Author: prayerfullife7

I continued to be in contact with my friend north of Tokyo as he worked on the score for my play. I sent him new scenes as I completed them, and he sent recordings as we worked out the details. I had moved out of the dorm. In fact, I had moved out of the college entirely after I returned from Taiwan, and I began attending a state college a little closer to home, and a lot less expensive than the private college I had been attending.

I was extremely fortunate to have a friend, a benefactor in many respects, who had purchased land near the university and wanted someone to care take it for her while she waited to build. I often think she made up this need as an excuse to be kind to me but I’ll never know for sure. In any case, this was the reason I moved onto her land. She even went to the amazingly generous trouble of purchasing a used camping trailer for me to live in, and a new gas generator to power it. It was a Spartan arrangement which suited me perfectly. The old trailer needed quite a bit of cleaning but once this was done and it was leveled on site, it was the perfect place to live.

We situated the trailer just under the dripline of several beautiful and enormous old Oak trees on the edge of an open grassy hillside overlooking a tranquil valley connecting Santa Rosa to Rohnert Park, California. The trailer was oriented for full enjoyment of sunsets across the valley in the evenings, and sunrises which peaked over the crest of the hills just upslope, and flooded my living space with rich golden light each morning.  I covered the floor with a variety of carpet samples I had found behind a local flooring company and slept on these in my panoramic ‘living room’.

One of the great natural wonders of Northern California is the earthy and stimulating smell of the grasses, the bay trees and the eucalyptus. My new home was immersed in the midst of this wonderful bouquet and I often reflected how truly lucky I was to be alive in such a place as that. Even the dirt and the dust smelled good here. There was no road up the hill to my new abode, just a rutted dirt path that became a driveway of sorts after many trips up and down in my indefatigable Toyota pickup. Further up the hill I never wanted to drive, rather preferring to keep the land as pristine as possible. But it was an excellent place to hike and enjoy my neighbors; deer, possum, raccoon, owl, hawks and a variety of other little critters.

One early morning before the sun had risen I walked far up the hill into a meadow beyond the oaks. There was still a light mist in the air and the distance was partially shrouded in fog. The meadow was thick with flaxen grass, waving gently in the early morning breeze. Dew glistened on each stalk of grass, and as the sun’s first light broke over the hills above, each drop of dew awoke; and in the midst of this golden flowing sea of grasses were hundreds, if not thousands of little sparkling diamond sails riding upon the waves. I stepped closer to grasp the nature of this grassland armada, and discovered in the midst of the rigging, in the very middle of each rounded, glistening, diamond speckled sail was a tiny sailor plying his boat in the breeze. They were spiders, riding upon their glistening webs, built within the framework of the surrounding grasses; and there were more than could be counted, filling this meadow, sailing into the distant fog, reflecting the sun’s light in a myriad of directions. It was a humble and a spectacular sight, and it did take my breath away for a moment. Hidden here amidst the clouds was a naval exercise like none I had ever heard of before, and one I’ve never seen again since.  I stood for a while and watched the breezes move these tiny sailors gently back and forth among the grassy waves while the sun rose in the sky and the fog melted away. In time, as the sun’s rays began to fall from a steeper angle, as the sun climbed higher into the sky, the glistening rigging of each sail faded and the sails disappeared from my view. The morning exercises came to an end and I turned and headed back down the hill to my trailer.

Of my classes this year, two were of note for the ways in which they informed my understanding of the inner man, and the human spiritual dimension; Jungian Psychology and Critical Thinking. Carl Jung was noteworthy in his development of the concepts of the collective unconscious, and archetypes, or shared collective myths held by all of humanity, which inform the way each of us act and live out our lives. Additionally he developed the theory of individuation, the idea that our primary goal and purpose as humans is to become truly ourselves, uniquely developed over a lifetime, made up of elements from the collective unconscious and elements of our particular personalities. In this I found a working theory that could give some meaning to my life, and purpose to my existence. Critical Thinking on the other hand, gave me tools to decode my thought processes, to allow me to lay bare the way I think, why I think the way I do, and how to change the way I think if I desire that. My professor liked to say that critical thinking was, “thinking about our thinking in order to improve our thinking”. I saw in this process, the building blocks for mental freedom, which could lead to emotional freedom as well. By bringing our thought processes into the light and analyzing them, rather than just taking our thoughts for granted, we can discover our underlying assumptions and the chain of inferences that we make as we reason, and we can discover faulty reasoning, erroneous conclusions, and thereby give ourselves hope of change, and freedom from the bad thinking which leads us to make bad choices which yield bad results in our lives.

I continued to take advanced classes in critical thinking from this professor and began working at The Center for Critical Thinking, which he founded as an international think-tank for the advancement of the field. We hosted visiting scholars from around the world for our annual conference discussing critical thinking and how to better teach the principles of good, sound reasoning to students through the development of better critical thinking curriculum from elementary grades, through middle school and on up into college. I also became one of his teacher’s assistants, and taught the introductory course for him when he was away at various speaking engagements around the country.

My final year of undergraduate studies, I finally settled on a major through the interdisciplinary studies department. This program enabled students to create their own major if they were able to convince the board of its validity, and if they could present a successful case for its acceptance. Most of my credits to this point were in philosophy, of which critical thinking courses were a subset, and in theater arts, excluding the mandatory general education requirements which I had completed years ago. I presented a case to the board to create a special major that I called, Hermeneutic Studies, which was basically a blending of philosophy and theater, and would include, as my senior project, the production of the play I had begun writing while in Taiwan. The board approved my petition, so the trajectory for completing my degree was finally determined. In the end however, my college transcripts just stated that my major was Critical Thinking, which I found a little amusing, given all of the work and effort involved in applying and gaining acceptance for my special major.

Against the backdrop of my coursework and theater productions I was offered a generous opportunity to go through the Montessori teacher training program. The friend who had let me stay in the trailer on her land was a Montessori teacher, owned a local Montessori school and also ran a program for training new teachers in the Montessori method. She had befriended Dr. Elizabeth Caspari, who had worked with Maria Montessori for many years, helped develop the music curriculum for the Montessori method, and was a lifelong proponent and master teacher in this method.  Madame Caspari had bought a home in town and over the course of time I had met and helped her with various tasks around her house; putting up shelves, moving furniture and things of that sort since she was in her mid-nineties and unable to do many of these things herself. Madame Caspari and my friend offered a full scholarship so I could attend the training program and eventually become a Montessori teacher if I wanted. It was a rigorous program, but it only met on Saturdays for fourteen weeks, so it was possible to include this on top of my other responsibilities. There was a lot of reading and many papers to write, but it was a pleasure to learn about Maria Montessori, her keen observation of children and her insights into the natural stages of child development, and the scientific process she employed in developing her methods of teaching based on her detailed observations of how children play, and learn most naturally and effortlessly through their play. Madame Caspari was very encouraging and often commented that the reason she felt I would be a good teacher was because I was willing to get on the floor and meet the children on their level. She was a radiant personality and filled the room with her love, but she was also very tough and wouldn’t accept anything but discipline and hard work. She had very high standards but enforced them with love. Having been born and raised in Switzerland and then spending many years in India, where she met and began working with Montessori, Madame Caspari had a thick accent. Prior to moving to Santa Rosa she had lived at a Unity Village in Missouri. In her lectures she would often comment on her time in Missouri, but with her accent it sounded like ‘Misery’. I didn’t know at the time she had lived in Missouri, so when she would talk about her time in ‘Misery’ I thought it was metaphorical and I felt an up-surging of empathy for her past. I wondered to myself for many weeks what the source of her misery was and why she had lived in it for so long. At long last I came to understand it wasn’t a state of being she had occupied but rather a state of the union.

(to be continued)

~FS

After leaving Taiwan, and spending a couple days touring Seoul, I flew into Tokyo and was picked up at the airport by a friend who was living about an hour north of town. We knew each other from college, he had lived in China for an extensive period and was fairly fluent in Mandarin, and was now here learning Japanese. He was also a musician and composer. We discussed the play I had started writing while in Taiwan and I explained my idea for a soundtrack. I wanted musical accompaniment for most if not all of the play, with musical settings for particular scenes, an overall theme, and musical signatures for the characters personifiying the inner aspects of the life of the main character; something to help identify the characters ‘Spirit’ and ‘Chaos’, as well as Chaos’s sidekicks ‘Pollution’ and ‘Noise’.

For the next week we worked together on the score for my play, while taking multiple trips with his friends into Tokyo to enjoy its nightlife. My second week in Japan I bought an unlimited pass on the Shinkansen, or bullet train, with the intent to see some of the main island, particularly the beautiful Shinto shrines in Kyoto, and the Peace Park in Hiroshima. To me, both of these exemplified the victory and resiliency of the human spirit; the shrines embodied beauty in symmetry and order, while the iconic image of the twisted metal dome atop the building that survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima symbolized perseverance, fortitude and indomitability.

The train let me off in Kyoto and I spent my first day walking to various famous shrines throughout town; spending quiet time within their contemplation gardens and admiring the order laid out in the building floorplans and the organization of the shrines columns and beams. This order is carried out on multiple scales and replicated in miniature in the patterning of the railings, privacy screens and the layout of the tatami mats which cover the floors of the temples. I found comfort and peace in the intelligently designed and crafted format of the temples, a theme and variation which showed itself in the smallest elements, the structural elements and in the layout of the entire shrine site and gardens. One could almost see the whole of the shrine in the smallest element, and certainly could formulate the underlying concept of it from these details.

At the end of the day I had no place to sleep, and hotels in Kyoto are expensive, so I waited until dark and climbed a fire escape ladder that was close to the ground on one of the high rise buildings downtown. I pulled myself up, threw my backpack onto the first landing and climbed aboard. To get away from the crowds and the noise of the city I climbed up to the seventh or eighth floor landing of the fire escape and set up my ground-pad and sleeping bag. It was windy on the side of this building but I was warm nestled in my bag. I looked out across the city, at the lights, and fell to sleep.

The next morning I had a surprise and a treat. In the dark of the previous night I hadn’t noticed the small home and enclosed garden directly next door to the building I had climbed. It was the only home in the area, surrounded by tall buildings. From my vantage point, sixty odd feet overhead, I had a complete bird’s eye view of the home and garden. It was old, a traditional Japanese home, with an encircling wooden fence that walled off a secret garden complete with a koi pond, small groves of bamboo, wooden walkways and gravel paths. The garden was being tended now by an old man. He swept the wooden walkways and trimmed some of the plants. He went about his business slowly and with purpose. From the fire escape high above, he looked small and his home also looked like a toy; I felt like a giant looking down on him, and I felt a little embarrassed peering down without his awareness. In the midst of the hustle and bustle of this large city he worked quietly and peacefully. I lay in my sleeping bag watching him for quite a while, admiring his work and the life he appeared to be living. I suspected he had had quite a fight though, in order to keep his home, when all of these buildings were being built around him, and the land was being gobbled up by builders and investors. I imagined him to be a warrior gardener, able to wield a sword, the law, as well as pruning shears. The morning light was beginning to break, though it was still early, and the sun hadn’t come over the horizon. I felt I should leave quickly before more residents awoke. I didn’t want to be caught up here on the side of the building so I gathered my things together, descended the fire-escape, dropped to the sidewalk below and went on my way to the train station.

Standing in the presence of the A-Bomb Dome, or originally the Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall, provides a visceral window into that horrible moment in history, when the equivalent of fifteen kilotons of TNT exploded overhead and killed nearly 150,000 people. It is chilling, heartbreaking and immediately makes one sober and introspective. I spent several hours walking the perimeter of this concrete and steel memorial to man’s power of destruction. In the end, it was hard for me to believe, and hard to digest the power of that bomb, and the far reaching effects it had on the people of Hiroshima and beyond.

As I walked across the Peace Park, thinking about these things; I felt weary from my travels but mostly from the things that man does to one another. I needed something to raise my spirits and suddenly she was there in front of me. I don’t know why she was there, but she was smiling and happy and looked like a lot of fun. She was a Japanese girl about my age and dressed unlike anyone else in the area; she had an eclectic style with mismatching colors and patterns, funky jewelry and scarves, a leather jacket, and hair the color of cherries. She was the perfect antidote to my current mood and I smiled back. Her command of English wasn’t great but it wasn’t bad either, and we were able to talk together fairly well. We walked around the park and eventually made our way to a little café where she introduced me to her friends as her boyfriend. I found this surprising but also amusing and I was happy to play the part.

We spent the rest of the day together, and the night, and the next day she took me to her uncle’s house to meet her family. Her uncle took one look at me, realized I was American, and forbade me to enter his house. I sat on the front porch while she gathered her things together and tried to convince her uncle to let me inside. I understood though, and she apologized and explained what I had already inferred; Americans had caused him untold pain and the loss of most of his family members, I was an American, he couldn’t forgive Americans for the pain they had caused, and therefore I was not welcome in his home. I felt ashamed and wanted to apologize but he didn’t give me the chance since he didn’t come outside again while I was on the front porch.

After a while she came back outside with a small bag and we set out on our adventure. We decided to travel together for my remaining time in Japan; she purchased a ticket on the train to join me, and she wanted to show me some beautiful places. I was touched by how quickly she had attached herself to me. I was also a little nervous about this, slightly uncomfortable, bemused and flattered. She was very gregarious and uninhibited, singing on the train, and laughing with abandon at things which struck her funny. Occasionally she would draw attention from others looking askance at her flamboyance but she didn’t appear to care in the least. She was a lot of fun and she made my time in Japan very memorable.

When we returned to Hiroshima at the end of our short vacation I sensed she didn’t want to part, and I considered what it might be like to bring her home with me. It seemed crazy and impossible but I fancied us to be a new John and Yoko. There was never a dull moment with her, but how long could that last, and really we hardly knew each other. Still it was a tempting thought and as we rode the bus back to her home, and she nestled close beside me, it seemed possible and maybe not entirely crazy. I wrestled with this idea, and considered asking her to come with me, but I couldn’t. It was too much; I was still in college and didn’t even know what I was going to do with my life, and she was so wild, how would she like America, how would she make it there, and I couldn’t take care of her.  Sadly, we parted, and I returned to the US, and I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t return her calls. Several times she called my mom asking for me to call her back and I never did. I was a selfish young man and had moved on with my life. She deserved more kindness from me and I regret not having been able to give it.

(to be continued)

~FS

Small gray monkeys were a favorite pet of the Taiwanese people, although many of the little creatures passed their days in cages, mostly neglected, and some in misery. One such unfortunate monkey was owned by my neighbors in Luku. They kept him in a cage in the open lot that separated our property and theirs. Occasionally, he was let out and tied to a tether which allowed him more room to move about; but it was difficult to see his loneliness and sorrow spending most days sitting alone in his cage.

It was especially sad to see him out there in bad weather and at night; so one day, I couldn’t take it anymore and I asked the neighbors if I could take care of him for them. They were surprised but agreed to let me look after him. They stressed to me that they weren’t giving him to me, and they expected him to be there when they wanted him, but I could interact with him and care for him as well. The first thing I noticed was that he was incredibly dirty and needed a good washing. Having never washed a monkey before, I decided the easiest thing to do was bring him with me into the shower. I had no idea how difficult this project would be and how much little gray monkeys hate the shower. In my host family’s home the shower was a concrete stall at the end of an outside walkway, nestled against a corner of the house. It had a door and was fully self-contained, which turned out to be a good, because things became very lively for the two of us behind that closed door.

All was well as I carried my little friend into the stall with me and shut the door but once the water was turned on, it was as if I had been lowered into a blender. He exploded and went berserk, flying round and round the little stall, up and down my body, and finally perching himself atop my head. His little hands and feet clutched savagely at my hair and scalp and he refused to let go or be coaxed down from his lofty promontory. As I attempted to pry him off my head he sunk his teeth into my finger; sharp little teeth which drew blood, and I immediately began to imagine what new, strange and unknown disease I might have just contracted. Hadn’t AIDS come from a monkey? Well, nothing to be done now but clean my finger, which I did, while he remained nervously attached to my scalp like an exotic, living, fascinator. While he was up there I was able to bring him into the shower stream several times and at least give him a quick rubdown before finally giving up the venture.

We dried off and then I brought him into my room, which he loved. I closed the bedroom door and let him down onto the floor and he was elated to be free to roam and jump, without a tether, and free of the tiny confines of his cage. If he could have spoken to me I wouldn’t have understood his joy as clearly as he communicated it by his running and jumping and playing. He leaped up onto my bed and used the mattress as a springboard to launch himself up onto the wall above my pillow where he immediately pushed off and then did a somersault in the air before landing on the mattress again. This became his favorite thing, which he repeated over and over again as I watched with a smile. Occasionally he stopped and looked over at me to make sure I was watching him and I voiced approval which was his cue to begin his acrobatics again.  Eventually he tired himself out and we both laid down for the night. I climbed under the sheets, and he lay down on my chest, with his little arms extended across my shoulders, his tiny head nestled against my neck, and went to sleep. For the remaining few weeks of my stay in Luku I brought my little friend in for the night; and we both enjoyed the warmth and shelter of my room, and also the warmth of our newfound friendship; but I never again tried to give him another shower.

At the conclusion of the semester in Taiwan, our group spent the last few days together debriefing at a rustic site in the mountains within Taroko National Park.  There, we discussed what we had learned and how the trip had changed us. Among other things, I found that this trip exposed and called into question some deeply held assumptions I had about the superiority of individualism. I come from a culture that places great value on the individual: the self-made man, the person who climbs up out of obscurity and makes a name for him or herself, one who overcomes and wins and does all of this in the face of the mediocre crowds, rising above mediocrity, finding victory in personal accomplishment. I came to Taiwan with all of this deeply ingrained in me and was certain of its veracity, but it wasn’t long before I realized that I was looked on with pity by the Taiwanese for these very traits. They saw in my individualism something sad and to be avoided. Instead, they believe that how one fits into the larger society, the group, is the important thing, and one’s value is found as a part of the whole, with the others, not apart or alone. Of course this is a generalization, and in the twenty five years that have elapsed since my time on the island I suspect they are now much more like the west, but at the time I was there, and of those I met, this was the belief and the philosophy that guided their lives.

St Paul admonished the church to be of one mind and one spirit, to flee from a competition of ideas, to find resolution to differences, and to foster harmony within the whole. St Paul went on to tell us that, though we may have diverse and individual gifts, they are for the benefit of the entire body, and we, as parts of the body, should find our value in how we benefit and enhance the other members of the body. In so many ways the beliefs of my culture are at odds with Christian ones, and have been at odds with them for many centuries.

After our group debriefing we all went our separate ways. I had booked a flight through Seoul, with a layover for a couple days to see that city, and then on to Tokyo to visit a friend, and travel for two weeks in Japan before heading back home again. My flight didn’t leave Taiwan for another day or two so I spent some time hiking in the area. It appears there have been many slides, renovations and changes to the trails since I was there in 1990, but at that time, the trailhead I took was at a cave entrance on the side of the highway, and one began by walking for a very long way through the mountain.

There is something strange and claustrophobia inducing about walking alone straight through a mountain by way of a small tunnel. In this particular case the light at the other end of the tunnel appeared very far away and looked as if someone was holding a single LED bulb very far in the distance. I began walking through the tunnel towards the light but it never seemed to get any closer. After a while of walking I turned and looked behind me and the entrance now looked just about as far as my destination; I calculated that I must be about mid-way through the mountain. The air was cool and damp and deathly silent. I could see nothing except these pin-lights at my two poles. I imagined the mass of earth and rock above me and thought how impossible it would be to reach me in a slide or collapse. Besides, nobody knew I had climbed into this tunnel, so they wouldn’t even know to look for me. But it was peaceful and so very silent and exciting too. I continued walking through the mountain and after a while the light on the other side did begin to look larger. My imaginations about a collapse provoked me to begin a faster pace and this stimulated my anxiety which in turn prompted me to break into a trot, and then a run in hopes of getting out of the mountain before something calamitous might happen.

The tunnel opened out onto a beautiful gorge and stream, and the trail continued up alongside the waterway and into the mountains. I had heard there were many more caves and tunnels up ahead, although most were short; and up to twenty-eight waterfalls on the trail, with some cascading down onto the trail inside the caves. I had brought an umbrella and light raincoat with me for the day, and a banana or two and a water bottle. I encountered a few other hikers at the beginning and again near the end but other than this the trail was mine. The solitude gave me time to reflect as I hiked alongside the stream, crossed the gorge on several footbridges, and walked through shallow streams, in the darkness of the caves, while water rained down upon me.

Opening an umbrella underground is an incongruous activity and leaves one feeling odd; finding oneself in a torrential downpour while walking through a cave strains our ideas of normalcy. I enjoyed this immensely. I felt alive and free again, as the stream poured down over me through the myriad fissures in the rock overhead; the Year of the female was behind me, and I felt I could breathe once more. I liked nearly all of the women I had travelled to Taiwan with, and all of those I had called my family the past six months, but at the same time I was glad to be alone now, without anyone to answer to, and immersed in beauty.

I emerged from the cave and back into the sunlight, wet and happy. My shoes and socks were soaked through, as were my shorts, but I didn’t mind. All I could see ahead was a wide open freedom calling to me, coaxing me through the next tunnel, across the next foot-bridge, further up into the clouds; and no petty annoyance could keep me grounded here and now. My body was wet and worn, but my spirit was taking flight; I could see beyond this trail into a bright, though unknown future. I had South Korea to visit, then Japan and then the rest of my life to unfold.

(to be continued)

~FS

That same year a small group of my friends and I produced a play which one of my friends had written. It was well-received, and this inspired us to work together on additional new productions. Over the next few years we wrote and produced five or six new works, and I came to conclude that there were few things in life that I enjoyed as much as being a part of a team, a small group with a common creative purpose. The exchange of new ideas between us was invigorating, and the process of translating these ideas into a cohesive story that was entertaining and edifying was challenging and purposeful.

One of our productions, I began writing while living oversees in Taiwan. My semester abroad had been organized to take place in Shanghai, China however, several months earlier the Tiananmen Square protests took place, and out of concern for our safety the school administration changed plans and directed us to a language institute in Taichung, Taiwan instead. Each of us were placed with a host family in Taichung for three months while we studied language and culture, and then we moved to the mountains and spent the next three months placed with a different host family in a small village named Luku, which was located in one of the premier green-tea growing regions on the island. My play was loosely autobiographical about my time on the island, within the challenges of living in a new culture and facing conflicting values; but it was primarily about the inner life of the main character and his battle to achieve balance and harmony amidst conflicting forces operating within his soul. These forces were personified predominantly in characters I named ‘Chaos’ and ‘Spirit’ who each fought for preeminence and authority within him and wanted sovereign control and the destruction of the other, but the main character’s struggle was to determine the place each of these forces should play in his life, and create a state of balanced inner peace. I took many of the ideas I was learning that year from Taoism and integrated these concepts into the storyline and the arc of the main character.

This was also the year of the female. This isn’t one of the Chinese zodiac, but it was the overarching, and overwhelming principle of my life in Taiwan. I was the only male in the group that traveled to Taiwan. Our group consisted of six other classmates and our program director, all women, and me. In addition to this I was placed in a host family in Taichung, with three daughters, and all of my professors at the language institute were women.  There were certainly many advantages and enjoyable aspects to this situation but when things got tense and stressful, as they invariably can when traveling for an extended period with others, I was nearly always the odd man out. I was a foreigner in a strange land and a stranger amongst my own people. Being the only male in the group meant that I was unique confidante to my peers one moment, and estranged outcast the next. By the end of the six months in Taiwan, I think I went a little batty.

While living in Taichung I attended a Tai-chi class on the rooftop of a high-rise building downtown. I had bought a scooter from a classmate and braved the streets of this large city, driving it between classes and my host-family’s home near the eastern city limits.  The rides through town were never without some excitement and anxiety since drivers in that city viewed road signs and traffic lights as optional recommendations, and considered sidewalks as an extra lane for traffic. Somehow I managed to survive the months on these city streets without incident, though there were several close misses and narrow escapes. By the time I arrived to my Tai-Chi class, I was in need of the soothing and relaxing effects of this ancient martial art.

One of the touted benefits of Tai-Chi is longevity and youthfulness. Our instructor was the embodiment of these effects since he looked as though he was about eight years old. This comes across as hyperbole, but when I first saw him I thought someone had brought their child along with them to the class. When he walked to the front of the group and began instructing I was completely amazed; by the moonlight I examined him intently, and giving him the benefit of the doubt, I decided he could maybe be as old as twelve. For no other reason than his apparent youthfulness, I was hooked on this class; because I was mesmerized by this man-child and was fascinated to watch him because he defied everything I understood about aging. I didn’t understand him very well since my Mandarin was very basic, but I did learn from others in the class that not only was he an instructor, but he was a master practitioner and an instructor of instructors. So he clearly was an adult, and apparently fully into middle-age, but he was the youngest looking adult I have ever seen. His class was exceptional and the setting was quintessentially exotic. Standing on a rooftop filled with Taiwanese Tai-Chi students, in the middle of their large city, at night, under the silver moonlight was a transcendent and magical experience. Doing so with this age-defying human as our instructor gave it all an air of mystery and fantasy as well.

Luku Township was about an hour scooter ride to the southeast from Taichung. This little village was set amidst deep green mountains and immediately surrounded by verdant terraces lined with rows of Camellia sinensis, from which green tea-leaves are cultivated. We arrived during the harvesting season and the entire town and countryside smelled of green tea. In my new host-family’s home, my bedroom was adjacent to the tea-drying room, in which was a long tumbler with a heater-blower attached, into which leaves were poured and dried. I marinated in the smell of green tea many days and nights, falling asleep to the sound of the tumbler as it rotated, drying the tea leaves; it was a natural and healthy intoxication that I felt throughout the harvest season.

In Luku, laundry was done in the streams which meandered along roadsides. In the center of the town there was an area where most people did their laundry. Laundry was only done by women and by me. In keeping with the Year of the Female, I discovered that I was the only man that did laundry in this stream, and as a by-product of my effort, I also provided the townswomen with new entertainment and cause for hilarity. Seeing me scraping and banging my clothes against the rocks, knee deep in the stream, brought joy to women and children alike, and the fact that I was the only white male in the area, I think added to the peculiarity of it.

It was unadvisable to hike in the countryside here too extensively due to the number of dangerous snakes. Venomous snakes had been bred on the island during WWII and after the war they were released into the wild and they propagated. While I was living in Luku one of the farmers unfortunately encountered one of these snakes while harvesting leaves and he didn’t survive. In addition to venomous snakes you might also encounter a large constrictor which is what happened to me one evening as I was riding my scooter to the town swimming pool. I was riding on a narrow road, flanked on both sides by tall reeds, when I rounded a curve and there, up ahead of me, appeared to be a fallen log across the entire road. As I approached it, a sudden chill went up my spine and I stopped abruptly, as the ‘log’ continued to slither into the reeds. It was a very large snake, perhaps six or seven inches in diameter; I couldn’t see its head, which was somewhere in the reeds to my right, nor could I see its tail which was someplace still back in the reeds to my left. The road had to be at least fourteen feet across, perhaps wider, since two small cars could pass each other on it. This snake continued to slither for quite a while, slowly but steadily before the tail finally came into view. I was completely repulsed, but nevertheless something in me wanted to go up and touch it. I pondered this idea for a moment as I continued to watch it slide off the road to my right, and then I determined it was better to leave this snake alone.

(to be continued…)

~FS

My summer Alaska trip had been a complete success, I had made enough money to pay for books the coming year, in addition to some tuition and spending money. Equally important I had a better sense of myself, my strengths and weaknesses in the face of difficulties, and a deeper understanding and compassion for others who find themselves in tough circumstances and need a helping hand, or friendship, or simple kindness.

I had fallen away from organized religion over the past few years, though I still had an inner appreciation and love for my idealized version of it, but I still carried within me many aspects of a social gospel that I had learned while in church; love for the downtrodden, empathy for those that are hurting, willingness to help others where I could. The golden rule had been inculcated within me and though I was by far an imperfect practitioner of it, at least I kept it as a standard to strive towards and measure myself.

I also continued to learn what I could about my inner spiritual life, to notice my inner motivations and my true feelings, and to make sense of the jumble of ideas and thoughts that ran constantly through my head. Meditation and theater rehearsals still provided me with tools and opportunities to practice inner awareness but I was still several years removed from engaging in something approaching spiritual warfare, or an active and consciously applied effort to fight and win against spiritual things detrimental to myself and others; and the time of applying myself to this fight systematically and with ongoing determination would be something I wouldn’t be initiated in, or begin to practice, for quite some time.

To this very point, I recall a conversation I had with my step-mother at the time. She was bringing up some failings of mine, and observing that I was out of control in some significant ways in my life. I couldn’t disagree with her because she was correct, but I explained why I felt this was the case; I offered a comparison of my inner being to a complicated M1 tank. In my view, I had been dropped into myself without an owner’s manual and suddenly I had to learn what all these levers and buttons and controls and screens meant, in order to operate myself properly, and frankly, I hadn’t a clue how to operate myself properly. I was just going through life guessing, and making things up as I went along; doing a little trial and error here, a little self-correcting there, experimenting with this and with that, and hoping I wouldn’t mess up too badly. Admittedly, it was an imperfect practice, and I yearned for something better, but I made the best with what I knew.

Soon after returning to California from Alaska I began my next school year. I started studying Mandarin Chinese in preparation for a semester abroad the following year. I lived on campus, which was situated in the hills south of Petaluma; a bucolic and serene setting perfect for contemplation and immersing oneself in nature. On a daily basis I could watch deer walking by my first floor dorm window and often resident raccoons could be seen congregating around the front door, eating from our dorm-kitty’s food dish. Having grown used to sleeping on the ground in Alaska, and indeed much of my life, I gave my mattress to the facilities manager for safe keeping and spread a colorful Mexican blanket over the plywood bedframe in my dorm room and used this as my bed for the year.

Chinese language and culture appealed to me because of the mystery involved; the written language was so different from my own, and the cultural history, from the various dynasties up through the Long March and the Cultural Revolution was strange and different and captured my imagination. As part of this exploration I began to read the Tao Te Ching, the basic philosophical and religious text of Taoism written by Lao Tzu. It didn’t enthrall me in the same way as the Bhagavad-Gita but I was impressed by the value it placed on things counter-cultural to my way of thinking; things like passivity and weakness which my culture disdains, and the harmony and balance one can achieve when one embraces these alternatives, along with their opposites, in a unified whole.

As a complement to this study I began taking Aikido at a local Dojo in town. While this martial art is from Japan, not China, and Taoism and Aikido don’t share a common lineage, for me Aikido seemed to embody concepts I was learning in Taoism. For instance, in Taoism there is a famous image about the strength of water in relation to rock, and how over time the water is stronger and wears down the rock; while in Aikido, one meets one’s opponent or aggressor in a way similar to water, allowing the force and violence of one’s attacker to flow past one, and to redirect their violent energy into a more constructive energy that harms no one. I enjoyed applying the theory of the Tao in a practical and active method through Aikido.

Against the backdrop of studying Mandarin and my other classes I was also involved in several theatrical productions. As I’ve mentioned earlier, theater was more important to me for what I could learn about myself and about other people and less about the production or the finished product. In our theater community that year, we had a visiting director from Poland who had worked with the renowned Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, so we were excited to learn what he brought with him from his experience. We were working together on a scene from Martin Buber’s play, Elijah and discussing how best to translate Buber’s interpretation of the Biblical account into modern terms to reach a modern audience. In the course of this discussion the director began to speak about Buber’s own philosophy and his method of Biblical interpretation, or hermeneutics. He went on to explain that as actors, writers, producers we are also engaged in hermeneutics in how we approach the text of the play, and how we translate that into action and perform it for an audience. The question was how to make the Biblical story understood to the audience in the deepest, most visceral and dramatic way, simply and without artifice but with sincerity and honesty and power.

This discussion reoriented me and gave my life new purpose. I had never heard the term, hermeneutics before and I was so excited by the prospect of interpreting sacred scripture and joining that to theater for the purpose of making spiritual truths known and understood by an audience. This idea was a seed of a new life’s purpose; I wanted to write plays which would somehow interpret sacred truths in an accessible way, presenting them to an audience so as to make the unknowable knowable, and to inspire and instruct in these truths to open people to hidden realms so they could know that there is more to life than just what we see and touch.

I wanted to bring the mystery down to earth in some way, to battle the cold rationalism, and the narrowness of the literal, data influenced culture of my society where things are only true and only matter if you can prove them beyond a shadow of a doubt, with lots of facts and charts and graphs to prove your point. I knew in the depths of my heart that God wouldn’t be known this way, that He couldn’t be known this way, and my peers were losing faith in droves because they were trying to find Him in the wrong ways and with the wrong means and because of this they were giving up and dismissing faith as a fairy tale. I wanted to reverse that trend.

(to be continued)

~FS