not native fruit

more moor

      You know, one of the nicest things for me to realize, is that I don't have to 'cultivate' my moorish heritage, or seek it out.  I've already been living it my whole life.  The beauty is that I can just relax into 'being me.' The difference is that I can appreciate more fully and more consciously now what it's all about, and why I am the way I am.  Sure, there are still many unanswered questions, but I begin to believe that these questions can only be answered through the action of Grace/miracle.  I don't find that anyone out there really knows anything more about my family's heritage than I do, and often seem to know less.  I certainly can't explain the way my people were and what they handed to me.  I only know it as an experience, my experience.

Speaking of experiences, I've been absent from the site for a while because I've had that flu that is going around.  I'm feeling better now.

I watched a program on kqed last night about the choreographer and dancer Jerome Robbins.  At the end of his life he believed his depression had to do with being alienated from his own heritage and trying too hard - putting in too much time and energy - to assimilate as an American.  I would imagine nearly all Americans have to deal with this to some degree or another.  One of my friends - whose ancestors are Russian Jews - says that she sees this as the quintessential American experience.  Interesting.  America is still, in many places, a 'frontier territory' in the sense that people unfamiliar with one another heretofore are meeting, living and working together, and often, fighting with each other.  Even if they are not fighting, there is so much to learn about each other, and the learning doesn't always come easy.

For me, the fact that I look so scandinavian (like my father) is in a way unfortunate because I think my appearance immeditately introduces a note of skepticism when I talk about our moorish heritage, but I can't help the way I look, it doesn't change what I am like, etcetera.  Anyway, I really have no 'verbal' way to pass along this experience, if it is some kind of cultural heritage after all - well, I feel deeply that it is - and anyway, apparently it is not something the family ever 'talked' about anyway.  It's passed on as an experience - you live it.

butterfly people

  This bracelet represents the four directions (on the left) and the butterfly.  I like the white color because it represents the Will of Heaven in Chinese lore, black represents wisdom, yellow abundance and red life.  I chose this bracelet, because when I was going through all my ancestry blues, I finally realized that people came to the Americas from many different directions, from all 'four directions,' and they morphed into something new: the American peoples.  Some people resist this process, but eventually someone in their family will marry someone outside their ethnicity of origin and eventually all those streams merge into the stream of the Original People, just like mine did.  My father came from Europe and fell in love with the indigenous people of the Delaware River area and married someone from that heritage, and they produced me. I feel an appreciation for all the streams of my lineage - they are all represented here - and I just wanted to share this image with you.