A song of moments.

I woke up this morning with hiccups and the sky felt like an ocean and the breeze licked my face with coolness.

Who crafts moments swollen with such peace? Who accounts for the touch of lives brushing briefly against each other? Who writes stories in the quiet that take shape in the noise? 

If I could write a story that would connect the stories from only this week it would be beautiful, moving, amusing, exhausting... it would read like life and you would be older having finished it.

Instead I write a song of moments, and dedicate it to a much better Author.

In praise of the Who:

It was the watermelons that made us giggle,

perhaps the taste of the word on our lips,

enhanced by the sight of them rolling on the street,

we three bound together with the cord of amusement.

It was the memories that made us smile,

our eyes glazed as we returned to the past,

a relationship built from time and cups of tea,

this student of mine with a long, black braid.

It was the bare office where one man sat,

Staring in silence at a pale computer screen,

there entered a foreigner bearing stories galore,

a text, a joke, and a face of stone melted. 

It was the pizza, recipe now memorized,

that drew the three teachers into my home,

perhaps loosening their jaws to let secrets spill out,

to be pooled up in a foreigners ears.

It was the shy, broken English of a student slurping noodles, 

that made me giggle as a story formed, 

of another teacher drawing him out of the class, 

to ask if he watched dirty movies on the internet.

It was the way the beggar walked with me, 

arms leaving black rings around my legs, 

their faces tilted upward as I washed them with a towelette, 

then hands outstreched to be cleaned as well. 

It was a newspaper shred from a nearby desk, 

my students article that filled me with pride, 

the depth of ideas strained to be expressed, 

caused all the grammatical errors to fade. 

It was the steaming stack of yellow pancakes, 

on a metal bench in a crowded, narrow street, 

and the way I had to instruct my Tibetan friend, 

how to purchase them, that sweetened their taste.

It was their mumbled Tibetan phrases of pleasure, 

from a simple dinner cooked for friends, 

that made me miss them deeply, immediately, 

I know you will return, they declared. 

It was the mixture of people's hearts revealed, 

our lives dribbling, staining each other's with color, 

that survive as a collage of praise and great worth, 

in the eyes of the Artisan who crafts such design.

Relate to me

The sky is blue and a breeze softens the glare of the sun, the mountains are painted in a thousand shifting shades and the car horns seem distant, the trees burst with green and I absorb it in stillness. Maybe this is shalom.

And like an old woman with a faded photo album resting dustily in her lap, scenes from the past few days turn idly in my mind:

-A lunch of too much randomly ordered food in a restaurant with shockingly pink walls and two students who slurp noodles vigorously and announce that I am the only teacher who has ever had lunch with them like this, before using English as slippery as the noodles to explain their social woes and family stories to a teacher nearly as pink as the walls from stiffled giggles and the honor of being with them.

-A walk past the gate grandfather squatting in the bushes as he sheepishly points down at something unseen. Suspicious, and caught in a moment of not know quite what to do since squatting in bushes ought to be a private affair, a glance in the direction of the pointing reveals a small white bunny. It's mine, explains the grandfather holding it out, it's name is bunny. I will give it a better name, I offer, and promptly named it Tashi.

-A walk back from the closest thing to a quesadilla this hemisphere has to offer arm in arm with a colleague looks like the snaking conversation of everything from classes, to lilac bushes, to meals,to babies with the appearance of bread, to plans, to homes, to futures... all disappearing into the warm evening air leaving only the scent of relationship deepened.

-A tea on a sparkling afternoon with a girl who only recently returned to Lhasa after a five year stay in America met at a bus stop on a day too random to remember. Ourselves oddly reflective in that strange coming and going of life and she expressed her conviction that it was god who must have allowed us to meet then, alongside the certainty of my future return. I poured cooled tea on the ground and we hugged as we departed.

-A split second decision of whether to try to sneak by the tumbling beggar children or not decided by their impeccable vision and ecstatic shouts of "HELLO!". I scoop them up in open arms that didn't betray the possibility of avoidance as they demanded to see my recently printed photographs in hand. We crowded together over the photos and I explained the characters in them, but their explanations were better as they pointed at my face in the pictures "look, there's Hello, look, Hello, it's you." I wiped their cracked bleeding noses and bought some snacks in a feeble attempt to care for the woundedness of their filth stained bodies I have come to adore.

As the scenes shift... now dappled with shadows from trees, now obscured by dust, now crowded out by the throb of people, now dampened with tea, now covered in spice, now lost in the chaos of sheer noise... my soul shakes a little and steadies itself in the realization that these images are the who and the how of relationship. And in a mystery so profound I dare not contemplate it long, I relate to them. They relate to me.

The defense of such Incarnation touches a tender spot deep within me and I am awed by it as it appears before me in all of its wondrous agony and joy. 

And, like the old woman with the photo album whose pictures sting with memories so vivid as to be recent, I am loathe to lay it aside.

Falling is more efficient

It was nearly six am when we met outside the Johkang Temple and the air was already tainted with incense. We were informed by a man I couldn't see in the darkness that there were three seats left exactly and so we got on the crowded bus. After my student inquired as to whether I had eaten lunch or not yet, I promptly fell asleep against the grungy, faded seat in front of me.

When I awoke it was to ice cold breezes and mountain passes covered with snow. I realized with immediate terror that my t-shirt and fleece jacket were hardly suitable. My ears popped and my fingers began to chap as my eyes watered in the glare from the snow.

We got off the bus and my two students were accosted by alarmingly forceful women selling frostbitten bags of incense. Ganden monastery looked appropriately dingy in contrast to the startling whiteness of the snow. After a bowl of warm noodles in a relic of a teahouse we dutifully made our way through a few dank rooms filled with idols and darkness before my students got bored. Let's go to see something really Tibetan, one remarked, gesturing to the snow covered mountains, to my joy at answered requests and relief at loosened chains. 

Snow ball fights, slippery passes, breath-taking views, and a few random moments of hilarity later and we decided not to wait for the afternoon bus but instead to walk down to visit another former student who was teaching at a primary school at the foot of the mountain. The road looked like a snake had swallowed something both jagged and loopy and it wasn't long before my students began to bemoan our fate and ask nearby yak for rides down. The yak slowly blinked in the snow. It is more efficient to fall down this mountain, declared one student, shaking snow and mud off his shoes.

So we flagged down a grinning Tibetan driver who seemed amused that I could sing along to the songs on his radio as we wound our way down and he dropped us off at my former student's school.The school looked more like a construction site and the children giggled wildly as I crossed the muddy yard arm in arm with their new teacher. Her home was sparse and messy but otherwise comfortable and we boiled potatoes together with fatty meat and cracked walnuts as snacks. Getting to spend time with her was like all the sunshine that our day had thus far lacked.

We ate lunch in an extremely hospitable families' small restaurant nearby and saw the buses coming zig zag down the road back to Lhasa later that afternoon. As we sprinted to the foot of the mountain waving our bus tickets in an effort to stop the buses, I bid my student farewell and hoped that I might see her once more before I leave. Our bus driver miraculously remembered us and stopped just long enough for us to squeeze on. We crashed into our stained seats and, exhausted, fell very nearly asleep as it rattled back to Lhasa.

As my drowsy head bumped against the smudged window of the bus I thought about the jagged, loopy, mostly obscured road of my future. I know I will walk it slowly step by snowy, muddy step, and I know I don't walk it alone and I know there will be people I must meet along the way... but I'm inclined at this point to agree with my student... to simply fall would be much more efficient.

The old man didn't know, couldn't have known...

Yesterday was a story of such desperate sadness, extreme exhaustion, unique momenthood, and tender joy so mingled I fail to think of an adequate opening line, or a description full enough to be genuine, or a possible meaning for such a collage... stories, days, can be frustrating that way... but tell them, live them, we must. 

When the old man drinking a Coke, like it was the most delicious thing he'd ever ingested, while people in bathrobes meandered around, grinned at our company it was clear he had no upper teeth. I had to physically restrain my desire to hug him. So toothless old people are endearing to me.

This is him. You'll probably want to hug him too.

He sipped his Coke and didn't know that we had arrived at the school gate to meet our eager and hilarious students, who had come equipped with a duffel bag of snacks, at six-thirty that pitch black morning only to wait nearly two hours there for the sun to come up and our driver, who was willing in that clever driver way to pile eleven people in a van that only seated five, to arrive.

He scratched his ankle with a wrinkled hand and couldn't have imagined that the van wasn't able to carry two foreign teachers and eight giggly girl students energized from hours of singing up to the first monastery we visited that day. So some of them got out and walked. And I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have realized the bile that rose and lodged in the back of my throat surly mirroring the tears in their Creator's eyes as eight beautiful Tibetan girls prostrated before hunks of metal and faded photographs and the morning turned into afternoon.

This old man slid over on his concrete bench and had no idea that I had fallen asleep on the shoulder of a student who insisted on holding my hand as she transformed herself into an unceasing jukebox and had woken up to this nunnery nestled in the filthy garbage laden crevice of some mountain like a return to my first trip out of Lhasa three years ago. I was greeted by yak climbing crumbling stairs, emaciated mangy dogs staring listlessly at bones, crippled nuns, and an odd assortment of semi dressed people crowding into two frothy hot spring holes.

It was a refuge for refuse. And so we found ourselves in the company of this old man.

He let out a belch that flavored the air and made my typically shy student with hardly any English at all burst into peels of uncontrollable laughter and didn't know that we would end up as guests in her family's house after a long drive back through the barren mountain passes on a bumpy one lane road. He couldn't have understood the honor of being poured one more cup of bland butter tea from the calloused hands of a damp eyed father or the tenderness of being served heaping plate after plate of meat dumplings surely costing this farming family a small fortune simply because I had made it known at some point in the distant past that they were my favorite food.

He tilted his head to one side and stared at me as he finished his Coke and had no idea that we would be visiting one more small monastery after our profusion of gratitude to my student's family that came no where close to being adequate, nor could he know that it would be deserted except for the untold horrors of watching eight beautiful Tibetan girls go into ecstasies over being touched by a reincarnated lama who was really just a man like any other. I shuddered and couldn't watch lest I collapse under the weight of despair and the sun set casting long shadows in the small, paint and butter stained courtyard.

This old man blinked hard in the glare of a sky white with clouds and vanished through a splintery door and never could have guessed that such a day was shared and to be shared. A day of baby goats and rippling streams, of vulture cries and sweet tasting bushes, of laugher and translation and pictures, a day of songs and sweat, of idols and bondage, of illusion and evil, and a Holy presence as small as the squeeze of a student's hand in mine.

All the things he didn't know, couldn't have known...

I dare not consider all the things about this day that I don't know... though surely therein lie my most throbbing, heart wrenching hopes for this people, these students, and this dear old man.

My seven 'I love you's' day.

On seven separate occasions random people told me that they loved me as I meandered through the day. That's got to be a record. 

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I woke up this morning and surprised myself by finding the strength to thank my Father for His silence in the face of all my questions. That's how I know His Spirit is present with me.

And I lethargically went outside to inspect our annual sport's day finale happenings greeting teachers who had shared a massive meal with me the day before, nodding at others who had been on my championship tug of war team, and ducking under the umbrellas of others I hadn't seen much of recently. I was compelled out of sheer love and silliness to write an announcement dedicated to a group of second year English majors that was read over the loudspeaker to their delight. I managed to squeeze a grin out of Mr. Wu. I made plans I knew I wouldn't keep and it would be okay with a colleague who has an astonishing zeal for bread and seems to be the only one genuinely mourning my impending departure. And I left to meet a long time very dear student for lunch.

Three random "I love you's" later and she told me this story:

I went to the tea house with the other foreign teacher and we ordered noodles. They don't look too spicy but really were spicy. The waitress then brings us more spice, we said oh no we don't need it, already too spicy and the waitress was so surprised and said oh this foreigner is not Ms. Kelly. 

Satisfied that my love of spice fame had spread far and wide, we ate rice and drank tea and walked through the bustling streets and bought pens and Tibetan children's books and heard "I love you" twice more and ended up in a different tea house with a different tea and sat and talked and dreamed and she told me she would send me any Tibetan thing I needed while I was in America.

As I walked her to the bus stop where we parted two more people declared their love to me.

I ended up surprising perhaps my best friend when I missed a message she had sent asking to meet several hours later and she didn't seem to mind and changed her plans yet again and we met her sister's younger daughter and another friend and went to a tea house I may never be able to find again because it was actually upstairs in somebody's home. A grandmother made room for us on her bench and we ordered enough sweet tea to make my teeth hurt on sight.

A breeze drifted through the barred windows and made the shadows on the teal wall shimmer and she lectured her niece: 
When you ride the bike you don't need to go this way this way, looks dangerous like you will fall, you can make your feet flat and your arms not moving so much, that's a better way, you listen to me and don't make your face black. 

We laughed until our cheeks were tight with fatigue and I had my picture taken not very discreetly by the tea house owner's cell phone and we parted amidst a flurry of hugs and promises to meet again. I decided a walk back to the school, as a time to contemplate my own lingering despondency, was in order. A few text messages and phone calls later and my entire weekend had been rearranged by a group of students who took my suggestion to plan a trip seriously. I have almost no recollection of the nearly forty-five minute walk aside from the face of a man pressed to a bus window. 

When I arrived back at school I was greeted with a bear hug around my knees by a neighbor's daughter. 

Then as I sat down to again search my soul for its pinpricks of sadness that are as unexplainable as they are slippery, I got a phone call from a Chinese friend in another city whose sole ambition in life seems to be amusing me.

As we chatted about nonsense my laughter became uncontrollable as he shared:

Sometimes when I wait in line for the bread I am ashamed and do you know why? Because I look around me, in front only old people and behind only old people. I know they all are thinking why a young man is wasting his time waiting for bread.

****************************

All I have wanted to be all this day is sad though it is hard for me to explain exactly why. Nonetheless, every time I get to thinking about being such someone has taken my hand or come running up to me or amused me with a story or distracted me with a travel plan or greeted me with excitement or beckoned me to their side or poured me another cup of tea. Seven times random people told me they loved me on this day when I was feeling as unlovely as ever.

So maybe my Father isn't answering my questions, but He is far from silent.

April moments

A diet of memories

A memory is what is left when something happens that does not completely unhappen. 

-Edward de Bono

I paid one yuan and took a bus until it wouldn't go any farther and looked up at the jagged mountains and around at the green fields and remembered the time when I had taken a tractor to the same place to visit a friend's hometown.

I walked through a sleepy village with I had never been in and chose a house with yak dung patties as wall art for my daydreams that looked exactly the same as other houses I had chosen from other villages on other days.

I stopped in front of a lady selling miniature watermelons by the roadside and insisted that we buy one from her so that we could eat it as we walked back to the bus stop and the sweetness of it flavored the sunshine and made me think of all the miniature watermelons I had purchased from past roadsides.

I went to visit a former student at her home and watched her chip frozen flecks of butter from a wad to make tea and as it frothed in my cup I remembered the first time I had wiped such buttery foam from my mouth before I had learned to blow it to the edge of my cup.

I had dinner with two former students and laughed until I became useless with chopsticks when one of them revealed a preserved edition of my first birthday party in Lhasa from his cellphone video camera and I couldn't eat any more because I was full on memories.

I found myself recalling a memory of a trip to a Tibetan hair salon in order to describe the use of hair dryers to a class of very low level students and to my surprise found that it was a collective memory that we all could share.

I walked into class and listened to a group of graduating students bemoan the results of their exams and reminded them of a time when they weren't even able to express their smallest discomfort to me.

I looked out after a snowy afternoon on the white mountains made whiter by the blueness of the sky and shivered when I remembered the time when I didn't know them and they were all strangers to me.

And sometimes I look out my dust stained window and wonder if the city I see is actually there or if the buildings and streets are only memories made solid and if the people that I know aren't really just black and white colored by my memories alone and I wonder if I'm really full or only feeling that way because of the crowd of rememberance and I realize my diet has become one of memories and I'm thankful that I'm not the only one devouring them.