Kyle Cornforth recently moved to Thailand with her family to take a job as Director of the Prem Cooking and Farm Academy. She’s writing a charming personal blog of her experiences in this very foreign country, her “musings on living, working and eating abroad”. This breathtaking video is from her post about the Yi Peng festival, in celebration of the full moon of the twelth lunar month in the Buddhist calendar. Writes Kyle:

“It starts with a procession of monks, followed by group prayer and meditation for 30 minutes, and concludes with thousands of people lighting paper lanterns and releasing them into the air… As you release it, you make a wish, or let all of your troubles be taken away with it. It is like being in a dream.”

They’re really little make-shift hot-air balloons to carry your dreams.

With big thanks to Andrea Raisfeld.

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2 replies on “dream balloons

  1. This is very reminiscent of New Year’s Eve on the beach in Brazil. First, there’s a “candomble” ceremony which ends at midnight, when the leader of the “bruxas,” the wise women, wades into the ocean to listen to the voice of Iemanja, goddess of the sea. The goddess whispers her New Year message on the third ocean wave. The bruxa comes back ashore and announces the New Year prophecy. Then, thousands of home-made hot-air balloons are released into the night sky. They rise and rise until they catch fire themselves, then fall, flaming, slowly into the sea, a cascade of fireballs filled with hopes for the future.

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