The Time Tree

Chapter 1
First Time Chengdu

I first became aware of the Time Tree in Chengdu. Chengdu does not grow evident beauty. It does grow time.

I was walking to work at 07.30am on a May morning. My first time, a full working day, Chengdu. I heard a huge blast of birdsong. It emanated from where? This was not easily ascertained. I sought to explore its source. I looked down this alley then that. There suddenly it was, a tea-house. Lots of mature man sat around drinking tea under lime trees. On every table, and hanging from every accessible tree branch, was a cage. The bird in each, maybe a hundred, were singing their hearts out.

I went in. I was amazed. Early morning on a work day. So many men uncommunicatively sitting around while little birds blasted the air with song. What was this?

Without Chinese I was unable to ask . I watched, listened and thought. How could so many working men on a working day have the time for this.

I made my way onward. My interest in Han Wen, written Chinese, made me stop in front of a huge advertising hoarding. It adverted, I discovered with the aid of my electronic dictionary, “Chengdu The 24 Hour a Day City”. I pondered.

Over the next few months I was to learn that Chengdu did indeed grow time. Sleep for this city is a redundancy. Everything expands here to accommodate its inhabitants need to be and be with. At all times of day or night whole streets lined with tea houses, bars or restaurants have people sitting, talking, playing majiang, having there ears cleaned, their shoes polished, newspapers delivered, etc. Everything is geared up to maximising the time people have to be or be with each other. Parts of Europe approach this in Chengdu it the art of its soul.

Chapter 2
Time in a Bottle

A thing rare in China but becoming less so is truly decent wine at a decent price.

Alcohol is easy. Enough white spirit to get very drunk on costs less than 25 cents.

This does not buy time it spends it in befuddled thoughts and a sore head.

Fine wine gains time, cool white Orvieto in a dusty Tuscan, Italian town, deep red Chateauneuf du Pape on a hot day in Orange in France, Cuvee Mumm on a sunny afternoon in the Napa in California or Shiraz on a dusky afternoon at Chat's Cafe in the heart of the fine Arts Faculty at the Austalian National University in Canberra with Colin, Murray, Peter, David and Jill. All wines and places where time grows if only for a while. In Chengdu it grows all the time out of such bottles not least at The Bookworm with a bottle of Chilean Campo Largo, white or red, to hand and good friends all around. Its ambience nurtures time. Chengdu procreates it and further nurtures what it helps grow. Thus The Bookworm provides a cultural palette, in the right place, Chengdu, for humanity to stand and sit around being as one Chinese, American, Australian, Argentinian, British, Brazilian, Canadian, French and Irish a delight of all the colours of mind and feeling generating more hope for a human future.

You can take a little of this a lot of that and time flows out onto the canvas of life. The pleasure of humanity on a small global scale. This Western enclave on the far Western Plain of the massive dynamic canvas of humanity of modern China. Hopes, expectations, realisations and growth. They, with love, are all around. Our species future?

Chapter 3

一年成池 “The first year a moat
二年成市 The second a city
三年成都 The third, Chendu

The third time West is to the Time Tree. You may be free but you never leave. The movement to the West is one way. Years speak centuries. In 19th Century America young men went West. In the 20th Century they took the Pacific and in the 21st the West beckons from the East.

What is this place. The West ends. The Silk Road starts to God, Islam and oil.

The Time Tree flourishes. Days are not centuries they are millennia.

With these thoughts Cheng looked at the emptiness that lay ahead and started out on the road to the mountains. He reckoned the bus would get to Song Pan and Emma's Kitchen by night fall.

He was looking forward to the Journey. It was going to be long. Could her get there ever, he wondered, thinking of the route he had chosen. Would they let him get there? He did not know. Fear tinged his thoughts. He knew from experience these would fade and Andreis would know the answer when he met him for dinner at Emma's. Andreis knew the way through the mountains. He would know, he mused. His darkness lifted to the light of the day and he settled into writing. It was to be a long journey on the road to the WAY..