The Flower and the Wind are Old Friends

I haven't been able to access my blog for the past couple of days, which has made me a little crazy. Even if I'm not writing, I find comfort in coming here. It is my secluded place.

Comments are messed up too. I tried to leave a message for Cookie, who wrote about an old medicine man who was buried today. Along with him, she says, more old old ancient knowledge disappeared forever.

Her post reminds me of a book I have been reading called Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits, about Taoist practitioners and Buddhist monks and nuns who live a life of solitude in the Chungnan Mountains of China. The author, Bill Porter (all italic and block quotes from his book), says that in ancient China the shaman was closely connected to a person following the hermit tradition.

When emperors, kings, clan chiefs, leaders of early Chinese culture needed to get in touch with natural forces, the gods outside the city wall and inside the human heart, they turned to hermits. Hermits could talk to heaven. They knew its signs, they spoke its language. Hermits were shamans and diviners, herbalists and doctors, adepts of the occult and the manifest...Detached from values imposed by whim of custom, hermits have remained an integral part of Chinese society because of their commitment to their culture's own most ancient values. If nothing else, they represent its mythic past...

Througout Chinese history, there have always been people who preferred to spend their lives in the mountains, getting by on less, sleeping under thatch, wearing old clothes, working the higher slopes, not talking much, writing even less - maybe a few poems, a recipe or two. Out of touch with the times but not with the seasons, they cultivated roots of the spirit, trading flatland dust for mountain mist. Distant and insignificant, they were the most respected men and women in the world's oldest society.

During the Cultural Revolution extensive damage was done by the Red Guards to shrines, books were burned and monks were beat up. Like Native American medicine men, it seems that hermits are a dying breed.

I search the land for those with wisdom. In this world real spirituality is feared, obliterated, through genocides and institutions, through obedience, and lack of knowledge. What is left, at least in this country, is a disapproving and damaging shell called American civil religion.

People willing to reduce their desires and cultivate tranquility in this modern age are few. This is the age of desire.