Solstice is A'Comin' to Town

A Hula Santa, a Sphinx (or something Egyptian), Fly Agaric Mushrooms (Gluckspilzen), and a Chinese Dragon...is this sufficiently multi-cultural for a solstice tree? The tree is very important to me, has to be real, and in the past 40 solstices**, I have only missed this tradition twice, for more or less reasonable reasons.

First was when we were moving from Idaho to Pennsylvania at Christmas time: our red and white van, decorated with antlers and a wreath, a Christmas ornament on wheels, broke down in a snowstorm in Iowa. Was it Davenport or Des Moines? Whatever, with an infant and four cats (having jettisoned the tropical house plants that did not survive the night drive through Wyoming), we were traveling back east. We had the van's universal joint replaced on Christmas Day, while the infant charmed everyone, mechanics and diner waitresses; we felt like Mary and Joseph on the way to Egypt.

Second tree-less holiday was a short December sojourn in pre-handover Hong Kong and I couldn't bring myself to pay such an exorbitant price for such a puny tree for so few days. The infant had grown and that year, his 16th, experienced his first serious hangover: he got terribly drunk on Christmas Eve with some graduate students in the residence hall where we were staying at HKU. It was the first Christmas morning he was not up at dawn. Later, we gave him cash and he went off on his own to Kowloon to bargain, quite well really, for a fancy Japanese boom box. No tree, but it was a memorable holiday.

This year's tree, the usual imported-from-Oregon Noble fir (they hold up well) will probably be around until Jan. 29, Chinese New Year. We got a good deal this year: the tree importer got a big discount from the shipper, Matson, and in a spirit of good will and aloha, passed it directly on to the buyers. That's why we always go back to the same vendor.

It's funny buying a Christmas tree in Hawaii. Solstice here isn't quite the same; mostly just rainy and cooler weather. But I need that smell and the feel of the needles to remind me of tramping around in the snow in the Christmas tree lots with my Dad in search of a tree just the right size to fit on the "platform" for the model train. If that resonates with you, be sure to watch Polar Express this year, the best new Christmas classic.

**That is, the solstices celebrated as independent from natal family: we are celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary on this very auspicious date. Longest night of the year. Yang rising big time. Cool huh?

Big Island Energy

Thanksgiving and the birthday came and went and have set the stage for the approaching solstice. The turkey holiday was spent on the Big Island of Hawaii where I did a masterful 20-pound bird for four people. (It was the smallest dose of tryptophan available.) Had so much we brought some home: I am still eating it. We especially enjoyed the pond in front of the house we rented. Not only could we swim in the deceptively deep, clear, 91-degree pond which we shared with fish, crabs and tiny shrimp, but it provided beautiful meditative reflections for contemplation. The whole area was networked with a series of geothermally heated pools which were clear and only slightly salty...brackish sounds yucky, but that's what they were. They were sensitive to the tides. The rocky bottoms were hypnotic.

We were about 30 miles from the ill-fated Kalapana Black Sand Beach and some subdivisions that were destroyed some years ago (1990) when Kilauea restarted its relentless effort to expand the land mass of Southeast Hawaii. In fact, there is a new island forming in the chain, although I will never see it. It is giving geologists and oceanographers a wonderful opportunity to observe the earth as it develops. It's alive: it's not done yet. We went to visit the area and though we couldn't get close enough to see the lava flowing, we did see the evidence of activity. Great steam clouds form where the lava is pouring into the ocean.

And it doesn't take long for things to start to grow in the cooled lava. Here's a noni plant, a Hawaiian medicinal, taking root in the natural asphalt.

We got a lot of frozen turkey past TSA to carry back home to Oahu on the return 45-minute leg of our $543 flight on the pesky little upstart that is held partly responsible for the failure of one of our original island airlines. This airline actually wants to buy the name "Aloha," the 60-year-old brand that is no more. Just one more thing happening that makes me question the conscience of business. Seems to me it's one thing to buy another business, but quite another to buy the name of the business you helped kill.

My Christmas cactus began to bloom on my birthday, another one of those cosmic calendar occurrences.

Later in the week, I went with a friend to hear Ledward Kaapana, a world-class, Grammy-nominated Hawaiian slack-key guitarist who happened to be playing in a coffee shop in Wahiawa, which is a stone's throw from Kolekole pass, through which the first Mitsubishis arrived in Hawaii 67 years ago today. (Now you see their descendants parked, and not necessarily driven by Japanese tourists, at Pearl Harbor Arizona Memorial.)

So, I gathered with the Led Heads to hear this unassuming guitar hero of Hawaii, who celebrated his own 60th birthday in September, playing for a group of about 40 people, including family, friends and fellow musicians. Home from mainland touring, he performs for FREE for friends, and also graciously showcases young talent and proteges. What a thrill it must be for a 13-year-old guitarist or a young singer to perform along with Led. In 1983, when I arrived in Hawaii, I bought one of his first albums after hearing it on the great speakers at the now-defunct Tower Records on Keeaumoku Street. It became a favorite in my slack-key guitar collection as I became a Led Head. I saw Led last when he opened for Bob Dylan about ten years ago in Honolulu. As an afterthought this week, I took the old vinyl album along to the coffee shop and asked him to autograph it. "It must be really old," he said. "Happy Birthday," he wrote, "Jus' press, Ledward Kaapana." Led grew up on the Big Island, not far from the picture up above, in modest means, without electricity, but with a lot of aloha and support. They say his nimble fingers can play anything with strings, and I am proud to have had them inscribe the album for me. I'm not big into celebrity artifacts, but this one is special.

Though we all live scattered about on these tiny islands --Oahu, Maui, Lantau, Cheung Chau, Manhattan, the British Isles -- on Earth (not even the Big Island of the solar system) -- none of us need be isolated because we have music from big hearts like Led, and the internet, so you too can enjoy some of that warm geothermal energy from the Big Island.

Alternative Transportation

Is there anything more metaphorical, romantic, or mysterious than trains?  I come from a family with a history in trains ("The Pennsy"--the PRR, the great Pennsylvania Railroad, now absorbed by AMTRAK). Great-great-uncle Hiram on Mom's side was a railroad man,  as was my grandfather on Dad's side.  My father recalled taking the train as a child to visit relatives 75 miles up north of the town I grew up in, which during the industrial 20th century was a major center of rail commerce and locomotive building and maintenance.   But I'd never taken a train anywhere until I was in my 30s, and then because it was convenient to get back and forth from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.  They were trips I took because I didn't have a car: the bus was creepy and boring and uncomfortable, and flying was too expensive.  But the train--what a relaxing and economical way to travel.  Have a beer and watch the world go by, sort of slowly, really, while basking in that comforting confidence that the train knows where it's going, you don't have to do anything.  I took the train about 10 years ago from Philadelphia to Altoona, while re-reading "Brave New World,"  a once futuristic and slightly lascivious book that now seems as quaint as riding a train.  I finally got to observe the "World Famous Horseshoe Curve" from the Curve itself.  When I was a child, we used to visit the Curve on family Sunday drives; it was supposedly an engineering marvel and a kind of shrine for railroad families. I used to irk my father by asking if they knew about the World Famous Curve in Pakistan. (They probably did, India and Pakistan being train-dependent countries.)  There was a point on the curve around the mountainside where the locomotive and the caboose would be just a few feet from each other if the train was long enough.  It's a pretty cool thing to experience, like being in a model train layout (another icon of railroaders, to be found under every Christmas tree).

For a recent gathering of family and friends for a wedding in Palm 

Springs, California, I was nostalgic when I got RT tickets for my son and his SO on the Coast Starlight, a train that runs down the west coast, from Seattle to LA.  I was vicariously anticipating the romantic 30-hour each way North-by-Northwest journey, with sleeper cabin and dining car, indulging in ancestor worship and thinking of trains in China.  My son took a fabulous photo from the train which I don't think he will mind my sharing here.

This image  seemed so Chinese to me, the beautiful cranes observed from a train, and made me think about my China train travel experiences.  (One in particular, a wonderful moment 20 years ago in the Chinese countryside when the Wizard was able to use, quite clearly in Mandarin, a phrase he had learned by rote: "Why is the train not coming?")

Here in Hawaii, we are having a major political "discussion" about rail, because we need alternate transportation really bad.  In terms of both destination and placement, the crux of the issue is "Where will it go?"  As if there will be one single long track that goes from here to there and solves everyone's problems.  In Hong Kong, and Greater China, EVERYONE can get ANYWHERE because the trains go EVERYWHERE.  Under harbors, through mountains, across deserts, below cities like mole tunnels.  And routes are added constantly, like the controversial train to Tibet, and new lines all the time in Hong Kong, which challenge the whole infrastructure to update fares, route maps, stations, all of which can be accessed with a convenient debit card system.  It makes the Horseshoe Curve seem really primitive.

This September, traveling from Xian to Wudang, literally THROUGH the series of mountains I had just two days before flown over, I was struck with the metaphor of train travel, the way we would be cruising through a long dark tunnel to burst out for a few seconds to glimpse a dreamy bright image of  landscape in a valley with houses, laundry hanging out, a truck crawling along a dirt road, peasants tending a field, construction of a bridge, then suddenly back in the tunnel for a few more minutes until another glimpse, a crazy slide show that went on for hours. It was a metaphor for daily living, as we move through our workweek, with glimpses, flashes of insights as we go in and out of the tunnel.  The metaphor of the train is so pervasive in modern literature, like that story of the train to hell we all had to read in high-school German class, and train references in blues songs. The train carries messages about love and death, destiny and fate.  Standing next to a waiting train, you feel it vibrating,  pulsing, breathing like an indifferent animal.  In the great new Christmas classic movie, Polar Express, (which must be loved by anyone of a certain age who ever had a model train layout under their Christmas tree) the train is like the Tao.  Just get on.  Go visit the relatives. Watch the world pass by.  

The Slow Train from Xian to Wudang

My Sunny Disposition

Not only was it a five-kolea morning, (see yesterday's yin post) but I discover that today, in about an hour, in Hawaii, the sun enters Sagittarius, my very own sun sign. My Yahoo! horoscope for this auspicious day (some other big deal things happening in the grand cosmic clock, planetary trines and moon-unions) notes that :

"After 30 days of soul-searching and going through various tests of endurance and stamina in often frosty Scorpio, the solar orb is welcoming a new, 30-day time-period in which adventure, exploration, athletics, philosophical discourse and a happy-go-lucky disposition are more the rule than the exception." (Mark Lerner, Astrology.com)

And my birthday coming up, too! Still this maybe explains why I haven't felt like posting anything yang since before Halloween, having been plagued with many deep, dark, frosty Scorpio thoughts and I was especially restless and uneasy during the mid-month full moon. The Scorpio period always makes me feel a little dark and kicks off a roller-coaster of activity that won't really stop until Lent.

There are people who might have trouble with having Scorpio and Lent referenced seriously in the same sentence. But I like to honor and celebrate everything, all that One-ness. So from Halloween, to the Scorpio Wizard's birthday, Election Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, my birthday, Pearl Harbor Day, a full moon on Dec. 12, the Winter Solstice which is also our wedding anniversary (longest night of the year!) and New Year's Day and then another New Year's Day (Chinese) and MLK Day and the Inauguration the very next day and then all those February things. Well, it makes my head spin. I look forward to Lent to calm down. And then the kolea leave. (I notice I didn't include Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, not really my celebrations, but there they are...certainly part of the same season.)

Marking holidays with that celestial calendar (maybe the kolea have Go to Alaska/Return to Hawaii celebrations)...it may not really mean anything, but it does help us give meaning to the cycles of our lives. In any case, I'm feeling sunny today!

Addition and Subtraction

Adding and subtracting must be the most simple of cyclical measures. For the Wizard, it is the only thing that works when it comes to dieting. Since mid-summer, he has lost 47 pounds just by counting calories: adding up the calories, subtracting the pounds. No workout program except maybe a little walking, no weird nutritional concepts like carbs or glycemic indexes or forbidden foods or exotic combinations. Just a daily budget which has allowed for things that I tend to cut back on when dieting like cheese, chocolate and alcohol. It's an accountant's diet: while he's not an accountant, he has always said one of the best courses he took in college was something called "Family Finance" offered by the Home Ec department. (Probably an easy A.) The concepts were simple: income and expenditure, assets and liabilities, everything balances. A little discipline helps too. So he has successfully diminished the spread with a spreadsheet. I am humbled. The only time I lose weight is on retreat: eating cabbage, tofu and rice, meditating, and hiking up and down hundreds of steps every day in the fresh air.

If only the folks who run our financial institutions, industries, and government had all taken Family Finance, maybe the economy wouldn't be in the mess it is.

Time Not Wasted

So many other things I could have been doing tonight...listening to the VP debate...reading that Oprah book...updating my blog (well I guess I AM doing that) ...watching a silly movie someone pressed on me ("What Planet are You From?")...but after a brief nap (still have a little jet lag issue) I am listening to NPR's pre-release streaming of Bob Dylan's latest official bootleg album, "Tell Tale Signs," lots of great recent old songs that are the perfect antidote to the campaign yammering and convincing me that in some deep way, Bob is a Taoist. That change and yin/yang thing, going on for 50 years. While listening, also reading an "Introduction to Chinese Philosophy" textbook I picked up in Hong Kong (I did do some shopping).  The concepts of Dao (Tao), Qi, yin/yang are easy to get while listening to "Born in Time."

"The soul of a nation is under the knife" (from "Dignity") ..and I think I picked the right diversions for the evening.

Inspired Cooking

Yummy dinner tonight.  First I have cooked since returning, jet lag/culture lag diminishing. Missing the simple braised cabbage and veggies in ginger and garlic of Wudang, I grabbed my favorite Chinese cleaver and chopped and sliced a lot of garlic, scallions and ginger and threw it into a cup of simmering vegetable stock. (The Wizard has a vegetable steamer and does mixed vegetables, sometimes with a hunk of pork-ish meat and it yields some tasty broth that is handy for later seasoning.)  Added some nice pieces of ahi (fresh tuna) to poach while also doing a quick separate stir-fry of asparagus with a bit of shredded cabbage and some of the aforementioned scallions, garlic and ginger and some of the veggie stock.  Really fast, really good.  I will never steam or boil asparagus again.  You shouldn't either.