A busy intense hot summer with some travel, work, painting, too much Facebooking, neglecting the TAO 61s. Over two months just flew by. Then the kolea returned and I booked my flight. I am about to leave, in two hours, returning once again to Wudang for three weeks.
It feels familiar, this pilgrimage, but I know it will bring new insights and new people into my life, if only for a few days. (I will also be visiting some lao pengyou, old friends. At last night's painting class, someone brought dim sum, so it felt like the kickoff for my journey. I was attempting images of the Eight Immortals, especially fond of
Tie Guai Li, with his iron crutch and gourd.
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| A little distorted, but he WAS crippled; teacher says, "You paint in the style of Li Keran." |
So I am off, with my own gourd and walking stick. Although over the summer I was troubled by a gimpy hip, like Tie Guai Li (in my case from too much seated desk work), I put myself to the test a couple weeks ago while visiting
Mount St. Helens on the way back from a Washington, D.C. conference. All these mountains --the Cascades, Wudangshan -- seem to have lots of stairs leading to forever views.
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| Stairway to heaven. |
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| The Cascading Shan. |
I passed the test and it even seems to have corrected my hip problem. Athough now I'm tending a little chronic plantar's fasciitis (one damned thing after another, cycles of pain and cycles of painlessness)...it will work out, but not sure if a coveted Chinese foot massage will be too brutal for my inflamed heel or will actually help. Whatever, in just a few hours, my next adventure begins.
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| A message left in a scenic spot in the Mount St. Helens area. |
I ripped out the relevant dated pages from my ancient falling-apart copy of Deng Ming Dao's 365 Tao and packed them, in the equivalent gesture of trekkers who might cut the handles off their toothbrushes. Now that I think of it, I may not have actually packed toothpaste. Something to do at the airport while I wait.
In any case, the message from Mt. St. Helens is pretty much the same as the one I get in Wudang. Things are destroyed, but return. To witness and accept these changes is magical. Where there is life there comes death; where there is death there comes life.
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| Felled trees from the kinetic energy of the blast 33 years ago; new trees taking their places. |
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| Trees not felled, but stripped by the energy of the blast. |
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| The magnitude of resurrection. |
