A message to the reader

Here's to you faithful reader.  I hope you are able to gain some benefit from my words.  After all, I'm out here going to considerable effort: braving the motor scooters, sweating in the humid sub-tropical air, struggling with Chinese grammar (not to mention the arcane shapes of Chinese writing).  Its challenging enough just existing here, but I must admit its a LOT of fun.
I had not expected to feel so comfortable with my fellow students.  Almost every night we gather to go somewhere different for dinner.  Its all arranged through tapping on the mobile, sometimes even before class ends at 4:30.  Tonight we all hopped on Ubikes and pedaled off to a Sushi restaurant. There were at least 10 of us, representing 6 or 7 different countries, snaking through the Taichung evening traffic on orange 3 speed bicycles.

So in an effort to open a window on some of the flavours of my life in Taichung I offer photos of some of my my classmates, glimpses of our activities and my favorite place - the park surrounding the Science Museum.
They constantly seem to be coming up with new ideas, these young friends of mine.  I feel very lucky that they always make an effort to include me.
Meanwhile I read Buddhist psychology and wonder if there's any                                                      
way to discuss the Buddha Dhamma with them.
 Possibly I'm missing the point.  Have I been discussing the way with myself?  Let's see.  1st truth: life is suffering.  Hmm, not a lot of prima facie evidence.  However, there is always this sense of something lacking - a sense of need and of anxiety.  And its all ever-changing and impermanent.  Not the sort of theme to worry most young people.  2nd truth -  In my case its more compelling, that the cause of suffering is the sense of clinging, wanting and fearing.  Its a feeling of insufficiency that is always there, but which arises more strongly in times of great pain and crisis.  We have hitched our wagons to external cravings.  3rd truth - there is an end to suffering if we embrace the truth of non-self and let go of attachments to sense pleasures and all their close relatives.  4th truth - the 8 fold path gives us the way to live in order to fully experience the 3rd truth.

 It seems clear to me that my path lies in between these apparent paradoxical experiences.
"Who holdeth to himself a joy doth the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity's sunrise."
You can see me in the pictures on either side.  Please take the notion of kissing as a metaphor.  These people are young enough to be my grandchildren.  Anyway, its not just the people, its the wonder and magnificence of the life that surrounds me.  Eternity's sun ever rising.