Subnostr

Dear Nostr,

Words cannot describe the feeling of seeing the 6 pieces that I submitted to the Sats and Facts Conference being printed, framed and hung up on a wall in Chaing Mai, Thailand where the Sats and Facts Bitcoin Technical Conference will be held this weekend!

Having studied Mediation with a highly respected Thai Buddhist Monk for 6 months in Toronto, Canada and on, completion, traveling with a group of fellow students to Thailand to do a walking mediation in mountains of Thailand just a few months after 9/11 in 2001, so many memories are flooding back and making me feel so deeply this experience.

Allow me to share a few memories:

To start, I was a single mom, living in Toronto and I had to leave my young daughter, who was 12 at the time, with my mother. My mother was totally freaked out, as were many of the students by the 9/11 event. All were imagining that our plane would be shot of the sky by some terrorists and my mother begged me not to go. When questioned about safety, the monk Laung Pau, who taught the King of Thailand to meditate, no less had this to say: "Have no fear for we will fly under a full moon and in that light, we will be protected. No harm will come to us."

Another memory was of going out to dinner at the most wonderful restaurants where the Monk, myself and my fellow students ate for FREE as this monk was so highly revered by all, that this was a way to show him respect. Since I am a vegan / vegetarian, as is 70% of the world, btw, there was a table dedicated for a small group of us vegetarians at each restaurant. One evening, when our food was placed in the middle of the table we all looked at it in dismay and called for the waiter saying, "sorry a mistake has been made, this is a Chicken dish and we are Vegetarians" The waiter took the dish away and returned shortly saying, "Actually, this is a vegetarian chicken dish" Could have fooled me we all said as the dish looked like chicken and tasted like Chicken, right down to plump thigh meat wrapped around a thigh bone. Turns out that it was the mastery of the chef who wrapped tofu around a bamboo shoot with the perfect texture, color, and taste to make some of us refuse the dish or eat it and still feel that we had been fooled into eating meat. It was Absolutely Brilliant, and to this day I never seen that level of mastery in making plant-based fake meat...

The third memory is of an Eagle Feather. One of my fellow students from Canada was an Indigenous woman. At the close of the trip, she presented the monk and all of his students with Eagle Feathers. It turns out that she was from the Cree Nation of Alberta, close to where I was born, in Treaty Six Territory, northern Alberta. To think that she brought those feathers all the way to Thailand and that I returned safe and sound with one in my suitcase remains to this day very auspicious on so many levels...

My love of the entire experience of Thailand, of travelling under the protection of revered Monk, of being treated like royalty - receiving such gifts of food and ceremony, made me want to return one day or at the very least be able to give back to the people of Thailand.

Now, thanks to Bitcoin, I am able to do so, to show, for the first time in my life, my work as a bitcoin artist, at an art show, on a wall in Thailand! WOW. All this has been orchestrated, from a distance by @bitpopart and @satsandfacts and I give thanks to them for this opportunity to share my work on the international stage. It's about TIME.

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