Meditations in Northern Thailand

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Northern Thailand is a place of pause. The air is different, softer, quieter, touched with the scent of temple incense and the cool mist of the mountains. It is a land of gilded rooftops and open roads, of monks walking barefoot at dawn, of rivers that carry stories across borders.

In Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, time does not rush. It lingers, inviting you to do the same.

Time does slow in Chiang Mai, or maybe it is I who am slowing, shedding the rush, letting the mind uncoil like incense smoke in temple air. The mountains rise mist-clad, and the temples stand not as relics of the past but as spaces where time stands still. Even the language flows differently, softer, unhurried, unlike the staccato beat of Bangkok.

In robes the color of saffron, monks walk barefoot through the quiet streets, moving with a grace that makes me mindful of my own steps. I follow, not in step, but in spirit, learning from their silence.

Further north, in Chiang Rai, Wat Rong Khun, the White Temple, gleams like an unfinished poem, its beauty both eternal and fleeting. I linger, knowing that some things are meant to be half-written, left open to what comes next.

At the Golden Triangle, Thailand meets Laos and Myanmar at the Mekong River, a convergence of borders and histories, of departures and returns. Karen women of the hill tribes weave their stories into fabric, their hands moving with the wisdom of those who understand that life turns in circles, not straight lines. Their necks, elongated by rings, seem to stretch toward some unseen horizon, seeing beyond or simply holding tradition against time’s weight.

In Mae Kachan, the hot spring holds me without question. I do not dare to plunge, but I listen to its quiet wisdom gurgling from the earth’s core. It is a cycle neither beginning nor ending, and in that moment, the burble sounds like my heartbeat.

But not all cycles are so easy to accept.

I watch an elephant paint on canvas, and also dance. A spectacle, no doubt, but one that leaves me uneasy.

These creatures, sacred in Thai culture, were once revered in war and worship. Now they stand before an audience, drawing self-portraits, performing the two-step, behaviors learned, rehearsed, expected, unnatural.

And yet, what is the alternative?

An elephant eats up to 250 kilograms of food a day. Imagine the cost of feeding even one, let alone the many that call places like Mae Taeng Elephant Camp home. Releasing them into the wild is not as simple as it sounds. Raised by humans, many have lost the instincts to survive. What seems like freedom could be abandonment. So I sit with this discomfort. The very performances that unsettle me also sustain them, funding their food, their medical care, their very existence. Is this a compromise or a necessity, a means to an end or a system that must evolve?

There is no easy answer, only the responsibility to choose well. Of one thing I am certain: I will never ride an elephant. The weight of human leisure is too heavy. It breaks more than their backs.

I wonder if the same weight is breaking the backs of others, not just the beasts of burden but the people who carry knowledge passed down through generations, their hands steady even as time moves against them.

In Bo Sang, the Bo Sang Umbrella Village in particular, the old women do not fade.

Their hands, still sure, still steady, turn mulberry bark into paper, split bamboo into bones that bend, cut and shape, tie and bind until an umbrella blooms like a second sun. No machines, no chemicals, only memory. How the bark must soak, how the paper must dry, how the frame must fold just so, or else it will never close again.

These women, craftspeople in their 70 or 80s, let me try, placing brushes in our hands, bowls of color set before us, as if paint alone could trace their knowing. We dip and paint, a flower, a swirl, a hesitant stroke where theirs are sure. The brush drags where it should glide, the colors bleed where they should have held. What they make so effortless, we make so clumsy.

By the time we finish, our umbrellas are far from perfect. Yet we held them with pride, not just for what we had made but for what we now understood. Beauty is not just in the final form but in the hands that shape it, in the years of knowing how.

And I think of home. I think of my country. I think of the Philippines. I think of hands left idle, of knowledge untaught, of all the things we used to make before we learned to discard.