not native fruit

vedanta

I haven't been on the website for the past month because we've been really busy. We had a wonderful friend staying with us from two weeks from San Miguel d'Allende in Mexico.  He lived up here in the Bay Area for about twenty years but decided to go home a few years ago.  Home happens to be a very beautiful, magical place, and we're glad for him, and also glad that he can come here to visit from time to time.  He plays guitar beautifully and gave me a lovely recording on CD that someone spontaneously did during a cafe gig in San Miguel, so while the recording is not perfect, it is indeed very spontaneous like everything else about Leo.

We also had a visit from our spiritual Beacon, Amma, which was enchanting and intense at the same time.  After her visit, I recalled that a number of years ago Amma told me that if I wanted to study something I should study Vedanta.  At the time I felt a lot of resistance to that suggestion and persuaded myself that I didn't really want to study anything.  (My original question to her had had to do with going for a Ph.D., mostly because I didn't know what else to do with myself, frankly.)  Well, long story short, I've managed to enroll myself in a Vedanta class, and getting back to the study - yes, I've 'studied' before, but in a desultory sort of way - so I'm making the real effort now.  The only trouble with the study of Vedanta is that it makes me feel so peaceful and content that I have little motivation to contribute to the blog.

In other news, a number of close friends of mine are seriously ill.  One elderly friend was diagnosed two weeks before Thanksgiving with end-stage metastasized bone cancer.  They're still trying to find the source, which will determine treatment and prognosis. She is just as 'live' and chipper as ever - this woman is a phenomenon!  And much loved by many, a sort of 'spiritual teacher' in her own right.  So, I've been involved in trying to make her life more comfortable, procuring a wheelchair and walker, (although these have since been replaced by her health-plan), and making arrangements to get help for her with shopping, meal prep, driving, etcetera. 

I think I mentioned that my friend in Idaho is on hospice, although she seems to be in what they call 'a plateau,' which means nothing seems to be progressing at the present time.  She enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday, which makes me feel happy, and I'm hoping she'll have a good Christmas too. 

Then on Monday night of this week, another friend phoned to tell me the doctors think she has breast cancer, and so she is going to be undergoing further tests.  At the very least she has been also diagnosed with a degenerative bone disease, so one way or another she is not well.  You'd never know it to look at her, she's a little beauty and has a delightful personality.  Another one everyone loves. 

Another friend and co-worker of mine has been going through the end-stage with her father who died on Thanksgiving.  He had a brain injury and the treatment did not work to restore him, so they had a very intense month which ended with his death.  I substituted with her client for that month, so I was very busy with so much extra work. 

Then there are my various clients, two of whom are also in straits at the moment.  So, all in all, it's been a very busy time with many needs to be met.

devi and me

Over at my Great-Grandmother's Blog I recently posted this:

i've been thinking lately that it might make more sense to tell people that my mother was a kind of creole.  Doing research, i've discovered that academics identify a group centered in the chesapeake bay area as 'atlantic creoles.'  the atlantic creoles are a simiar ethnic makeup to the well-known louisiana creoles - french, english, spanish, african american, native american and sometimes caribbean.

Links to information about creole people can be found here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole_people

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_peoples

www.frenchcreoles.com/CreolesWeAre.html - this is a nice one with music, slide-show, videos, etc

Atlantic Creoles can be searched on Wikipedia, yielding lots of links, although they do not have a page devoted to them.  I first came across the term in a text on the Atlantic slave trade when I was researching my African roots.

I know I've said before that I am grateful to all my ancestors for leading me on a search for them because I've learned so much about the world, especially Africa, Native America, and all places with so-called mixed-race populations.  I've met so many wonderful people online through the course of the journey too.

But I think the single most significant discovery I have made so far has been to re-connect with the Moorish Science Temple, to read their original teachings and realize how I absorbed them at my mother's knee.  This has always been my 'true' spiritual education, despite the fact that, on a conscious level, my mother tried to make me into a Catholic, something I continuously found to be at odds with my own spiritual experience and nature, and which I struggled with for years, and made various sorts of peace with, only to feel dissatisfied at the core.  When I studied theology at GTU, I was very fortunate that the feminist movement was active at the time, because I found people who could hear me say that I felt my real spirituality had come to me from my mother's line, and was not from 'the church' but seemed, rather, to 'ride' along with it, rather like I was doing with Catholicism at the time.  The feminists agreed that women had their own spirituality, although what they meant, and what I meant, by that phrase were not exactly identical.  What I know now is that my mother had a dual religious upbringing - one in the Catholic church, which was the societally-validated norm (in highly Irish-Catholic Philadelphia), and the Moorish Science Temple, which her father's church of choice.

My reconnection with the Moorish Science teachings and my almost irrational drive to find out 'the secret' and reconnect with my roots leads directly to my present spiritual path, with Amma,and Devi spirituality, out of south India.  My grandfather would be thrilled, and as for me, I feel ever-so-much, at long last, at home.

working with the aged, by wendell berry

i work with the elderly and i liked this passage from wendell berry's 2000 book, Jayber Crow, on the subject of elderly customers at the barber shop:

"But I must say I always liked having the old ones around.  I sort of had a way of collecting them.  There was a long string of them who made a regular sitting place of my shop after they got too old to work.   I came to feel a tenderness for them all.  This was something new to me.  It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughened old faces.  They had known hard use, nearly all of them.  You could tell it by the way they held themselves and moved.  Most of all you could tell it by their hands, which were shaped by wear and often by the twists and swellings of arthritis.  They had used their hands forgetfully, as hooks and pliers and hammers, and in every kind of weather.  The backs of their hands showed a network of little scars where they had been cut, nicked, thornstruck, pinched, punctured, scraped, and burned.  Their faces told that they had suffered things they did not talk about.” 

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: