HO, HO,

Ho Chih Minh!

Wasn't he just adorable in 1961, in the picture on the previous post? Part of my collection of interesting looking Asian Communists, which also includes a couple of images of Zhou Enlai, who had an equally intriguing charisma to his look in the early days.

Zhou Enlai, film star bearing

Zhou and Mao in Shensi in 1937***

I don't know what Ho, at a sprightly 71, and his buddies were doing at night in the Liang River in China, just before the Vietnam War started to heat up with our involvement, but if he was looking for a politically meaningful eclipse, perhaps he had better luck than with the one supposedly occurring right now above me. My eclipse is eclipsed by dense cloud cover, part of some serious rainy stormy weather pushed to the islands by some cyclone 1500 miles off to the west.

I hope I do better with tomorrow's Solstice full moon, which will mark our 42nd wedding anniversary. There's a lot of odd yin/yang stuff going in the heavens right now.

***I saw an exhibit once with this photo, reprinted huge, like 4 feet wide, which also includes a couple of other of the Red geezers like Zhu De and oddly, one of the Western hangers-on, I believe it was Owen Lattimore, I can't remember. Most images I see crop the Westerner out. But in poking around for information about these guys, and the Eighth Route Army I also learn that George Hogg, "English adventurer and local Chinese folkhero...stayed in the Shanxi 8th Route army for a time and also befriended general Nie Rongzhen." How curious this history is. George Hogg is the subject of the movie The Children of Huang Shi, about which I recently commented.

WHOZIT?

One of the things about blogging is you develop a little community that opens you up to a lot of things you didn't know, but should have. For instance, another blogger more or less led me to this absolutely wonderful image, and I throw out a challenge to any of my readers to tell me who it is. ( I know, but it's too weirdly charmingly cool to reveal.) Tsui Hark? Ho Chih Minh? Gia-Fu Feng? Who do you think?

I don't have a prize to offer, but maybe a link to your blog?

Just In Time

Like clockwork, the red Christmas cactus is blooming, actually a little early, if not as exuberantly as I hoped, though there's still time. (It has been known to blossom again at Easter.) I think it is still confused by a repotting. But still, there it is.

I thought nothing was happening with the undisturbed, healthier white one; it usually blooms later, but I looked closer and am assured of its promise: one tiny bud beginning to form. There will be more.

We have been having Hawaii Christmas weather. Rainy, cool nights. I woke up around 2:30 a.m. recently, shivering. It never occurred to me to turn off the fan and close the windows.

The rain obscures the usually vivid Waianae Range, so the horizon is pretty much limited to a stone's throw from my balcony/lanai.

This is the kind of day, if I was going to work, I would say I just want to stay home. And today I can, enjoying the steady rainfall, the sound of the stream below, the apartment warmed by some holiday fairy lights (a tropical corollary to a fire in a Franklin stove).

Tree Progress

I put an ornament on it now and then as I walk by. I should be done by Christmas Eve, and it will be fine for the 12 days of Christmas after which I will remove an ornament now and then as I walk by, hopefully undone by Chinese New Year. But tonight, something special. A dear departing co-worker passed his farewell ginger-ti lei to me (he was allergic to it) so I strung it on the tree like a garland of snow. The combined fragrance notes of white ginger and fir are quite intriguing. And real, not something concocted in a perfume laboratory. Yes, that is a gecko in a Santa hat peeking out from the branches.

Earlier, I had thrown a nut/shell/ti leaf lei into a fall/Thanksgiving arrangement that seemed aesthetically pleasing, if not completely traditional.

The custom of lei-giving in Hawaii is something really special. I wore a lei presented to the Wizard a few days ago, a beautiful complex green and purple orchid thing, here a little wilted, but when it was fresh, I dressed to the lei: green pants, a burgundy top. Everyone commented on it.

"Is it your birthday?"

"No, that was last week."

"Well, I love it when folks wear lei for no particular reason."

Which made me think of a comment I made to a blog-o-pal about the curious integration of pagan traditions like Santa (the Wild Man) and amanita mushrooms and bunny rabbits and chicks with the Christian icons of the creche and crucifix. Like language, our traditions evolve and conflate, to the point where no one really knows what anything really means. But they are all quite delicious, hinting at secrets of love and lust and spiritual longing, expressed in these tangible ways. Very natural things, flowers and fecund rabbits point to immortality, the promise (fulfilled or not) of spiritual aspiration.

Christmas Tree 2010

The tree has been sitting naked in the living room for a week. Every morning I comb through its branches with my arms to relax it, unfurl it. It's beautiful. It smells divine. I wonder if it really needs ornamentation. The cats love it. Fifi, la plus belle chatte de la maison, lurks under it, I'm sure feeling like she is outside.

We missed getting a live tree last year, and I wasn't sure we would do it this time, but we did. This year, a trip to our favorite tree vendor, who sends us a discount coupon every year, was fruitful. We were greeted in the lot by a guy who was clearly a casual hire, probably from the Salvation Army, toothless, but full of energy and more customer service-oriented than anyone in Bangalore.

"What are you looking for?"

"A six-foot Noble." (Like Song Il-Guk as Jumong, Muhyul or Yum Moon.)

"Follow me. ... here's one," he said, stripping off the plastic net, propping up the heavy tree for our consideration.

"Beautiful, we'll take it."

The Wizard went off with the coupon to pay for it, leaving me with the casual hire to bounce it free of needles (with a curious vibrator that shook all the loose shit out...I wanted to sit on it, that six-foot Noble) and package it up to take to the roof of our car. He looked at me, "Are you sure this is the one?"

This very hard-working guy then told me he just had a woman come in who made him take 18

(eighteen) trees out of the Matson** container, unwrap them, display them...and she didn't like any of them. And then she left.

"We like this one, it's just fine. I hope this makes up for that," I

said. He took it to the car, the Wizard tipped him well (fresh trees are really heavy) and now we have a truly lovely tree, still waiting for decor, but perfect.

All of which made me recall tree selections of the past:

---going to a "lot" at night near my grandmother's house, strung with lights (kinda like a used car lot) with my father, who in my memory resembles Gregory Peck in "To Kill A Mockingbird," (at right) when I was as tall as maybe his mid-thigh, stomping around in the snow. The tree had to be short enough to fit on the "platform" (wrapped in brick-printed crepe paper) for the American Flyer train and village under it (wish I still had that).

---finding a little tree on December 23, just after our Solstice wedding, also from a snowy lot, decorated with tacky glass ball ornaments from Woolworth's that I still use, (they are on their way to becoming antiques) and a paper-cut snowflake made by my aesthetics professor who said at our wedding that I looked like a snowflake; the tree sat on top of a blond '50s era B&W TV-set, a hand-me-down from the in-laws.

---cutting our own tree on a snowy Pennsylvania hillside, celebrating with champagne many things, particularly 100K miles on the Honda station wagon, a recent birthday, an upcoming anniversary, and the fact that we didn't get caught because we cut down someone else's tree, marked with a tag earlier in the season. My perpetual apologies, we never saw the tag until the tree was felled.

--driving around in the Idaho wilderness with a permit to cut anything we could find. Mulled wine and friendship and a poorly wildly shaped but very fresh tree made that holiday memorable.

--waiting for an hour or so with a few other desperate last minute folks like us, for a tree to be trucked in from Makaha: "They didn't sell well out there."

The Christmas tree is indeed a sacrificial thing. I get very upset with indiscriminate tree slaughter. I have ambivalent feelings about the Christmas tree industry. But at the same time, I remember all those trees of the past, their aroma, the bedecked glory, and...now it's time to put on the lights.

**I am not an employee of Matson, but I love the company's logotype. I don't know if it is intentional, but the "T" looks like an anchor. Perfect for a marine shipping company.

Confucian-ing

I'm not sure what to say about this. But the events are SO Chinese. A Confucius Peace Prize? An alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize. (The Chinese invented peace. And the Sunzi Bingfa.) Regarding the 21st Century Confucius Peace Prize:

The first honoree is Lien Chan, Taiwan's former vice president and the honorary chairman of its Nationalist Party, for having "built a bridge of peace between the mainland and Taiwan." A staffer in his Taipei office said she could not comment Tuesday because she knew nothing about the prize.

Which is all really really weird.

I was intrigued by this not only because one of my blog-o-pals is publishing The Art of War, line-by-line, oddly with no commentary, but also because I just discovered in my DVD collection a set I bought couple of years ago in Hong Kong, something about the 36 stratagems (or as the DVD says "six times six equals to thirty-six number goes with art," whatever that means). It is a Chinese-produced "TV-play," about the Sunzi Bingfa (albeit pathetic by Korean-drama standards). I bought it thinking it was an academic documentary about Sun Tzu, but I discover it's an interesting drama, (recalling the production values of late '50s television's Hallmark Hall of Fame or Alcoa Presents dramas of my childhood) with very attractive Chinese men in topknots. (Having just finished Muhyul, this may be the next stimulation I need. )

The real point of my post here is that a reading of The Art of War may be helpful in understanding just what the hell the Chinese are really doing with their Confucius prize.

Equanimity

Nothing like a birthday to make you review your year. Did I make progress? (What is progress?) Did I just keep my head above water? (What is survival?) I review this year, the first half of which was spent planning a trip to China, and the last half, recovering from it, and not much else. Well, actually, lots more, documented in both Tao 61s. (And a lot of undocumented shit.) But during this period of dark and new moons, I make a personal internal commitment to plan another trip.

I did observe this morning something that ordinarily would have outraged me, but today just made me sigh. I had been watching the blooming of a huge clump of aloe where I park my car over the past couple weeks. I watched the tall coral-colored blossoms (above) develop daily. I thought I had photographed it, but not. I regret that.

Today, a DoT worker was digging the entire clump out of the ground, to make room for some other "more attractive" plantings the building management wants to install.

I sighed. I may have been the only person who was watching the blossoming in the parking lot.

The deed is done. I can do nothing about it. I can only sigh. An in breath, an out breath.

But at the same time I had an interesting conversation with the DoT worker, a woman who seems attached to me, who is kind and open. She offered me a clump of the dug-out aloe, telling me how to process the plant for its juice. She had no choice but to dig it up. We both agreed that the building manager is a bitch.

I am thinking of equanimity. The aloe comes and goes. People do what they have to do. Friends arrive and disappear. There is no progress. Only survival.

I think I must focus my practice on achieving equanimity. I may be making progress.