Tainted Beauty

 Phnom Penh is a unique kind of beauty.  The city has character leaving San Francisco by comparison as dull and uninspiring.  Walking the streets alone today I was filled with a peace and serenity despite the tumult around me.  I ate at a french resturaunt and enjoyed a perfect meal.  One of those meals where nothing in the world could have possibly made it better, lack of company aside.  A perfect feta and tomato salad and iced coffee had me laughing aloud at the joy of it by the end, I kinda disturbed a family next to me.

After the meal, as I was reflecting on what made it so amazing, I found it was the entirety of the circumstances, being here, eating here, sweating here.  I then realized suddenly I had a greater appreciation for the city and its beauty because yesterday I saw the city and its latent pain.

Yesterday we went to the killing fields.  An overwhelming experience, I meditated and tried to drink it all in and I couldnt, I was brought to tears and had to excuse myself from the group to cry alone.  The sheer horror of the place was made even worse by the surreal beauty of it. 

 A tall stupa (pagoda looking thingy) dominates, and it is only upon approach one sees the mountain of skulls in the center.  The earth has grown green over the graves, there is a school next to this place, over the screaming anguish in my head I could still hear the children playing soccer.  

Within the stupa/pagoda, a mountain of skulls, each dug from the ground where that persons life was extinguished in a shallow grave.  I saw teeth embedded in the ground, cloth from shirts and pants, halfway decomposed, remaining fragments of skull yet to be gathered and accounted.  But none of the graves and bones could have possibly affected me like the trees.  They were wrongness, they had been perverted and I refused even to accept their shade after I read that these were the trees used to tie up and beat the children before their execution.  The trees, oh the trees, and the horror, oh the horror.  

"Jill suripticiously tossed them peanuts, despite the no feeding signs.

She tossed one to a medium sized monkey; before he could eat it a much larger male was on him and not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating, then left.  The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; he squatted at the scene of the crime, pounded his knuckles on the concrete floor, and chattered his helpless rage.  Mike watched it solemnly.  

Suddenly, the mistreated monkey rushed to the side of the cage, picked up a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a drubbing worse than the one he had suffered--- after which he seemed quite relaxed.  The third monkey, still whimpering, crawled away and found shelter in the arm of a female who had a still smaller one, a baby, on her back.  The other monkeys paid no attention to any of it.  

Mike threw back his head and laughed."    

"Man is the creature who laughs." -The father of all.