“It wasn’t always like this, you know” Aez said to me in her usual sage-like tone. Dusk was approaching and the streets were becoming increasingly chaotic and increasingly wet with Songkran merry-makers. We were watching two kid siblings across the street shrieking for joy and dousing each other with buckets of ice water. “Oh?” I prompted her. “Yeah, all this, with the waterguns is to support the tourist industry. When I was little, we would sprinkle a little water on grandma and grandpa and then go to the temple.”
Being a religious omnivore, I was intrigued to experience the True Meaning of Songkran, so we planned a day to experience what the locals call “Kon Saai Kao Wat”, a phrase which my American mouth always manages to flub up in the most ridiculous possible ways. “Kon Saai Kao Wat” means “People Bringing Sand into the Temple,” but if you say “Wat” with the wrong tone, it means “to have a cold” and if you say “Kao” with the wrong tone it means “rice”, so you can imagine the disastrous ways a foreign tongue could mess this one up. Thankfully, I could insulate myself from causing an international incident by surrounding myself with Thai friends who could poke me when I needed to shut up, bow, or stand in a different place.
My friend Kookai, who owns On the Road Books (please support her if you’re ever in Chiang Mai!) is an absolute gem of a human being, and she had everything prepared for our day when we arrived at her shop. Traditionally, people scoop buckets of sand from the river to bring into the temple, but in the modern age it’s okay to buy it from a shop. We each got a little plastic pail and a flower garland to bring to the temple. All of us were dressed in traditional “Lanna style”, with handwoven fabrics and silk shawls. I anxiously asked Aez if it was okay for me as a white person to wear Thai traditional dress. She insisted that it would be “more cute” and even used her limited pocket money to buy a men’s style Lanna shirt for me. Gender affirmation for the win!
As usual, as soon as we entered the temple, I could feel a shift in the air, an atmosphere of peace and tranquility inside the courtyard. A welcome respite from the wet, loud chaos already ramping up outside. We took our buckets of sand and dumped them onto an already overflowing pile, decorated with Lanna flags on top like a huge sandcastle. Then we took small ladles of water and mindfully poured them over the shoulders of the Buddha statues. It was a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the themes of cleansing, renewal and new beginnings that the day is meant to represent. After a hellish past year, this meditation felt ever so poignant to me. I sighed a deep exhale and felt all my stress melt away.
We completed our respects at the temple and I still felt like I was walking on air as we started our journey back to the bookshop. Well…until a party truck rattled by drenching my all-white outfit with watergun crossfire.