Kayaking into the sunrise

In all good Westerns the hero gets to ride off into the sunset. In the end. When the day is done.

Though I currently don't know whether I am headed East, West, North though assuredly going South according to some (and me directionally challenged too from the upside down other hemisphere and having to stand on my head to read maps: lucky I am a yogini, huh?) I do know that this stage of the action is a Western. Think "High Plains Drifter" with Clint Eastwood, 1973. Yeah. The Stranger comes to town. That one.My first paddle of the year was into yesterday's sunrise. That translates as around about 8 in the morning. The time of day. I mean. Don't know much about the metaphor of paddling into yesterday's sunrise. Do I now? Now that the light is making its slow return.

I highly recommend this way to begin a day, a year, no hey! why not the rest of one's life. Yes, it was cold, but not near as cold as early December. Paddling soon warmed me up anyway. The light was exquisite: charcoal smudged and soft in the sky. The water was calm and reflective, filled with debris from the recent, previously mentioned, storms and exceedingly high seas caused by a combination of moon, weather and atmospheric pressure. I saw washed away private docks and flooded boathouses, spectacular mudslides as high banks succumbed to wave action.
By good luck, not good management because I do not look at tide tables, I caught a magic time of calm between change of tides when everything feels suspended. The pause, as in yoga, between the in breath and the out breath. The tide was really high but neither pulling in nor out strongly. A perfect prayer paddle.Otters popped their heads up to watch me. Huge logs floated by.

I spent part of the paddle contemplating the notion of beauty, human connections and place inspired by this beautiful blog post which I had read earlier in the morning, by Diana in Istanbul. Thank you Diana.

Was thinking too, out there on the water, about how my primary relationship on this continent is not human, but the natural environment. Every day I wake and am subject to whatever mood comes to me from the salt water, sky, shoreline and all the inhabitants of earth, air and water. These are my consistent companions and interlocuters. For the rest: it is all passing and peripheral. It is a rare human comes as close.
I also couldn't help noticing all the plastic debris in the eddyline, flushed out by winter's high waters. Makes one feel inclined to NEVER use plastic in any form again. Bottles, bags, trash and polystyrene. In our oceans. NO.

It all ends up eventually in some gyre, swirling, twisting and turning. Indestructable. Please reduce your plastic consumption NOW.

De-valuation: humanity as a house of cards

See that highway curling up like smoke above (my)shoulder? I don't wheel and I don't deal. Though it's true I did a good line in shelter. Once..... Okay, the bridge of someplace. Later.

Let's hear it for sword ferns and cedars! Native plants rule!

Reflecting calm

Three days after the storm, the water is once more satin and reflective.
Of course I will let him get away with forgetting the birthday. On a morning like this, how can you hold a grudge?

Damn! that Fav Tribal Elder has got him some powerful allies!

Weathering the storm

Right now the crystal ball is kinda murky.

Likewise the water recently. We had a wind storm through the night Monday which put the power out for most of the night and half the day following. Everywhere trees fell blocking roads and pulling power lines down with them. That's what you get for living amongst the tallest trees in the world.

News articles on this little blow tell me that 10 000 homes in my county were in the dark and the wind speeds reached 23 miles an hour with gusts of 38 miles an hour. This is nothing compared to the nearby Olympic National Park, across the Hood Canal, which saw wind speeds of 68 mph gusting to 127 mph. No wonder the road to Hurricane Ridge is now closed. There go my weekend plans for snowshoeing!

For me, no electricity in the morning meant camping stove tea, and a bundled-against-the-wind walk down to the water where I found that it was a magnificently wind-whipped wild high tide. Huge ocean-like waves threw themselves against the dock on all sides, making it bob around like a cork in a washing machine. Spectacular and rather seasick making.
The normal clear salt water of this inland section of the Salish Sea frothed and chewed at the high banks, bringing them down in inevitable mudslides. Logs churned in the maelstrom adding to the general elemental mayhem.
A juvenile eagle swept by as I stood on the dock, close enough to warm my forehead with its wings. As if to make sure that I noted her, she circled and flew by again, wings spread to soar on the wind.
Today, a full day later the water is still unsettled, dark and full of debris. Swollen like eyes after a night of crying. The sun rose with brief opalescent brilliance, before being conquered once more by cloud and another eagle, a mature adult this time, graced me with a fly-by. The whoosh of eagle wings in the dawn as the crack opens to let the light in. Unforgettable. And also elemental, my dear Watson (with apologies to Sir Arthur).

There are benefits to having time to stand and stare. Huge benefits.

Crow morning

A Ted Hughes morning raucous with crows flying the black flag of themselves, absorbing all light into their mystery darkness. Bare winter trees spider-vein clot against the drumskin of day.

What does it take to become raven in this exquisite mundanity?

Another year's anniverse: anyday now

I Shall Be Released - by Bob Dylan - Live at Budokan 1979.

They say everything can be replaced,
Yet every distance is not near.
So I remember every face
Of every man who put me here.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.

Standing down here in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he's not to blame.
All day long I hear him crying out so loud,
Crying out that he's been framed.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, oh, any day now,
I shall be released.

They say every man needs protection,
They tell me every man must fall.
Yet I swear I see my reflection
Somewhere so high above this wall.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, oh, any day now,
I shall be released
I shall be released
I shall be released
I shall be released
I shall be released.

Getting lucky: breakfast interrupted: an ode to loveliness

Sometimes it just works that way. You get lucky, everything comes up rosy and you find someone who stops for roadkill. Heaven and earth are in accord. As above so below. Hexagrams of cloud and water, transforming light.This post, besides bringing you yet ANOTHER perfect sunrise, some motherly mumbo-jumbo and the remains of the seal breakfast day, is for my two fav young explorers of the animal world. Colour coordinated to go with the lighting: the morning's mystery gift to you: a fish on a dock.

Good day at the office, dear? An excess of princess

Ja-nee, well, uuum, yes...this is difficult to explain to people-not-from-here. I cannot claim to understand the phenomena.

As I have said before: there is a curious workplace dress code in the New World.

Yesterday the place exploded with a shrieking of girls in pouffy, shiny dresses. For what seemed like hours one couldn't get into any of the (staff) toilets for the frenzy of dressing, adjusting and making up with glitter and gleam.The front -of-house was a fantasy of draped tulle, plastic roses and and overrun by a positive satin excess of princess. Plastic tiaras and jewels, this way.
Herewith, on a random day in early January, two of my most cherished colleagues, Ariel (in the pepto-pink) and Maleficent.

Even though it seems I just do not have this kind of tiara and pouffy dress Princess in my cultural heritage, it sure looks to be an interesting year. If the first 6 days are any measure.We live in interesting times. Better believe it. Disney crafted or no, play is a pretty good way to go.

A Japanese New Year

I am having handmade old style mochi for breakfast: sticky white rice balls with sweet adzuko bean paste in the centre.
Yesterday I experienced a true treat for a nomad who delights in exploring other cultures and festivals, in the lichen festooned woods of Islandwood school, on Bainbridge Island, at the Mochi Tsuki new year celebration hosted every year by the Bainbridge Island Japanese American community.

Mochi making and eating is apparently part of traditional Japanese new year activities, celebrating good harvest and good company and ensuring abundance for the new season. At Islandwood we were treated to all aspects of the process.
The sticky sweet rice was cooked on open fires outside on fascinatingly low tech, homemade, innovative steamers consisting of everyday items: half drums, wooden boxes, even soft drink cans. An African felt truly at home around these fires. I lingered long in the aromatic cedar smoke.
Once sufficiently cooked, the rice is pounded into a doughy paste in a huge stone urn with huge wooden mallets. Rice paste spattered the crowd. Young boys jostled one another to try their hand. I believe that there can be a more ritualistic aspect to this part of the procedure with chanting and drumming to keep the rhythm going.
Inside the dining hall, rows of women and young girls rolled and formed the mochi balls, while the queues of attendees absorbed them as fast as, or faster at times, than they were produced. Green tea and sweet soy sauce for dipping were provided too. Well, this being the Pacific Northwest, urns of coffee stood around prominently too....
The finale was a taiko drumming performance from a very accomplished Bellevue group. The speed and precision of their movements and the solar-plexus stirring reverberations of their sound is with me still.
It seems to me this is a good way to look to the future: celebrating abundance and energy. Sharing. Oh did I mention this is a FREE event. Donations are always welcome, however, to the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community who are currently engaged in a fundraising campaign to build the Nidoto Nai Yoni "Let it not happen again," Bainbridge Island WW2 Nikkei Exclusion and Internment monument at the site where the first group of internees were taken from the island in 1942. One of the honoured guests at the Islandwood ceremony this year was 99 year old Fumiko Hayashida. The following is extracted from the Washington Women's History Consortium website:

In 1942, two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the relocation of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast in order to incarcerate them in isolated and desolate concentration camps. The government’s justification was to protect the country against espionage and sabotage by Japanese Americans. Those rounded up included everyone who had at least 1/16th of Japanese heritage—from newborn babies, young children and orphans, to the elderly and the infirm. They were interned between 1942-1945 in ten states from Idaho to Arkansas that were surrounded by barbed wire and soldiers with machine guns facing inward.

Exclusion Order No. 1, authorizing the first relocation, targeted the Japanese Americans living on Bainbridge Island, Washington. One of them was 31-year-old Fumiko Hayashida, a pregnant mother of two. She was one of 227 members of her community who, dressed in their best clothes, assembled at the Eagledale ferry landing on March 30th, 1942. As they waited to be taken off the Island by armed military escorts, Fumiko, holding her 13 month old daughter Natalie Kayo, was photographed by a Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer. The photograph has since become a lasting iconic symbol of the internment experience.

Fumiko Hayashida's story reflects the effect of a great historical injustice on the lives and dreams of many immigrant farming families in the early 1900s, and how the futures of an entire ethnic community were changed by that experience. Families suffered loss of property, hardship, and shame because they looked like the enemy. Often separated from their husbands, in other camps or away fighting to defend the country that had imprisoned their families, the mothers and grandmothers in the Camps maintained the community.

More information:

Visit the BIJAC website for additional information on the history of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American community. For further information on the entire internment experience visit Densho.

Migration: what does it take?

Flying in formation or going solo? What does it take?

Living with a volcano

Never know when it's all going to erupt. In the meantime: terrible beauty. Waiting to be born.