A Change of Perspective

When confronted with annoying change, sometimes the thing to do is simple: change your own perspective.

Over the past couple years, I have been fighting disappointment and anger over the callous action of my condo association which is just a little too chainsaw-happy.  When they cut down two huge albizias,  (allegedly some sort of threat), whose treetop-level flowering I always enjoyed from my tenth-floor lanai, I was devastated and angry.  My night-time meditation practice, my morning coffee, my afternoon reading, was disrupted, ruined even. Now I had a glorious view of...the parking lot! These majestic trees, I often said, were what made me love my otherwise very ordinary apartment, the asset that spoke to my soul.  I began to retreat inside, and nursed the wound as if my own trunk had been sliced just at the root.

Only just recently I discovered all I had to do was move myself, my chair, my cushion, to the other side of the lanai.  Moving some potted plants around to block the view of the parking lot, and reorienting my view from the northwest to the southwest, et voila, I have a peaceful natural space again.  I still miss those trees, the way I miss my parents, my aunts and uncles, cousins, and friends who have passed on.  When I meditate, I can still feel their presence.  But just by shifting my position, I find all is well.

Hermits and Friends

Sometimes I like to leave my little solitary retreat and venture down the hill.  All the things I like to do alone are precious:  contemplation and meditation, painting, reading and writing. (Notwithstanding some interludes with Korean drama.) I can become quite the hermit when I have the opportunity.

But down around the corner is my friend.  We make tea and conversation,  share medicine and cookies, laugh and tell stories, reminisce and make plans.

But eventually, I return to my hermitage, my solitary silent mind, to think and then not-think, to sleep, and rise again for another day.

Always Another Side

The other half of this perfect arc of a rainbow can be found over on the Yin Side. I actually stopped my car on the freeway Sept. 1 to take this shot, it was such a nice positive thing to see first thing in the morning. Half-and-half pictures because I don't have a wide angle lens on my little Casio Exilim, which for nearly five years has been faithfully doing duty not only for the everyday snapshots like this, but also on travel to the U.S. Mainland and China, at weddings and funerals, the ordination of an RC Bishop and the destruction of a sand mandala by Buddhist monks, recording my teacher's Chinese painting demonstrations and my own feeble efforts. The pocket digital workhorse is looking kind of beat up, but after all this time I am pretty adept with its controls. Only 5.0 megapixels, it seems obsolete, but, like my 20-year-old car, it still goes the distance. It does the one job it was designed for: no phone calls, no internet access, no calendar, just photography.

I only hope to become so adept with my new car radio...will it take four years? After I shot the rainbow, I managed to tune to the local NPR outlet to hear some news, some things to think about.

I learned from someone who runs some kind of "senior" home health care service that 7 out of 10 deaths in the growing population of folks 60+ are ultimately due to falls. I haven't been aware of being in such a demographic since the last time I was thought to be a "senior," the 45th anniversary of which condition is coming up next month. I won't make the high school reunion on the East Coast, but I have been thinking much about those of us on the leading edge of the Big Boom. I was so excited then to be a "senior," ascending the side of the rainbow leading to a wide open future; how quickly we reach the zenith and slide down the other. This melancholy thinking does remind me that I must step up my qigong exercises, one movement of which is called "past the rainbow." Qigong does promote balance, which I can always use more of, and thus, prevent falls.

Next news item was about affordable housing in Kaneohe. The state has spent $60 million on affordable studios and 2-bedroom units to rent to qualifying (poor) folks for ~$365-$865 a month. For perspective, my condo maintenance fee (which seems to be financing deforestation in my "woodland" complex) is just in the middle of that range.

As I was contemplating this, the next item had to do with affordable hotels in Makena, a Maui resort neighborhood adjacent to the ultra-pricey Wailea. The Makena development will feature rooms in the "affordable" $200-250 range, a value, I guess, if you can't pay the $400 to $500 nightly costs in Wailea. Such contrasts. I do hope that the folks in the cheap studios in Kaneohe have better manners than some of the Wailea guests. I have a friend who works in a dress shop there who has on more than one occasion found urine in the trash cans in the fitting rooms. Which just suggests that money doesn't buy decency.

After these curious news reports, I turned the radio off (having learned how to do that) to drive in silence (not counting the Miata's purr), contemplating the sun rising from behind the mauka cloud banks. Later that night, I watched the same sun set off my lanai. It gave me a sense of balance.

Oh Me of Little Faith!

Some weeks ago I was annoyed and grumbling because in the wake of extensive tree removal and pruning, the groundskeepers seemed to have gone a little overboard with their chainsaws, whacking off all the best parts of the ornamental shrubbery that keeps our place from looking like a low-cost housing project in Chicago. These are the kind of plants I used to have as botanical house pets on the mainland; little did I know then that I was really torturing them, keeping them stunted in pots and living on artificial fertilizer and limited sunshine in Appalachia, far from their tropical roots, so to speak.

Truth be told, the greenery around the building had gotten a bit rangy, although I enjoy that overgrown jungle mess, keeping in mind my previous prisoners of horticulture. And in fact in Hawaii, unless you lop off an offending plant pretty much right at ground level, it will be back, and sooner than you expect. (And that may not even be enough; you may have to dig it out, or burn it, or poison it.)

So today I am delighted to see and report the life force bursting forth from the cut branches, promising an even lusher display of tropical foliage in the very near future. I need to

 overcome my reluctance to intervene in the management of my own plants (I still keep some prisoners) beyond providing water and food; there is a big fig tree on my lanai suffering from neglect and entropy, not in the best of health, anticipating stress fractures in its pot, even the table it sits on is in danger of imminent collapse. I must get a good sharp saw (and buy it a new cage) to bring it back under control before it gives up its ghost just because I refused to cut it back. It's too late to make a bonsai; anyway, as beautiful as that can be, that seems like real torture.

And since Kim Jong Il seems not to have made good on his pompous threats to blow the Hawaiian Islands into oblivion in observance of Independence Day, (not that I was really worried, but if you are at ground zero, there's not much point in thinking too much about such things) my 10th floor fig tree certainly deserves a chance, like its cousins on the ground below and all of us, to continue to enjoy soaking up the sun and the moonlight that streams to my lanai for as long as possible.