Alternative Transportation

Is there anything more metaphorical, romantic, or mysterious than trains?  I come from a family with a history in trains ("The Pennsy"--the PRR, the great Pennsylvania Railroad, now absorbed by AMTRAK). Great-great-uncle Hiram on Mom's side was a railroad man,  as was my grandfather on Dad's side.  My father recalled taking the train as a child to visit relatives 75 miles up north of the town I grew up in, which during the industrial 20th century was a major center of rail commerce and locomotive building and maintenance.   But I'd never taken a train anywhere until I was in my 30s, and then because it was convenient to get back and forth from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.  They were trips I took because I didn't have a car: the bus was creepy and boring and uncomfortable, and flying was too expensive.  But the train--what a relaxing and economical way to travel.  Have a beer and watch the world go by, sort of slowly, really, while basking in that comforting confidence that the train knows where it's going, you don't have to do anything.  I took the train about 10 years ago from Philadelphia to Altoona, while re-reading "Brave New World,"  a once futuristic and slightly lascivious book that now seems as quaint as riding a train.  I finally got to observe the "World Famous Horseshoe Curve" from the Curve itself.  When I was a child, we used to visit the Curve on family Sunday drives; it was supposedly an engineering marvel and a kind of shrine for railroad families. I used to irk my father by asking if they knew about the World Famous Curve in Pakistan. (They probably did, India and Pakistan being train-dependent countries.)  There was a point on the curve around the mountainside where the locomotive and the caboose would be just a few feet from each other if the train was long enough.  It's a pretty cool thing to experience, like being in a model train layout (another icon of railroaders, to be found under every Christmas tree).

For a recent gathering of family and friends for a wedding in Palm 

Springs, California, I was nostalgic when I got RT tickets for my son and his SO on the Coast Starlight, a train that runs down the west coast, from Seattle to LA.  I was vicariously anticipating the romantic 30-hour each way North-by-Northwest journey, with sleeper cabin and dining car, indulging in ancestor worship and thinking of trains in China.  My son took a fabulous photo from the train which I don't think he will mind my sharing here.

This image  seemed so Chinese to me, the beautiful cranes observed from a train, and made me think about my China train travel experiences.  (One in particular, a wonderful moment 20 years ago in the Chinese countryside when the Wizard was able to use, quite clearly in Mandarin, a phrase he had learned by rote: "Why is the train not coming?")

Here in Hawaii, we are having a major political "discussion" about rail, because we need alternate transportation really bad.  In terms of both destination and placement, the crux of the issue is "Where will it go?"  As if there will be one single long track that goes from here to there and solves everyone's problems.  In Hong Kong, and Greater China, EVERYONE can get ANYWHERE because the trains go EVERYWHERE.  Under harbors, through mountains, across deserts, below cities like mole tunnels.  And routes are added constantly, like the controversial train to Tibet, and new lines all the time in Hong Kong, which challenge the whole infrastructure to update fares, route maps, stations, all of which can be accessed with a convenient debit card system.  It makes the Horseshoe Curve seem really primitive.

This September, traveling from Xian to Wudang, literally THROUGH the series of mountains I had just two days before flown over, I was struck with the metaphor of train travel, the way we would be cruising through a long dark tunnel to burst out for a few seconds to glimpse a dreamy bright image of  landscape in a valley with houses, laundry hanging out, a truck crawling along a dirt road, peasants tending a field, construction of a bridge, then suddenly back in the tunnel for a few more minutes until another glimpse, a crazy slide show that went on for hours. It was a metaphor for daily living, as we move through our workweek, with glimpses, flashes of insights as we go in and out of the tunnel.  The metaphor of the train is so pervasive in modern literature, like that story of the train to hell we all had to read in high-school German class, and train references in blues songs. The train carries messages about love and death, destiny and fate.  Standing next to a waiting train, you feel it vibrating,  pulsing, breathing like an indifferent animal.  In the great new Christmas classic movie, Polar Express, (which must be loved by anyone of a certain age who ever had a model train layout under their Christmas tree) the train is like the Tao.  Just get on.  Go visit the relatives. Watch the world pass by.  

The Slow Train from Xian to Wudang

My Sunny Disposition

Not only was it a five-kolea morning, (see yesterday's yin post) but I discover that today, in about an hour, in Hawaii, the sun enters Sagittarius, my very own sun sign. My Yahoo! horoscope for this auspicious day (some other big deal things happening in the grand cosmic clock, planetary trines and moon-unions) notes that :

"After 30 days of soul-searching and going through various tests of endurance and stamina in often frosty Scorpio, the solar orb is welcoming a new, 30-day time-period in which adventure, exploration, athletics, philosophical discourse and a happy-go-lucky disposition are more the rule than the exception." (Mark Lerner, Astrology.com)

And my birthday coming up, too! Still this maybe explains why I haven't felt like posting anything yang since before Halloween, having been plagued with many deep, dark, frosty Scorpio thoughts and I was especially restless and uneasy during the mid-month full moon. The Scorpio period always makes me feel a little dark and kicks off a roller-coaster of activity that won't really stop until Lent.

There are people who might have trouble with having Scorpio and Lent referenced seriously in the same sentence. But I like to honor and celebrate everything, all that One-ness. So from Halloween, to the Scorpio Wizard's birthday, Election Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, my birthday, Pearl Harbor Day, a full moon on Dec. 12, the Winter Solstice which is also our wedding anniversary (longest night of the year!) and New Year's Day and then another New Year's Day (Chinese) and MLK Day and the Inauguration the very next day and then all those February things. Well, it makes my head spin. I look forward to Lent to calm down. And then the kolea leave. (I notice I didn't include Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, not really my celebrations, but there they are...certainly part of the same season.)

Marking holidays with that celestial calendar (maybe the kolea have Go to Alaska/Return to Hawaii celebrations)...it may not really mean anything, but it does help us give meaning to the cycles of our lives. In any case, I'm feeling sunny today!

Addition and Subtraction

Adding and subtracting must be the most simple of cyclical measures. For the Wizard, it is the only thing that works when it comes to dieting. Since mid-summer, he has lost 47 pounds just by counting calories: adding up the calories, subtracting the pounds. No workout program except maybe a little walking, no weird nutritional concepts like carbs or glycemic indexes or forbidden foods or exotic combinations. Just a daily budget which has allowed for things that I tend to cut back on when dieting like cheese, chocolate and alcohol. It's an accountant's diet: while he's not an accountant, he has always said one of the best courses he took in college was something called "Family Finance" offered by the Home Ec department. (Probably an easy A.) The concepts were simple: income and expenditure, assets and liabilities, everything balances. A little discipline helps too. So he has successfully diminished the spread with a spreadsheet. I am humbled. The only time I lose weight is on retreat: eating cabbage, tofu and rice, meditating, and hiking up and down hundreds of steps every day in the fresh air.

If only the folks who run our financial institutions, industries, and government had all taken Family Finance, maybe the economy wouldn't be in the mess it is.