Going up to the 6th floor in the elevator
Ding Ding, the bell rings
Seeing the janitor standing outside
Wondering if I have arrived
“There are only 6 floors,
and we have no elevator for further more!”
I joked with him: there is still heaven
and the heart is the elevator for all!
We are trapped & tangled, deep
by the promise of our past
we have a life that is connected to our promise of the past
obligations linked with our grace tight & fast
We are tired of our routine
yearning for surprises
We are bored of our chores
dreaming being taken away from our fate
Who are we to give our time and energy
carrying out a purpose that no one praises
Who are we to love our kids
who do not say & mean I love you the same way
Yet life changes and love transforms
into time when we feel strange about our past vows
into space where we do not even know who we are
We wake up with nightmares, sweating & struggling…
We start blaming
blaming our husbands for petty things
We start manipulating
thinking that things would be different with chains on him
Nonetheless, it is our life that has changed,
but our mind hasn’t
nevertheless, our heart goes faster & further beyond
than our heads with morals & disciplines
Our life will drain, if no spring to pass under
Our love will die, if no one to hold it tender and high
Who has this power to keep our life forever young?
Who has this wisdom to keep our love alive with time?
We need this filter, to sift the rough
guarding the gold to shine the road
We need to hold our own anchor
preventing to float away into the river with current flow
Grass over the fence is always greener?
Other people’s life is always easier?
Others’ husbands are surely greater?
our heads try to figure out the grass over, leaving our hearts wonder…
Where is this love that can always comfort us?
Where is this man who can always be there for us?
This love is the love we have for life
This man is not the one beside us!
If we seek love outside our own heart
it is nowhere to be seen
If we search perfect man who turns with us
he is nowhere to be found
I say, hey girls,
just look into your own heart
We have the love that we need
just as comforting and amazing
By finding this love within us
we gain real power for our heart
By finding this love within us
we become forever young with energy, trouble fades away from our heart
If ever one day we would leave to grow
it will never be anyone’s fault
it is only that our heart wins over our head, and
please be kind and keep our love for the ones we have loved.
Love,
we all know it so well
and it is so swell!
Love,
it is so cliché to mention
and to talk about!
Love,
always fell in
and fell out!
Think,
when we are in love with someone,
this person makes us feel
expecting, imagining & sensation of flying!
Feel,
when we love someone,
this person seems to be
the air, the water & the pulse…
Love,
when we lost our love,
it makes us feel
lost, confused & time stops going…
Love is our life,
love is our hope;
Love is our wings,
without them, no more flying…
Love is our nicest, finest and noblest sensation,
love is our sweetest home where we are at ease;
Love is our joy when it is returned,
Love is our heart squeezed with lemon juice on when no resonance,
the pain, the sadness, birds without wings…
We build our families on
Love,
We trust out friends with
Love,
We give our children,
Love,
We repay our parents with
Love…
With friends, children, parents,
Love is safe,
tumbling, smooth, always there,
with you, my love,
why it appeared and disappeared…
Lived 47 years,
loved, dreamed,
still dreaming and still loving,
don’t know when the heart will settle
don’t know when the love for my love
will stay…when the love for me will stay…
What are we chasing?
the love, the comfort?
the love, the recognition?
the love, the dreams fulfilled?
the love, the fear hidden?
We are so small in the universe,
trying to find someone to be bigger;
We are so insecure when we are awake,
trying to find someone to assure ourselves…
We look, we search,
we hunt and we dream,
Is there anyone who meets our needs?
Is there anyone who can meet our needs?
We always dream,
Dream that we are loved like a child being loved by a Godly parent;
We always dream,
Dream that we always find THE person…
We never know that this person is a ghost,
appearing and disappearing;
We never are willing to confess that we are chasing the wind,
only are always falling in love with us, ourselves, our dreams
the ones who represent our dreams…
This is the 4th night on vacation at Palm Desert, California. Having 4 days of leisure: playing tennis in the mornings, swimming in the evenings, dipping in the outdoor spa anytime, gives me a weird feeling that time has stopped for me even with the traffic muffling outside the Desert Breezes Resort and my life has held its short gasps, replacing it with a preparation for a quiet long deep breath through my nose into my soul…
All over this resort, there are these triangle-shaped leaf-like flowers, along the walls, over the fence, outside the windows…they are called bougainvillea, the same as in my parents city Panzhihua. Similar weather brings out very early spring with this easy growing flower. The passion of this reddish purple or yellow color couldn’t make the perspective white winter disappear in 3 days at Montreal, yet it brought back the days when I was accompanied by bougainvillea in Panzhihua 15 years ago…
Like here, there were — still are I believe — in Panzhihua, gated communities. We had a party before my boss went on his vacation back to England to see his 4 children and girlfriend. After dinner in the One-Street City, I invited the gang of my department to my parents’ empty dwelling to kill some time before seeing the boss off at the railway station at 1:00am.
When we arrived after dinner, the gate was still open. We had soft drinks, played cards and it was time to leave. When we got down to the gate… shit!… the gate was locked. Yes, of course, it would always be locked after 11:00pm every night! If only we had no car nor the old German and our big bear-bellied boss, we would have just got out by climbing over the gate and got a taxi!
I went upstairs to find some tool to open the padlock. Our German guy had pulled out a coil of rope, attached one end to the back of our car, one end to the gate and started the motor! Bing Bang! The gate was down before I knew his true intention. Then you could hear me screaming and yelling at midnight to the German guy about pulling down the gate of my father’s school! Yes, we had to bring the gate back to the job side, weld it up, bring it back and install it perfectly! Thank god, we were people who were working for the famous big german company Holzmann and who were building the highest concrete arch dam in the world at that time, fixing a gate was of no big deal!
The gate was fixed, so the school didn’t say anything, but one big branch of this bougainvillea was broken during the installation. I picked up some little branches and put them in my parents’ apartment where I had no one to look after them…
I grew 15 years, yet strangely I do not feel that I grow older. I am like a starfish, the longer I live, the more suction cups I have. The suction cups serve for me as sensing radars which provide me with information and knowledge that give me holding points for life. I feel that all these events: the reappearance of the passionate and romantic bougainvillea, the gated community, the similar type of weather, the repeat of vacation by different people at 15 years apart, are nothing but the extended time of my life. By having more and more suctions cups and extended time, my life is extended and beautifully stretched out in a way that you can not see from top down, but I can feel all the time. My life is not just one life. It is composed of many little lives, like a book of many pages and chapters, a piano of many little keys with each having its own strings and a soft-headed-hammer to make fresh, beautiful pieces of music, complicated and sophisticated symphonies…
I had been afraid of death and darkness. But since quite some time, I have been cool! It seems that life’s events have built up a stage for me to see life’s procedure and variations, to understand life’s pace and meaning, to grasp life’s essence by seeing and feeling the true nobility and grace of life itself. We truly do not get older! Wonderfully, we do get wiser and even younger in mind. The time and wisdom of life opened our eyes and heart, gave us suctions cups to hold strong our places, liberated our clouded minds, drove away our fear and it enabled us to live our lives over again and again, each life with more wonders, more beautiful variations of bougainvillea, fresher Satie’s Gnossienne and more energizing Fate of Beethoven…
Annie Daigneault, an auxilliary nurse at L’Hôpital Charles-Lemoyne, Longueuil, decided to rent my apartment. Her daughter is already going to the primary school right in front of my block building and she is moving out from her boyfriend’s condo.
She is just a special potential French speaking tenant with a proper and correct writing style (non-computer-geek kind of writing which I appreciate!). Don’t forget, even you are educated in French, it is not guaranteed that you will always write correct French! At the end of her e-mails, she has a proverb:
“Aimer, ce n’est pas se regarder l’un l’autre, c’est regarder dans la même direction!!”
That stands out for me! That helped me see Annie as a person. Usually I check credit for the qualification of the tenants, but her good French writing with such a proverb, plus the fact that she is a nurse saved me the necessity of checking. Someone who has the insight to find out and share the proverb with her friends and contacts is a trustworthy person!
“Love, it is not looking at each other, it is rather looking together in the same direction!”
What a wonderfully beautiful, powerfully energizing proverb! Yes, we look at each other in order to find ourselves as life partners, and once found to walk together on the path, if we continue looking at each other, where are the eyes for the road – its bumps, its thorns by the roadside, its ziggy-zaggy change of directions and who will open the umbrella to shelter both of us when the rain pours down? How far can we go and what destination can we reach if we continue looking at each other?!
Scrutinizing their husbands is the traditional habit of many Chinese wives. The outstanding example is my mom when she was younger. I didn’t know that until she told me all what she thought and felt about my father. So many times she complained, wined and self-pitied that she married a person who didn’t know how to cook, change clothes diapers, comfort her when she was sad, etc, etc. So many times she dumped what she discovered in my father into my little ears trying to show that she was the one who held up the pillars of the family! She not only looked at my father closely, because they had been very close every day of their lives, but she looked at my father’s family members closely and vented her very personal biased point of view into my little heart! As a result, against her wishes, I took my father’s side. In the beginning, I would remain silent, but as I grew older, I started telling her what I thought and felt about the whole thing. Remembering it was my father who served as the High School & College Head Masters successfully, I told my mom: “Yes, he is not as satisfying as you would wish, but who are you to judge your husband in such a mean and disrespectful manner?”. It was his hand I could hold when I was afraid and it was him again who always walked me along the railroads when I came back from or going to my university at winter and summer vacations…
Obviously my mom forgot to look in the same direction together with my father and kept fussing about the life chores and my father’s family. She became such an expert in looking at my father, finding out his faults and those of his family. It seemed she was such a perfect person, yet the most extraordinary and comic fact is that, of the 2 people, it was she who came from a poorer, less educated and a family with an abusive step mother while she had been acting as if she came from a royal one, behaving like a Queen detesting and looking down on this and that!!
Lucky are we women today that we do not have to work and look after our families by ourselves as my mother did. The Chinese men have improved with time, and of course with all kinds of pressure, like that from my mother to my father. Yet, has this improvement from the side of our men eased the pressure they get from their women? Not necessarily, I think it has nothing to do with the improvement of our men or our living conditions or the amount of money the husband can make a year! The tendency has always been there, the tendency by which Chinese women can never be satisfied, always wanting more, from their husbands, children, working positions, money, etc. I myself as a woman, wonder how much a man can do for his wife and how far can he go under such constant unpleasant pressure feeling like a bastard!
“Aimer, ce n’est pas se regarder l’un l’autre… “, what a wonderful wise saying! Who in this world is perfect? Who in our life can say that they have no faults? Who has the power to enslave our partner into subordination by withholding sex or the money the man has or the important position one of us holds? We choose our partner to walk the road with us, we should know that we are not perfect, we should know that each person has its difficulties in their jobs and that each person has its reasons and obstacles to go further forward. What should we do? Belittling the other, thinking and saying they are stupid, lazy, and a coward? Venting our dissatisfaction to our children about their faults proving we are right and perfect? If we do that, there are no limits to how stupid a person can be and how destroying and dangerous we can become!
“Aimer, ce n’est pas se regarder l’un l’autre, c’est regarder dans la même direction!” Stop looking at each other, forgetting the goal we are holding! Stop finding faults in each other forgetting that we are the same imperfect human beings. Love is to look into the same direction together with your partner, watching out for the road – its bumps, its thorns by the roadside, its ziggy-zaggy change of directions and opening the umbrella to shelter both of us when the rain pours down! How far can we go and what destination can we reach if we look together into the same direction?
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