Tag Archives: mountain

Cloudy Daze

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Clouds

I love clouds.  They are a metaphor for the manifestations in my life.

Clouds remind me of life.  They are temporal, ephemeral, aways drifting and changing driven by the wind the energy of life.    They can be misty or snowy.  On a rainy day cry me a cloud full.  The ideas they carry can float away or appear and stay.  Clouds are never the same always changing.  A fine mist-like cloud can cover up a mountain and hide information, then dissolve and reveal the beauty within.  I like the idea of a cloud being an incognito veil  and the veil is blown off at different times to reveal new insights.

This is the entrance to the pagoda on the hill out my window.

It’s clear today.  Misty cloudy mornings hide it’s colorful beauty.  On a clear day, like today you can see to the Yangtze river and the bridge beyond.   At night the pagoda is lit up.  Green and red fireworks are exploding in the night sky next to the temple. I love this pagoda anytime day, night, in the fog, mist, rain, snow or sunshine.

Words of wisdom:  Find something you love!

I love looking at the pagoda, writing philosophy and taking pictures.

Did you know it all comes together, if we let it?  Thinking about it long enough will make it appear.  What would we like to manifest?  Contemplate our desires, then sit them on a distant mountain in the morning mist with clouds wafting around the entirety of our ideas.  Life is like this pagoda atop the hill, looming on the horizon, ideas percolating about to appear in our life, right before our eyes.   It might be concealed by a cloud.  Take notice as the clouds dissipate, part and dreams are lifted into reality.

My new life is  there on the moutain, in the mist, in the clouds waiting to appear.

One day the wind will blow, the clouds will move and there you will be.  You are there I just haven’t seen you yet.

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Snow Mountain Mediation on a frosty day

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This is the actual Snow Mountain in China.

It snowed today and I rode my bike to work in the falling flakes, actually delightful.  Therefore, I am writing about snow inspirations.  Jon gave me a book to read called The Secret of the Golden Flower by Thomas Cleary.  It is a Chinese Taoist book about mediation.  After reading it, I did some research on some of the terms and found an interesting Taoist meditation called Snow Mountain Meditation.

It’s simple to do.  Sit upright in a chair.  Take a couple nice cleansing breaths, release the tension from your head, neck and shoulders.  Smile and relax.  Put your attention in the area in front of your tailbone maybe a half inch from the pelvic floor.  This is the Snow Mountain area or sometimes called the Golden Urn.  In this space, deep in your belly, visualize a mountain of snow with a very warm sun shinning down from above, as though there were a sun in your lower belly, shining down on the snow mountain.  Continue to visualize, as the sun warms and melts the snow.  The snow melts and flows down the mountain to create a lake.  Steam rises and nourishes your entire body.  Repeat this visualization, warming sun melting snow, creating a lake and steam rising.  In a couple minutes you should feel renewed and refreshed.

I thought this was a lovely meditation and a nice visual to practice on a snowy day.  Let me know the outcome of your snow mediation.   Just hit reply, I am curious what you visualized and felt.

Tian Qi Shan–Do you have a picture of heaven?

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Describe heaven?  What do you think it looks like?  The mountain I climbed in Tonglu was called Tian Qi Shan, meaning Heaven Place Mountain!  The misty fog was heavy Sunday morning when started our climb, all 200 teachers, children and spouses!  It was like a sidewalk up the hill with steps and stops to have tea, look at coy fish, run through the bamboo forest, take pictures of children and adults acting like children.

Heaven do you picture it in the clouds, well then I was there.  The light poured through like shimmering crystals onto the sparkling river flowing in and about the mountains.  The light bounced and played on the tall grasses growing out of the cliffs.  Amazingly beautiful.  The Chinese ink watercolor landscapes I had seen over the years had clouds weaving in and out of the pictures, little did I know today I would see the inspiration for these paintings.  I took picture after picture trying to savor the moment, research for future paintings.

Today I read up on ink paintings.  One artist described the paintings as having a life of their own.  He was commissioned to paint four dragons and did, but left their eyes off.  The buyers wanted to know why.  The artist said if he painted the eyes it would come alive.  The buyer persisted and the artist painted two sets of eyes on his finished dragons and to the buyers surprise the dragons came alive and jumped off the paper.   The artist refused to add eyes to the other two dragons and the painting is as it was, two dragons no eyes.  An artist that can create the moment, the feeling, the life he feels can make the viewer feel that same moment in time.  Today I will paint a landscape of heaven, the heaven I saw in the mountains.  Probably no dragons though.  They might come alive and mess up my apartment!

Frogville TV

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September 3, 2010

Nice big thunderstorm, after I got home from my one class of three students.  Turned the TV on and have about 25 channels, of course it is all in Chinese.  There are no western programs or English.  On occasion you might hear seconds of English on a news broadcast, but it is nothing important.  I saw a water buffalo fight tonight; concept was like a cock fight in America.  Water Buffalo 48 was doing really good, they run head on into each other and try to kill the other, till he met up with number 15.  Water buffalo 15 knocked him to the ground and they hauled him off in a paddy wagon, poor 15. The owner of 48 got a red scarf which they put on the back of the buffalo.  Everyone cheered.  Then I flipped it to a show about frogs, looked like a place where they raised them, like a Frogville.  The weather was too hot and the little guys were dying of heat exhaustion.  So the owner was showing how he grew plants with large leafs to create shade for the little guys.  He even had cabbage plants for them to crawl in.  Then as it got hotter he made little wooden plank bridges so they could crawl under. The frogs had a mud moat to swim in and seemed to love the slime.  Then the owner showed how he took raw meat and let it set out and catch flies and in turn created maggots.  The maggot worms were gobbled up by the frogs, creating a very efficient business.  What he did with the frogs I do not know.  After thirty minutes I switched channels.

The channels are all called CCTV- Central China TV.  CCTV 1, CCTV 2 and so on, no diversity like in the US.  Although there is CCTV-MTV, now that’s a hoot.  Saw a guy that looked like Wayne Newton, ok sort of, with glitter in his puffy hair singing a Chinese Celine Dion song.  She would have been proud.  His voice was higher than hers!  Then a Michael Jackson rip-off was performing, and a Yanni piano guy. Yes, I liked the Yanni guy!  Remember it is all in Chinese!  There is a lot of Drama- with Ming Dynasty costumes, which is fun to look at for about five minutes.  Lots of love stories, boring.  Tonight I saw a Color Splash/Devine Design HGTV type of show.  The designer redid a Chinese apartment.  She had gone to IKEA and got some cheap shelves, which she arranged on the covered balcony, and then made a vase with popsicle like sticks.  GEEZ.  Not real impressed with the style.  Hey I found “Family Feud” in Chinese, just can’t read the answers!

Commercials are interesting; saw one today that was made of smoke that changed from a mountain, to a butterfly into a man, to a dragon, to the Great Wall of China and back to the mountain.  That was actually artistically cool and got my attention.  Don’t have the foggiest what it meant.  Cartoons are about the same, just Chinese-esque.

Speaking of smoke, the Chinese can smoke in motel rooms, cafes, taxis and at school.  My motel room occasionally will smell from next door smokers’ waking me up causing breathing problems.  Pollution is bad, yesterday morning was one of the first times I actually saw a blue sky.  It is humid, so mixed with the pollution seems smoggy most of the time.  I imagine in the country side it is cleaner.