Daniel Reid - Shots from the Hip: Energy, Light, and Luminous Space

When I moved to Thailand after sixteen years in Taiwan, I spent my first year there living in the steamy, sensual playground of Bangkok. It reminded me of my early wildhood in Taipei and rekindled the embers of my voluptuous way of life there, but it didnt last long. It was my last hurrah in the Floating World and my parting shot at that way of life. Id had my fill of sexcapades, and now it was time for me to slow down and live the leisurely life of a literati the old Chinese way, as was my intention when I came to Asia. When Laiet offered to let me rent the teakwood studio in her tropical garden on the bank of the River Ping, where her late husband the Swiss painter Theo Meier worked, I knew Id finally found the secluded setting where my vision could come to full fruition.

I arrived at the compound shortly after sunrise and found Laiet waiting for me at the house, sipping her morning coffee and munching dried chili peppers from a bowl. She showed me around the house, which shed fully furnished for me and provided with sheets, towels, and kitchenware. The bathroom had a modern shower as well as the traditional Thai ap-nam style bath, a clay vat as big as a wine barrel with a pewter bowl to sluice cool water over the body. Its the perfect way to bathe in the tropics and feels like standing under a waterfall.

Shed also installed a telephone and a tank of propane gas for the kitchen stove and set a bowl of fresh fruit on the teakwood dining table out on the terrace. The young couple who served as her maid and gardener came up the steps, and she introduced them to me as Nyang and Duan. She said they would do my laundry, clean the house, and run errands for me.

Here at last, far removed from the temptations of the fleshpots in Bangkok, I could live the reclusive life of a scholar and writer, resume my studies, and get serious about my research and practice in energy and light. Secluded in my riverside studio amidst a flourishing tropical garden, I spent most of my time reading books mailed to me by friends in America and Taiwan, old books and new books in both English and Chinese, and I resumed taking notes and quotes for future writing projects. I lived in an antiquated world formed by the books I read, a world in which I felt far more comfortable than I ever have in the modern world, which I had now abandoned once and for all. The authors and the characters they introduced to me in the books I read became my sole companions and trusted advisors. One of my favorite sidekicks that first year in Chiang Mai was the Chinese poet Yuan Mei, properly introduced by my favorite translator of Chinese poetry, Arthur Waley. Yuan lived in China during the empires peak of peace and prosperity in the 18 th century, and he approached every aspect of life as a fine art to be cultivated to perfection. In this entry from one of his journals, he tells us the key role books played in his life, a role theyve played in my life ever since childhood:

Id rather live with sticks and stones

Than spend my time with ordinary people.

Fortunately one need not belong to ones own time;

Ones real date is the date of the books one reads!

Each book I read contributed new ideas and insights, most of them culled from ancient cultures, to the world that took form around me. I asked a friend to mail me a book Id read long ago and re-read it cover to cover. Titled The Importance of Living, it was written by the erudite Chinese scholar and connoisseur of life Lin Yu-Tang and first published in 1937. Two of the most important pillars of support for living the good life, he states, are friendship and leisure time, and these became the foundation of the life I was building in Chiang Mai. Like-minded friends with similar tastes are indispensable for sharing leisure time, writes Lin, while leisure time without the congenial company of compatible friends is hollow and useless. He lists three civilized pleasures that are particularly enjoyable when shared in a leisurely way with good friends, and I concur completely :

I do not think that, considered from the point of view of human culture and happiness, there have been more significant inventions in the history of mankind more vitally important and more directly contributing to our enjoyment of leisure, friendship, sociability, and conversation, than the inventions of smoking, drinking, and tea.

In the 18 th and 19 th centuries in China, smoking would have included opium smoked the Chinese way as well as tobacco smoked the Western way, and today it includes cannabis as well. Connoisseurs of life like Lin Yu-tang were worldly-wise aesthetes with cosmopolitan tastes culled from all civilized cultures past and present, and thats the way I approach life as well. Lin correctly cites the discoveries of wine and spirits, tea and smoking as major contributors to human happiness and the enjoyment of life throughout the ages, and he further states that in order to cultivate these pleasures as arts of life and enjoy them at their best one must, as the absolute necessary condition, find friends of the same type of temperament with whom to share them.