8. Happy Valentines Day 2012

Dear family and friends -

Happy Valentines Day!!!  This is my favorite holiday - because it’s all about love and love is what I love most of all. It seems ironic that I have been single most of my life - separated from the physical expression of love - but I know what my heart feels--what for me, this life, this existence--everything--is really all about. Love. Pass it on . . . 

One World of Love

Laying on my back in bed early in the morning

I am completely relaxed and at peace--

Angels, spirit guides and fairies float around me.

Under my blanket--secure in love,

I feel the warm steady burning in my heart.

I surrender to this healing flame--

                                                   I send it down to the tips of my toes.

I move the fire up and throughout my body,

filling every cell, every molecule with love--

 permeating my body, mind, spirit and soul.

I am totally and completely alive--

I have become/I am a vibrating generator of love.

This generated love, my love,

is more than I can contain in my body--

From my burning heart

I send my love out into the world.

I send my love out to everyone on this planet,

to every man, every woman, to every child--

I send my love to all animals and birds,

to the elves and the fairies, to the plants and trees,

to the earth, water and sky and all that is and ever will be.

I bring my love back into my heart

only to send it back out again

particularly

to all my friends and family

to all I have or will dance with

this lifetime--

I give my love to you.

David Dakan Allison

Two of the big loves in my life are reading and writing. When I was living in Germany in the 4th and 5th grades we didn’t have a TV. I would spend my evenings reading one novel after the other--it’s a wonderful childhood memory. I recreating it here in Chiang Mai--I don’t turn on the TV and every night I lose myself in a wonderful novel. Sometimes I read until two or three in the morning. One of my new years resolutions was to read 65 novels this year. I’m well on my way. I started with a Michael Connelly and two Rex Stout murder mysteries and then Leo Tolstoy’s The Awakening, Arthur Conan Dolye’s The Hounds of Baskervilles, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet and The Night Circus by Erin Morganstern. I highly recommend all of them.

Fried insects - yumm - I'll take two pounds

I went to the Sunday Night Market for the first time in about six weeks. I’m so impressed. They close some major streets and the market goes one mile this way and one mile that way and off into lots of side alleys - booths side-by-side on each side of the roads and down the middle. More than a thousand booths I’d guess - and many thousands of shoppers--where sometimes its hard to move forward. And what is fascinating to me--it’s all non-smoking. Except for a few ignorant farangs--there is around 100% compliance. Chiang Mai continues to amaze.

Sunday Night Market before the big crowds

Dancing girl

I’m always surprised with what I see at the Sunday Night Market. At one point about twelve western Hari Krishna’s come dancing down the street clearing the crowds away with their drums and hands flailing about, singing their devotion. Every block there’s a blind singer not realizing that nobody is paying attention. There’s all kinds of food. I decided to pass on the fried grubs, worms and grasshoppers. I almost bought a very old monkey skull before I came to my senses. I’m always a sucker for the little girls in tradition costumes dancing in the street--so cute and talented. I stopped for an hour and had a foot massage--$5. Then back into the crowds and all the lights and color and sounds and smells of Chiang Mai on a Sunday night. And rode my bike home in the dark.

Then yesterday morning I went back to the hospital--this time to have some rapidly growing tumors removed from under my eyes. I thought it would be a minor thing, but it turned into a full operation. In my hospital robe they wheeled me into the OR on a gurney. Under the bright operating lights the kind doctor outlined where he was going to cut into my face. He showed me where he would re-graft skin. I asked how long it would take and he said one hour and then asked, “Are you scared?” My reaction took me by surprise. “I am.” He was so sweet. “Would you like to sleep?” “OK” Next thing I knew he was doing some things - I wondered if the little shot he gave even worked, then he said, “OK. I’m through. It was very successful.”  Now I’ll look silly for a week with bandaids under my eyes.

Favorite Chinese vegetarian dinner - full plate $1

So more reading and writing and being here in Chiang Mai enjoying myself - sending Valentine love to all my friends - wishing that you would be my Valentine--ah, what memories . . .

With all my love,

David Dakan Allison.