not native fruit

daoist wisdom of the ordinary

Here is something I really liked from "Daoist texts with commentary by Thomas Cleary" (with my own comments in [ ] brackets). 

“Ordinary expressions and common sayings accord with the path of sages; you should turn to them for careful research.  If you use everyday activities to search in reverse, everything in the world turns to jewels.” [This reminds me of how I felt about the Book of Proverbs when I was 21-22.]

“The Tao is not far from people;  what people consider the Tao is far from people.  [This was true in Catholicism too.  People thought the mystics were so extraordinary that there was no way on earth we could have any of their experiences.  We grew up with that bias and discouragement.]  The Tao is essence and life is the eternal Tao, the eternal Tao is the Tao of daily life; it’s just that while people use it daily they do not know it.

“If you carefully investigate the principles, you do not need to read a thousand classics and ten thousand texts; there are great revelations of the celestial mechanism right in ordinary expressions and common sayings.  For example, good people are called really genuine, truthful, conscientious, reasonable, respectable, aware of proper proportion, aware of when to go forward and when to withdraw, circumspect, perceptive, having their feet on the ground; bad people are said to be inhuman, lacking conscience, and unreasonable – they hurt others to benefit themselves, are self-deceived, violate nature and reason, take suffering for pleasure, take the false for the real, pick up one thing and forget another, without knowing death and life, without knowing good and bad, only knowing one and not two, only aware of the existence of themselves and not that of others.”  (p. 156, The Taoist Classics, Volume Two, from ‘Understanding Reality.’)

earth snake month begins

This month's image comes from the Aromatherapy Conference 2009 brochure.  Isn't it great?  It's called "Die Medizin" by Rolf Deininger.  (The proceedings of the Aromatherapy Conference are available here.) One thing that makes this image so meaningful is that it makes visible the digestive process that is so much a part of the nature of the Earth Element.  (Snake's natural element is Fire.) It makes sense that this image is applied to 'medicine' here, because all 'learning' is a process of assimilation and absorption that is represented by the Earth Element. 

This month's Earth nature, added to our Earth Ox Year, gives us an excess of Earth element to deal with again this month. Lots of attention to detail, lots to think about and consider, lots of conversations, mediations, reconsiderations, judgments and discriminations, syntheses, interpretations, integrations and harmonizations ought to be happening again this month.  But this month will be quieter, more reflective and conservative.  Mercury will be retrograde during most of our Earth Snake month, so this will be a good time to finish up loose ends, organize what you have on hand, clean out files, and review work already done.  Earth Snake month begins on May 5, 2009 and ends on June 4, 2009.

Success is very possible during Earth Snake month, especially if we keep our humility out front and don't resort to boasting or bragging to get what we want.  Also success is most likely to come in small ways or in the context of a small setting or community.  Make it personal, be charming but self-effacing and self-contained, restrain all avaricious thoughts, and the way will be smooth for your sinuous advancement during this time period.

While Earth Ox and Earth Dragon were somewhat at odds with one another, creating a note of conflict and struggle in the ethers, Earth Ox and Earth Snake create the Metal Trinity together, helping all of us to straighten up and fly right.  Our Principles will come to the fore to guide us to make wise plans for the future and will help us to solve even our most intransigent problems, so put on the old Thinking Caps during this month.  The best days for planning and problem solving will be May 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28 and June 1. 

 

 

the five elements and the sweatlodge

Reading Christal Quintasket's - Mourning Dove's - memoir of her life as a Salishan Indian in the late 19th century.  She describes the children's traditional spiritual training - which was carried on simultaneously with their Catholic upbringing - in detail, especially how they went out at night to find their spirit-guides, beginning at age 5 or 6.  She says the most powerful Spirit Guide to connect with was the spirit of the Sweat-lodge.  It had a 'ribbed, conical shape' and was composed of the same Five Elements we find in Chinese Daoist cosmology. 

Mourning Dove writes, "No other guiding spirit could ever overcome this power because 'it' had five special strengths: wood for ribs, fire for heat, stones (chinese: metal) for stamina, earth for support, and water for cleansing.  In all, it was a symbol of combined strengths, much more than the abode of any animal or spirit."

All of these elements are 'interpreted' basically in the same way as the chinese interpretation.  Metal means 'minerals' and is good for structure, organization and upright posture.  Wood is often symbolized as beams, columns or posts, because it is the element of 'manifestation,' ie birth, growth and development.  The other elements seem self-evident and don't need explanation.  In comparison with European and also with East Indian cosmologies, Wood is equivalent to Aether (the space that allows things to happen, allows movement to occur, etc), and Metal/Mineral is equivalent with Air.

The Five Elements are a picture of 'wholeness,' they represent archaic science's understanding of the composition of Creation.  None of these words are really adequate, however.  'Archaic' is not quite right, rather what is meant is the kind of science that preceded what we now call 'modern science.'  String theory may relate to this former scientific theory when viewed from a creative standpoint.  *smile*  Also, Creation is probably not the correct term either, but I don't think we really have an adequate term for 'this experience' we all concur that we are having, both in its consensual forms and its non-consensual aspects.

Anyway, I find the Five Elements 'poetic' and enriching in the way that poetry is: sensually, imaginatively, insightfully.  Therefore, I like to dabble with them.  See my other website for more info on one of the ways I am doing that.

 

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.

local animal tiles

  I found these tiles at the Royal Cafe on San Pablo Avenue in Albany, right next door to Berkeley.  Breakfast or lunch at the Royal Cafe are gr-r-reat! 

They have more tiles of animals, not all members of the Chinese 12, and I hope to post their Rooster tile soon.  Pictured to the left is their PIG, and below, a HORSE.  These tiles are hand-painted.

If you have any photos of any of the 12 Chinese Animals - Mouse (Rat), Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig - please send them to the email address in the side-bar, and I will publish them with an acknowledgement of you on my new blog:Birthday Safari Twelve Animals.

sound familiar?

the great way is easy,
yet people prefer the side paths.
be aware when things are out of balance.
stay centered within the dao.

when rich speculators prosper
while farmers lose their land;
when governement officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn -
all this is robbery and chaos.
it is not in keeping with the dao.

yin within yang

My partner and I are like 'yin within yang' here in Berkeley.  The Bay Area is a very Yang place - lots of airy open space, cars whizzing at high speeds over long distances on freeways that tie the whole bay area together.  Wind off the ocean, hard surfaces of rocks, hillsides, canyon walls and so on.  Tremendous clarity that alternates with murky fog.  And people who are very very ambitious, very goal-oriented, leaders, starters, etc.

Gary and I are more about a quiet, reflective lifestyle that I don't see much evidence for among other Bay Area afficianados, with the possible exception of other Berkeleyans.  We like to read, to garden, to walk in nature (when we can dodge the whizzing bicycles), and to philosophize.  We Berkeleyans have always been, in general, a more introverted set, yet we've always had an emphasis on community: witness the old Co-op, various political groups, the arts, etc, and now there seems to be more spiritual grouping as well. 

I need community too, but I must say I can't take too much of it.  *smile*  Well, it kind of feels good to be the yin within yang.  Sometimes I feel homesick for my homeplace, too: southeastern Penna and south Jersey, but that area, especially Philadelphia and surroundings, is much more yin to begin with: soft, sultry in summer, a place where things mildew overnight.  (even Wallace Stevens wrote about our mildew problem in a poem).  Anyway, it's just nostalgia.  In the meantime, I'm here, in the Yin-Yang (slightly Yang predominant) cold windy Bay Area, in exile from my native place, and finding solitude here, a different lifestyle from the warmth of home.

grackle

When I was in my mid-thirties and realizing after eight years of trying to conceive a child, visiting doctors, adoption agencies, etc, that my husband and I were not going to have children after all, I was very depressed and confused.  I also discovered that I had a terrible physical condition that caused a lot of hormonal imbalance, crying, fatigue, menstrual disorders, and probably contributed to my infertility.  I don’t want to go into the gory details too much, but suffice it to say, I was quite miserable, and extremely disappointed.  Somehow, in my confused little brain, I had had it all figured out that by marrying and having children and providing them with a good home, I would be making up for certain things that had been lacking in my own early life.  And I would be helping to make the world a better place.

During this period in my mid-thirties, I began to realize that these expectations and fantasies about the life I was going to create were actually contributing to my disease.  I grieved the loss of my dreams (and many other losses that piggy-backed onto it) and began to gird up my loins, and make a firm and clear intention to change the way I saw my life, to change my expectations, to try to find a new way of seeing myself and my life.  To heal myself and begin again.

Everywhere I went during this period, I would constantly see a solitary grackle.  I must have seen grackles before, but never really noticed them or thought they were quite ordinary birds, perhaps because they are a simple blackbird in general lineament.  But upon closer observation, I noticed that they had lovely rainbow colors around their necks, a subtle iridescence within their black feathering, and a most startling, sparkling, vivid amber eye.  They made me think of a poem I'd read that included some phrase like, 'to pierce the sour rind' (of life).  I could taste that when I looked at the grackle.  Making the rounds of various parking-lots in my empty circle of household duties, I would spot a grackle again and again.  I began to think of grackles as a kind of ‘totem’ bird in my life. 

current reading

Gone to Croatan - this is an amazing collection of essays on the roots of alternative or counter-cultural communities in the United States.  When I began researching my familial roots and came across my connections to the Melungeons, Delaware Moors, Native Americans and early western european and African Americans, I realized that there were definite cultural elements in my own makeup that predisposed me to early interest in communal living (lived in an intentional community in my youth and by the way, it wasn't a 'cult'), in yoga, vegetarian diet (I am no longer a vegetarian, much to my great regret), a health regime based on closeness to nature, meditation, a view of the world, the universe and myself as a self-mirroring unity, and other non-mainstream cultural values, practices and beliefs.

Well, this collection of essays tells it all.  The first essay deals with a community of mixed Native Americans and others, characterized by a Moorish bias, called the Tribe of Ishmael who followed an annual migration path in what is now the midwest, subscribing a rough triangle between towns with names like Cairo, Mahomet, and Morocco.  They were marginalized and eventually obliterated in poverty by the incoming farming culture who despised their peripatetic, subsistence way of life. 

The essays also cover the Quakers and other antinomians in the early colonial environment, the roots of the American Revolution in the new proletariat communities of seamen, freed indentured servants and slaves, and others.  Initially, these 'crowds' - who had power unlike any in the US today, due to the complete absence of any kind of police forces or militia - as the book mentions, most of the militia men were a part of the 'crowds' - anyway, they worked together with the more respectable, settled landowners in the push for liberty, but after 1787, these populist groups began to be repressed and landowning values asserted predominance in the new republic. 

I think part of what forged the alliances among these people, is that so many of the early leaders of the American Revolution came from fairly low artisan classes, such as Benjamin Franklin's candle-maker father, who were bettering themselves but not so far removed from the new 'proletariat'.  The latter were particularly formed by the new mass of seamen as a class of land-free, wage-earning laborer.  Also, some of the lower levels of British gentry who found land opportunities in the colonies also wanted freedom.  But not everyone did, obviously.  There were plenty of Tories about, as well.  Anyway, the whole picture is much expanded by this book.

Many idealistic communities flourished, if briefly, in early America.  The ones we know most about now are the Shakers, the Amish and Hutterites, etc., who have actually survived the test of time.  Well, I guess not the Shakers.  But the book highlights a few others as well. 

I particularly found the Irish-African connections interesting.  All this and I've only read the first third of the book.

Night Train to Lisbon - this book is fiction by Pascal Mercier, and it's in translation.  The translation is not always very good, and in a way, I enjoy that because it gives me a window into how people are thinking in another language.  His name sounds French, but really I have no idea what language the book was originally written in.  One of the main threads of the novel is the idea that language shapes our thinking, and what it means to be attuned to that. 

The protagonist of the novel, Raimundus Gregorious, is a Swiss teacher of ancient languages - Greek, Latin and Hebrew - who becomes fascinated with Portugese and in particular with a dead Portugese philosopher, doctor and resistance fighter.  Gregorious travels to Portugal in search of this maestro of sensitive, self-revelatory, reality-penetrating prose, and finds him - explores and discovers him - through meetings with the people who were close to him in life.  As such, there is a bit more character-study in this book than I enjoy, BUT it is all so beautifully written that it is thoroughly worth the effort. 

Of course, everything Raimundo Gregorious discovers about Prado relates to himself as well, and I find the development of the character of the protagonist to be the one I am most interested in.  What I particularly love about this book is that it goes deep in the area of how much we are all related to one another and how much the past intersects with the present in our lives.  Since I am exploring how much the Spanish and Portugese Inquisition affected my own family, and this is all a new discovery for me, our family having denied our history for so many decades, this approach is very meaningful to me right now.

No Title - I have no titles to share on this, but yes, I am still doing a good deal of reading in the area of my Chinese interests.  Will post more about the 'Four Pillars' soon.

month of rabbit and 'awakening insects'

I love the name of the chinese half-month that begins today: month of awakening insects.  I have a Chinese therapeutic-music CD entitled 'Awakening Insects' and it is the most vibrant, energizing yet somehow ethereal piece of music I've ever heard.  Really, quite unlike anything else, and yet it vividly brings to mind those moments in nature when a chorus of insect-singing begins.

Of course, the awakening of the insects represents the return of life after winter's sleep.  The preceding half-month is called 'Spring Rains.'  What follows the Spring Rains?  The up-burgeoning of life!  But the return of life is still in its early stages.  Yang 'gains influence' as Yin begins to decline. 'Cold' has become 'cool,' with occasional slightly warm days.

This is the month associated with the Earthly Branch known as 'Rabbit.'  "The Rabbit is linked to the colour green, which is associated with the season of spring.  It is the colour of new life, tranquillity and relaxation.  It is said that dreams will end well if they feature the colour green since it is a lucky and influential colour."  (p. 19, Chinese Astrology, by Man-Ho Kwok - this is the one book to get if you are at all interested in investigating Chinese nature-wisdom.  I wouldn't call it 'astrology' since it has virtually nothing to do with the stars.  Unlike western astrology, this system really relies on seasons and time of day, basically with placement in space and time.  They do use a few fixed stars in one branch of the system.  Rather than 'Astrology' the 'Four Pillars' is more like a sort of 'Feng Shui' of the person.  I will be posting on Four Pillars soon.)

Anyway, interesting that we also celebrate the Rabbit at this time of year, here in the West, right?  And that we chose 'green' as the color of our money.

I've introduced a new category with this post: dao and chinese.  As some of you may know I have been an acupuncturist for the past 19 years, and a student of daoism.  I've scaled back my healing work in the past two years and have been doing less demanding work as a personal assistant/elder companion, which harks back to my earlier life.  I guess I must be a born caregiver, can't seem to get away from it.  But I am definitely pulled by this daoist system of healing and would like to do more with it in some way, shape or form.  So, one step in that direction may be to begin sharing this part of myself on this blog.