Once upon a time there was a Puzzle.

And along came a Monkey.

And he looked at the Puzzle.

And he became rigid with fright and all his hair stuck out in every direction,

and he could never

move

again.

And that is how the Monkey Puzzle Tree came into existence.

And the moral of that is: Character building must not be rushed.

To which we say: Amen.

Many thanks to Irving Finkel in the Cuneiform Character Building Department of the British Museum.

Surprise: The Advanced Class
 
Lorenzo(Shah Tien) and I are being asked to read the sentences on the whiteboard. He reads at a steady, comfortable pace. It is 60 degrees. He finds it summery. I take as long with one sentence as he does with ten of them. It is 60 degrees. I am wearing most of the clothes I brought with me. Sixty degrees inside is cold.
 
At last, I understand the value of tests. On my midterm I got a 51. That clearly defines how I’m doing — teetering. It was reassuring to have an assessment that matched my reality. So I spoke to Teacher Fong after getting my results (20 on the orals — I’m still tongue–tied — and 65 on the written part). I explained that I was really doing the best I could but I was treading water and sensing that the rest of the class were swimming and would soon be miles ahead of me. “Well, to be truthful,” she said. “This class is one of the most advanced beginners’ classes I’ve ever taught. The Japanese and the Europeans are going very fast.” (The American and Canadian had dropped out the third week.) “Oy,” I responded. I’m doing my best to add as much Yiddish to the Taiwanese culture as possible. Woody Allen has paved the way. “Oy,” I repeated. “So what do you suggest I do? I can’t go much faster.” She paused. “Do you think I should just take private classes so I don’t hold the group back?”
 
She paused again and then said, “It might be good for you to take private classes twice a week to improve your speaking. But I think it would be good for you to continue in my grammar class three times a week and then take the class over again next semester.” Hmmmm. That was a first: Failing.
 
I was disappointed. I thought I could get at least a 60 so I could continue with my class and especially with Teacher Fong. But I also realized that taking the class again would enable me to move at the pace I’m at. Nevertheless, I bargained, “Well, if you’ll teach the class, I’ll do it.”
Teacher Fong said, “I am thinking of teaching the beginner’s class again.”
I’d never expected that. Surprise! I just assumed our class would continue with our first teacher until the end of eternity. She would teach it? “Excellent,” I said,”so it’s a deal? I take the class again and you will be the teacher.”
“Well, the school can’t promise that you get the teacher you want.” I looked at her as if she’d returned to another reality and said, “What would be the point of my getting a teacher I don’t want?” She laughed. “But what about the tests?” She answered, “You need to take them, but just consider them a game.” Strangely, I’m relieved. I don’t have to swim faster than I can swim. And I’m also excited. Although I can’t move at the pace of the others, I’ve fallen in love with the language and I’m grateful that I have a professor who understands my dedication and wants to help me move at the pace that I can move. I can now breathe and learn. So this Tuesday, after the New Year, my new schedule starts.
 
Surprise: A Storyteller’s Nightmare
 
Happy Chinese New Year!! Everything stops from five days to two weeks for the Chinese New Year. Stores close, hotels triple their prices. My beloved hotel told me I had to leave for four days because they’d been booked for a year in advance. Thinking it would be nice to be warmer, a month ago I called a hotel in Kenting, which is south of Kaohsiung, to book for the Chinese New Year. The man, Scott, who answered the phone said they were entirely booked. We talked a bit more. I explained I was looking for a quiet place because I was working on a book. He was intrigued, checked my website and called me back five minutes later and said, “Wow, I didn’t know you were a big man. Would it be impolite to ask you to consider telling stories at our hotel?”
 
Hmm, that’s the challenge I’ve been wanting — forcing myself to speak Chinese words in public. “Well, that sounds like fun,” I said (knowing I’d be terrified). So somehow he found rooms in the hotel, a different one each night. I put in about 60 hours with my teachers and different Taiwanese friends trying to add about sixty Chinese words to Monkey King, to learn them and to pronounce them correctly. Yep, about an hour a word. We’re talking slow.
 
And then arrived every storyteller’s nightmare, which had not yet happened to me. Not in forty years of storytelling. I’ve never had an audience leave. Triple oy. The first afternoon, about thirty people, mostly adults, including Vivian who drove down specially from Kaohsiung with her children, came and stayed and clapped and seemed to understand. But the next afternoon, the weather was perfect. About ten people came with young children and sat scattered about the hall. First the children left, then the adults. By the last ten minutes there were only four people in the hall. Two mothers, five year old Andrew who had volunteered to turn the titles, and Scott. As I continued the story, I wondered if everyone would leave. What would happen then?
&nsbp;

Even though I knew it was awful to have an audience leave, I felt for them. The sixty words of Chinese which I pronounced fairly well did not balance the weight of the hundreds of words of English. Strangely, I was giving one of my best performances. It was simple, clear, slow. I was very present and very happy. And yet, the children and the adults couldn’t follow. Watching the audience leave was the worst of nightmares; and surprise, it was also fine. I was glad the people were returning to the beautiful outdoors and I was glad I had told a beautiful version of Monkey King. The failure succeeded. We all learned. And handsome Monkey King had a chance to play once again.
 
Surprise: Yum
 
Friends asked me before I left, how will you manage to eat? I’m allergic to soy sauce and soy products. Americans seem to think Taiwanese food is soy. For the Chinese New Year, there is a buffet. And on the buffet, there were my favorite foods: Crab, lotus, seaweed, duck, sweet black beans, honey lamb, tuna, and boiled lettuce (a new favorite).
 
 
 
 
Surprise: The Sea
 
At last. Two days off. I forgot. How very much. I love the sea. The sound. The light. The air. The sand. The shells. The stones. The emptiness. The colors. The movement. The vastness. The no words.
 
 
 
 
 

So, fighting the impulse to leave the room and quit school, I looked at the quiz with the Chinese characters and they all looked Chinese. Meaningless squiggles. I couldn’t differentiate one from another. Breathe, look at another part. Look again and with time, I was able to recognize maybe half of the characters. Why such focus on a quiz? Why such disturbance? Why are quizzes needed? I suppose they spur on the learning. I don’t know. This was not the intention of learning at Summerhill or even at Bank Street College of Education whose graduate school I attended forty years ago. Learning was for the individual and for learning’s sake. Well, maybe it’s like giving recitals in music; finding out what it is that you know and what you don’t know; pushing yourself to another level. Thank goodness there are no quizzes in Kindergarten, First and Second Grades. Learning would be torture. As it is, we have fifty–minute classes at the Chinese Learning Center and I find myself watching the clock at 35 and 40 minutes. Part of it is Mrs. Ding’s inane textbook, part the drill, and part the lack of relevance to my life. And then, once a day, (and sometimes twice or three times — like today) there’s the joy of emerging out of the thicket of so many unknowns and suddenly something connects, and it begins to make sense… until the next thicket blocks the view.

After our official class ended at 12, Teacher Fong and I wrote on the whiteboard the characters for the titles of Journey to the West (Xī Yóu Jì, 西遊記). The first character is West (西) which is a small slanted square with two legs at the top extending into the square. It kind of resembles a bird sitting on its nest, (birds fly home to the west every evening). I find the character adorable. The left leg is straight, the right one curves. Even before I knew that it supposedly resembles a bird, I found it adorable. On Wednesday and Thursday this week, the Chinese Learning Center offered optional calligraphy classes. Again, the setting was without spirit or soul — it began with a five minute film on why Chinese people paint their houses red on the New Year’s (to protect them from monsters who are afraid of the color red???!), but once I had a brush in my hand and began to try the strokes, a kind of reverie set in, a timelessness. These squiggles are each simple ordinary lines. But they curve and relate to one another. They feel like a family talking and moving and expressing themselves each in their own way. And now today I was actually drawing the very characters of the title of the story that has brought me to Taiwan. And as I drew them, Teacher said, “Good, good. You have a skill for this.” I don’t know if I have a skill; I know that I have, and have always had, a love, a taste, an inclination, an affinity for the Chinese characters. I want to be close to them. I want to know them.

This morning I woke at five with the most vivid dream. I was in a room with my brother Martin. For the past 20 years we’ve barely spoken. When I would visit my mother, he would leave the apartment. Last March my mother was hospitalized for a month. Visiting her each day at the hospital, the two of us sat in the same room and so we began to talk. It gave me great hope that we were connecting again because despite the fight we had over money I’d never stopped caring about him. In the dream, a voice said, “So Martin is really very ordinary, probably the most ordinary of all the family.” Then Martin sat up and said to me, “There you are.” I saw him. He was glowing, golden, in his twenties. I could see all his sweetness and goodness. I saw his wonderful essence. I grabbed him by the front of his white shirt and said, “I love you so much. I love you so much.” At that moment in the dream I’d entered a place with no constructs. Just love. I knew I was in a dream and I thought, Go ahead, here’s your chance, you can learn something more, ask, but I didn’t. The seeing; the experiencing, was the knowing.

Sometimes being here in Taiwan feels like a dream because I can’t speak very much. And because I can’t speak I connect in a deeper way to people and to myself. I find so many of the people here kind, tender, caring. They not only walk you to the bus stop, they give you the token you need to take the bus or the subway. They want you to be well. After I asked for herbal tea for three days at the restaurant, the manager of the restaurant, brought me a canister of lavender tea and a tea pot with a filter. Last week when the manager was about to leave her job, I brought her back the tea pot and she said, “No, no, that’s a gift for you.” I was speechless. She has so much less than I have. But it’s not the more or the less of it; it’s the freedom of choosing to connect. It’s seeing the connection. Under his anger and resentment, my younger brother Martin still has the open loving tender heart that he had as a child. And I do too. I am my brother. Pushed under by all we need to learn and surmount, we become the thicket and lose the connection to our own hearts. Here in Taiwan, in a foreign place, a new aspect of myself emerges–the one that is so often hidden and defensive in the States — the innocent, open, loving heart, eager for connection.

Several years ago I read Fabienne Verdier’s extraordinary book, The Dragon’s Brush, about her journey to southern China in her twenties to learn calligraphy. She suffered greatly during the experience from the harsh physical conditions as well as the grueling schedule but after three years she learned to do exquisite calligraphy and her eighty year old teacher, who would soak his feet in hot water each morning because of the cold, took her as his companion on journeys to the mountains to understand the art more deeply. So, I shall plod ahead, and trust, at least for the time, that the process will lead to where I’m meant to go.

At four today, I was to meet Effie at Dante’s Restaurant. I was late and she was even later but I could actually say in Chinese: Woh yeh chida le. (I was also late.) I couldn’t have said that two weeks ago. We spoke about politics and she said that her learning until now was based on what she had read in Chinese textbooks, but now that she has been living in Taiwan for four months she has a different understanding about Taiwan, Tibet and other places. She loves the friendliness of the Taiwanese. She wants to return. She is writing her final paper on the history of Taiwan. She is an exchange student from Nanjing University. From politics, we turned to the task: and I read the chapter for next Monday from Mrs. Ding’s Family Textbook: Do you have a car? I read the Chinese excrutiatingly slowly. Effie responded by kindly saying at the end of each sentence, “Good.” What a relief when one is trying so hard (and not really succeeding) to have another person respond by saying the cheering word, “Good.” Effie is so genuinely happy for me (it may also be that I’ve reached the end of the sentence). And then came the gifts.

A new person appears in Mrs. Ding’s Family Textbook. Her name is Lin Xin–ru. As always, I asked Effie if the name has a meaning and she said, “Yes, xīn (心) is heart.” Ahh, I looked at the character more closely. The character for heart is a pulsing open heart. So beautiful. Lin Xin–ru and her classmates are in the classroom. I asked Effie to explain the different words for school, classroom and student. The three confuse me. When Effie explained the word student, that clarified the word and the whole process. Student in Chinese means Learning/Birthing/Borning. Xuésheng (学生). Learning is pushing out of the thicket into the world of possibilities.

Walking slowly home from Dante’s, enjoying the strong virile sprouts that are budding on the palm trees. They will probably be leafing in February.

Before I do, I did as badly as I thought I had on last week’s quiz: 34 out of 100. This Friday I was determined not necessarily to do better on the quiz but to be relaxed with the process of taking a quiz. Also, Jasper at the front desk helped me put the week’s lesson on my computer so I could listen to it repeatedly. That helped in placing it in my mind as well as recognizing the characters. Over and over I listened, sometimes reading the text, sometimes just listening. Although 50 times is the suggested amount, I only had twenty times to listen to the lesson because he only installed it the night before. So this morning, well this morning, really started before the quiz; it started as it does each morning with the sea. Every morning I stand at 7 a.m. by the edge of the sea and watch the swimmers (60°F) — the Kaohsiung polar bears — and breathe in the sea air and do chi gong. As the swimmers run out of the sea, they greet me with “Good Morning,” and I greet them with “Zo–ann.” This morning marks a month. And this morning, I don’t know why but as the swimmers came running out of the sea they shook my hand, one after another. I felt as if I had arrived in Taiwan and all these repetitive classes will allow me within a week, maybe, to greet them with another word than “Good Morning.” Maybe “How’s the water?” Yes, I want to try for that.

I finished the quiz and my breathing didn’t change. I still think it’s idiotic to match sentences as a way of testing one’s knowledge, but it was satisfying to realize that as I took the quiz I could recognize about 80 per cent of the characters, meaning I may know at the end of one month 30 characters.

I stayed after class because my teacher, Fong, offered to help me on Fridays with Monkey King. We worked for about a half hour on just pronouncing the words: Journey to the West, Sun Wu Kong and “I am Handsome Monkey King.” Every single syllable has another tone! It’s actually taken me a full month to hear this. My teacher used all kinds of analogies. My favorite was take the elevator directly down with the word wù. Pronouncing wù (meaning aware), the fourth tone, is the most difficult.

Then she wished me a happy New Year. I thanked her and explained I didn’t really celebrate this New Year because I am Jewish. I had recently rebelled on Wednesday in class about the constant talk by the teachers about Christmas by going to the blackboard and explaining that there were other holidays in the world and one was called Hanukkah, which no one in my class had ever heard of. That gave me a perspective on the importance of Judaism. We have three Japanese men, one man from Belize, two Frenchmen and Lorenzo. None of them knew about Hanukkah. So Fong asked me how Jews celebrate the New Year. When I told her that one of the ways was for ten days we are not to say anything bad about anyone, she began to speak about her life, and for nearly two hours she told me the most extraordinary story which I promised to have a closed mouth about. Ahhh, dear Melissa, you commented on my last week’s blog that my way of learning is story. What can I say? To hear a teacher’s story, to hear another’s story, that is my happiness. So for me the celebration of completing one month of intense Chinese learning is to hear the teacher’s own story. That’s a true and unexpected celebration.

Then, I met Effie at Dante’s Café. I was very tired. And there were so many new vocabulary words to learn: dining room, kitchen, post office, supermarket. Do I care? I really just want to say, “How’s the water?” Effie was smiling. Her warm big smile. Yum. Her light pink sweater. Her soft skin. Her constant enthusiasm. My fatigue vanished. When I haltingly read the Chinese words, she encourages me by saying, “Good.” And sometimes, “Very good.” Her good is imprinted in my brain. Good, good, good. The kindly repetition of good permeates my struggling brain. Then her cellphone rings. She mouths to me, “My mother.” Her mother was calling from China to ask if Effie has enough money because Effie hadn’t called her. (Her mother had called yesterday.) And, her mother wanted to know if Effie had eaten and what she had eaten and what she was doing next. Effie smiled so sweetly and said with no irritation, just understanding, “My Mom worries about me.” In the closeness I feel to Effie, I feel her mother’s love. Effie is majoring in international relations. I wish she were President of China. But she says, she just wants to teach, to help people. This is the inside of the story, dear Melissa, this. Your connection to and love of the Kalahari bush people and your wanting to help them. My connection to the Chinese people and wanting to share their culture and bring it to the western world. Who can explain this? The tenderness we have for one another is the great healing. It’s ineffable. Effie brings cookies and I buy a hot chocolate for her and an apple vinegar juice for me. “Is your hot chocolate good?” I ask her. And then say, “I will miss you when you leave for China.” How can this be happening? I only know her three weeks.

Now the time has kick–started and begun to run. With love, time runs.

The class continues. She realizes that I’m no longer present. We’re now considering “Is this her book?” “Is this your book?” “Is this the teacher’s book?” I’m certain this has relevance, but I’ve been shot. And then I realize what a struggle it is for all those who can’t learn quickly. I want to cry for all the students who do not understand quickly. Why must tests be done quickly? Why must we learn quickly? So many students suffer. They try hard and yet it does not come easily. I think of my own arrogance. I was always a quick learner and I never thought to consider the ones who were behind. And now, I belong with the slow ones. I know the characters but I can not quickly identify and make relevant comparisons.

The teacher comes over. She tries to help me with this new section. I repeat the Chinese words she is saying. Over and over. Maybe seven times. I appreciate her kindness. She coming to help with the wounds. Her voice is soothing. I try to rally. We’ve gone ten minutes past the class break. Shah Tien is trying to encourage me as well. Finally the break comes. “What’s the trouble?” Shah Tien quietly asks. I explain that I just can’t do the quiz that quickly. He says, “I’m sorry but that’s how language classes are in universities. Maybe you should consider learning in New York.” He leaves for the ten minute break. I sit there stunned. What did he just say? I speak to the teacher. She is very comforting. “We’re older,” she offers. “I was trying to learn Japanese this summer and I couldn’t remember words from one day to the next. It’s just slow. You’re learning every day, just at a slower pace. Be easy with yourself. Be easy. I had a Czech student. She learned by writing each character 50 times. Then by the next month she was much quicker. It’s not even a month.” Okay. Okay. Wounds heal. Go on. Breathe.

At 12:10, there is a Christmas party for all the Chinese Language Center students on the roof. Good fun. We are divided into groups and play “Telephone.” Each group passes on a Chinese word from one to another. The group that comes closest to the word in the quickest time wins. Good fun. Playful. Afterward, I sit with our teacher and ask her about her interest in Japanese. Her parents spoke Japanese in the house when she was young when they didn’t want her to understand what they were saying. How interesting that she would be revealing languages to others. I tell her my parents did the same; they hid from us by speaking Yiddish. Her grandfather had studied in Japan and then her father. Both were intellectuals who never worked; they just studied and read. Today her father never leaves the house. He reads a book a day. Forty years ago, he invented the match that never goes out. Which is useless. And dangerous. The match that never goes out? Well this is the part I like the most — learning her story.

After the party, I go to Dante’s where I meet Wanling’s friend, the compser Kwang–I. We drink apple vinegar juice and discover we are both practicing Buddhists and her teacher is the Karmapa.

At three, I meet Effy, a young student from Mainland China, who wants to have an exchange with an American. We’ve met twice and each time we laugh and our drawn more and more to one another. She intends to teach English when she returns to China so she is eager to tutor me. We also drink apple vinegar juice and laugh and spend two and a half hours and it is all fun. No pressure, no anxiety, no fear; just enjoying one another’s presence and stopping to sing Christmas carols. The invasion of American culture throughout the world is extraordinary — the music, the clothes, the iPhones. I remember forty years ago going to France and not even being able to buy milk. And here we sit, Chinese and American, teaching one another and laughing while someone is singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain” on the radio. We laugh at how hard it is for me to say in Chinese Djeh geh yong djong wen zen ma shoaeh, which means How do you say that in Chinese? She’s going to Taipei for four days and says, “I’ll miss you.” We both smile. We are happy to be together. We’ll meet again on weekday three: Wednesday.

Learning is large. It’s what happens every minute. We are almost always offering some information to someone. The kindness of this exchange is so crucial. I am deeply touched by the kindness of the Chinese language teachers. And even more so, the many young people I meet at the university. I stop at the art gallery and chat with the guard and we are soon doing a language lesson for a half an hour. I chat for an hour with Tangie at the front desk. We learn from one another. We feel fortunate to share what we know with the other. That is the joy; the gratitude of having something to offer that helps the other. Ahh, that’s the learning. And also remembering, the pace must be my own.

Immersion. That’s it. I’m in a Chinese Language Immersion class.

I signed up for classes. I had no idea it was immersion.

So two weeks forward and now when I do my daily chi kung, I say the numbers in Chinese. And I can actually write the 37 letters of the phonetic Taiwanese system called beh, peh, meh, feh which identifies all the sounds. I’m still not really daring to say the words that I’ve learned in class to outside people. Well… I did try a few times but others’ lack of comprehension quickly made me switch to English. My classmates who are younger are much more articulate.

However, I remember Cordelia Avis’s response to my first week’s blog. “I can’t remember anything more difficult than this has been, and continues to be, and I remember so well the moments when crying was the only answer. However, the moments when it all starts to make sense are ever so sweet!” Yes, Cordelia! At last there were two sweet moments that both happened today. The first was when we wrote our first Chinese character. I nearly cried. I was sitting next to Shingo, my Japanese classmate. (Our teacher insisted that Lorenzo and I separate some of the time.) Shingo looked at my character and said in Chinese, very good. “Your characters are so beautiful,” I whispered to him. He smiled proudly. The teacher then came over and, not understanding the tears in my eyes, said to me, “Don’t worry.”

“No, no worry here,” I replied. “Just beauty. The way each line curves and then moves to the next — like melodies. So different from our clunky a b c’s.”

She shook her head. I adore her. Her naturalness, her ease, her beauty, her happy spirit. I feel so blessed to be in a class where I just enjoy the beauty of my teacher. Somehow, she saw the last blog that I had written and told me not to photograph her anymore. “But why?” I protested. She just shook her head. Inscrutable. I haven’t decided whether to be rebellious or not on this issue. I so want everyone to see her spirit.

The second lovely moment was after class. Our teacher told me she’d be glad to help me with Journey to the West and that I should bring in a Chinese version. I have several versions but they are all too advanced. Then, just by chance, yesterday at lunch, Vivian Chung, the head of international students, gave me the gift of a children’s version of Journey to the West in beh, peh, meh, feh. Life in Taiwan is magical in that kind of way (a/k/a the kindness of the people). Whatever you need keeps appearing. So I read the first three words, and our teacher urged me. “You must guess,” she told me. “What do the first words mean?”

I shook my head.

“But you are a storyteller, how do stories begin?”
“Once upon a time?”
“Yes. And?”
“Long ago? Far away?”
“And? — one to another? Stories are from one to another…”
“Some people say…”
“Yes, it is said.”

So we began together to read the children’s version of Monkey King and it was all Chinese until we came to Hua Gwo Shan which I immediately remembered as Flower Fruit Mountain. A great smile. “It’s Flower Fruit Mountain!” I said. “Yes, yes, go on,” she said.

That’s it. No stopping. But as we continued, we came to Stone and then to Monkey. and then to Shi Hou. Stone Monkey. Ahhh.

We read one paragraph which took a half an hour. And then back to the beginning and I went at a truly painfully slow pace. “I’m so slow,” I moaned. “I’m sorry to be so slow.”
“Slow is good,” she said.

Ahh, “thank you,” I said. “I’ll remember that. Slow is good. Slow is good. Slow is good.” What compassion I have for all students, for those who are learning throughout the world. Dear friends, remember: slow is good.

Report from Kaohsiung. Second week. One to another: slow is good.

I am the slowest in my Chinese class at National Sun Yat–Sen University. The other nine students, all men, are twice as quick and three times younger. Our teacher is a whirlwind. I sit there tongue—tied and mostly flabbergasted at the speed of digestion of beh, peh, meh, feh. Fortunately, I sit next to Lorenzo with the curly blond hair. I sit in the very corner so that I can’t be seen. Lorenzo assures me after it’s my turn and I can’t speak. He pats my knee and says, “Anyone over 40 studying Chinese should be praised.”

Lorenzo is from northern Italy, the son of a teacher and a journalist. He’s always in the cheeriest of moods. Our teacher gave us Chinese names. His Chinese name is Shining Heaven. Shah Tien. I asked to be called Gwan Yin (I thought that would give me some courage.) Our teacher laughed and said you can’t have the name of a goddess and named me King Tree/Rain Sound. Wang Mu Ing. We all pay attention since the class moves very quickly. Sometimes it’s three hours a day and sometimes nearly six. Yesterday was the worst. Everyone in the class said the sentence, Chingwen ni, jiao shenme mingzi, which literally means Please, you, are called which name? (Or, what is your name?) It’s the sentence order that throws me. So when my turn came to repeat the sentence that everyone could repeat, I just couldn’t remember it. I couldn’t even remember the first word. I had to simply confess, “I forget.” The teacher kindly said, “Don’t worry. We’re all here to help one another.” I was mortified. Since I don’t blush and I can’t evaporate, I wondered for a brief second if I might burst into tears and thought that would be really awful after taking up everyone’s time by not being able to remember. Most likely I gulped.

So next came what really could not be imagined. We have a ten minute break each fifty minutes. At our break, Lorenzo turned to me and said,
“I have a question for you which is not about our class.”
“Yes, that’s good.”
“Is your name Deeane Wolfsteen?”
“Yes.”
“Do you, did you, are you, connected to a book called Inanna?”
“Yes — yes. Why do you ask? I’m the co–author.”

“Really! Really! I kept noticing your name on the sign–in sheet and it seemed so familiar. At our university in Trieste, we translated Inanna your book from Italian into English in our translation class. How did you write such a difficult book?”

Truly… How unlikely is it that we would be sitting together for a week trying to fathom a language foreign to both of us and meet across the world and he would be so kind and encouraging every day and then we would realize that we actually “knew” one another. We had been connected through another language — Sumerian — the very first of languages, which was written down on clay tablets four thousand years ago. The words lay under the sands of Iraq for thousand of years then were unearthed by archeologists and deciphered by Sumerologists and especially S.N. Kramer in Philadelphia, whose book I read in NYC and then from Philadelphia and NYC our translation of Inanna traveled to Italy, to Trieste, to Taiwan, to Kaohsiung. All most unlikely.

And now I have to measure up and open my mouth and forget about logic and simply enter a new grammatical system with new tones and sounds and letters. Actually, despite my incredible slowness, I find the precision very beautiful — each word has its own sound and I like the artistic movement of the letters. It’s a bit similar to the aging process or maybe it’s the same. Everything seems so miraculous but I can’t as easily do what I find so exhilarating. And I am very grateful to our teacher: “We’re all here to help one another.”

Sometimes, when we are all fanatically repeating the sounds that our teacher is making: boo, too, pooo, gooo, kooo, I laugh. My teacher looks at me quizzically; the others don’t even notice, they are so serious about getting the exact placement of the tongue for the sounds. I am too, but it somehow makes me laugh because we’re adults and I remember when my grandson Judah at two would repeat the sentences I said, in a gulp. That’s the way, children gulp and we position.

Wish me strength. I’ve the will power. It’s just the stamina to keep repeating goo, doo, noo, koo until……they’re all digested.

Highly recommended wherever you can see it.

Just found this photo from 2004 of me telling bible stories to patients at the Terence Cooke Hospital. It was a wonderful storytelling series, organized by Hasna El Badaoui.

During her trip to Australia earlier this year, Diane had a chance to sit with and interview Josie Wowolla Boyle, an Aboriginal storyteller, singer and painter who has shared the stories and traditions of the Wongi people for five decades. That conversation is now in the Winter 2011–2012 issue (“Many Paths, One Truth”) of Parabola Magazine.

“Everyone is teaching the child, especially the storytellers. The stories give the child wisdom. A storyteller tells a story while moving a stick, a Mirlbindee, in the sand. When stories are told casually, the people sit around the storyteller, their feet in the sand, and with sticks draw the images of the story as the storyteller tells it. The children usually sit with their grandparents during ceremony. Stories have their special times and places to be told. As we walk across the land, we can feel that in certain places the ancestral spirits did certain things. As we walk through country, the stories come out, and so those stories are told, songs are sung, and dances are danced. The songs of the places where things happen make a song–map of the country. There is also a song–map of the sky. There are many stories that connect Wongi people and country to the cosmos, and as the stars reach significant positions ceremonies are held and stories are told in song and dance. So the stories ‘happen’ according to what parts of the country the people are walking through and according to alignments between the stars and the earth.”

You are encouraged to read the entire interview in the new issue of Parabola, on sale at Barnes & Noble or your favorite independent bookseller or better yet subscribe to Parabola online and support quality independent publishing.

Above: Thich Nhat Hanh at Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush, New York (a moment together during Walking Meditation).

Sitting close to Thay. Who is he? Aware, connected, caring, removed, playful, spontaneous. He does fingerplay with the children, asks to sing “Present Moment, Wonderful Moment,” gazes at the miracle in which we dwell. Within him there is space, a blooming of skin and spirit.

When I travel, people often ask me about what it was like in New York during 9/11. There was an amazing feeling of wanting to help one another and tenderness in the midst of horror. This amazing story speaks of the goodness, the deep goodness we experienced all around us.

As one of the ship owners says, “Never say I should have.”

Five hundred thousand people were spontaneously shepherded out of New York City in nine hours!! Not since Dunkirk were so many people rescued — and with Dunkirk it took three days.

We were especially touched by this quick comment from the Lincoln Public School’s 9th Grade English Class blog:

“3rd period went to an assembly! Diane Wolkstein is a world famous storyteller and she was awesome.”

Many thanks to all for your warm welcome!

Diana’s portion of the teleconference, entitled “Midlife lessons from the Myth of Inanna: Returning Home,” will happen on Monday, September 19th, at 2 p.m. Eastern time.

You can learn more and register at the Menopause: The Magical website.