Flux

Still searching for something to hang my hat on. Could it be that a half year of accelerated change actually begs for more? How big will it get or how high should I aim? The conservative side says, eh, take a yoga class, start reading poetry again. Retrain your mind, exhaust your body.

It's funny how adjusting the angle of your perceptions by just a few degrees can make things feel so altered. I sat in my neighbor's kitchen yesterday, while she consulted a recipe taped to a cupboard door at eye level. She grated ginger and scraped the innards from vanilla beans into a small glass bowl, while a large bowl of skinned peaches and nectarines waited to be butter-browned in a cast iron skillet. I sipped some iced green tea and failed to remember a time in the past months when I had watched someone else cooking in their own kitchen. And here, too, we were in identical set-ups, in our little rows of ranch houses. She opened the doors above her oven unit for baking powder and flour. "That's *crazy*," I told her, "Everyone knows you keep your tupperware containers above the stove~~" She laughed and told me about kids alternately astounded and flummoxed by the same houses/different worlds up and down the street. Is it the mark of a lesser mind or less maturity to want those external markers to help establish a sense of place?

Last month I met new friends who had moved from their original countries, to create lives elsewhere. I asked one man if he often missed his homeplace. "Noooo," he said. "I have never been that tied to one place as 'home.'"; he simply creates what's needed where he is. I guess we all ultimately/eventually do that, but I wonder over our different relationships to rootedness. Of course, life's work and love also create rootedness: infinitely better routes?

Stop! Buddha Time!

First Buddha I saw in the Shanghai Museum, in the Ceramics gallery:

Statue of Buddha
zhangzhou ware

Chenghui reign (A.D. 1465 -- 1467) Ming

Numerous Buddhas and Boddhisattvas were featured in the sculpture gallery. It was interesting see Indian and Chinese visual cues overlap.

Almost martial looking, Lao Jun, from Tang dynasty 618-907

Bodhisattva
painted and gilded wood
Song, A.D. 660-1279

 

A Stunning
Mahavairocana Buddha
Gilt bronze
The Second Year of Shengming Reign (A.D. 1163)
Dali Kingdom

 

  

 Hope Everyone's enjoying their weekend and ushering in the Fall.