A monk's routine in rural Thailand varied little no matter where he stayed. In the afternoons, I would join the monks at the well near the main hall where we each drew a bucket of cold water for our bath. This bathing area also served as a meeting place where the monks met twice a month to make their brooms for sweeping the paths and to wash and dye their donated robes by boiling them with the orange bark from the jackfruit tree. (We were treated to a hot bath every two weeks!).

I would walk back to my hut after the bath and practice meditation for the rest of the evening and usually late into the night. How could I be happier? I had two geckos as companions and my meditation was improving, too. I was beginning to feel at ease with this practice; the fertile soil my heart was growing in.

I was feeling increasingly at home in nature. The unique aspect of nature is its vastness - I could take in as much as I wanted and not diminish it. While I was there, I tried to attain jhanas, deep states of concentration that systematically relinquishes attachments to the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body sensual sensations, as well as attachments to directed thought and mental evaluations; rapture, pleasure, equanimity, form, infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, and neither perception nor non-perception.

Jhanas are complicated. They are experiential, and making one's way through the maze of sensations and impressions that result from deep concentration that can culminate in jhanas can be mind-boggling. I soon found myself writing a monk in Australia that I had become acquainted with years ago at Wat Pah Nanachat in 1981, and had since moved on to a monastery in Perth, Australia where he currently was the abbot. He was a monk well known for his familiarity with jhanas, and his advice was exactly what I needed to help me get past some obstacles. He was an interesting monk, his three-page letter back to me was hand printed and spaced with such precision that I was positive it was done with a fancy computer font, but upon close examination (under a magnifying glass years later), sure enough, tiny microscopic dissimilarities could be seen between the characters.

In addition to working on jhanas, there was the everyday routine to follow. A little before sunrise, I would make my way through the night on a narrow trail to the hall, being careful of the Russell Vipers that liked to curl up in the middle of the paths looking very much like little piles of leaves. In the hall, we would all meet and then start walking to the villages nearby to collect our alms, a custom that has been unchanged for twenty-five hundred years. At this wat, we didn't meditate as a group; everybody was supposed to be advanced enough to be on their own!