Friends in Lhasa

"What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high."

I'm sitting here in Asia Minor wondering how friends in Lhasa are coping with their new reality. The news blackout makes it difficult to know the extent of destruction and suffering. I have changed their names to protect their identity.

Tsering, a gentle young man living and working with his mother and sisters; shopkeepers in the Barkhor. Remembering how we walked the kora, the circle of prayer around and around, talking as he shared his dreams of returning to Amdo and being a teacher. We were surrounded by peaceful, devout pilgrims making offerings. How he led me into the Chinese owned and managed concrete mini-plaza where Tibetan women offered coral and turquoise stones. How we haggled, enjoyed their company, laughed and continued on our way.

We met again one day during Losar, the Tibetan New Year, at Deprung Monastery outside Lhasa. They'd climbed through the series of temples, making offerings, saying their prayers. We shared butter tea with his mother and her friends overlooking the Lhasa valley.

I remember Shalu, a young Muslim girl studying English, also dreaming of being a teacher. Having been to her home for a meal and conversation with her family I feel she is safe from the chaos.

Her friend, Dorje, is a doctor at a Tibetan hospital. I imagine she is taking care of her patients with loving kindness and working under extreme stress.

A Tibetan photographer and his Chinese wife, a painter, and their young daughter I met climbing the mountain above Drepung to release our prayer flags during Losar. How they graciously invited me to their home for fruit, tea and conversation.

I remember all the kind compassionate people in Lhasa.

May all of them be well. Light a candle.

Peace.

Lhasa locked down - demonstrations spread

Lhasa remains locked down. Informers are offered rewards. Fear and money and paranoia are great motivators. Reports indicate demonstrations in Gansu and Sichuan.

A young Tibetan monk was less circumspect about government restrictions on the proposed march from India to Tibet. After all, said Tenzin Damchoe, the Indian-born child of Tibetan refugees, Tibetans had learned the art of the peaceful protest march from Gandhi. “It’s a little bit disgrace,” Mr. Damchoe, 30, said.

As for the revolt inside Tibet, he said he could only imagine the worst. “They crushed their own people,” he said of the Chinese response to the Tianemen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989. “There’s no doubt they will crush the Tibetan people.”

Demonstrations, some peaceful, others violent, against the brutal repressive Chinese regime continue around the world. They blame separatists and outside influences. They blame the Dalai Lama.

He said he was aware that the Chinese government blamed him for fomenting rebellion. “I’m happy they found some scapegoat,” he said, in half-jest, and then described what he said were deep-rooted grievances.

“Whether the Chinese government admits it or not, there is a problem. The problem is a nation with ancient cultural heritage is actually facing serious dangers,” he said. “Whether intentionally or unintentionally, some kind of cultural genocide is taking place.” (NYT linked below for full story)

The Drapchi prison outside of Lhasa will be overflowing with newly incarcerated monks, nuns and civilians. They will be tortured and some will die. New refugees will flee across the Himalayas.

Light a candle.

Practice nonviolence.

Peace.

NYT

Children police force

Welcome to another edition of plant-a-rama, ding dong song.

You visited a wonderful nursery on the edge of town past exotic car factories and fields filled with gleaming metal. Every car on the road is a used car.

Guided by a young pale well seeded and seasoned botanist girl you selected roses, ferns, bamboo, lemon trees, wild camellias, climbing vines, hysteria, wistfulleria and assorted green. Where the roots whisper below the surface of apprenticeships and ocean liners.

So it happened one day when the crows were calling after sunrise, he opened the blinds. Riding the blinds is a phrase, a cryptic description of railroad life, hopping a freight out of town. Ain't nothin' but da blues.

Light streamed across a room to the pink and red veined orchid in a brushed silver container. Tibetan incense curled into light. Red gladioli, so glad, petaled their beginning. Piano Etudes by Glass. A handful of dust labeled fear gathered to celebrate in the light.

The piano fell silent. Violins picked up the slack hemming their garments, idling at intersections along life's loom.

In the "new" world order all the police are children. They know how the world word woks work.

Thermal Waters

The day after a two-hour tennis workout on cold hard cement in a cavern, focusing on timing and footwork essentials I visited a thermal bath/spa. It was built in 1555 by the Grand Visier Rustem Pasa for Suleymann the Magnificent.

First, a long sauna spilling temperate water over skin.

Then into a clean and spacious white marble space with a high vaulted dome, 32 pin points of sunlight shafting across mosaic tiles, with eight domed recessed arched cubicles where men soaped, slathered, scrubbed, melting, relaxing in mist heat. The round thermal pool was huge, filled with deep hot water.

Perfect for sitting meditation.

The pool was a simple luxury, hearing, listening to water, all the musical water notes. Then an extensive scrub and massage as a man worked sandpaper fibers over skin, removing dead cells followed by a dive into the thermal waters.

A glass of fresh squeezed juice and slow steps out into fresh spring air below snow covered mountains and clear blue sky.

Defrost your imagination.

Hello Talking Animals

The logic of pain. Pain tolerance. Pain loss, pain's memory, pain's fascination. The awareness of pain, how it dances, how it begins, creating itself, developing the heavy lidded dull, perhaps sharp edge - no, the dull throbbing kind, the kindness, the specific joy of pain down through the nerves - exposed - sliding along invisible blood red threads that you can't, you don't see - these minute tentacles of laughter, however you know they are there. 

The roots of pain bellow well below the surface of appearances, growing down into cold hearted tissue. It needs a biopsy. What's that? A lab tech's evaluating, analysis under a microscope - sterile environment, free of dust, germ free; tissue and a semi-colon; all in the same sentence which, after five days of blizzards is the perfect opportunity to be sitting outside with an iced coffee at dusk near a water fountain pen resolving the pain issue tissue, yanking it out after inserting 3-4 needles filled with antiseptic solutions into gum tissue, so soft, so pliable, how they massage tissue preparing it for a needle, one of those heavy duty stainless steel syringes made in Finland probably, with a perfect circle for a finger so the downward thrust of pressure is constant and now bewildering.

This is what happened and it didn't take his well trained discernment eye more that a nano-second after the partial was removed to see the tooth, as witnessed from inside near the interior monologues, dialogue, red stormed flesh dancing with pain ( a sickness leaving the body ) how now the birds fly, free from pain winging one true sentence.

It would have to come out, how the old recalcitrant reclusive tooth had served it's large print purpose dancing with food, clicking gum lined stories (some never to see the fine print) never the less dazzling to the extreme pleasure of pain, how it was a vast comfort, this pain and it was well worth remembering and nurturing, hearing "18 Musicians" by Steve Reich Ensemble speaking as the heart beat out it's death defying rhythm pulsating along beating faster than shadows leaving themselves in the labyrinth of love. In theory.