曲徑通幽處 ...

Somewhere in the midst of the dream-hotel, a fountain gushes endlessly in a deserted courtyard. But where does the water come from? Where? I'd like to ask but the right person would never be there for me to talk to.

When Aliya first saw the silver starfish pendant hanging from my neck (four years ago now ...), she told me that a starfish will grow its lost limbs back without the hindrance of a brain or its rationalising faculties. I think about this from time to time and wondered if I could ever learn to bow down to the wind when it takes a fragment of my life away from me. I'm still not sure ... so I sat down one day and painted this story because I wanted to let the starfish take me away, whisk me through the portals of space and time, because I too must keep going without spending all day worrying about what I'd lose along the way!

Argh! But when I will stop writing about the river? Perhaps not for a very long time to come.

I was so happy painting these, just thinking about a postcard full of cryptic messages landing on the roof of this building one day. An extraterrestrial being reaching out from another galactic space? Or a secret signal waiting to be received by a faceless being? Anything felt possible to me then and I think it still does!

But whenever I tried imagining the front door of this house, I'd see billions of moss and green grass growing all over the railroad tracks leading to its secret entryway. Oh, well. I guess only those who knows how to decipher the messages of the wild flowers will ever find their way in.

An abandoned room in the dream-hotel, inhabited now by a number of residents from the forest. But still, a careless creature had left the lights on after checking out of the hotel!

The sun could be setting or rising on the days when I was painting on this bag but it doesn't matter either way because this peninsula will never know anything but a single, humid summer that stretches on and on forever.

But for now, I'll stay in the center of the maṇḍala and repeat María Kodama's words like a secret mantra: there can be no illumination without faith ... there can be no illumination without faith ... there can be no illumination without faith ... there can be no illumination without faith ...

In the "Recurring Dreams: Hotel" story, two anonymous figures sit in a hotel room day after day, waiting for somebody to arrive without knowing that the hotel has been abandoned for years ... maybe I was thinking of Beckett's play when I wrote this story, maybe I was, but I don't recall any of it now ... all I know is, I still can't get rid of the feeling that I'm waiting for somebody ...

I don't know why I waited eight years before taking Steve's advice of outlining my leaves green! So now my forest is green and I think it could heal my broken heart too? But could anything ever heal a broken heart? I don't know, I'll go and ask Doctor's sapodilla tree, my secret shrine in this universe. But if somebody out there hears me, please pray for me because even painting feels impossible these days.

Whenever I look out of the bedroom window, the range of mountains in the distance pulls me in with their unflinching gazes. So I trace the outlines of the mountain peaks over and over again until one day, I notice a tiny figure clambering up the slopes of the mountain. Oh, but that must be the Mountain Visitor of my imagination, I think that must be him! Look, I think he's trying to find his way back into the heart of the Mountain Kingdom again!

The boatman was humming a tune to himself as he rowed the boat forwards but my ears were filled with the songs of the cicadas and the movement of the water. The river reminded me of a story I wrote a few years ago, "Green River Myth", in which a twenty foot long Channa Striata haunted the depths of a river called the Green River. I was thinking of this story again because I thought I felt a strange presence in the water, trailing after us as the boatman led us further and further into the forest.

... and what did happen to me that year? The year when the rat finally made its way back to the first day of the calendar. I don't know, I suppose I was waiting for it to hold a light up for me and to tell me that the path ahead is clear! You're safe if you walk down this road! But was it?

When I was about ten or eleven years old, I used to dream about the same labyrinthine hotel whenever I fell asleep in my grandmother's house. The hotel in my dreams stood at the top of a hill crawling with emerald-green grass, a small, rounded hill that would dissolve into a vast expanse of field at the foot and then stretch on for infinite miles in all directions. The first time I saw the hotel there, I climbed up the hill on my own and wondered whether the breeze could be blowing in from the south.

I made a book out of scrap paper and brown wrapping paper so that my friends and I could write stories to each other when the ocean held us apart. But the book got lost in one of our letterboxes and never found its way back to me again ...

Years later, a memory came along to create a tidal wave that washed over the surface of my mind to reveal the dream-hotel lying beneath my consciousness. How could I have forgotten all about it? I tried finding my way back into the hotel after that but it no longer exists anywhere within the accumulated layers of time within my mind ... and so I started searching for it again by collecting articles after articles on dreams, fantastic doubles and the mirror-world.

傳說中，東邊的那座山上住著一隻熱心於圓夢事業的蝴蝶神。蝴蝶神有雙長達兩百八十一公分的翅膀，顏色有點像外婆家後院種的深橘色假向日葵。有人曾經告訴過我說，蝴蝶神喜歡在潮濕的五月至八月夜間出沒，將所有睡夢中的山林動植物驚醒。但我始終沒辦法逃出自己的夢境，因為蝴蝶神未曾把我的夢给圓一圓。