Rainy night in Lake County in heading in to Harbin
Rainy night in Lake County
in heading in to Harbin ...
Blue moonlight on wet road
illuminating the behind,
through my rear view mirror.
I stop for beauty.
Mozart sounds ... what
musical conceptions!
And from long ago,
yet here so now, -
away we go
all over that space
of virtuosity ...
I slow in, in wonder,
to Harbin,
soon to soak.
Traveling here,
another poem coming,
expression finds
flower form
like water traveling
up from ground,
seeking pool to warm
seeping into
all those
inner bodymind recesses,
that welcome ease ...
and flourish in.
There's freedom & agency
in writing poems ...
to write what one likes,
and to sing the song
one wants to, -
to fly in the warmth
of word music,
intimate, lyrical & free -
and inhabit all those
rosy spheres,
or what you will,
which differs from
the freedoms
of being a Doctor,
or an Anthropologist,
with their languages.
Exploring other
languages & spheres
is possible
wth these knowledges,
but these freedoms
aren't inherent in
knowledges' discourses.
Writing Poetry offers
autonomy -
but by which, especially! -
when you find
(one of your) your muse
of poetry ...
you soar.
Snow in the morning,
beautiful snow
on the evergreens
above the creek
over the bridge
to the conference center,
I see out the door of my car,
in quiet, wintery Harbin ...
bodymind music with Harbin. :)
I see in this snow,
falling in nature,
a beautiful philosophy of
Lao Tzu and Gia-Fu Feng's 'Tao te Ching,'
with Jane English's photos ...
Up to the pools
'cause it's cold out
and the day is alive.
... But first a little warmth
under my 2 sleeping bags
in the car.
Winter camping is amazing
because you are right there
and so alive
in the cold beauty
of the snow.
... A tree branch breaks
from the wieght of snow
off to the side.
Snow is richly falling
and warm pool awaits.
The snow falls & accumulates -
seven inches -
the power goes out,
and people smile differently,
at Harbin.
The world is changed.
The ground is white,
and the red lawn chair,
with the light green ones
that match the color
of Walnut and Azalea
guest buildings
are a surreal trip,
a French painting
of white otherness,
of a transformed
afterimage, light world.
Where did this come from
and who anticipated this
beautiful otherness -
for seeing?
Some folks are soaking
in the heart pool.
She, coming in naked to him -
they have a good relationship -
is pretty.
Her breasts are nice too.
They linger together a lot
in the waters, both smiling
in their intimacy.
The warm pool is closed,
because the still-falling
snow is heavy
and tree branches
are cracking all around.
A branch might fall
on someone in the pool.
One man is standing
on another underwater
in the heart pool, body-surfing,
and stands a second too long,
and he, underneath,
comes up coughing.
They do more Watsu.
One woman - we're all naked
in the heart pool - makes three
mini-snow people
at pool's edge.
She is the snow queen
and they are her subjects,
and they are m e l t i n g.
The snow is falling so heavily
that some of us have
snow crowns on our heads.
Another woman in the pool
is high energy -
hippie, 'out there' -
different from the calm
of many of us
in this pool,
on this crazy-weather day.
She wants to engage ...
hippy neurophysiology
can be free, sexual
and in your face,
and Harbin's doors are open
to hippies.
Later in the day,
this white woman
comes into the warm pool
with her black friend,
does some dolphin flips,
talking much of the time
in the waters
then cuddles with her
African American friend.
Nothing seems to settle her.
This snow is wild, unusual,
and there's so much of it!
A dance! Someone
in the heart pool
says there's a dance
at one in the Temple.
How unusual -
the power's out -
sounds fun. It's a
Harbin thing, - a dance
in the middle of the day.
Good energy:
someone has a
small boombox
on batteries.
There are two congas and
some percussion instruments
in the middle
of this beautiful round room,
but no one is playing them.
There's quiet, meditative
music playing - not quite
exuberant, dance music -
and he asks me if I have
any other music.
People are dancing -
fifteen folks perhaps.
I ask everyone whether
they have any other music,
and someone sits down
at a conga in the center,
then another drummer ...
Man, they can play.
More people join in,
and the dancing grows,
with folks improvising,
and grooving -
pretty wild, -
and all because of the snow.
Someone opens the
harmonium and another
pulls out an upright base -
and everybody is
playing and making music,
and weaving in different
lines of music.
I start to sing
in the tenor range,
in a high falsetto voice -
while sitting on the cushions
under the temple windows -
harmoniously, while the
music is peaking, crescendoing -
MMmmm ... Musical energy
exchange, and synergies.
Thank you, Harbin :)
It's three, and there's a
Breema bodywork
workshop next
in the Temple.
I want to head home
back to Canyon,
where I live,
before the road freezes,
so I take off.
I soon find out
that the Harbin road
is closed - with seven inches
of snow, trees across it, and
a power line down on it.
Up to the pools instead.
Electricity generators
come out.
There's one just inside
the pool area to illuminate
the warm and hot pools,
and dressing room.
And there's another
at the top of the
restaurant stairs
to power the kitchen.
The restaurant and
Stonefront's living room
have fireplaces with
natural gas, and
are toasty warm.
Harbin in
such a power outage,
years ago, would have been
a lot colder and darker.
What energy works at Harbin,
when the electricity goes out?
Geothermally warmed
waters still flow out of the ground, -
so the pools stay nice.
The mechanical timers to turn on
heaters in the dressing room
still work, although there's no heat -
that's physics.
And there's natural gas, or propane,
fueling the three power generators
that I've seen - the third one to illuminate
the lower parking lot.
When electricity fails at Harbin,
the geology and physics
of other energy sources still work, -
Far out.
When Harbin returns to the natural
because the electricity fails -
thank you Thomas Edison for electricity -
Harbin's waters still flow,
but get a little browner from the stormy weather.
And Harbin gets a little wilder and darker at night, -
with its wondrous, evening illumination out.
Harbin is already pretty close to the natural,
especially relative to city life.
There's a lot of untouched land
in its valley.
It's simple & rustic
as a hot springs' retreat center,
and, emerging from the 1960s,
'the natural' (and, to some degree, the organic)
are integral to its vision.
Yet lack of electricity as a definer
of Harbin's naturalness -
because, in this snowstorm,
Harbin reverted to nontechnological processes
of detritus falling into the pools,
of diurnal rhytms, and snow falling -
I see how far Harbin is
from the ecology of wilderness,
as another definer of the natural, by contast.
I appreciate Harbin's degrees of naturalness
and technological choices in 2011,
- thanks to this snowstorm and electricity outage.
To transform writing about (inspiring) Harbin
(in contrast. for me, to modernity)
not only into poetry,
but also into Mozartian-cum-J.S. Bach-cum-Grateful Dead music,
so that the writing itself is
blissful, erotic even, social and joyous
and produces beautiful, improvisational music,
is a process I'm curious about.
Up to the pools ...
It's fun to write poem-field notes
in my sleeping bags,
in the back of my car,
on a rainy morning at Harbin.
Thank you, Heartsong. :)
(First lines about through 'Tao te Ching' written on February 16 & 17, 2011, and posted here in blog on February 17).
(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2011/03/azelea-rainy-night-in-lake-county-in.html - Edited and significantly extended on March 2, 2011)
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