A Year at River Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

fleeting. What I have learned here is that nothing is entirely my own. Between heaven and earth, as Shakespeare knew, runs a current that we vertical ones must transmit or suffer the consequences. Put more than two of us together and we collect what the universe throws at us, but don’t know what to do with it. Only two and the container has a kind of perfection. What I feel might be what you are feeling; only lifetimes of whimsy and intuition — not interpretation — will shade the difference between us. What delight and misery!
    I looked down from the middle of the bridge. While not quite leaping up and waving bandanas at me, the river people, some of them children, were looking in my direction, some with expectation in their eyes. Already I recognised many, though some seemed distant, seemed to belong to other times and places.
    Across the bridge, outside the monastery, I was entirely alone. Ah. If I remove myself from results then everything I do will set in motion energy along the path that needs the juice; every intersection will light up like a transit schedule.
    M AN’S W ELCOME
    On the bridge home at noon I met someone again, not the woman but a small man, a dwarf with a large head of black hair and the blackest eyes, who was leaning over the rail scanning the water below. He’d seen me and as I approached gave me such a look that I stopped in my tracks. I waited beside him for further acknowledgement while he returned to his searching. The sun came out of the grey sky, hot on my back. The weather was unsettled. Rain had fallen in the night and it had been cloudy all day. We watched mist flowing around both banks and in and out of the forest. Perhaps he was waiting for the river to reflect these changes. We stood an hour in silence, during which time I had the feeling we were in conversation already, and it was not going well. The perfection between two beings seemed unlikely. My stomach went from unease to embarrassment, then to such shame that I couldn’t move. Eventually he spoke. The sun burned deeper into my back. Hot nails into metal and fire points: pericardium, lungs, heart. I glanced down at the water and saw something float by and at the same instant the man’s shoulders hunched and he got down on his knees and gripped the sharp metal edge of the bridge.
    â€œMy sister, Song Wei, has lost her husband and now her child,” the dwarf whispered.
    W ATER P ROMINENCE
    We spread carpets under the plum trees in the margins of the storehouse courtyard in order to practice point location and the subtle pulses. The monk I worked on was the youngest among us. He giggled when I felt for Kunlun Mountains behind his ankle where water meets fire in the heavenly star point.
    I found it difficult to concentrate. I couldn’t stop thinking of the meetings on the bridge.
    The boy monk had dusky skin like Song Wei’s. His body had weak pulses on the left, and gall bladder felt like a kite in gusts of wind. Around us, monks were murmuring the names of points, and for a moment I got lost and couldn’t feel the pattern of his deeper paths. Song Wei’s face wouldn’t go away. Nor would her son Suiji ’s identical drowned face.
    When it was my turn to lie on the carpet, the young monk said my pulses were big, bigger than usual, too big, like proud judges! Circulating sex, kidney, wham, wham, wham!
    Q I A BODE
    Every morning the sun lights the bamboo outside the storehouse window; this is the first thing we see when we sit down to eat, after the body’s electricity has left the core for the skin and the orifices are wide and dreams have ebbed to leave bits of image and sensation in pathways of the strange flows.
    Yang bridge, couple point, Back Ravine, Small Intestine-3, edge of each hand between the root of the little finger and the wrist. I hold this, talking to heart’s minister near the inner frontier gate. How’s it going?
    I kiss the jumping skin of my inside