This year, on Yom Kippur I took a vow of silence and went for a hike on Lantau Island.
By the end, I decided I really needed a blog. I also decided that writing in it on my day of silence would sort of be counterproductive, even though there were lots of thoughts I was having that I wanted to get out. It was like being 10 months pregnant. I felt 10 months pregnant, AND hungry.
Lots of these thoughts centered around the holiday. I was thinking about what it means to be hungry, why it is we consume things, the difference between needing and using, how use determines need, and a person's relationship to a custom like fasting, or Tashlich. Naturally, I was thinking about the extent to which people put customs like these into practice, and what it is about these customs which make us feel rooted. On Friday nights, when I go to the third floor of Wing On Plaza to find a collection of Jews from all over the world sitting down to eat challah--it's about feeling rooted far away from home. You recognize a familiar meal, a book, a chant.
There are lots of things in Hong Kong that are unfamiliar and alien, for example: cow lung noodles. Banyan trees are another good example--although they're the type of alien thing that is so magnificent, that they shock you straight into a state of reverence. It's because they illustrate directly something other trees only suggest. Banyan trees grow branches out, and down into the ground again, which then become new roots. They grow all over the place here. How clever! In order to put down roots, there must be a period of branching out--and what is the difference really, anyhow, between a root and a branch?
The branch is for the root, and the root for the branch.
And a boot is for a r-ranch.
So that's why I call this blog "Moot Root." It's a root, and it's a branch.
It's open to debate, and it's of little or no practical value.
It's just so, and for itself.
