Category Archives: Asia

Art and Culture, Asia, Sport

On the Tour

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Spring                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

ESL tour was wonderful.  When asked if they recognized any of the objects, the response from the Vietnamese and Cambodians, “No.  The old people, they know about that.  But not us.”  At a Hmong piece, I asked one young woman a question.  Her reply. “I no sprek Engrish.”

Still, it was obvious that seeing these objects from their home cultures resonated with them, and gave a hook, a place to return to later.  I suggested bringing some of the old people along.

My Sports Show tour only had 2 people, but it went well.  I transited backwards, starting with Zidane again and found, again, that it made the tour livelier, more engaging.

Bought a short book on Symbolist art for lunch time reading.  Some interesting insights.  I’ll share them later.

Aging, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Family

Shun Yen and Falun Gong, once more

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Imbolc                                    Woodpecker Moon

One more thing about Shun Yen (see below).  Their pitch is that they produce performances that draw on and therefore promote 5,000 years of Chinese culture.  Maybe.  They have dances based on various Chinese myths and legends, like Monkey’s Journey to the West, and on ethnic Chinese communities, but there are also contemporary dance pieces and, scattered throughout something very, very odd.

The contemporary pieces feature a common theme.  Black clad police thugs with red hammer and sickle insignia on their shirts.  They beat senseless the gentle, meditating citizens who hold up a sign that says Falun Dafa is Good.  Yes, Chinese police have beaten Falun Dafa or Falun Gong members and persecuted them.  That’s not at issue here, but, again, I paid $90 a ticket to see several dance numbers that were propaganda against the Chinese government.

There was no balance here, no context, no alerting the audience to the fact that this was their intention.

These vignettes, I think there were four, were not the oddest part of the evening however. Four times during the performance the dancers would remain off stage and a Steinway, a big black concert Steinway, and either a tuxedoed male singer or a formal gown clad female singer, all Chinese, would sing short verses, maybe they were songs, that declared some piece of Falun Dafa dogma.   Continue reading Shun Yen and Falun Gong, once more →

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics

Partners and Co-Creators

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Fall                                                       Waning Harvest Moon

Went out and picked raspberries for pancakes this morning.  With a definite chill in the air the garden felt different, a bit sleepy, ready to bed down for the cold season.  After a month or so of feeling burdened by it, wanting it to disappear, my spring affection reappeared.  This patch of earth, these beds, work together with the plant world and Kate and me.  We share a joint stewardship of this property, each in our way committed to making it healthy, beautiful and bountiful.

The soil has given of its nutrients, its water holding capacity, its sturdiness as a base for roots and stems.  The plants have combined the chemicals of the soil with that water and pushed themselves up and out of the earth, then blossomed and in many cases fruited.  Kate and I weed, tend the soil, watch the plants, picking bugs off of them, pruning, replanting.  We also harvest and, when the harvest ends, we replenish the soil with composted manure and mulch.

When we use the plants and their produce, we take the leaves and stems and other unwanted parts and put them in a compost bin to return to the soil.

This complicated working partnership among many different parties here is, in microcosm, the partnership we humans have with the natural world and the world of soils, air, water and sunshine.  It’s significant to note that the one unnecessary party to this the work is the human race.

Plants will grow.  Rain will fall.  The sun will shine.  Soils will improve.  Fruits and vegetables will be made and distributed, all whether humans enter in or not.  We exist only as part of a richly integrated chain of being and we exist as its wards, not benefactors.

We do have the capacity to intervene, but too often, far too often, when we do intervene, we disrupt what nature does willingly and foul the process, in the end harming ourselves.

I wish our gardens and our orchard were more than supplements to our diet, but that is all they are, to be otherwise would require a commitment to the work I no longer feel able or willing to give.  Even so, as a supplement, this growing of flowers, potatoes, tomatoes, beets, carrots, leeks, beans, onions, lettuce, chard, spinach and peas, this caring for bees and harvesting honey, does keep us intimately engaged as partners with the natural world, a partnership so often hidden from view in this, the most capitalistic of all possible worlds.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

How Are We?

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Lughnasa                                     Waning Harvest Moon

In preparation for my presentation, Spiritual Resources for Humanists, I have come across two mentions of a critique of Enlightenment thought’s emphasis on individualism.  In one instance the critique compares Western individualism with the more integrated person of Taoist thought, one with the Tao, or with the more communal sensibility of the East in general.  In another instance individualism lies at the root of contemporary nihilistic ideas.  Life’s a bitch, then you die.

These two critiques I know now only in their casual clothes, not in their full dress argument though I intend to hunt them down as I work.  My first instinct is to bristle, to lean into the obvious benefits of individualism:  creativity, activist politics, a chance to flourish as an individuals gifts and dreams suggest, personal liberty.  My second instinct is to note that even the most individualistic of philosophical stances cannot extricate a person from family, from socialization, from nation, from history.

Then, once my bristles lie back down and I quit pawing the earth, I move to a possibility that neither the more communal and integrated inflection nor the individually inflected position has it right, that the reality is more dynamic, at some times we Westerners are as communal and familial as the East while at other time the individuality of an Easterner comes to the fore, both depending on the particular situation, era, motivation.

This is all before I sit down to think about it.  At first I defend my intuitive position, then I ameliorate and finally I move to the dialectic.  All without benefit of much reflection or introspection.

That comes next.

Asia, Humanities, Travel, World History

Visa, Visa. Where Art Thou?

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Lughnasa                                          Waxing Harvest Moon

Oh.  Visas.  I think I shall never see a visa lovely as a tree.  Or something like that.  Anyhow, the Saudi visa saga took an unexpected and unpleasant turn this morning.  Turns out there are two steps to the process for teachers, certification of the degree and qualifications, then, the visa process itself.  This introduces more days, perhaps as much as a week more.

We’ll find out tomorrow how the school takes this news.  I’m not sure why the school didn’t alert us to this fix since the Saudi visa process is the same the world over, but they provided no help at all.  In fact, we’re still down one vital piece of paper, something from the Saudi Foreign Ministry inviting Mark to Saudi, a piece of paper the school was responsible to produce.

Dispiriting.  Mark and I had a heated conversation about the appropriateness of my way of addressing the school’s administrator in an e-mail.  Mark felt my wording was rude, boorish.  American.  To my ear the e-mail had nothing unpleasant or confrontational in it at all.  Mark says I don’t understand and he can’t explain it to me.

Well, maybe.  He and Mary both have a keen sensitivity to Asian cultures and their ways are not our ways.  I’ve only visited and studied Asia, not immersed myself in it as they have over the last 20+ years.  Of course, their knowledge is better than mine.

Even so, I believe Saudi culture different from Southeast Asian and enough so that whatever slight Mark felt I might have delivered will not be felt there.  We’ll see tomorrow.

He certainly has a broader and more direct experience of world cultures than I do.  If he turns out more right, I’ll have learned yet another lesson from life.  If I turn out more right, he will have learned one.

Aging, Asia, Family, Memories

Growing Up

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Lughnasa                                        Waxing Harvest Moon

Mark’s (my brother) days here will end on September 16th provided the Saudi visa process works and it’s on track, though a track with a terminus very near his flight date.  He flies from Minneapolis to Chicago, Chicago to Amman, Jordan and onto Riyadh.

He will spend a few days in Riyadh in an orientation program for new teachers at the English Gate Academy after which he reports to his teaching post.  He asked for Hal’in, but his assignment is not yet certain.

We sat on the couch tonight, after having watched some TV, and did a favorite family thing, trading memories of when we were young, especially memories we did not share.

I told him of climbing up on a chair to find, to my dismay, a door knob above a shelf I could not see over at age 3 or 4.  It looked like a big eye looking back at me.

In the basement of the same place, an apartment building where I lived with Mom and Dad, there was a coal chute. (“Coal?” Mark asked, a bit wide eyed at this ancient heat source.) The coal room connected to the big pot-bellied furnace through an augur that would turn on whenever the thermostat called for more heat.  In other words unpredictably.

When I was down there with Mom while she did the laundry, I would play.  Until the coal augur came to life.  It was loud and came on with surprising swiftness.  The furnace would hiss as the new coal fed the fire.  Made me think of a dragon.

Mark remembered sleeping in Mom and Dad’s bedroom until he was 5 or so, then moving upstairs in our house on Canal Street.  When I went off to college, he took my corner room, the one with a window facing west and another facing south.  Out that west facing window, at midnight, a Nickle Plate train would rumble down the tracks, and sound its warning signal for the crossing on Monroe Street only two and a half blocks from our house.  Mark remembered the train, too.

I’m not sure why I recall this and I don’t know if it was true, but I believe the last steam engine in US pulled its train through our town, sounding its steam whistle every midnight.  Right there on Monroe Street.

Asia

Finishing the First Third

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Lughnasa                                       New Harvest Moon

Tai Chi.  We have now officially learned the first third of the short form.  6 months.  Wonder how long the long form would take?  We went through the first third three times tonight, an amount of time equivalent to the whole short form.

We ended with a toe (turned all the way to the east while facing north) into the second third.

Learning has been slow, especially for us who don’t take easily to the physical but even my form looked better tonight.  Cheryl said so.

The first third, those who’ve studied a long while, say, is a milestone.  If you make it to learning the first third, the probability that you’ll finish is high.

Cheryl told us tonight that until Professor Cheng Man Ch’Ing, a Chinese scholar, physician of Chinese medicine, calligraphy, traditional painter and tai chi master, tai chi was only taught within an extended family.  In this situation the Yang family tradition, which my classmates and I are now learning, would never be available to any who was not only Chinese but of Yang lineage.

Professor Cheng learned the Yang style though he was not of the family and, after being invited to teach tai chi in New York to Chinese business men, made the heretical step of teaching anyone who would come.

He came to New York City in the 60’s and his first students were dope-smokin’ hippies, probably friends of mine.  This did not endear him to the local Chinese business folks who had invited him.  Nonetheless he persevered and Tai Chi is now taught by those who studied with him and, also, those, like Cheryl, who studied with one of his students.

My classmates and I are the third generation.

Aging, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Health

Degree of Difficulty

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Lughnasa                                                                                    Waning Honey Extraction Moon

I have grasped the swallow’s tail, offered a shoulder strike, wielded a single whip, pushed and pulled, brushed the leg, deflected, parried and thrust.  All moves in Tai Chi.  I have made real progress over the last 20 weeks, nearing the real end of the first third of the form.  Once I finish the first third, I can practice it three times in a row and will have a feel for the time it takes to do the entire form.

At some point I will have the entire form under my belt, perhaps in the next year, though I will have a month and a half hiatus while rounding South America.  Then, I can continue the form as a means of meditation, relaxation and conditioning.

With the single exception of some modern dance I did while in college, this has been the most difficult, by far, physical work I’ve ever done.  Not difficult as in strenuous, but difficult in the care and precision needed, the execution of movements which do not come naturally to me.  The degree of difficulty has surprised me, but only because I was so ignorant of Tai Chi.

Mastering a difficult physical project has been satisfying for me, satisfying in direct proportion to its difficulty.  I tried piano for quite a while about ten years ago, but I just didn’t have the skill or the real interest.  This I can and am doing.  New for me.

Aging, Asia, Great Wheel, Health

A Beautiful Moon

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Lughnasa                                                                 Full Honey Extraction Moon

The moon.  Tonight.  A darkening sky, blue behind the openings in the clouds and peeking out from behind a modest veil, a full Honey Extraction Moon, its color a silvered gold, honey-like and mysterious.  I love the surprise of a beautiful moon in the sky, looking out on a familiar horizon to see it transformed by the ordinary extraordinary moon.  The moons from now through the end of the year often have a wow factor.  The Harvest Moon.  The Thanksgiving moon rising over stubbled fields coated with snow.  The Winter Solstice moon, sending lambent light onto the snow, casting faint shadows of trees, houses, people.

This moon shone in the eastern sky as I returned from Tai Chi.  This was the 20th week and the teacher, Cheryl, announced, again, that we were close to a third of the way through the form.  “It’s a milestone,” said Cliff, a 13 year practitioner.  A third of the way through.  20 weeks.  At this pace it will be a year before we have worked our way through the whole form.  Being patient with myself.  Learning that in this class.

At points now I feel a grace coming into my motions, a fluidity beyond learning the choreography, beginning to make it mine, to work from the inside out rather than the outside only.  Not often.  But I have felt it.

Thought about Cliff, a younger guy, maybe in his forties, having practiced 13 years.  Realized I’ll be 77 by the time I hit 13 years.  Whoa.

Asia, Family, Sport, Weather +Climate

Running Aces Harness Track

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Lughnasa                                                          Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

“Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.” – Horace

Horace has an early version here of wherever you go, there you are.  My brother has carried the same soul with him from the soi of Bangkok to the exurbs of the Twin Cities.

Mark, Kate and I took off through the beautiful backroads of northern Anoka county and made it, after a couple of years of talking about it, to the Running Aces Harness Track.  I’m not kidding about northern Anoka county, much of it is as interesting and as attractive as the northern part of the state.  There are large stretches of marsh land and forest, small lakes, pine trees and surprisingly few development thanks to a generally high water table.  Driving back in the night it was exactly like traveling on county roads in Cook County.

Running Aces.  A subculture, harness racing has a lovely track here with plenty of seating and parimutuel betting.  When you drive up, there is a big port cochere, much like the entrance to a resort hotel. On the benches around the curve of the drive a man sat hunched over smoking, his peroxide blonde hair mussed, as if he had been running his hands through it.  Just inside the glass doors a floor to ceiling painting commemorates Minnesota’s harness racing legend, Dan Patch.

Floor to ceiling glass doors allow a glimpse of the harness track off to the left, it’s gravel covered surface banked and curved.   In the middle of a half moon layout and up on a raised floor was the off track betting area where races throughout the country showed up on several flat screens mounted one next to the other.  A woman with bottle red hair, a jean-jacket and sequined cowboy boots passed betting slips to a middle-aged man with an impressive paunch.  They studied them, trying to read the runes.

At the right lies the card room.  Several Asian folks played Pai Gow Poker, an Americanized version of a game originally played with Mahjhong tiles.  There were black jack tables, the James Bond favorite, baccarat, a Mississippi river boat table and several, perhaps 12 or 14 tables filled with 8 players each engaged in Texas Hold’em, the dominant form of poker played on the professional circuit.

We passed those by and headed out to the track. (Though I snuck inside later and checked them both out.)

The betting windows have wood fronts and look much like old bank teller cubicles, save for the How to Bet sign posted below.  The betting windows and three lines of chairs occupy an enclosed area that has a full view of the track, but has either A/C or heat depending on the circumstances.  Outside there were tables, rows of chairs, a few benches right in front of the track and a restaurant with a patio area.

Kate and Mark had purchased a racing program while I parked and they had it out, trying to read it, figure out the symbols and the information about horses in each of 8 races on the card for the evening.  Post time was at 7 pm.  We missed the first race, but saw the second.  A white Cadillac has a long starting gate arranged like dragon fly wings while extended.  The Cadillac takes off and the horses trot up as the Cadillac heads toward the starting point about half way around the large, 5/8ths mile track.  When the Cadillac hits the starting point the dragon fly wings retract and the horses take off in a flying start.

Tonight a 3/4 Honey Extraction Moon sat directly over the far straight away as the sky went from blue to dark blue to bruised red then a clear night.  The air temp was about 68 degrees.  A perfect night for racing.

We didn’t understand much of what was said and even less of what was written, but we did see a couple of races where a horse came from back in the field to win at the end.  I noticed a guy in jeans and a windbreaker come to full attention as the horses pounded down the main straight headed for the finish line.  What happened mattered to him.