Asakiyume mita

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.

This was a beautiful moment, yesterday

This is a secret world



Where you can find marsh marigolds, tussock sedge, and skunk cabbage







I went for a brief walk here with Wakanomori. Birds came and talked to us at eye level, little frogs jumped into the water. It was lovely.

-------

In other news, I dreamed of a tree with a growth habit and leaves like a black locust, but a trunk and branches that were segmented like bamboo, and smooth green like bamboo, only the joints, instead of being flush with the surface and pale colored, were BLACK and stood out from the surface as if they were arm rings or bangles that the trunk and branches were wearing. In my dream I stroked the smooth surface of the trunk and branches and the smooth, raised black joints and thought, What a remarkable tree--I have to look up what it is.

But of course it was a dream. It doesn't exist :(

However, when I searched--just in case--"black jointed bamboo," I discovered a type of black bamboo (but with pale joints) called Bambusa lako... Timor black bamboo. TIMOR.

It's very beautiful.
( large photo )

Also, I finished translating my Timorese acquaintance's story, and we sent it to Strange Horizons. Hopefully they accept it!

Today I went out to mail a letter, walking through the woods, like I did the day I dropped a card by a pine tree. It was much warmer today, but the path through the woods was still covered with ice. If I had been wearing ice skates, I could have sped along it, my own tiny Rideau Canal.



On the way back from the post office, the clouds were thickening and the wind picked up, and I worried about trees falling on me. I never used to worry about this in the woods, but winds that bring down trees are much more common now. At home, I picked up mail from our postbox... and there was this postcard:



It's from minoanmiss --she sent it for me to share with the pine tree.

Isn't that great?

Next time I walk that route, I promise I will! Thank you, MM!

I will joyously post if my cat comes home, so in the meantime ...

Well, here is something I loved on Twitter: Answer the question (link takes you to a one-minute TikTok video on Twitter).

I love this guy generally; his little videos are always hilarious, and the interactions between the two characters are so perfect, and oh the question!

So ... WHAT WOULD YOU BE?

On Twitter I said "I think I'd like to be as heroic, beautiful, and liminal as a red mangrove" --to which one of my Twitter friends replied that he'd like to be a black mangrove because those are the ones that have pneumatophores, the little breathing tube sticking up like straws from the sand.

--Bonus points if you noticed, as the ninja girl did, that the music playing in the background of the video is from Spirited Away.

They cut down a massive oak tree across the street from the supermarket. It was really huge, so huge a parent with two small children could have a picnic on the stump.

In situ



My shoe, to give a sense of how large the stump is



I thought, That stump would be a great place for a mandala-flower. So this morning I drew one:



I might try expanding it ... or maybe I'll just leave it at that. I have until it next rains to decide!

More Timor ca. 1960:

They also chant "songs of instruction" to the trees before they are hewn down, asking that they provide strong supports for the house and allow no harm to come to the family who will ultimately live within; and there are songs to encourage the Nautilus pompilius, to leave their sea bed and decorate the roofs of the most important houses with their shells.

That is a mighty fine tradition, and I wish we had it here. (I wonder if they still have it there.)

Here's a picture taken in 2006 by Flickr user giantpandinha of a house going up in Timor-Leste



And here's another by her from the same year, looking up at those strong supports:



There are different styles of house in different parts of Timor, but the ones King was talking about are the very distinctive house of Lospalos. Here's a photo taken in 1988 by Flickr user incitio.vacations

I picked some violets after a run today--I saw them on a hillside, a really rich, deep purple. At home I have lots of violets too, but the purple ones are more washed out. Then there are the white ones with purple veins, and best of all, the speckled ones.

Here they all are in a little vase:



And here is a photo of one of those trees of gold that grow in fairy woods, along with trees of silver and trees of crystal. This one has been felled by a beaver. Look how beautiful its bark is.



And here is a tree that has been gnawed at three different spots. Three beavers sharing a meal? Or one beaver not satisfied with the taste and hoping it gets better if he tries a different spot?

Here is a road I walk every day. This photo is from yesterday, but this morning, when I passed this way, an oriole flew into an apple tree (not visible in this picture) and seemed to be sniffing the blossoms. Maybe it was sipping nectar. Maybe it was nibbling the petals. Maybe it was listening to whispered secrets--I don't know.



These are not the apple blossoms that the oriole was getting intimate with, but these are apple blossoms I especially love, because they're on a tree I grew from a seed.



Beautiful May ♥

On this day, Kaya took to writing her journal between the lines and in the margins of Trees of Insular Southeast Asia, which is not a pretty guidebook like Trees and Fruits of Southeast Asia but more like Wayside Trees of Malaya, created over decades by a scholar born in 1906:



Here is some marginalia in the copy of Lord Brabourne’s Letters of Jane Austen owned by by Fanny Caroline Lefroy and, later, her sister, Louisa Lefroy Bellas, who, as you can see, made corrections and added information (Source)



And here are some of Isaac Newton's own notes and corrections to his 1687 Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, because science folks do write in the margins too, even when they're not political prisoners (Source)

( under the cut, as it's a bit big )

Along the way to creating this post, I happened to come across images of palm-leaf manuscripts--writing not about trees of Southeast Asia, but on their very leaves:

16th-cent palm-leaf manuscript; image source Wikimedia commons


The writing was incised, and then darkened with soot.

And, to bring the talk back to marginalia, I'll observe that Daniel M. Veidlinger notes in Spreading the Dhamma: Writing, Orality and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Thailand that

There are ... numerous interlinear corrections that are most often written in ink or lacquer, but are also incised into the leaves like the main text. (118)

Marginal notes by readers, on the other hand, are "completely absent."