Lotus.

In Shanghai’s M50 art district, I wandered into another world. In a city of 28 million souls, she was a still point: a living work of art who spoke of life, creativity, and eternity. We drank blue flower tea, sketched without words, meditated in a room filled with dreams. And then, as suddenly as she appeared, she was gone — her studio vanished like a myth, leaving only memory and the scent of incense behind. Lotus is a story about fleeting encounters, lost worlds, and the strange timelessness we sometimes glimpse inside the noise of modern life.

LOTUS

Those of you who are my age will remember the BBC children’s animated television series Mr Ben and the phrase ‘As if by magic the shopkeeper appeared’.

I found my way an art studio in the M50 art district of Shanghai and there she was... Lotus. I instinctively took off my shoes and stepped into another world, far away from the hubbub of the seething city of 28 million people outside. Lotus emerged, draped in a gown of her own design and invited me to tea. She poured blue flower tea into tiny cups, surrounded by her astonishing art.

The atmosphere in her studio was electric but soothing and she spoke in halting English of her vision of ‘life as art’. Myself, being useless at flirting, pontificated on the mythology and healing properties of the Silver Birch Tree and we communicated mostly by sketches and doodles. I felt a calm that I hadn’t experienced elsewhere in my stay here. She turned the lights down, curious Mongolian nose flute music (or some such thing) echoed around the room, and we meditated for a while. She projected images of herself, naked, covered in body paint, onto the walls around us. Note: If you think this was a ‘come hither’ moment then you might be mistaken, artists do this sort of thing. I drifted off into a cat-like doze until I came back to my senses wondering if it had all been a chapter in a novel. I bid her goodbye after gifting her with drawings of the Goddess Guan Yin and a few sketches of herself. She responded with a gift of tea from her ‘master Buddha type person’ in Tibet, some rare hand-made incense, and a strange and beautiful brass tool for hacking the rock-solid tea apart. When I found myself back on the street, navigating the intensely energetic metropolis that is Shanghai the thought occurred to me that this moment could have happened at any time in the past 1000 years. I could have been a traveller in the time of Marco Polo and it would have been almost the same (with the exception of the video projections of her beautiful bum 15 feet across on the studio wall). But she was, she is eternal. She has always existed, at any point in time and space. And, of course, her last words to me were, “Your blue eyes, so deep, they hold so many secrets”. And with that, I disappeared into the night.

When I returned there on a whim she was gone. Her studio had gone. As with the mythical Scottish village of Brigadoon she had perhaps returned, along with her studio, to the endless realms of eternity, only to pop up again in some other reality.

The brass tool for hacking tea I carry with me everywhere - like a child that forms an attachment to a specific toy for reasons that can’t be determined.

I assured myself that the photo of us together was proof that she had existed. It wasn’t just a dream, she must have been real.

I will never see her again.

Enjoy the moment. It will not last.