Asakiyume mita

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.

On the first day we spent together, my friend took me down to the edge of Yahuarcaca. That name goes with a group of lakes connected to the Amazon, los lagos Yahuarcaca, but she calls it/them río--Río Yahuarcaca. Like the main river, it inhales and exhales. The waters are at their highest in April or so, and then begin to recede. In June (when I was there this time) they're not at their lowest, but they've receded a good bit. So as you walk beside the water, you're walking in places where you'd be swimming at other times of year. You'd be waaaay under water in April, but in June you're on (more or less) solid ground, breathing air. The same trees that feed the terrestrial creatures drop fruit into the water to feed the water creatures at other times of year. They're watching over and providing for everyone.

"When the forest is flooded, this is a nursery for fish," my friend told me.



Wouldn't you feel safe there? A good place to grow big. It was the fishes' turn to be in this space a few months ago, but at that moment it was our turn. We're sharing the space, just time-slipped. Water creatures were swimming by and over me--time-slipped.

Trees must grow very wise indeed, presiding over two worlds like this. Think of the tales they can tell of all the creatures they watch over.

Genipa americana, known as huito in Spanish, é in Tikuna, is a very wise and generous tree. Francy told me it's a great-great-great grandparent of the Ticuna people.** So when she and her brother took me to meet a huito tree, I felt really lucky to meet it.

Its fruit is edible when ripe, and when unripe, it makes a blue-black protective dye (as described in this entry). In the blink of an eye, my friend's brother was up in the tree. He tossed down a couple of unripe fruits so we could grate them and make some dye back at their house.



**Online I found the story of this written out: Yoi and Ipi, two brothers, came to Earth when it was completely dark: they cut down the giant ceiba that was obscuring the sun, and all manner of plants and animals then were able to flourish. Yoi, the older brother, gave Ipi, the younger brother, the task of growing huito and then grating the fruits. Some of the gratings fell into the water and became fish, which later Yoi caught. The fish he caught became the Tikuna people.

I think I maybe shared earlier that the Tikuna see a linking between certain creatures of the land and certain creatures of the water: for example, river dolphins are linked with humans--every time a human dies, a dolphin is born, and every time a dolphin dies, a human is born. Thinking of the world population of humans versus the world population of river dolphins, the connection must be between only limited human populations.... maybe just Tikuna.

And they see a similar connection between manatees and tapirs. The symbol for Fundacíon Natütama, a Tikuna nonprofit, shows this with a manatee-tapir creature.

Another nonprofit active in the Colombian Amazon, Fundacíon Omacha, shared another story about manatees that they say is Tikuna--though when I ran it by my tutor, she'd never heard it, so... not sure. But I like the story, so here it is:

It's said that manatees start out as worms on a particular tree. They wrap themselves in leaves, making nests like the nests of the arrendajo bird (which, may I just say, is káurë in Tikuna, the name of the colonial person in "New Day Dawning"). After three months, the worms have the shape of manatees, but it takes a flash of lightning to cause them to fall from the tree into the water. The story concludes by saying that if you stop seeing those trees on land, you'll stop seeing the manatees in the water.

What happens on land affects what happens in the water, and what happens in the water affects what happens on land. Good to remember.

Here are Fundación Omacha's images for this story (plus the text in Spanish). (Originally posted on Twitter on September 12--link to that post here.)

I wanted to try to bring some of the good things that I saw in neighborhoods in Leticia to my neighborhood in western Massachusetts--the sense of (mild) commerce and work mixed in with homes, of people doing things by foot or small transport, right in their neighborhoods, interacting with each other in the spaces by their homes rather than life lived in a series of space stations (the home station, the work station, the shopping station, the kids' activities stations) only reachable in your spaceship, which you pilot through the vacuum of space.

To that end, I decided to press the little wagon that wakanomori had built for my bicycle into service to sell ice creams in the neighborhood. But not to earn money: for one thing, I already have a job that earns me much more. For another, I think it would be, shall we say, confusing for my neighbors. But selling things for a cause is okay: people are used to that idea. One of my neighbors was super enthusiastic about the idea and came up with the notion of choosing a different local cause each week to raise money for (and suggested that we do rounds once a week all through the summer). The advantage of two of us is that if one of us can't do it, the other one can take charge.

The Icicle Bicycle--not yet loaded with ice cream, but with a llama balloon.



So we launched the Icicle Bicycle! We've done it for three weeks now, and it's gotten (touch wood) really good reception so far. We have some repeat customers, and each week some new ones. We get parents with little kids, teens on their own, and adults. It's wonderful!

Last week was also Tanabata, Japan's version of the pan-East Asian star festival, which commemorates the one day a year when the Weaver Maid and the Oxherd Boy (aka the stars Vega and Altair) cross the Heavenly River to see each other. Japan celebrates it on July 7, and one of the traditions is to hang wishes on decorated branches of bamboo. So I invited people who were buying ice cream to hang wishes on a branch of, uhhh, burning bush:



I kept the branch in my front yard for a few days for people to enjoy, but rain was causing the wishes to fall off, so I took everything down, and I confess I read the wishes. And oh my heart, such a mix...

( Tanabata wishes )

Please join me in praying for all these wishes to be fulfilled, especially the one about the father.

And if you're in my neighborhood on a Friday around 6 pm, you can pick up an ice cream for a dollar ;-) This week's cause is our town library. I'll be away, but if it doesn't rain, the Icicle Bicycle will be making rounds.

I tuned into an episode of The Moth Radio hour about halfway through a segment called "The Hat," by Omar Musa, a Malaysian-Australian author, rapper, and poet. The things he said about machetes and words stuck with me enough that I want to share them--those things, and an almost fable-like story of his father, which comes in the middle.

First, the machetes. At one point, as a teenager, Omar goes to visit his grandparents in Borneo, and they go to some family land, and his grandfather has to cut a path for them to get to the house. Omar reflects that the parang, the Malay machete, is associated with piracy and headhunting, but as he saw his grandfather clearing the path, he has a different impression:

suddenly in my head I realized that the parang ... can be something that forges a path between places that don't usually connect, places that don't usually communicate.

Hold that thought for the end, when he talks about words. And now comes the entrancing story of his father:

So we get to this hut in the middle of the jungle, and there's a family of orangutans living there, and we have to shoo them out of the house. And my grandparents tell me that when my father spent time at this little piece of land, he would sit in front of the hut, and he would read the Quran with this very deep, mellifluous, beautiful voice, and suddenly dozens of orangutans and families of monkeys would start climbing down from the trees and sit in front of him like a rapt audience ... and listen to him reading the Quran.

I couldn't stop thinking of it: his dad, like Saint Francis, sharing sacred text with the animals. I could picture it so vividly, all those orangutans and monkeys, gathered round, listening.

And then the last part: when Omar goes to his cousin's wedding and his cousin asks him to come on stage and do some hip-hop:

"Hey Omar, I want you to get on stage, I want you to do that thing that you do, that type of poetry, that hip-hop, that thing that you do in Australia, I want you to perform for us for the first time."

So he does, and then afterward...

And I stood there, and they were cheering and applauding, and I went and I sat down next to my grandmother, and my grandmother looked at me with these piercing eyes, and she said, "You know, I never learned how to read or write ... I've been illiterate my whole life; I left home at the age of nine, and tapped rubber and lived on the streets ... but I have 150 poems in my head that I created when I was living out there, kicked out of home at the age of nine, A-B, A-B, pantoums, the traditional improvised form of Malay poetry. This poetry that you're doing now is like the poetry that I used to help me get through these hard times."

And it was then that I realized I had found my own parang, my own machete, my words, my words that could cut through worlds, that could cut through time and even generation.

And I thought that was brilliant, because it was was the cutting that was doing the connecting, the sharp slicing not to hurt but to cut down barriers, so that people can find a connection.

Link to the complete segment: "The Hat"

A friend on Tumblr introduced me to this short-film series by Cecile Emeke, "Strolling," which Emeke describes as "connecting the scattered stories of the black diaspora."

These videos let you fall into conversation with complete strangers. It's not really conversation, of course; it's monologue (even in the first one embedded below, each of the people takes turns talking to you-the-viewer rather than talking to each other), but the intensity with which they address you, and the inherent interest of the things they're talking about, make you feel like it's important you're there.

All of the conversations are with people of color, and so all of them talk about the experience of *being* a person of color--but not (mainly) in the United States: elsewhere. As aliettedb and others have pointed out, racism in the United States is not the only style and pattern of racism, and it's really enlightening to hear people talk about what it's like elsewhere.

But that's not the only thing that the people talk about by any means. The young woman in France talks about how what makes fast-food jobs so exhausting is the emotional effort of being sociable and smiling all the time, and about what makes something true, and the two in Jamaica talk about Patois and the language of education there, for example. I've only watched the two below, but I love them and intend to watch the rest, a bit at a time.