Magic on a Tuesday......in Asia

As life is constantly challenging us in our day to day world, its wonderful as well as stimulating to be involved in something that is totally outside the norm and even totally inexplicable.

I am in Thailand this week and met up with my "brother", the artist Rearngsak Boonyavanishkul. Why my "brother"? Well, we have known each other for years and have become family. I trust, respect and love him as a wonderful human being and I hope he feels the same about me. We are family.

Rearngsak is also a practicing Buddhist and is as generous as he is kind. He donates his work to finance Wats (temples) and charitable work and, as he is doing now, has produced a large sculpture of the Buddha to sell with the proceeds going to a Wat in a poor province of Thailand.

But this is not the subject for this post, just some background.

Rearngsak is often speaking about inexplicable happenings that he has encountered. Spiritual events. Never frightening, but always uplifting and difficult, if not impossible to explain with logic.

He invited me to meet a man who collects budding lotus blooms.....but nothing was actually that simple. The man we met DOES collect lotus buds, but only after they have been blessed by monks.

Nothing startling here.

However, as I sat speaking with them, the man asked me to go to his refrigerator and select a lotus bud. They were singly packed in clear plastic bags, so I chose one. The bud was tightly closed and the stem intact. A perfect lotus bud.

He then asked me to slowly remove one unopened petal at a time. I inspected the lotus and decided to slowly remove just one petal. He asked me if there was any evidence that the bud had been opened? I thoroughly inspected the bud and there was no evidence at all that it had previously been opened: the petals were still actually green and VERY tightly packed. The wonderful lotus colour had not yet come to the petals.

I continued to remove the tightly held petals, one after the other when suddenly, in the centre of the flower, I noticed gemstones !!

I emptied these onto the table and continued to remove more petals....more gemstones appeared. Some were inbedded in the still immature seedpod.

He said these were a gift from a Naga, sacred serpents.

I was intrigued, but nothing I encounter in Asia ever surprises me....it is so spiritual.

I actually checked other lotus blooms he had, all appeared to be completely original and certainly, I cannot see how they could have been opened, the stones placed inside and closed again without some evidence of bruising or cutting.

So, why have I shared this? Well, we all live our lives and sometimes we forget that Life itself is magic, not only the events within it.