At Esalen

In 1949, communist China took the heart out of love.

They were trying to make the written language more accessible to the illiterate, to open up the world to those who did not yet have access to books and directions, to writing letters to lost loved ones.

Reading poetry perhaps to a devoted wife, to coloring large folios with "Happy Birthday" to a child you have always loved, with or without the symbols, the black on white, the elegant stroke of brush-on calligraphy.

There's just so much beauty in a word. And in all their tender caring, their thoughtful "Let's just make this easier," they cut, like so many unopened buds from the garden, the heart right out of love.

I don't pretend to know the heart of China except to say I know the desire of every human heart to connect, to unite, to love and be at last love expressing itself, its delight.

To take the heart out of love, out of the word, out of the feeling itself is to take the roots from the tree, the sky from the bird, the wet from the rain.

Still Mother Nature will always raise her glorious head to the challenge. Then ow.

Huang Lao Tzu Chong Lian Tai Chi dancing across the globe's arms gathering energy sharing joy breathing a thousand empty cups and the one filling back up the possibility that we can change we can transform one sweet literate and illiterate person at a time back into the always already knowing that you cannot with acts or edit or denial ever truly take the heart out of love.

So we put it back, sending our chi, love, energy, wisdom, light back to China, our rooted mountain standing atop it.

All of us witnessing that great revival, our hearts already having traveled together back into the center of love.

At Esalon for our Grand Master Tai Chi instructor, Tai Chi instructor.