not native fruit

new year of the rabbit

Year of the Metal Rabbit, to be 'exact' (a 'nice' 'metallic' 'quality' - in fact, all of 'these words' are 'metal' words).  I picture the Metal Rabbit on a mountainside beneath the full moon.  The Rabbit in the Moon, the presence of minerals and metals in the mountain, the stars - a cold white light in the heavens - all of these are associations for Metal and for Rabbit.  Metal can be harsh, precise, exacting, but the Metal Rabbit is subtler and less heavy-handed than  Metal Tiger, more decorous, polite, and diplomatic.  I like my Rabbits to have a sense of humor about them, a certain warmth and personable quality, hence the slightly comic grin.  In the case of people born in the Year of the Rabbit, this friendliness is more an appearance than a reality.  They do care about others, at least theoretically, but they are intensely private and like a lot of alone-time.  They will be solicitous and do things for others but usually with a certain quality of reserve.  They'll create a nurturing pleasant atmosphere, which they offer to near and dear ones, yet need to enjoy on their own as well. 

So, how does my New Year begin?  Well, without my special friend, Risa, who passed away on January 22nd.  It was indeed very much expected.  One might even say she did very well in terms of lasting as long as she could.  She passed on with her values intact, and that is saying a helluva lot.  She was a magical person, and I would expect she will be missed.  But it must also be said that she left a legacy of positivity all around her, and I'm sure that will help her soul-survivors to continue in her foot-steps.  She taught the dance-steps, and now it's up to us to continue the dance, perhaps to improvise and embellish her steps.  I'm thinking especially of her fifteen year old son.

What else?  Working a lot, but enjoying it, so that's okay.  Gotta bring in those clams, but it can be fun at least some of the time. 

dalva and crazy horse

My husband has read the Mari Sandoz book Crazy Horse: the Strange Man of the Oglalas two or three times and has always encouraged me to read it as well.  So, finally, just a few weeks ago I took out Larry McMurty's book, Crazy Horse: A Life on CD's from the library and was able to hear it being read while commuting through the park to work - about a 45 minute trip - twice a week, and also while driving on any other little errands or visits.  It was only three disks and went fast.

In the meantime, I was reading a memoir called Off to the Side by an author named Jim Harrison, whom I'd never heard of, but then I don't keep up with the NY Times Best Sellers List.  I have a more Daoist approach and let the Dao brings books to me. :-) And this is an example of how that process works!  I still haven't finished the memoir, but I liked it so much that I decided to try one of Harrison's novels, and as luck would have it, Dalva was the first novel to come into my hands.  And who is one of the featured characters of the major sub-plot?  Crazy Horse.  So the story of Crazy Horse, and his friend He Dog, and the military outpost of Fort Robinson - all of this was fresh in my mind as I read Dalva.  I've visited Fort Robinson once, by the way, knowing nothing of Crazy Horse's death there, but feeling averse to 'the energy' as they say.

Anyway, Dalva is a masterpiece of writing, most of it first-person narrative with a female voice (Dalva's), told in flashbacks to adolescence and other stages of life from a 45-year old standpoint.  The central section of the book is narrated by a crazy professor who is researching the journals of Dalva's great-grandfather, an early comer to the Sand Hills area of Nebraska, and someone sympathetic to the Sioux, in fact an agonized witness to their demise.

I find it interesting that I've characterized the professor, Michael, as 'crazy' and that this was also the appellate of Crazy Horse.  Harrison mentions that for the Sioux the word 'crazy' really meant something closer to 'enchanted' or 'magical.'  Well, the professor's academic mind is something like fly-paper, everything sticks to it, and his personal mind is very mobile, not being undergirded by a strong character.  He is thoroughly opportunistic, desperate and needy, but talented!  Harrison does a marvelous job in capturing the chaos of someone like Michael.  In fact, all of Harrison's characters are rich, nuanced and feel thoroughly authentic.  Despite Michael's failures, Dalva and her family are very kind to him, protective and nurturing, rather like the attitude of the Sioux towards those they regarded as 'crazy', such as Dalva's great-grandfather, a johnny-appleseed-Methodist Minister whome they saw as 'too strange to kill.'

Much of the book takes place in natural settings around the Niobrara River, the kind of country I just love and tried to depict in my own novel, Desert Sanctuary.  Harrison recreates the vitality of life lived close to nature.  Anyone who has ever experienced such a life will be grateful to him for this book, and other readers will appreciate the window onto a life that is still available here and there in the west.

What an incredible book!  And what a wonderful coincidence to have read McMurty's Crazy Horse: A Life just before reading Dalva.

happy new year

  Happy New Year!  To me, a tree is the best symbol of a new year.  The way it rises up from a single point and then spreads out!  It's a visual image of expansion, growth, new activities, and also continuance.  The form is not that different from year to year, and it arises from the old rootstock.

This is an old shrub of ours that has morphed over the years into this lovely, twirling form.  This year it is utterly loaded with red berries of a color so luscious, so full of passion and energy that I like to think of it as my image for the New Year. 

Wishing you, and everyone, all the best in the coming year.

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.