Asakiyume mita

Over on Mastodon I was made aware of the existence of this beautiful little zine, done in the traditional way (all printed on a single sheet of paper), Meditations with Insects: An Art of Noticing, so I decided to order it.

It came in a brown envelope with drawings of a beetle, small bird, and owl on it, and the sender was "Unfolding Connections."



It was everything I hoped for and more. The main text directs readers to quiet, curious attention to creatures often ignored or disliked:



And then, wonder of wonders, there's text on the reverse side, too: quotes about recognizing and appreciating the presence and wisdom of other beings--unfolding connections to make ;-)



That quote has a typo, but it's the one that got me choked up reading it aloud to Wakanomori.

I really loved this one, too:

"the world is full of persons
only some of them human
and life is always lived in
relationship with others"

--Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World

The creator, Kristian Brevik, has a Patreon, and he also makes lanterns of sea creatures that when lit up show the creatures' skeletons. Seems like a very cool guy.

And here's a photo from a week or so ago of some bright yellow coltsfoot pushing up through the leaf litter.



... I offer these as necessary nourishment in the harrowing landscape we're navigating right now.

(about half of these are real)

Netflix content notes

Peril
Language
Noteworthy soundtrack
Brief smoking
Introverted
Unstable
Suspenseful
Mutable
Provocative
Dizzying
Loneliness
Bravado
Last chances
Gritty
Barren
Fleeting
Gone

Billy Behind Me, who was a character in the Patricia Russo flash story "Mena, Until," which I talked about back in February, makes an appearance in the second of this trio of short poems.

I like everything about that poem. I have a broken pot whose shards I want to try drawing with (though I have brilliant street chalks, so I don't really have the need--but it's the principle of the thing).

The end makes me think of how we talk with people when we can't talk to them in the waking world anymore. How we talk in dreams. Makes me think of what Ailton Krenak says, and about what the characters say in Embrace of the Serpent, and also of the story The Lathe of Heaven.


Some music for you: Baixi-Baixi

Last week I saw No Other Land (2024; Oscar-winning documentary on destruction of a group of small hamlets in the West Bank, filmed from 2019 through 2023).

In it, at one point the father of Basel Adra (one of the two main young men making the documentary) takes several of the children in the extended family to school in a van. (The school is later destroyed.) The children are chanting in the van, they say--

We have grass; it exists.
We have a mountain; it exists.
We have a chicken house; it exists.
We have a rock; it exists.

There may have been other things they say--those were the ones I scrawled down in my notebook in the theater.

This could be something similar to playing "I spy with my little eye" ("I spy with my little eye something striped!" and then people guess what you see). Or part of a nursery rhyme or something that doesn't rhyme when you translate it into English.

But to me, watching that movie, it felt like a verbal way of touching, and touching base with, things that are really there and won't disappear. It felt like a spell, even.

Although the chicken house does, in fact, get bulldozed.

I am loving Saint Death's Daughter, by C. S. E. Cooney, with a powerful love and a deep wonder. No description I encountered of the book before starting it comes anywhere near doing it justice, including the author's own, so I'm not going to try. Instead I'll tell you about its effect on me and some of the things it's done so far. (I'm a little more than a third of the way through the story.)

I was enjoying from the start its humor, both in language and in in-story encounters, and its tenderness and darkness, and how deftly and quickly I knew and loved the characters--there were some dramatic moments, some regrets for the main character, Lanie Stones, and some sweet successes--and THEN there was a tremendously dramatic moment, and I realized I was experiencing the story with the sort of bated breath and tenterhooks feeling that I haven't had since childhood. In that moment there were several swooping twists and turns that I totally didn't expect, and yet they were completely right and justified, if you know what I mean. They had been prepared for, but I hadn't noticed the gears and scaffolding of the preparation, not because I wasn't reading closely but because it had been in beautiful plain sight all along, and I'd been admiring it for other reasons. As if the painting on the wall of a woman with a sword is actually a woman with a sword--I didn't notice! But of course!

To be transported like that by a story, it's like flying.

But it's not plot magic for just for plot magic's sake, there's profound stuff going on too, about different understandings of love and everything it can shade into, and about regret/remorse/recompense, and about children and adults, but none of that stuff is blared out like an object lesson; it's not a burden the story's carrying-it's all just part of the weave.

Have some wonderful lines.

Here, a terrifying character observes her beloved:

Nita’s gaze tracked the gyration, a terrifying tenderness colonizing her face.

Here, a conversational gambit typical of children:

“Why not?” repeated her remorseless niece now. Datu was entirely capable of repeating those same two words for the rest of the night.

Here, curiosity described in a way that lingers:

“And what is it,” breathed the Blackbird Bride, her colorless eyes brilliant with calamitous curiosity, “that you ask?”

Here, a father (Mak) saying to his young daughter that choices have consequences:

“Mumyu is not here,” said Mak flatly. “Mumyu made her own choices, and her choices found her out. We are here. You and I and your aunt and the Elif Doéden. We are all here together in this place. We are in great danger. We must trust and respect each other. We must treat each other as allies.

Anyway--thoroughly enjoying it. And the sequel, Saint Death's Herald, comes out next month!

Earlier this week, I not only got to see this remarkable film, I was able to participate in a video-link Q&A with the director, Cero Guerra.



At the start of the film an indigenous man dressed in traditional garb (which is to say, just with necklace, arm bands, and a loin cloth) watches as a canoe approaches. The year is 1909. The canoe holds a desperately ill German ethnographer and is paddled by his indigenous (but more assimilated) assistant. "Go away!" the man on the shore shouts, but the assistant, Manduca, addresses him by name: "Are you Karamakate, the world mover?" Manduca says that no shaman has been able to heal his friend Theodore Koch-Grünberg: they all say that only Karamakate will be able to. "I'm not like you," Karamakate replies. "I don't help whites." But eventually he does agree to help.



In 1940, this same Karamakate, now an old man, is approached by a different Westerner, the botanist Evan Schultes (whom we find out is from Boston--he's a fictionalization of Richard Evans Schultes, who, Wikipedia says, "is considered the father of ethnobotany"). Evan is searching for the rare flower that Karamakate had sought out to heal Theo.



These two timelines and stories ripple in and out of each other like the water of the river.



The harrowing effect of colonialism on indigenous people is the large topic, but the near-at-hand one is the attempts of the main characters to understand one another.

In the Q&A, Guerra said he shot the film in black and white to capture the feeling of the actual Theodore Koch-Grünberg's sketches and photographs and also to escape the easy touristic appeal that comes with color filming. Also, he said, when you're filming in black and white, there's not the same distinction between people and forest--everything shades into each other... which goes with the world view there.

Many languages get spoken in the film, both colonial ones and indigenous ones, and among the indigenous ones spoken was... Tikuna! The character Manduca speaks in Tikuna,** and a couple of times I could understand whole sentences he said (... only a couple of times--but I could also catch the odd word here and there). I was so pleased! And I was mind blown when I was talking about the film with my tutor and she said that the actor is her uncle! He's her mother's brother.

( some quotes from the film )

The movie is available to see for pay through Youtube and Apple, and is free (but with ads) on Tubi. I highly, highly recommend it.

**I've seen him before: he played the shaman in Frontera Verde.

This flash tale is about hope in a world of hot rain and ashes. Hope in a cold bucket. Hope actuated by a bright, sharp trowel. A waitful silence.

And Mena’s walking faster than I would have thought she could. The soles of her shoes glint silver in the gray afternoon light.

It's about Billy Behind Me. Look after him, Mena says. But when he touches the narrator's hand, we can feel it's a mutual looking after.

Mena, Until, by Patricia Russo

A Christmas story by Aster Glenn Gray that I only got to reading now, in February--but just two days until Valentine's Day, and it's a romance, so that fits! And it's very wintery where I am right now, which fits in with the setting of the story, a snowed-in chateau.

George and Nikolai have been rivals (and secret lovers) in a US-Soviet game of spy-versus-spy for 20 years, but it's December 1991 now, and the jig is about to be up for those sorts of games ... but not before the two find themselves thrown together at a chateau, rented out to a toff Englishman (he goes by the name of Biffy) who's hosting the most massive of Christmas parties there. The chateau was supposed to be abandoned; they've both come looking for compromising letters...

The touch is light and the atmosphere is comfy (so much good food!), but the mood, while never heavy, is nostalgic, with a touch of melancholy. Maybe two or three touches. But there's humor, too, as when they have a race back to the Rudolph Christmas sweater that George has been lent (all houseguests are given a Christmas sweater for the duration), and Nikolai gets there first:

George chased after [Nikolai] and tackled [him] just a hair too late: Nikolai had already flung himself on top of the sweater. They tussled briefly, George trying to distract Nikolai by kissing the side of his face. But Nikolai, giggling, slipped away like an eel, and he danced away and pulled the sweater over his head before George was back on his feet. ​

George gave in gracefully. “You look hideous,” he informed Nikolai. ​Nikolai proudly smoothed the sweater “You are grieving the loss of your pompom,” he replied, giving Rudolph’s [pompom] nose a gentle squeeze.

It's a quick read and good fun--and it had a great eleventh-hour plot twist with regard to who-all is after the letters, which I enjoyed.

Asa-no-ha moyō

My third kid, Little Springtime, was born in Japan. Friends there gave us baby clothes for her that had this pattern on it. We were told that traditionally, this was a protective pattern that will keep babies safe.



I thought I'd like to make a quilt with this pattern for my arriving-in-April grandchild, so I wanted to find it online so I'd be sure to get it right. But I didn't know the name for the pattern. Imagine my amusement when I found out it's 麻の葉文様, asa-no-ha moyō. "Moyō" means "pattern"; "ha" means "leaf"; and asa (麻; also read "ma") means .... drumroll please... cannabis! (but also hemp or flax; all these things are related). In fact 麻 is the first character in the compound 麻薬, mayaku, which means "narcotic."

Japan is very strict with regard to drugs. It's something universities here have to counsel students who are going over on an exchange year about: certain ADHD medications are prohibited--Adderall, for example--and certain things that are over-the-counter medications in the United States are also prohibited (e.g., Nyquil). And let's not even talk about cannabis possession.

But in olden times, people knew another truth ;-)

A father's face

My dad frequently buys ham at the deli in his local Hannafords, so he's a familiar face there. One middle-aged woman behind the counter is always friendly to him. Yesterday, when he was there, she said,

"Do you know why I like you so much?"

"Is it that we know each other from somewhere else?" he asked.

"No--it's that you remind me of my father." She gestured to her chin to indicate my dad's beard. It turned out her father passed away two years ago. She and my dad got to talking more. "You've inherited his friendly ways," my dad said to her. It turns out she's from Iraq.

Sometimes people are angels in our lives, and I feel like he was one for her and she was one for him.