4 Small Rivers

Da An park, on a damp spring day. A cluster of people around a scrawny tree, some with cameras. Really big cameras, not "happy-snap" cameras. The focus of attention, a mid-sized green bird. About 12 feet off the ground, where the first set of branches now leave the stem, a brilliant green bird is pecking and building a nest from the wood knot where there had been a branch before.
Some thoughts: what happens next? The nest hole looks like the next visitors are likely to be the asian squirrels that also abound in the park.

The bird, gorgeous green, seems to be the Taiwanese sub-species of the Asian black-browed barbet. Nice pictures at Wikipedia.

A nice - if hot - weekend day.

A walk in the YangMingShan mountain area, followed by a visit to XinBeitou. Part 1: a nice soak in a hot springs ... temperatures up to 47C, pH as low as 2!

And then: across the road from the hot springs spa, a Buddhist group had gathered: the Dharma Drum Mountain (group). http://www.dharmadrum.org/ Rhythmic chanting, quite reminiscent of Gregorian chant - except sans the precise tonality of Gregorian chant and plus some Asian bells. A nice lady there tried to show us where, in the Chinese-language "hymnal" we were ... o well.

Leaving that, we went toward the train station, and there was a small museum of Taiwanese aboriginal cultures, free ... and in we went, just in time to hear a demonstration of (allegedly) aboriginal, Miaoli music and dance. Insofar as this was an accurate representation of anything: the Miaoli music seemed more Polynesian and Indonesian than Chinese. Bamboo and hollowed-wood drums. Some of the chanting here could have been Navajo, seriously ... or an Hopi chant.

Back to it:

It's been over a year since I wrote anything. It's been a year full of challenges and changes, and these caused me to wonder: why am I writing and publishing this? And: what should I write and publish?

As I jot this first note, I'm sitting in a hotel room in hot, hot, steamy Taipei. Life on the road getting a startup off the ground is NOT going to be the subject of this blog, but minor cultural notes, photographs, observations from the world of doing this - perhaps - will be.

 

Spring is on its way! A warm day, and trees at Concord's Great Meadows are nearly in bud! 

Una at Looe. Never mind that it's quite cold, she's got two of her favourite things: ice cream and a bag from a charity shop! 

Peter and Una enjoy a nice day out on Bodmin Moor ... to the ancient stone circle known as The Hurlers.
It's been a long, wet, cold winter. The ground is sodden, the visibility poor. Peter, now used to travels in Africa, is not all that happy with the weather. Una, on the other hand, seems not too fazed. 

February 12, 2006 ... and that's the State House dome gleaming through the trees. 

The wee street where we now live. Red brick houses (and sidewalks), gaslights, and snow. 

Picture of me mugging in front of a poster educating the mindful of all the tea (growing regions) in China. [The ever-exciting tea museum at Pinglin, Taiwan.] And, tea growing in Pinglin: both the flat area in front and the steep hillside are covered with little tea bushes.

The main temple in Dougga, viewed against a dark sky. A Tibetan stupa in an arid area, viewed from a cloudless sky.

In Dougga, the bizarrely-well preserved Roman city in northwest Tunisia, near the Algerian border:
Africus ... a huge circle marked out on the paving in an old square, denoting the various winds. Africus ... the hot wind. (The arc is the horizontal line running above the word africus)
(ip)siobhon(o ... a near-word created by the Latin run-on writing in an inscribed block in Dougga.
For both ... it's hard to see these as 1,800 years old, being so clearly written and well-preserved.

Mossy growths on beach on northern most tip of Taiwan island; sulfurous fumarole (great word ... means volcanic crack in the earth's crust where steam and sulfur come out) in Taiwan's Yangmingshan national park.

I know: no earthquakes, no tsunamis, no hurricanes. Really: we have nothing to complain about. Even so, this October: several cities in New England recorded their wettest month ever. EVER. Concord, New Hamster, got a 14.6-inch dousing; prior record was 10.7 inches, back in, o, 1937. Providence, Rhodie, luxuriated in 15.4 inches, way over its prior record of 12.7 inches, set in 1983. Manhattan, poor Dominic: 16.7 inches. (Half of that fell in three days.)

Then, before the month was out: snow.

Big sloppy wet flakes, lots of them, for several hours. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/10/30/snowstorm_packs_october_surprise/

Can I blame these on George Bush?
[a] Yes
[b] Sure, why not.

Last week, as we all know, Rosa Parks died. I never met the woman, who defied racial hatred at its heart and, through her quiet obduracy, helped enable many more people, and not just 'blacks', to sit in far more interesting places than bus seats. I don't know if she was a saintly woman as some cartoons depicted her. I'm happy that Congress honors her by placing her casket for viewing in the Senate: I'd go.

And then this. A full page ad in today's NYT (Sunday, p11, main section, New England final).

The page is dominated with a picture of a woman on a bus. Rosa Parks

The headline: "Never has a more quiet act of courage been heard so loudly by a nation".
Below: "On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, paid her fare and sat down. Her strength in refusing to give up her seat helped spark the civil rights movement and inspired a nation to change for the better. It's a single act of courage we honor with two simple words. Thank you."

That's it, its stark, well-written simplicity as good as any eulogy. And one more thing: far away from the text, is a tiny, subtle logo; concentric rings, the familiar logo of Target. BUT NOT the name of the company, which appears nowhere on this page (and there is no text anywhere else to make the point). And for this classy recognition of heroism's importance, commerce's insignificance, these small words to Target: thank you.