D.H. Lawrence wrote: when we travel, cool, unlying life will rush in. Travel forces you to leave all your possessions behind, keeps you struggling for balance, forces you to trust strangers again, confront other ways of life and religious beliefs, as well as food, customs, toilets, exchange rates, and the only thing you recognize are the eternal things—the moon, the sky, the sea, breath, the flow of life, but if you roll with it, you may feel what Anatole France called “the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.” Traveling is in our blood. The earth was never flat and travelers always knew it. They also knew that to be lost is to be on the road to being found. We never remember the malls and the movies and the comforts we’ve had, we remember the lost and lonely and crowded places that called to us, called to us by name, like when we stand at the edge of the ocean, all that roaring water summoning us, speaking a language we once knew, beckoning us back into who we always were but don’t remember. Traveling reminds us. Traveling plugs us back in. Traveling reinforces connection. Traveling brings us back home.
It’s occurred to me that wandering is what I do best.
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Whenever I see the winter crescent moon appear horizontally in the west shortly after sunset, looking like a Cheshire cat smile, I always take heart because spring cannot be far off. It’s not as if winter here was cruel, in fact it was nice getting reacquainted with it. It was Gobi Desert dry with frequent urgent dispatches from the Himalayan Mountains. The only snow so far amounted to whimsical flurries creating brief Rorschach inkblots open to interpretation. The Yellow River is unfrozen and sweeping ever downward. The willow trees have not cast off all their leaves and from the limbs droop brown, withered notes of submission. Decorative shrubbery, once free to feel the wind, has been enclosed in manmade cocoons of plastic, dreaming secret dreams and biding their time. Right now, the sun rises around 8 am and sets around 6:30. This creates long winter shadows in the afternoon, unexpected crisscrossing giraffe necks, abstract arteries, veins, dark pools of seasonal longing and surrender, spiders of worry, zones of regret. Winter is the time for brooding, a time for planning, and closing one’s self off for introspection and repair. Yet the parks are never empty and the streets are never still. China does not retreat indoors during winter. People laugh, people move, people take care of business. There’s always something to sell, money to be made, friends to greet, gossip to be shared. In the afternoons in my neighborhood, people gather on the wide steps of the bank on the corner and sit and soak up the sun, smiling, talking for hours, and I always stop and enjoy the sight of it because I couldn’t imagine this ever happening in the States; I’m sure there’s a law that prohibits it. Today it was 32 degrees Fahrenheit, so I sat down with them, turned my face to the sun and just suspended myself in time, like a bee drunk on pollen, like a lit up brick alley wall, like a Chinese sun poem, a hat in the Easter parade, a seed awakening in the rich dark earth, a pink flamingo doing a mating dance. Participation makes all the difference. "I have become too much a friend to rules . . . " — James Somers "Respect involves accepting people for what they are without revising or marginalizing or objectifying them — or even elevating them." – James Lee Burke “Crede quod habes, et habes.” (Believe that you have it, and you do.) Below the stars, the city lay frozen. People moved about briskly, cars waiting at traffic lights emitted a breathy exhaust like winter farm cows; ice scabs crusted the sidewalk in unexpected places. The domed sky absorbed all human wishes while threatening snow. It was a city suspended, stretching outward into nothing and everything, as if waiting for something to claim it. Ties to harmony unraveled, reformed. Secret music rose, carried by the wind across the river, to fall like invisible snowflakes or maybe prayer. It was a night you could hear people dreaming. People casting off chains, submitting resumes to the universe, awakening the next morning remembering nothing. Blue steel midnight. Ancient Chinese clocks ticking across forever. Zodiacal societies casting predictions no one ever checks a year later to see if they were right, the spiral path of the cosmos sweeping everything along, the knowledge of the entire forest in a single pine cone. More wishes, flung out like seeds, stardust, the ear, resembling an upside down, tucked in human embryo, listens to acupuncture needles play old stereo records, backwards. Twelve drunken tourists pass by in a slur. Aristotle said beauty is order, symmetry, and precision. Confucius said everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it. This night has a beauty that hardly anyone will see as well as order, symmetry, precision. The frigid air is as threatening and precise as a cold steel bullet. As if it were a pistol wanting to say, “Give me your wallet, chump.” Everything surrenders to it. Everyone measures it. Everyone is left wanting. Cold blue angels hover protectively over trashcans and alleys. Stutterers speak freely, in labyrinths of riddles. Order is on holiday in Goa, India, and for the moment, anything goes. Everyone wants understanding. Everyone wants time and a half. Everyone wants to blame it on someone else. Everyone wants to know what happens next. Everyone would like you to believe they’ve read War and Peace. Everyone surrenders to something. Not everyone admits to it. The wind blows down the cold pavement streets in a foreign language. Mount Everest lecturing. Gobi desert dry—heaves. When was the last time you thought you knew where you were going? When was the last time you felt truly relaxed? When was the last time you had faith in something? The old woman sells baked sweet potatoes on the corner. She overcharges. Nobody minds. She is still there at midnight. She doesn’t appear to question. Is that wisdom or stoicism? The country rises up westward from the ocean to the Tibetan Plateau. No one seems mindful of the terrible and wonderful geography. The pattern of the winds is perfect. The drainage of the rivers carries you along in some crazy booguloo of transcontinental sea yearning. The worn hills are ancient. The coal-heated cities are Dickensian. Everything is old and new at the same time. The new year beckons. The new year pleads. The new year wants recognition. And in the cold starlight, the new year doesn’t seem to care. Or does it? You will decide. Create the best year ever. “Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.” – Leonardo da Vinci |
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