Midsummer Dinner fun at Barefeet Bangkok

The guests were supposed to bring their own food but in reality only couple one had done so – but they had brought so much, that all could be full!

During the dinner, the lucky draw was held to determine which resort should host AsiaNAT in October this year – winner was Barefeet Heaven Hill in Trang. See separate article.

A Pub Quiz with 25 fast questions was held and Gregers Moller held a camp fire speech when the fire was burning brightly.

In the Nordic countries we light fires on this day because tonight it is the shortest night of the year – and today has been the longest day.

From tomorrow, the days will be shorter and the nights longer until we get to Christmas and it turns around again.

Do you know how important fire is?

Fire is the fourth element. The four elements are earth, water, air and fire defined by a Greek philosopher Empedocles who lived around the same time as Lord Buddha.

But a thousand years before him, in the Veda scripts of Hinduism in India, fire was not just an element – it was a God with the name Agni.

Agni has this unique ability that he can consume an offering or a sacrifice and transport it via smoke and gasses up or over to the world of the gods.

By the end of life, we also use fire when we burn our dead – we use fire for the transportation of our deceased from this world.

In Thailand, we meet the fire god in the old Ramayana as Phra Ploeng.

But fire is more than this physical fire – in hinduism, fire is also inside every human being. The three kinds of fire are the krodha-agni or “fire of anger”, the kama-agni or “fire of passion and desire”, and the udara-agni or “fire of digestion”.

If we go back further, our relationship with fire is much older than hinduism.

Deep in our genetic material, we know fire. We have lived with fire long before we became primates and eventually humans. We are fascinated by fire, we fear fire, we worship fire.

So tonight, I would like to make an offering to the God of Fire.

I thought about it for many days. In the Nordic countries, we often burn a puppet that we pretend is a which. It used to be a live one, actually! Something bad, we want to clean out of our lives.

And then I thought, what bad is there in our naturist lives, that we would like to get rid of? The belief that nudity is a sin – how can we burn that? That nudity is obscene and must be covered – how can we burn that?

Well, if we cannot burn beliefs or perceptions, maybe we can burn the symbol of this? Right? So here you go, I am going to burn my underwear! And to prove my point, I have also taken one of Dao’s bras and will burn that too!

Go to hell!

Cheers!