At the Heart of the Universe by Samuel Shem & Samuel Shem

Author:Samuel Shem & Samuel Shem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: China, Changsha, Hunan, motherhood, adoption, Buddhism, Sacred Mountains, daughters
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2016-05-27T12:45:48+00:00

It is a simple “Chun.” Simple strokes that are like the ancient carving on an oracle bone or a tortoise shell she once saw in a photograph. A seedling struggling for the light, strokes that have reversed the complexity of centuries, which evolved the nine-stroke character for “Spring” out of this elegant three. A simple “Chun” she has gotten back to, back to that single shoot struggling in darkness to find the light and grow toward the sun and blossom and give back seeds. Whatever she has learned and seen now in this day’s simple character, she realizes that she has come to understand not only sorrow but love, not only depth but lightness, and so she is surprised to find herself saying out loud—to the lush pines and magnolias, to the stream and the fallen log spanning it, to the deer she has tamed who are curling into their beds nearby and to her playmates the erratic monkeys in the forests up the mountain—yes, breaking her silence, saying out loud:

“So? So, fancy lady, put on your plastic orange jacket and take your broom and go to work.”

A blue jay appears, the sharp face reminding her of her old calligraphy teacher. He chatters at her. She chatters back at him in blue jay, and walks out of the clearing.

The low, tilted morning sunlight casts the black shadows of the pine tree trunks across the bed of ferns. In one moment the shadows seem to her like a ladder laid down toward the most heavenly heart of nature, and in the next moment they seem like lines on her dead mother’s sallow, waxy brow, and in another moment like a mere calligraphy of the number three, counted over and over again in her path.

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