"IT's NOW EARLY MORNING IN CHINA,"
I thought one night while up late alone. Yet another thought amid the competing contemplations of the indulgent distractions which would keep me from either the sleep I need, or the sober considerations of life's truths. Even so, the dawning of a fresh misty morning over the Li River Valley keeps my thoughts on track. My inner eye envisions white watercolor cranes taking wing across the riverbank as along the reedy shore an old man "strums the lute," while an old woman "catches a bird's tail." Each one breathes in the warm chi of the new day, as I do also, vicariously through them.

All this is perhaps a preferrable vision to the real damp darkness outside my home in Seattle. What life consists of here rather, along the chipped and littered streets, is a night still around but no longer alive. The cold outdoor carpaths of my own location lie wet and choked with gritty pine-pollen, coloring yellow the silent drifts of curbside automobiles evicted from warmer garages by cluttered collections of useless suburban junk. Such paved arteries of possibilities, each connecting my own doorway to billions of others throughout the hemisphere, are instead swallowed up in sleep by a dense fog, which forbids any view of the sky to quicken their pulse with starlight.

How much more would I instead like to feel that crane's refreshed freedom, and mount up with wings of my own, to dry my feet in the warming air, or to emulate the rooted movements of the people's pushing hands, bathed in morning sunshine, gliding across that distant sandy shore, never needing sleep.

In these parts there are no thunderstorms or fireflys. The flickering flames of the Northern Lights rarely charge the night, even if the cloud cover permitted. Instead there is the chilling persistence of bills which wait to be mailed by the 15th, 18th, 20th and 24th of the month, and the distant rumbling of garbage trucks plowing along those yellow streets. My drapes are still drawn tight on all sides, and the T.V. is still on - to something, it doesn't matter what. It's flutter and mutter - a poor imitation of the Aurora - are companion to the drip and drizzle outside. There is as yet no sign of a new day, but I will be looking for one.

When morning finally does arrive, I know that the first sound to greet the day here will be the alarming crackle of snooze radio. It will be inevitably followed by the bubbling bouquet of the latest edition pot o' coffee, and the companion clinktink of spoon in mug. Soon the neighboring grumble of idling engines will rattle the walls, sounding the start of a new day's race. Elsewhere the hum of office photocopy machines will accompany the brryang of business phones in an electric charged symphony throughout the city. I will look up into my morning's diffuse dawn, and search for a ray of that light that had once greeted the otherside of the world of my imagination, now struck with shadows of its own making, far far away from the white crane's valley.