Parrot Fish: Service, Community and Meditation, Water as Shared Clothing, Harbin as Subculture & Place

The pools ... the Harbin pools are lovely ...


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Tree Woman has often talked about service, community and meditation as significant for her, and especially vis-a-vis Harbin. She's been at Harbin a long time, and is pretty 'connected' in a 'spiritual' way, and has great energy, as well. These practices often inform life in ashrams in various traditions, and Harbin's ashram aspects reflect this. Tree Woman is also pretty incredible.


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People take off their clothes in the dressing room, ~ men and women together {as well as kids}. In the context of Harbin's pool area, this becomes easy, normal and familiar.

Taking off your clothes is interesting at Harbin, because you shed, in one way, how you relate in society, and begin to play in a different milieu.

People then often go first into the warm pool, with its just-right temperature ~ around 98 F - and, in a way, don new watery clothes. But these are a shared fabric, and also see-through, and people feel the ripples of these new, watery, shared 'clothes,' whenever someone else moves. And as people ease in the warmth and beauty of this Harbin warm pool surrounded by green, with couples, often cuddling and snuggling quietly around you, and some pods of people together in the middle, - with some people also giving friends Watsu {water shiatsu} ~ this watery-clothing idea may disappear, and a kind of oneness, or ease together, happens. The clothing-optional Harbin warm pool here now is a happening, which has been happening 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at least since 1972, and probably a lot in the 1960s, too. And it's wildly beautiful in an unique way ...


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I see Harbin as a kind of subculture (viz. Dick Hebdige's "Subculture: The Meaning of Style"), but very geographically - place - based {vis-a-vis Basso's "Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache"} in a pretty valley at the end of a road in Lake County, California.

All of the residents have conversations going among themselves as individuals, - about service, Harbin, events there, Harbin's history, their own and shared 'visions' of Harbin, about other people, and all of this together creates a fabric of Harbin life, in conjunction with all the other things that happen (and have happened) there, and all the people who have come through the Harbin gate over nearly 4 decades now (in the time I'm interested in).

Harbin is unique, and hippies (and Hells Angels) just started coming up to Harbin in the 1960s and early 70s, and hanging out. While possibly a little like the Rainbow Gathering in the 1970s, Harbin has always been its own thing. And while people may have lived more hand-to-mouth in the 1980s (someone told me yesterday), people - residents, visitors and guests have a little more money these days, - they are still, very generally, the same group of folks coming through the gate as were coming to Harbin since early 1970s, I think (perhaps a little less 'out there,' but still 'out there,' nevertheless}.


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Harbin is a gem ... and the pools glisten in the light.


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The Harbin pools make me go a little parrot fishy :)