Madison Soul Global

And... I'm back. Again, in the place where the dream began. A slice of inspiration with subtle elements of the lives I've lived embedded in the places I hold dear, and the ones I am still discovering. Finally, my stubborn silence has been eroded by the warmth of family and friends, and the Soulful Energy of identity in place.

Learning.

And it's never ending, this changing perception of time and place and purpose and reason and logic and understanding.

I'm still not certain of where I am, where I am going, or even what I am doing - but therein lies the beauty of the times. I can do, go and be anything, anywhere. I have two certainties contradicting my confusion. To quote Paulo Cuelho in "The Pilgrim": You have only two certainties - What time is it? Now. Where are you? Here. Now begin your fight for truth." (That may be a liberal paraphrasing, however I believe I am doing poetic justice to the essence of his message.)

My last posting was in reaction to things that I learned in Laos about a cruel, unjust, vastly unrecognized crime against humanity. And it brought me great silence, especially in the face of the warmth and joy of the Laos people. Subsequently, each stage of our travels were viewed through this lens, and were somehow irreconcilable in juxtaposition one to the next. The struggles of Vietnam have bred a certain harshness and edge into the psyche of the Vietnamese... but also an irrefutable resilience. Cambodia... the dichotomy of the glory and fall from grace that has been achieved and committed in the name of the Khmer - Angkor Wat in all its majesty stands... and the legacy of the Khmer Rouge lives on. It seems I have buried most of the questions and sadness elicited by those things: pictures, places, bones, videos, testaments, emotions, human essence, injured Soul... And the silence those things create endures, against the passion of the Souls who demand recognition. Leaving Cambodia, the memories remained but struggled against the hard reality that life goes on in spite of itself - or perhaps out of a singular strength of manifest Soul. Thailand... somehow calm, clean and orderly against the backdrop of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. And then Koh Phangan... a life apart, but still, there is struggle for the Thais to maintain their dignity and identity while creating a sense of perfection and paradise for their unsuspecting guests.

And then there was time crunch and exhaustion and budgets. The curse of the overzealous, curious traveler is that you want to see too much with too little time. And so in sacrifice of a depth of experience you attain the title of having "been there". Of course the observant Soul never misses the world turn. And so Malaysia passed in a whirlwind of experience in the Kuala Lumpur metropolis with a pervading energy of tenuous inter-ethnic compromise - an ironic expression of our preceding journey from the Arab Gulf, India and Southeast Asia. And Singapore was just a "been there" as we passed through by bus and metro to the airport, as clean as it was made out to be as well as efficient. We successfully made it through the country in less than 24 hours.

Tokyo warrants a posting entirely unto itself, and may get one as I wind down. It is my hope that different experiences back in Madison and the next chapter of life will elicit different recollections and reorganizations of memories and experiences. The danger in this account writing of such experiences is that I run the risk of letting things go to a world apart as they are beginning to feel. But then there is potential to weave my experience of a lifetime within the running thread of local reality that will create a lasting fabric of inter-connectivity. And thus, realize my ultimate discovery - that as human beings and experiences, we cannot shed our fundamental unity that is our Soul. I've seen it. I've lived it. I've hated it. I've loved it. I've released my doubt into the truth that the Soul Is.

What is Dubai?

We've been in Dubai now for two days. Our primary purpose of the trip was to renew our visas, and to actually upgrade to a longer term, multiple entry status, as well as to rendez-vous with our third compadre. Those missions were rather quickly attained, and actually we've just been the waiting for the visas to be processed at the Omani Consulate here. In the meantime, we've been able to check out some of the things that are Dubai. I had a mix of expectations before I got here, ranging from a modern metropolis to a businessman's dream to The Club of the Middle East. What I found has been a bit of all and more. It is certain that the city is home to some of the most extravagant developments on this planet, from the palms to the Burj al Arab where Agasi and Sampras played their match on the heli-pad to the now proclaimed tallest building in the world. It is also true that it snows in the desert. Above all, the city is a phenomenon that I don't think anyone yet understands. The ruler himself may have a pretty good idea, but inside all the glitz and glamour there remains a human community that is trying to sort itself out. The local population is small, 10% being Emirati with the rest being expats from all over the world. The identity of what Dubai is seems transient, and may be defined by the next super development to come its way. Gathering places are few, and to truly thrive here you need your own car - this is not a pedestrian metropolis, nor a model for public transport, yet. Life is expensive for those who want to live it large, and that may very well be the norm in another decade. There are multiple skylines, clustered in these super developments that have been planned from beginning to end. And in it all, I search for some sense of identity here. I look for an element of culture that says, "We know what we are to the world, and we are special because of it." Perhaps that identity is in the future claims as the center of the world. For now, Dubai seems to be a developers playground, and the next best thing is always the most daring and innovative. I hope it is sustainable for its own sake, and for the sake of the region as well. And I look forward to many returns to see what kind of a city it is becoming - in order to better understand, "What is Dubai?"