Thac Ba Lake – Entering the Eye of the Prism

Leaving Hanoi felt as disorienting as entering it. We had been told to wait on one

side of the road, and so when the bus came, it passed straight by us on the other

side without even seeing us. It was only through Rose’s quiet clarity that we realised

what had happened and moved to the correct side, where we waited in a small café

for another two hours before finally flowing out of the city. Once we crossed that

threshold, the density loosened almost immediately, and the land began to open

again in a way that allowed the body to settle.

By the time we reached Yên Bái and made our way to a small village on the edge of

Thác Bà Lake, it felt as though we had stepped into something entirely different. We

had arrived in a field already in motion. An initiation ceremony was underway, and

from the moment we entered the village, the rhythm of the shaman's drum was

present, steady and continuous, holding the space in a way that was both grounding

and expansive. It began on the night we arrived and continued for three days, only

falling silent on the final morning, and it was difficult not to feel that we had been

placed there for the exact span of time that the field was being held open.

At the centre of the ceremony was a young boy crossing into manhood, yet what was

unfolding around him extended far beyond a single life. At the same time, an

ancestor was being called back into presence as something immediate and alive

within the field. It became clear that this was not about a single returning spirit, but

about the opening of a much larger continuum in which the human, the land, and

something far older were all present together.

It was out on the lake, on the second day, that this deepened. What was returning

through the ancestor was not only the life that had been lived, but the full resonance

of the being itself—land, memory, myth, and something that reached beyond the

limits of the human story. Within that, I felt the dragon again as a current moving

through the same field. The movement we had encountered in Hanoi, where the

dragon beneath the lake had begun to stir and clear itself, and was not left behind there.

Here, it felt as though that current was being received and stabilised within the

ancestral field.

This was where the prism revealed itself more clearly. In Hanoi, the lens had

fractured, and nothing would hold. Every attempt to orient dissolved into another

angle, another version of reality. But here, within the steady rhythm of the drum and

the continuity of the lineage, those fragments are no longer scattered. They began to

align, forming a coherence that could hold multiple layers at once. The eye was not

returning to how it had seen before; it was learning to see through the prism anew,

allowing the human, the ancestral, the earthly, and the cosmic to exist together

without contradiction.

At the edges of this experience, another layer became visible through the people we

met. A young German couple spoke openly about the medical system they were part

of, recognising that it no longer served them or their patients, yet feeling unable to

step outside of it after so many years of investment. The following evening, an Israeli

couple shared a similar tension, caught within a story of land and conflict that they

questioned, yet still felt bound to continue. In both cases, there was a clear

awareness of the structure that held them, and yet a difficulty in stepping beyond it.

Sitting within the village, with the drum continuing its steady rhythm, the contrast was

unmistakable. Here was a way of life still in continuity with the land, the ancestors,

and the rhythms that sustain it, not preserved as something of the past, but lived in

the present. Alongside it were systems that shape and organise human life in ways

that often disconnect it from that continuity, even when those within them can see it

clearly.

It was not a question of choosing one over the other, but of seeing both at once and

in that seeing, something shifted. The prism did not resolve the tension but allowed it

to be held within a larger coherence, where different realities could be recognised as

part of the same field.

We left Thác Bà with the sense that something within the eye of the dragon had

adjusted with a quiet precision. The lens had shifted its kaleidoscopic frequency and

whatever is emerging from that shift is still in the process of revealing itself. Whether

this marks the ending of old stories or the beginning of something new is not yet

certain, but the question remains present.

Can we release the stories that bind us, even when they feel immovable, and begin

to see ourselves differently?

Time will tell.