I wrote my first book, Exotic Pets, using a pencil on a yellow legal pad, sitting at a bar called The Blue Max in Lahaina town on the island of Maui. It is long gone now, but the bar had a nice view of Lahaina harbor and I watched the ships come in and, mostly from memory, chronicled my love affair with parrots and fish and turtles and snakes while sipping the odd tropical rum drink. I’ve been going to Hawaii on a regular basis ever since, even though the Caribbean is much closer for me these days. There’s just something about the Hawaiian culture, with its Polynesian roots and splashes of Asia thrown in that combines with sheer middle-of-the-ocean isolation to generate energy I find unique and fantabulous. I write well when I’m there and I write even better when I come back.
Jetlag aside, I find that travel is an absolutely necessary lubricant for my inner muse. Big trips across the ocean are getting harder to pull off these days, what with hyper-vigilant airport security and nearly five-buck-a-gallon gas, but even a weekend away helps shift my perspective and adds new zeal to my work. Sometimes I travel with my Daoist teacher—we know Daoism these days as “the force” of Star Wars fame—and he and I have gone to China together and across this country too. Even when I travel alone, however, I am in the company of hundreds of old Chinese masters I’ve never met. These sages tell me that there are three reasons a follower should travel: to further cultivate the self, to meet new masters, and to explore the workings of nature.
I just returned from Hawaii yesterday, and while I was there I did, in fact, do some self-cultivation in the form of meditation longer and deeper than I can usually manage in the face of the distractions and responsibilities of home. I found a beautiful garden on the island of Kauai in which to stand quietly amidst rare local flora—most of Hawaii’s indigenous plants have fallen prey to the rapacity of introduced species—and discovered a new way to exhale through my skin, something I’ve been working on for a while without success.
As for meeting new masters, I was introduced to an elderly couple that had been practicing tai chi for fifty years. While their physical techniques were of a different strain than that espoused by my own martial lineage, I found them to be living a very Daoist life. There is tai chi ch’uan the martial art and there is tai chi the way of life, and from the standpoint of going with the flow and living simply and modestly in the embrace of nature, the couple and their children were masters of the latter an inspiration too.
As for the workings of nature, I got to spend two days and one night atop Kilauea, the Big Island of Hawaii’s active volcano. I will put images up on my website shortly, but suffice to say the plumes and the lava flows and the earthquakes are at a historical high. Watching the Hawaiian fire god Pele belch sulfurous gases up into the stratosphere was as humbling and magnificent a vision of nature at work as can be imagined.
A Daoist trip indeed!
Tags: Daoism Tai Chi Hawaii Travel Masters
