Hanoi – Calling of the Grand Dragon

Arriving in Hanoi felt like a crash landing on an alien planet. If the journey up to this

point had softened something within us, Hanoi immediately disrupted it. Nothing

flowed in a straight line. The bus from Thanh Hóa dropped us on the outskirts, and

from there everything fragmented—taxi, bus station, conversation—each moment

disconnected from the next. We asked for Yên Bái, but our words seemed to

dissolve before they reached anyone. Faces looked back at us without hostility, but

without recognition either, as though we were speaking through a veil. The more we

tried to orient ourselves, the more the city seemed to rearrange around us.

It became clear that we were not navigating Hanoi in any ordinary sense. We were

inside something else entirely, a field that would not hold still, where perception itself

was shifting. Eventually, exhausted, we gave up trying to move forward and allowed

the next step to reveal itself. That was how we found the Grand Dragon Hotel, or

perhaps more truthfully, how it found us.

Even there, the movement continued. Our booking was wrong, and we were left

waiting as everything seemed to slip just out of alignment again. And then Rose

appeared. Her presence changed the field immediately. Where everything had been

fragmented, she brought a quiet coherence, guiding us through what needed to happen with an ease that felt almost effortless. Through her, the path reassembled

just enough for us to rest.

The following morning, we went to the lake. At first glance, it was beautiful, but the

surface concealed something else entirely. The water was thick with algae, clouded

and heavy, and fish rose to the surface to gasp for air. Rubbish gathered at the

edges, and although the city moved around it as if nothing were wrong, the

dissonance was impossible to ignore. Standing there, I could feel the presence of

something beneath the surface—dormant, burdened, unable to breathe. The lake felt

like a body that had forgotten how to circulate its own life.

We stood quietly at the edge and began to speak, not loudly, not ceremonially, but

with a steady intention. We called to the dragon beneath the water and reminded it of

the path it belonged to—the current we had been following from Java through

Angkor and into this northern point. We reminded it that it was time to rise, to clear

itself, to breathe again, and to reconnect with the deeper waters moving beneath the

land and the wider field that held it all.

At first nothing changed, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, something stirred. It wasn’t

visible in the water, but it was unmistakable in the field, like a deep movement

returning after a long stillness. We stayed with it, holding that connection, until the

sense of it grew stronger and more coherent. What we felt was not a gradual return,

as though something ancient was remembering itself and beginning to move again.

When it felt complete, I took a token I had carried for this moment – a replica of the

one we had left at Angkor Watt of the galactic star map geometries and dropped it

into the lake. It disappeared instantly, received as though it had always belonged

there. We stood in silence afterward, allowing the moment to settle, aware that

something subtle but significant had shifted.

It was not something we could prove or explain.

But something had been reconnected.