Communicating With Rice Mother

It’s not much of a stretch for me to assume that I am one of very few American citizens who has the ability to communicate with the Mae Posop.  She is, after all, an ancient and sacred spirit in faraway Southeast Asia (SEA) and I am far from being a devoutly religious man.  However, over the last four years I have studied and come to accept her spiritual values. 

 I am attracted to her myths and rituals that provide poor rural rice farmers with a whole paradigm of how to live in harmony with nature and its cycle of birth, death and rebirth, creating equality in society, and respecting the feminine power as the source of life.   The Rice Mother has become a close friend of mine.

Our long path together will, I expect, end only when her documentary film series (The Search For Mae Posop) is being produced and distributed, as I envision, exclusively over the Internet in the aforementioned, faraway SEA.   Such a task would seem impossible to achieve without my daily dialogue with Mae Posop.   She is able to critique me, and patiently guide me as I endeavor to advance daily, in any way that I can find. 

During most of my relationship with Mae, her spirit has seemingly arrived at my side in the form of intuition: a sixth sense about what is important.  More recently, I am also learning to how to have a one-on-one dialogue with her through meditation.  Meditation requires a quiet mind and lots of practice.  I'm working on it.  On top of all that, I’m confident that Mae will also be appearing in my dreams.  Or so I’m told.  I wait hopefully.

My most recent dialogue with her informs me to continually monitor media coverage from tha part of the world and to wait for political calm before taking my small camera crew back into SEA.  The United States has elevated its warnings to recommend that Americans postpone non-essential travel to Thailand.  If we were going to travel only to Thailand, I would travel without hesitation, but now the State Department recommends that Americans currently avoid China’s Yunnan Provence as well.  That’s where the Mekong River begins it’s journey through SEA and where our series begins. On top of that my Asian friends, both here and over there, suggest it would also be foolish to travel into Myanmar, Vietnam and Cambodia at this time.  All of the above are experiencing some turmoil and political uncertainty. 

There is an old proverb that proclaims, “Smooth seas do not make skillful sailor.”  And so I take this opportunity to shout from the rooftops, “If I can’t do what I want now, I will be even more prepared to do what I want in the future.”

Job number one: get the trailer for the doc film series edited and make it available to the Ford and Sundance Foundations.  There is an urgency to the project that keeps me fully occupied.  Well, nearly.  I'm also setting up to shoot a film next month.  The script (A Lovely Adult Beverage) is an award winning script written a few years ago by San Franciscan David Asher and me.  I'm also working daily on a coming-of-age, art heist thriller screenplay called Objects of Belief.  

Stay tuned, won't you?