The Lantau Rope

It could very well be raining this morning halfway across the world on Lantau Island, driblets
weeping off the
magnificent bronze pate of the Tian Tan Buddha. Like some choice filling wrenched from the
open mouth
of an ancient, widespread humanely decaying religion. Where he once was in the firmament of
the living and
dead equally, now he occupies a crystal nod to fear, a psychological grip of some
consistently disappearing
rope. It didn't fall from the sky, though that fact didn't manage to stop millions from climbing it.
Nor did it
wiggle out of the earth like a cobra bellydancing on the wavelength of a flute. The rope was born
when they were
and remained well-hidden until one day they took a look at their X-rays
or spied
photographs
of what a person's inner calcium looks like disrobed. Flesh gone, skin, muscle and viscera.
The rope, to
their surprised eye, was there all along. For each a spine that climbs them and which holds them
aloft
like figments of fulfilled gravity. Lying to dredge sleep, they held it lateral above the below
of them. As they
sat up, curved it like space-time in the presence of superior density. But the finest moment
was when
they sent the rope climbing, up a ladder, a flight of stairs, a length of its knotted namesake out there
in the surmountable commotion.
The Buddha was an elegant solution, an intuitive and precise way of talking to it. A choice example
of vigilant ease
and the measuring of fate with awareness. How many saw the huge buddha on his stupa, surrounded
by vegetation
that thrived and fed from the sun in cycles? One among many islands at various distances from the
panicked navel
of Hong Kong? Statues of beings that may not have even lived live more vividly once they've mixed
the seen and
the believed behind both eyes. Not one or the other: both. Because the bridge of the nose, the
cartilage above breath
divides them.