Here’s an update on an old post. As the celebrations get prepped for around Lunar New Year, here in Cambodia, I am reminded of my time in Viet Nam where everyone was getting all set for a long holiday, a week or a month, of lazing and eating and meeting family and friends. Quit season, I was told. Quit and then go home. And eat.
Eat Tet.
The funny thing is, I couldn’t help but think of tetrahedrons, every time I heard it. Hence the illustration.
This was from 2021…
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Today was extremely quiet; except for two things. A parade. And a long period of gong going. A going gong.
Hm. It was really fascinating hearing the latter, last night, waking up to it. Yeah. Strange how a sound can take you back. I remembered Japan… about twenty years ago, when AM shuffled me out of his parents’ house at roundabout midnight, in the cold, with an air of adventurousness and conspiring together between us, to the closest temple. In order to do one thing. To hear the New Year get rung in. This was in Tokyo. Snowy. Cool. A new coat. A best friend. Warmth and comfort and a sense of beginnings. A different lifetime, a different mood, a different moment.
Now it’s Lunar New Year, or Tết, not the January 1st Western calendar year for New Year … that I got to celebrate more than once… even this year, 2021, in a fun, light way… at New Years, or, Oshogatsu, in Japan. I think we drank something kind of warm and extremely stiff. I still love that time of year, in Japan.
This time is different. I’m not having mochi and I’m not in the innermost, smallest circle of just the dearest-and-nearest to me. Not right now, I can’t be. Physically. Even emotionally. So many kinds of borders are closed, and that’s that. Accepted it. Right. Now, with that, I get to sit still and enjoy this peace and quiet as there is no traffic. I repeat. No traffic. This, in Saigon, is bliss. So yeah. I’m just here, on my own, thinking about things, reflecting on the years and years of being with people, elsewhere, and at different times, in life.
Being on my own in Viet Nam for like 20 months, during the pandemic, felt like this.