Brightwind: Meditations 

The Story of Stuff

A very meaningful and easy to understand 20-minute flash video (also available for download) about crisis of the materials economy.

WoW Insider

This is the site where I've been working for a while now, writing columns and blog posts about World of Warcraft. If you'd just like to read the articles I have written myself, you can click here.

Brightwind is back!

Brightwind returns today! For a long time I haven't been sure where to go with this site. Ever since my mother got cancer way back in 2005, I've had all sorts of ambiguous feelings about what I should do with my life and even more ambiguous feelings about how in the world I could write about it. But now, that ambiguity is just floating away like so many clouds; I've been learning so much, talking to really interesting people, and most importantly rejuvenating my spiritual life through a series of journeys, prayers and meditations. Some of this is very personal of course, but much of it is on subjects I think lots of people can understand and appreciate.

So from now on, I'm going to start sharing thoughts and pictures and whatever comes to mind more. I might do various updates or changes or whatnot, but really my main purpose is that I can keep in touch and share ideas with my friends scattered about the world, who can also leave comments and share their ideas and thoughts too!

The few minutes you spend here on Brightwind should be very bright indeed, I hope, though not necessarily very windy.

Site Currently Half-line.

Thank you for visiting Brightwind. Please be patient this week while the site undergoes changes according to the new management.

You know what? What do you know? hmmm....

A strange thing has happened! I’ve suddenly realized why I haven’t updated this website since February.

I’ve changed.

That’s to say: the things that have happened to me, the questions I’ve asked, and the truths I’ve been exploring in my life this year have made me understand that the previous Brightwind no longer fits my mould. I have to reframe this website’s management and organization to do things in a rather different way.

So. It is with some amount of mixed sadness and relief that I tentatively announce to the thronging millions who have been checking my website for the last 11 months each and every day that David Bowers will no longer write for Brightwind. Instead it will be taken over by a small cast of fictional characters (created, scripted, and copyrighted by a mysterious group of 1 to 10 people and/or demi gods).

May your life, dear reader, be eternally blessed with interesting questions.

another change of direction...

I haven’t known how to say this, so I haven’t said anything for a long time. I suppose I still don’t know how to say this, but I should really say something… My fear is that I’m going to sound depressed and upset and I’m going to make other people feel that way as well, so let me state for the record that I am not depressed at the time of writing this entry. Life just threw another curve-ball, that’s all.

I was in China just about a month ago. I had a great time in Macau in February, saw lots of great friends, even met up with a few great friends in Nanjing and Shanghai in the end of February and the beginning of March. And then I got a phone call from my family back in the States saying that my mother was in the hospital.

Turned out that she had a brain tumor, and that the surgery would take quite some time for her to recover from, and that I was needed back in Colorado Springs, Colorado to help take care of her during the next few months. Of course when she told me this I was more than happy to come help my mother! Who wouldn’t?

So the long and the short of it is that I’m not in China anymore. I’m deeply sorry to all my Chinese friends that I missed while I was there for about two weeks. I swear I miss you even more now. Of course I’m very happy to be here with my mother, and I’m grateful for the chance to help her out, but I won’t pretend that my heart doesn’t cry out with longing to return to China, be with my friends, and continue my graduate studies.

Mom and her doctors and everybody are all hoping that I’ll be able to come back to China in September. I think I’ll wait a little while before thinking about it too much. I hate it when I get my hopes up for something and then I have to change plans again. That’s been happening a lot over the last few years, so I’m taking a break from plans of any sort as much as I can.

So that’s the latest on my whereabouts and current condition and all. If you’re concerned about my mom, you can find out the latest on her health at her own personal website: nancybowers.com/updates

Please keep her (and me too, while you’re at it) in your prayers, if you’re the praying sort. If you don’t pray, you could always just send us loads of money instead…

Ha ha… just joking. I know that’s not very funny, but hey… one ought not to be serious all the time. God loves laughter, you know…

The Bright Wind Blows...

My time in America has been fulfilling and good for me, but I've been learning that it's not the place I need to be right now. On one hand, coming back here was like a kick in the face, while on the other, it was like a sweet honey.

For a long time, I had been planning to spend a long time in China - maybe my whole life - learning about the Chinese, living among them, becoming friends with them, and sharing my life with them. This has always exhilarated me -- from every word I breathed in the Chinese language, to every night I spent in a Chinese bed, I knew that my life was growing and expanding in ways I could not predict.

But some things tempted me to come back to America, and to find out if maybe it wouldn't be better for me to stay here for a while. Suffice it to say that even though I always intended to go back to China, I considered being here for a year or so. Then, those temptations which had lured me here suddenly became unhealthy for me and they left me wondering what I should do. I felt ashamed that I had even left China in the first place, when it had been such a great home for me and held so much promise, and I thought maybe I needed to stay here for a while, just in order to become worthy of going back.

But things don't work that way. Worthiness doesn't come from outward measurements: degrees from western universities, or years of experience in some profession. Somehow I realized that if I'm going to be worthy to go back to China, I have to embrace the worthiness I was born with.

You see, I know so many people there in China, who are to me like stars shining in the sky of humility and friendliness. I hear some foreigners complain about problems they have with Chinese people, but somehow I think that they live in a different China from the one I have known for 4 years. Truly, the Chinese friends I am blessed with make me feel awed. They are so different from me, and yet, in every way that counts, not different at all. None of these dear people ever looked at me and thought I was not worthy.

For me, the word I made up for this website, "brightwind," has taken on a real meaning. It is that mysterious wind which blows you where you need to be in life. It may blow you onto a certain path, then off it, then on it again, but all the time it is blowing you in the right direction. It is the force behind "Yuan Fen," as the Chinese love to call it -- the way people come into your life just when you need them, and the way you come into their lives, just when they need you.

This brightwind whispered in my ear that China was not waiting for me to be worthy. The reality was something else. When you hear the brightwind calling you, soothing your heart, you can't really put into words the message you hear. But suddenly, it makes you feel warm and content with your life as it is, with the plans as they were before you tried to fix them -- unbroken, whole, and worthy.

I hold in my hands a plane ticket to Nanjing, arriving February 26. (Happy New Year)

The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

Probably the most noticeable change since the last time I lived in the U.S. is the heavily charged environment of public fear. The experience of 9/11 has so traumatized the country of my birth, that it leaves many Americans in the constant fear that something like this could happen again. Usually this fear rides at a low level of consciousness; it still allows us to go to work, make stupid jokes, and go to sleep at night, but it influences the world of public thinking and decision-making so much that hardly any topic is covered in the news which does not betray some kind of fear motivating its discussion.

In this election season, the fear seems to be projected less onto various terrorist organizations and more onto whichever presidential candidate one dislikes most. The sense is that if that politician you dislike is elected then the country is in real danger, and this feeling is stronger now than in any other election I can remember in my life.

If I didn’t know better, my tendency would be to become deeply afraid of the way the media corporations continually reinforce this fear in American society. I often look around me and notice varying ways in which some individuals and organizations bend this fear to their advantage. It would appear that they are inflaming this fear in order to achieve multiple ends, from improving their ratings to influencing the election.

But I do know better. Having been away for so long, I can sense that my own fear is likely a response to the public fear all around me rubbing off on me too. Whether the American media really is horribly corrupt or not, my being afraid of it doesn’t do anyone any good. I must work hard not to be afraid of that, or other negative possibilities. While each part of the American community seems more and more eager to blame a certain group or segment of society for all the horrible things that could happen to us in the future, I would like to work hard not to succumb to the need to blame others that fear inspires.

At times like this, each person has a choice to make: whether to be a force for unity and agreement between individuals and groups around you, or to be a force for disunity and attacking whichever group you direct your fear at most. To feel afraid is natural, but when we allow that fear to control our actions, we must take it as a sign that we all have a lot of growing up to do—both on our own and as a society.

A Stranger in a Familiar Land

I've been back in the United States for a couple weeks now, and I'm surprised how much is the same, and how much is different. I had been reading, during my time in China, about how America has been changing during the four years that I've been away, but now that I'm planning to be here for a year or two, experiencing these changes for myself is quite different.

When I last lived in the U.S. four years ago, America seemed to enjoy unparalleled prosperity, while the whole world basked in its glow. Americans complained about many things of course, but generally we took for granted an overall optimism that things would only keep on getting better for us. I imagined the most upsetting element of American culture to be a widespread materialism, combined with overblown concern with celebrities and various petty issues of the day. I had a sense that our biggest problems in the future would continue to lie with the burdens and excesses of being the world's most well-to-do society

I had just graduated from college, and I wanted to explore a new life in the land on the other side of the world. I was also eager to get away from a country that understood little of the disheartening living conditions that many other people are living in. When I left, war seemed like a far away thing from history.

But the times have changed. I think in the coming weeks, it would be useful for me, and for you too, I hope, to try to process these changes that have taken place in my homeland, as well as changes in my own life that have taken place during the same period of time.

More New Directions

This last month and a half have reordered so many things in my life. I hope you will pardon my absence. Some people say that change is hard, and while that’s true, I feel that my particular changes this time are very good indeed.

I would rather not say directly what all the changes in my life have been, yet. You’ll know that soon enough anyway. It will affect this website, but as to exactly how, I’d like to let that be a surprise for later.

The one thing I should say now is that I’m planning to go back to America for an extended trip of more than a year. I’m currently getting ready to go now, and I expect I should be there in about a month. During my first month or two in the States, I plan to dedicate a significant amount of time to making this site work the way I want it to. Then during the months after that, I hope to mainly just write new content for it, without working too much on the underlying code.

I like surprises, so I’m going to let you wonder for a while what Brightwind will become. I myself am eager to discover more about that as I go, anyway. I may end up even more surprised than you! Whatever happens to me in my life, and however Brightwind evolves as a website, getting there will be a gradual journey, so I hope that you’ll be patient with me as I work at it. Thank you for being here all this time so far!

New Directions

Brightwind has been running for several months now, and it’s given me a lot of chance to think about what it could become in the future. I’ve tried posting everything from inspiring essays to film reviews, and from short stories to photo galleries. All this experimenting has given me a better sense of the kind of thing I like to write, draw, photograph and so on.

In terms of the site management, I was going strong with the Typepad system for a while, and just when I was getting into its rhythym, the Typepad service became inaccessible from China and I was forced to move over to a new provider and a new blogging engine. I chose Expression Engine, even though it was expensive for me, because it seemed to have the widest potential for growth. With it, I could make Brightwind into any kind of website I might want to have.

But this added flexibility and power, combined with a wider appreciation for what I really want to accomplish here, creates a much larger work load! The current design is not flexible enough to handle everything I want to do, so basically I need to work out something totally new.

Here’s the list of ideas I’ve thought through concerning ways Brightwind’s content might develop:

1. My original motivation for developing Brightwind was to have a space to share some different views about things going on in the world, as well as issues that other people like me might be dealing with. I’ve been thinking for 10 years or so about everything from love to education, from religion to world peace, and it might be useful to others if I wrote some of these ideas down. Also, since I graduated with a major in religious studies from Vassar College, it would be nice to apply some of the things I got out of my formal education.

   To me, the name “Brightwind” itself refers to a stream of beauty and constructive thinking flowing between the minds of human beings, and it was with the hope of contributing something to this stream that I started up this website in the first place.

   Up to now however, I’ve been a little timid in my writing about such issues, and I think it would be better to step up and speak more about them.

2. I’ve started a hobby in photography and have a number of neat photographs of my travels in China, coupled with little observations about living here. Sometimes little things are the most interesting memories, and it would be nice to have an outlet for sharing them.

3. In addition, web design itself has become an increasingly important part of my life. I read all the time about it and keep thinking about how to incorporate new techniques into Brightwind. Some websites that really inspire me are whitespace for its approach to content arrangement, and the CSS Zen Garden, for its variety of approaches to beauty. There are many others, including sites like So Very Posh, with it’s cool calendar setup on the side, with one feature or another that I’d also like to integrate into Brightwind at some point.

4. Finally, and possibly more importantly, I’ve been working on my dream of writing children’s books and other picture stories, and it has occurred to me that it might not be a bad idea to start a webcomic. Being that I’m hoping to make my career with picture stories of one sort or another, for me not to do something creative and cartoony for you to enjoy seems wrong somehow, like a person who dreams of being a writer, reads books on writing, buys fancy pens and word processors — all without laying a single word on the page. I’m a bit better than that, though. I have a good deal of creative ideas and sketches (in some cases I’ve even planned out huge epic stories), but I still lack finished products. This problem deserves to be remedied.

So then the issue here, is how do I fit all these different kinds of content onto one website? Should they all be separate sub-domains of Brightwind.org (such as china.brightiwind.org and comics.brightwind.org)? Or should they all be woven into one stream somehow? Furthermore, since Expression Engine makes it very easy for a website like mine to maintain memberships, it would be possible for me to create methods by which any of you might also write content for Brightwind. I could move the comments you add to my work into a much more prominent position as whitespace has done (although I would need many more people to visit Brightwind and comment more often for that to work!). I could also set up means for any of you to register as a member at Brightwind and start writing content for in a section of your own. What would you write about? How would it fit into the themes of the site as a whole?

The best approach I can think of so far is to separate out all this content into different sections and then, perhaps, provide one home page with much of it laid out like a newspaper or something. It’s easy to write out that idea of course, but actually doing it is a big effort! Doing it really well is an even bigger effort.

And how many people are really reading this site anyway? This is the question that anyone who maintains a personal website must address at one point. More precisely, the essence of the question in the weblogger’s heart is twofold: “Why do all this work if only my mom and dad and a few friends of mine are going to come look at it?” and “Will I ever break out one day and reach lots of people?” There are some people out there who get hundreds or thousands of readers every day, but up to now, Brightwind has not been one of them.

But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be. I’ve done some reading on this issue, and it seems that the most important thing to keep in mind when you’re producing some kind of content for the internet, is that you should really put your heart into making it as useful, entertaining, and inspiring as it can be. Most everyone wants to be inspired, entertained, and get useful ideas. “If you build it, they will come”, so to speak. And even if only a few people visit Brightwind, and yet come away with some useful gifts of knowledge or inspiration, then a great deal of effort will have been worthwhile.

Chessmaster

This man was playing chess, as if for the millionth time. I saw him one day, when some friends of mine and I stumbled upon a beautiful garden in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. There were a pagoda, a tea shop, and lots of old people sitting around, filling up their time with hobbies.

I walked around with my camera looking for interesting things to photograph, and I saw this man’s wrinkles, his cigarette, and most importantly, the attention he devoted to his game.

Chinese Chess is different from its western variety in a number of ways. Some say that it’s more subtle. I certainly find that it’s easier to find yourself on the losing side without knowing how or why you got there, but maybe that’s just because I’m not very good at it.

In any case, I politely asked this man if he would mind my taking his picture. He didn’t respond. I asked him again, but all I got was something like a shrug that seemed to indicate contempt. Another man, younger than this player, although by no means “young,” who was apparently just watching the game, took notice of me, smiled, and gestured for me to go ahead and take my picture. If he hadn’t done that, I think I would have considered myself blown off and walked away.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of Chinese Chess, a magical square of hypnosis into which old men can fall when they desire to escape from the world, its young people, and its digital cameras. It seemed to have developed in this man the power of concentration to such a degree that I was reduced to little more than a fly.

Or maybe he was just in a bad mood. Maybe he was deaf. In any case, his attitude surprised me, but also left me feeling like I shouldn’t be surprised, as if I had just started a game with him and found myself at a sudden disadvantage.

Even though one part of me felt as if I had been treated rudely, another part of me felt that there was something noble about him and his game. Or perhaps the nobility really came from the observing man at his side, who was kind enough to be polite to me on this man’s behalf.

Living in China

an excellent and frequently updated collection of views about China

Old Woman, New World

This is my favorite photo out of the 500 or so that I took last winter in Yunnan. It’s not the most beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but it has a symbolic meaning to it that I was extremely lucky to catch. I was just walking down the street with my camera open, and as I saw this lady, I stealthily turned to snap a picture from my stomach-height as she walked by.

The woman clings to the past. The future is already here, and she seems almost ill and dizzy in a new world of shopping complexes and brand-name clothes. All of the modern age is caught up in this one blurry moment, and everything is so unclear to her. She clings to the hand of her grandson, who laughs and plays in a world he can understand but she cannot.

But she is the one with the keys to this new world dangling around her neck.

Taking Humble Steps

As long as I don’t understand why I’m behaving in a certain way, I tend to feel guilty about it. I’ve felt guilty for not updating as often as I have wanted to in the last few weeks. Thinking about why this happens sometimes, I can of course blame it on being occupied with various things, but really I think it comes down to expecting too much of myself. I have tried to learn a lot about writing and web-design, and I have a number of goals in both of these fields that I’m still far from attaining. I have a pretty clear idea of what I like in good writing, but I often feel that I’m not in the right mood—too tired, too sick, too busy, or whatever—to put down writing that lives up to my own standards.

But the real mistake here is to let that stop me from trying—even with just a few words at a time. I need to remember, as many people do, that real progress comes about mainly through the little steps we take on the path towards our goals. The steps that count most are the ones that no one congratulates us for, when we tripped up a little or even just accomplished some small success. Countless little steps cover far more distances than great marathons ever will.

Whatever it is that may be taking place in my life or in the world around me, there is invariably something beautiful there waiting to be discovered… but the approach to that beauty requires humble steps, patient walking, and a steadfast resolution not to let expectations get in the way.

Old Man Tree

Many trees in the Forbidden City, and elsewhere in Beijing’s historic sites, are so old and weak that they need to be supported by these big green crutches. This one looks like an old man trying to bend over without falling over. It’s pitiful, and beautiful, too, in an old and gnarly kind of way.

It reminds me of the dryads, tree spirits of Greek myth. Even though dryads were usually young and female, they had a vulnerability that is still here in this old tree.

In most cases, it would be the old trees that sacrifice themselves for us, in the form of paper, lumber, or a host of other purposes. Tourism is a force, however, that makes us bend over backwards to protect the few trees that tourists will see. Vast forests people don’t see—or more particularly, don’t spend money to see—are also something people rarely spend money to protect.

The Shanghai Taxi/Shopping Problem

The thing about Shanghai is that it’s not quite like what you’d expect China to be. Standing on the pedestrian overpass, you see just how much light there is down there in the intersection and you wonder how China got to be this way. Major shopping centers, such as this one, feel like the beating heart of the city. This is where thousands of young people come each day to hang out, watch movies, eat pizza hut and buy new computers. You could buy an iPod here, eat some French-style vegetarian food, and then go shopping for underwear all without breaking a sweat—if you wanted to, of course.

People are everywhere in places like this, and getting a taxi feels a bit like cutthroat competition at best—if you wait in some sort of respectable line, you’ll never get where you want to go. The first time I tried to get a taxi in this intersection, I waited through about 40 minutes of frustration before a kindly Chinese gentleman finally noticed my plight and had pity on me. Later on, I got good enough at it so that I can go to the right place, cut some other people off, and get in my taxi like an old pro.

The only thing is: I still feel guilty about it. A real Shanghai pro would be past that.

This feeling represents the contradiction that Shanghai presents us with: modern China versus traditional China in all the little aspects of life. Somehow the proper Chinese gentlemanly spirit would be to look around you and see if there’s anyone who needs help getting a taxi, especially a foreigner, a mother, or an elderly person, and then assist them to get one. Even in a crowd, a Chinese gentleman would do that. Having to play along with the regular Shanghai big-city-rules feels very much like going against the civilized rules of greater China.

Is China growing to encompass new things, like shopping megacomplexes and busy city ethics, or does embracing such new concepts mean betraying the values that have always made China what it is?

Gateway at the Great Wall

The beauty of China is ancient and glorious, yet everywhere you go, you can see the marks of modern life scratched onto its ancient surface. On the sides of this doorway, for example, you can see the names of various Chinese tourists who have been to that spot over the years.

Any moment now, you may also see someone walk up from the stairway just below the scene you’re trying to capture here, right into the field of view of your photograph. They know that by the time they’ve seen you, they’ve already gotten in your way, so rather than back down and wait for you to take your master photo, they just keep on coming. Sometimes it seems that there are hordes of tourists coming in waves upon waves, and you’ll never get your scenic photograph.

Drawing the lesson from missed opportunities, we often say “carpe diem” or “seize the day.” At a Chinese tourist attraction, however, armed with your camera, the most important principle is “seize the instant, or be prepared to wait an hour for another one.”

What's This?

Some things look rather alien when you see them close up. I took this photo at my friend’s house when he was so kind as to let my mom and I stay there during our travels last winter. You’ll find it in a kitchen.

What happens when you tell a lie?

Examining virtues from a practical point of view.

McGurk-effect

A weird audio-visual illusion. Are you hearing the same sound that you’re seeing? (thanks: firda)

How Steep It Is

In China they have a saying that: “If you don’t make it to the Great Wall, you aren’t really a good man.” I always chuckle when I think of that because I think “wow, women really got it made!” but I have to admit that the intention of the saying is that the Great Wall is not only a great sight that you must see—it is a challenge to overcome.

You have very likely heard many things about the great wall: that it is the only man-and-woman-made thing which can be seen from space (which it isn’t, actually), that David Copperfield walked through it one night (which he obviously couldn’t have really done), and that people periodically try to soar over it in a non-aerial vehicle (sometimes with unfortunate results.)

But one thing that is very difficult to understand, even when you see pictures of the great wall, is just How-Steep-It-Is. When you take the average picture up or down the great wall, you see that it is steep indeed, but you don’t really get the proper feeling of vertigo that you have in real life, as if you’ve come to a great precipice and the wind might just push you to your death at the bottom of the stairs.

This photo tries to capture something of that feeling. It’s about the relationship of the stairs to the mountains and trees behind them. You have to imagine how looking down to the left actually feels more dangerous than peering over that edge at the needle-like trees far below.

Wonderful Hope

These last few days I caught a bad head cold, which then progressed, for various reasons, into worse things. Of course, when you are sick, you can’t think of many things, and updating a website seems like a monumental task. Yet I’ve seen other websites’ authors deal with sickness bravely, with such words as “sick now… update later,” or “uggh! I hate being sick! can’t think straight…” But somehow I felt that writing such a thing for Brightwind wouldn’t be right. What’s the deeper meaning behind “uggh”? How is it relevant to you, my dear reader, that I am sick, except as an excuse for not updating Brightwind, and perhaps a plea for sympathy?

Anyway, my particular character is not to bother you with some aspect of my life unless it contains some deeper meaning or is particularly relevant to major things going on with my website (such as the recent redesign).

But then, just as I was getting to feel better today, I realized that something rather interesting is going on here. I no longer have a fever, and my thoughts are once again liberated (although still a bit slower than usual). My headache on the other hand, has merely gotten worse. All day now it’s been pounding around in my head.

But I’m happy about it! Relative to yesterday, today is so much better! My appetite has returned, I can walk around short distances without feeling dizzy! I’m getting all excited about little things like drinking a lot of water and juice and eating a lot of fruits.

And most of all, I have this wonderful hope to look forward to, that my health can only get better I go on taking my medicine and resting as much as I can. It’s amazing how great it feels to be pretty sick after having just been really sick. It feels almost like being healthy again, but maybe even better, because I know that real health is on it’s way.

Glorious Blue

Once again, Brightwind is blessed with a suitable design. I am pleased. I can rest…

But first let me share: one of the things I have learned from designing my own websites is that you have to be very patient with your computer. Sometimes you come up against strange problems, where the code you’ve written works fine in a reasonable web browser, but when you load it up in the browser most people use, then things look inexplicably unlike what you intended.

You could, of course, just write code with only that most popular browser in mind, but then it would look strange in all the other browsers. You have to remember that many people use an alternative operating system, and the most common browser, that is the version with most of the problems, is only available on windows. To compensate for this, most of the alternative systems and browsers try to adhere to a set of web page coding standards, so that people like me just have to write one set of code and can feel relatively confident that most of it will look the same no matter what system someone is using.

Of course, web pages can be extremely complicated, and various systems’ web browsers have bugs, so things don’t always work out like you would have hoped. But the fact that they make a strong effort to adhere to these standards goes a long way to make the web designer’s life easier. Unfortunately, Microsoft has neglected to update their Internet Explorer at the same speed as other systems’ browsers, so the poor program you are most likely to be using has many problems that have been lingering around for years. If you try to design according to these standards I mentioned, Internet Explorer quickly begins to feel like the old, broken-down car you have to take to work everyday. You spend more time fixing problems with it than actually using it. (If you’re using a windows computer, by the way, fear not—other, much better browsers are available to you, and offer you many more interesting features too.)

So anyway, there I am, studying the code for hours, trying to figure out why Internet Explorer doesn’t like it. Finally, at three in the morning, I have to give up for the night and try to sleep even though I have unfinished problems to solve. I hate that feeling—trying to sleep with unfinished creative work to do.

But then in the morning, I look at it again, and new ideas come to me. I see new possibilities that were not there the night before. It seems like just a few little tweaks and the whole thing starts to look okay no matter which browser I use.

So one moral of this story is that more and more people can use better browsers and allow a better experience both for themselves and for web designers.

And the other moral is that being patient and giving yourself all the time you need to work something out is really the fastest way to do it. Banging your head against problems late into the night leaves you with a sore head and the same amount of problems to solve in the morning. Letting it be for a while saves you both the headache and the lack of sleep.

The Writer's Almanac

a daily fountain of inspiration to anyone who enjoys or creates literature.

Working on a Redesign

I have been using a lot of my free time over the last two weeks developing a new design to celebrate Brightwind’s transfer over to a new hosting service and a new weblog publishing system. I struggled for a long time before finally finding something I was happy with. You can see an image of what the design will hopefully look like when it’s finished here.

Right now I’m in the processes of slowly modifying the site piece by piece so that the new design will gradually fall into place. I’ve already made some modifications, such as removing the old image behind the title, and I’ll be putting in the new one soon. Hopefully the new design will be ready in a few days.

Excellence

I learned something about myself yesterday, and maybe something about human nature, too: putting your heart into something is what makes it meaningful to you.

As you already know, I have recently become a graduate student at Nanjing Arts Institute, and so far I’m enjoying it tremendously. Whenever I go there, I feel as though I’m soaking in a special kind of air, breathing in creativity along with oxygen, nitrogen and whatever else. It’s a place specially created for developing artistic talent, skill and inspiration—and it does just that.

I found that as I went there to study and absorb all those new experiences more, teaching at my Chinese high school began to seem older and less interesting. When I came back from my most recent trip, teaching English seemed almost unbearable, and I was filled with a desire to quit as soon as possible.

Then I realized that the high school itself hadn’t changed at all; my attitude towards it had. I let myself begin to think of it as an “old” thing and stopped wanting to try hard at it. In fact it was trying hard to be a good teacher all this time which had made it interesting in the first place. If I didn’t put any heart into this or any other part of my life, that part would certainly deteriorate into meaninglessness.

So now the challenge is to look at whatever I do with the knowledge that somehow just doing my best at whatever it is can really give it a life that it would never have had on its own. This website, for example, can only begin to transcend itself and become something more than just kilobytes on a hard drive when its author spends something of his heart on it, and uses some special love in the writing, a magic which belongs to his soul alone.

Perhaps this magic is a natural love of excellence itself. It can make any daily activity we undertake worthwhile and holy to us. Even if something seems to be meaningless at first, the act of doing our best at it can lift it into the realm of sacred work.

With that spirit, I ought to clean my apartment!

The Meatrix

A flash animation about where your meat comes from.

chrisruzin.net

has lots of neat ideas, and also uses expression engine, just like me.

World Changing

a site about changing the world

Mostly Updated

Okay, I think that the site is basically about ready. I have fixed a number of the major problems, such as broken links and so on. In the coming week, I’ll still have to upload all the old pictures and adjust the coding behind a number of old entries, but overall, this new site is pretty much ready to go.

I’ve got something of new design, and I would very much like to hear your ideas about it. It should be a little faster than the old design, because it’s lighter on images, but it’s also got more simple white space. Did you like the look of the site as it was a couple weeks ago better? Those of you outside China should be able to access the old site at this address, in case you’d like to compare. If you do prefer the old one, I think I should be able to change it back again. I’d very much like to see what you think. Please leave comments if you have an opinion.

As far as plans for the future are concerned, I plan to open a section for image galleries once the plugin for that is released by pmachine (again, for visitors outside China, the old galleries are still available). I may also open another section for stories, like storysphere on the old site.

First Entry on the New Site

Welcome to the future of Brightwind—on a brand new server, and with brand new software! For the time being, the site is really raw, but I got all the old entries imported alright. Now I need to work on changing the colors and the look of the site, as well as getting the pictures uploaded and so on… God willing everything will come fast. I’ll be working on it a lot over the weekend.

Bleeding Edge

Here it is, the bleeding edge new version of Brightwind (also accessible from China), hosted on a different server and powered by a different weblogging engine. Right now, it’s very raw (and pink, too), but I’m just so excited and I want to let you know that Brightwind is still alive and kicking, and before long it will be restored to all it’s blueness, with all or most of it’s current entries imported over to the new system. Sooner or later here, when you go to http://www.brightwind.org, you’ll go to those servers there, and not to this one. You’ll be able to see the difference. That system is the better one!

Stay with me here… I’ll be trying to get everything ready over the weekend, but I’m really not sure how much work will be involved. Already, I’ve found some parts of the migrating process confusing and strange, but we’ll see how things go.

In the mean time, I went and got myself a .Mac account, and I put up some new photos there. It’s really simple and temporary, but it works. Check it out by clicking here.

Beautiful Homework

Another big news is that I’ve officially signed up to get an MFA in graphic design from Nanjing Arts Institute (where I happen to be writing this evening). My dream is write my own stories and illustrate them. As it is, I’ve been drawing pictures of my story ideas for years and years, but I never really thought that I could make a living at it. Anyway, I think I can have a chance at it if I get the skills I need to make it happen. And with the skills I do on the road to this goal, maybe I’ll be able to do some professional photography and other art as well! (The photograph associated with tonight’s post was an experiment in how close I can get to the flame without burning my camera—Thank God I still don’t know. Imagine how lucky I would be, though, if someone actually paid me for this!)

Today I just talked to my professor here, and I got my first real homework assignment! I am to work on a logo for a student of mine, and also design a new introduction to myself on this website. I need to try to use style as much as content to give you the kind of impression of me that I would like you to have.

For a long time, I always thought that a web page that was just about me would be a “vanity page,” a fruit of my own self-love and an attempt to show the world how great I was. But now, my professor has helped me understand it as something like an expanded electronic business card on the web. It’s as much a service to all of you out there as it is to myself, in that it helps you to understand what this particular person is all about as he offers his writings and photos to you in this manner.

Not only that, but it’s homework, too! How wonderful art school is!

Back in Business

I haven’t written for Brightwind for over a month. In the meantime, a group of American students from my old high school came for a school-sponsored trip to China. The school here where I teach hosted them for a while, and during that time, they met with Chinese students here, danced, played and talked with them, and also visited nearby cities in the daytime. After about five days there, I took them on another adventure to Beijing. We saw the Great Wall, the Forbidden City (which is hardly forbidden anymore), the Ming Tombs, the Summer Palace, the Beijing Opera, and some Chinese Acrobatics.

I was lucky that the two teachers, husband and wife, that came with the students to China both happened to be artists. The man was my art teacher when I went to school there almost 10 years ago. Both of them gave me lots of really neat tips on my photography, and I feel much inspired from meeting them.

The students also proved to be fascinating people. They were very mature, and they embraced their new experiences with open-minded enthusiasm. I’m very proud to have attended the same school as them.

I have much more news to share, but I will save it for my next entry, which, now that I have a bit more time, will be coming much faster than this one has.

Walking

All you have to be is what you are—not the you that you were in that present moment which has just escaped and fallen into the past, nor the you that will be a long time from now. Very soon, you will have a chance to be the you that you can become just now. That is all you have to be.

The human being is a walking creature. We walk into times of joy and then walk out of them again, but if we keep our feet moving as straightly and we can, each small inch of time brings us a little bit closer to infinity.

Your Wings

During the vacation I just spent with my mother, so many of the veils over my understanding have disappeared, and the eyes of my soul feel as if they can see more clearly. Of course, every advance in one’s own understanding reveals more clearly that vast oceans of mysteries lie beyond one’s grasp, but there are moments of joy that come with it as well, which somehow make things seem as if all is right with the world. It lasts this way for a while, until the time comes for you to pass some major new test, and acquire powers and knowledge you didn’t know you wanted. Confusion is a necessary ingredient in the stew of spiritual growth, but you never know that until the spiritual meal of the day is finished and ready to enjoy.

Anyway, one day I was talking with my mother about a number of things, many related to my early childhood, and I realized that I had gone through a large part of my life always wishing to serve others on the quest that they had rather than to take up my own. I had a feeling that I was destined to be the father of someone important, remembered as something like a footnote, treated only in the introduction of that person, as a background to their lives.

Today I can put that notion at ease more easily than before. Whatever or whoever my children, or friends, or anyone else in my heart will choose to be is very much up to them. But my choice is the one which is up to me. Each of us has only our own life to live, and a major part of that life is to take up the challenge of making one’s own special contribution to the world. No one else would ever think to do the things you can do, in the way you can do them, simply because they are not you, and they have other tasks of their own to fulfill, other potential they must unfold.

As beautiful as others are, whether they fly high above you or below, there’s no one else with those wings at your side, and there’s no one else who can fly with them.

One Month, Two New Years

The fireworks burst all around, rising up between the apartment buildings and all around them, firecrackers booming into the earliest hours of the morning. The land where fireworks were invented has little fear of using them to full effect when the occasion calls for it, and for centuries, there has been no greater occasion than that of the Spring Festival.

For Chinese, the Spring Festival actually comes in the winter, but it signalizes that spring is coming. Moreover, according to the traditional Chinese Lunar calendar, the new year starts today. So Chinese first celebrate the international new year, wishing all their friends a happy new year, lots of good luck, all the best things in life, happiness everyday, and so on, and then about a month later, they wish everyone the same thing again for the more important Chinese version of the same holiday.

As I begin writing this, it’s already 1:30 in the morning, and the fireworks are still going. They’re much less than the cacophony of the midnight hour, but it’s not unlikely that if you were sitting here at this moment, looking out of any given window in a Chinese city, you might be able to see more fireworks too.

But maybe this is almost the last of it. Maybe Shanghai is ready to sleep now, and begin living the new year it has just celebrated. There are just a few drunken fireworks now, as if straggling home from a big party, totally unwilling to let it end for real, still singing on the road when everyone else has gone to sleep.

Pandora's Hope

In a previous entry, I wrote about how rare it is that someone really finds “true love” in this world. For a long time, I had cherished the idea that I might be able to create a truly happy and successful family, but after some disappointing experiences, I began to believe that I had failed. I seemed to be, like so many other people, condemned to live my life in solitude, or at best, in a pale shadow of my impossibly idealistic dream.

My dear mother took issue with that. In an email, she wrote to me:

Minor criticism: I wished that the article on marriage would have been more upbeat. There are some good things about being single.

At first, I wanted to respond to her that I didn’t feel upbeat about marriage at the time I wrote that article, and how could I have written something that I didn’t feel? But then I started to think that my negative attitude was the fruit of a belief that, for whatever reason, I was chosen to suffer in this life, to have my dreams dashed to the ground instead of fulfilled. It seemed impossible that things could have happened as they did if this were not true.

But then I happened upon a very special film in a local DVD store, and it started to make me think again, about the great stories that people have always told and remembered through the ages. How many of them ended with the hero realizing that he was simply chosen to fail and suffer in this life? How many of them allowed our hopes to die? Nearly each story which lasts in our hearts is a Pandora’s Box of turns and disasters, most of them far worse than anything I have known. And in so many of them, the main characters feel exactly the same things that I have felt, and for a moment, they too lose sight of what dreams they know are still worth holding on to.

In the end, that may be the purpose of stories—all of them must contain tension and conflict, or else our hearts will not acknowledge them as true or interesting. Our very lives are about resolving the tensions and conflicts we detest so much, and we require that a story bring out in us a new knowledge or a new faith in our power to be the heroes that our lives require us to be.

Because, while the characters of our favorite stories may be up against all the forces of evil combined, their journeys are just reflections of our own, blown up bigger for us to understand and relate to in a new way. Might it not be heroic to keep on believing in the possibility of love and happy family life—while at the same time appreciating the beauty of being single? In some ways, we are always alone—in our secret thoughts, and in the dreams that even we forget upon waking in the morning. Yet in so many ways, it is only through the others, whom we dare to allow into our lives and hearts, that we learn to make sense of who we are, and come to understand what being alone in a healthy way really means.

We began the journey of life at our mothers’ breasts, drinking on the milk of dependence. Slowly, we have learned to be individuals. And yet we must transcend even that independence in order to become interdependent on those whom we love. In that glorious adventure of relying on others as well as ourselves, hope is indeed a most valuable thing.

Imagine

Ever since the turn of the millennium, each New Year’s Day has felt like a leap into the future. Here it is: January 7, 2004— already seven days into the third year since 2001: A Space Odyssey became alternate history rather than a possible future. We still have no monoliths, aliens, or crazy space stuff. There’s plenty of crazy people stuff though—but we’ve been living with our own craziness for so many centuries that now it seems almost normal.

As you already know, I’ve enjoyed science fiction since I was a kid. It’s filled with imagination, creativity, and it has often been the spark that pushes real science in new and interesting directions. It discusses problematic issues of technology and philosophy before they even become real issues. For example, when the news first started talking about the cloning controversy, many people familiar with science fiction felt like they’ve been down that road already, and long ago formed an educated opinion about cloning, wether for or against it.

In many ways, it is just as important to look into our future as it is to look into our past. Making sense of history has always been a way to make sense of ourselves, and learning where we’ve been, it is said, can tell us the most about where we are going. Yet it is the art of imagination that actually dares to directly ask the question of what we are going to do with our future, and it’s myriad answers provide us with a myriad possibilities to dream of.

Christmas Changes

The history of Christmas has been something like the “telephone game” we played as children, whispering a sentence from ear to ear and finally ending up with something quite different at the end of the line. Millennia before Christ was even born, people had already been celebrating the winter solstice in late December, as the long nights finally started getting shorter and warmth began to return to the world. The Romans, for example, celebrated this as a tribute to Saturn, the god of agriculture.

Later, when the leaders of the church decided to celebrate the birth of Jesus for the first time (more than three hundred years after the fact), they decided to hold it very close to the date of the Roman “Saturnalia Festival”. Yet while “Christianity had, for the most part, replaced pagan religion” by the Middle Ages, the original form for celebrating Christmas remained very much the same:

“On Christmas, believers attended church, then celebrated raucously in a drunken, carnival-like atmosphere similar to today’s Mardi Gras… The poor would go to the houses of the rich and demand their best food and drink. If owners failed to comply, their visitors would most likely terrorize them with mischief. Christmas became the time of year when the upper classes could repay their real or imagined “debt” to society by entertaining less fortunate citizens¹”

In fact, the modern form of Christmas (in the spirit of Silent Night) was very much an invention of the American upper class in the mid-nineteenth century. It sought to put out the raucousness of the event and prevent additional “Christmas riots”.

Now that another hundred years have gone by, the winter solstice is no longer immediately relevant to modern life and the old form of celebration is well forgotten. Yet America’s economic growth spurt of the twentieth century has consolidated another change: the commemoration of the birth of Christ has become the most significant incentive to go shopping that mankind has ever known. A culture has sprung up where gift-giving (and lots of it) is both a pivotal way to show your love for friends and family as well as a massive influx of fuel to the international money machine².

Here in China, the youth may give each other small gifts, but there is nothing on the scale of America’s massive shopping spree. Instead, Christmas in China feels like a low-key version of America’s New Year’s Day. People use it as an reason to go do something fun, to whatever extent is within their means.

On Christmas eve for example, my high school students have a regular day of classes and then arrange for parties to be held in each classroom in the evening. A wealthier friend of mine goes out with her family to a karaoke restaurant, where they can spend the whole night eating, drinking and singing. Chinese may or may not know something about Jesus, but generally, their Christmas has nothing to do with Christ.

A faithful Christian may be saddened by all this, and sincerely protest that Jesus is supposed to be at the center of Christmas. Yet, since Jesus’s birth was actually put into this holiday long after it was established, is it wrong for other cultures to take him out of it again? Indeed—how might Jesus have celebrated his own birthday, and how would he have asked us to celebrate it today?

¹ From the “History Channel” web-feature devoted to Christmas.

² See also this article on the history of Christmas (archived at Looksmart.com’s “Find Articles”, with a specific reference to the “Christmas economy.”

How Long, How Dark, is the Road to Peace?

Japan is the only country whose constitution prohibits war (as far as I know). Now, however, Japan is planning to send some defensive troops to Iraq to engage in unwarlike activity. Such offshore movement of Japanese forces would have been unthinkable in the past, and many are afraid of what this will bring in the future.

But leaving that fear aside for the time being, I would like to consider the history of how things got to be this way, and show some of the implications it might have for the whole world’s progress toward peace.

Japan used to be the world’s most war-hungry nation, yet after the tragedy of its involvement in the second world war, it went to the opposite extreme. For nearly 50 years now, we have had at least one nation on earth for whom war itself was illegal, according to its own constitution—certainly this was a major breakthrough in the history of humanity.

It is not inconceivable then, that such a change could be brought about on an international scale. The real question is: what measure of horror will finally awaken the human race to the fact of war’s continual failure to bring us good in this world? Have recent wars been enough for us to realize that all nations must be forced by law to work together in peace? Do we require another wake-up call as bloody or worse than what has already happened, or can peace come as a result of the collective efforts of relatively small groups of people to educate the world about the best interests of humanity as a whole?

The last two years since that fateful September day have seen the apparent return of warmongering to the world. The relative international tranquility seems forever shattered, and all the nations are wondering who’s going to preemptively strike who next.

I admit that this may be the beginning of a century that will show us the horrors of war even more clearly than the last, but who can deny that this will give us even more obvious reasons to establish unassailable laws of peace—not only in one nation, but in many?

Eventually, there must come a turning point, at which humankind will have to chose either peace or extinction—and let’s admit it: that’s not such a hard decision to make. Already the choice is clear to some of us, and we would just as soon choose peace now rather than later. How much effort must we dedicate—and how many lives must be sacrificed—before the choice is apparent to the whole world community?

Whether peace is to be reached only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by humanity’s stubborn clinging to old patterns of behaviour, or is to be embraced now by an act of consultative will, is the choice before all who inhabit the earth. At this critical juncture when the intractable problems confronting nations have been fused into one common concern for the whole world, failure to stem the tide of conflict and disorder would be unconscionably irresponsible.(source)

Worth a Thousand Happy Romances

Many people have advice for me about love. Another teacher who works in my school confided in me one day, telling me how she loved a young man in high school once, but since there was so much pressure for her to focus on her studies, she said nothing to him about her feelings. Later on, she married a different man, and buried in her heart a question that has stayed alive all these years, always asking her what would have happened if she had told that young man about her feelings while she had the chance. She urged me to follow my heart, and when I love a woman, to let her know that I love her.

I confessed to my friend that this might not be a good time for me to talk about my own love story. The last time I actually sat down and told someone any details of my love stories over the last two years, I discovered hot coals of anger hiding in those memories, and the very act of breathing my tale flamed them into a small rage, furious with God for allowing such a string of bad luck to have come to pass. In some cases, my luck has been so bad, so tinged with irony and impossible coincidences, that it seems it could only have happened with the hand of heaven controlling it behind the scenes, purposefully arranging for David’s heart to be crushed several times in a row.

Now this is the part where my good friends tell me, “now David, don’t be so pessimistic. Those girls were not right for you. Surely there’s someone out there, and God just is helping you get ready for her.”

I appreciate their sentiments, and I want to believe them, but then I look around at the world and I wonder: 9 times out of 10, I see people married to someone they are not in love with, often still in love with someone they are not married to. Human lives overflow with regret.

Now the statistician in me gets to work, and starts calculating the odds that David Bowers, resident of Wuxi, China and author of the Brightwind website, will ever meet that mystery Miss Wonderful. He doesn’t think long before looking at me in the mirror over the rims of his glasses and saying, “Don’t get your hopes up.”

“You’d better get used to just being yourself” that face in the mirror tells me, “because you can never guarantee that any other person will ever make you happy.”

Yet good possibilities are always there, waiting in little bubbles to just pop over your head and drop something wonderful into your life. Every day, beautiful things happen, little miracles with heavenly signatures all over them, and yet many conveniently ignore them in determined self-pity.

But that’s where those impossible coincidences come in. You can see heavenly signatures on the bad things as well as the good when you realize how far most things are out of your control. Limitations are part of the very fabric we are made of, like a ray of light which can go on forever in one direction, but never in two at once.

To realize this is to admit that the joy of life is not in the happily-ever-after fairy tale we’ve been taught to believe. We so often expect that some great event or accomplishment will “make us truly happy” only to realize that we are still the same person after the big day has come and gone.

Some things don’t really matter then: perhaps you are reading this article as a happily married person, or perhaps you are struggling through every day of your marriage just to keep on going. Perhaps you have just fallen deeply in love with someone, or perhaps you have just been deeply hurt. Either way, you are yourself, and the one person that can never go away is you.

Our little rays of light speeding through the dark vacuum of time are limited in every way but one: straight ahead. Our bodies will eventually fall apart just as they were gradually put together, yet we will not fall apart with them. These rays of light, which we are, cannot be divided into pieces, analyzed or decomposed.

Indeed, we can only shine brighter, and we will always find our greatest joy in shining, as brilliantly as the sun, on whoever we are given to shine upon. A single act of genuine kindness is worth a thousand happy romances.

What do you think? If you have something to say on the subject (and I imagine you do), please leave a comment below.

No Words to Describe It.

Although I majored in religious studies in College, I found that the most spiritually inspiring class was Astronomy 101: Stars, Galaxies and Cosmology. Each class was a slide show of the most beautiful photography available to the human race, and each picture dared us to believe that such massive and beautiful things could exist.

Possibly the best-known astronomer in America was Carl Sagan. He crafted words which brought the universe down to the earth for anyone to understand. Through him, the vast complexity of the heavens seemed at once awesome and intimate. His sensitivity to the beauty of the universe had a very spiritual quality. It moved him in his soul, and he was able to make it move others the same way.

In the film Contact, based on Sagan’s novel of the same name, Jodie Foster’s lead character is able to go out and meet the universe on humanity’s behalf. There is a moment in which we watch her as her watery eyes gaze into the stars, and she exclaims in a shocked breath, “Some celestial event… no… no words to describe it!... Poetry!... They should have sent a poet! So beautiful!... beautiful!.... I had no idea!”

Until now, I have found only one artist whose portrayal of the stars—indeed, with no words to describe them—adequately reflects the wonder of Carl Sagan’s vision. His work is so astounding that it makes me wonder: perhaps they should have sent a painter.

Greg Martin depicts planets colliding with one another, stars peeking out from behind the worlds, and nebulas erupting with color. He confronts you with the beauty of a world’s destruction, and seems to stop time at sudden moments of light in the ageless darkness of the universe.

Both Carl Sagan and Greg Martin have been able to see the human spirit reflected in the sky. Each burst of light is at once the brief span of a human life, and all the timeless potential with which it is endowed.

3 Interesting Resources

These days I’m battling a head cold… my whole world feels a little bit dizzy and slower than everyone else’s. Even though it has all but arrested my brain, I still entertain high dreams for this website.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with everything from the style of the content I write for Brightwind to the style of the page itself. On the days that I haven’t been posting to this site, I’ve been rearranging everything for it on my computer. I’m also planning to expand it in a number of ways. I hope to be able to have everything ready soon.

But until my brain is back to a real functioning condition, I thought I would share the following interesting websites with you:

“WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together.”

“Metafilter is a weblog that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to. A typical weblog is one person posting their thoughts on the unique things they find on the web. This website exists to break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members.”

“Jugglezine: An unassuming e-zine about balancing work and life.”

The Birth of the One Who Gave Birth to You

My mother was born on a day with the same name as this one, December First, with no idea that someday her body could become the vehicle for my soul’s ascent into this world. Yet before her, there were millions of women stretching into the darkness of the past, each one born without knowing that they would be mother of the next.

Contemplating the birth of my mother reminds me of the mirrors many elevators have on each wall—as you gaze into either side, you see an infinite array of reflections stretching into the darkness. Your own head is merely one of many on a single path, whose end is murky if not invisible. My own mother, however, is like the only face staring straight back at me in those mirrors, the only one I can see completely.

My mother and I, like any individuals, each live in little worlds of our own: our thoughts and desires, our daily hellos and goodbyes, our private chuckles when something funny comes to mind. Yet we also share a portion of that world with each other. We count each other among our best friends, and we understand each other as equals, with common hopes, experiences, and even similar fears.

When our faces also disappear behind the reflections of those many generations to come after us, our lives may be lost in that darkness of time. But none of that seems to matter; the fact that we may be forgotten makes these present moments more real, not less. Our worlds are valuable precisely because they are so small, unique, and infinite beyond memory in their details.

Depends on Your Point of View

What if you could see all the world’s sunsets and all the world’s sunrises—all at the same time? Such a thing is possible, if you travel to the moon on May 4, 2004. On that day, the earth will eclipse the sun, and the only sunlight reaching the moon will pass through the keyhole of the earth’s atmosphere. The air will scatter the blue light down to the earth, but the red light will make its way back into space, and, from an earthly point of view, will dye the moon with the color of blood.

But from the perspective of someone on the moon, our planet will have a red and gold ring of hope around it, which, for just a moment, will let you see all the world’s sunsets on the west side of the earth, and all the world’s sunrises on the east. You could consider yourself united with millions of lonely poets and happy lovers on earth, finding a home for their heart in that sight.

No one has yet photographed this event from the moon. We can only gaze up and wonder what someone there might see if they were gazing back at us.

Butterfly Kings

You may imagine that monarch butterflies are so named without reason, but in fact they are the steeds of the Faerie Kings, who flitter about on their mighty beasts with sublime aimlessness. To a Faerie, indeed, it is a sin to pretend that you know where you are going.

You cannot see the Faeries on the backs of butterflies because they will not let you see. They hide in the folds of the wind from all creatures with eyes, and especially from the creatures whose eyes may understand what they see. They do not like to be understood, and they distain to be followed by anyone.

That is why the Kings are separated from the other faeries, with no one to rule except the bugs, the plants and each other. They take turns playing rulers and rebels, fighting with their symphonies of insects. Cicadas are particularly popular instruments of art and war, compelled under the sway of their masters’ magic to sing in a language they cannot understand. With such poetry and song, the Kings make alliances and break them, declare victory and decry the tragedy of their betrayals—all without even a single drop of faerie blood.

All Faeries are aware that were these Kings, in their reveries of poetic war, to allow such blood to touch the skin of any earthly thing, it would be as if stars had collided, and a vast fury of light would blind them all.

Since the Faerie Kings make war with art, and never rule any other Faeries but themselves, they tend to displace the Faerie Musicians and Poets out of their jobs. Unable to compete, these are left with nothing to do but govern the rest of the Faerie peoples.

The Wonderland of Science Fiction (and the Matrix)

The Matrix: Revolutions is playing in Shanghai. If you’re in town, I recommend that you stop by and see it. It’s in English with Chinese subtitles.

I invited one of my best Chinese friends to see it with me last weekend. She happened to take the English name Alice before I met her three years ago, which is a beautiful coincidence to anyone who has seen the Matrix films. I imagined that this movie might make her feel a bit like that Alice, following the white rabbit to Wonderland, so I tried to catch her up on the main idea of the story as we had lunch before the movie, to show her just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

“Ok,” I said, “actually, not many people realize this, but the word Matrix literally means ‘womb.’” We were still waiting for the food to come. The restaurant was decorated with strips old China Daily newspapers on the walls, and strange spiraling glass decorations hung from the ceiling. “In this movie, though, it means something very different.”

She nodded in confirmation as she checked in her electronic pocket dictionary, and the Chinese words for womb appeared on the small screen. “Ah, yes. I see.”

“Well, the idea in this movie is that everything you see around you is not real, it’s all part of this giant computer world called the Matrix. These bodies we think we have are actually just computer programs—our real bodies are sitting in little red capsules somewhere just making electricity for intelligent machines, while our minds are trapped in this false virtual world. The main characters in this film are people trying to save humanity from this ‘prison for your mind,’ and awaken everyone to the truth.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “It sounds really complicated…”

• * *

Most Chinese are not used to science fiction stories. Although science fiction has made great strides in recent years (the popular Chinese magazine Science Fiction World being a notable example), it has nothing close to the volume and diversity that western countries have. The cultural atmosphere, from Confucian traditionalism to Maoist crippling of the educational system, has not always facilitated the development of the imaginative arts.

I had feared that Matrix: Revolutions would be a huge, confusing mess to Alice, but when she came out of the theater, she was giggling to herself. “It’s just like a video game! In the end, they saved the world by using Chinese Kung Fu!”

• * *

When I was small, I used to watch sci-fi movies and television programs with my father every weekend. When he came to pick me up and drive me an hour and a half away to his home in Denver, he used to tell me science fiction stories in the car.

He made them all up on the spot. Of course, years later he admitted how difficult it had been, how many times he had said “uh” and “um” while thinking of what should happen next and keeping his eyes on the road at the same time.

But I was enthralled, waiting on his every breath. When I wasn’t listening to his stories, I used to ask him about all kinds of scientific possibilities, and draw cartoons of my own sci-fi stories in my sketchbook. Somehow I began to see science fiction as way to envision the future so as to give people some sense of where they were going in their lives right now, and would ask them to think about where they really wanted to go.

• * *

On the surface, the Matrix really is just like a video game, with flying kung fu, laser guns, and hordes of mean robots to blow up. Of course, our reality is about none of those things. Reality means making friends, cherishing your family, and working hard to accomplish goals; it means waking up every morning to a world in which the most important thing is to serve other people and to make yourself a better person.

From another perspective, however, the Matrix is an excellent example of a fantasy story unlocking something much more than dazzle and hype. Underneath the fantasy, action-flick context of the story-line, there is a message about striving and transcendence, choice and fate.

Whatever form it takes, a good story should bring out the beautiful reality in us, show us a deeper layer of our own selves, and make us desire to bring others into that new reality as well. It should liberate our minds from the forgetfulness we fall into, where we worry too much about things that are somehow less than real. Any faithful journey into the wonderland of human imagination is ultimately about a very real understanding of human nature. By creating a fantasy world so unlike our own, we can highlight the basic things that make us what we are—truths that all the worlds cannot change.

(...dedicated with special gratitude to my father, for all the stories, all the patience, and all the “uh”s and “um”s…

Writing Itself

Sometimes, when I am writing something, I really hit on the essence of the words and it comes out nicely the first time. Other times, I write for a long time about something I like very much, but I keep on missing the right mark by just a little bit. Sometimes I can’t even write at all—my brain just goes to mush and begs me to watch television or something.

When I am having difficulty with articles for this website, I am compelled by the urge to keep revising them, working on them, and trying to see what I’m doing wrong. I can feel it when something is wrong with my words, like dirt on my skin, itching me, begging me to wash the problem away. But with writing, the problems don’t just go away as easily as soap and water. They need a long time to soak in the back of your mind, until you can come back later with a cleaner mind, and see clearly the same mistakes you were blind to before.

Writing even a simple paragraph is a journey. It may take minutes or days before it feels right enough to let someone else read it.

The shoes on this journey are perseverance. You write and write until you can’t write anymore… and then you keep on writing, even about writing itself.

(updated 11-23-2003)

Where is Your Home?

My home is a floating speck of dust. If you concentrate closely on this photograph, you’ll see it roughly in the center of a golden beam of light—just a pale blue dot. I live on that dot.

I am obviously very small… smaller than you might think. Small enough, if you can believe it, that billions of creatures just like me all live here on this same little dot—with plenty of space left over!

All this extra space is just crawling with other kinds of life, too; and most of them even smaller than we are! In fact, life seems to appear everywhere here. Every moment, we breathe in hundreds of life forms even smaller to us than this dot is to you.

But the problem is that even though my home is so small, it seems really big to most of my fellow creatures. They fight all the time over who controls different parts of this place… and all this fighting means that we don’t share things. Hundreds of millions of us have to go hungry even though there’s plenty of food, or get sick even though there’s plenty of medicine.

Some say that much of this little dot is going to be more or less unusable in just a few of our short life-spans. They point out, quite rightly, that we’re all stuck here. Together. And the thought of that just terrifies them.

But to me, it’s just that terror which causes all these problems. Our dot is not a cage, it’s a home, and the people who live here are a family. If more of us could see this picture of our home like you do, as a small point of light, perhaps more of us would start to think of it as just one place—one home, each and every pixel of it belonging to all of us at once.

It is our tiny, priceless jewel in the mist.

The Color of the Wind

We see color in the wind just as we see meaning in our lives.

Wind, as we usually experience it, has no color of its own—it simply reveals to us the color of whatever passes through it, whether that be your face or mine, blowing sand or leaves, springtime clouds or sheets of rain.

In the same way, a life’s value comes from the thoughts, actions and spiritual qualities which we allow to pass through it. “True loss,” it has been said, “is for him whose days have been spent in utter ignorance of his self.”

But the air itself can be bright as well. The whole sky shines with the scattered light of the sun. If it is seen over long distances, as in the Grand Canyon, the mass of air will make distant red stones appear blue. In fact, any molecules in the universe have a color of their own as long as they move light around, each one in its own way.

My mind shivers with awe to consider that even the wind has a color, that if you look deeply enough even into the blackest corner of the night sky, you will find the brilliance of billions of galaxies, as well as all the stars, worlds, and peoples that must inhabit them.

Perhaps, behind all the darkness of our small and mortal lives, there is a mysterious brightness, an inherent beauty like that of the sky, which all souls, whether good or bad, must ultimately reflect.

Writing in the Mirror

Everyday, we stand in front of a mirror, and we examine our faces for new deficiencies of various sorts. We try to heal them or cover them up, and we hopefully leave home satisfied with our appearance. Ideally, this activity gives us a sense of physical readiness and lets our minds get started on the other activities of the day.

Yet, when we go to bed, we just cut off our experiences of the day, like raw meat, ideas and feelings bleeding all over. Our dreams often have difficulty digesting this and making sense of it.

Writing can help us prepare for our dreams, just as the mirror prepares us for the day. We may not remember what we dream, but we will almost certainly go into it prepared. We can see before us the ideas we carry into that hidden world, and find in them a reflection of our souls. This process of reflection, which writing helps us ignite, cooks the experiences of the day into a fully digestible meal. Our dreams spread its lessons throughout the whole body and soul.

The problem for most people is that they think that they always have to write something really good. They may feel shy about writing down their deep feelings and thoughts. Of course everyone wants a finished article or story to communicate something special to readers, but we must first give ourselves permission to just communicate with our own souls as easily as we do with our own faces.

In these moments of utmost privacy, we may find that writing is more like listening than it is like speaking. We simply record the voices of our soul, our experience, and our life as it was today. From the image of who we are when we go to bed, we may have a better idea of who we want to be once we wake up.

China and the New World Wisdom

The Chinese are generally a proud people, and consider their culture to be a marvel thousands of years in the making. But China is as much a new civilization as an old one. Although the people have lived on this land since before recorded history can tell, their modern ways of thinking are not always informed by that history.

The modern flow of information all over the earth has meant that most Chinese are as much influenced by Hollywood as they are by Confucius. The twinkle of opportunity is brighter than the spark of wisdom in the eyes of a fast-developing nation – and perhaps rightly so. Since the world’s equilibrium is passing through cycles of upheaval and drastic change every day, many people wonder how much of the old wisdom still applies.

American leaders would just love to tell the Chinese all about the New World Wisdom, and to a great extent the Chinese are actually willing to listen. They are not, however, always so inclined to agree. To some, “new” means “Western,” but to those educated in the vastness of China’s past, it means something much more, something they wish to arise and define for themselves. They take what they like from the West, and they leave what they don’t.

Time will not tell us who was right or wrong. Historians of future ages will record how each nation on this earth was a strapping young adolescent at the turn of the millennium, full of ideas about how the world should be run, and equally full of confidence that their ideas would work. They will see an emerging world community struggling to piece itself together while at the same time keeping each part distinct.

For China, as for every nation, “new” increasingly means “together” with the rest of the world, while “old” means “apart.” A new wisdom for the world’s old countries, as well as the young, may very well be the fruit of that process of learning which joins these two identities into one functioning world system.

First Things First

Late at night, after sitting at the computer and staring at these myriad configuration pages, I do believe I have made progress, and this weblog is ready to crawl into existence. Like most weblogs, it needs a first entry, a test of sorts, to verify it’s own being. A web log without logs is hardly any use to anyone.

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Brought to you by David Bowers, who works as an English teacher, and as a writer too.

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