I woke up early. I was lying on my back, with my eyes open, before the talking would begin. My gaze traced the curtain and the light. I faced the ceiling, the matte, white, level screen floating above me, and watched what was there to be watched.

The light certainly has its ways, this I was sure. It slips through a tight opening, spreads out wide, and lights the room. It doesn’t seem to take effort in it. Neither does it look brutal, nor selfish. Yet here it comes, spreads, lights. This is the light. This is one of the crucial components for life. This is the thing that created eyes. Certainly it wasn’t the other way round.

I got up, ignored the bathroom scales, wiped the floor, took a shower, shaved, put on a fresh face mask, a baseball cap from a small company in Portland Maine, The Black Dog, and went downstairs, outside.

I switched on the Vitamin D management DMinder app, pressed »Start Sun Exposure« and hesitated. The strip of sunlight on the floor looked vigorous. The fiery version of strong rain. The light hit down hard onto the ground. The Vietnamese avoid being touched by it. Some even wear socks with their flip flops and dress in long trousers and long sleeved shirts with tall collars and have big hats on top. Only us foreigners run around in short trousers and short sleeved shirts.

I checked the DMinder app: it read an UVI of 8 for Ho Chi Minh City, which would be 14 a few hours later. I set the timer to 15 minutes. It felt good for the moment.

Side-note: UVI, an Ultra Violet radiation Index of 0-2 is considered save even for light skinned people, 8-10 is considered Very High and should be avoided. The public scale ends at 11 (Extreme).

Back in my apartment I felt like I had been sunbathing for a full hour. My skin didn’t tan much, but it was hot and dry. I felt some regret and put on aloe vera gel.

Then I opened one of the densely written medical books about the Pelvic Floor I’ve been meaning to read. I thought of a short imaginary exploration: imagine a flash light, one of those modern, small, strong flash lights, with bright LED lights… imagine holding it inside of yourself. Come from your heart and chest, point and shine downwards, towards your pelvic floor. Identify the different parts of your pelvic floor: the muscles in front around your urethra, and the ones in the middle, and the ones in the back around your anus.

But then, considering how I came back to my apartment, running from the light, I was thinking: the light needn’t go everywhere. We also need cool, secluded areas, serene shades, places of shelter, of safety, of retreat, places that are protected from the light.

Therefore, imagine to switch that flash light off again. In fact, forget about that flash light altogether. I’ll find something better. I closed the medical book and opened a page from „Nature as Teacher” by Victor Schauberger (1933):

„These very dark places and glistening water streams out of the Earth’s surface are the spawning-grounds of fish for good reason. If we examine such water at the very limit of light penetration, at the place where it first encounters light, a noticeable change can be detected: the first beginnings of life. The closer we approach the zone shielded from light, the more highly evolved the good bacterial life in the water becomes. Conversely bacteria are increasingly less complex the longer water flows in the light. For the fish, the closer the fish are to the spring, the tastier they are. Every fisherman knows that the powerful, stationary trout which live close to the spring, spurn every type of lure.”

Natural spring water from deep within the mountains, mountains that are covered by healthy old forests. The origins of life. The original microbiome. Nature, balance, health. Does this analogy compare to the healthy microbiome of the intestines, and the healthy microbiome of the bladder? To the balance and relations between the pelvic floor—that’s deep down in the pelvis—and all the other things, all the way out, including the surface?

I poured some stale oat flakes and chia seeds and bottled water into a bowl and called it breakfast.