colin penter: "always keep a diamond in your mind": Michael Breen's travels through Burma, Thailand and Laos

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Michael Breen's travels through Burma, Thailand and Laos

(photos taken by Michael Breen)

My good friend and esteemed colleague Michael Breen spends time each year traveling through northern Thailand, Burma (Myanmar) and Laos. Michael has family living and working there and also teaches English to various local people.

Michael has set up a website about his travels. It's a collection of photos, reflections on daily life during his travels and vignettes about people he has met and places he visited. Much more than a travel diary, its a moving reflection on life, on people and on places. Michael's introduction to his web site speaks in the following terms:

"Sometimes we travel on the surface of the globe and sometimes we travel inside the mysterious globe of ourselves"

The quote below from Rumi reflects the spirit and ethos of Michael's travels. It's a lesson for all of us in our busy daily lives:

"Give thanks; don’t be arrogant or vain
Pay attention without self-importance"

Michael has written some wonderful and moving pieces about people he has met in his travels. and places visited. This is a piece here about a man he met at a local market. And another piece here about conversations on a boat sailing down the Irrawaddy River from Bagan to Mandalay.

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Reflections

"Faces skyward, we all seek/songs in the whirlwinds/that parch our slow lives" Adrian C. Louis

"Don't allow the lucid moment to dissolve/On a hard dry substance/you have to engrave the truth"Adam Zagajewski

If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have" Tony Judt

"Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely" Mike Davis

"Inverted totalitarianism marks a political moment when corporate power finally sheds its identification as a purely economic phenomenon, confined primarily to a domestic domain of "private enterprise", and evolves into a globalizing co-partnership with the state..... The former becomes more political, the latter more market oriented"

Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism

'I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream
big dreams,
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands'

Woody Guthrie

'And they'll take the money and spread it out equal
Just like the Bible and the prophets suggest
But the men that go riding to help these poor workers
The rich will cut down like an unwelcome guest.'
Woody Guthrie

“And I want to know
The same thing
Everyone wants to know
How it going to end?”
Tom Waits

'I used to ask the question, "Am I an activist or writer?" I don't ask that anymore. I am simply a human being engaged'

Terry Tempest Williams

“What remains of neoliberalism after the financial crises? The answer is everything”
Colin Crouch

"The poem/is finished/now to break it"

Tadeusz Rozewicz

"Who calls anyone civilized

Where does the crying heart graze"

Naomi Shihab Nye

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life"
Mary Oliver

"That pack of scoundrels

tumbling through the gate

emerges

as the order of the state"

Stanley Kunitz

"predators

of greed

whose minds create vast lies

Peter Blue Cloud

"Trickle down hasn't worked, but gush up has. According to the rules of Gush Up gospel, the more you have the more you can have"

Arundhati Roy

"History is the labyrinth, labor the low high road, art the curved arrow to our common heaven"

Thomas McGrath

"At a basic level, everything I write is a result of what I've seen, heard and felt. I aim to be clear. I aim to be accurate. The songs are my testimony"

Neil Murray

"For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--should be clear: the darkness around us is deep"
William Stafford

"We have a system of political paralysis that responds only to the dictates of the corporate elite, not to the needs and the rights of the citizenry"
Chris Hedges

" yet unborn in the dark/who will be the throat of these hours/who will speak these days,/If not I/If not you"
Muriel Rukeyser

"As you sleep and count the planets, think of others- there are people who have no place to sleep/As you liberate yourself with metaphors think of others- those who have lost the right to speak./And as you think of distant others- think of yourself and say- I wish I were a candle in the darkness"
Mahmoud Darwish

"Life after all is just a
passing phase"
Kevin Gilbert

"What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?
Naomi Shihab Nye

" and still one burrows
makes a place
an impact,
in some crevice of the globe
Dennis Brutus

"Help comes
but it comes too late"
Bob Dylan

"Here I have a voice impassioned,
here I have a life
embattled and angered,
here I have a rumor
But here I have a life"

Miguel Hernandez

"I will defy corporate power in small and large ways. I will invest my energy now solely in acts of resistance, in civil disobedience and in defiance. Those who rebel are our only hope. Chris Hedges

"Whatever you say reverberates
whatever you don't say speaks for itself
So either way you're talking politics."

Wislawa Szymborska

"What three things can never be done? Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone"
Muriel Rukeyser

'I'll kindle my fires with the words/ I can't send you/ And the roads I can't follow/ and the songs I can't sing/ I'll wander alone on the sleighbells of winter/ With the stars for a diamond and the world for a ring'

Townes Van Zandt

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
James Baldwin

"the cries of those who vanish
might take years to get here"
Carolyn Forche

"State the bare fact and let it sing"
Dennis Brutus

"Enjoy every sandwich"
Warren Zevon

" Give a thought once in awhile to this little soldier of fortune"
Che Guevara

"I sense an awakening around us. People are preparing to stand against oppression, austerity, cut backs, selloffs, awful corruption in high places and robbers walking free. lies are ringing louder these days"
Christy Moore

"What weighs more heavily on the belt, sadness or memories?"
Pablo Neruda

"So friends, every day do something that won’t compute."
Wendell Berry

I simply kept my goal in mind and persisted. Perseverance is a large part of writing"
N. Scott Momaday

"For an ideology to be hegemonic it is not necessary that it be loved. It is merely necessary that it have no serious rival"
Colin Leys

"When I'm buried/ don't forget to put a Biro in my coffin."
Mario Benedetti

"Songs are like Japanese painting. Less is more. One brushstroke takes the place of many if you put it in the right place. I’m trying to get whoever is listening to think, ‘Oh, man, I was there. I did that. I know what that’s about.’ Too many details take away.”
Guy Clark

"Her voice carries her
higher and further than the
seashore. She screams at night over the land
The echo has no echo...so she becomeshe endless scream in the breaking news
which was no longer breaking news"...
Mahmoud Darwish

"Citizens have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the state consumes itself, attract larger and larger numbers. Perhaps the full-blown revolution will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist, we can keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die."
Chris Hedges

"How could I have come so far?
(And always on such dark trails?)
I must have traveled by the light
Shining from the faces of all those I have loved"
Thomas McGrath

"The job of the responsible social scientist is first to uncover these forces [of wealth, power and control], to write about them clearly, without jargon... and finally..to take an advocacy position in favour of the disadvantaged, the underdogs, the victims of injustice."
Susan George

"Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender".
Rebecca Solnit

"It is only those who can retreat into the imagination, and through their imagination can minister to the suffering of those around them, who uncover the physical and psychological strength to resist"
Chris Hedges

"Maybe that's just the price we pay for the chains we refuse"
Richard Thompson (Beeswing)

"What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion"
Chris Abani

"There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost."
Muriel Rukeyser

"Market forces and the military mechanisms that protect these forces are the sole ideology that governs industrial states and humans’ relationship to the natural world. It is an ideology that results in millions of dead and millions more displaced from their homes in the developing world"
Chris Hedges

"Throw it away. Throw it away
Give your love, live your life,
Each and every day
And keep your hand wide open
let the sun shine through
Cause you can never lose a thing
If it belongs to you "
Abbey Lincoln

" Tell me how long is a short time, is it longer than two hours/Or a bit less than a weekend, is it shorter than a year?/ Is it the time it takes to not complete your business with a person?/With a friend you make in transit, to a daughter held so dear"
Mick Thomas (Weddings Parties Anything)

"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil."
Albert Einstein

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness: like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,: I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Nazim Hikmet

It is usually the case that abuses of state power become a source for concern and opposition only when they begin to subsume the elites who are responsible for those abuses"
Glen Greenwald

"All you can write is what you see"

Woody Guthrie

"And so/ for your consolation/I send these fragments/random pebbles I pick up/from the landscape of my own experience/traversing the same arid wastes/in a montage of glimpses/I allow myself/or stumble across”

Dennis Brutus

“Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”
Wendell Berry

"The truth no longer sets people free: it only makes them drowsy"
Sam Smith

"Everyone is at the mercy of another one's dream"
Sam Baker

"What is important, what has meaning, is the journey… [and] journeys are through history as well as through a landscape".
Theo Angelopoulos

"We humans cannot absorb the bitter truths of our own history, the revelation of our destructive potential, except through the mediation of art (the manifestation of our other, our constructive, potential). Presented raw, the facts are rejected: perhaps not by the intellect, which accommodates them as statistics, but by the emotions—which hold the key to conscience and resolve."
Denise Levertov

“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”
Wendell Berry

"Those with a systemic critique need to find ways to bring radical ideas, and the energies they unleash, into immediate struggles – and fight to win".
Mike Marqusee

"I was born in a lucky country/Every day I hear the warning bells/They're so busy building palaces/They don't see the poison in the wells/In the land of the little kings/Profit is the only thing"
Paul Kelly

"My sword's in my hands and I'm next in command in this version of death called life"
Bob Dylan

When the state no longer carries out its role of constraining capitalism, people are left fully exposed to the unmediated market... The state, however has not shrunk away: it has been transformed into an instrument of market-driven governance"
Margaret Somers

"However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows.We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human."
Hannah Arendt

I believe in the refusal to take part
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.
These words soar for me beyond all rules
without seeking support from actual examples.
My faith is strong, blind, and without foundation.
Wislawa Szymborska

May the stars carry your sadness away,
May the flowers fill your heart with beauty,
May hope forever wipe away your tears,
And above all, may silence make you strong".
Chief Dan George

The split in our language between “political” and“personal” has, I think, been a trap.
Adrienne Rich

"Someone
made me more alive,
more human;
I repay that gift
by making more alive
someone else".
Dennis Brutus

"To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves"
Carrie Chapman (US suffragette)

"I always figured you get to be more eccentric as you get older and people have to endure it"
Tom Waits

"Each land has its time for being born
Each dawn a date with a rebel"
Mahmoud Darwish

"I refuse to live.
With the wolves of the marketplace"
Marina Tsvetayeva

"There are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about.. things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight"
Phillip Pullman

"Writing must teach man soberness: to be awake"
Zbignew Herbert

"The intellectual responsibility of the writer as moral agent is obvious: to try to find out and tell the truth as best one can about matters of human significance to the right audience."
Stanley Cohen, States of Denial

"It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity/Thus could I sing and thus rejoice; but it is not so with me".
William Blake

"Is this why the more I know the louder I lament?"
Mahmoud Darwish

"The power of the dominant order is not just economic but intellectual-lying in the realm of beliefs"
Pierre Bourdieu

"The world cries out for meaningful, combative, political art."
Stephanie McMillan

"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose".
Tony Judt

"Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance".
Mahmoud Darwish

"The markets have ruled for a third of a century but it has all ended in tears... Any great failure should force us to rethink. The present economic crises is a great failure of the market system"
Robert Skidelsky

"See how our once lived lives stay on to haunt us"
Peter Porter, An Australian Garden.

"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power".
Howard Zinn, US Historian and Author

"I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things"
Tom Waits

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength never power. Above all to watch. To try to understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget"
Arundhati Roy

Let me not watch in spite, caring no more/
but let my heart’s old pain tear me until I bleed
Judith Wright

"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life"
Rachel Carson

"To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and to anger others; and if you cannot tolerate this anger, you are wasting the time you spend thinking deeply. One of the rewards to deep thought is the hot glow of anger at discovering a wrong, but if anger is taboo, thought will starve to death".
Jules Henry, Culture against Man

"Our lives gain purpose and worth when we recognize and confront the evils we encounter-small as well as large- and we meet them with determination to take action even when we are all but certain that our efforts will fail. For in rising to those challenges, there is no failure".
Derrick Bell

"..those who have the good fortune to be able to devote their lives to the study of the social world cannot stand, aside, neutral and indifferent, from the struggles in which the future of that world is at stake"
Pierre Bourdieu

"accuracy is essential/ we must not be wrong/
even by a single one /we are despite everything/the guardians of our brothers/ignorance about those who have disappeared/ undermines the reality of the world"
Zbigniew Herbert

"Climate change is not a future problem for wise statesmen to patiently work to avert. It's a right now, present tense, capital-E Emergency."
Bill McKibben

"This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships... ."
Michael Lerner

"The government has thus been remade in the image of the business firm. And in this way, it has become subject to all of the administrative and organisational pathologies that bring large businesses to grief. It has come to absorb every great innovation in corporate mismanagement, deception, market manipulation and fraud of the past forty years"
James K Galbraith The Predator State

"What swells over us now is a logical spread
from the horizons we made-
the heave of the great corporations
whose bellies are never full".
Judith Wright, For a Pastoral Family

"Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead to freedom or constitute a proof for its existence"
Hannah Arendt

"So many reports
so many questions"
Bertolt Brecht

"The dominant culture of the world teaches us that The Other is a threat, that our fellow human beings are a danger. We will all continue to be exiles in one form or another as long as we continue to accept the paradigm that the world is a racetrack or a battlefield. I believe that we can be compatriots of many different kinds of people, even though they are born far from our own lands and in other places and in other times".
Eduardo Galeano

"The consuming life is a life of rapid learning- and swift forgetting"
Zygmunt Bauman

"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist"
Kenneth Boulding

"The powers that be, bent on inculcating narrow-gauged formulas about the necessities of human nature and human society- on the acceptance of which the continuation of their hegemony depends- must always vilify those purveying a more sanguine message".
Martin Duberman, writing about Paul Robeson