Its a puzzle how the future becomes the past, or more appropriately, doesn't. I sit here writing this, conjuring up how I felt sitting in my friend Joe's apartment in Osaka looking over maps of the Middle Kingdom before I took the slow boat to China; the mind was so tied up in a future that never came to pass. I'm laughing. I see it as extra potent in this very moment because here I am again, tying and untying the future with my mind, in a similar fashion as I have done so many times just substitute the name of the country.
Its nothing like I thought it would be
and it never is - that's the mystery
one step at a time
I get ahead, or stuck behind
like a candle unto my two feet
I see what you want me to see
the future
remains open to me
the mystery
it sets me free
To know it and to live it; it is a slow development I've witnessed throughout the course of my journey. I can only hope one day to truly have no worries (mate).
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After all, everything worked out in China...
More or less.
Speaking of which,
Less is more,
especially when dealing with the barrage of noise, pollution, and violent foreignness of China. It is, for any accurate measures to be taken in relaying the feeling and the observation and analysis, a different planet.
But I won't be able to describe it. Who could really describe the subconscious impact that the Great Civilization of the East would have on such an isolated, unawares and sheltered Midwestern boy?
I don't understand what happened or how what I saw and felt will change me as it gestates in my deep subcortum. I know many times I wanted to get out, to fly away, but that I took China like medicine. It was too much for me, and I sought shelter often. At the end of two months, I still didn't feel like I had a handle on it, even in a slight regard. China is another life.
And Tibet is another China.
Wild, massive and dangerously hungry dogs make there presence known around every (wrong) turn. Big skies you can touch with your gritty fingers. Dark flocks of vultures ripping human flesh from a corpse on the frozen tundra, 4000 meters above the world. Salt and fat boiled in a tea, mud houses, yak, bus rides through eternal fields of low, hard ochre and mossy green plains. In the barely breathable air, pink yellow sunrises hang on loosely to the rarefied mists. Time begins in the morning and ends at in the twirling indigo galaxy of your spacious mind. Tushi dey leh.Tibet made me realize, just now in my recollection on its wonder, that I cannot realize how magic life is while im in it; it still requires me to reflect to see just how unbelievable and fleeting the magic of the world is.
It is so hard to be where we are, to live right above our shoes every day, especially when discomfort, fear, malnutrition and fatigue cloud my eyes, but these demons that haunt the road less traveled are no more ferocious than routine and boredom. I must uncloud my eyes. The world is so real, sparkling, even in the evil mud of Sumatra. My insignificance and smallness is so apparent when I get out of the way and the universe cuts through the clouds on strange lucid days.
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