I write sitting in lotus pose on my couch; I realize this cannot be good for my back, but refuse to begin breaking the habit by moving to the table. The MacBook fits so nicely, front edge against my pelvis, side edges nestling into my thighs. Within reach is my coffee table, the earthy clay cup with steam still rising, the pen, the pad.

Returning last week from Burma, I almost wept at the cleanliness of my home, the worn but shiny bamboo floors, the orderly kitchen, the pleasant welcome of fabric and wood and high ceilings.  Lawrence had come in the day before with two bouquets of flowers, had wiped a bit of dust off the furniture with my sandalwood spray polish, opened the bay-facing windows just a hair.  Pure gratitude and a feeling of soft safety bathed my travel-worn mind.

Those flowers, sunflowers, and something blue, have since bit their own dust, but I’ve replaced them with yellow daffodils, slid without ceremony or attention to symmetry into a funky yellow vase I’d bought at a yard sale. A gift to myself, the flowers.  I can just glance over the rim of the laptop and admire their burst of color, vibrant. Wanting to live. Their petals fold and dance into one another, each individual flower like a family of nestling parts, as though protecting something sacred inside. The cacophony of leaves pointing to heaven, to hell, and off to the east and west. Likely there are too many stems in their narrow glass home, but I’ve never been much of one for keeping things alive.

The truth is, I will never let this spot on the coffee table go flowerless again. As I inhale and let myself really see them, for more than their quick infusion or color and life, I cannot exhale without thinking of their opposite and that which I can’t seem to shake. At the refugee camps in northern Thailand, there are no vases, for there are no flowers to put in them, there are no coffee tables to rest the vase on, there are no wood polishes or windows to open, no bay to turn the face toward for soft salty air. There are no couches to sit on, no cushions to soften the blow to the lumbar spine. There is, however dust. The kind you can hear when you bring your back teeth together by accident. Dust that cakes in the eyes of infants and the throats of old coughing women as they bend crouch over a pot to make their American guest soup. Dust that ends up in the soup made from water and tree bark and mushrooms grown in chicken shit. Dust Soup. Soup which really must be eaten, it has taken such effort to make.

Lets just pick one, Umpiem Camp. I wake up there at 5am, sick with fever, and rise from the floor to get some air. Outside, a teenage girl across the way is filling a bucket with water from the stream, hauling it back, and pouring it on the path between our huts to pack down the earth. Over, and over, and over. Beyond the roosters, I hear the sound I’ve heard for days, a three part human expelling of dusty phlegm. A long painful clearing of the throat, a hacking, and then spitting. The first time I heard this upon arriving, I couldn’t imagine how someone could be so rude. Within the first day I’d witnessed it aurally at least a dozen times. And eventually it becomes part of every other thing. Initially one wonders why, in this lush area just over the Burma border, there is no plant life. And then it becomes clear; every item of flora has been used for shelter or nutritional consumption. Imagine that for a minute. Look out your window, see all of it gone. All of it. Your grass, your garden? Its dust. Not even soft dirt. Dry, grainy, angry, hot, dry dust. Grit, lets call it. Colorless.

My daffodils block the view of my duffle bag, the one that still sits on the floor with pages of my writings, of interviews and underground documentaries on the atrocities going on this very day, even after the supposed positive turn of events in Burma. My daffodils open a little as the sun steaks though the eastern facing windows. They ask, “Why are you so afraid to put all this to paper?”