Full Circle

What goes around, comes around, they say.  I don't generally like those kind of pop Taoish karmic statements, like "It is what it is" and "Go with the flow" and "Be like water."  But there is some truth in them.

Just a little over a month ago, many months, years even, of planning culminated and I boarded my usual Korean Air flight to Seoul, to connect on to Beijing, and then to wherever.  I got to Honolulu International a little early, out of eagerness, thinking I would just relax in the lounge before embarking.  Who knew that hordes of Korean tourists would be returning home on an ordinary Thursday morning.  The lines were long, ticketing and security was slow, and only because someone in the line translated a Korean announcement for me, was I able to jump the queue because my plane was just about ready to go. Made the gate in decent time though, had a moment to send an email on my iPad before flying, settling into a very cramped window seat in a bank of three.  Nine hours in the air was made bearable by individual movie selections: I watched four Chinese films to get ready for my Wudang adventure.

Usually I'm one of those that waits until everyone else is off the plane before I exit, but by the time we landed in Seoul I was in Beijing-subway-mood: push, shove, there's a line, there's order?  Transited through another security and passport check at Incheon to make another tight connection to Beijing.  Maybe time for another airport-wifi-supported email on the iPad.

I reached in my bag and discovered...it wasn't there!  In my haste to get off the first plane, I completely forgot that I had even gotten it out of my bag.  I told the ticket clerk what happened.  She would try to connect with the plane, on the other side of the terminal. But come boarding time, no luck.  My iPad, loaded with Tao e-books, Chinese dictionaries, photos to share, music, and at least one Korean Drama (the first 18 episodes of Jumong) was not to be found.

For several days my carelessness nagged me, but soon became a lesson in attachment, and finally I stopped lamenting, and even considered buying a new one in Beijing. 

Forbidden Fruit store near the Forbidden City

There is a huge Apple store in Wangfujing, the big shopping area next to the Forbidden City. It's a popular brand in China, as evidenced by this child's haircut, seen on the train, where practically everyone under 60 had an iPhone, or something even better.

The Apple of his mother's eye.

But getting a new iPad felt like buying a new puppy right after the old dog dies. I still had my iPhone, and updated the service so I could make calls and check email on it.  I was even able to post to Facebook from China, altogether a costly proposition, but still, it worked.  I consoled myself by recalling my last trip to China which was a delight, despite (or because of) breaking my camera on the third day of the trip.  It had been liberating, like losing my car radio.  Lessons in silence and the direct pleasures of the moment.

Still, once I returned home, I thought I would check Korean's Lost and Found website one more time.  They have a photo database of all items found on planes: an unbelievable number of cell phones, earphones, children's toys, pillows, books and other weird forgotten stuff.  They maintain the items for 90 days. Still a little attached to my electronic pet, I was pleasantly surprised: lo and behold, there it was.  After a few emails and a phone call to Korean, I got it back in Honolulu, all nicely bubble wrapped and packaged in a Korean Duty Free bag.

It was like a Korean Drama, really, with a happy ending. I had suggested that the iPad could be identified as mine (as if any other had been left on the same flight) by a red sticker on the case, a cat named Chairman Meow, representing a website, http://www.obeythekitty.com/ . 

What the South Koreans thought of a parody Mao cat is beyond imagining, but I did get the following emails:

**"REF.NO 9459 iPad KE072/30AUG goods are goods that are learned from. It also reaffirmed record and offered hope with photo please check the board."
**"I’m writing this e-mail to you on behalf of Korean Air Lost & Found Center at Incheon Airport. We see that there is a sticker of red cat "Obey the Kitty". 
**"We will send the item(ICN9459) to the Korean Air office in HNL airport through KE051/28SEP flight."

I was thoroughly impressed with the honesty and service of Korean Air, which I have been flying for years into Asia, watching as this once lowly carrier has become one of the best in the skies.

And now, iPad back in hand, I have a different feeling about my trip, which had been a little tainted by my careless stupidity.  Even now, the scams, cheats and pickpocketing I endured in Beijing seem trivial.  All is well. Everything is back where it started, and now I can review my trip.

And as Korean says: goods are goods that are learned from.  And I might add, "Obey the Kitty!"

Korean jet getting ready to leave Beijing for Seoul.



Day 1 in Beijing: it was remarkably clear, you could see the Western Hills all the way from Beijing West Rail Station.

Le morte d'oncle Zhou



An impromptu Thanksgiving journey, on the heels of my D.C./Portland escapade which included visits with friends and family, has left me a little exhausted, but glad to be alive.  We flew out of HNL on Tuesday night, on a flight that was pushed back several times, leaving us anxious about our tight connection out of Chicago.  Bad enough to have that long haul in cattle class, but our worries were pointless: the connection was delayed five hours.  And when it was finally announced, the gate changed six times.It was like a remake of Airplane.  Thank god for the frequent flyer lounge with its free booze and snacks, civilized and comfortable surroundings and wifi.

Thanksgiving was as it is supposed to be--a lovely meal (the vegetarian Sister-in-Law even cooked a turkey for the rest of us), catching up and laughing by a wood fire, dogs and cats cuddling up with us, and tryptophan helping to overcome (or possibly complicating) jet lag. It was my first time back there in over 20 years (what a lot of gray hair has sprouted).  The fire was essential; it was as cold as I have been in 20 years, too.

The next day I eagerly abandoned the stubborness and exasperation that was abundant while the Wizard attempted yet again to solve the Father-in-Law's issues with Mac file hierarchies and MSW style problems.  The 92-year-old deserves much credit for writing romance/spy novels, but self-publishing paperback-sized volumes (including printing and binding) with a word processor and scanner is a recipe for disaster. Before I could say Pagemaker (which dates me as well as the FIL),  I was on my way 30 miles west to my own hometown, where I thought I might be filially pious in my own way and visit my mother's grave. Despite my aversion to ancestor worship and grave maintenance, it seemed like the thing to so, since it was her birthday and I'd only been there twice before: once when the grave was filled in 1970, and another unpleasantly emotional weepy visit with my father maybe 30 years ago.

To decorate the plot I bought a poinsettia plant (knowing full well it wouldn't survive the night outside) and drove about on a tour of the cemetery. No sexton was on duty, but I expected to remember the landmarks, or that some unknown force would deliver me to the right spot.  Up this road, down that one, past that war memorial and the utility shed...to no avail.  In retrospect, I think I knew exactly where it was, but failed in reluctance to get out of the car and search about. So as cold rain began and the brown leaves from the naked trees began to swirl about, I gave up, decided to take the poinsettia back to the FIL, and took a side road out, through an older section where the headstones were weathered and a bit askew. The area looked like the sleepers had rolled over a few times, leaving the bed disheveled.

But what was this I spied?  There, a  huge marker with my maternal grandmother's family name: a family plot.  But I knew Mom wasn't there.  Still I got out and discovered none other than Hiram, my great-grandfather and his wife Emma.  Hiram was a bit of a legend in the family as a GAR veteran and a longtime locomotive engineer with the Pennsylvania Railroad.  Actually I have in my possession 30 years' worth of railroad passes good for him and his wife after he retired, and his GAR badge.  Very elegant and interesting artifacts.

Such beautiful boarding passes, from 1894 to 1925.

 As I wandered about the area, I also noticed a couple of stones with my mother's maiden name and another of her best girlhood friend.  It was a neighborhood of dead people!  How folks stuck together way back when even after!



I contemplated Hiram's stone while clearing away the leaves that obscured the inscription that certified him as a Private in Company E of the 20th Regiment in the Pennsylvania Cavalry.  Although I had other proof at home:



He answered the call in so many ways.

I was about to leave when I literally stumbled on a small flat headstone at Hiram's feet.  It was my mother's brother, who died a year before she was born. Baby Dean succumbed to some epidemic, as did one of his cousins, same age, at about the same time. It was too late I think for it to have been Spanish flu (to which able-bodied young men were more susceptible anyway), more likely a disease no one gets anymore, like whooping cough or diphtheria. Nobody ever talked about it.

So this was Uncle Dean, whose name my mother had rearranged to use as a nom de plume for some stories and a novel she was working on (but which she insisted my father burn when she was dying). Lot of unpublished writers in this extended family.  I left the poinsettia for this child, for whom no one but me is left to remember anymore anyway, and whom I felt I was directed to find.  I know my mother, her spirit is not in the grave I couldn't find, but Older Baby Brother Dean?  Did Mom send me there?

He would have been my only maternal uncle; Mom was, for all practical purposes, an only child like myself.  Since then I have been imagining what life --particularly mine, in a kind of Wonderful Life way-- might have been like had he lived. If still alive, he would be a year older than the FIL struggling away with Microsoft Word, fantasizing his own memories in romantic spy fiction. Perhaps Uncle Dean would have become a business man, left his fortune to me, his only heir, (assuming he had no children of his own.) Perhaps he would have been killed in the Second World War, becoming another legend like his grandfather at whose feet he now rests.  Or perhaps he would have fathered some cousins to whom I would be no closer than the somewhat estranged (from themselves and myself) cousins I have on my father's side.  Like the Chinese story of Uncle Zhou and his horse, speculation can go both ways...maybe good, maybe  bad.   It's like doing genealogy in hopes of finding illustrious ancestors, more likely very ordinary people, or possibly scoundrels.  That's what my mother found when she did some of that sort of research, probably for her novel.  I am somehow related it turns out (probably through Hiram), to the so-called Robin Hood of Pennsylvania, known in part for having robbed John Jacob Astor's wife (whose portrait I just saw in the Smithsonian American Art Gallery in D.C.).  Legend has it the ancestor hid some treasure in a cave in the Pennsylvania countryside.  We visited state parks when I was a kid, partly in hopes of locating the goods, more likely just to feed the family fantasy (and the novel).

In any case, it's all moot.  When I finally left the cemetery, this caught my attention, winking at me in  a "duh, get real" sort of way.

Though not relatives, Alfred and Zelma put an ironic Terry Pratchett-esque twist on the end of my day. I capped it off with a visit to a favorite hot dog stand I used to visit as a kid: "Texas Hot Dogs", a tradition since 1918. Baby Uncle Dean never had one, I suspect, but maybe it could have killed him, eventually. The two-fer chili dogs with grated onion in steamed buns weren't anywhere as good as I remembered. But on the other hand, I am still alive.

Oddly enough, my rental car had a Texas license plate.

November Oregon Holiday

Like Hawaii, but different.

Felt like the Big Island, except it was 41 degrees and the mauka side was pine forest and snow.

One of the several off-shore rocks.

Crowded beach.

Cannon Beach

Cannon Beach

Seals take sanctuary here.

Our lodging with koi pond and peculiar bronze Indian statue.

From our balcony, the Indian appeared to be peeing into the stream.

We did NOT eat here.



Carousel of wondrous creatures in Seaside.  We did see a deer in someone's yard in the middle of Astoria.  I thought it was a statue until it ran across the street.

Sighting Off the Port Bow

Like a good omen, and as predictable as the upcoming Blue Moon, I spied a kolea off to the left this morning as we drove out of the wooded and grassy residential area where they, and I, like to make our homes.  She may have been there the past few days, but it's been rainy and my morning schedule a little disruptive, not conducive to birdwatching.

It lifted my lethargic dog-days spirit a bit to see the returned bird, whose arrival I had expected to herald the final preparations for a trip I'm now not going to take. I suspect the economy and election year anxieties were responsible for my trip planner not being able to sign up enough bodies to make the trip worthwhile.  I could have done it on my own, but planning Plan B became more complicated than the trip itself.  I have been plagued with dreams the past couple weeks of travel, of confused packing, of ambiguous ticketing and conveyances.  Perhaps now they will cease and I can just get back to a normal, post-Labor Day, post full-moon routine existence of work, classes, painting, reading, writing, and the ongoing entertainment of Korean historical drama (a welcome diversion from the election-year yammering).  Somehow the politics would be more interesting if it involved swordplay and not just the yammering.


Vincent Zhao in "The Great Wudang." I'd vote for him.

I've been thinking about "yammering" a lot lately, its meaning being something like what wolves and coyotes do at night, calling to each other or the moon.  A lot of it on forums and blogs, about the meaning of life, morality, purpose, God, gods, wu wei, dao, qi, yammer yammer.  Meditation, by definition, is an escape from the yammering. (Well, so is Korean Drama and travel to foreign places.) The more we talk the less we know; the less we know the more we talk.  I so want to emulate the quiet kolea, coming and going as she will, with sufficient strength and wingspan to escape the howling dogs and prowling cats. 

But everyone wants to talk politics...why the president need/need not be a military man, why abortion is/is not a woman's health issue, why Monsanto is killing us while feeding us, why Islam is/is not a threat, why there are no jobs, why I can't expect to live on social security, why gun control will cause/prevent theatre/school shootings, why Bradley Manning is a traitor/patriot.  Yammer yammer.

I wish I could vote twice; then I could do my civic duty while also cancelling out my own vote. Voting as yammering.

Stuck in Neutral

After the milestone of TAO 61 making 225,000 miles, everything else in August seemed anti-climactic.  But not, really.  I have been exhausted after hectic business travel to Washington, D.C., returning home with a bad summer cold (though made bearable on the long return trip by the fortuitous upgrades to first class--real kind, with full reclining seats and elbow room and custom-made ice cream sundaes and free booze and real cutlery and dishes for real hot food. I don't quite know what I did to deserve it.)

Then an all-day program/presentation in which I had to teach faculty about research grants.  At first I approached that task in utter fear and not a little loathing, but it turned out to be a cat-herding exercise. And now people know me and what I do for them. 

The real pleasure of the month, counter-balancing the disappointment in the collapse of my September China trip plans, has been my Chinese painting class, with an extraordinary teacher who has taken my studies up yet another level.  I was painting images of my Taoist hermit, which kept coming out sad, despite his reputation for cheer, probably channeling my frustration at not being able to visit him and make obeisance in his little cave temple.  But finally, I laid in a sketch in ink, which only needed to be intensified with some color.  My teacher helped with that, so the final result is a true collaboration.  Not yet properly mounted, or signed, I share it here in its wrinkled state.  I don't want to mount it without laoshi's assistance. But I want to share it.

Jia Ye, by Laoshi and Me

Any morning now I should notice the returned kolea; my Chinese haiku-writing friend saw one a few days ago and penned this:

 

on my neighbor's roof

sighting of first kolea

autumn closing in

 



I should get brush, ink and paper together to illustrate it.  If I can't fly to Jia Ye, the kolea at least can come to me.

Butterfly Dreaming

The sun has entered Sagittarius, my own birth sign, causing me to feel a little like a butterfly emerging, moving toward the solstice, yet a month away.  It has become a truism for me that from, say, Labor Day, the season is one big wild roller coaster ride of thinking and effort, and this year, no different.  Travel (albeit both business and pleasure), home maintenance, health adjustments, office work...I need a little holiday, like maybe on a butterfly farm.

Which is exactly where I'm flying off to tomorrow for the Thanksgiving holiday.  The Rainbow Bridge House is somewhat famous, like a Maui Big Pink, for having been associated with a Jimi Hendrix event in 1970 when Jimi and countless other counterculture spiritualists and druggies did a concert and some movie production on Maui, just a few months before Jimi's death.  I didn't know this when we made the arrangements to stay at the house, which is co-located on a butterfly farm. And  I didn't know you could farm butterflies, but someone does, for release at weddings and other events, hopefully of a somewhat spiritual nature.  I would be very disturbed to find hordes of monarchs clouding the PowerPoint presentations of a business conference (like I just endured for two weeks on the chilly mainland).

And this all should come as no surprise--every time I do background research on some spiritual personality, musician or poet, it appears that they live on Maui, or one of the other Hawaiian Islands, for at least part of their lives.  Maui has a reputation for attracting spiritual types of all persuasions, from Chinese Taoists to Gaia goddesses, Buddhists, Sikhs, Sufis, and Catholic saints. Ram Dass and W.S. Merton both live on Maui, as did George Harrison. Master Alfred Huang, an expert on the I Ching and a teacher of Taoist philosophy, physical arts and meditation, lives on Maui.  (Hawaii as a whole has been home and host to an inordinate share of celebrities from sports, entertainment, and politics.)

While everyone else is hitting the malls on  Black Friday, or whatever they call it, maybe I will do some holiday shopping of my own.  You can buy butterfly kits!  I have slightly mixed feelings about this but maybe I'm just dreaming.  But I'll know better if I take a tour of the farm.  Wonder what kind of chores you do on a butterfly farm?  Tending the milkweed? 

I don't think the farm will mind that I share one of their beautiful images:

I am looking forward to this weekend.  Please let me know if you feel a disturbance in the force caused by butterflies flexing their wings atop a volcano in Hawaii.  In the meantime, please enjoy this little butterfly dream:

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Un-Selfless in Portland

This probably should have gone with the previous post. Learn to adjust your spirit and then go next door for a manicure.


I bet Alley Pat spun this one more than a few times at WERD:





Of course, if you don't have a self (because the smoke got in your eyes) none of this matters one whit. But you can always check it out:

On the internet no one knows you don't have a self. 

Haircut Moon

Once again renewed by a close haircut (which suggests more Buddhist tendencies* than Taoist**) and pivoting of the dark/new moon, I am feeling yang energy rising like the bubbles in champagne.  (Perhaps that "falling" thing that Guinness does is yin energy?)

Yesterday in a neighborhood where I rarely do business or shopping, on a sunny, balmy morning, after a hurried necessary bank deposit, I stopped in at a shop I never noticed before.  All banks are pretty much the same, and so too perhaps, all shops offering "Himalayan Treasures."  Just a quick poke-about to see what was on offer, I picked up some incense and a random CD, not knowing if it would be chanting or Nepali jazz. It turns out to be pretty good, manufactured and marketed by the Kathmandu Music Center. 

The music, new-agey jazzy with tablas and sitars and flutes and western guitars, highlighted a very peaceful and positive feeling I haven't had in the middle of an ordinary workday for a while; satisfied, happy, and complete, I am liking my job.

For which I today needed to remake some travel arrangements to add on a week of mainland visits...a whirlwind to Atlanta and Washington for some training and project planning.  The two weeks will culminate over Veterans Day with another quick stop to visit my son in Portland, Ore., where there is another Himalayan shop with a big brass bowl that has been singing my name to my heart since last I visited.  I didn't want to bring a huge singing bowl back with me on a plane, and now I find some very nice similar bowls on King Street, right here in Pacific Ocean City.  Is it appropriate to ask for a Tibetan singing bowl for Christmas?

My travel plans conflict with something delightful I found in the mail on the same energetic day: an invitation to the opening of "Masterpieces of Landscape Painting from the Forbidden City," an exhibit at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, where I have studied Chinese painting over the past three years.  Quel dommage, my teacher will probably be there, and I will be some tens of thousands of feet over Cleveland.  Still the exhibit continues through January 8, so after I tire of my Christmas singing bowl, I can be sure to take in the landscapes.  And I can take advantage of the lecture series which includes topics like "How to Read a Chinese Painting," "Confucianism and the Aesthetics of Becoming Consummately Human," (with UH's own sage of the Tao, Roger Ames), "Dong Qichang and the Formation of the Literati Canon" and "Landscape Painting and Garden Design."  Such are the topics I had hoped, in vain, would be part of the current "Oriental Painting" class I am taking right now.

I will also miss the concurrent film series, "Cinematic Treasures from China, ...highlighting the influential, trailblazing films of Chinese, Taiwanese and Chinese-American filmmakers."  But I've not only seen all these films by Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Ang Lee, I own them all.

So many good things happen all at the same time.  The only thing I will really miss is a lion dance at the exhibit opening.  I'll have to wait for Chinese New Year for that.  And since at such a late date, I couldn't get a non-smoking room in Atlanta, I will carry with me some "energy" and "wisdom" Himalayan incense to burn there: it is a smoking room after all!

*My own ongoing private Asian film festival is currently featuring a long Chinese series, "The Shaolin Warriors," about Shaolin monks and pirates.  It features Sammo Hung and his adorable son Sammy, as a Shaolin master and a monk.  What I can't figure out is, while Sammy and his warrior mates are properly shaved,  Sammo Shifu sports  a hairdo that looks like my own shoulder length locks circa 1972.  Do Shaolin masters use hot rollers?  In one scene, Sammy and his reluctant monk buddy actually wash the master's hair.

**A Taoist master I met in Wudang last May, when asked what one had to do to be a real Taoist, said: 1) you must know the history of your lineage, the generations; 2) you must have a deep understanding of Tao, and 3) you must grow your hair long, for at least three years, to be natural and to be able to wear the taiji topknot at the bai hui point, where yin and yang meet.  In fact the topknot is twisted in a kind of chignon to create a yin/yang object.  No wonder the Buddhists shave their heads.

Blank Canvas

Washing Away Summer on Maui

Woke up groggy today, probably a side effect of the sense that summer is over, at least the series of events that started last March or April--a moved office, a new job, Beijing, Washington, Portland, and this weekend, Maui.

My reading from 365 Tao today seemed precise and profound:
An ocean of ink in a single drop
Trembling at the tip of my brush
Poised above stark white paper
A universe waits for existence.
"...A painter poises above blank paper. But it is not the painting to come that is as important as that single moment when all things still lie in a state of potential," Deng Ming-dao writes. "Will something ugly or beautiful be created? The stately determination to make something worthy of the materials and the moment is reverence."

There was a lot of potential in my summer, all that travel and new possibilities. With my recent visit to the next island over, I concluded something and now feel on the verge of the next roller coaster that will build up speed until the New Year.

"Only when we tire of our excesses can there be esteem," Deng continues.  That describes how I felt on awakening this morning.

So much potential in a drop of ink. My new painting class is good, but challenging, because the style and techniques seem not as traditional as my previous teacher's. (Well, not strictly true. I was immediately moved to an advanced level; most of the rest of the students are painting grass orchids, and have been for three weeks. Fortunately I have escaped that boring exercise.) It's all rooted in the "oriental" method, but with different (Japanese) paper, different (Japanese) brushes, different (Japanese) colors. The ink is the same, but I cheat: I surreptitiously grind my ink stick in bottled ink, a quick trick I learned from my Chinese teacher. I feel my old teacher's admonitions and instructions. I think she would say what I am doing is ugly. But, she's not there, and I actually kinda liked the image I made last night (regrettably I had to "turn it in" for class, and I failed to photograph the landscape of somewhat garishly colored trees, mountains, and rocks.) The beholder I suppose determines if it is ugly or beautiful; the painter simply creates a universe. Maybe a Japanese universe. Or Korean--my new teacher is a Korean nun. She is quite kind and patient; I don't expect her to smack my fingers with a brush handle.

I realize other students are not necessarily in the class for the same reason I am; they are undergraduates fulfilling some requirement. I am there to paint, and increase my skill and knowledge. I did not expect challenges to my already acquired method. But I find some wisdom in The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, a classic Chinese text from the 17th century:
"To be without method is deplorable, but to depend entirely on method is worse. ... If you aim to dispense with method, learn method. If you aim at facility, work hard. If you aim for simplicity, master complexity."

And if you didn't think there is Tao in Chinese painting, there it is. 

One of the things that all this painting exercise has done for me, perhaps the real point, is to cause me to look at real things a little differently.  I notice the structure of trees more, the beauty of a flower, the mist on a mountain, a carp in the koi pond.  And at the same time, I look at classic paintings and enter them. They are the original virtual reality. Photos become inspirations for paintings.  Like this fish, a denizen of a koi pond on Maui.

Happy Fish

But I won't paint that fish.  Or even a fish.  The aim is simply to paint fish.

____________

NOTE:  Not sure if this post is going to publish correctly; I have been having a little struggle session with Windows 7, which seems to exxhibit some quirks regarding my habitual blogging method.  Taoists are supposed to cope with change, but not sure that patience with operating systems is what is intended.  Those are methods you do come to depend on; why not, when they work?  One time when I hate change!

Monumental Capitals (Part 1)

I notice a lot of blogs I read have been a little stalled lately, perhaps it is the laziness of hot dog days, or just that summer is busy with travel and leisure. I feel stalled, but have compelled myself to share some observations about my recent travel.

My May China trip was certainly personal, but I mixed a little pleasure with business during a trip to Washington, D.C., a town I haven't visited in decades, and even then it was with grandparents or Girl Scouts. I vaguely remember cherry blossoms and a spitting camel at the Washington Zoo, or that may just be because of photos of me at four with Grammy and Pap. I have more valid memories of the Girl Scout trip, lead partly by my co-troop-leader mother, who made me call her "Mrs." and never paid any more attention to me and my troubles than any of the other Scouts, some of whom "sneaked a boy into their room." (I couldn't get away with that.) We visited our Congressman, and I sliced my big toe open (not in Congress). Mom made me drip blood in the bathroom. "Don't bleed on the hotel carpet!" she advised. "Bleed in the bathroom!"

I measured this recent trip against the recent walkabouts in Beijing. I was in D.C. during the budget debates and heat wave--but you'd never have known the dealing was going on just by walking around, although the heat was obvious and oppressive. I wanted to contrast the capitals, but found more in common than not. Yes, one party versus two, but really, which government gets more or less done. One is impotent, the other reckless; I leave it to you to determine which is which. It's kind of yin/yang.

It would appear that Congress has gotten the message.

The Great Hall of the People! Walk don't linger.

A constant police presence at the Capitol.

A constant police presence in Tiananmen. But this guy doesn't have the luxury of dougnuts in an air-conditioned squad car while on duty.

A bronze lion guards Capitol Hill.

A Yuan Dynasty stone lion guards something imperial.

Warriors for the people, justice for all!

Warriors for the people, but these guys don't have any shade trees.

I left Washington for a brief sojourn in Oregon before returning to the 50th State, which is just about as close to Beijing as it is Washington, at least judging by my air travel time.

More irony to follow in Part 2.

Xuanzi Jiandan

That may be bad Mandarin, 选择简单, but I think it means "choose simplicity," which I have. The smaller bag is packed, and a rucksack for carry-on is loaded with my iPad, two pocket point-and-shoot Casios (forget the Nikon SLR with extra long lens and the Sony videocam), my phone, an extra iPod and a couple of phrase books, including Outrageous Chinese--A Guide to Chinese Street Language. While it's fun to know how to talk like a sailor, it's wise to know how not to, as well. (In Chinese you can make some bizarre mistakes. For all I know, the title of this post is "choose sodomy.")

I would like to carry Peter Hessler's Country Driving, which I haven't finished yet, but it's a heavy hardback. I am taking Terry Pratchett with me to the Counterweight Continent (Interesting Times) and I have lots of reading material on the iPad. I packed my brushes, ink and some paper (as if I can't get them in China). I am not taking any tea.

I do not anticipate blogging on the road, behind the Great Firewall, but one never knows. It may be a useful exercise in simplicity to make my observations in my little Moleskine notebook with my favorite 0.07 mechanical pencil.

I do know that, even in the mountains, anything I think I might need or have forgotten can be easily obtained. There's not much to need really.

So, see you all in June!

Shit Keeps Happening

Very early in the morning the day before I go to pick up my passport stamped with a visa to visit China, ($195!), I am pensive about taking a trip that feels a little like watching a favorite movie I have seen many times before, knowing the ending, but having forgotten choice bits of dialogue or screen angles. The way you remember the events that were going on outside the theater when you went to see that movie the first time. Which is more real? (A somewhat troubled little girl once asked me about something, "Was that on TV or was that in real?")

This moment of personal planning is colored by the reactions of the world around me to the "end" of the Osama drama--jubilation on the one hand, and a sceptical wary disbelief on the other, the mixed emotions of the public to events they have no ability to influence. ("Was that on TV or in real?") I lie awake pondering this decade of global rubbernecking, ten years of natural and economic and political disasters and debacles...curiously taking place on a screen projected for entertainment and edification. No wonder I stopped watching news and listening to radio several years ago. (It's been more than a little coincident with my deepening involvement with Taoism, these trips to Wudang. This upcoming trip feels like a senior seminar, the fourth-year summarization of independent study and practice. Graduation? A degree? Immortality?)

It was just a few days after I returned from a trip to Hong Kong in 2001, one of the last in a series of fairly frequent regular visits since the mid-'80s, that I was awakened at 4 a.m. by a friend who phoned. Pre-dawn phone calls are never good things, at best wrong numbers, but in this case, "Turn on your TV! We're being attacked." (Never mind that the attack was in New York City and we live in Honolulu, as if there were something we could do by turning on the TV).

The Wizard, not completely diplomatic when he's awakened just a little too early, sarcastically responded, "I'll be sure to let the President know." Then, of course, we turned on the TV to watch in sad shocked disbelief the images which are now etched in my memory as vividly as mushroom clouds, a slain president in a convertible, a guy standing in front of a tank with flowers (was that 1989 or 1968?). Movies that rerun in memory, as vivid as Gone with the Wind or It's a Wonderful Life.

The same friend who made that early morning panic call sent me a text a couple days ago that I didn't see until 24 hours later. (Texting is not my preferred method of communication. I get texts, but rarely initiate them. Like I get a lot of lunch invites, but rarely suggest them.)

"R U watching news?"

The next day I replied, "No, but I see Osama is dead." Who could miss it? (To say nothing of the Royal Wedding, which people who had stayed up late to attend kept telling me about, somewhat against my wishes. I wasn't invited, I didn't care. But which reminded me that Diana was killed just days after I returned from a different trip to Kong Kong, 1997, during the Handover. I also remember I didn't pay much attention to that early '80s wedding either, except to think that she was all wrong for Charles. Why are all these events linked in my mind with travel?)

"Yay 4 our troops and intel folks" my friend instantly replied to my very late text-back.

Despite not watching a bit of this on the TV, I am bombarded by internet discussion -- hard to avoid when you're on line a lot. And it got me to thinking about all the decade's events to which I have been a witness, if not exactly a participant. Hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, corrupt elections, financial meltdowns, escalating wars in hopeless regions of the world, disease and starvation (why would anyone put melamine in milk, anyway?). Ten years used to seem like a long time, now it seems just a long tedious movie, one I really don't want to watch again. And the trivial markers in my own life...I come across a bottle of nail enamel I first used on that trip in 2001...I thought it was new; it's ten years old. (But remarkably still fluid.) I've changed jobs three times in the decade, moved on, and on, from endless daily invented office crises (all of which had to do with the bottom lines of money or politics or both) that in time are as fleeting as the rain that fell and has since recycled into the atmosphere. As the rain that is falling right now as I write this. The shit that just keeps happening, all while I keep on moving on.

Beyond the mild anxiety about my visa (the true meaning of anxious), the rest of my trip planning is as routine as going to the office. I have become that seasoned. My list making consists of about six tasks which I didn't really need to write down anyway. It's just nice to monitor the progress. (The only things left are "pack" and "get a haircut.") Some people seem awed when I tell them I'm going to China on my own for three weeks. "Oh I would love to do that, but..." All you have to do is do it. Leave behind the obligations, the fears, the daily news, and just go. Live your own life, the shit will keep happening whether you know about it or not.

Just Trust the Cycles

As I predicted, today, the day of the new moon, my reliable Chinese travel agent called to tell me my passport with essential visa had made it back from the Chinese Embassy. The one hurdle that causes the most anxiety is negotiated. Now it's all administrative and housekeeping...travel insurance, register with Department of State (a good idea for travelers should one require assistance from one's own embassy abroad), collect travelling cash, get a haircut, shop for necessities, pack.

Decisions. The big bag or the small one? The digital SLR with two lenses or the pocket Casio? Video camera or just a notebook? I lean to small and I have never regretted it. (The opposite of buying memory for devices: no one ever complains of having too much memory.)

Again I envy the kolea...they just take off and arrive. They must be settling into their nesting areas now, have overcome jet stream lag, are engaged in family planning activities. I am not the only one who wonders about these birds and their mysterious magnificent migrations.

May Day, M'aider?

Perhaps it is the holiday of May Day that has caused a delay in in my China visa arrival. I will grant government workers, mine and theirs, a little slack. Or maybe it's not a delay, I am just impatient. Last year, coincident with the kolea's departure, my visa arrived April 27 for the same time frame of travel. But my beloved migratory birds seem to have left last Tuesday evening, their cosmic visas approved. I won't feel like I'm leaving until my passport is in hand. Birds don't carry passports.

Why do our Chinese visas have to go to Los Angeles? There are enough Chinese people here in Hawaii, enough travel to and from the Middle Kingdom, a desire to increase it, that there should be a consulate. I think we should be able to get Chinese visas at Wal-Mart.

Monday's New Moon seems auspicious. I hope my travel agent calls me. "Come pick up your passport. And bring $150 for the processing fee."

A week to go before I pack. Next weekend, a haircut and last minute shopping for anything I might need. (Lomotil, Band-aids, batteries.) This is beginning to feel routine. I love traveling, paring down my baggage to bare essentials (and I don't mean that complicated cosmetic that is touted as simple). On the road, you simplify, you live in the moment. When that plane lifts off, I leave all my cares behind. "Will you be accessible?" someone in my office asked. I hope not. The point is not to be. And I can use the Great Firewall as an excuse. Some years ago, when the Wizard was in Hong Kong regularly, he said the pleasure was the difficulty of communication. Now, with email, internet, and Facebook, the getting away is the difficulty. I want to vanish for a while. M'aider? Let me alone.

Waiting for My Turn

I'm sitting on my balcony in the moonlight (and the light of my laptop), enjoying a cool breath of air, a cool drink of water, listening to lusty frogs in the stream honking at one another, a white noise of chirping insects, and the occasional restless song bird. Someone just came running through the parking lot below. (Who runs at 2:30 in the morning? Who writes blog posts at 2:30 in the morning? I have a friend who would make a haiku out of all this.)

I'm wondering where the kolea are right now. I really don't know where they sleep, these busy bug eating birds with their long legs and strong wings. Every day they are looking plumper, more vivid in their new feathers. Usually they are diligently picking through the grass like rice farmers, or monitoring the traffic on the road, but lately they look like they are gathering in a lobby, waiting for an announcement: "Kolea Air Flight 411 to Alaska is now open for boarding." They are ready with their round-trip tickets for a four-month holiday of breeding and family fun.

By the time they actually leave, I will be just days away from my own trip, not exactly a vacation, not exactly like a return home, but like the kolea's, a sort of pilgrimage of renewal. My China plans are firm, unaffected in the end by the Japan disaster. I have no anxieties about any of it, I'm just awake in the middle of the night, roused by a peculiar dream brought on, I suppose, by an emotional movie, the weather with its haze and humidity, and a little indigestion. It's always best to just get up and let the feelings subside, not wondering too much about whether I was the Baroness dreaming I was escaping from a house in danger, or if I am dreaming now that I am the Baroness blogging on my lanai. Do the kolea dream?

The moon is flirting with me from behind fast moving clouds. The kona weather from the south has everything running a little backward. All the planes at the airport are taking off from the opposite direction on the reef runway; my new office, still annoyingly fragrant with the smell of gallons of fresh latex paint, does feature an exquisite view of the airport and the harbor area. Twelve hours ago, I watched several big-old-jet-airliners gather at the end of the runway like patient kolea, politely (safely) waiting until one of their own kind made a landing, the scene framed by two huge cargo ships lying just off the reef. Later two F-18s made sudden, shocking, nearly simultaneous takeoffs, showing off their speed and climbing capabilities in a now-you-see-us-now-you-don't exercise. Helicopters and small planes flitted about like mosquitos and flies. I could watch this activity for hours, the mountains on one horizon, the sea on the other. I wait like the kolea for my turn to take off.

Postscript: The first rooster is calling, at 3:39 a.m., to the frogs. Perhaps it's time to go back to bed! And, my laptop is at 61% of battery power. The universe is speaking to me. Good night, and good luck.

Auspicious Post

I notice, revisiting my most recent post about packing, that it is the 108th I have made here on the Yang Side of TAO 61.  If that isn't auspicious for setting off on my China trip, I don't know what is!

Picked up some omiyage to carry with me -- some red Hawaiian salt, koa bookmarks, some charged collectible Starbuck's cards from Hawaii -- and all I have to do yet is hem a pair of pants, which I will do while watching the second part of 14 Blades,  Donnie Yen's latest movie which should put me in a mood to visit the Wudang Mountain Kung Fu Ranch and Lychee Nut Farm, where the Wizard seems to think I am going.  He's not far off.

Got a new battery for the watch I bought on the way there, two-and-half-years ago, in the Swatch store in Incheon.  I never much wore a watch before that, but it seemed like a good thing to have while traveling.  Now I feel naked without this basic analog, big-numbered, black and white dial, black leather-strapped watch, whose battery failed last week.  It's got a big vivid display I can see even without my glasses and the strap has acquired a lovely complex fragrance from the various perfumes I dab on my pulse points. New battery installed, it's ticking now, counting down the hours until I leave...and it gets reset to Beijing time...real soon now.

Tao-Loading

For me, actually achieving entry into a foreign country is far easier than deciding what to take there. Nearly packed for my early morning departure, well under the 44-pound bag limit, have remembered toothpaste this time, tucked in with various chargers and power converters, a reasonable if not extravagant assortment of clothing for any occasion, miscellaneous tools, medical supplies, entertainment items, and gifts.  Spare eyeglasses. Pared-down toiletries and cosmetics and bijouterie. Notebook, sketchbook, brushes and ink.  My nifty new iPad is carry-on, along with digital camera, phone, a backup iPod and a nice volume explaining Chinese characters.  (And I mean ideograms.)

My only dilemma (which this isn't really**), not even a weight issue: do I take a video camera?  Had it with me the last time, never used it, but there was one moment I wish I had lugged it along to record a marvelous tai chi demo by a master at Purple Heaven Palace.

Movement in Stillness (Wudang 2008)

But I also I feel video cameras move you one step away from actually participating in the present moment, making a movie of your own memories, which you didn't really see first hand because you were playing cinematographer.  The digital still camera, for me feels freer, merely like I'm underlining scenes to share and remember, making checkmarks on a document instead of photocopying the whole thing without reading it.   

My hesitance may also be because it's just one more piece of technology to master.  Right now, even though I know it's mindlessly simple, I feel like its slave. I need to read the manual. I don't think the decision to take it with me is going to happen until I actually walk out the door tomorrow morning.  It might be interesting if I could videotape my decision making.

**When I was a young girl, I was really eager to go to the circus one year because I had heard there would be "dilemmas."  This seemed exotic to me. I imagined three-ring mysteries, metaphysical high-wire acts, all accomplished by ethereal and spooky clowns. I was enchanted.  And then disappointed to discover that "the llamas" were just part of a parade of zoo animals.  

Imminent Departure and Arrival

Plans become preparations, then it's time to leave.  The well-nourished and well-dressed kolea are gone; I saw the last one last Friday. I thought they had already left, hadn't seen any for a couple days. Then one last bird, maybe the first one I saw last August, picking through the grass at my parking entrance, seemed to give me a goodbye nod.  Bird migrations are quite mysterious, mystical even. How do they do this?

I was relying on the exodus of the kolea to kick my own travel preparations up a notch, and so they have.  The waxing moon, full tomorrow, may also have helped. Perhaps it has helped the kolea navigate to Alaska. They have already arrived, I think, their 36-hour crossing anticipated by someone on the other end, saying "They're back!" just as I am saying "They're gone."  Arrival and departure, a very Tao thing.

And so today I go to pick up my visa-stamped passport, the first of the last of a few steps before I make my own flight in less than two weeks.  The kolea have a compelling vision of Alaska, I suppose; my vision is the Bund in Shanghai, the gardens in Hangzhou and Suzhou, the mountains of Wudang, and the imperial treasures in Beijing.

But especially the mountains.

My last painting of the session, after more than a year of brush painting study (a class once a week, and weekend painting exercise) with my teacher, who says I may frame this one. Though her specialty is bird and flower painting, she says I should specialize in landscapes. "Maybe in two years, you paint a flower."  I will resume classes in the fall, but take my brushes with me to China.  I plan to spend some hours at the Summer Palace in Beijing with them.

The mountains in Wudang aren't quite like my vision above. They are dense and green, would appear to be perfect hiding places for yiren or yeren (a Chinese-style bigfoot, yeti or Sasquatch, sightings of which have been reported in the area.)

I am eager to revisit my favorite spot, the area behind the modest Taichang Temple not far from the more famous Nanyan.  It's easy to visualize myself there now.  Espcially because I have photos from 2007 and 2008.

Spirit Screen at Taichang with Lao Tzu

Taichang Plaque

Path to Follow Just Outside and Beyond Taichang Gate

Though I have made barely a babystep in "Opening the Dragon Gate,"perhaps I have done better than I think.  I have meditated on that path above and even now, closing my eyes I am there.  Not with the same skill as Wang Liping, I'm sure, but I have over the years cultivated an ability to "memorize moments,"places where I have been at peace, experiencing wholeness with the environment. (I suppose it would be loss of these memorized moments that makes Alzheimer's so poignant and tragic.)  Oddly, I am loathe to revisit the places of memorized moments of many years ago; too many changes, too much disappointment.  My memories are better.

I did this exercise often when I was young, like imprinting something, as my parents sailed around the Chesapeake.  And later, in my father's final years in Florida, I would visit Shell Mound, memorizing part of a Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast near Cedar Key (hot spot for hurricanes).  I once spent some time  meditating at the spot below.

Memorized Moment

Different Path to Enlightenment

After I meditated, I strolled about the park, listening to insects that sounded exactly like the cicadas in the mountains of Wudang. I asked a park ranger exactly where this "shell mound" was.  I saw nothing like a mound.

"Actually, you're standing on it," he said of the accumulated oyster shells under my feet, left by an earlier indigenous people.  It was their garbage dump.  I can't imagine anyone meditating or enjoying a modern landfill. Some things are meant to be forgotten. If only they could be.

Contemplating my desk globe, I see that Shell Mound is at just about the same latitude as some of the NW Hawaiian Islands, which are just a little below Shanghai and Wudang.  I have many memorized moments hovering around the 30th parallel.

Just Like a Chinese Painting

Intense shooting pains in my arthritic thumb joint in the middle of the night should have alerted me to the deteriorated morning weather conditions: dense sooty gray clouds and hard rain.  Driving to work, I struggled through an intense downpour and then realized it might be better if I switched on the wipers.  This revealed to me a scene of great beauty (compensating for my hand pain).  A featureless opaque oatmeal sky, limited visibility, with silhouetted trees marching to the horizon in increasingly faint inky layers, the seven shades of Chinese ink. Just like a brush painting. I drove down from the plateau where we live (the downlooking view adding to the sense of a Chinese landscape) and the virtual scroll painting continued, albeit with occasional hazy highrises in the distant mist. I once thought I might paint a contemporary version of these scenes, but now it seems so wrong.

Then I remembered: tonight begins my next round of brush painting classes,which should keep me Sinologically jazzed until my planned May trip to the Middle Kingdom. I searched for some flights on line yesterday and concluded that earning miles on my preferred carrier is not worth the cost or the extra time; United likes to take Honolulu folks to LAX or SFO first, before arriving in Shanghai.  (This is not so bizarre as an intinerary I was presented a couple years ago, from HNL to Beijing, a 54-hour flight which featured stops in Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Get a globe, people!)  I will probably go on my usual Asian airline, Korean, which makes the trip pretty efficiently in 13.5 hours (and sometimes on 747s) through Seoul (regrettably, through Incheon and not the funky old Kim Po). So I won't get the miles, but I can save time and a lot of cash.

So driving through the driving rain, I recalled a trip down the Li River more than 15 years ago, a little tour out of Hong Kong to see the fabulous formations in the Guilin countryside.  I may have already blogged this memory, but it came to me so vividly this morning.  We had been drifting along the river in one of the flatbottomed boats, marveling at the beauty of the karst landscape when it started to rain.  Most of the group went below where a perfectly timed lunch was ready. We were neither feeling hungry nor social and decided to stay above, irritating the crew who had to stay on the upper deck with us to make sure we didn't steal the souvenirs on offer (but covered against the rain).  But we all became enchanted with the cruise in the mist; overcoming his frustration on having to accompany the pesky tourists in the rain, one of the crew members tried his English to remark: "It's beautiful, isn't it...just like a Chinese painting." Not unlike below, but mistier.

Not My Photo

We returned from the river cruise to a restaurant in Guilin which was memorable not only for the rat runnning around in the overhead light fixture, but for all the paintings decorating the walls, all for sale. I acquired a wall scroll that was better than any photo I could have taken of the scenes. (I had neglected to carry enough film--remember that stuff?).  But the painting is completely accurate, in mood and memory.

Not My Painting