Dear Adam,

 

Remember how you always tell me how much you love Venice and how you want to go back there? And how Hong Kong is the most beautiful place you’ve ever been? And how cool it would be if we could all just go and live out on Lamma Island with the hippies, next to the Buddhist monasteries and the big nuclear power plant, and we could eat seafood and get deep tissue massages and trade in our books at the local second hand bookstore, so we would never run out of things to read, so we would not really need anything. Except sometimes, we would take the ferry over to the main island, where you can get EVERYTHING. I mean, not everything that money can buy, but all that and everything else, and yet nowhere else is so pervaded by the sense that it’s all just…it’s all just Samsara, which is a Buddhist term meaning ‘continuous flow’ or stream of consciousness, but also it means that everything is just an illusion, a figment of your imagination…

 

So, now we can begin: Read the rest of this entry »