not native fruit

love medicine by louise erdrich

i've just finished reading Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich.  this was her first novel, i believe, and as such, it is rather raw yet extremely beautiful and powerful at the same time.  this book has got to be a classic.

part of the reason i feel it has been so important for me to read, is because it's given me a chance to process a lot of my feelings about the native american element in my own life: my feelings of loss, because my life took me away from 'native america' for so many years and yet has brought me around full circle back to it.  so there is wonder, grief, regret, joy and appreciation in the experience for me.

also, this book allows me to vicariously live the life i might've lived - or something close to it, since our tribe does not have any reservations anymore - if my coloring had been a little different so that i was more obviously a part of our group, or if my mother had given me more instruction in the correct etiquette to observe.  i really do understand why she may have hesitated to tell me the truth in the first place.  you had to be there, perhaps, to know what i mean.  but the book allowed me to imagine what may have happened in the lives of Angie, Philip, the Hammonds, Andersons, Strausses and Moores.  It allowed me to remember Ronny R, Christine K, the Scul---ys, and others.  not that i would have wanted to have their lives, because, in fact, they were very difficult.  i've had my problems too, but i've also had the way out.

in the book, there is a character who doesn't know his parentage.  he's been adopted and raised by the woman who is really his great-aunt, a woman known for taking in strays.  the reader is clued in from the beginning as to who his mother is, so the reader knows he really is a part of the family, but the character doesn't learn the identities of his mother and father until the end of the book. his process, while somewhat different from mine, is also somewhat similar, and i found it helpful to walk through that process with him. 

one of the important lessons for me in his story is to recognize, along with him, that the child (of his mother) who was acknowledged has had a very tough road to tread, while he, who was her secret child, slipped under the radar and was allowed to live his own life, be his own self, and find his own way back to his parents and ultimately to himself.

i found the whole book really healing for me to read.  not always easy, by any means.  but extremely rewarding.  i highly recommend it to anyone interested in native american lives, or just in human life, or simply in the most masterful level of writing.

geriatric dementia

Someone asked me the other day, "What difference does it make whether I take my 87 year old aunt to the tea-room on one Tuesday and to the cafe the next Tuesday? She doesn't remember anything!  I might just as well take her to the same place every week, or even not take her out at all!"

My answer to this question - or rhetorical question really - is that: She Has A Good Time While It's Happening !  So what, if she doesn't remember?  Someday we're all going to be dead and then none of us will 'remember anything' - so why not just skip our whole lives? 

Were you planning on doing something fun over the weekend?  Well, just skip it because someday you're not going to remember it anyway.

What is this big emphasis on remembering?  I'll bet none of us remembers three-quarters of our lives anyway - all those moments getting in and out of the car, walking up or down the stairs, commuting, taking a shower, etc - do we remember all of those moments? 

This is so important to remember when working with the elderly.  It doesn't 'not matter.'  Just leaving someone to sit day after day in the same room is not going to create the quality of experience that taking them out for a change of scene once in a while - even though it is something of a drag for you - will do for them.  No, they won't remember, but they may just have a nice feeling inside for a half an hour or so.  Is that too little to count?

My experience is that they 'do' remember - while they're there.  When I take my aunt to the downtown tea-room, she remembers the fun times she had meeting 'the girls' from the office there on Wednesdays - it kind of broke up the work-week for them, gave them something to look forward to, and she recounts different reminiscences of her friends.  She comments on the fashions the office girls today are wearing.  She analyzes their facial expressions, their makeup and hairstyles.  She makes witty remarks and we both laugh.  Then she goes back to her room at the old-age home.

The next week we go to the cafe out on the avenue and she admires the trees, notices the birds and flowers when we find a nice table outdoors.  She enjoys seeing the mothers with their babies in strollers who are also meeting at the cafe.  She laughs at the teenagers at the next table, awkward and gawky, looking and sounding like teenagers always have done, when they are acting and feeling so grown up, drinking coffee after school at the cafe.  It's an entirely different experience from the tea-room, and from the old-age home too. 

These experiences lend some texture to her days.  She has plenty of peace and quiet and vistas of nature at the home.  It's a good place, a nice place full of good, nice people.  But sometimes my aunt just wants to remember that once she had a life, wore high fashion, was a mother with a baby in a stroller, was a teenager stopping for a treat with friends after school.  Even though she forgets again very soon, at least she could remember for a little while. 

panchakarma

i just finished my annual panchakarma cleanse. Panchakarma means 'five cleansing actions.'  it's a rejuvenating and healing process from the ayurvedic tradition of Inida, involving diet, herbs, purgatives, sweating, lymphatic-style massage, sinus cleansing, and more, administered over a time span of about a month.   i've lost ten pounds or more, plus i've lost toxins galore.  I feel great!  Let me tell you, it isn't exactly easy to do, but with persistence it gets easier every time, and has helped me to make some necessary changes in my regulator diet and lifestyle.  my practitioner has a fantastic line of products - without exaggeration the best herbal products I have ever used - Sarada's Ayurvedic Remedies.  Here is her website.

Just before I began the cleanse, I had the flu, so it's been about a month of being caught up in the process of working with my physical health.  I've been making daoist perfumes to handle the spiritual side of things.  They are also very effective, not to mention extremely pleasant.  I learned this technique from my daoist medicine teacher, Jeffrey Yuen, of the Jade Purity School. 

Pica, Lori, Carrie, Peter, Dave, Yemi, Dick, Beth and other supporters of my site, if you think you'd like a personalized daoist perfume (for free of course) please email me.

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. 

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.

little miss by the day

"The older I get the more convinced I become that the most fascinating persons in this world are those elusive souls whom we know perfectly well but whom we never, as children say, 'get to meet.'  They slip out of countries, or towns - or rooms even - just before we arrive, leaving us with an inexplicable feeling of having been cheated or something that was rightfully and divinely ours.  That's the way I still feel about little Miss By-the-Day.  Perhaps you, too, have been baffled by the will-o'-the-wispishness of that whimsical young person.  Perhaps you, too, tried to find her but never did.

"She sounded so casual and commonplace when I first began hearing about her that I let her slip through my fingers.  She was just a little seamstress who had a 'vairee' odd way of speaking; it was quite a long time before I realized that everybody who spoke about her was unconsciously trying to imitate her drawling voice.  And then I noticed that everybody who mentioned her smiled dreamily and wondered where on earth she'd come from.  I kept hearing, just as you probably did, odd scraps of things she had said, droll adventures in which she had figured, extraordinary and fantastic tales about the house in which she lived.  And presently, when it was too late, I found myself listening to regretful murmurings of scores of baffled persons who couldn't find out what had become of her.  She suddenly vanished, leaving nothing behind her save her delectable house."

Little Miss By-the-Day was a novel by Lucille van Slyke, published 1919 by Frederick A. Stokes Co in New York.  It belonged to my mother and I discovered it among our books as a child and probably read it when I was about ten.  It's the story of a French girl of old New Orleans, who's parents (of course) die, and she is taken away from their grand old mansion by her grandfather to another manorial dwelling that has become quite ramshackle somewhere in the country-side.  While there, she nurses her aged ailing grandfather, and recreates her mother's gardens, based on her mother's original plan for the gardens in a book which she finds among her mother's things.

Later, after her grandfather has passed away, she becomes aware that she has inherited the old mansion in New Orleans, travels there and finds it has been subdivided into rooms and apartments and let out to immigrants.  (Immigrants always seem to get short shrift in our country, and they do in this book too.) She is not pleased, but moves into one of the apartments and takes work as a seamstress by-the-day in order to be able to pay off back taxes and fines to fully repossess the house.  Slowly she is able to regain possession of her house bit by bit. 

In her travels she finds destitute poets and sculptors and other artists and brings them home with her, ensconcing them in rooms in her mansion and trying to encourage them not to give up hope, to keep writing, sculpting, drawing, whatever.  She adds little touches around the house that she knows will cheer them up.  She has a certain something about her that some people at her various day-jobs notice while others do not.  In the end she restores her home, creates a community of happy successful artists (quite an accomplishment! lol) and is reunited with her long-lost love.

I was simply mermerized by this book as a girl, and have read it several times as an adult.  To me, as a healer, it is such a great book about healing! I feel that I learned the value of patience and time and process and synchronicity from her finding of her mother's garden plan and her ability to reconnect with her lost mother by recreating her garden.  Then she applies what she knows to her next challenge which is 'out in the world' - the restoration of her family's house to a place that protects and nurtures artists.  Gad, I loved this book!  Just had to tell you about it.

Also, might mention that it seems like I am doing something similar in my own life, which is really just too weird!

moroccan memorabilia - cosmetic case

A few months ago I was browsing at the elegant Moroccan import store in Berkeley, Sahara, when I saw something that jogged my memory.  They had several of these odd little wooden 'fortresses'  with turrets sticking up, in different sizes sprinkled throughout the store.  Made of wood, they looked like small medieval towers, complete with turrets.  It took a while, but at last the image surfaced.  We had something like that in the room with my great-grandmother’s things at home when I was a little girl. Not exactly the same, but similar.  Flat, though, not, like a tower.  Only like 'one side' of these little towers.  It had taken me many many years, but I finally figured out that it had been a sort of moroccan cosmetics case, not unlike an American woman's twentieth century ‘compact.’ 

I asked the very friendly proprietor what the towers were, and sure enough, he said, ‘to hold the makeup.’  I almost bought one, but it wasn't the same as what we'd had, so I decided not to. Then a few months later, I phoned and he said he now only had the largest one, and it was really expensive. I must have sounded disappointed, because he added that he would be going to Morocco soon, and he would pick up a few more, and I sould call pack in a few weeks.  So I did that, and when I called he told me that, lo and behold, he could not find any more of the compacts, but that he did still have one, very small one at home, and that if I wanted it, I could have it. 

He knows about me.  I'm that nutty lady with the Moroccan great-grandmother (maybe), and so he invited me to come in and take a look at the case.  I did, and to my joy and amazement, it was indeed the exact same wooden cosmetic case we'd had at home, the only difference being that ours was much much older, made of dark wood, and the markings were probably different.  I can't remember them exactly, but the markings on this case are much more distinctive, I think.  Anyway, it just means so much to me!  It's like a piece of myself has come home to me.  You know, I keep thinking it's a funny thing, but the part of our history that was denied to me, hidden, seems to have held all the power of the 'atmosphere' of our home, and so much power for me personally. Anyway, the man at Sahara says this one is Tuareg, from the Sahara.  But, long story short, here it is:

tears

She’s working on me through tears:

the hardness I pressed down

onto my lips, my cheeks, my eyelids,

She’s melting it, washing the hardness away.

So that now I see

so many things I saw and judged

and felt triumphant over,

over-looking them,

from my high vantage point of ‘beauty and brains’

the self-sufficiency of the ‘loner child.’

I’ve been now crushed down to join the mash

so that I can clearly see that all along they were me.

I should have seen, from all I saw

that I was headed there too

- heartbreak hotel - to

the land of the childless couple,

the unbudded and bitter.

Before I wed I saw them

standing there

at the front of the line

in the Boswell House,

the place where we later
ate our wedding dinner.

And they seemed attractive to me at the time,

they were tall and straight

and their stately heads,

erect and handsome,

radiated spiritual light,

yet their connection to each other

appeared intimate.

My own mother bailed from the childless canoe

with the help of doctors

and the prayers of a cloistered nun,

yet strangely, she didn’t seem to want me

once she got me,

or not completely - she felt ambivalent.

This is not uncommon among those

who struggle to attain some prize

and after getting it feel overwhelmed.

Now I’m rowing that old dugout.

And I know that

the real pain is coming

from the loss of ego

- it’s a lot to give up

those pictures of yourself:

the happy matriarch

beloved of all the clan,

the maker of biscuits

with upper arms and breasts like

loaves of bread,

near the frowsy milky heads

of your young

watching them grow to

adolescence,
young adulthood.

To accept the aloneness of the spiritual life.

Yes, Divine Mother is using tears now

to clear my eyes

so I can see.

*       *       *

This is one of my ongoing issues: our infertility.  It's all a long time in the past now.  I wrote this poem in 2002, and at that time I was newly at the age when there could be no further doubt that it wasn't going to happen.  I mean, conception.  So, in my mind, it makes sense that I would have another go-round with all the feelings at that time.

poetry workshop - moroccan nights

elizabeth m.,
short, round as a dumpling,
irrepressibly giggly,
full of mischief and fun,
you wave your small
dimpled white hands,
while talking, gesticulating,
keening with laughter,
sparkling with silver,
all the chingle-changle
of the spice-nights
of Morocco.
"what stories could you tell me
about our old home place?"
i ask, and you
tilt your head,
all your curls jingle-jangle
slant round your wide eyes,
turned towards me,
sly,
inviting
my question.

I wrote this poem as part of a poetry-writing workshop happening at our local Albany Library, which I attended last night for the first time.  I will include a brief description of our process at the end of this post.  But first I want to write a little something about Elizabeth M, and what she meant to me.

Elizabeth M. was one of my mother's 'old family friends,' and one of the very few people who tried to tell me about my heritage.  When I was about five years old, she came to visit us one morning decked out in silver coin jewelry.  My recollection is that she wore bracelets, necklaces and especially some kind of string of small silver coins around her face.  I remember her shaking her face slightly and all the little silver discs jingling.  I was thoroughly entranced.  I'm sure she came to our house dressed like this specifically to impress me.  I remember her as someone who almost frightened me, because her energy was so different.  She was so direct, irrepressible in her energy, playful beyond anything I'd ever encountered up til then and for a long time afterward.  She moved differently from other people, naturally and full of a kinetic energy like little elves or demons, she spoke differently, laughed differently.  I think I thought she was crazy, actually.  I was more than a little afraid, and yet kind of fascinated too.

the hundredth birthday

Last year I wrote a poem called 'Ruthie's Last October' and put it here on the site.  Well, 'Ruthie' is still going strong, and has passed her 98th birthday.  She may be smaller, more transparent and more child-like, but she is still here.

This reminds me of a client I treated quite a few years ago who was in his early eighties at the time.  His mother, 99, lived alone in a trailer about 60 miles away from where her son lived in Oakland.  Herbie took a bus down to see her about once a month.  He always said his mother seemed to be doing fine living alone down there, and the only thing that worried him was that there was never any food in her refrigerator when he would arrive.  He would always stock up the fridge with produce before he left to come back to Oakland, and remind himself that she was surrounded by community in the trailer park, and that people did look in on her regularly.  She was well-known down there, so he could relax a little.

One day after such a visit he said to me, "Mom is going to turn one hundred next month."  I said with feeling, "Oh, really!"  "Yeah," said he.  "Yeah, she's scared." 

I thought that a peculiar thing to say, but reflected to myself, 'I'm not surprised she's scared, who wouldn't be?  When you come up on one hundred you know your time can't be long, and you're going to have to face 'the big change' of death soon.  But I thought it would be interesting to find out just which particular aspect scared her as she approached her hundredth birthday, so I said,  "What is she scared of?"

"Oh, you know," he said.  "They might give her a party."