That Sound

A man and his wife had just crossed the railroad tracks.

The snow made a temporary journal of their travels.

It had just turned to dusk as they walked to their car.

They were talking about a movie they had just seen.

At first he heard a sound; but could not connect it to anything.

Then he felt something smack him in the side, just above his right hip.

If this was an scene from a comic book, the sound would be graphically registered as a "splattt-tt" or a "tha-wock".

The man looked up and saw a SUV with the passenger side window rolled down.  It was too dark and the windows were too tinted to see anyone. Darkness surrounded the vehicle, as it slowly drove away.

The man was dumbfounded.
He looked down at his side and saw a dark stain growing on his jacket.

The only thing he could say to his wife was, "Why ? "She answered his question with a question,

"Would an explanation even help ?"

They went back to talking about the movie.

Seeing is deceiving, hearing is believing.

Before

The night before she had gone to a seafood restaurant. She was seated directly on a floor of clear, glass tiles. The tiles were about 18” square and 1" thick cast glass. It reminded her of the "rustic" glasses with tiny air bubbles frozen in a bluish vitrification. She sat atop an architecturally sized aquarium. The entire floor below appeared to be about 15' deep, painted that awful aqua-toothpaste color community pools are sometimes painted. She pointed to a fish and a guy in a hachimaki opened a trap door and used a net on a very long pole to snare her dinner.

She arrived with a small, independent film crew. Not exactly sure what the director's vision was; she thought a little escape was in order. The young filmmaker went for a walk by herself. She knew nothing about Kyoto. Sighting a mountaintop, she headed down the many winding streets and alleys ways. The tiny vans and pick-up trucks sounded like motor scooters as she navigated to the outskirts of the city.

Now the dense urban collage transitioned into a sparsely populated landscape. Suddenly, the many possible options narrowed to a single pathway that snaked into a green bamboo forest. The trail rose gently, but it was easy to follow. She was young, and felt happy to be alone.

There was an open grassy area after the bamboo forest ended. Ahead, she saw something she never even imagined existed. Glowing, unmistakably in front of her, was a forest of pink pine trees. The trail now became a carpet of pink pine needles. Sunlight filtered through the pine needles; making pink light on the pink forest floor. As the wind blew through the trees, the swirling needles, became pink sparks that jumped into the air, from an imaginary camp fire. She thought she might never leave. Maybe she would just live there forever. For the first time in over an hour she stood still, breathing in the pink moment.

The trail got much steeper. She found herself pausing for a second before pushing forward. At this point, she could rest and hold onto the wooden rail. The cedar wood felt clean and perfect to her touch. A carpenter of great skill had constructed this spectacularly humble structure. She continued to pull herself up using the rail. When she reached the end of the rail, there was a rice ball placed on a simple but beautiful ceramic dish. She thought about picking it up, even tasting it; but she thought it might be the wrong thing to do.

The incline became extreme. If she were to stand erectly, she might lose her balance and topple backwards. The trail changed dramatically, it narrowed to a path about 10" wide. Steps were replaced with embedded stones, whose natural surface was sculpted to fit her hand exactly. One crouching step after another got her to a stage where directly above her 7 or 8 nearly vertical hand holds. For the first time she wondered if she should keep going? What could possibly be at the top of this remote place? She thought about the rice ball and something inside her made her reach up to the next stone.

As she pulled herself up from the final step, she wondered if she had enough strength to climb down the mountain. Standing up straight for the first time in 40 minutes, she took a deep breath. In front of her were a "torii" and the mountain's cliff. A torii is a ceremonial gateway, meaning "where birds reside". This torii was different. About seven feet high, this gateway was constructed from cedar. Hanging from the torii's horizontal member were two amber colored ropes. The ropes were attached to a cedar plank that formed a swing. The torii framed a magnificent view of the highest mountaintop in the distance. The sky was a color it had never been before.

She sat down on the swing, looked over the edge and pushed herself off. In that moment she swung out into a space that was no longer mountain, it belonged only to the sky. Her toes stretched out. She leaned back as far as she could stretch and the mountain disappeared. She looked up and saw sky for the first time.

photo credit: Michael Levin "Torii Gate"

Chinatown

It was frightening, to consider of all the things he did not know. The fact was, he never really had a job before. In college, he studied sculpture. His youthfulness did not realize the world was not going to come to him.

A temp agency had sent him to a grand, old department store, across from Union Square,in San Francisco. He had no experience.

Together with seven Chinese kids, they would do inventory in a stockroom on the top floor.

The view was magnificent. They did not have palm trees in the Midwest. The young sculptor noticed, rich people had a particular fondness for things; he knew he would never need.

By noon they had accomplished very little, but had become very hungry. Everyone put down their pencils and clipboards and took the creaky service elevator to the ground floor. They were a group of kids cutting down alleys, and taking shortcuts through stores.Their happy voices made conversations and they spoke as if they were excited about living.

Not so surprisingly, they arrived at the gates of Chinatown. All the buildings seemed pressed together like the shiny skin of ducks hanging, gleaming and glowing. They entered a building, ran up 4 flights of narrow, twisting stairs, dodging annoyed waiters and cooks gesturing angrily. Reaching the top floor, they walked across rooftops, under lines of laundry and entered another building. Through the noisy chaos, smells of fish and garbage, they descended 3 more flights of stairs, to a table set for eight.

There were no menus and no one spoke English. He only really knew one Chinese dish to order.

Noodles.

It was the best bowl of noodles he would ever eat in his life. Actually, he ordered the same thing for the next 4 days.

Sometimes not knowing is the key to learning.

Heaven

He could tell by the woman's deeply creased, too tanned face and froggy voice;
she would lite up as soon as they landed.
Looking down, big things became smaller.
That reminded him of the only time,
he ever saw the shadow of his plane passing over a vast nubby carpet of clouds.
It was like the first time he peed in the woods.
Something more magnificent and powerful was occurring; he just wasn't sure what it was ?

Now that he was airborne, he looked for markers that would be an absolute indication where he was.
He looked for roads, highways, rivers and lakes.
Bodies of water were particularly fascinating.
From above, the blues, greens and purples seemed to paint an abstract of the water's depths.
Another palette called out to the sandbars that ribbed the coast.
Below him stretched out farmland, cities, baseball diamonds and gravel pits.
The predictability of the suburbs displayed patterns of small geometric dots.
People lived in those dots.
At night, the greenish street lights lit the roadways, and the whiter beams of cars made a slow procession of flickering lights.

In remote regions, he liked to follow trails that might wind around mountain terrains.
It was like tracing spirals in the sand.
Sometimes they might lead to a fabulous resort or a stunning lodge or just an old abandoned cabin.
The pathways he liked the best, were the ones that led nowhere.
They were like a pointless conversation, that just trailed off.

He was particularly interested in seeing golf courses, sports stadiums and nude sunbathing.
Fortunately, there were a lot of golf courses.
The fluffy white clouds could be conjured into an elephants, squirrels or manatees.
Once they were at cloud level he wondered if he actually believed in heaven ?
Making up animals or believing in the afterlife were really very different measurements of certainty.
Something he did learn; was water vapor forms tiny droplets or ice crystals, about 0.01 mm in diameter.
Clouds become visible when billions of icy crystals are suspended in the atmosphere above earth.
Every day he looked up into the sky and listened to the clouds.

He wondered what people thought they meant, when they talked about heaven.
Talking and believing are so different.
He wondered if people knew, that heaven was a place for hydrogen molecules.

The Map Maker's Mother

A cartographer’s mother made cards to send her daughter.  The mother saved stamps from different countries.  The daughter knew her mother would steam the stamps, releasing them from the letters.  She would mount the stamps on colorful paper.  The daughter studied maps of places that no longer existed.
As she paused, the cartographer would think about her mother's life.

She hoped her mother was happy with the life she lived.
It made the map maker think about her own life too.

Being there is not a place.

Watson and the Shark

The boy's favorite painting was called "Watson and the Shark".
He would stand for hours and gaze deeply into the painting.
What intrigued the boy so much ?
Maybe it was how menacing the shark looked or the grave peril the boy felt for Watson ?
One day while studying the painting, a group of people crowded around him.
They were listening to a woman in a blue jacket.
She said the man holding the rope and the man in the water were doppelgangers.
The boy wasn't sure what this meant, but he could almost feel the savagery of shark's bite.
Given a choice, he'd rather be the man in the boat.
When he grew up, he would bring his children to see the painting.
They would all stand around the painting and talk about who they would be:
Watson, the Shark or the man with the rope.

Identity is in the eye of the beholder.

"Watson and the Shark" John Singleton Copley 1778

The Avatar and Zebras

When an economic crisis came to the ecosystem,
all the animals of the savanna were affected.
Maybe hardest hit were the zebras.
During tough times, nobody really liked black and white stripes.
Historically, belt tightening was a conservative preoccupation.
As hard as the zebras tried to become either all black or all white;
it never seemed to work.
They asked for assistance from a higher power.
Vishnu summoned Parasurama; Rama-of-the-axe to go the savanna
and quiet the crisis.
Although Parasurama was a warrior god; he was revered for his ability as a strategist.
The problem as Parasurama saw it, was one of perception.
Because everyone was concerned about the economy,
the zebras stood out as petulant and uncommitted.
Parasurama decided to make it rain and turn the arid savanna
into a mud bath.
All the animals became cloaked in a dark, muddy suit.
Everyone looked the same.
Now the animals focused on solving the problems; rather
than only assigning blame.
Eventually, peace and prosperity returned to the savanna.

Parasurama took his axe and ascended to the higher spiritual realm.

Perfection is unattainable, but acceptance is another story.


Photo credit : Peter Bland