followed our teacher's instructions and let them come out unobstructed. It went something like this:

"I see you sitting at a desk overlooking a field. It might be a soccer field. The word 'soccer' is coming to my mind. At least, that's what I think it is. It sounds more like 'soaker'." He was clearly confused, but didn't let that stop him.

"You're sitting at a desk, working very hard at something. It looks like you're writing. Your house isn't old, but it is decorated like something out of the fifties. There's a glass-topped coffee table and some plastic flowers. I don't know why, it just feels like the fifties. Does that make sense to you?"

With that, the spell was broken. He opened his eyes and shrugged. We tried to fill in the picture with something I could relate to, but nothing he said matched anything in my experience. I quietly feared that in my future I'd be living in a cheap rented home close to a footie oval somewhere in Australia. But that was always my fear. My future prospects were pretty grim at the time.

That was in 2005. Flash forward to 2007 and I find myself sitting at a desk in my newly built home in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. There's a plastic clock in front of me and a plastic bouquet behind me. My home can best be described as "French-Khmer," a style that originated in the fifties. I didn't have a glass-topped coffee table in 2007, but I do now. For the record, I didn't buy it. Sopheak did. Downstairs in the living room, our gaudy chandelier would have been quite a status symbol in an American home in the fifties and our wedding photos in their kitschy gilded frames look like something my parents might have hung on the wall in our first home - the one they bought in about 1952 with my Dad's GI loan.

And what about all that stuff about a "soccer field" that sounded more like "soaker?" My house does overlook a field, but it's divided up into paddies for growing a local vegetable. Close enough? No. But just down the road, at the Sokha (sounds like soaker without a hard American 'r') Resort, there is a soccer field. I often ride past it on my bike. The grounds of the 5-star Sokha Hotel are an important part of my spiritual life here. There's almost never anyone on the quiet stretch of beach near the soccer field and I go there frequently for some much-needed quiet and solitude. In fact, it was there that it dawned on me just how freakishly accurate my fellow psychic experimenter's vision had been.

I wish I knew where this couple is now. I'd like to tell them my story. What's most interesting to me is that I'm sure that the young man was only there to indulge his fiance, yet it was he who had the greatest success. I have a feeling this might be why he was successful - he wasn't trying. Like they say in Zen, the key is in "effortless effort." Why is this so? I'm pretty sure it's because when we are thinking, we are in a "beta" or fast brainwave state. Beta is great and necessary for dealing with this plane of consciousness, but is completely useless when it comes to the psychic or spiritual planes. These are the province of the slower alpha and theta frequencies. Remember I said that in our guided meditation Michael was taking us into the theta state? Well, I've been there since, naturally and aided by brainwave entrainment software. When we're dreaming we're in theta. It's the place where dreams can come true.

I just googled "Psychic Oranges" again and am happy to see that Michael Wheeler is still in business. His website is quite a bit slicker than I remember it and he's written some books and CD's. Check it out


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A Random Entry

Six months since my last entry. Seems like 6 days or 6 years. 6 days when I think about chronology, 6 years when I think about all that's changed in the past six months. What I didn't mention last time was that I was running out of money and had no future prospects, other than selling our house. The trouble with that idea was that no one was buying. Ex-pats weren't buying because their investments had gone sour and Cambodians weren't buying because they were afraid of an impending war with Thailand over Preah Vihear, the ancient temple complex in Cambodia's far north. In case you don't know about that, it was granted world heritage status with Cambodia awarded stewardship. Even though this happened after long and I'm sure complex negotiations, Thailand cried foul, produced a map of their own that "proved" Preah Vihear was on their side of the border and sent some troops to the border to reclaim it.

The troops are still there, but the panic has subsided and we've finally had a couple of look-sees on our house, but so far the offers have been too low. In the meantime, at just about the time my money ran out, a job fell out of the sky. With no dole and no real job market in Cambodia, it was a gift from God and it's kept food on our table for the past six months.

If there's a recession, the developers in Sihanouk Ville haven't heard about it. There are several huge projects underway. The photo above is of a condominium complex at the edge of town near what is set to become the main road into town. I took 2 pictures before a security guard came and told me photos were not allowed. Luckily, he didn't tell me to delete the ones I'd already taken! The huge Sokha resort/golf course at Occheuteal is underway, as is the equally large "Pearl City" development not far from our house. The old bus station has been torn down and a big upmarket shopping center is well underway. This photo was taken only about a month ago, but is already out of date. If you looked behind the sign today, you'd see the first floor already bricked in.

I'm not really in the mood to tell the story of how I had to kick Papa out of the house last month and all the dramas that ensued. I'll get back to that one later.

I get the feeling some of my small group of readers have abandoned me because of my spacey sounding but true stories about ghosts, spirits and magic. Well, here's another Ripley's Believe It or Not moment. As I said, we were seriously broke and even Sopheak, who is used to having nothing, was worried. In fact, she was probably more worried than I, so she did the logical thing: she played the lottery. For about 2 weeks, every night she was dreaming numbers. Every day she'd buy a 500 riel ticket (about 15c) and every afternoon she'd come home angry because her numbers came in, but in the wrong order. Then one day she won $125. A little later she won $75. And about 2 weeks ago she won another $50. Even the most hardened skeptic would have to admit that this kind of "luck" is a little beyond chance!

In another true dream story, a woman up the street died about 10 days ago. I think I'll leave that story for next time. Have to get back to work now. CU later