Many  years ago I was on my way to Vietnam after working in Thailand, but it was TET, the lunar new year holiday that brings everything in countries like Vietnam to a screeching halt. I decided to stop first in Cambodia, a country still reeling from the genocide of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and a place I was told would be less influenced by the major holiday.

Through serendipity, on my second day in the country, with little effort on my part, I was offered a job teaching journalism as part of an NGO program out of New York.  The students would primarily be professional journalists from Burma, India, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, all gathering in Phnom Penh to study the fundamentals of journalism, Western style.  The Laotian and Vietnamese reporters were shocked to learn we in the West don’t editorialize in page one news stories! 

My stay in very dangerous Cambodia seemed charmed.  I made connections easily, doors opened, opportunities presented themselves.  I say Cambodia was dangerous, because Phnom Penh was at that time a place where you could buy a hand grenade at the Central Market for forty-five dollars.  Some places, like the floating casino on the Tonle Sap River, had signs out front with a picture of a hand grenade with a circle around it and a line through it (the same image for an AK-47, a .45, and a bayonet).  I knew a teacher who was robbed at gunpoint while walking to his apartment one evening around 10PM.  The thieves wanted his shoes. They took his money, too, but he bargained with them to leave him several hundred riel so he could catch a cyclo home and save his now bare feet.  The papers were full of stories of locals being randomly shot for their motor scooters.

 But for me Cambodia was Shamballa.  When I visited Angkor Wat, the massive ancient temple complex that is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, I had a semi-mystical experience.  This was at the main temple complex — Angkor Wat actually being a grouping of many temple ruins spread out over many square miles.  I was on the top level — at least the top level as far as the public is concerned — when a rainstorm blew in from nowhere (this was the dry season, mind you).  The cool rain on the typical hot, muggy day was an absolution. 

 In under the eaves some kind of Buddhist ceremony was taking place lead by a monk in white robes.  Thirty or forty locals sat chanting cross-legged on the stone floor and I joined them in the very back.  The head monk spied me, and as he gave anointments with holy water he purposefully made his way to the back row to give me a blessing.  It was a delightful experience and the prevalent feeling was quite joyous.

 That night, in Siam Reap, the bucolic town a few miles from the ruins where all the tourists stay, when I mentioned the rainstorm, people looked at me like I was nuts.  What rainstorm?  Nary a drop had touched Siam Reap, only a couple of miles away, and it was the DRY season, after all.  ‘What had I been I drinking?’ seemed to be the general consensus when I spoke of the rain.  So I felt my water baptism to be special indeed.

 At one of the ruins the next day, I came across a piece of a stone column about the size of a small loaf of bread.  It was just sitting out on the dirt in a room as if someone had meant to steal it, but left it behind.  I surmised it would easily fit in my backpack. Security was nonexistent; looting had been going on unabated for centuries, and I was sorely tempted to take the stone, wanting a souvenir, no a sacred object, connected to my experience the day before.  No one would know but me–and the spirits.

Hmmm.  I certainly didn’t want to anger the spirits by stealing something that wasn’t mine.  It was easy enough to buy looted artifacts in Siem Reap; the place is crawling with genuine (and fake) antiquities.  That would shift my moral dilemma from ‘stealing’ to ‘receiving stolen property.”  I ended up choosing a third option by gathering a few small rocks as my Angkor Wat talismans, leaving the stone column piece to another fate.

 (I was in the habit of collecting rocks during my travels and sending them to St. Louis psychic Bevy Jaegers, at her request. She used the rocks as training tools for her students, who psychically attempted to determine the rocks’ origins. I kept that information blind, in a separate sealed envelope that Bevy would later open to check results.  Bevy had located more than a few dead bodies for stumped police agencies, and had helped a gentlemen become wealthy by predicting for him the movement of coffee futures) 

The stone that went begging at Angkor Wat reminded me of being at an archeological site in Belize where the caretaker, the man hired by the head archeologist to protect the site, explained to me that he could provide looted artifacts to me “If I really had to have them.”  The philosophy of the locals being that it was their blood ancestors who made the antiquities, built the great cities that now lay in ruins, and so in a sense bequeathed these items to those (in his case, Maya) who came later. 

I couldn’t fault the man, he was clearly poor.  His home had a dirt floor and pages of old magazines had been glued to the walls to provide a sort of insulation from the elements. He had a wife and kids who wore clean but shabby clothing.  Who was I to say he was wrong?  Still, I didn’t buy any artifacts from him, though I did buy him a pair of badly needed shoes in exchange for help he rendered for my research of local shamans.

Sacred objects that I choose to take into my possession must come to me in a certain way.  I can’t really explain what that means other than to say, it has to ‘feel right.’ 

As I think back on it, my luck was so good in Cambodia, I now wonder if that stone was there for me to take as a gift.  And perhaps my own paranoia or analytical judgments prevented me from recognizing that.  Many would of course scream at this notion, but those who work with energy understand what I am saying.

Regardless, I find it interesting how some places on the planet seem to be “luckier” for a person that other places.  It’s certainly true that we can’t run away from our problems, because guess what is in our luggage — us.  Still, astro-cartographers make their living by telling people where on the earth is a good place for a client to live, and where is a not so good place, our so-called Jupiter and Saturn lines, respectively.

The lines used in astro-cartography are the earth meridians — latitude and longitude lines.  In my case, Los Angeles, my home for many years, is directly on my Saturn line. the worst place to be, supposedly, unless one wants to burn karma through the overcoming of difficult challenges.  My Jupiter line, theoretically the best place for me to reside, bisects the Denver, Colorado area, south through Santa Fe and down into Mexico.

I’m not endorsing astro-cartography as being bona fide in any way; however, there is no denying that Cambodia was extremely lucky for me, while other geographic areas have presented myriad hardships to say the least.  Why?  Can one really change their luck by simply relocating? Do they become more fortunate because of a belief it will happen, because someone predicted it would and thus became a self-fulfilling prophesy?  Can we really succeed as part of a self-fulfilling prophesy? (There’s an avenue worth exploring!)  Is a lucky relocation all just timing?  Or destiny?

My old friend Lou was just another car salesman in LA until he moved to Fort Meyers, Florida where fortune smiled and he ended up owning a chain of used car lots that made him into a millionaire. He was the same Lou, but in Florida, the opportunities flowed.

Resonance is a scientific principle that most of us can relate to.  Have you ever visited some locale that you simply resonated with, a place where you wanted to spend more time?  There are several places like this in the world for me.  Being more in touch with our intuition helps us identify such notions. As for me, I can’t wait to get back to S. E. Asia, regardless of where my Jupiter line lies.