Shadow, sun, shrine, smoke, and glow!
Useless is my tale, unless
You have understood it. So –
You may choose! You are just starting;
I have long been on the go.

            ~~The Shadow, George Cosbuc

 

I am sitting at the Thousand Buddha Restaurant looking out on to the street for Anne. She won’t be coming on time… she never does. I’m annoyed, but I know when I see her strawberry blond form striding down the street and running up the step, I will forgive her… age 23… the eyes that see for the first time… this back street with the smells of cooking… fruit carts piled with oranges and persimmons… this quiet alley secluded from the dust and noise.

I am thinking about this place as I wait. There is a Go board hanging on the wall with championship moves… and calligraphy brushes that are four feet high… a small library with Buddhist writings… and an altar with a fat, smiling Buddha of smooth, dark teak… the daily offerings of fruit and flowers before him… incense and small bills. I can hear the chanting of mantras in the background. A monk dressed in black, his steel-gray hair pulled up into a topknot held in place with a plain sandalwood pin is eating his lunch with a group of men. They are intent and pulled in by what he is saying. I am pulled in, too, even though I cannot hear their conversation.

I won’t forget this place up the steps off the quiet street, but it is Anne who will be haunted by this memory. Her thoughts will return here as an old woman.  By then… China will have been a distant memory for her… but it will have been a first place…  the one that you are unaware of at the time that will carry you to other places. Me? I have far less distance to go… and I have been in many such places. The memories converge… impressions emerge for a moment with clarity… and then recede into a patina of feeling that is just China… other faraway places… and the ache of time passing.

 

I began traveling alone when I was just 19.  I went off to Russia and ended up in Uzbekistan. I had never traveled alone before. This way along the Silk Road was fraught with difficulties and freezing cold that evaporated with youthful exuberance in a Tashkent moment in the bazaar… the memory of Solzhenitzyn’s Cancer Ward when the dying Kostoglotov wishes for just one shashlik… just one. They bring me five shashlik for dinner like the construction workers in the novel… life is full and rich in my miniskirt and tights, leather boots above the knee… a black gabardine coat with the shiny silver buckle pulled tight around a slimmer waist… hair in one thick braid descending to the nether regions of my body. I am the hero of my own novel… the flat, smooth surface of single sight that is selfish youth and childish longing to look good.

It’s only later that the realization grows… the “I” traveling is not about boots and black gabardine…the “I” traveling is less about “I” than about my part in the cycle of nature as its patterns unfold day to night, season by season. That wandering into the tattered place few wish to go is not to visit the quaint and the exotic… but is the foundation of a life in context… the “you,” the small sameness of a grain of dust among many blowing hither and yon with the desert winds and sea breezes. Later still, comes the other realization… there is peace in this knowledge.

This inkling of my future comes with a visit to the Emir’s Palace in Bukhara with its broken panes of stained glass… the loose parapet hanging precipitously from the roof… weeds growing in the empty pool of the harem where once the emir, laughing with a sidelong glint in his eye, tossed a rose-colored apple to his beloved on a sunny day. It is a place of eloquent longing and wild beauty… history left abandoned at the side of the road. Even at 19, I see that… my shadowy imaginings quickening to the layered shading of the place.

I have kept the remembrance of the Emir’s palace for a lifetime. I’ve traveled down the Silk Road again forty years later in what had once been “Old East Turkistan” and now called Xinjiang, the New Frontier.  I’ve wandered along the desert and down a road to the last outpost of China among bright caravans of people…Mongolians and Kyrgyz, Uyghurs and Tadjiks, Circassians, Russians, Gilgit people and Kazahks. I’ve wandered miles in the dust on foot for just one glimpse of a tiny part that is left of kingdoms of sultans and walled cities… camels, silks and tea…  mosques and old citadels. I don’t know why I’ve wandered there, but, early on, I recognize it as a return to the Palace of the Emir… two ends of one strand unconsciously joined.

 

It is in these places of poplar-lined streets and vibrant, green grasslands that love comes up to me as I take an evening walk and looks me in the eye.  I am startled when I return its glance. I am in an ancient land of Persian and Turkic poetry… of song and dance… and I feel myself twirling under the blue sky… the tendrils of words twining around themselves… and, in those evenings, a solitary traveler who knows no one, I am full of joy. I don’t understand how this could be, but I know I will write about it. I make this decision in the cemetery of the Yarkland kings. The tombs of the kings don’t make me think these thoughts but the endless graves of souls buried among them… and, I am given the choice to embrace this expression of life that remains to me, because I know that, at one time, there was this remainder of life for them… this first deepened sight of what had resided outside of myself… that part that replaced what I could no longer be at just 19, and still be  able to keep the sharpness of it… this memory that surfaces at strange times like a mirage that resembles an old, cracked  daguerreotype of a family member long gone.

I’ll forget about my decision until one day I receive a picture from a young Chinese student. I keep losing the email… until suddenly I find it and open up the tourist picture from Turfan of an old man and me sitting beside each other… a young Uyghur girl holding her skirt like a peacock, our backdrop. At the last minute, this man of 103 takes my hand and looks into my eyes. He is courtly, sincere and well intentioned… makes me feel welcomed and valued. In that moment as we both turn toward the camera, I feel very loved. I feel it in the way he holds my hand.

 

Days after the picture, this thought meets me on my evening walk beneath the poplars in Tashkurgan. Love stands in an empty space that knows no comings… no goings. Love knows consciousness in sadness, loss and longing… revelation in joy and intimacy. It is steadfast because it can acknowledge the sameness of itself in both despair and fulfillment. Love forces no one… asks for nothing… offers itself completely without fear… gives without need of a result as proof. I’ll think this thought over the days until the thought leaves me in the Sangke grasslands. In its place, at this late time in my life, I become this thought.

Nothing will ever be the same after that.