Asakiyume mita

Today “The Bee Wife” is available! You can get it from all the usual suspects (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, etc.) for 99 cents, or if you’d prefer to get it directly from me, drop me a message here or by email.

It’s the story of Florian, a beekeeper whose wife (Joy) has just died, and the swarm of bees that attempts to comfort him. Here’s what they do (this is what I read at the Mythic Delirium 25-plus-one-year anniversary reading):

( Death is a law that cannot be broken )

Happy mid-Autumn festival, one day late! Please enjoy this Google doodle that was only shown to people in East Asia. In the United States Google was busy urging us to register to vote.

It was a lovely harvest moon--with a bite taken out of it in these parts, due to a partial lunar eclipse. Like a ghostly version of the moon cakes made in its honor.

Some time ago I learned how to ask questions using "Why" in Tikuna. I gave some sample questions (Why is the cat happy? Why are you tired?) and my tutor went to town, giving me *lots* of why questions. There was a theme...

Why don't you listen?
Why don't you listen to your grandparents when they want to give you advice?
Why don't you pay attention to your parents?
Why did you go without telling me?
Why don't you want to?
Why don't you want to eat?

There were others that didn't fit the theme, but those were so salient! I had a feeling these were things my tutor had heard a lot. If I memorize those, I will know how to nag a teenager in Tikuna ;-)

Recently my college-aged nephew was at my house, helping me smash hickory nuts. We smashed enough to get a cup of nutmeats, and then we made a hickory nut shortbread, yum. I sent a picture of my nephew to my tutor, who remarked that he was cute. I said he was two years younger than she is, just twenty years old. "Veinte añitos!" she said, "Waooo!" --I like that Spanish can do that: turn years (años) into cute little years (añitos). Twenty cute little years. Twenty adorable years. Twenty yearlets.

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.

In order for me to learn how to say things in Tikuna, my teacher sends me short recordings over WhatsApp. I then save them in files on my phone and computer and listen to them over and over and try to copy what she's saying.

These recordings are so, so charming, they always make me smile. She starts off with good morning, good afternoon, good evening (in Spanish), and in the background there may be music, or kids playing, or the sounds of cooking, or the sound of rain, or birds and insects. Sometimes she's whispering because she's sending me a message late. I never realized how VERY QUIET my own environment was until I started getting these lively recordings--such a gift.

And then there's how she frames what she's teaching me. She had just explained to me how to say "I want to eat pineapple (followed by fish, and then grilled chicken--"I'm getting hungry!" I told her), and next she wanted to tell me how you would ask someone "Do you want to eat pineapple?" She introduced the phrase by saying, "When you want to ask someone if they want to eat pineapple, for example, your niece, your child, your uncle... [brief pause], your husband ... [another pause] your dog, your grandfather, your grandmother, you ask--" ( want to know how to ask it? )

I was grinning and grinning at that very broad and inclusive list. She's very close with her nieces and her boyfriend's nieces; I'm not surprised she put them first ^_^

Today was my weekly trip to my dad's in upstate NY, and I stopped at a small supermarket to pick up some things for lunch.

The guy ahead of me in the checkout line--tall, bearded, father of a young-teen daughter who was bagging for him--had a tattoo on his skull, curving around his left ear, that said "WORK HARDER."

What the--? Is it an admonition for the rest of us? A reminder or motivation for himself ... that he can only see if he looks in a mirror? In the alternate reality I conjured up to explain this mysterious tattoo, some of us are perpetually indentured out for hard labor--okay, that part's already with us, but the alternate part is that the Company or the Institution or the Unit or whatever tattoos "WORK HARDER" on people as a punishment for not meeting quota. Late-stage capitalism's scarlet letter(s).

But in our reality, that guy most probably *chose* that tattoo, so ...

He paid for $230 worth of groceries with 50-dollar bills (the cashier checked each one) and his daughter had a sweatshirt that said "Lourdes Camp,"*** so ~those~ details sent my mind winging in a different direction: They are a Latin-Mass-attending Catholic family that want to keep their purchases out of the eyes of Big Corporations and who furthermore believe good works mean snap to it! Stop slacking! The girl was wearing a surgical mask, though (the dad wasn't), which somewhat confounded the profile I was developing.

I am willing and eager to hear ~your~ speculations.

***Turns out to be a summer camp for underprivileged children, which keeps its Catholic affiliation hidden until you get to the "about" page (although with that name...)

I got five questions from osprey_archer!

1. What's a skill that you're proud of having?

... I'm realizing that it's hard to write an answer to this because as soon as I start composing in a direction, I think, Now you really sound like an insufferable asshole.

Am I perhaps proud of the skill of being able to guess when I'm about to sound like an insufferable asshole? ... Mmmm, I am not particularly proud of that. And I'm not even sure if my assessment is correct, so.

So ... skill implies something that you've worked on and honed--so not, say, a one-off accomplishment, and not something that's just part of your personality without your particularly exerting yourself.

Okay, how's this: I don't know if I'm proud, exactly, but it gives me great joy and exuberance to have discovered, in my fifties, that it's possible to learn multiple languages more or less simultaneously well enough to read them and attempt rudimentary communication in them. It literally feels like having developed a new sense, like my brain has changed its shape. ... Other people knew this delight from a young age, but not me. And there's something about coming to it later in life--you can be very consciously grateful, appreciative.

2. What's a treasured memory?

Sleeping together as a family on summer nights in Japan--the tactile-ness. The in-out of our breathing, together; our hearts are beating, together. Our foreheads are touching, or someone has an arm flung this way, or someone's toes are touching someone else's calves. Outside, insects are singing.

3. Do you have any unusual yearly traditions?

Not really; I have a hard time repeating things cyclically. For a while our family did Boston's Walk for Hunger yearly, but that's not a very unusual thing, and anyway, we since stopped. There are certain things I like to forage when the time is right (cattail pollen in June, chestnuts and hickory nuts in September and October), but I'm not consistent.

4. If you could have a telepathic companion animal, what kind of animal would you want?
I waver between something small enough to sit on my shoulder and something large enough that I could drape my arm over its shoulders. Much as it would be fun to have a telepathic connection with a dolphin (hello Ring of Endless Light) and fascinating to have one with a celphalopod, I think I'd prefer to have a connection with a terrestrial animal because delightful as water is, I can't breathe in it or even keep air in my lungs for as long as dolphins and other water-living mammals can. OTOH, if there are some telepathic marine creatures out there who are hankering for a connection, I withdraw that caveat! Come to me, friends!

... I guess not someone really small, like a tardigrade. I want to be able to see my companion. Probably someone adapted to the type of climate I live in--hello coyotes, bobcats, foxes, bear, deer, squirrels, chipmunks, mice. And I don't want to exclude birds, though I think I would want a very friendly type of bird for an animal companion--someone like a catbird or chickadee, or like the starling that drank the last of my sister's wine the other day.


5. Favorite museum?

Without a doubt, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

Anyone else like some questions?

When started my Livejournal in 2006, I asked the ninja girl--at that time 16 years old--to make me an icon. "Draw me as a wanderer with a little gray in her hair," I said. She created this picture:



Not only have I used that as my default icon for 16 years now, but I've used it on other sites, too--so much so that I really think of it as me.

Today I received this mother's day portrait from Little Springtime--who is currently 29 (she was 13 back in 2006). She did it on a form they had at the local convenience store for kids to do portraits of their mothers--you can see she's given her age at the bottom right. When I got this, I at first thought it was manga art from a magazine. And then I realized it was my icon! I love it.

A project I haven't touched in a while was to read through some folktales from Amazonia. The other day I got back to it. I'm lucky to have the book in two languages: Spanish (the language it was written in) and English:



The English translation is obviously easier for me to read, but it misses certain details, and the English book fails to give certain information--for instance, the names of the people from whom the tales were collected:



Also, the English sometimes elides over details ("cómo conseguía las palometas, doncellas y sábalos tan deliciosos" gets reduced to "how she always managed to get such delicious fish"). Both books have indexes at the back with the Latin names of the plants and animals mentioned (more extensive in the Spanish version), so you can look up what they look like. You want to know what a palometa looks like? Well, search on "Mylossoma duriventris" (turns out to be Mylossoma duriventre, but close enough) and you will see it!

(here it is--pretty!)


The Spanish version also contains illustrations by Rember Yahuarcani López, an artist of Huitoto ethnicity. Here is one of his anacondas:



In this story, a lonely girl wanders out into a pond up to her waist each day to collect the fruit of the aguaje...

It may have looked like this... I can picture the scene thanks to knowing that "aguaje" is Mauritia flexuosa, often called in English a Moriche palm:



Imagine you're wandering out in the water... the fruit you're collecting, which float on the water, look like this:



They hang in luxuriant bundles from the palm:



... so you're gathering your aguaje fruits, and a handsome young man comes up to you--he's fallen in love with you! And you fall in love with him too... but he is an anaconda.

Your parents and younger siblings are willing to turn a blind eye to your remarkable luck bringing home piles of fish (supplied for you by your anaconda boyfriend), but your older brother is suspicious, discovers the truth.... and shoots your boyfriend!

But *you*, meanwhile, are pregnant! And in the fullness of time you give birth to some healthy anaconda babies! (Anacondas give birth to live young, as it happens.)

(they take after dad)


Thanks to your asshole brother, you are a single mom, but your parents support you and build you wooden cradles for your babies and help you look after them until they're old enough to live in the pond. When the babies cry for you from the pond, you go feed them, or, as the Spanish puts it, you offer them your breast.

Your children are very loving and keep supplying your family with huge piles of fresh fish. Happily ever after? But how about some justice for their poor slain father?

... Hmmm, well, to get my mind off revenge, let me share a link to more of Rember Yahuarcani López's art: here you go

And what the heck: a hot link, via Twitter

I read a play, Our Lady of Kibeho, by Katori Hall. It's about three girls in a Catholic secondary school in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1981, who have visions of the Virgin Mary. The play is beautiful--sharp and funny and light and deep and sad and true and profound, but not at all pretentious, if you can believe it. Here's just one quote, from one of the visionaries:

I saw a girl. Running down a hill. She had legs so long they could take her into tomorrow. She had feet so quick they could cut down blades of grass.

The girl is herself, but the vision gets grim, as she sees her own death. That was one of the striking things about the visions of Kibeho for the rest of the world--that they predicted the genocide of 1995. But even though the play does go there--not to the genocide, but to that prophecy--it's not an oh-my-gosh-they-predicted-the-future thing, not at all. It's more about what the intrusion of something as big and strange and extradimensional as a vision does for everyone in the circle of the visionaries. It made me think about how hard it is, actually, to accommodate that intrusion. Krishna may be able to fit the whole universe in his throat but we mortal types have a harder time with that stuff.

ETA: I forgot to mention that the play is based on historical fact. Our Lady of Kibeho is an approved Marian apparition.

* * *

In totally other news, my dad sometimes reminisces, when we're on the phone together, and some of those reminiscences can be wonderful. Even really brief ones. He was talking about a friend of his from high school: the friend lived in East Lexington and my dad lived more in the center of Lexington. They would bike to meet each other at some middle spot... "We'd sit there, smoking Parliaments," he said. That detail. My dad as a teenager, smoking Parliament cigarettes.

Okay folks, that's it for tonight. I just wanted to post *something* because it's been more than a week.

My sister has many talents--one of them is painting. I really *love* her painting, and I thought I'd share her painting website and highlight a few of the pictures so you can enjoy them too.

(This is the website--you can see these and many more paintings there in a larger size)

One thing she does is look at the relationship between sky and water--all the colors of sky, and what those do to water, plus the texture of clouds:



She also paints the many, many textures and patterns of water--man I love that:







Some of her paintings capture the ethereal magic that can happen with our atmosphere...



And lest you think that the palette is always tipped toward the cool--no! not at all:



Do check out the website if you'd like to spend some minutes in the company of more scenes like that.