Taipei and I meet often in Da’an Forest

Summers, rains, winters, springs, mornings, evenings, afternoons, every hour of every season, I go into the lap of Forest Part in the middle of Da’an to be cradled like a babe. I walk on the trails that hold the hand of streets and traffic. I venture away into the depths towards a pond where seasoned birdwatchers with cameras and telephoto lenses pointed to some hole in the branch of a tree stand still waiting for some bird to come out and bask its beak in the Sun.

In the middle of last century, someone tells me, the site housed an encampment of refugees fleeing from defeat to come and rule the island with an iron fist. Overnight, people who had been coerced to learn Japanese for half a century were coerced again to learn an altogether new tongue.

From schools, colleges, cities, clinics, and newspaper offices, many were rounded up on the charge of human desire to speak their minds and seek their place on earth. A museum some distance away contains a wall hung with frames in whose blank depths so many disappeared. On Green Island off the southeastern coast, a prisony to those who were snatched from their friends and lovers stands testimon to be submerged for decades of White Terror.

Now the encampments leave no trace, I wonder if some archeologist in some distant future will be able to uncover their remains, the temporary huts and houses of the forlorn, and imagine the lives they led, the food they ate from amidst the trash discarded and covered by the earth that gives burial to all, and never discriminates what camp one of her sons or daughters belonged to or was killed by.

When I enter the forest park, I seek some benches and a quiet patch of grass to lie down and gaze through the shivering leaves to the trembling patchwork of skies. When the leaves are lush, the air is sweet honey; when they dry up, a music of crinkled breeze echoes. The sun reaches me green and yellowed, red and amber, colored in the shades of the seasons.

Under a station amidst the trees, an amateur band of old friends plays on saxophone. They are so terrible; they make me laugh. Yet they are so persistent; they carry me away nonetheless. Ears tickle at the missed notes, and my palms rub on the earth and tear some blades of grass, a sweet perfume rises and mixes with the sound of music.

Every evening, some group of older folks gather to sway their limbs slowly to the movement of Tai Qi, the source eternal, whose turbid and subtle manifestations give form to that which is fine amongst us as well as to that which is gross.

Flows of Qi, a river, makes

and makes the limbs of man and fins of fish.

Sages flow with the Qi and lose themselves;

mortals resist and become lost.

Mothers and fathers push their newborns in a pram, and toddlers go looking for fireflies. The young ones in love stand beneath cherry blossoms in bloom, kiss the shining sun, and a friend clicks the shutter. A friend learns how to ride a cycle, making circumambulations of the Da’an park, and I follow behind as a father looks upon his babe’s first steps.

So many seasons twirl together on the few acres of Da’an park, the summer gust of rest, the winter rain of despair, the noon of belonging and the sunset of separation. The summum bonum of petty humanity and vast nature echoes like the splash of fish in a pond and the chirping of birds in the skies. I make so many friends without ever saying a word, we pass each other by, each her own music, the swing to her very own dance.

Anthropologists are usually very late to discover what the birds and clouds have told the sages eons ago. They pose questions, ‘Does the forest think?’ and think themselves profound, not knowing it is like the blind asking, ‘Is their light?’ when their faces burn with heat, and the deaf learning about music through their feet.

In Da’an Forest, I am born again, created a new,  

chasing the trail of claps,

echoed at the hour of dusk,

for an answer to some old koan.

A gathering of new residents

have chosen a dense clan of trees

for their elders

to lead an initiation,

into some esoteric ritual.

I remember the mighty banyans that grow to be a hundred,

two hundred,

three hundred years old,

sending shoots below to spread new roots.

‘In the arrival of the new, the old is replenished,’ the forest says without uttering a word. What is Taipei? It is such a boring question. If you ask Where is Taipei? I will say: in the breath of Da’an forest, the flows of Tamsui, the smell of stinky tofu, everywhere the city flows eternally birthing new, burying old.

In one corner of Da’an, someone gathers his possessions in a bag for a pillow, curls up on a bench to make a home for the night, shielded by the roof, open to the elements. In another corner, a statue of Buddha stands amid a bed of flowers, the forest welcomes all, the one who searches and the one who comes to rest at the end of the day’s search, the one who preaches the Dhamma and the one who wanders in Samsara, both in the shade of a bodhi tree.

Lest we mistake the silence of trees for submission, I must tell you of the banners of protest and resistance that rise in the womb of Da’an, protesting the scythe of injustice and resisting the knuckles of tyranny, waving the banner of belonging and a march of humanity.