Wudang Woes

My plans to return to Wudangshan this September completely fell apart today.  Thus, although the verse primarily pertains to meditation, I am concentrating on the travel wisdom of Dao De Jing 47:

Without going out of your door,
You can know the ways of the world.
Without peeping through your window,
You can see the Way of Heaven.
The farther you go,
The less you know.

Thus, the Sage knows without travelling,
Sees without looking,
And achieves without Ado.
(tr. John C. Wu)

Well that's wisdom, but for real consolation, last night, in some sort of prescient synchronicity, I had a pleasant surprise.  A movie released just this summer that I thought I might see or buy in China during my trip was made available on YouTube. I have been eager to see Vincent Zhao in The Great Wudang for over a year, when I first heard about it. 

The Great Wudang

So without peeping out my window, just by peeping at my computer screen, I visited Wudang anyway, albeit homesickish the way ex-pat Hawaii people might be when they watch 5-0.  (And equally puzzled when the locations don't always make sense...how do you get from the North Shore to Diamond Head on foot in an hour?...How do you get from Golden Top to Purple Cloud in five minutes? It took me six hours to walk that route down the mountain once.)

Turning away from Episode 66 (of 77) of Yi San, my current Korean escape, I watched my favorite MA star in a kind of typical wuxia story, set in post-Qing/early Republican times.  In the first few minutes, there is a kick-ass fight in an airplane flying over Hubei on the way to a martial arts competition at Wudangshan.   Everything about it--the time, the plot, the romance, the quest--has led me to call it "Indiana Zhao and the Temple of Tao." (Vincent seems to be channeling Harrison Ford a little bit:  motorcycles, leather coats, scholarly spectacles, and a daughter. No fedora. Or maybe there was. Need to watch again. And where was Sean Connery?)

Indiana Zhao

I'd like to have seen this done as a 20-episode TV series (20 hours of Vincent) with more character and plot development, but it's fun anyway. Scenery is all familiar and authentic (except possibly the mountains in the competition arena: they looked CGI to me, more like Hua Shan).  I have mixed feelings to see sacred spots used this way, but it's not the first time...Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Kid and the 2009 TV series, Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre, were both filmed there too. (Contrary to popular belief, CTHD was not.) The Great Wudang was fun if you like the wuxia action genre and Vincent Zhao. (I certainly do!)

It was nice to find it on You-tube just at this moment, and I'll probably watch it one more time before it disappears. Still, I'll buy it when my DVD vendor calls me and tells me she just got it in.  Just for the locations, you know...and Vincent.

Vincent, where are you?

March on Washington

Despite a very full schedule of conference presentations in Washington, I did manage to see some sights, some of which will never be seen again.

It was nearly a full moon my first evening in town.

Yeah, that little white speck in the middle right.  It was crisp and cool, with the smell and color of autumn leaves, something I hadn't experienced for a long time.  My cheeks were rosy and tingly. And dry. Still, a nice evening for a walkabout.

I strolled down to K Street, which was under occupation.

It all looked like any homeless campout in Hawaii, except for the creative take on the D.C. license plate (which actually reads "Taxation Without Representation."  I didn't know that.)  It all would have seemed utterly ordinary except for the police on watch.

I wanted to get close enough to photograph the really interesting thing, a police horse with a really huge head, patiently waiting in his van to be useful.  My friend R noted, "You wouldn't want THAT charging at you."  (Later, back at my hotel, I watched an episode of Frasier, in which he and Niles buy their Dad's beloved but pastured police mount as a birthday gift. It's sad.  They're both too old to do much of anything.)

Just below K street was the Treasury Department:

And the White House:

Everything was very benign.  It seemed like there should have been...news.

There could have been. But even the newspaper office was dark and quiet. There in the outdoor atrium, another monument to the obsolete: a Merganthaler Linotype that had been used to set most of the important hot-lead stories of the past.

I fingered the Linotype's "etaoin shrdlu" keyboard, which summoned a security guard out of the inner lobby. "Oh sorry, sorry," I said, "but this is SO cool."  "What is it?" she asked.  I wound up giving a little lecture on the history of printing and journalism, there in the outer lobby of the Washington Post, inspiring her to be even more protective of the artifact.  Oddly, when I emailed the photo of it back home to my husband, he told me he and our son had just an hour before been having a discussion about Linotypes.  The synchronicities of this trip were beginning to weird me out.

Not QWERTY, but ETAOIN SHRDLU

In its bizarre and complicated mechanical presence, I was thinking of the Linotype and the real freedom and power it represented in its time before offset printing, desktop publishing, email, blogs and Twitter. I once composed headlines on a Ludlow, its little letterpress cousin; I still have raw lead blocks and type I set from those days; I use them as paperweights to hold my Chinese painting paper in place on the table.

The Linotype was still on my mind the next day when I stumbled into the Laogai Museum, a little monument to the lack of a free press and expression, a sort of Chinese Holocaust Memorial.  (I've never been to that place, having grown up in a time all too aware of the Holocaust.  I don't need to see all the photos and shoes and eyeglasses to remember the horror.)  But the Laogai...I hope my Visa statement for a book I bought there doesn't hinder my visa application for my next China trip.  I probably should have paid cash.)

It took me two Harps to sober up at my new local on Dupont Circle where I also enjoyed some French onion soup and shepherd's pie.

If you get bored in Washington, there's something wrong with you.

Marching Out of Atlanta

Three days of torture by Powerpoint in Atlanta was sufficient that I began to relate to General Sherman.

Burn This City...Now!

I don't know what he would have thought of ATL's big ants, but they certainly convinced me to march out of my hotel early, to get to the airport to make sure I didn't miss a delayed flight.

Sherman's Army Ants

Alas, no Red Carpet Club in Delta's hub. But I did find a nice R&B & fried chicken bar, albeit a little ersatz, owned by Budweiser, decorated with fascinating memorabilia of the early days of R&B and soul music. Sort of Hard Rock Cafe, but small and black and in an airport concourse. No ants, just record albums and flyers of Dinah Washington and Etta James performances and photos of blind Delta blues men. I was enchanted by the photo of a disc jockey who seemed to be watching me as I fortified myself with some meaty wings and brew for my pending foodless flight to D.C. (indirectly via Chicago).

Alley Pat

I thought the DJ might have been the bartender in earlier days; the bartender told me if it was him he'd own the place, not work there, and he told me the DJ's name which I promptly forgot. It's Alley Pat. I've learned a great deal of interesting stuff while tracking it down. Now pushing 90, he was one of the originals for WERD, the first African-American-owned and operated radio station in the country.

The bartender was friendly and talkative, and posed under Alley's picture for me.

Not Alley Pat

I arrived in D.C. very late with some of the leftover Atlanta wings for a snack, and then went to the hotel bar for a nightcap.  The bartender got me my G&T and then said, "Didn't you used to work at XYZ Corp. in Hawaii?" Why, yes...it was R, a great guy I worked with at XYZ more than 20 years ago.  Not someone I think about frequently, but remember fondly.  Curiously, I actually had been thinking of him just a few days before I left on this trip.  "Wonder what ever happened to R, where did he go?" And there he was.

My friend R

My G&T was on the house, and after R's shift ended, we went to the hotel bar next door and did serious damage to a couple bottles of fine chardonnay.  This answered my question, "What do bartenders do after they leave the bar?"  They go out for drinks.

And at least I was out of Atlanta and in the company of a friend.

Hail Atlanta!**

Recently home from an exhausting business (with some pleasure) trip to the Mainland. It started out very mapped, laid out, itineraries through no less than seven major cities between Honolulu and Atlanta, but despite effortless packing and wrapping up of last minute details, I still felt as if on a treadmill, a little too lockstep for fun. Still, it was a beautiful flight east, with no seat mates, not even row mates. Flying away from the sunset, I caught the last glint of the day's sunlight on the port wing.  I  should mention it was Halloween.

Then the trick or treating began.  A departure delay due to "mechanical problems" put us in late at LAX, missing a connecting flight to Atlanta via Cleveland.  (The flight attendants wondered why I wasn't on the Houston to Atlanta run. "You should do that," they said.  From now on, I will book my flights through the cabin crew not based in Mumbai. ) A midnight to 5 a.m. hotel stay was arranged where I discovered hotels don't provide toothbrushes anymore.  Fuzzy teeth were bad enough, but the view out the window of one of those big L.A. industry billboards was more disturbing.  (We don't have signage like this in Hawaii.)

All night, I felt like I was being watched.  Even from a prone position in bed. Talk about peeping toms!

If it had to be a film star, why couldn't it have been this one?

I could have closed the drapes, but I was relying on the sun to wake me to get back to the airport where they had neglected to rebook me on the next flight out.  They had to handwrite a ticket!  Eventually, about 24 hours after I left Honolulu,  I arrived in Atlanta, all groggy and jet-lagged with bad breath and disoriented after a long walk from gate to baggage claim, past an endless display of somewhat disturbing sculptures by an artist from Zimbabwe.  I waited patiently --what else can one do?--with a bunch of people at a carousel that kept recirculating the same bags and no one was claiming any of them.  I had a nasty feeling my own bags had gone missing.  I looked up at the ceiling and experienced a truly Kafka-esque moment.

I'd been rerouted to Antlanta!  As if the hideous Zimbabwe bronzes weren't enough, these guys --at least 24 inches long, antenna to tail--formed a strange welcoming committee.  And I have confirmation that I was not hallucinating. Whose idea was this? Promoting Georgia red fire ants?  Just what a person after 24 hours in the air with missed connections and lost luggage needs to see.  Was it a promotion for a remake of Them?

My wayward luggage was eventually delivered to my Atlanta hotel, which also makes me wonder about yet another of the art installations at this curious airport.

This "piece," cleverly named "Samsonite," appears to commemorate the loss of luggage by travelers from all 50 states.  If I had had the presence of mind, I would have searched for the Hawaii license plate to photograph.  It reminds me of those charm bracelets composed of tiny enamel maps of all the states in the union. (I have one.)  But I just wanted to get away from those ants.

And this was just Day One.  

**I also wish I had had the presence of mind to have written the first comment on this Youtube link. I take the liberty to quote it here:

Atlanta was a city, landlocked, hundreds of miles from the area we now call the Atlantic Ocean, Yet so desperate the city's desire for tourism that they moved offshore, becoming an island and an even bigger Delta hub. Until the city over-developed and it started to sink. Knowing their fate, the quality people ran away, Ted Turner, Hank Aaron, Jeff Foxworthy, the guy who invented Coca-Cola, the magician and the other so-called gods of our legends. Though gods they were, also Jane Fonda was there.

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.

LETTING GO OF Go!

The aspiring Taoist in me is trying to let go of the rage over the debacle of Sunday night's cancelled return red-eye flight on Go!, the pesky upstart airline that is held by local folks partly culpable in the death of Aloha, a tradition in inter-island travel. (Although I probably won't fully let it go until I send a letter of protest to the airline, not the sort of thing I usually do, but feel compelled to now.)

It's a tough business, and Aloha was in trouble anyway, the yin or yang, who knows, of a classic Hawaii duopoly. But when cheap flights on small equipment became available, along with some possibly shady business strategizing on the mainland-based carrier's part, Aloha eventually collapsed and the new player in the duopoly was Go! (It's like a board game on tarmac.)

Over the past several years, I flew a couple of the new neighbor island routes, partly because I enjoy the smaller planes, and there is a tropical retro-feel to boarding after walking out on the tarmac instead of marching down a jetway.

Now that I think of it, other places I have enjoyed that unique feeling were Palm Springs and the now defunct Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong where you might disembark a 747 on the runway pretty much in the middle of town. It's more organic, not so homogenized...all jetways are the same, but to be actually out on the ground with the plane stirs my Sagittarian blood.

So for this trip I didn't think to choose the bigger player and even older tradition than Aloha, Hawaiian, opting for the smaller commuter terminal and timing that was convenient for my weekend jaunt to Maui, looking forward to a private film festival with my friend. (She usually has a stack of DVDs for us and her tastes are a little different than mine: she likes British romantic comedies with a twist, and Tim Burton. They're always fun.)

The weekend was over too soon, and my friend delivered me at 8 p.m. to Kahului for my 9 p.m. 20-minute flight back to Honolulu. There was no line at the Go! counter when I tried to check in; I was informed the flight, the last of the night, had been cancelled. I should wait over on some benches while they figured out what to do; she would come and get me. The agent let it slip that there were only 12 persons booked; they had to wait to see if they could get 30 for a flight. Something was up and I think she probably shouldn't have told me that. (It smells illegal. But I haven't read the mouseprint on my reservation.)

I set myself up on the outdoor bench, under a 100% full moon, sent an email and watched part of a Jumong episode on my iPad. At about ten to nine, I thought I might go see if anything was happening. Would they have a plane? Would they put me on a Hawaiian flight? What?

At the counter, the rest of the dozen passengers were gathered (the agent had not come to get me), all in a dangerous mood of rage and resignation. The agent announced the flight was indeed cancelled but they were doing all they could to accommodate us. Which wasn't much. The agents were about as accommodating as the Han emperor when Puyo needed assistance. WWJD? (What Would Jumong Do?)

"You can get a refund and then go find another flight (at 9 p.m. in Kahului) or I can book you for the morning." Someone pointed out, not so politely, that the airline had made no attempt to alert anyone when they KNEW the flight was cancelled (apparently at 7 p.m.); they made no attempt to assist in other arrangements for flight or hotel arrangements. We were advised if we weren't happy, we could write to the head office and "try to get a free round trip or something." WE could try??? This is customer dis-service.

I decided to call my friend, opting to enjoy one more gin and tonic and some more talk, and leave in the morning. I had to cancel a Monday morning doctor's appointment, but no big deal really. (Although that entailed its own struggle with automated messaging...I may have left an obscene muttering on the answering machine when I had trouble navigating the menu with my cell phone.) But I felt bad for the woman who had to return home Sunday to pick up her child from a baby sitter; another woman who had to go to work on Oahu that night;a tourist couple who had already checked out of their hotel and returned their rental car. Maui at night can be desolate and the airport actually closes after midnight.

As the group got more and more emotional --even I complained loudly about the lack of Aloha spirit on the part of the airline that actually wanted to use that name--an airport security officer, a cop, arrived to hover around the 12 angry men and women.

One person opted to take the suggested 8 a.m. flight out

"Well, you 'll have to come in before 7; we'll put you on standby, it's fully booked." WTF??

Several of us waited while others' refunds were processed; I don't know how those folks, some with children, got home. I opted for the open 10:30 a.m flight so my friend wouldn't have to fight the early morning traffic. (There IS a rush hour on laid-back Maui.)

My friend came back to the airport, fortunately from Kihei, just a few miles away, and not, say, very distant Lahaina or remote Hana. We went back to enjoy the full moon from her lanai. "I knew we hadn't had a proper goodbye when I dropped you off," she said.

Next morning, I arrived in plenty of time, about 9 a.m. for the 10:30 flight. I had to be assertive about my checked bag--the only "accommodation" the airline had made for us was to waive the $10/bag charge for us who were inconvenienced (after someone demanded that courtesy), but I had to remind the ticket agent who then had to get manager approval. (I wouldn't have checked the bag except that I'd bought a large jar of expensive and presumably dangerous body butter that wouldn't have made it through TSA security.) Then I settled in at the gate, enjoying free wifi to watch YouTube videos of Vincent Zhao kicking his way through the new airport in Hong Kong, when, despite my noise-isolating earbuds, I heard the announcement.

"Go! Flight 1003 to Honolulu will be delayed. The plane is still on Oahu." It was only a half-hour delay (but really, the flight itself is just 20 minutes.)

Eventually, I got off the rock. Luckily, I work near the airport and my baggage was minimal so I was able to walk -- also about 20 minutes-- to my office. I didn't have my car since on Friday my husband had dropped me at my office, from which I caught a ride to the terminal with a friend. As I walked, I repeated a mantra--"Go! never again." I also thought about the airline's in-flight magazine's letter from the CEO in which he reminisced about the past four years doing business as an ambitious low-fare airline in Hawaii, making reference to "our.. goal..to offer...the highest quality, friendliest, and most reliable service." I mentioned this to a co-worker, even more mellow than I try to be, who routinely flies to and from Maui (on Hawaiian).

"That's just PR," he reminded me. Well, yes, but it does lead to cognitive dissonance, something marketing and advertising departments try to avoid. Go! has yet to make its goal. Maybe that's why corporate America is so goal-focused: something to achieve in the future, not necessary to deliver now. At least they didn't send my bag to Hilo; that would have been the last straw.

Lineage is a much regarded concept in martial arts about credibility and authenticity of training and style. It was a travesty of lineage when Go! actually petitioned to use the Aloha trademark after the bankrupt line's planes were sold and its gates were closed. It would be like some Hollywood pseudo-martial artist-actor killing the last of the Wang family and then claiming Wang lineage.

This airline's lineage is poor. From now on, I choose authentic heritage in the islands: I'll fly Hawaiian.