If Paris in December of 2012 was the most romantic and hauntingly beautiful City I’ve ever experienced in my life, then Beijing is the most captivating, complex, and intriguing when I had the good fortune to visit for ten days in March 2013. Unexpectedly I find my heart quite utterly captured and I will anticipate returning to another province in China next year to indulge my senses in the juxtaposition of art and rawness while attending to the business of the Codex Alimentarius (Latin for Food Code) World, protecting health freedom with the NHF team.
Beijing, China is the terrain of opposites and contrasts are everywhere and often simultaneously. The most lovely, elegant woman in a blue velvet evening dress with a sensuous side-slit emerges from a taxi with an equally handsomely attired date and proceeds to spit (in the most fulfilled sense of the word) on the sidewalk, narrowly missing me, in the most incongruous display of what Westerners would term the worst of manners. Welcome to Beijing where I learned to dodge men and women heartily embracing this “way of being” here in this atmosphere of sophistication, oppressive smog and cigarette smoke-filled air inside and out. Next this Oriental Beauty covers her nose with the stark protective whiteness of a surgical mask and glides down the street leaving me jarred internally. This is Beijing 2013 with one of the most envious subway systems in the World.
The noise in the City is continuous. The imaginative display of vehicles is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Most of the smaller “conveyances” are equipped with a basket or cart and they all zip around amazingly without incident with man or machine and within millimeters of both. Bikes are everywhere and none are remotely new. It is incredible how much recycled cardboard one can fit on a bike and remain upright! Restaurants become oases of calm to balance the intensity outside. Walking to a restaurant I witnessed the spitting beauty queen, a man urinating quite impressively actually behind a tiny taxi sign (no prostate problems here evidently), and a woman losing her noodles literally on the sidewalk as I dodged to avoid the backsplash.
Life in Beijing has a rawness I haven’t been exposed to since Greenfield Junior High in Bakersfield, California but also an intensely heightened beauty that I could get used to living with. Even with the lovely calligraphy everywhere the Chinese manage to merge rawness and great art every moment. Simplicity in a floral arrangement is refined to high art and poetry in motion in a young woman’s flawless hands as she swirls warm water over tea leaves is as immensely splendid as watching a meteor shower. These contrasts excite my senses and quell the restlessness within me that comes from monotony of a predictable life; the daily “expected”. Despite being a nature girl, I can get used to this…the visual stimulation, the energy, refuges of peace and art to nurture my soul…
But what if the current Beijing, China is a microcosm of all humanity? Full of lofty beginnings, intelligence and creativity, forging their way into the World scene with inventions and spectacular color on symmetrical architecture enlivening a gray, chill climate. But then entropy sets in…things trending toward disorder and chaos. And now our eyes are red from the smog, even bordering on infection, classy women spit openly in the street- surely something in them must recoil at this but hey, there’s so much smog that the mind overrules propriety to spare the lungs, 14,000 pigs bloated bodies fill the rivers moving downstream and polluting the water while the government assures the Chinese and tourists like us that all is well. We can only fool ourselves so long. There comes the clarion call to retrace our steps to our roots. Return to what we were doing when we were the most successful… China is instant messaging this to the World. Do you see it?
We have nobility within, grace resides beside innate power. We just have to clear to the pure flowing channel past putrid, rotting pigs to get back to where we were on the ascendant. Each of us has areas that need reclaiming. I defy even one to show me they are at their pinnacle consistently unless perhaps you’re a hermit or a monk. Life and the law of entropy rush in. Our schedules often get too busy to see to important details like introspection, prayer, sleep, supplements, and 10 live organic fruits and vegetables a day. Our spiritual life? Nurtured or withering on the vine? Walking meditation or plugged in to the World vs. the Universe? Interior pollution is akin to 14,000 rotting pigs versus the clear, untainted water of life flowing through us.
China is vast, rugged, refined, exquisitely beautiful, shockingly raw, and threadbare all at once. Tonight I breathe the pure air of the great Pacific Northwest. I look out of spaciousness ($33,000 per square meter to buy land outside of the Forbidden City in Old Beijing…) to survey the Lake Mayfield which happens to have a cloud resting on the serenity of its surface and upside down pointed Fir at its borders. Has the sky turned inside out and what is up, is down?
Life is full of these reflections and China reflected to me our greatness and our tendency to dissipation and degradation. We must choose and we must fight to keep making positive progression because it doesn’t come naturally. Making a life precariously straddling the Great Wall will find you in a crumbled heap at the bottom with a cracked head. The vision must never be sacrificed to the hard climb. It IS hard and it IS worth it – the ascension.
We must stand against the World for our nobility, our purity, our pride. It took immense vision to construct the Great Wall, the Forbidden City but not only that but protecting the vision and creation that resided in the act while building something that lasts. What are we building that we are prepared to defend – our spirit, our health, our family, our wealth, our path of service? What has been built that we enjoy that we are prepared to defend? The Forbidden City allowed nothing that would compromise its integrity: no soil to tunnel through, and it was surrounded by a great moat and walls in a defensive posture. There is a time to know our magnificence and a time to protect it with everything in our power. That time is now.
But to remain VITAL with open options to exercise our talents and power we must realize that the powers that rule World trade and supposedly our health: Codex Alimentarius, of which I attend- they are NOT for health despite their false mission statement. National Health Federation was the ONLY Voice for YOU- the shopper buying for themselves and family at the grocery store or market, at the last meeting.
There was no one in the whole World who spoke for the consumer except NHF and I mean it. I heard lies in the 7 days of meetings on Food Additives. Lies from the sweetener industry. Lies from the artificial coloring people. Lies from the US and Australia. Lies designed to defend World trade, their companies, their nations.
China is set forth in the World right now as a failing example in the things that really matter in life (like breathing…) and they did it to themselves.
Do you wish for yourself to create a World in which you used to be the head and now you are the tail, despite money pouring in? When you cannot take a single pure breath- and I mean it literally even in the mountains I visited- is that wealth to you? Money in the bank while your lungs fail you…HEALTH IS WEALTH and you know it is true.
Monsanto, Agenda 21, Doctors killing more people annually than perhaps they actually heal… Do you wish to create a World where babies are poisoned by greed- Melamine is the name of that greed and dogs were carted to their graves over that atrocity as well.
Do you wish to poison and pollute the soil with “compost” made of old car batteries and human feces and then enjoy that watermelon plucked from the vine that was desecrated in that soil and now becomes part of YOU? China has adopted for this choice and all inside a political system that is not for the people.
The Chinese were the great Minds that brought forth great inventions like the printing press, the compass, and more. They thought so big centuries ago that their ideas traversed miles of mountain ranges becoming walls and they created a City that made my heart exult because it felt so holy and so splendid. They cultivated beauty, intelligence, and a profound spiritual depth despite your denomination. China wove its way unexpectedly into my heart with a respect and admiration that the current decay cannot obliterate.
China is an invitation to us all to return to our roots: to the heritage of grace, magnificence, and expansive vision we all possess. We are destined to reside in beauty, in love, in strength, in compassion, in progress, in dominion over forces that would hinder those goals. China is a World irritant at present like the freshwater oysters infiltrated with a foreign body which produce the pearls.
China’s wise pearl reminds us we can relieve ourselves of the irritants and embrace beauty, our destiny, our future and that of the World. Make our investments now and make them strong, make them last- each one using our gifts and talents to restore this World to rightness. In the health freedom World I see a lot of people getting angry and upset. That is not passion. Passion creates a new terrain. It builds a Great Wall and a fortified City like the Forbidden City. Anger can easily turn inward on us. It must be directed into a constructive energetic use that will create the World we are proud to leave behind as our legacy.
When I left China, I prayed over the City as I looked out from my hotel room. I prayed over all those that would remain to breathe that air, dodge spit in the street, wonder about the integrity of their food and water, and the milk they feed their children. China has inherent greatness and power. So do we. We must train our hands to war once again because this insidious degradation that seeps into whatever continent we are on to destroy our magnificence is easily crushed when we wake to our beauty and our power and the amazing force of our collective will and create the life we imagine.