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9 Tsunami December 26, 2004 Do not rush to know the difference as that will be a door too large for those who rush. Take instead the slow touch of bamboo. Come each morning to the same tree and rub it slowly the way you would rub a limb of your own. Know that you may lose it to a surgeon’s knife and touch every thin line. Feel the color of a single shaft of the thing the way you would find the smallest places on a finger. Put your lips against the leaves the way you would kiss the hair on your own arms. Embrace it with all of you and promise to keep the farmer’s axe away. Promise to shoo away the poison air of the cities. Ask the earth to bless it with children that are bamboo. Come at night and wait for the bamboo to sing in the wind, wait until the song comes, until hunger makes you angry. Think of the lines of bamboo, how they shoot up and then bend with their accomplishment. This may take more years than you have, or you may press the bamboo into a heartless fear of its own beauty. If so, start again, more slowly this time. After each step, pray for the children who went back into the sea without enough time to learn the songs of bamboo, or to remember. ...

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