CYCLES OF CHANGE

I should know better than to listen to the news in the morning while I'm getting dressed..it gets me dEPressed, especially when I'm in one of my very yin cycles, evaluating how the end of the first year in my new cycle (that 61 thing) is shaping up.

For all the global optimism after the US election in anticipation of change--positive change--it doesn't feel so optimistic to me. All you have to do is listen to one half-hour of CNN and realize that in fact nothing really changes---there's just cycles. Russia still wants to turn Poland into a parking lot, actors still go on futile junkets to Africa to call attention to interminable strife, pirates still roam the seas, the economy goes up and down, there are still robber barons (in the form of auto execs with private jets). My Tao teacher explained how that is normal in the "post-heaven" state, illustrating with yin and yang and trigrams and hexagrams and cycles. The Asian mentality just gets suffering....and gets to suffer. But still, it is little consolation considering my 401(k). Glad to have paid off the mortgage in spite of our financial advisor's advice not to. What was he thinking? The Tao, the DOW. And I saw a foreclosure notice on someone's door as I left the building.


So after I turned off the news and left for work, on a glorious sunny morning, I looked for my touchstones, the kolea, the Hawaiian name for the Pacific golden plover, at right. I usually see at least one, sometimes four to six, on my way out of my neighborhhood. I say hello, and then feel like the day will be okay. They always look like they are waiting to see me too. Masters of cycles, they fly to Alaska to breed every April and return to Hawaii in August to winter. They breed in Palin country and but come home to Obama land. I thought this morning I wasn't going to see any, but finally, just before turning on to the main road, there she was, waiting for me. And then another. Has turned out to be a pretty nice day. A two-kolea day.