ONE FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON

Last night I was a grateful guest at a fundraiser for the nature education non-profit with which I have some history of affiliation. At the outset I must say it was a lovely event, catching up with folks I hadn't seen since last year, nice food, wine and margaritas under the stars, and it probably raised more money than was expected in these times.

I was seated as usual with a table of academics, a nice variation from my usual social life with defense contractors. A younger couple was demonstrating the bazillion clever apps on their iPhones: a finger painting program, an easy way to view real estate listings with pictures of bathrooms and kitchens, YouTube searching for a '70s era video of David Bowie and Bing Crosby, ambient sound programs to help you sleep, light sabres, a flashlight! And you can make phone calls! Like a digital Swiss army knife.

At one point I tapped the shoulder of my dinner conversation partner whose eyes had begun to glaze over. I pointed up to the trees where the 98.5 percent waxing gibbous moon had just made its appearance over Diamond Head. It seemed like a Zen moment, because we had been talking about my Wudang meditation retreats and her travel to Ireland and, perhaps, a walking tour in Japan.

I was struck that this event, designed to support nature awareness through education, was going on a little oblivious to the spectacle unfolding above and beyond. The noise of the live auction and the preoccupation with virtual technology seemed alienated from the purpose. And I believe our preoccupation with technology --which I am using right now of course --tends to increase this alienation from nature.

I paid my way at the event; I bid high for a piece of art at the silent auction. But I think more importantly, I pointed my finger at the moon. At least one person noticed.

HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW

I was having a lunchtime chat with the girls the other day when the topic of underarm hair came up. "Who doesn't shave?" was the question, because someone was curious about the visible hair of a friend she had seen. Is it a European thing? An immigrant thing? What? "Gross!" was the general conclusion.

Mostly I was keeping my mouth shut; I have gone through frequent lengthy periods in my life when for ostensibly feminist political reasons (but that I see now as just plain laziness and conveniently living with a man that actually likes hairy women) that I abandoned the blade. And was happier for it.

I had just read an article in Tricycle, the Buddhist journal, about a renegade Roman Catholic priestess (really, that's another topic) who was assisting a Theravada nun in her final vows, which of course included the shaving of her head. The nun received the long black symbols of impermanence, spa-like, in a large lotus leaf. The priestess, I must note had, like me, very short gray hair, which I have been quite content with over the past 20 years. But honestly, I have sometimes entertained the notion of asking my hairdresser to just take it off, take it all off...even though I prefer the Taoist topknots to the Shaolin-style bald heads. (Although that pixie Pema Chodron is pretty cute.)

Funny this preoccupation with hair. I thought the musical had addressed all that. I was at that show in 1970, amidst a lot of tuxedoed folks in the audience feeling underdressed and out of place in my Army field jacket bedecked with bells and my partner in leather pants and a flowered calico shirt. Then I saw some other folks like us wandering in the aisles-- turned out they were in the cast.

What I didn't say at lunch the other day was that I thought shaving of pits and limbs was just a less violent body modification akin to footbinding and female circumcision (FGM), things women have sadly endured to distinguish themselves from the masculine. In some Song Dynasty erotic art, the only way you can tell the males from the females is that the females' feet are bound. (Penises seem to have a life of their own, like third parties in the encounter.) And FGM is said to be practiced to rid the female body of parts that are suggestive of the male's. You can make a case in both instances that these are to restrain women, the feminist case, but there is something to the artifice argument as well (like makeup and fragrance, which I genuinely enjoy as ways to channel my mother and Cleopatra.) Think about this the next time you are having an expensive laser hair removal, a painful wax job, or struggling with a dull and dangerous blade in the shower. (No double entendre intended.)

But again, for me the shaving always seemed to be just a nuisance; though stubble is repulsive, fully grown-out leg or pit hair is not unattractive or dirty. We've just been taught to see it that way. I shaved my legs for the first time at 13; it was such a weird feeling, like a neurological symptom, my truly naked legs against the bed sheets. Two days later I realized I was going to have to maintain this thing endlessly with a scary razor (they have improved). My mother gave me a little pink Schick electric model with a side reserved for each body area; it was never very effective. Then I discovered dark tights. And later, like the rest of us, suffered the messy trials of waxing (not a great DIY exercise) or that electric thing that ripped out your hair by the roots. (Applied to a non-consenting person, could that be considered torture?) Effective, but really, what are we doing? And I'm not even talking about bikini lines!

Today, the only hairs I really make an effort to remove (leg and pit hair diminish with age), are from the follicles that seem to have migrated from above my brow to my chin. They just don't belong there.

In the meantime we might all just step back and think what is so troubling about a little body hair. Kate Winslet looked great in The Reader's sex scenes with hairy pits, but then again maybe not the most convincing example: she was playing an illiterate prison guard. But we don't know that when we first see her. It didn't stop her young lover!

ADDENDUM: I just read that Kate Winslet had a hard time with the grow-out and maintenance phases of the body hair, especially in the bikini area. Somehow given her prediliction for full-frontal displays, I would have thought this was nothing.

MORE TREE WOES

It's not just me who gets upset about tree removal.
http://ilind.net/2009/05/12/tuesday-2an-urgent-plea-on-behalf-of-historic-kailua-trees/

Seems to me judicious pruning is called for. And why can't people just pay attention to avoid tripping over a tree root? My mother-in-law would have a thing or two to say.

HAPPY MOTHERS' DAY

Well, not exactly.  After some months of steady decline into very old age, my wonderful Druid-ish mother-in-law died last Tuesday at 89 in a hospice setting, attended by her husband, son, and daughters.  In a very normal series of events, her last days included one "hallucination," perceiving she was on a train.  In a way she was.  She was probably recalling the long rail trip that was one of the big events of her early life, as a young woman, traveling  with her first daughter and pregnant with my husband to meet her own who was off on an Army training mission in Texas. It must have been early 1945. Not long after reliving the train trip, she told the nurse she knew she was dying and ceased asking to go home, understanding her destination was elsewhere.  In the Anglican prayer book there is a prayer for a "happy death." She was happy on that train, I think.

In this situation, having lost my own mother to cancer nearly 40 years ago, I was caught up thinking about Mothers' Day while having  dialogue with a friend who is having a likely unreconcilable conflict with her own mom.  She has generated many pages of what amounts to testimony to this unfortunate relationship, love lost.  

I took the opportunity to help another friend, incapacitated in Kentucky, whose mother is afflicted with Alzheimer's and resident in a facility just a few minutes from my home.  I took her flowers and a card, on behalf of her daughter, playing surrogate daughter but really paying tribute to all Mothers. Perhaps I am coming under the influence of the Wizard's Marianist colleagues.

The moon is 100 percent full this early morning, 3 o'clock, May 10, which to my surprise is also the so-called "Optional Memorial" day of the already Blessed Father Damien, to be canonized this coming October as Hawaii's first Roman Catholic Saint.  

Ironically, the good Father became a Saint by doing 

the work of a good Mother. His life of dedication and selfless service is the subject of an excellent 1999 film. The effect of Christianity in Hawaii is not limited to those New England Protestant missionaries who invented the mu'umu'u for the sake of the natives' modesty, or more accurately, their own discomfort with the naked body.  Father Damien cared for lepers in a colony on Molokai, in a setting that looks not unlike the place shown here where I spent the afternoon after taking flowers to my friend's mother. I had a little solitary picnic of sushi and chocolate cream puffs near the Century plants in bloom -- those are really the tall flowers of a large kind of agave.  It was a good day for flowers; I appreciated the digital photos my own son sent me of wildflowers in Oregon.  They last, and didn't cost him too much,  and will serve as references for my pathetic Chinese painting efforts.  A good son, he makes me feel like a good mother.

TOO MANY MILESTONES

Nearly a month of milestones just flew by! The colonoscopy must have depleted my energy to have missed commenting on the calendar events surrounding Easter....all those mixed up solar/lunar Hebraic/Christian dates. Work just got in the way. Then I realized last weekend included Day 108, a mystical numerological moment in Taoist, and other spiritual traditions, marking among other things, the conclusion of three cycles of 36; it seemed like an auspicous time to get a haircut, rid myself of accumulated negative energy transferred by stressed running of hands through hair. I feel renewed.

And tomorrow is a new moon. The kolea will have to fly in the dark.

BALANCED?

Well, a little bit off maybe.  The delightful "sedative" I had "just to relax you" before the endoscopy left me just somewhat physically wobbly.  It was great.  After being fully prepped stem-to-stern, with a painless IV inserted by a very beautiful young blonde, the ubiquitous oxygen tube up my nose and draped around the ears, a funny bite pacifier thing in my mouth, the sedator announced she would just give me a little "good medicine to relax you."

 "Ahhhhhhhh..." If I had to swear in court that I actually had this upper GI procedure, I couldn't.  I wanted to say, "Ahhhhhhhh...okay, you can just hold it right there for a few hours," enjoying the feeling that we think we are trying to achieve during deep meditation or possibly after drinking a gallon of actual mai tais in a Waikiki beach bar.  I didn't make it past the third or fourth "h" in "Ahhhhhhhh."  Then I came back like a bodhisattva from my induced nirvana to be confronted with the already-in-progress visual journey through my colon on a high-def screen much much bigger than my laptop's, and with a background commentary that mostly involved the staff comparing notes about their teenaged sons' bad behavior.   (I kept wanting to say that they are all hopeless, but I couldn't do anything but laugh.  I'm not sure they heard me.)

I had been watching a DVD the night before while sloshing down 8-ounce faux mai tais every time the kitchen timer went off, like a really desparate happy hour.  Wong Kar Wai's "Fallen Angels" had more plot, but the visuals of my colon's twists and turns were just as interesting as Chris Doyle's cinematography. (It only lacked a Tony Leung.)  When I had finished drinking (yang?), the action was getting good for the evacuation (yin?) portion of the prep.  Being a little too distracted to follow another subtitled Hong Kong film, I watched "Moonstruck," an old favorite.  The DVD's extra feature about Italian cooking explains why I was craving spaghetti and a meatball on my release from the Endoscopy Unit.

So, speaking after the quick announcement from the doctor, "No polyps, no cancer, no problems from your GERD, just keep doing what you're doing," I must say that if you are of a certain age (50+), and have health insurance (shouldn't everyone?), there is no reason to avoid having a colonoscopy.  If Katie Couric can have it done on TV and Dave Barry can make it sound hilarious even in its apparent horror, you can ENJOY this.  Much in the way we reference root canals, now I can honestly say, when I am in a mind-numbing meeting or during some other tedious waste of my precious time, "I'd rather be having a colonoscopy." Really, I would.

GETTING IN BALANCE

Had a pleasant equinox last weekend (3/21), when everything felt very balanced, warm, dry and sunny, but I am dreading the new moon tomorrow a bit. My TCM* source says spring is a good time for cleansing to unblock stagnant liver qi, but I don't think what they intended was quickly drinking a gallon of salty pineapple-flavored electrolytic fluid until my gut runs as clear and vigorous as a mountain spring. Tomorrow is colonoscopy day! And since I will be all prepared, and have occasionally complained of heartburn (who hasn't?) I get a complimentary endoscopy too. I've never done this before, and it is time. All my friends are saying, "It's horrible, and you won't remember a thing." I hope. Dave Barry's colo-column at least gives me honest encouragement.

So I started this day-before with black coffee, have a can of chicken broth set aside for lunch, and will probably get through a busy day with Monk's tea. Then home to the large faux mai-tai. I can't believe some people do this high-colonic cleansing stuff on purpose, and possibly for fun. On the other hand, I wish we had senior health spas where, while one is getting probed, one might also get a mani-pedicure, maybe a waxing, a facial, even a teeth cleaning, while listening to a nice Hawaiian quartet, with attractive buff attendants in lava lavas and sarongs. At Ka'anapali. That might make it fun, especially if my health plan covered it. Then I could truly face the rising yang of spring as a whole new person.

Why can't they make a gin and-tonic-flavored cleansing solution?

*TCM=traditional Chinese medicine

DUCK ALARM
Some ducks have moved in under the bridge outside our parking lot, having found safe refuge from people, traffic, dogs and whatever else threatens ducks. In this rainy winter, the woodland stream is full and flowing, good duck conditions. But some of our human tenants are complaining about the ducks' morning quacking, a new note in our usual dawn chorus of birds, frogs, a couple roosters and an occasional horny Siamese cat. I like to hear them, the noises of nature waking up. I used to have a telephone shaped like a decoy that quacked instead of rang. It was weird, but less alarming than an ordinary phone ringer. There's something goofy about quacking that just makes me smile.

I'm betting that the complainers are also the same people who have big noisy cars and trucks with car alarms that go off at 2:30 a.m., stereo systems with excessive bass response and loud conversations in public spaces. Give me a duck any day. In fact, I might like a car alarm that quacked.

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!

WHO SPEAKS FOR THE TREES?
It's a real heartbreaker when trees become a hazard. The H-2, my parking area and lanai view, and now Waimanalo Beach. And to think that it is because of lack of respect and proper care for the trees. The Outdoor Circle can do a lot for the trees, but overall there has been a loss of the understanding of what trees, in their natural environments do for us to provide health and beauty. (Admittedly, I am speaking as someone who likes a real Christmas tree--that's why it is a kind of sacrifice.) Education is important. But even there, we focus more and more on science and high tech education, but environmental education, the kind that instills love and respect for nature, is a luxury no one wants to pay for anymore. A lot of us were indoctrinated into nature by our grandparents during quiet explorations in the woods and picnics at State Parks. If you can't give money to support organizations that promote these values, at least try to spend time with a young person in nature and pass on proper respect and your love for nature. Leave the handheld electronic devices at home, please. (Except for a cell phone for real emergencies!)

BACK IN THE BURROW
Yesterday, Punxsutawney Phil (was) returned to his burrow from which he (was) emerged, to let us all know it's still winter for a while. Even in Hawaii. PP is a part of my childhood; I have roots in that neighborhood of Pennsylvania Germans. Imagine my surprise when he became a national phenomena (mostly due to the movie), but he is not well understood in Hawaii. So I always bring my plush stuffed Phil to work on Feb. 2 to spread groundhog/whistlepig/marmot/woodchuck/ground squirrel awareness. Everyone in the office insists he's really a rat, a beaver or possibly an overweight mongoose. (You could get a nice one too, although mine is actually a marmot acquired on a trip to Pike's Peak in Colorado. He kept us good company when the transmission on the Explorer went out about a mile from the summit.)

Groundhog Day is co-located in time with the Catholic feast day of candlemas (40 days after Christmas) which celebrates Jesus as a "light to the world." There is a purification after childbirth reference too, and it is supposed to be when Christ was presented at the temple. There's that light thing again, solstices and other pagan seasonal markers, but I never understood why the groundhog would go back in his hole when he saw the sun. He's afraid of his shadow! I guess he would like to live in Seattle. Of course, I tend to pull the blanket over my head when the sun comes in the window in the mornings, especially on days I have early meetings scheduled. I return to the burrow; let me -- and Phil --get up when we want to.

SUFFERING THE NOISE

"Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else.  They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea.  ... The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquility of nature by pretending to have a purpose. ... It is the silence of the world that is real.  Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion." 

Thomas Merton

After the opera --I know  some people consider THAT noise, but actually this particular Puccini was quite quiet--a company party and the Superbowl. I feel like Punxatawney Phil.  I will try to pop back in my burrow tomorrow!  Six more weeks of winter...and silence.

The opera was indeed peaceful except for the last act in which Manon Lescaut dies in her beloved's arms in the desert of Louisiana. The Wizard remarked that he wasn't aware that anyone ever died in New Orleans for LACK of water.  Puccini's sense of geography seems a bit off.  It was nice to arrive at our seats, just in time after a lovely dinner at Cafe Sistina (perfect opera starting point) to greet last year's season ticket holders to our right.  She and I caught up on the grandchildren...a great-grandchild!...during the intermissions while our husbands paid no attention.  The Wizard was Googling with his Blackberry, her spouse was doing between-act stretches in the aisle.  

Although we were out until midnight, the next night, a company party, was not so easy. These events are always too small-talk, too compulsory, too gamey for our taste...gamey because it was a casino theme, and we don't gamble, even with play money. We left early, after applauding the awards for the more hardworking employees, and before the door prizes.  I might have lingered, but it was too...noisy.

Today I looked for peace and quiet, reading, cooking, painting, but noisy Superbowl revelry was to be heard through the trees.  I'd been invited to a Superbowl party, but one more evening out was too much, though I would like to see the friends.  Another quieter time perhaps.  The only thing I took notice of regarding the Superbowl (football, right?) was a Pepsi ad on the Yahoo homepage which featured Bob Dylan, weaving his "Forever Young" in and out of a more contemporary hip-hop rendition. This gives me mixed feelings.  It just seemed like...noise.

Ah, but as Thomas Merton reminds me...the noise is all illusion.

THE OX ARRIVES

Was awakened this morning, in the first hour of the new year, by a mosquito. I was irritated, and later consulted my feng shui calendar, which indicated that today was mostly auspicous or neutral, but that the hour from 1 to 3 a.m. was very bad. Indeed! I tossed and turned and sprayed DEET and tried breathing exercises. I may have slept, but can't be sure. I was partly disturbed because I started reading that damned "Eat, Pray, Love" book again. At the ashram, she is having all kinds of issues, which might have been more interesting if she'd used the third person in her narrative. More relevant to the present moment though, one evening she meditates to ignore the mosquitoes that are sipping her troubled blood. My mosquito was quite harmless I'm sure, but would you trust mosquitoes in India? Do they have malaria in India? Why am I reading this book? She says all the bites faded quickly. She was lucky: a couple weeks ago when our night visitors were out in large force, my complexion acquired a frightening adolescent appearance for a few days. While she has many interesting observations about meditation and spiritual quest (that's why I'm still reading it!), there are way too many problems of her own. I think I would have avoided her if she were on one of my own recent retreats --speaking of which, while trying to ignore my pathetic buzzing Year of the Ox harbinger by thinking about what to do in the coming year, I made a decision to go back to Wudang in September. Now the year begins to map itself out. I have a vision, a plan, a framework for the next cycle.

What's your plan?

END OF THE SEASON

The last long weekend of the season was appreciated, thanks to the MLK holiday, and I used it well enough, I guess. Got off to a strange start with a toe injury when I got up in the dark to check on a tree that had blown apart in one of our recent high-wind events. The tree was fractured, but my toe was only sprained. Needed a quick visit to the doctor confirm that; fortunately Dr. Liu was much more sympathetic than House M.D. would have been: "You sprained your toe! Stupid! Be careful next time!" Still the calm and compassionate Dr. Liu did say that had it been broken there was nothing to be done anyway, except suffer and heal. Which I'm doing. After I returned from the doctor, I arrived at work only to be sent home because it was...windy. Hawaii weather alerts are not like the rest of the world's. Triumph the insult dog had it right. Poor Hawaii.

Still, it was VERY windy (50-60 mph gusts) and the tree suffered in the weather.This is a BIG tree, maybe 12 stories tall. (This view is from the 10th floor.) It was entertaining to watch the professional tree guy disassemble it later. If you look closely, you will see him in the very center, dangling a 10-foot log he's just chain-sawed off. There are two more albizias, at the right, lovely to look at but vulnerable and dangerous, that really need to be removed from the parking area to avoid lawsuits and injury or death; it will cost something like $12,000 apiece. I love these trees and hope we can preserve as much of them as possible; they provide shade, noise muffling, and a pleasing aspect, especially when they are in bloom.

Speaking of trees, we dismantled the Christmas sacrifice and stored the decorations in the remote locker for another year. Inspired by the professionals, the Wizard devised a clever method to get the tree down to the dumpster area and avoid a lot of fallen needles to sweep up. Just lop off all the branches. We wrapped up all the "trimmings" in a sheet for disposal.

Had a couple of great dinners with an at-sea sailor, a friend from Maui on Oahu to complete some Coast Guard certifications to get his license upgraded. His tour-boat gig has failed in the bad tourist economy so he needs to do something on a larger scale, like oil rig tending in the Gulf of Mexico. Our dining-out included the most costly restaurant meal (>$250) I have ever shared among three people. Maybe the economy isn't that bad. Fortunately, my entree, a chunk of ahi as big as my cat's head, (never eat anything as big as anyone's head) with doggie bag provided me three complete meals so nothing was wasted. But I was forced at claw-point to share a bit with the Yellow Emperor.

The Yellow Emperor

All this exuberant dining led to a couple of major middle-of-the-night heartburn attacks, particularly after the rich northern Italian food at Cafe Sistina, where the decor features reproductions (by the chef/owner) of the Sistine Chapel's frescoes. The food and service there are also great, and not reproductions. But after the GERD episodes, I think the season is telling me it's time to cut back. I'm not sure which is yang and yin, but anything spicy rising in the esophagus is not fun.

Since it's been "cold" (58 degrees F, Poor Hawaii, in the bedroom the morning of the tree-toe fiasco) it's also been some good days to cuddle up under a quilt and read when not eating food contra-indicated by GERD or destroying trees. I finished one book, read another, and started a third. I completed "Red Dust," so-called Chinese version of "On the Road." Something may have been lost in translation, it was good, a picaresque travelogue, but it wasn't Kerouac (whose "Dharma Bums," another Christmas present, is rising to the top of my to-read pile, along with a lot of David Foster Wallace). I switched continents, from Asia to Africa, to read "The Miracle at Speedy Motors," the ninth Botswana book, which was as usual, a bon bon with vitamins, maybe an odd book to read on MLK day and in anticipation of the Inauguration. After that fast feel-good read, I decided to revisit "Eat, Pray, Love." I managed to get through Italy with this depressed, lonely mid-thirties divorcee but I'm not sure I can continue with her to the ashram. I may simply be jealous that she got an advance to write this whiny soul-searching travelogue, or I may just not be able to relate to her inablity to have a committed relationship. I'm not sure I want to find out if she can heal herself. I'm not sure I care. (Was this another Oprah book?)

Tonight I start a 14-week class in traditional Chinese Brush Painting to kick off Chinese New Year. As with the Inauguration today, it signals a new kind of energy and effort. It's yang rising, that first bit of momentum out of the fullest yin; a surge of hope, movement away from fear, and time to change the subtitle of this blog to recognize the Year of the Ox.

COBWEBS AND DUST

Woke this morning at 4 with the huge yang moon shining in my window, and I was a little cold. My bedroom thermometer showed 64 F, a bit on on the chilly side for Hawaii. Of course it never occurs to me to turn off the fan or shut the windows, I like the fresh air too much. The Wizard is not here to keep me warm, having been called to monkishly sit in vigil for a beloved colleague who will be cremated later today, it would seem quite auspiciously. The astronomers say this is the first and biggest moon of the new year (Gregorian 2009) or by the lunar calendar, it's the last and biggest of the Year of the Earth Rat. Regrettably, I missed gazing at the last big 2008 one, owing to dense and persistent cloud cover from the rainy and stormy weather that was our Christmas. I was sorry I'd missed it, but counting the cycles differently, I haven't missed anything. That's the nice thing about two calendars, always a second chance at everything. (Maybe that's why I have two blogs.)

I'd also awakened early yesterday out of necessity for a dreary business conference call to the east coast; I participated with coffee on my lanai while watching the moon set over the mountains. Next time, THEY get to phone in in the middle of the night! Why is it, on a weekday it is painful to get up so early, but now on Saturday I am up all abuzz and rarin' to go.

This morning as I wandered about the house in the moonlight waiting for my coffee water to boil, I was thinking about the funeral and noticing the cobwebs and dust I really must clear in the next two weeks to make way for the coming of the Ox. The old Gordon Lightfoot song, "Cobwebs and Dust" came to my mind, a tune I might like to make people listen to at my own funeral; it's a sentimental country waltz about shaking off the accumulated dust and saying goodbye to your island, floating through the sky, sorry to leave you , but leave you I must. (Here's the best lyrics link I can find ; the song is from the album "If you Could Read My Mind.") So I listened to it on my iPOD while gazing at the moon, my Taoist contribution to the vigil.

Last evening, not yet thinking about the moon, I was in the Barnes and Noble at Ala Moana Shopping Center, poking around in their small but respectable collection of Taoist books. I waited until a man with a little boy finished going through the shelf; they left empty-handed. Then I squatted on the floor (it was the bottom shelf) looking through Eva Wong and Thomas Cleary and Alan Watts titles. I made a selection and the man reappeared with a clerk. "Looking for something Taoist?" I asked. "Yes," he said, as the clerk handed him the title he was looking for. We started to talk; I told him I had been to Wudang, and he asked which book was my favorite (well, the Tao Te Ching) and if there was a community of practitioners here. (If there is one, I haven't found it; Taoists tend to be low-profile loners, a bit isolated.) "Which book would you recommend for me," he asked, so of course I picked out Deng Ming-Dao's 365 Tao, neglecting to tell him it would be a great tool to start the new year, either one of them. Also neglected to suggest the "Empty Vessel" journal; there was a pile of back issues in the magazine section. And finally, neglected to find out who the heck he was beyond a 4th-grade teacher in Waikiki. On the way home, I lamented my failure to provide more guidance and conversation, then concluded he will find his own way; he already seems to be on a path. I have faith the moon will guide him, even as it soon starts to wane as the cycle continues. He said he hears the Year of the Ox will be one of change: well, isn't it always? Friends will arrive, friends will disappear; big old lobsters will be released and small ones will be eaten, the Dow will go up and down, wars will start and stop, politicians will do what they do, sports teams will win and lose, folks will be born and folks will die, the moon will wax and wane, the sun will keep rising and setting (I have this confidence). And the cobwebs and dust will pile up and be swept away (or maybe not, at my house). Change, but no real progress, except maybe personally. Then, at some point we get to bid it all goodbye, reluctantly, while someone sits in prayer by our body or thinks of us while listening to music in the light of the moon as we start our calculations by yet another calendar, as if there are calendars in eternity (which I'm pretty sure there aren't).

The gigantic glowing pearl is still well above the western horizon, there is a rooster crowing, and Fifi and the Yellow Emperor are busy bringing me their faux mice, the results of their futile domestic crepuscular hunting. That long thin dawn is comin' on again. (Another great Lightfoot tune.) Life goes on. All you can do is watch it go by.

YIN-YANG of SOLSTICE
I finally realized why the run-up to Christmas leaves me so weary: it's the last days of full yin energy before the solstice, when things turn around and yang starts rising. There is yin and yang in every moment, but overall in the annual solar cycle, this is my experience.

Here's a curious thing: most scholars agree that Jesus Christ was probably born in May, and the Christmas feast was designated by the church as Dec. 25, to replace the post-solstice Roman pagan festival pf Saturnalia, at which point it can be perceived that days are getting longer. And the Nativity Feast of John the Baptist (the precursor of Christ) is just after the summer solstice, June 24. Seems like an expression of yin and yang. The days begin to get shorter after John's Day, until the moment when --with more sun -- the days begin to lengthen, Christmas Day. All these cosmic metaphors!

I guess this works just the opposite below the equator; just another yin/yang opposition. Or as my son points out, axial tilt is the reason for the season.

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.

WHAT TO READ NEXT?

With a great sigh of relief, I have completed the monumental effort of "Pillars of the Earth," Oprah's Ken Follett pick, the book I bought in HNL and nearly left with my boarding pass in a restroom in Narita Airport in September on my way to China. I only read a few pages as I lugged it from Honolulu to Hong Kong to Xian to Wudang, and back home, then to let it ripen under a pile of Chinese-related books until a couple of weeks ago. Not sure what Oprah was thinking (especially since her latest tout is Eckhart Tolle), but it did get me through the last of the election noise. On finishing I was motivated to get out my DVD of "Becket" with Richard Burton as a perfectly priggish St. Thomas and Peter O'Toole as Henry II. And then, a quick visit to W.E. Lunt's "A History of England," just to get more bearing. Should have done these things BEFORE I read the book, but who knew? And now I have a compulsion to see "A Lion in Winter," O'Toole again as Henry II, but a little later; "Camelot," and a "Man for All Seasons." All those great Brit-history movies of the '60s. I also feel compelled to track down and reread "Mont St. Michel and Chartres," Henry Adams, which was a required college freshman Western civilization read.

Despite having unintentionally acquired two copies of the sequel to "Pillars," (see previous post about book club orders) I'm not quite ready to commit to 1014 more pages, another kilo of Follett. Checking in Lunt for a quick overview of the 14th Century, I am reminded that this is Black Death time, so I watch a History Channel DVD about the plague (when people really did have reason to think the world might be ending). Interesting stuff, but still my dilemma: do I attack one of the several dozen mostly Chinese-themed books in my to-read stack (the Chinese philosophy texts don't count, I usually read from those with my morning coffee) or do I plunge ahead, or cannon into, as Follett might say, the new "Novel Without End." Noting the Washington Post's blurb which cites Follett's "no-frills prose," (praising with faint damns), I flip through this bulky publishing equivalent of a soap-flavored mini-series to see if the plague appears as a character-- well, it has to -- but come across several of Follett's frequent no-frills sex scenes. Spare me! Though I finished "Pillars" with only minor tendinitis in my wrist, the sheer volume of these volumes must explain why no editor could afford the time to chisel them down to size. Neither of these works would make it as recommends to MY book club, but "Pillars" did make me go on a search in history about a time and place I haven't paid much attention to recently. And I like a big old miniseries as much as anyone.

So what next? I rummage through my to-read pile and after rejecting a few false starts (Stephen King's "On Writing," "Eat, Pray,Love," and two journalistic books about China--"Factory Girls" about migrant factory workers and "China Witness," interviews with the generation of Chinese people since the Long March,) I settle on "Red Dust" by Ma Jian, blurbed as a "Chinese equivalent of 'On The Road' ." I see an intriguing scene where the protagonist is visiting a Daoist master, and a chapter called "Flies in Scrambled Eggs." I think THIS is the book for my mood right now. It's only a 314-page paperback; I can hold it with one hand. When my other hand feels stronger, I may pick up "Pillars Vol. II." As "World Without End," I'm sure it'll be there when I'm ready.

MESS, Part 2

Still contemplating "A Perfect Mess." This is the most inspiring thing I have read since Lao Tzu.

The organization industry is like the diet industry: a bunch of self-styled professionals ready and waiting to charge us to get our homes or bodies in the same shape as portrayed in magazines. They prey on the guilt we suffer when viewing the images of beautiful rooms, svelte bodies, the promise of perfection and happiness and --more than anything -- the ideal images that we would like to project to other people.

It's just self-help for people who really don't need help, they have just been convinced they do. That guilt thing. That desire thing. That fear thing. That American thing.

Now, there are some truly pathological messes--cases of people being killed when stacks of old newspapers fall on them, the organizational equivalent of 650-pound people who can't leave their home without the help of a crane -- they do need helping hands and counseling. And now that I think of it, our preoccupations with anorexia and OCD seem like parallel pathological overboard reactions to the self-help and perfection movements.

I have often thought that it would be nice to have a drug that would make me a little more OCD (without any of the annoying physical, mental and legal side effects of cocaine or meth), the mirror of the pharmaceutical that stops people from washing their hands 120 times a day, something that would push me to make my bed and clean the litter box every time the cats use it. But now, after reading this book, I realize I'm okay. (The Perfect Mess authors observe that making the bed every morning is something akin to tying your shoes after you take them off.) Not that I didn't know I was okay all along, but I did buy the book for some reason. But now I'm going to make an effort to love my mess. (Still, it bothers me that I can't discard those size eight tweed suits in my closet...and I will probably file the other two organization manuals, useless and unread, right back in the pile with "A Perfect Mess.") So no zen existence for me. Yet.

I realize too, that for many of us, our messes develop because we no longer have attics and basements, the normal repositories of junk and, upon excavation by the next generation, treasures. eBAY is our communal attic. In my little storage-challenged condo, you might be hard-pressed to tell whether we are moving in or moving out. In fact we are going nowhere, having paid off the mortgage and looking forward to retirement, possibly funded by a sell-off of all the crap we have accumulated. And who would pay money for all these collected camels and Chinese objets d'art and costume jewelry and old computers and complete runs of magazines like Fate and T'ai Chi and Allure and Life? Well, I did.

The Life magazines, truth be told, were rescued from an old public library weeding and resided for a long time at the in-laws'. "But we threw those out once already," they complained. It's a lot of fun to get a miscellaneous box, say July-Dec 1956, and just read them, a kind of history lesson. More fun than looking at them on CD, the solution, as yet untapped, for my now-discarded 15 years' of New Yorkers. For Life, it's not so easy though, because they are in our commercial attic, a storage locker about 8 miles away. That means going to get them, lugging them up and down to our 10th floor appartment, and taking them back. Just like a library without overdue notices. And I am loosening my grip on the fashion and decor magazines, a certain effect of my Taoist training over the past two years. All these magazines accumulate because things come upstairs in little bits almost on their own--and between us, we must have 20 magazine subscriptions--but it takes a real effort to get them back down to the dumpster.

I'm sure someone out there would love to see pictures of my messes, and that may come in time. But right now, just go look at your own. I just know you have some somewhere! I think , like those tours you can go on to visit people's beautiful homes, we should have tours of other people's closets. And now I see a retirement gig for myself: Closet Inspector. There are people who would pay good money!

MESSY STUFF

Beginning to feel normalish after too much travel...China...Palm Springs (CA). The thoughts and observations have been overwhelming me, my mind is a mess.

So today I picked up a book, A Perfect Mess, lurking among the piles of tomes to read. I am indeed a compulsive Amazon one-clicker with a wish-list, but there are also a couple of book clubs I "belong" to and I like to send off the order in the mail and then forget about it. Then maybe six weeks later, these books I don't remember ordering arrive like little surprise presents to myself. Very disorderly. Three of these recent arrivals have to do with the concept of getting organized...one is about planning and features lots of acronyms and mnemonics and bullet points, one is about shedding (what was I thinking, ordering more books?) and tackles the emotions one has about those old really nice clothes you have in the closet that don't fit. But the best one, A Perfect Mess, is about "why bother?" There is a whole INDUSTRY of people helping other people clear their closets, manage their space (to say nothing of their time) and making money off the tremendous ambivalence that modern Americans have about materialism. Why? Turns out order can be counter-productive and the time you spend creating it may be a waste. And really, who cares. In my case, I don't entertain, I know where everything is (or what it is under) and I know there is no closet inspector.

Once when I was a little messy girl and sloppily stashed and crammed everything in my closet, my mother in exasperation persuaded a nice man from our church to pose as the closet inspector. We actually had closet inspections. Consequently, I now keep pretty orderly closets and drawers, but the open space is a problem. I need more. It is true what Stephen Wright said:" You can't have everything...where would you put it?" But again, who cares?

These thoughts come to me at a strange time, after having recently traveled with a Buddhist monk to a Taoist place, where material stuff was not an issue. The monk had NOTHING except a bag of robes and some malas. (But it should be pointed out that his existence depended on the benevolence and largesse of people who would provide him food and shelter just because he was a monk.) He was not burdened with stuff -- I thought I had packed lightly, but he shamed me.

The authors of A Perfect Mess point out that it is in our mess and display of accumulated stuff that our personalities can be detected. It would make sense that the monk would have no stuff: he also has no ego (or at least he's trying to clean that out of his being).

I think my mess and my ego are going to be with me for a long time.