Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, " I do not want to live on as a shadow of myself. " What is so wrong with my shadow? If there's something wrong with it it's only because there's something wrong with my Self.  If I see in my shadow someone fat and lazy I surely don't want this Self of me, not now, not later, hopefully never.  What I can stand being hidden in my shadow is what I have been tolerating in my Self when the sun was at the top of my head and my Self and shadow were at one. When the sun rises we see our silhouette cast out to propose a possible future path; when it goes down we see on the ground dark matter we left behind.  Mid-day is when living is happening, the present Presence comes out to play in reckless abandon.  Life is fragile but for a brief moment there's no shadow on the ground to remind us of that, to curb our enthusiasm. What Hans Küng was getting at, I think, is the idea of "to live on" as if the shadow is the Self.  Imagine th

Dear Eugene, I was determined to not write this morning: I really should be reading more.  Then I walked by the house of my neighbor who suffered a stroke and thought about  Hans Küng . It is dangerous to think about heroes, especially gigantic ones, for you would need to confront how ordinary you are.  Whereas I no longer find myself as infused by the thoughts of Küng as I once was, over 20 years ago when I first started to get serious about theology and, really, life in general, his presence is always there-- here --at the bottom of my heart, a stone that anchors.  He was the first man on this moon. I was a late adopter to email. My first address was hans_kung@mybc.com.  Don't try to reach me there; the domain name doesn't exist anyway.  Alex doesn't live there anymore.  I was young then and Küng a true rock 'n' roller to me.  He's never run out of dynamite ever since he blasted himself into the scene. In 2013 he wrote about how he was considering

Dear Eugene, I don't play with my phone and last night I thought maybe I don't play with it enough: there must be something good, something better that I can do with it. So I found myself an app to identify plants, went into my photo album to do precisely that, surprised by how it actually worked, wasted 30 mins in sort of a good way. And I thought, Yeah, if I can do school all over again, this is the kind of thing that would interest me.  There are stuffs you put in your head because you need to use them, and there are others just for the joy and pleasure of their being revealed.  Somewhere in between exists a tenuous dance of the realistic and romantic, I suppose, if one doesn't mind the obscenity of such arbitrary sorting. Now I used the word "sort" twice already this morning, a word I don't often use.  There are 20 stand-ins lining up to deputize but I let the stranger stay.  I determined to do something I didn't even know the reason for an

Dear Eugene, The night gets longer.  Now in the morning I look out the kitchen window to see my backyard emerges out of a play of dark shadows.  Soon enough the curtains' movement shall slow down and with that the unveiling of familiar things made strange by rain and wind and critters, friends and foes, stuffs out there once made impressions in me coming back to add nuance and emphasis, correct misconception, tie up loose end, suggest new connection, revisit history, bury and build. Isn't this how we emerge every morning from the death of night to a new day?  The change of season just makes the rumor unmistakable. Yours, Alex

Dear Eugene, If there is a thought that I think everyday now it is how my life is more than half over but if the human experience is a feast I haven't tasted the half of it. Heck, I don't think I can even remember half of the stuffs in the books I placed on the shelf right behind me, books I pretend to care enough about to have them have my back.  How many words do you need to hold on to, to live by, to stay alive? Sometimes I saw a shadow at the corner of my eye (don't know which) and I wondered if it will grow bigger.  Now if you are a doctor you will say Let me take a look at that and would try to see through my eyes, and I'd say Don't bother, I am half way done .  I don't think it will help you to see things through my eyes, that's all, not trying to make a statement about optometry. I have a friend who said if he could choose again he would rather be an optometrist and I asked Why?  I don't know if he knew the full reason but it has to do

Dear Eugene, The morning gets cooler.  The weatherman said the warm days are still here but the mornings are certainly getting cooler and I can feel it.  I wonder what it means, the cooler, to other people. I live in a house and the condition of my surrounding is conditioned to suit my conditions.  I feel the changes in the air I suppose but they don't hurt.  If they can hurt me it's because I walked out of my front door my back door and faced the unconditioned conditions.  These are choices I can still make. These little squinting eyes of mine see things.  The last owner of my house covered the big sundeck above the garage and turned it into a room.  This room is conditioned to be habitable, with baseboard heaters, but when it is heat you want to get rid of during summer I wouldn't waste the wheeling round of a fan head to spread the roast: it'd be like peddling ice blocks in a desert.  So I use the room for storage. There is another thing about the room.  T

Hey Eugene, Anything interesting this morning? Everything is interesting; though I think not much actually sustains our interest. Yesterday I walked some steps unnecessary and saw a pair of soccer cleats hanging high up close to a ball field.  It looks pretty "sick," as my son would call it, meaning cool, awesome, most interesting.  Nike.  Turquoise.  Sicker still that it seems to be a brand new pair, from my angle gently if not never used, with not a blade of grass to spill its history. Pranks are meant to be sick jokes, in both senses of the word, interesting and disturbing. Now I don't think this prank is very interesting because there are too many done the exact same way.  What's interesting is how the beautiful pair's hanging made me think about stuffs.  I smelled Hastings Street in the Chinatown area where people would place stuffs on the roadside to sell, probably stolen goods not worth stealing, selling to whom I shall never know, at a pri

Dear Eugene, I suppose if a person wakes up every morning without considering the compromises he's going to make in the next 24 hours he probably has nothing to fight for, nothing to lose himself into. A person with an ideal knows every gain comes with a loss, and if she doesn't count the latter there really is no urgency or even necessity in and for the former.  A victor runs a tight ship of damage control and writes his concession speech first thing in the morning. Yesterday when I was high up on the Skytrain (a LRT in the sky) I saw a man on the ground exposing himself.  He placed himself at a spot where the train swoops down for the audience to take in the spectacular.  Our stomach is supposed to drop with the sinking motion, and to get his high the man wanted to take us to a lower place.  It's very strategic; he certainly knew what he was doing.  If he could add music to the head of the passengers I am sure he would have done it to usher us into the epic momen

Dear Eugene, People you see once a year, if that, send them back to where they came from, expect the circle to come around again, who are they to you anyway?  Signpost?  Of what? We should do more of this , a family member said to an annual visitor during our two-day mini-vacation together.   DV . Let's just say God wills.  I am more interested in what Man does.  (Not that one can easily untangle the two.) Do I expect the same person to show up next year?  Is it kind of me to expect this way, as if it's a well-wish, for him to retain his youth even knowing for sure he's losing it at an ever increasing pace, for him to gain more wealth even seeing the abrasion on his face by the mechanism of prosperity, a peeling off of humanity, layer by layer?  How presumptuous of me to think what goes around really comes around. I wished him well.  I let him be.  Is this the best I can do for a friend? The world is full of bad news.  He trotted around the Globe to find my h

Dear Eugene, Season changes.  Does a person, truly? There is a well-known C. S. Lewis saying:  "It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind." I wouldn't change one word of what he said, other than maybe the word wind to hurricane . Therein lies the rub, we are living in a wind, a hurricane, and to "shove them all back" one must at least acknowledge, recognize the strength of gale around him, carrying him, battering him, pushing and pulling him this way and that.  When one is getting used to the noise and commotion one is truly getting old. I don't suppose one ever

Dear Eugene, Here I am, writing at an hour when I don't usually write, with tons of stuff I want to write about but not the heart and energy to sift through the rubble and find a gift meaningful to you. I can never be a poet; I know that already.  You've published a book of poetry and said it took you, what, 55 years(?), to come up with those 100 pages.  That's very prolific, compared to whatever output I am yielding so far--if I should be so shameless to take liberties with the word "output." Life has its way to drain poetry out of everything. Now I am not blaming life.  When there is no life there is no poetry. But it is also true that much of life's circumstance is not conducive to giving the light of day to the dark corners of heart. Am I suggesting poetry should only be about the melancholy?  I hope I am not; though I must say it often feels like so to me.  Maybe the word is not sadness, but thoughtfulness. Yet so often the birth of a poem

Dear Eugene, I am not too sure if this is the right way to have your neighbors find new respect for you, but here I was, shooting for the stars, if only those eight feet off ground, and with a laundry mesh over my head.  I liked the smell. You are a home owner; you can see the pain in the humor.  I am sure you have done something more ridiculous than this. If there is a different catalog of dreams for every season, my summer catalog is surely full of bugs.  Last year a swarm of bees decided to build their nest between the walls of my garage.  When I served them an eviction notice they decided to send their strongest four to go kamikaze on me.  I wasn't an experienced fighter then--and who would know their sting could actually go right through garden glove?  Let's just say their coordinated simultaneous effort was precise, efficient, effective and I was miserable. I didn't blame them.  I was trying to kill their whole family after all. Early this year, at the ta

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I walked aimlessly and dictated to my phone my aimless thoughts: I always find it interesting I should be given this freedom this Freedom so tentative and fragile as if it will be taken away any time without notice since it was given me with no reason it wouldn't be improper for it to be taken away for no reasons too sometimes when I walk on the street I wonder why  there is no one coming up to me and strike me in the head since no one made no promise to me that I should not be struck in the head  I couldn't say it is a totally unexpected turn of event if it happens I really see no reason why someone should not just come and take things away from me or that I should find the strengthen and will and necessity to not let that happen I walk to a library knowing that today is a holiday and that it is not open but who says something new could not happen new things happen if I cannot stop bad things from happening with my suspension of disbelief then I

Dear Eugene, Nothing drives us.  No thing  drives us. Of course the one who does the driving is never a What but a Who .  How can it be otherwise? This is no high philosophy or mere play on words.  A child can see that but most of us have effectively chased away the child. "What drives you?"  Again that's the question.  Career?  Ambition?  A will to survive?  Lust for life? The one who does the driving is never a What ; I feel silly to state something so obvious.  To say our life is fueled by, for example, ambition is to say a car is driven by gasoline, maybe the law of physics, maybe even human ingenuity. No.  A car is driven by a Creator who purposes the car's moving to achieve an end meaningful to the Creator.  If the Creator finds no reason to move, no meaning to go from A to B, there would have never been a car, not even the idea of giving something a "drive."  The Creator is driven; the drivenness in the Creator makes the car move. The

Dear Eugene, "What drives you?" I was asked this question this past weekend, a question, I suppose, we've all been asked, in different settings, by different people, under different shades of moonlight. It's about time I give an answer.  I'd usually question the questioner's question, at least three questions thrown back his/her way; but none of that evasion today. I came up with something worse. My answer is: This question ( not the questioner) disgusts me, that whenever I hear it I feel this strong repulsion in me to expose its wrongheadedness, by doing exactly the opposite of what it suggests I should be doing to wake up meaningful the next morning, specifically by resisting what proposes to make claim on my will and hope and energy and the very next step I take, and I would slam on the brake to grind my every action to a halt and see if my non-drivenness would kill me.  And if it does, then I shall meet the Person who drives me in my dying.