AWAKENING ON A TWO-WAY STREET

"Holy crap!" I exclaimed to the void when thunder, practically in my bedroom, roused me out of my early morning dream. I'd been resting well, having cleared all work-related duties from my conscience and having the weekend to pack before leaving Monday morning on my Korean Air flight to Beijing via Seoul.

An odd office moment on Thursday enhanced my anticipation. Our health insurance carrier (AKA, health care provider) had scheduled a health education presentation. I usually attend these sessions about nutrition or exercise or proper self-treatment --things all promoted in the interest of "containing" health care costs, something I understand because 25 years ago I used to work for this particular carrier. The idea is that the more the health care provider/insurance company does to "educate" the policy holder, the lower costs will be. I am not sure this is a proven concept.

I was a little leery this time because the session wasn't by the usual charming, fit, and handsome young man (who usually tells us things we already know but in an engaging guilt-inducing manner). But the topic was intriguing: "Meditation: A Modern Approach to Ancient Wisdom." Modern, of course, means western and scientific, but still, it seemed like a good excuse to get away from my desk for an hour. Meditation was being promoted, with the sanction of the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (an arm of the National Institutes of Health) as a stress-relieving (and thus heart-healthy) technique. Not too many of the staff took the time for the brown bag -- desk slaves slammed by deadlines. "I would have liked to come, but...". If I was the CEO I would have made it mandatory that the entire staff participate. But the CEO didn't attend either. (But his administrative assistant did.)

It was a nice overview of something my China trips have been about, although the insurance company educator, who seemed to have some background in neuroscience, was quick to point out that this was not being presented as any spiritual exercise. (That was part of the "ancient" concept.) No slouch, the charming, fit, and energetic older man reviewed some classic techniques (breath counting, visualization, affirmations, mindfulness), citing The Relaxation Response from 1975 and the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. (No neidan or Wang Liping here.)

The health educator led the desperate little group (mostly from the accounting department) in some basic breath counting ("1 to 10 is good, if you can do 11 to 20 you have reached the meditative state," he claimed); some affirmations (I am confident, beautiful, etc., appealing to the HR staff), and some mindfulness ("Unwrap the Hershey's miniature--unless you are allergic to nuts or chocolate--and slowly savor it."). Actually, I'd never noticed how well-polished and shiny a Mr. Goodbar could be. And you can make it last a lot longer when you're not simultaneously slaving at your desk.

I had already become one of the interactive talkative persons in the group, being the same age as the presenter and the only one familiar with some of his antiquated allusions (W.C. Fields, patent medicine, Proust) when I made an observation based on something my Chinese neidan teacher had asked me last year.

"Are you meditating always?" Or maybe lao shi said "always meditating." Whatever. Though I suspect he might have meant "regularly," I have been thinking always since then of the notion of "always" meditating.

"You know," I said to the health instructor,"if you practice deep meditation it makes the mindfulness stuff come more easily. And mindfulness makes the deep meditation easier. It's like you're meditating always, these techniques become a two-way street."

"Ah," he said, "that's enlightenment! Everybody, talk to her." I don't think this decreases any of the deductibles on my health care plan, but later, the person who is revising business cards to reflect the new office address asked me to verify my title.

"Just put 'Enlightened One'," I joked. She had also attended the session.

"Like a certification," she said. "Certified Enlightened One. CEO!"

In the meantime, wandering about this two-way street, my attention was called to something I said just previously in "Miswiring," that I'd come to rely on my car radio when I was "tired of thinking my own thoughts." (Ah, the two-way street of blog comments, something not everyone likes, but I appreciate the dialogue, the observations. I suppose I might enjoy chat rooms and IMs, but that seems too fleeting and noisy, too much like the office.)

My blog commenter quite rightly pointed out that I might myself be a little "miswired" at the moment, and this made me more convinced that it is time to make this trip back to Wudang for a little adjustment. Hardly a CEO (that's just a title, a position of control and arrogance all too often), I'm just trying to meditate always, trying NOT to be thinking my own thoughts all the time.

But I do have a couple of trivial puzzling thoughts about enlightenment on this early stormy morning, awakened before dawn by thunder and, yes, lightning:

1. How do I get my health insurer to subsidize my trip in the interest of health maintenance and stress relief?
2. How do I clean under the keys of the keyboard of this MacBook Pro, across which I splashed a glass of red wine, and now the "q,w,e,a,s,d,z,x,c" section of the qwerty chiclets is dimmed. I can touch-type well enough, but the lit keyboard enhances writing in the dark. (They say red wine is good for your heart health, right?)

Time to brew the coffee, smell it (slowly, slowly), get a haircut, shop for travel necessities, prior to tomorrow's packing exercise, to be followed by the opportunity for 13 hours of meditation at 30,000 feet.

WHERE DO ALL THE BLOGGERS GO?

I've been a little concerned of late because one of my favorite blogs I follow, over on the Yang side, hasn't been updated for a couple of months. I am reluctant to de-link it, partly because I still go there to look at his photos, and I enjoy his music links. He never writes much --pictures being worth a thousand words, to someone somewhere. This guy has a photographic style that is unusual, like you are really looking out of his head, and over time you get a sense of who he might be. (A French socialist with great taste in music, possibly a doctor, but more likely a patient? A lot of photos from pharmacy and outpatient departments. His last photos include a hospital room. Not encouraging. If anyone knows his condition, I would love to know.)

Another blog I find interesting is so sporadic I wonder if he even tries anymore, but once a month or so, he pops up with something. I feel an affinity for him because his blog started just about the time mine did; I discovered his in a mutual link. He is surprising and sensitive and honest, but not very regular. (I suspect he is a very busy man with a family and a demanding job.) Not that I am so daily, but it is a habit you must cultivate just by doing. On the other hand, if you're not COMPELLED to blog, then you're not a blogger.

I recently* read Stephen King's ambiguously* encouraging On Writing book, and have been thinking about someone else's comment --writing isn't about having something interesting to say, it's about making anything you say interesting. A friend once told me in college when I was the school paper's editor, that I "could write with my mind tied behind my back." That's a backhanded compliment, but he thought what I wrote was interesting anyway.

There are a few things about Stephen King's style that bother me, but I've never read one of his books without pretty much barreling through it in just one or two sittings. And I just learned that Anthony Trollope wrote ALL THE TIME with daily quotas. (Stephen King does the same thing.) Not only did Trollope invent the English letterbox, which at the time was a revolution like having email--providing efficient private and direct correspondence--but he also might be credited with an early paradigm of the laptop computer. He built a little portable writing desk that he carried everywhere. He wrote on commuter trains or wherever he had spare time. It was all by hand, and on the road he used a pencil so he didn't have to worry about running out of ink, the equivalent of a battery failure.

But I digress.

I worry about my missing or absent bloggers. In the blogosphere (what a creepy word), we exist only in our posts. To be sure, on the positive yang side, assuming the servers keep working, there's a kind of immortality there. But in the end, we don't even know who cares.

*Mr. King would really like me to edit out these adverbs, feeling they are unnecessary. But I like adverbs, and the passive voice, too, where appropriate. But I think I know how to use them effectively. (Ooops.)

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED BLOG?
(Actual date of this post: Feb. 26.)
A considerable few days ago, a blogger to whom I link asked his readers if he should decrease his blogging frequency from every day. And I've been wondering if I should increase my frequency. I'm approaching the first anniversary of the TAO 61's and I am quite aware of how FEW posts I make. Another of my friends has apparently discontinued a blog, I hope because she plans to publish its content in the real print world, although her copy editor will surely throw up hands in despair. There is an advantage in the world of on-line vanity publishing: NO PESKY EDITORS!

As a result of these events, I began thinking about the what and why of this blogging thing, self-publishing in the vast sea of noise that is blogland. I think a blog, being your own private publication (I exclude the sites meant to keep family and friends up with intensely personal activities), finds its nature in frequency and its topic and tone. Are you a daily newspaper (a shopper or the New York Times), a weekly news magazine (Time or People), a monthly review (The Atlantic Monthly or Vogue), a quarterly journal (Granta or Tricycle)? Such distinctions also describe the nature of the subscribers to those publications. My own blogging tendency, it is obvious, tends toward the biweekly essay (partly because of the compulsive copyediting). I admire Anna Quindlen, who turns out a piece for Newsweek about every other issue, alternating space with the more conservative George Will (a yin/yang thing). I'd love to have a gig like that, although I have little interest in politics, sports or the minutiae of current events. I aspire to be an essayist, not a commentator or entertainer, and I write mostly for myself. It's difficult for me to toss off the quick irate and irascible daily posts characteristic of so many bloggers, frequently not well written or edited or thoroughly thought out. (My rants turn up in personal emails.) I am still THINKING about events that happened a year or decades ago which I bring up from time to time to make a point. I am writing history (and possibly a novel).

So it happens that today, while reviewing the events of the past week or so, on the morning after the new moon (and Ash Wednesday) I feel the yang energy rising out of the empty yin. As it has been quite cool in the mornings here I said to the Wizard, "I wish I could go somewhere warm and just bask in the sun and relax." Then I remembered the many folks who are here in Hawaii right now from Minnesota and elsewhere doing exactly that. That's yin/yang relativity.

Later at the elevator (which at my building is outside), impatient to get to work, I was delayed by a small boy wearing hardly anything who came runnning to the door to hit the down button repeatedly. Then two more boys with the same military haircuts, an older and younger brother, the younger in the older's arms, arrived and blocked the door. "We have to wait for our mom," the half-naked one said. I was a little irritated; I needed to GO. But after a few moments she arrived. "Aren't you cold?" I asked the shirtless one. "No," he said, bouncing off the walls of the elevator. "My Dad's coming home today...from Iraq." Mom looked very weary and explained he was returning from a 15-month deployment. The youngest boy couldn't have been 15 months old; his father had never seen him. I abandoned my irritation and wished the family a happy reunion. These rambunctious boys and the weary mom have been in my mind since as a kind of prayer.

Another observation earlier this week, on Mardi Gras, I saw that someone had finally discarded their Christmas tree at the dumpster. So someone else lives season-to-season, event-to-event. Maybe it was the boys' tree. (The poor dry brown thing would surely be depressing for Dad's homecoming.) I bet whoever finally cleared out Christmas probably doesn't blog every day either!