Have bamboo will travel

Well, it's time for me to open the little Moleskine and share some musings. A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned.

Once upon a time last week to be exact a traveller went to the main bus station in city A. Sticking out of his worn green satchel was a single bamboo. It was green with a fine strong shoot near the top. It's root structure was in the early stages of escaping from the base.

Anyway, he was taking the bamboo to city B, his new home. It was important, having given away bamboo, roses, ferns, cactus and flowering life to friends in city A to carry one along with him. Now, the normal idea of taking the bamboo was really about beauty and nature and companionship. He'd nurtured bamboo, roses, palms, violets and growing species for the last six months after moving to A from China.

Before leaving the Middle Kingdom for the country of Turnkey he gifted twenty plants to Chinese teachers and friends. People who'd be staying. Naturally, he was leaving - he was continuing his wandering ways, his adventure. So it goes.

Obviously, people in the bus station stared at this vision of a man carrying bamboo. This sense of green life, growing amazing beauty allowed and created a magic feeling to permeate their being. Maybe it gave them some comfort.

He got on the bus, took seat 16 and propped the bamboo into the meshed seat container so it could rest against the window in the light.

They travelled west together for six hours. They passed snow fields where brown thick feathered hawks waited, then passed astonishing silver-white trees on a hill sparkling in light wearing crystal-like diamonds back lit against a clear blue sky. It was a scene of mysterious clear magic - all the white and blue!

After the winter they continued through steep mountain valleys into landscapes without snow, like autumn. One leaves seasons, the winter becomes fall in reverse; green moss, fields of fruit trees, a farmer plowing soil - "Ah," whispered spring - "I am coming, I am ready for the turning. I feel tires and weight and blades in my furrows..."

Then the pure joy of seeing distant mountains with silent snow peaks, where we will live. They are high and rolling as late afternoon light plays with red wispy cumulus clouds. They easily remind him of the Colorado Rockies and more recently the Himalayas in Tibet.

The bamboo is happy in it's new home where it can grow free.