At last, I’ve come to the first day.  It is the last page I am writing. I am in Urumqi walking down a street in the rain… this lovely neighborhood of Uyghur people who pass by with their umbrellas.  The Hami melons pour out onto the street.  The Uyghur man in his embroidered black and white dopa will always smile and try to get me to buy one as I pass by many times.  One day I will. It has a sweetness and a perfume like no other that matches the look in his eye… a life of kindness in his spirit.  In that moment of bargaining for the melon… in that moment of smiles and laughter, there is a resilience of undescribed meaning and value… something so old… so subtle.  A brook bubbles through this neighborhood.  I stand in the middle of the bridge in the rain and listen.  The page flows blank before me.  My body seems to vibrate with anticipation for tomorrow, but I’ve stopped to take a moment to enjoy the brook… my hands wet from the rain gathered in fat silver drops on the slick green paint of the iron bridge.  They drip silently leaving wet rivulets in the dust on my feet.

This first day and the last page meet each other and whirl together until all that is left is what is contained in the essence of turning.  We are all turning… under the revolving heavens as our feet are planted on an earth that turns to the sun and then, in shadow, the moon.  In the very center of that turning is the melody… often unheard… sometimes doubted and misunderstood… that draws us to each other… the mother… the father… the child… the teacher… the passerby… the lover.  Sometimes it is known only in the instant… sometimes it comes for a very long time.  I cannot say that love is a gift although it seems so when it comes.  Love is simply there if we are humble enough to seek it… to ask for it and still there when we do not… is there if we choose to find it in the harmonious nature of things.  It is the harmonious nature of things.

The bright light of summer has faded to the early evenings of winter.  The leaves are now gone and it is the time to wait for tiny living things to push themselves up out of the steamy earth… the first green. I am sitting in this common city of China.  It is so quiet and the circle of low light from the lamp casts shadows in this bare room… this peaceful room… this soft light… this sound of no shore my boat has dropped its anchor upon for now.  It is I who has been left to love the world.

 

You’re sitting here with us, but you’re also out walking
in a field at dawn.  You are yourself
the animal we hunt when you come with us on the hunt.
You’re in your body like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet, you’re wind.  You’re the diver’s clothes
lying empty on the beach.  You’re the fish.

In the ocean are many bright stands
and many dark strands like veins that are seen
when a wing is lifted up.
Your hidden self is blood in those, those veins
that are lute strings that make ocean music,
not the sad edge of the surf, but the sound of no shore.

 ~~Rumi
~~The Diver’s Clothes Lying Empty