Monks on Motorcycles

How many times can a person be awestruck and still live?

Apparently, the human mind and heart can hand multitudes of mind-blowing sights in one day!  

I’ve seen plenty of beauty and stunning visual delights in my life as a traveller; SCUBA diver, sailor; resident of the Caribbean; Republic Korea; North Carolina; and sojourner in the countries of Europe, Central America, and North America.  I’ve been enveloped in a whirlwind of silvery fish, creating a funnel about me, meters below the surface; I’ve witnessed the elusive “green flash”, seen for a split-second at sunset, while in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight; my heart has fluttered in the mountains of Korea and North Carolina; and I’ve held crumbling dust and pebbles— aged nearly two millennia—from the ruins of cities underneath cities in Zaragoza, Spain.

But, here, in the area of Kham, in the town of Kandze (aka Kardze, Ganze, now designated as western Sichuan, PRC), high up on a mountain, where hues are fiercer and mountains are fearsome; no emerald, no jade has ever been so green, all shades of green must envy the colors on this mountain... nature’s first green is gold... youth, blooms...

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.  

Both the young monk boys whoop-whooping as they fling themselves across the beyond-verdant terraces, and the verdis of the blooming plants brought these lines by Robert Frost to mind.  The  caelum blue above expands, closing in, and the clouds are the grandest white.  It really does feel like the “Roof of the World”!

And I feel as though I have been transported into a three-dimensional National Geographic magazine! 

To be continued...
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