Visited some temples today, and felt the thundering of the great spirit before me; I'm starved of that sense of contact and need to nourish it in my life. Thailand is filled with physical reminders of the sacred--lots of Thai Buddhist temples, sure, and monks, but also churches and mosques and Chinese temples and shrines, and then they have an even older but ubiquitous tradition of honouring the earth spirits and ancestors through building little 'spirit houses' (on single pillars, about the height of a person or a little taller altogether, the house itself just 1 or 2 feet in height and width) whenever a new building is built, so there is a spirit house (or two) for every human building. You see them everywhere, and along the roadside as you drive, because the tradition is that to honour the spirits (read: to respect the earth's sacredness) you have to give the spirit house the best location on the property such that it is prominent and never in the shadow of the human building. Offerings are made at these spirit houses every day, beautiful strings of flowers and bits of food, water, incense. It's really neat.
Another thing that appeals to my natural, earthen sense of the sacred is the way that certain big old trees are honoured by having colourful ribbons tied around them near the base, to honour and protect the 'angel' that lives in them. This is also the case for some of the really big old termite mounds. It's cool how these ancient animist traditions persist alongside and among Buddhism and other religions here.
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