Those looking for what they love without understanding will find it in this video.
You may enjoy or choose to skip the introductory first five minutes, which will bring you slowly down from a new-age normalcy to where you need to be for the rest of the program, which is a berserk wilderness of an elderly man's hypnotic mannerisms.
We cannot stop watching.
If this was all there was, the world would be as mysterious as could be.
One of the first cautions we received in Thailand was not to stop and ask for directions, because the people are so polite they will pretend they know where you're headed, even if they have no idea. Do not ask directions from strangers. A simple rule. 
Except that the cities are developing so fast that roads are magically created and walled off all the time, as you can see at GoogleMaps. The structure of the system changes so often that you must regularly stop and ask for directions.
You get used to perfection in design when you live in Chicago. Clean lines, alleys behind every street, and a grid system that tells you where you are if you have an address. The Mysteriam body of work is generated with the assistance of rules and guidelines which make creativity thrive (we may think firm rules are necessary, but it turns out there are wildly different ways to utilize them.)
Cultures and languages here morph from mountain to mountain. There is no standardization as an American would know it. There is, of course, a tradition of alienness and unbalance in art, as a stay in HOTEL will demonstrate perfectly.
Chiang Mai and the outlying mountain villages have become the fuel and backdrop for the stories we've been told; it makes a person realize that although there are universal truths, there are ways to experience them that we would never have imagined. These people's lives are not anything like ours. Thank you, thank you to our hosts and interpreters, the Sanborns, who have allowed us to hear the fringest of foreign thoughts and histories, and realize how completely our American worldview is imperfect.
On the shuttle bus, there was a man from Cambodia who became a commercial pilot, a proud father of 2, happily married and very giggly when asked about his wife, though when he was 10, of course, his parents and 4 brothers and sisters were all executed by the Khmer Rouge. In the tiny mountain village of Musikee, the chief authority is a soldier named Haan, married seven times, no children, once severed his own finger to accompany a family-less fallen friend into the afterlife, and is now considering becoming a monk. You, too, can interact with your body parts and see what we can live without!
Every house has a spirit house beside it, a dollhouse they make very cozy and fill with food to keep the evil spirits from living in their house with them. There are spiky ornaments along the rooftops, as well, to keep them away.
You take your shoes off. You bow and smile. You do not ask for chop sticks- if you need them, you will be given them. You don't touch another person's head, laugh hysterically, get upset, or cry, in public. How many people have seen mysterious and otherworldly things in their lives? (a majority raise their hands) We are interacting, sharing, watching, and listening, and collecting a mountain of material that will assemble itself when the time comes.
We are flying to Thailand tomorrow. In the mountains around Chiang Mai, the DV camera and sound recorder will collect two and a half week's worth of material to be assimilated into the Mysteriam body of work. There is no clear indication of what will happen, although we will be relatively safe, guided by family of ours that have been Christian missionaries there for thirty years.
The goal is to interact with orphans and educators in remote villages. We're taking singing, clapping, theatre games, and recording devices with us to facilitate the moments of uncomprehending fascination (of which I hope they will experience as many as I expect we will), and there will be artwork generated from the results this spring.
To learn more about how far we can go in engaging such a foreign community, we visit the Interactive Institute.
To prepare for the unpredictability of our own reactions in an exotic culture, we take the Invisible Bias Tests, and you should too.
To practice the acceptance of absurdity, we use the Translator from English to another language, then back again, and what we have is perverse, just like we will be. Good to be prepared to look ridiculous for awhile.
