A Moon Every Night

While waiting for final edits of Nature’s Stricter Lessons to come in, I’ve begun to work on the next book in my series, to be called A Moon Every Night. The title is from a quote from Su Tungpo, a Song dynasty Chinese poet who lived from 1037 to 1101 A.D. Su Tungpo, also known as Su Shi, was a statesman, writer and painter, whose brilliance and insouciance endeared him to his times, and ever after. I’ve seen several translations of this bit of writing, but the following is taken from the biography of the poet by Lin Yutang, The Gay Genius [1947]:

“I was going to bed when the moonlight entered my door. I got up, happy of heart. There was no one to share this happiness with me, so I walked over to the Chengtien Temple to look for Huaimin. He, too, had not yet gone to bed, and we paced about in the garden. It looked like a transparent pool with the shadows of water grass in it, but they were really the shadows of bamboos and pine trees cast by the moonlight. Isn’t there a moon every night? And aren’t there bamboos and pine trees everywhere? But there are few carefree people like the two of us.”

I have often thought of this passage in the many years since I first read about Su Tungpo. It is true that we can see the moon most nights, that we can follow its monthly circuit around our earth. Its beauty is dependable, as are the trees and luminous clouds which set it off against the night sky. We have only to lift our eyes.

The decade which A Moon Every Night chronicles is one of increasing global ties between nations. The Cold War is declared over, though ethnic conflicts continue. Communications technology grows exponentially, with satellites, the Internet and cell phones. Container ships continue to reshape global trade and passenger travel between countries reaches new highs. All of these things lead to increased cultural exchange, of which our characters, the Mikkelsons, take full advantage.

Line’s kids are now young adults. Christopher spends a couple of years in the Peace Corps and Heather takes a winemaking internship in Chile. Fern and Ivy go with their parents to Edinburgh, where Stephen has taken a lectureship. Fern becomes captivated by archaeology. We cannot follow all of this activity, but it echoes throughout Line’s world. Though she faces very physical manifestations of homesickness, Line studies the gardens, herbal healing and Celtic history available to her in Scotland. When at home in Santa Cruz, she becomes involved in the growing hospice movement.

Marty’s interests have turned toward the countries on the Pacific Rim. She travels to China and returns home to study tai chi, calligraphy and tea ceremony. These interests help, but do not assuage the pain of a bittersweet love affair with someone who is married. Paul goes back to teaching when he realizes that Mother finds it hard to live at the lake by herself in the summers. Thus he spends more time with her on the Minnesota lake that is the Mikkelsons’ heritage. Paul and Marie perform as a musical duo throughout the state, but Marie’s light is flickering and Mother’s goes out during this decade.

Line, Marty and Paul Mikkelson are well aware of the moon’s path across the sky at night. Endowed by their parents and Scandinavian ancestors with a strong sense of connection to the natural world, they are sometimes more carefree, sometimes less. As they grow older and their children grow up, they confront themselves and the lives they have made for themselves, mindful of place, of the world evolving around them. Hearts and minds united, they are each in their different ways open to the “thin places” where the core of reality shines through.

On the Path

California Path, Danielle Rosa

Working in California doing various kinds of data processing left me free to pursue my own internal goals. I wasn’t clinging to a traditional religion, but I did begin to feel its lack. At first I searched literature, resonating to the spirit I found in the language of certain writers, not others. During the early 1980’s it was the surrealists who followed from the boy-prophet Rimbaud, and led to Henry Miller and the American Beat writers. My guide was Wallace Fowlie, a writer, translator and teacher who wrote “the prophet or the visionary is the man who daily lives the metaphysical problems of his age. How to live is the theme of all prophets. Peace is always the goal.”

Toward the end of this surrealist seam of writers, I found Gary Snyder, a Californian who was a friend of Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg. Snyder studied Zen in Japan and wrote essays on nature and life which met me exactly where I was. According to Snyder, “the man of wide international experience, much learning and leisure – luxurious product of our long and sophisticated history – may with good reason wish to live simply, with few tools and minimal clothes, close to nature.”

A biography of Su Tungpo, The Gay Genius by Lin Yutang, captivated me. Su Tungpo was a Song dynasty (11^th Century) poet and politician continually in trouble with centralized imperial rule. He was exiled to remote places whenever he was in disgrace, but seemed to care little whether he was in high places or low. Once he wrote of walking in a garden late at night with a friend: “It looked like a transparent pool with the shadows of water grass in it, but they were really the shadows of bamboos and pine trees cast by the moonlight. Isn’t there a moon every night? And aren’t there bamboos and pine trees everywhere? But there are few carefree people like the two of us.”

This literature wasn’t completely new to me. In high school I had found a book of translations of Chinese poetry by Arthur Waley that I loved. I was very fond of Kawabata’s novels as I found them. In the early 1980’s I was also working in a company influenced by Chinese and Japanese architects, who embodied a tradition quite different than my own. One of my best friends at the time had grown up in Hong Kong. Living on what has become known as the Pacific Rim, I began to see myself as having Asian values.

And then I discovered John Blofeld, who in wonderful language expressed these values. Blofeld studied with the great 20^th century Chinese Buddhist Hsu Yun, but also described the centuries of Taoist learning that sustained China in his book Taoism: The Road to Immortality. Blofeld traveled much in China, meeting Taoists who showed him that “when nature is taken as a guide, a friend, living becomes almost effortless, tranquil, joyous even. Care departs; serenity takes over.” He described the Taoist concept of the “indivisibility and indeed identity of spirit and matter.”

What is fascinating about Taoism is its essentially feminine logic. In the Tao Te Ching, we find that “the valley spirit is undying; it is called the mysterious female, whose portal is known as the fundament of heaven and earth.” Taoist hermits retreated from worldly achievements, fame and money in order to live broadly and freely, like water. Blofeld says, “By being content with little and not giving a rap for what the neighbours think, one can attain a very large measure of freedom, shedding care and worry in a trice.”

All of this helped me understand my own deep needs for peace and freedom. Blofeld wrote of the conviction of the educated Chinese that “life itself, flowing in accordance with mysterious natural laws that operate in sweeping cycles of change, is charged with spiritual significance,” and said “true spiritual life must depend on something more solid than belief: namely the direct apprehension of realities that cannot be conveyed in words.”

Having established this base camp, I continued to explore, delighting in the poetry of Basho and the physical and mental explorations of Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard. I turned to many other books, including Deng Ming-Dao’s Scholar Warrior: An Introduction to the Tao in Everyday Life. As I began to study tai chi and qigong, I was reminded by Deng Ming-Dao that “It is only with discipline and perseverance that you will reach your goals. Discipline is freedom, and the companion to imagination.”

Beginning the practice of tai chi with the San Francisco students of Master Tung Kai-ying in 1989, I found a living tradition of moving meditation which quieted my mind and answered my needs for community and disciplined study. Instead of reading, tai chi requires physical practice, attuning the body, mind and heart. It can be done anywhere, on an island in Maine or under the trees at a California YMCA camp. Thus the search resulted not in a religion, but a practice; a path which excludes no part of life and is anchored in the truly ancient subculture Gary Snyder describes in The Real Work: “The subculture is the main line and what we see around us is the anomaly.”

In Nature’s Stricter Lessons, this path is given to Marty. Paul has slipped easily back into his cultural Christianity, leavened somewhat by his readings in Bonhoeffer, and unapologetically open to the growing Darwinian theses about the origins of man. Line’s social justice ideals are not based in any particular religion, though she has been influenced by her husband’s expansive Jewish family, and by the herbalists and healers she knows. She has no problem bringing up her children to a strict morality and an understanding of the love and kindness embodied in the Golden Rule.