Yang Rising

I wonder if it was so difficult adjusting after my Chinese dream-trip because I arrived back just after the full moon. I was feeling increasingly oppressed with the subsequent gathering yin energy exacerbating my jet lag, the anti-climax of a wonderful spiritual, physical and cultural adventure, and the return to office responsibilities complicated with processes and procedures, the world of MBO, which used to mean Management by Objective but has also come to mean Management by Outlook (Microsoft's ubiquitous email system.)  Wu wei and MBO don't really coexist well. Maybe it's another yin-yang thing.

But last night as I sat under the first quarter moon, a perfect balance of yin with yang about to rise, I began to feel some energy. This morning's reading, "Shrine," from Deng Ming-dao's 365 Tao was inspiring:

"It is good to have holy places in the world, and it is good for us to go on pilgrimages. Ultimately, it is not the place that is important; it is what you feel that is lasting.  To visit a place is minor; to change within yourself is greater.
    When people visit a holy place, some say that the spirits of that place speak to them. Others remember the exotic pageantry. When it comes to sacred sites, it's better to be a pilgrim than a tourist. Go with a humble attitude, and let your heart be moved by what you experience.  Then you will receive the true treasure of the shrine."

This was exactly the message I needed.  The true treasures of the shrines I visited are in my heart.  I just wasn't paying attention the past week or so.  A friend recently told me she overcame a moment of personal torment by sitting on the beach while reading her Bible. In Hawaii, that interface between vast ocean and solid rock is a holy place. You can feel the Tao in the waves as they crash and recede on the sand and lava. Whatever the place (beach or mountains), whatever the scripture, (commentaries on the Tao or Pauline letters), these moments can lift us and remind us that we can easily fix our troubled hearts.

Temple Courtyard Where We Practiced the 8 Brocades

Morning, Moon, Mountains

Can you see the morning moon in this image, waning, but still dramatic? The fig leaves are kind of pointing to it. The black thing to the south-west in the sky is really a small spider weaving a web in that very same lanai fig tree.

The moon was quite nice last night as I drove home, top down, from the fifth of ten lessons in my current third session of Chinese painting classes that I started last January and continued through the summer. Coming up the freeway, the moon dogged me while I sniffed the damp earth exuding the delicious smell of the recently burned kiawe, the air a little like lapsang souchang tea. The weather has changed a bit, and I've been driving top down again lately, which I especially like to do at night.

I guess I sort of passed my mid-term in class; Lao Shi approved my little landscape and didn't want to change it; the rest of the class applauded.

My Little Landscape

This could have been because she and the class focus more on flower and bird painting, not shan shui/shui mo landscapes. Or maybe everyone was just being polite. But someone commented, "Wow, that's hard, did you copy it, or think of it yourself." I used the taught techniques, but the landscape did come out of my own mind, inspired partly by the views of the Waianae ridge (see below) on the way home in the evening, their jagged rift-volcanic summits demarcating the line between earth and heaven, Wudangshan memories, and images from the Red Cliff movies. What I find hard, or possibly less personally compelling, is the xie yi flower style. One young woman in the class brought her homework, gorgeous peonies, a copy of one of Lao Shi's demonstrations. "But I can't do that," I said. She told me she's been studying for five years and it was only after two that she started doing flowers. All Taoist cultivation (and this is indeed a cultivation exercise) takes time.

I will just keep on keepin' on my own path, like the little guy in the corner of my painting.

Walking My Path

Waianae Range from my lanai in the morning.

Just so there's no confusion, the image in my blog title above is NOT the Waianaes, it is Wudangshan, Hubei Province, in China.
And speaking of the moon, this just seems so wrong.