A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.

You can talk about movies all you want, but I have this porcelain fetish. I've had it since I was a kid, because there were so many kids in my family, the only place I had any solace was in the bathroom.

I had a lot of Barbies growing up, and a lot of porcelain dolls, but I was scared of them. I was so scared of them, I would try to turn their head away and would make my mom take them out of my room.

In the liquid amber within the ivory porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

Words can never fully say what we want them to say, for they fumble, stammer, and break the best porcelain. The best one can hope for is to find along the way someone to share the path, content to walk in silence, for the heart communes best when it does not try to speak.