Several professional climbers have scaled the SanFran Golden Gate Bridge to put up huge flags high on the tall girders on the bridge. The flags read:
ONE WORLD ONE DREAM
and
FREE TIBET
Fox News says they have the cell phone numbers of one of two city workers who are at the highest point on the bridge, about half again as high as the climbers, who are pretty high indeed.
Apparently the police have arrested several people on the ground, and are not hazarding to climb the guy wires. Instead they will wait ’til the climbers come down. Western manners.
Regarding the two workers on the top of the bridge who are just sort of leaning there, waiting calmly… I hope the cell phone number Fox News has, goes to the guy with the long black pony tail. If he’s a Latino or a Native American, I hope Fox knows that we have five versions of yes that mean no.
On another note, there were riots in Paris, as there had been in London yesterday, as the Olympic Torch passed through; it was apparently extinguished three times today in the melee. I felt sorry for the torch bearer. Probably the honor of his lifetime. But, then, depending on his sentiments toward others, he might stand as a strong figure trying to do what Olympics athletes do; prevail against intense competitors. Who’d ever think carry the torch would turn into an endurance event?
Yet, I wonder at the headsmen in London and Paris, not realizing that people feel strongly about Tibet since it was misappropriated by China many years ago during a bloody war in which China boldly murdered the monks and nuns and many Tibetans… who are known as some of the most gentle, unassuming and hard-working people in the world.
It truly was China’s slaughter of the innocents.
The torch is to come to San Francisco in the next couple days.
I keep thinking of how the winds on the bay bridge are nothing to fool with. I hope all, workers and climbers, return to ground safely. The tradition of flying flags from highest places, is a prayer rite for Buddhists.
In an old story told by the elders in Tibet, a man who hunted and killed everything in sight, one day wounded a deer. By following the blood of the wounded, it is said in Buddhism, the worst most debased man might be turned to a heartful person…
In the story, when the man finally corners the terrified deer on the high point of the mountain, he realizes the fawn inside her has died as a result of her fearing for her life, and running running, never being able to be at peace.
It is a moment of satori, sudden realization when the man realizes every creature he has mistreated, every human he has scorned, has run from him, risking death from the running… all in order to not be near him in any way.
He is beside himself with regret and seeks a teacher to teach him the old traditions of peace and conciliation.
To a modern who wears too much jade in their minds, such a story is foolish.
But, this Tibetan story, and many others like it, carry the infinitely tender and iron faith the non-violent carry in their hearts; that peaceful saying and doing can somehow, like a spark jumping to hidden tinder, transform a human from a life ill-lived, to a life deeply lived with love.
It is not by accident that the Buddhists of Lhasa, Burma, Tibet, Sri Lanka, China, Thailand and other Asian countries are sometimes called living evidence that the world’s heart is still beating strongly.
By many eyes, so too the climbers of the Golden Gate.