Root-Tongue Letter: The Flower Beyond the Clouds
I do not know when the yearning began.
Perhaps it was in the scent of wood smoke carried across the rice fields at dusk, or in the hush that comes after frost first finds the grass. I only know that I felt it before I had words for it. A kind of aching direction. A place I had never seen, but which knew me completely. Sometimes it appears to me in dream as the city Chang’an, though I have never walked its streets. Other times it has no name, only a shimmer at the edge of things.
Tonight, I write by oil lamp. The flame leans when I sigh. My mat is thin. The insects outside the window sing with such precision it wounds me. I thought it was silence I wanted - but this is a silence with teeth gnawing at my heart.
Earlier, I unrolled an old poem from a forgotten drawer. The paper crumbled slightly at the edges, and a silverfish darted into the folds. It was Li Bai. His words returned to me like an echo from my own marrow.
The beautiful person is like a flower beyond the edge of the clouds...
Yes. I too have seen that flower. Not with the eye, but with something within the heart. I too have rolled back the curtain, stared at the moon, and long sighed in vain.
And still, I walk.
I have tried many names for what I seek. Some call it the True Place. Others, the Inner Guide. Some say it is the Self, others say it is the Beloved, the One Who Knows. But none of the names hold. All are empty and hollow. All fall away at the threshold. I know only this: it waits, and it calls.
Sometimes, I think the call is what makes the world.
This week, I crossed a narrow mountain path, where wind carves song from stone. I had eaten nothing but boiled roots and rainwater. My breath became shallow. Then - just before the descent - I saw it:
A flower. Just barely breaking through the frost-hardened earth. Pale. Shivering. Alive.
And I heard - no, felt - Li Bai’s line stir in the earth:
“The spirit I dream can’t get through, the mountain pass is hard...”
I did not touch the flower. I left it to bloom, or not, as it chose. But in that moment, I understood:
Sometimes the path does not lead to the destination.
Sometimes the path is the flower.
And you are what blooms.
To the next seeker who finds this letter:
If you feel that old ache rising in the chest like a broken heart - do not be afraid.
If you dream of places that shimmer and vanish - do not despair.
If you sit awake while others sleep and find yourself weeping at nothing at all - welcome.
You are walking with Li Bai now.
And the flower beyond the clouds may already be in your hand.
In longing and in flame,
- A fellow traveler, beneath the frost