1st 1/2 of 2009
Q1/Q2=reaping the sown
san diego, london, beijing



This morning, in my pleasant, cheap hotel in downtown San Diego with great continental breakfast (hotel occidental), after a 12 hour sleep, while studying Chinese (oh, supermemo, you're the joy of my Chinese studies and bane of my existence), I opened my .mp3 qin collection. Returning After Resigning was the second song and I surfed to find our what it meant. Qin master John Thompson provided all the backdrop:

John Thompson translates the poem by Tao Yuanming (365-427), on which the song is based, as follows:

Come away home!
My fields and garden will be full of weeds, how can I not go back?
It was myself who put my mind into bondage,
so why go on being sad and lonely?
I understand that what is already past cannot be rebuked,
but know the future's possibilities.
In fact this wrong road has not taken me so far,
and what I now realize is correct, while yesterday I was wrong.
My boat wobbles about in the light breeze,
the wind swirls as it blows my clothing.
I ask a traveler about the road ahead,
and resent that the early morning light is still dim. (silkqin.com)

So here I am at the beginning of the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Back in San Diego for the quarter taking classes in corporate strategy and the environment, non profit management, government in the era of globalization, Chinese politics, and one other (20 credits) all while working ostensibly 3/4 time (beyond full time, really) with the organization I've given my life to over the past year and a half.

There's something that makes me feel nostalgic when I'm in San Diego. I think it's the spring-like air. Every day feels like the last week of school, so it's somehow easier to tell yourself to get the work done, and then somehow easier to let the mind wander back to the dead you've left behind.

Many trips ahead. London next week. Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang. Back and forth. Hoping the connections I make and the work I do more than offsets the flying free for all.

Time to get our work done.

Labels: john thompson, personal, qin, san diego, update

Movie Mumbai from the Suburban Parking Lot Lagoon:
Globalization in Stereo from an American Mini Mall
in Grand Rapids, MI

The urge to type comes to me often sitting in theaters. Does anyone have links to where I can buy a silent, one-handed keypad? Or need we invent this device? Or wait for commercial scale wink sensors? Or plugs to the brain?

What a joy tonight sitting with Mom in a packed showing of "Slumdog Millionaire" in suburban West Michigan. I'd never been to a sold out show in Grand Rapids (near where I grew up). The usher made us stand up and scrunch to the center.

For some reason I suggested we buy tickets early. Then we were stranded far from the familiar in cold winter suburban parking lots of fake Italian summer cottage restaurant facades. The most appetizing was Chili's, which I commented was the whitest Mexican restaurant I'd ever been in, as most customers were eating hamburgers. I had coffee and a Corona.

The next moment we were sucked into what just might have been some of the most eye-opening depictions of India most of these crowded-in Dutch descendants had ever seen. The "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" storyline and a fab RS movie review gets movie goers in; perhaps Hollywood-style depictions of "other" people with own emotions still living in landfills will open suburban minds to the way most of the world's urb lagoons. Or maybe these scenes are just another series of war spectacle money shots lacking the immediacy I sense from interviewing Nicaraguan huelepegos children living in Managua's city dump and being robbed by their older brothers. Or Caracas at sunset with the same fear that your roommate won't come back with the key.

How the mind steers around our memories. And then back to work. That we may know our fellow humans slightly better is my wish for 2009. That I might manage my time better is my resolution. Time better managed, because we're running out of it the way we're running out of space. Bottlenecks await, my friends! Now will I to the chink in this wall and get a view of what I may.

What is the phrase? En el pais de los ciegos, el tuerto es el rey.

Estmos finalmente abriendo los ojos....

Labels: bottlenecks, globalization, movie review, suburbs

Reports from Michigan's Beaver
At the first Fox on a Hill retreat on
Beaver Island, Michigan

You'll find Miss Michigan's nicest big island tucked up in Northeast corner of Lake Michigan between the state's two pleasant peninsulas.

Before this week, I hadn't been to Beaver Island since I was about 12 (1992). As a youngster, I didn't have to say to friends, “No Beaver Island isn't a lesbian resort.”

The Emerald Isle's 60 sparsely populated square miles of people with mostly Irish ancestry have witnessed relative peace as oil, rail and timber industry ventures rolled through. The only notable exception was when James Jesse Strang and his Mormon contingent kicked them out and used a forged letter from Joseph Smith as an excuse to declare Strang sovereign of his island kingdom. King Strang was eventually killed and his followers were kicked off the island by raiding bands of Michiganders. Rumors abound that Strangian Mormons still make pilgrimages to their holy land.

Today, Beaver Island has a larger proportion of electric cars than anywhere else in the state. You get there by ferry from Charlevoix, a place of memories for me: where my then-three-year-old brother survived a swan attack and the main street where I always picture And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street take place.

This year, Fox on a Hill invited me to do a bit of joy seeking, nature communing, strategic dialoging, and music making on the founder's property on the remote southeast side. Earthwork musicians joined. We talked about meefers and plume (two great resources for the gay community—spaces to watch as they develop real, non sex-centric online gay community).

I cleared my lungs out with fresh lake air and native plants. The invasive species Mullen grows all over the island and makes a fine tea or bidi for expelling all that clogs you. I left large chunks of Beijing toxins on the forest floor. Invasive species are trying to tell us things and they're there to help.

My excuse for leaving Beijing for Michigan was to attend my cousin's wedding. A week before I left, I was comfortable with my decision to see the Olympics from afar. Then the air got clean and the cars were gone. I started to fall in. But family—getting tribal—is exactly what I needed. Life is easy with your own people.

Now I crave to go back and take in this Olympic spectacle. My good friend the dragon is throwing one hell of a party. I'll catch the last four days of what Tom Brokaw called "perhaps the most significant event in modern Chinese history" in Beijing (well, that's how I remember the quote from the Today Show). The Chinese are my people too. There's so much work to be done.

Coming up:
The NPR story: Link
Our Beaver Island EP: Link

Labels: fox on a hill, history, michigan

Roots & Shoots Day of Peace 2008
A message from the Dame
September 21, 2008, San Diego & Los Angeles

Here's a message from the dame. Thank you, my friend!



I hope to see you either in San Diego, Los Angeles, or digitally via uploaded photos.

Let's create peace in our lifetimes!

Labels: jane goodall, peace, roots and shoots

Reflections at morning rain
after yesterday's hail and the day before yesterday's sandstorms
spring's arrival in Beijing



My grandparents always talk about the weather. If dinner conversation during infrequent visits languors, the weather topic of weather looks plum. My Yorkshire colleague claims weather is required conversation at his family's dinner table. Wow, what surprise outside the window after days of sandstorms and hail that the tiles of the courtyard houses should be wet and a tree in bloom! Rain in the desert. So I turn to piddly things like updating my blog and photos of "Arm & Hatchet" baking soda packages. Good stuff.

After a late night of AA deadlines, I woke up early for an interview about the April 1 Jane Goodall UCSD event and CLC conference call. For a moment, I forgot other looming deadlines. These morning silences hunched over statistics and emails and listening to beautiful Buddhist poet-singer-song-writer-friend Daisy May forgetting my good fortuned curse of being keenly interested in these fast times are maybe the closest to what I am.

Fast (by Daisy May, from the album "Mother Moon")

I've been away from myself.
It's time to get back to what I'm used to.
All this runnin' around.
Makes it hard to do the things I need to.

Can you see the change in me?
The way that I'm worn down from all of this shifting.
Can you love something that isn't there?
All of this running around is getting me nowhere.

Fast..............................
Fast..............................

I've been entertaining thoughts of monkhood lately...before tech is embedded in the skin. Scant time left to pop away from our globally-integrated individual enterprises. I still try to walk as if in a meditation cave, but the draws of city life and householding drag me into the turning wheel.

The birds are quieting. The city stirs. The magpies are out and appointments set. Let's hope, in our age of global climate change, that time for reflections on the millennial seasons is here for a good long while.

Labels: Beijing, reflections, seasons

Jane Goodall
at UCSD
April 1, 2008



Not an April Fool's joke! Jane Goodall is visiting UCSD on April 1. Please join us for a tree planting ceremony. Volunteers, invited guests, and ticket holders can take part in an intimate luncheon.

Labels: events, jane goodall, organic, UCSD

Happy Chinese New Year
Paint the Town Red!
from Beijing

Dear friends and associates........

After accepting an offer to do sustainable development work in line with my passions, I am now working in Beijing until the Olympics. I did not expect to stay here when I came to Chinese capital last fall...but those of you who know me well could see that this was not entirely unexpected either. Just like leaving the Chinese painter to give my bedroom what I wanted to be a temple red coat....


September should find me back at the University of California San Diego finishing my masters degree in international relations.

Here's another view--of the sky ablaze with fireworks!!--from my new Beijing apartment.


Peace to you and yours,

Joshua

Blog Descriptions:
Out with the in with the...

Old: You may have followed my "s'more goes blog" of trackeds and endtrials through S/SE Asia, the Middle Kingdom, or months of Pan-American overland wandering, but you ain't read nothing till you read about...grad school. Actually, you won't read much about grad school because, well, it's grad school. Expect occasional updates from Jets, Journal, Wonder and environs.

New: Help yourself to my "s'more goes blog"! You'll find trackeds and endtrials through S/SE Asia, my Pan-American overland wanderings, SoCal, and always bridges to and through the Middle Kingdom. Expect only occasional updates now from Jets, Journal, Wonder and environs.

Labels: blog history, vanity

to Beijing!
with curiosity, hope, and love
from San Diego

Ten days in the US now over. A final all-nighter to get my work done. Meeting after meeting. Greeting after greeting. Goodbyes here and there. See yous on Skype or google chat elsewhere.

San Diego almost felt like home. There's a reason there are so many midwesterners in this town.

Sunday was Roots & Shoots International Day of Peace in Griffith park in LA. After flying the peace doves and giving her speech, Dr. Jane demonstrated to me what she did when she first met Pan Yue, Vice Minister of the State Environmental Protection Agency in China--"as a female chimp greets a high ranking male." It involved some panting on my face, the Dame (of the British empire) instructing me to bristle, and then me patting her on the head (though I almost knocked off her sunglasses).

Afterward we went to Santa Monica Pier to fly more doves and watch the sunset. I took some photos with my Treo.

Beijing should be a fun ride. I'll be representing AccountAbility there. I also have lots of friends in the capital. Looking forward to a bit of sleep on the train and planes.

Labels: travel, update

fortunes read from traffic cameras
and other tales of wonder
from Paris, London, NYC

Before going to Paris, Mom and I saw the Merchant of Venice in "Shakespeare's" restored Globe Theatre. We liked the atmosphere so much that we saw a new play there the next night, We the People, by Eric Schlosser of "Fast Food Nation" and "Reefer Madness" fame. It's amazing to see new plays with 20+ actors covering what could have been very dry subject matter--the US constitutional convention--with such a large audience and up tempo. I regret slightly that we missed the London Youlan Qin Society's yaji outside of town because London sucked us in.

After three nights in Paris (ok, three hours), I was ready to move there. Unlike London, everyone elegantly moseyed, except the tourists. In a cafe, a Parisian recovering from cancer told us how much she loved Bush "because he's courageous" as she puffed on a cigarette. We climbed over some ancient buildings, rode the bus, learned a little French, and stayed in the Latin Quarter. Being back in London was brief and pleasant.

After one last walk through my neighborhood of Hasidic Jews in their fur and coats, a couple more flushes of the "crappy" English toilet, and goodbyes to roommates, my summer in London was over.

In New York, I saw my friend Chipp Jansen's exhibit "Counting Cars" at the Conflux Festival as part of a Psychography exhibit. Given six cars on the West Shore Expy Victory traffic cam during my thirty seconds led to the 6th RSS feed of the New York section of the NY Times, which means I got an article about bowling in Central Park. "Wiggled a dance of delight" and "silence is an anomaly" stood out, as did "a compelling distraction for tourists".

Or according to Chipp's co-conspirator, Will Pappenheimer,

Counting Cars is an interface and consulting station that connects Manhattan traffic cams to local New York RSS Internet news of the moment via the vernacular consultation practice of "counting crows." As a performance, I will assist participants to seek the moment's situational wisdom for a question they might entertain. With the aid of computer equipment, we will consult a live NYC traffic cam and initiate a programmatic process that utilizes motion detection to count cars within a certain period of time. The number generated as the "car" or "crow" count and is used to retrieve the text and imagery of a current corresponding RSS New York news story that is related to the participant.

As fine a counselor/psychic as e'er I saw.

Labels: London, NYC, Paris

Realisation:
How to Handle the Most Difficult Person(s) in Your Life
some tricks to see past the delusion of anger



I found this post in my weekly thedailyenglightenment.com email, which often has interesting dharma movie bits and fine zen quotes. I repost here without permissions, thus happy to take it down.

It is a most ironic "illusion" that there are many difficult people in our lives out there, especially while the most difficult person is the most immediate but continually missed one. Now, who is this person so close yet so far? It is none other than you! No, not me, him or her, but you. (Of course, when I read "you" to myself, it refers to me!) Due to the deep-seated tendency to self-rationalise, the person least likely to admit one's mistakes could be oneself. We might think we have got most, if not all things right. But that's self-deception - especially when we are obviously unhappy. If we are so right in the way we see and handle everything, how could it be that we are not happy? Surely, if truth is totally on our side, there would naturally be happiness.

The ones who really make our lives difficult are us - because we choose to react negatively to those around us. Obviously, to react negatively to those neutral or positive to us is downright foolish. So is it not alright to react negatively to those difficult to us? It might be "natural" in terms of force of habit, but it doesn't make it wise or right. When we react negatively, we are hurting ourselves, when our intention is to hurt others. We will definitely succeed doing the first, while there is no guarantee for the latter. Ironic isn't it? Since the one being difficult is suffering, we should focus on being compassionate, not difficult! The truth is, psychologically, no one can hurt us, other than ourselves choosing to let ourselves be hurt. Just as we perceive it wrong for others to hurt us, it is first and foremost wrong to ourselves to hurt ourselves.

Our suffering can be related to our karma in many ways. First, it can be an effect of our past unwholesomeness. Second, it can be an instant effect of the present unwholesomeness of our reaction. Third, it can be a combination of the duo. In other words, at times, we aggravate and perpetuate our own suffering when we react unwholesomely to suffering. It's a vicious downward-spinning spiral. When we mindfully train to sever or reduce the second form of suffering, much suffering is reduced. In fact, when we master the art of not reacting negatively to suffering by realising the unsubstantial transience of suffering, whatever remaining suffering becomes powerless in making you unhappy. When you are less of a difficult person to yourself and others, your world "magically" has less difficult people – because your "difficulty" is the centre of it all. -Shen Shi'an

And this:

"One attached to personal delusions cannot be liberated by the impersonal truth." - stonepeace

Thus we turn inward and then outward again, using knowledge to gain experience and experience to gain wisdom.

Labels: buddhism, liberation, peace, philosophy

Dear friends,

This Harper's article presents convincing evidence that our executive branch and our chief executive's ideological handlers are using Fox News to quicken our nation's pace toward war with Iran, just as they did in the lead-up to Iraq in 2003.

For the fast, dirty evidence and an online petition asking other networks not to follow Fox New's lead, check out this page.

Let us do more this time than hope and pray that we do not go to war again.

Peace.

~JJW

--
--
-- --
School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, UCSD
Masters of Pacific and International Affairs candidate 2008
-- --
"Ten Years ago...Hong Kong was the tiny flickering light of internationalism on the south coast. Now the whole country is lit."
  --Professor Michael de Golyer

Unconstitutional:
The War on Our Civil Liberties

...is the third in a series of Public Interest Pictures films ... Unconstitutional provides the facts and stories that illuminate administration lies, wrongheaded policies, and the real victims of these actions--the American people.

Here, you'll get the real story behind the USA PATRIOT Act and other administration policies and the gut wrenching stories behind those affected--from law-abiding store clerks to United States Olympians unable to travel. It'll remind you of what America used to stand for and what it seems we're falling for now. In short, this one-hour film will affirm why you're angry and give you a tool to help others join your ranks.

Check out this video here.

Labels: civil liberties

the last days of guqin camp
at the Royal Academy of Music
London

Following from this post.

I could write a lot about my week at the Royal Academy of Music's summer school, but I won't. I enjoyed the people I met and being in that atmosphere of exploration and excitement about Asian music. There were many people who had never seen a qin before, and others who had practiced half a lifetime.

The campus is near Baker Street and Regents Park, which meant new friends and I could stroll out to smell the roses or buy a sandwich with shops painted with Sherlock Holmes murals.

On the second day, the organizers asked me to translate some talks by Zeng Chengwei, guqin professor at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music, and Hu Bin, erhu professor at the Royal Conservatory of Music. It was really a "pre-concert lecture" in which they described the songs they were going to play the next night. Though my music vocabulary was a bit rusty, I got through the technical aspects of the lecture just fine. It was Professor Hu's emotional language of her songs' heroines that stumped me, along with Professor Zeng's rattling off of classical Chinese phrases. I think he was asking me to translate something about sage emperors in the picture on the right.

The next night ZCW performed five songs, the first being Zuiyu Changwan (The Drunken Fisherman Sings at Dusk), which he was also teaching me. After the performance, I congratulated him and told him how marvelous it was to hear him play in that nearly acoustically perfect auditorium. He said in typical Chinese modesty that he "played poorly."

Our class on stage:


Thanks to Peng Hua, scientist and musician extraordinaire, for taking and sending the pics.

Labels: guqin, London

Future Mediascape?
Don't say you weren't warned...


Admittedly a bit sensationalized, but still a decent video that adds something to the debate and wonder of our emerging mediasphere.

Labels: media, video