Welcome to this new domain. It is protean, like the dragon pictured here. At present this page provides access to other pages and electronic musings. In the future, like the dragon itself, it will arise and it will fall away to rise again.
You may have been redirected here from onefathom.com. That one is moribund for now. In the meantime, I'm happy to say that an old website of mine, my favorite, has been grabbed from the clutches of spammer pirates and is back home safely. There you can read the first few years of Silver Tea, as well as stories by friends and family. Be sure to notice the dedication of the page. It's more relevant now than ever. http://ordinary-things.com
And please visit my ongoing letter to my son, called Silver Tea, at www.silvertea.net.
Here is something I wrote to my son about Dragon.
Dragons mounted the skies last night. Outlined by thin and brilliant jagged networks of light that flashed and died in the snap of a claw bone, their bodies were vast against an endless clouded night sky. Their roars were constant, the lights never stopped erupting and falling away and cloud hidden sheets of clear light were bright enough to front-light the trees by the river and show the true colors of trees, greens against brown. They tumbled and roared and fought for over an hour as I sat in awe on the porch, often feeling the hairs on my arms stand up with the thrill of their electric ecstasy and anger. The sounds and the lights never ceased for even an instant for that time.
Then they moved on, across the river and out of this valley but I heard them, fading away, for nearly three hours.
Such, I guess, are thunderstorms on the plains. I've lived on both coasts and in Florida and in Central America and I have never experienced such a storm. The rain was heavy and came straight down, like in Costa Rica. The closest to this experience was the summer I lived in a tent, in a plum orchard, for 8 weeks in the Dordogne in France. The storms there came nearly every night and the lightning was visible through closed eyes and the crack of the thunder was scary loud.
But not like this, not like this.
During the hour or so that I sat on the porch, part of the storm, I didn't think much, couldn't think much. I came to my senses, my mind gone. Here was Dragon of ancient China, the mysterious force of life itself, arising only to disappear and then arise again. Tzu jan - the reality of "occurence appearing of itself" as David Hinton would have it. "Suchness", a Zen master would say, smugly enigmatic, challenging the student. Everything appears, everything falls away on this earth, an ongoing regenerative process, I would say, because I can't do any better than that. I mean, hell, I sat right in the lair of the dragon last night and got it. I got why this awesome display was one, but only one, of the sense of Dragon during the paleolithic, before "we" became self-conscious and turned our backs on the gyno-centric and tribal life. Necessary, of course. Otherwise, we wouldn't have developed the iPod.
I can't express it. My skin still tingles from the experience. Last night, for an hour, I was in the court of Dragon and my life will never be the same. And I promise you this: next time I come to New England, I'm coming by way of Boston to go to the MFA to see the painting Nine Dragons, the one shown, in part of the frontispiece of Hinton's version of the Tao Te Ching. I saw the ancient dragon and the youthful one last night, for only a moment and got that painting. So I'm just passing on the dragon's story to you, youngling.
Drop me a line if you wish: bill@selfablaze.com.
Love, Bill |
