Stone Basin

Stone Basin
at Ryo An Jin

Monday, May 14, 2007

Day 11 HK

Tano's off to Singapore for the Buddhist Film Festival, an admirable feat anywhere in the world. Check it out at ibff.org
Seb's off to India and Bhutan, his second home. Regrettably, I am unable to go with him. I thought about the yaks and the tea bushes Seb planted years ago. Up on those elevations, the plants must be doing well, waiting for some tea masters to roll in and have them processed as Bhutanese High Mountain Oolong. As someone from Nepal once said, 'our mountains are at least 12,000 feet...'
But I will be off to Taiwan tomorrow where the mountains are 800 mi, or around 1500 feet.
The colorful cast of characters have disbursed.
Today was a normal day in HK, running around shopping, what Hong Kong people do best. But I did make a stop at my godfather Wong Dai Shin's temple, an ancient Taoist master whose immortal body was enshrouded in gold leaf because it never rotted from its sitting meditation position. The people of Hong Kong go ask for advice in the form of wooden sticks that pop out amongst a can full of about 60 other sticks for a reading or prophecy. Masters sit around the temple to read your stick for you, which are numbered. I lived near this temple as a child and was adopted as the Taoist Master's goddaughter. Don't ask me how that could happen as he's been dead for over 500 years. In any case, his readings for me has always been dead accurate. Each time I am in HK, and have extra time, I always pay him a visit, and if I have the nerve to want to know my future, I will pray for a stick reading.
This year was one of those years. The readings this time were strange in their specificity. I will leave it for some of us to read. But I can't reveal its contents here.

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