Ring the Bell

At Jinming Temple on Saturday I held three smoldering incense sticks in the sticky humid air and bowed in four directions to the Buddha, beginning with the East. I inhaled the smoke and then opened my hands and heart for a blessing.

A few hours later, I paid two renminbi to sound the massive bell in an inner courtyard of the Confucius Temple. A small log was wrapped in red cloth and suspended by two ropes. I pulled it back, posed for a photo, and released the log toward the bell and the boom reverberating through flesh and bone and air. I paid another five renminbi to hold mallets and play three rows of graduated bronze bells, a very big drum, and a Chinese zither. My five minutes on that stage were not enough to perfect my style, but to confirm a vision that this might have been my role in a past life at this temple.

On Monday, I climbed every available stair in the weaving workshop garden; the geometric and smooth ones as well as the water-shaped, rough and uneven ones, filling all my frames with texture. I looked and longed toward the roof garden that was inaccessible to my ascending desire.

I confess that I am the one who touches sculptures despite signs that say “Do not touch,” and on Tuesday, I touched the lucky turtle, and the elephant, and the camel, and the lions. They were stone both before and after, but I was not.

At the gate of Linggu Temple on Purple Mountain, I ate slippery cold noodles of bean paste with shredded carrots and cucumber, sauced with sweet, pungent, and spicy. Though I held my sticks upside down, no one noticed my splashy style.

Today, I plan to touch silk and jade, perhaps to great excess. When the antiphospholipid antibody syndrome rings the final bell in my head or heart, I will be ready.