The long way home?

I've been living away from Scotland since 1991, and here in Hong Kong since Christmas 1999. My time here is coming to an end soon - I'm on my last contract, and will leave in summer '09, latest.

So I'm thinking about endings and beginnings - or, at least, my dreams are all about endings and beginnings. Not the same thing.

It's maybe the best way to a calm and happy life, if you can learn to manage your goodbyes. For me at this moment as I'm coming towards my second Saturn return, I'm impelled to ask, as I was 30 years ago, "What am I for?", but this time I also have to ask myself if the answers I provided then are still useful.

This was when I began to be a translator and when I began to write and publish: as I defined myself then, I was a meditator (2 hours daily!), a vegetarian, firmly located in Scotland, and pretty much at peace with where I was going, though I couldn't see how to achieve it.

Oh boys and girls, the things I've seen and done since then. I've climbed the Great Wall more times than I care to recall, I've seen pink dolphins on the Amazon, and watched the stars over Machu Picchu. As a boy I dreamed of visiting Rome, Florence and Athens, of walking the streets of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and I've done it. I've loitered in cafes from Amsterdam to Berlin, got stoned in Morocco, woken on the overnight sleeper from Sydney to Brisbane to be gobsmacked by the other-worldly weirdness of the Australian bush under a full moon. I got lost one night on the black sands of Karekare beach outside Auckland, under the strange southern stars, I've many times been at the taking of drink with poets and other such hooligans in Auckland, Wellington, London, Edinburgh, and many other places besides Hong Kong, and I've played music or been on stage reading poems in Bali, Thailand, Vietnam, China, New Zealand, Portugal, France and Spain, and all over England and Scotland.

So many things to do still.......

My friend Thor's wee laddie said to him the other day, "Dying's like a bubble: POP! and it's gone....but it's in the water, really." Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings cometh forth wisdom: I've never heard a better description of the moment of nirvana, the absorption into the universal Buddha mind (may all living beings get there).

Maybe there are no goodbyes in truth. Love is incontrovertibly unconditional: it transcends the conditional, man-made concepts of time and space, so maybe when we love, we love for once and for ever. If we truly open our hearts to the magnanimity of the living multiverse, why shouldn't we?

The living wisdom of the salmon flickers in the granite below us, and between the stars.