Orchid Calypso Borealis: Harbin is Just Like the Outside World

"Harbin is just like the outside world," someone said as I arrived there last night.

After setting my sleeping gear up on a platform in a beautiful area among oaks, and near a dry, seasonal river bed, I proceeded along the village path to the pool area.


The heart pool was closed for cleaning, and so I went into the warm pool ... home again. The easing that occurs when one enters a beautiful body of water at about 98 degrees Fahrenheit is hard to replicate elsewhere. (Living in cities - and sometimes among people? - seems to bring people into mental patterns that are not very easing, and it's only coming to the Harbin pool area, as well as thinking about releasing {and focusing on it - http://relaxationresponse.org/steps}, that what release is, experientially, becomes obvious.


*

It was windy in the middle of the night. I wondered whether my sleeping bag's bag had blown away.


**

(I wonder if John Muir visited Harbin in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, - so I googled this but didn't find anything about it. The information I found did remind me that where I live, in Canyon, California, is quite close to where Muir lived in Martinez in the East Bay, starting around 1880).

The Orchid Calypso Borealis was of John Muir's favorite flowers.


...


I saw an old friend in the restaurant who excels extraordinarily with ideas. He articulates a wide-ranging reading, with a kind of synthesis which, when, in conversation, heightens the interchange and friendship. He's also very generous with his understanding and his remarkable insights, and able to converse in multiple modes of thinking, from science to math, to the highest aspirations of inventive and psycho-inspirational, spiritual thinking.



****


Later I saw another friend close to the warm pool, who also adventures in life - into realms of thinking and freedom that are wondrous.


Seeing and talking with him reminded me of this 4 part round I love, which ends with just a hint of irony. So I sang it to him briefly, sitting on the bench outside the dressing room, and very close to the Harbin warm pool.



Take the time to sit in silence,
Take the time with a friend,
Take the time to sit in silence,
with a friend, with a friend, with a friend.


Oh a sometimes no words are spoken,
I just look into your eyes,
so deep into your eyes.
Sometimes no words are spoken,
I just look into your eyes.


Love, Love, Love, Love ...
Love, Love, ...
Love, Love, Love, Love, ...


Today, just for today,
Today I will believe
that those I love love me


*****

Both of these friends were influenced by the freedom-thinking (and freedom-seeking) movements of the 1960s and 70s, and, in many ways, aspire to more freedom.


******

And Harbin seems to me, too, to have a wholeness - a kind of inside - relative to the the rest of the world, and modernity.

(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/10/orchid-calypso-borealis-harbin-is-just.html - Oct 1, 2009)