Czech women, Corn Flakes and the Buddha

Talking with two Czech women outside a 650 year old Temple at Fan Ling, Hong Kong, and walking around with young students from Beijing and Boston are life's delights while an international student at Hong Kong's Baptist University.

Reading of life as a concubine in the Qing dynasty [1644-1912] in China or Australia-Chinese relations during the Howard years. And learning that Red Packets can be filled with coin or something that will give your friend good happiness during the coming year. Or eating Kellogg's corn flakes while listening to Fleet Foxes and reading the Naked Buddha by the Venerable Adrienne Howley. We are global creatures in an increasingly busy and digested world.

I was born in the Year of the Monkey, Hou in the Chinese calendar. The Buddha was born in the same month 2499 years before me. The calendar didn't exist then. I've read that the Chinese zodiac was invented on the Buddha's death. Monkey's are inquisitive, prone to narcissism, intelligent [that's the narcissistic side], fleet footed, quick, get into trouble. And generally a bother from time to time. But we traverse a lot of interesting things and issues, and learn quickly. I wish Mandarin was as quick as my English. But that's an impossibility for me.

The women are from Frenstat and from Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic. One of these days I will drink a little beer with them and ask about pilsner and life in a newly born republic. [The current republic was born in 1993.] I wonder if it was a breach birth?

This is We Are always too Late from Eavan Boland, from his collection, Outside History.

Memory

Is in two parts.

First the re-visiting:

the way even now I can see

those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.

It is New England, breakfast time, winter. Behind her,

outside the picture window, is

a stand of white pines.

New snow falls and the old,

losing its balance in the branches,

showers down,

adding fractions to it. Then

The re-enactment. Always that.

I am getting up, pushing away

coffee. Always I am going towards her.

The flush and scald is

to her forehead now, and back down to her neck.

I raise one hand. I am pointing to

those trees, I am showing her our need for these

beautiful upstagings of

what we suffer by

what survives. And she never even sees me.

This is a good piece by an Irish poet who hears his language anew. Lap it up, simply read it to yourself, listen and take in its cadence. I am lapping up my life now.