PENDING EQUINOX
Awoke this morning with my personal barometer/sinus headache caused by low pressure and rain, which will probably prevent viewing the spectacle of the full moon at the equinox tonight, not a common conjunction. Night-skygazing can be a spiritual activity, but is easily hampered by clouds, as a muddy murky mind clouds meditation.

This reminds me of my only "regret" from my last China trip, a failure to observe a particular starry night in the mountains, listening to insects and frogs, away from city lights and traffic noise. We had been out in the courtyard at the kung fu academy, watching the moon set, also noticing a passing satellite. I had washed out some underwear, hanging it on the line in the dark, then did a little qigong, a little standing meditation. I reminded myself that it would be great to come out and do some sky viewing after I had been asleep for a few hours, eyes adjusted to really appreciate the stars after the moon had gone. When I awoke at 3:30 a.m., it was just too cold and damp to leave my finally warm (if hard) bed. I told myself...tomorrow night.

But the next night it was rainy and cloudy, a condition that continued until we left the mountain. It's always better, I think, to regret things you haven't done (as opposed to what you have). You can't change what you've done, but you can always try something again, the way I finally, after several visits to Beijing, managed to spend some time at the Temple of Heaven. It had been on my to-do list for years. (Is that the "bucket list" people talk about? What is that? And the Temple of Heaven itself wasn't all that great after Wudang, though the wandering around in the park on my last day was pleasant.)

Temple of Heaven (for solar festivals)

In any case, I have already seen the Taoist mountain stars in great glory, Big Dipper and all, on a painful dark descent from the main summit of Wudangshan in 2007. I just thought it would be nice to see them when I wasn't suffering from leg pain and exhaustion. That was the real regret. But I got over it.

******
The falling barometer may also have caused some bizarre dreams for me (or it could have been a lot of really bad, if yummy, food I overate yesterday. (A chai latte from Starbuck's, a pumpkin cream cheese muffin, a Beard Papa cream puff...a Korean chili-cheese dog with jalapenos. What was I thinking? I'm fasting today, more or less, and Longjin tea has calmed my stomach.)

The dreams were only in my muddy murky cloudy mind, but they seemed meaningful. In the first, a version of the "exam in class you haven't ever attended" dream, I was among a group of peorsons to be presenting scientific abstracts for proposals. When my turn came to present, I realized that instead of a proper paper, all I had was a couple of pencil doodles on a scrap of bond paper.

"I propose," I said,"to posit an imaginary universe." I went on to discuss something about imagination, imaginary things, all fluid and fluent, it was really good, like a successful Toastmasters speech. When I was done everyone applauded. The next speaker up, said "You're a hard act to follow."

"Why don't we just take a little break, " I asked the moderator. And we did, and I woke up.

Only long enough to remember the dream and fall back to sleep again, when next I was on some sort of job interview, trying to talk to people who didn't really understand me. I was having a wardrobe malfunction, no nudity, just all tangled up, so I threw the uncontrollable bits of my costume (which may have included a sword) over my shoulder like a sari. Then as I was leaving, I met my boss on the way in. This actually happened to me once. She got the job, I got hers.

Practically everyone I know is in some state of distress over relationships, job pressure or lack of such, health puzzles...seasonal existential despair. Perhaps once past the equinox and its unusual associated full moon, things will begin to change. Partly because in past years, this is when I ordinarily would have been returning from China and I have a nagging longing to be returning (one way or the other), and partly because I am having my own share of existential despair, I hope the dreams actually mean something. In any case, "I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."

May we all have sweet dreams tonight.

SOME WESTERN MEMORIES

I just added, courtesy of my new Netflix account, several Western movies to my recently watched list. Not exactly Westerns (compared to my ongoing festival of Easterns which I tend to purchase), but interesting topics.

A respected traveling companion recommended The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to me, something I had avoided, not being a big Brad Pitt fan, but its association with F. Scott Fitzgerald lent it some credibility. It poses interesting questions about aging and time and relationships. From there I went to The Time Traveler's Wife, more Indie than literary, but produced by Mr. Pitt, it plays with a vaguely silly sci-fi time-travel topic in which a man with some kind of genetic disorder spontaneously pops in and out of the present in both directions. It would be like having memories at the same time as having premonitions, never knowing which was which. Like real life in a way. Confusing.

I don't remember putting the next film in my queue...maybe I did it in the future. But the next red envelope was Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges playing, quite exquisitely, an alcoholic country-western singer/songwriter who becomes involved with a younger woman, a journalist, in an affair that changes his life. It precipitates his rehab and recovery. They don't get together in the end, but it was a nice story, with very good music. I didn't know Jeff Bridges could sing.

The movie was like a memory, because for a time, many years ago I worked as an entertainment columnist for a local newspaper in Idaho. There were always guys like the Jeff Bridges character, and a lot of young rock and rollers, coming through town on the way to Seattle or Portland or San Francisco, stopping at our local Holiday Inn or country bar for a weekend gig to pay their way further west. I never had any kind of an affair with any of them, but there were some memorable characters. (Like an attractive Greek who resembled Cat Stevens and advised me that playing the harmonica was simple: "All you need to do is blow and suck.") So, watching Crazy Heart felt like time traveling. I could REALLY hear the music, smell the booze, sense the sadness and frustration of a creative life steeped in beer and bourbon. I'd been there.

While considering these films, today I revisited in detail, for the first time really, my little Moleskine notebook of jottings from my trip. Two months down the road, I was amazed not only at how much we crammed into each day, but at the details I would have forgotten if I hadn't written them down. They were more poignant and vivid to me than other times when I kept my notes on my laptop. I remember wondering if I should take a video camera with me (in the end I didn't) to record memories, but instead I relied on my little Casio (for which I had to buy a lot of extra SD cards). But even the photos fail to trigger the same breadth of recall than my handwritten observation or note does. The written memory opens up some other path in my brain: the photo seems to limit it. Like the difference between reading a book and watching a video. Maybe it's the difference Marshall McLuhan was getting at between hot and cool media. I think my journal notes are cool (requiring more participation) and my photos are hot, although it's probably not useful to make this "binary" distinction. Just like yin and yang, they combine to establish a vivid memory....which is hardly distinguishable from my vision of the future. It's all dreams anyway. But as Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) says in Crazy Heart, "Ain't rememberin' wonderful?"

ONLY IN YOUR HEAD
When the Wizard brought me my morning coffee today, he said, "Your phone's been ringing since 6. It's playing Bob Dylan."  It was 7.  "Please bring me my bag," I mumbled after a slurp of homemade latte.

Although I apparently hadn't heard the ringtones emanating from the depths of my leather carryall (Subterranean Homesick Blues for incoming voice  and Like a Rolling Stone for voice messages), maybe that was why I was actually having a dream about Bob Dylan before the latte was delivered.  I don't generally dream about celebrities or my particular idols -- although Vincent may have turned up in one or two -- but Bob?  In this dream, I was at a concert, a small venue, he was there, I was probably flirting, and he introduced himself.  I shook his hand. It was small and delicate and soft, feminine. I wasn't sure it was really him though, he looked young.  I commented on that and he said he'd had a face lift.

I returned the phone call; someone on the 6-hour-later East Coast urgently needed something, and I had to rush to the office to satisfy the need.  Dressing quickly, I actually put on an old Bob Dylan T-shirt. My office has a pretty forgiving dress code.

I was thinking about the dream when later someone else came to me and said, "There's a new Bob Dylan album at Starbucks."  Huh?  I usually know about these things well in advance. "No,  I'm sure that's Jakob, his son."  They insisted.  So I went to Starbuck's and confirmed that it was indeed the younger Dylan. Looked just like Bob, with a face lift.

DAO DREAMING
Recently I had a little comment-dialogue with one of my Taoist blogger/corrrespondents about sleeping dreams (in one of his several posts for Dec. 9, you'll have to search for the specific entry).  He says doesn't have any, a pity.  I have an active dream life, and this morning's was most interesting to me.

I've never been one to wake up to an alarm to jump out of bed into a shower (unless forced by circumstances---getting up at an early (unnatural, for me)  time to meditate was very difficult for me in Wudang). An alarm clock;  my mother throwing on the overhead light before dawn to get me up to go to school;  a cat poking me for food; a partner poking me for sex: all these abrupt awakenings are rude interruptions of a vital mental process, one of the purposes of sleep. I value a more gentle transition from the dream state to wakefulness, my body irrelevant while I review the dream and contemplate what it was telling me.  Maybe it is a kind of meditation.  A contemplation of meditation.

In this morning's dream, clearly derivative of my recent holiday in Hana, I was visiting a beach house with friends, and exploring a cliff down to a beach.  It was exquisitely beautiful, the vegetation, the water, the sea, stones and rocks, but very dangerous.  Obviously inspired by places I have been, but also with a unique but consistent geography, there is a country in my dreams, there are places I revisit and remember, just like the various places I visit in wake-time.  After exploring this beautiful spot, I wanted to go back and get my camera to record all these beautiful things (maybe for my blog)...I did, but by the time I assembled all the paraphenalia I needed to record those images (which now have the same reality in my memory--my brain-- as waking ones),  it was too late.  The light was gone, the opportunity was past.

As I was realizing this, another person (clearly modeled on someone from the current TVB DVDs I'm watching now, a con man in 1930s Guangzhou)  was raiding my friend's fridge to make a sandwich. "That's not your food, " I said.  "It's not yours either," he replied.

Then I was wandering in the dream garden where the surf was washing up over a dike lined with...tulips (I'd gone from the tropics to Holland?)... as I drifted up into my bed, waking up.

What were these dream images telling me?  Live in the moment.  Mind your own business.  Nothing is permanent.  A dao dream indeed.