Country Roads

To say that things have changed over the past weeks would be a vast understatement. Right now I'm sitting in my parents' home in Knoxville, reflecting on the few short weeks I've been in the US. Tomorrow, I leave for England.

There's a lot to say, but I think I'll leave most of it unsaid. I've enjoyed so many cups of coffee or tea, so many important conversations. I've shared so much life with people, really, since I've been home. I don't think I could have asked for more. Thank you all for your kindnesses. Ultimately, for your love.

For a long time, my heart hadn't been in a very good place. Many were praying for healing. Be glad to know that their prayers, like mine, have not gone unheard.

And being here--something about this place still commands my attention. A country road. Horses standing against a fence. A line of trees on a hill, perfectly straight, across a meadow. Forests that swallow your car whole, sending down only speckled sunlight. A broad lake. The mist that rises from it, the life that moves inside it. And all those same things by the different light and scent of night.

There is something significant about knowing a small, winding road. How your hands move the steering wheel in anticipation of a curve. How your body articulates a reaction before your mind knows to need it. And how it can be this way with not only roads but people, not only routes but communities. And somehow, in a way that's difficult to describe, they become home, and seeing them feels like pulling into your parents' driveway.

I'm ready to see the life of the English countryside. I'll be glad to learn to live within it. And hopefully I'll have time to share here a little about the new roads I'm learning. Far away, yet again, from the ones I know.

The Strange Purposes of Winds

Today I saw an elderly man with a cane, standing among piles of rocks near a construction site. He was looking around in melancholy, almost as if measuring what had been lost. 

As I watched, the wind picked up pure green leaves along with the dust, and they all hung suspended in the air around him. 

It was like a hole had been opened in him, one that the sky swept down to fill. 

Good Morning

"Sometimes I wish that I could sing or dance or paint or compose symphonies or build cathedrals to express somehow what all of this means to me. I wish I were a priest or a robin or a child or a sunset."

-Robert Benson


Yesterday I went home a little bit early. Threw the windows open to a strong wind, in spite of the layer of dust that it would inevitably leave in my house. Laid on the couch, made a cup of coffee. And waited for a storm that ended up passing us by, listening to my doors slam open and shut in turn and the wind howling around corners and through cracks. I watched the Princess Bride, which I hadn't seen in years. I couldn't help giggling throughout the whole movie like a delighted child, just like Justin talked with me recently about doing. I made some chicken noodle soup for dinner. Read late into the night.

This morning I woke up early. Or, earlier than I had to.

I got up, made a cup of coffee. Put lots of cream and sugar in, which is a little unusual for me. And I had some local snacks like graham crackers to accompany it--half covered with roasted sesame seeds, the other half with pieces of peanuts. I sat looking out my window at the still-white sky, before the afternoon's blue. Just quiet, still, but feeling something leaping inside me that just might be life. I prayed off and on. Drank slowly. Ate slowly. Just slowly enough to be late for work.

The waitress was sitting on her bike waiting for me when I got here, wearing a yellow jacket and the perpetual black head covering. When she saw me I made a face, and she laughed. I threw open the sliding metal door over our glass entrance, and walked in. The shop always has a sour smell when I first get in, so I turned on one of the fans upstairs to help it air out.

I swept the coffee shop barefoot this morning. Danced around to old 90s songs while I worked in the upstairs, while the waitress scrubbed dishes in the kitchen. Sang along to the best parts.

When I swept the narrow band of tile outside our storefront, a woman looked at my feet, and looked up at me like I was some sort of savage. Maybe I felt a little savage this morning--I was dreaming of running barefoot through soft grass.

Maybe I was dreaming of childhood. Maybe I was remembering a piece of some sort of home I had once. Or maybe I was looking towards what is ahead, a different kind of existence than this one. It was one of those moments that you snap awake and remember the deeper life whose streams flow generously under the small paths we walk. Their waters run underneath all the cities we've seen, and will see, through the course of our lives and ever after. 

Baby Panda Dive-Bomb

As many of you know, my dear college friends Rob, Michael, and Amy visited me in March.

While they were here, we took a trip to Xian, which ended up being pretty much perfect, from Michael dancing with a noodle which we later ate, to a sing-along of '90s pop songs while riding bikes on top of the city wall. 

Much of it will have to be cherished solely in memory and photograph, but thankfully the following was captured on video for posterity's sake, and for yours.

Wind

All last night the curtains in my bedroom filled and twisted with wind coming through my poorly-sealed windows. It purred as it dove in through the hole in my kitchen window and curled around and under the kitchen door.

Today was the first cold, blustery winter day. The first one like I remember from last year, when I wore the Russian-style fur hat that my parents bought me for Christmas the year previous. I wore it when I first met my current landlord, and the next time I saw him, he didn't recognize me. Remember, I'm not exactly forgettable here. But the first time he saw me in that hat, and it alone had curled up in his memory like the small animal whose fur it bears.

This evening a friend came in wearing the same style of cap. It had been given to him by the Police Department long ago, when he worked for them. Now he's a teacher, sixty-seven years old, having twice come out of retirement, now teaching maybe the last classes of his life. As he's talking about his work, even the difficulties of his work, you can often catch him smile.

And then tonight, trying to fix the blender at the coffee shop, I cut my finger, deep. Only then did I realize how long it had been since I'd last seen my own blood. So red, so alive. I am so alive, really. It made me smile to see it.

Dance

Here, fruit and vegetable carts float through the city like shrimp trawlers. Some always go to the same place. Some are more dynamic, moving all day, loudly yelling the name of their wares.

"Corn! Corn! Corn!" and on, and on, all day.

Today, I passed one full of the tiny winter clementines that we have in our city, that seem to taste sweeter than anything I've had at home. They're not much bigger than a quarter, and for maybe twenty minutes a day I'll carefully make a cut with my pocketknife, peel and eat the tiny wedges one at a time like the sections of a clock. Left will be a pile of orange peels, the fragrance of oranges, a sweet acid taste, and a burning on my tongue like fire.

The man I passed was yelling as usual. "Oranges! Oranges!" And his three-year-old daughter was moving back and forth to the rhythm of it, the familiarity of it, swaying and precisely moving her hands in a dance probably thousands of years older than she is, or will ever be.

Snowfall

I suppose I would say, to start, that one of my passions (and duties) is recording my life here. Trying to really capture it. And I know that lately, I have done a poor job of that.

Part of it may be that it's just been so long. What could help you best to understand? The fragrant pile of orange peels on my desk at work? My breath, quick and white, in the unheated concrete room where, in the mornings, I practice tai chi? The small clinks of forks and plates and cups, the sound of laughter coming from an upstairs room?

Would it be the boisterous conversation over cards, or the hushed tones of lovers in the corner? The crunch of snow, or the flush of a face at sudden warmth?

Holan wrote, "If there were no silence here / the snow would have dreamed it up." Maybe the silence, maybe the sleep, the solitude would speak it all best. I like to think that there was no silence here, and the mantle I bear nightly is a dream of the snow.

Regardless, all of these have been, and for a while yet will be, close companions. From these common seeds, each day blossoms differently.

Signs and Wonders

A few days ago, an old man sitting on the side of the road, smiling out from under his broad-brimmed hat, blew me a kiss. 

Fifteen minutes later, in a restaurant, a two-year-old boy did the exact same thing, exact same gesture. 

I smiled and smiled. 

Yesterday, a stranger stopped me in the grocery store and asked when the coffee shop is going to open, and we chatted for a minute. 

In fact, a lot of people yesterday appeared to know who I am, or at least were much more friendly than normal. I felt very known, and wanted. 

Nostalgia

Tonight, as I did laundry by lamplight, I threw open my windows to a storm. The wind that rushed through carried, unmistakably, the scent of perfume. Even now, later, the house still smells faintly of it. 

The lingering scent reminds me of something Pessoa once considered (or should have), under the moniker Bernardo Soares. He wrote of a kind of nostalgia for a memory that never happened. 

Moments Away

Okay! So! I have figured out a way around this whole thing to where I can post text, but not pictures. Stay tuned.

This week has been busy. I've been tired, and, honestly, in a bad mood or stressed out a good bit. But, in the other moments, I've been striving to keep up a healthy exercise routine and appreciation for the beauty that's around me. For a few days, I would walk down the street listening to music, and whenever a certain song would come on, I would take short notes of the things around me that I enjoyed for the entire length of the song. Here's one example:

trees trimmed, branches the same length, to look like upside-down bowls (quick sketch)

3 generations sitting together - dad child & g-dad

a dog rooting in the grass, looking up at me and smiling

a man, suit jacket off, pants rolled up, sitting on a ledge and watching the sunset

an old man enjoying the cool of evening sitting in front of traditional Chinese gate

under it, a woman and her two sons play badminton in front of a stone carving of the buildings in Red Park

a lit-up sign for the China Construction Bank that's strangely evocative

all the flowers growing on all the ledges of apartments and in yangtais

birds playing in a circle, passing overhead again and again


Do you ever feel as if you wouldn't so much like a picture of what you're looking at, as a picture of you, doing what you're doing, looking at it? I had that feeling last night, brushing my teeth, watching through my window the last few late-night taxis find their ways home in the rain. Maybe it boils down to a desire more to capture a state of mind than anything. Or maybe mark some sort of moment, a turning point that you don't yet know the meaning of, but that maybe later you'll recognize in the changing lines of your face.

Sitting with the Fruit-Seller

I probably spend at least 45 minutes every day walking down the street--I try to walk pretty much everywhere I need to go unless I'm late, especially as the weather's been getting better over the last few weeks. Normally every day I would greet, and maybe sit down with, a man who has a tent where he sells fruit about halfway down my street. Lately he hasn't been there--his tent's been closed down--and today it made me start thinking about him a lot.

I remember one time in particular that I sat down with him. He sits there all day, and different friends come, sit for awhile, and go. Normally no one says very much--we all just watch the people walking by, maybe exchange a few comments about the weather. He's a man who knows how to pass the time.

Well, this particular time I noticed that he had a bird in a cage--and I told him that it was beautiful. And it was--it's one of the dark-colored mountain birds that are beautiful, yes, but untame. As you walk up, each will glare at you with a wild, yellow eye and beat its wings against the cage.

Well, when I commented on it, the look in his eyes immediately showed me that I'd said the right thing, and it's clearly something he cares for. And he reached over, opened the cage, and took it out to sit on his hand.

The bird obviously didn't share his sentiment. It immediately started pecking his hand with its incredibly sharp beak. When it started pecking one spot over and over, he would slowly turn his hand, so that it wouldn't start tearing out a lot of flesh. It had to hurt, but he just continued to look at it in love and wonder, offering only a soft smile, handling it gently.

After about a minute he put it back in its cage--and I saw flecks of blood all over his hand where the skin had been punctured in several places. There was something really special about the moment. But something would be lost in the interpretation. I'll just leave you with the story.

Hua'er Cafe?

So! After a ridiculously busy week that included a last-minute trip to the big city to get the company's name approved, I got the company's name approved! The good news is that now we know the name of, if not the coffee shop, at least the business. The bad news is that it doesn't translate very well into English. Go figure.

It's the 花儿餐饮有限公司. The last part basically means that we're a company that deals with food and drinks--basically it indicates that we're in the business of starting restaurants/drink shops. The first two words, "Hua'er," are a little more difficult to explain.

Basically, a long time ago in our area, men would be way too embarrassed to tell women how they felt about them. So, instead of going through the immense embarrassment of a red-faced "I like how your shoes are so sparkly," they would instead sing a song they would make up as they went along, that implies that they like the girl. To me, impromptu songs are a few more rungs up the ladder as far as embarrassment goes. But anyways: those songs are called hua'er.

Mark gave me an example of what a hua'er would be like: "Everywhere I look, I see pairs. The doves in the sky are two, and every railroad track has a mate. But I am alone. I use all my strength to climb the highest mountain. I look down, and I see a beautiful flower." THE END. Sorry, girls--we're too manly around here to actually say (sing) anything directly about a woman ever.

I told my friend that I'm going to sing a hua'er to the next girl I date. But it's probably going to just be an out of tune rendition of the following: "I climb a mountain... and I see this flower, right? It's a really beautiful one... and its name may or may not rhyme with someone's name who's in this room right now. Hint hint."

Eventually it became a genre of folk song, and a man and a woman would, at festivals, stand on different ridges of mountains around here and sing hua'er to each other. Nowadays, there are still hua'er festivals, but they sound slightly less dramatic.

I like the fact that it was a spontaneous, impromptu love song that rose in spite of embarrassment. You get the feeling that the guys had no other ways of expressing incredibly strong emotion, so eventually they just had to start to sing--and the only way they wouldn't be completely embarrassed was to sing something that would take some interpretation. It makes me think of the love song that stirs in our hearts when we see those first buds of spring, wake from a nap on the couch to a light breeze blowing through the apartment, or lay in bed in the early morning, inexplicably awake, listening to the rain.

Although, admittedly, Spring's not coming easy. It snowed again today. But I didn't mind. Something about the sound afterwards of it melting--like the whole world was dripping to the ground.

The Big Chill

So, at this point, writing this as my heat is on and sunlight is pouring through my window, it's hard to even think to write about just how cold it was Before. Before my heat turned on on November first, that is.

I guess I'll let pictures tell it for me.


This is pretty normal night-time attire. Fur boots, long underwear, jeans, shirt, sweater, fur vest, coat, scarf, fur hat. Well, sometimes not the hat. But I wore all that more than you'd think.


Wait--you thought this post was about things Before. So why the pictures of snow?


Well, it actually snowed the night before my heat turned on. Awesome. This is part of the truly beautiful view from my window.


This is another part of the view out my window. You couldn't really see it in the other picture, but this mosque dominates the view here from my desk. It's really delightful just to stare out over the city--it's really a beautiful place.

Escape

Today, as we were riding by, a bright green bird escaped from a cage now holding only three others, and was flying from tree to tree. Everyone on the sidewalk stopped to watch, the boy owners running underneath, anxious but silent.