Harbin conjures up many metaphors in people's minds ... recently it occurred to me that the Harbin Gatehouse, where people check in upon arrival, is like the bridge of a ship, with the whole Harbin Valley as a very large sea-going vessel ... but which isn’t going anywhere. So when I saw the person checking me in last evening, looking out the front windows of the Gate, with another person whom I don’t know, I was amused, because in a sense they are both on watch, and steering also a non moving ship …
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I was going to ask jokingly at the gate as I arrived, “are there any hookah smoking caterpillars here?” per Grace Slick’s singing of the Jefferson Airplane song which rifs on Charles Dodgson / Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” (1865:40) but the opportunity didn’t arise.
And per the Harbin folks at the Gate as pilots of the stationary good ship Harbin … are they taking or steering a kind of Taoist (wu wei – non action) tack toward independence (thinking also a little of the Scottish Independence vote this autumn) in this pretty little valley?
There's freedom in soaking meditatively in the Harbin warm pools ...
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