Another Cycle, Endings and Beginnings

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.

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.

Stairway to heaven.

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.

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.

Felled trees from the kinetic energy of the blast 33 years ago; new trees taking their places.

Trees not felled, but stripped by the energy of the blast.

The magnitude of resurrection.

Moon Madness

I awake at 6:30 before it is light, darker even than it was when I awoke earlier at 3 a.m. to the moonbeams shining through my window.  I wasn't aware it was the full moon (full dragon) as I went to the lanai to drink a bit of water.  It was raining, but the moon was shining bright through clouds; I could discern a misty clot of vapor in the the stream valley below.  Not up for moon cream meditation, I lingered a bit before returning to my warm bed with its fresh soft sheets and a cat who rearranged himself between my legs, purring.  We don't know what purring really means...is it happiness or submission?  I have come to see it as a sort of qigong device, like the kneading routine they go through before settling down.  The faint vibrations from his body to the back of my knee helped me drift off again.

I was feeling a little more relaxed anyway, having relieved myself of a burden...I have been blocked (probably stagnant liver qi) for the past few weeks, unable to complete a painting project to which I had committed myself.  I owed one more image to my friend to illustrate --as if it's necessary-- her collection of haiku.  But the dragon I envisioned just wouldn't come. I did a little Chinese New Year's sketch that had been taunting me on my table as I passed everyday, but I just couldn't finish it.  I confessed my blockage, but not to worry, she is not waiting on me, so some relief.  Perhaps now the dragon will come easily; it is hard to get the image out of my head and on to paper when there is an obligation involved.  It interferes with the spontaneity.  I am not professional or commercial enough (which simply means I'm not getting paid for it) to produce on demand.

On awakening in the dark --the moon has long set--I made a conscious effort to remember the dream I was having.  I was at an academic conference of some sort. I  went back to the dining hall to retrieve a missing shoe, a red stiletto. It was still under the table.  Attached to it was something like a bicycle chain, which on closer inspection turned out to be something like a tapeworm.  (In dreams things are always "something like.")  To the tapeworm was attached a card with instructions on how to ingest it, with special notes on how to take it camping.  I know there are people who use tapeworms as weight loss devices.  My reader who recently did a piece on her own dreams might explain what all this means.  Unblocking the liver qi?

Liu Ye

No, I suspect the dream is related to the surreal and shocking media I have been indulging in the past few days. Last week I watched a little film called Dark Matter, with Meryl Streep, Aidan Quinn and the extremely versatile Liu Ye.  I've enjoyed his eager, brooding style before in several films--Postmen in the Mountains, Purple Butterfly, Curse of the Golden Flower, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, and a couple of historical Chinese political propaganda epics. I've not been able to get this story out of my mind. Loosely based on an actual event, the plot concerns the trajectory of a brilliant young Chinese doctoral student in a western university--literally in the Rocky Mountains. Reviews suggest this was unappreciated by mainstream audiences, but I was blown away. Under the ineffective protection of Meryl Streep, who studies tai chi, mandarin and tea making, as part of her support of young Chinese students at the university, Liu Ye's character (Liu Xing) tries to adapt, but in an inappropriate way.  Liu Xing gets mixed messages all along the way.  He is encouraged to challenge his professor (Aidan Quinn) who advises him that his dissertation thesis is way over his head, (meaning way over his advisor's head and challenging his mentor's theory).  A staged western shootout in a tourist pioneer village is contrasted with his watching a wuxia film on pirated TV and foreshadows the disastrous end.  The film is accented by chapter divisions that follow the wu xing, a Chinese cosmological symbol which probably was not understood by most people who watched this film.  A patronizing cultural clash leads to a shocking conclusion.  Why I am discussing movies lately here on my yang side may indicate some integration of yin and yang.  (I wouldn't mind integrating a bit with Liu Ye, which Meryl Steep failed to do do in one sexually tense scene when the failed cosmology student, reduced to selling cosmetics, applies cream to her hands and face.)

At the same time, I am nearly at midpoint in 1Q84, Haruki Murakami's new big novel (925 pages).  I'm not sure why, but I need to finish it, hopefully without injury.  The last time I read a big book like this, that big Ken Follett book about gothic cathedral building, I did actual diagnosed arthritic damage to my wrist (which I have since overcome through qigong). 1Q84 has the pace of a long Korean drama with cliff-hanging chapters, with intense and possibly unnecessary physical descriptions of characters, especially the shapes of people's heads.  With even more bizarre sex scenes than Ken Follett's, set in contemporary Japan, it has a manga, Studio Ghibli feel, as if interpreted by John Irving. It's oddly compelling, but I'm not ready to say yet that it's really very good.  A few good lines to underline...in 925 pages one would hope.  Easy to read, but one wonders what might be lost in translation.  I have read some Murakami before, none of his novels, just short stories in the New Yorker.  Over the past several years I have ceased reading New Yorker fiction, and now I think I know why.

The sky is lightening, but not like it was at 3 a.m.  The world seems a little different today, though not as different as 1Q84's with TWO moons in the sky.  I must get ready for my day in my academic office.

Mountaineering

Engineering mountains (mountaineering?) in painting class...my heart is in the mountains.  I feel like Slartibartfast making his fjords.

Wudang Revisited--The View

After settling into our hotels --each year I came to think of them as Camp Wudang -- we took walkabouts in the area. It was breathtakingly authentic.

Below, a closer view of the temple seen in the distance above, one of many in the area.
Below, a view from the temple grounds in the afternoon mist.

Can there be any doubt how the tradition of shui mo (ink and water) shan shui (mountains and water) painting was conceived?
These scenes inspire my own feeble attempts.

Above, a copy from some ancient dynasty piece.

This was inspired by my memories of the temple above.