Monday Morning in Hong Kong!

Monday Morning:

One scroll at the Hong Kong Museum of Art was titled “Saying Goodbye by the Stream at the End of the Year.”   For some reason, I interpreted it to mean that the stream was saying goodbye, that it was drying up until the rains, and tucking its watery legs up into the hill and saying good-bye to the outside earth and each of us.  I love that thought.  After awhile, my eyes came down to the bottom of the scroll, where people stood on a small dock and a man was on a small boat, and the people were saying goodbye.  I suppose both interpretations are the same.  Parting.  Leaving.  Saying goodbye.  It is part of life.  We move on and out and in again. 

I look out this morning and it is gray.  Each day the view closes in. I wonder if one day even I will disappear, and, of course, I will, and yet, like Kowloon, I’ll still be here in some change of form. The window is wet with condensation.  The boats seem slower as they pass in the gray. It feels like a day to curl up like the stream, and I will see.  Steve and I agree that we have seen more people in this nine days than we would see in a year back home.  It is amazing how many people one passes in the street and how many one is passing along with.   There is a continuous line of busses and they are usually full.  All moves. 

My images this morning are with the children I saw yesterday, how precious they are, and how I would like each child on this planet to experience the love, care, and attention I observed.  What a world that would be!  I know we grow from strife, but I was reading one day about a man, Fra Angelica, I believe, who cried with joy, as he created his art.  Can true art be created any other way?

Lawrence Durrell said, “I imagine, therefore I possess.”

Peter Matthiessen, of the book Snow Leopard fame, says, “There is a wonderful Zen metaphor, that we are like a bottle of seawater floating in the ocean.  We are encased in a bottle of our own construction, and we are separate from the whole, from the one.  If that bottle were to melt or dissolve, we would then rejoin the whole, which is our natural condition.  We aren’t separate from other beings.”

Perhaps, here, because there are so many people, it is easier to believe we are not separate.  I cannot imagine separation from so much.

Peter Matthiessen feels we come into this world, pure, a blank slate.  He says: 

          “For a time we are this extraordinary blank slate.  I describe it as a child in the sandbox in the summertime, watching the birds go by and the leaves dancing and the sun coming through the leaves.  He has no ego at all – he’s completely part of that.  You see a little kid playing in the sandbox, his eyes are absolutely wide, he’s not separate from that at all. He’s absolutely what you try to become through all these spiritual disciplines.  You’re trying to return into the one.”

So, today, is a day to dream of the earth as not separate, of people knowing so wholly they are one, that they paint with their being what they want to see.  Stroke the canvas of your life with the oneness that is love.