My fingers are purple and sore. They are purple from a species of Lindera I have just cleaned that smells like a rip off of Joy dishwashing detergent, yet born from a lovely rounded evergreen shrub with glossy linear leaves that reeks of elegance, growing in the hardiness zone of 7,000′. My thumbs are sore, and will be for several days, from two hours of inducing the birth of seed of Illicium (star anise) from its premature fruit. I am carrying about town, with said sore and stained hands, rather stylishly I am told, and from my room to the hovel where I clean my collections, a three dollar pirated rendition Louis Vitton, (more pathetically, it appears by Viet news outlets, any recent donations to the RNC has proffered the rogue hockey huntress the real McCoy which certainly will be donated to charity). In this I am carrying my computer, Ziplocs, strainers, sieves and a novel (Knowing Frank) that I have not opened for over two weeks. I am in northern Vietnam in a once small hill station transformed to Kathmandu sans high quality weed, a profoundly proud minority and a refined French cuisine. My sixth time. Tomorrow I leave for a trek into new territory called Five Fingers and I feel much like Frodo might have felt before his departure from Middle Earth to Lothlorien. [Read more…]

Yeh, ok, I realize that. I said ok, ok? I know I do not write often enough and I know that when I do write, I write too much. There are always other more important things to do than to sit to write; put suet out for the birds, the birds that somehow disjointedly figure into what I was going to write about, weed the part of the garden that has the plant that I was going to write about, take a picture of the plant I was going to write about, collect its seed, remove a dead branch, clean the refrigerator because it had absolutely nothing to do with the subject I was about to write about. You know the drill. And then, when the dogs are walked and asleep on the banquette and the most up-to-date election polls are examined, I begin to write about what I was meant to write about, at last confronting that bridge to nowhere while attempting to create a reality that someone will be sufficiently naïve to believe. And then I write too much because there generally is too much too say, especially so when I am saying it, and you end up on a long bridge that leads to nowhere. And sadder still, I know precisely what all of you must be shrieking when you attempt to decipher my infinite, yet I must say ever so thoughtful and witty musings; thanks but no thanks. [Read more…]

It seems an eternity since last smelling rain falling on warm earth, while visiting this sea of humanity. The latter platitude is more appropriately applied to Tokyo than any place on this earth, at least of those I have visited. I walked around the lake inUeno tonight after dinner, rain be damned, listening to the background buzz of a city overlaid by emotive cries of night herons and the swallowing, hollow gathump of bull frogs. While savoring the fine petrichor, I marveled in the fact that other life forms have successfully jived with such kinesis and infinite lay of (mostly) uninspired but seismically stable architecture and imponderable sprawl of concrete.

It is my sweet 16th visit to this country, the archipelago I fearlessly continue to negotiate by cutting wide and vulgar swaths through its language and etiquette. Yesterday I became imprisoned on the wrong bus that, after a gruesomely long haul, ended up where I had started instead of where I was going. [Read more…]

There was something horribly unsettling about the beautiful weather we had thus far experienced in the mountains of Taiwan. It was like finding a child’s room completely and utterly organized or our ill behaved dogs sitting when commanded, as if they had done something very bad or were about to. This was not the Taiwan that I knew from the past, the country whose atmospheric marinade permanently saturates your clothing and prunes your skin before you even set outside. During my last visit in 1999, seeds collected were 4 parts water, 2 parts misery and 1 part embryo.

So I took the first week here with a deliberate daily Thanksgiving, appropriate as it was the week of turkey fest, knowing full well that the irritable child that had unexpectedly said ‘I love you’ would soon again be acting out. The days were splendid and the views sublime. [Read more…]