A Trick Question Noted, And A Bonus Dialog

 

I was just thinking about how framing a question can frame perception.

When they ask, “when does life begin,” that suggests that there was a time before life when there was no life, for an individual in this case. The question causes you to focus on one theoretical infant.

The question closes off the idea that life was there already, in the mother and father, and that it continues as a result of conception. If there had been no life already, the infant could not suddenly just begin to exist on his own. The idea is nonsense.

Of course, I’m talking about physical life on the surface of this planet.

However, it’s not a bad metaphor in the world of spirit.

That life is like an endless, beginningless, ocean that permeates all of time and space and matter. It runs through all.

When we are sad or in pain we tend to focus on the metaphor rather than the ultimate reality, just when we should be looking “up” to the mountain of God.

Just a thought or two.

*0*

If You Had To Pick Just One

 

Ah Life's Little Joys

    Imagine that one day you are minding your own business, polishing an old copper French omelet pan with half of a lemon, rubbing heavy salt on it just like you are supposed to and a genie appears looking rather like a rotund French chef. 

    Imagine also that he says that you can have your favorite national cuisine for the rest of your life, free!  But you have to pick not three, but one.

    Which would you pick?

    I know which one I would pick. Vietnamese for sure. It would be hard to reject Middle Eastern, but I would have to.

    What say you?

    I know two very good dishes that I just can't live without. No. 1 is the Bahn Mi sub sandwich containing grilled meat, sweet pickled veg, cilantro, jalapeno peppers and mayo or whatever you want. To be authentic the roll is made of a half rice dough, extra crispy!  They learned baguette making from the French. 

    The other ineffable wonder is good old Pho'. Spicy beef broth, sliced rare beef and other bits and pieces as desired, rice noodles, sliced onion, etc. It is garnished at the table with bean sprouts, black pepper, cilantro, sriracha, lime juice, or whatever suits.

    They also make a killer noodle salad called Bun. So those are just about my favorites on this earth.

    But I must not forget the fresh spring rolls!

    What are yours?

Arboreal Olympiad

 

    Like so many things up by the cave in the Baker National Forest, it started out as one of Ralph’s jokes.
    He was getting some silver streaks on the sides of his chin and down his back and maybe he was feeling a little past his utter stunning macho prime. It made him feel a bit competitive. He kept checking out his biceps when Ramona wasn’t looking.
    “Ralph,” she said one day, “what’s the matter?”
    Being a guy, he said, “oh, nothing.” Then he said, “I want Twigg to be proud of me, you know? By the time he is big enough to care he might think I am some old embarrassing bag of bones and hair Ramona.
    “I should do something great for him to remember. It will help him feel great too,” said Ralph.
    “What would it take to make you feel better Ralph?”
    “I’d like to whoop up on about four other Squatch guys. In a friendly sort of way of course, but real good, you know? With Twigg watching. And Bob doesn’t count! He’s too busy being straight right now anyhow. It takes all his time,” Ralph giggled.
    “How about a contest, Baby,” Ramona asked, getting into the spirit of the thing. She was giving him a little sideways grin.
    “How could we do that Ramona?”
    “Well, it shouldn’t be too hard. You choose six or seven activities, and a time, and we send that goofy bird out with the news. All she would have to do is fly all over the forest finding those wild guys who think you’re a sissy anyhow. She could invite them. They’d swarm here to beat you!
    “Then all you have to do is be better than them, and it will be easy for you big boy,” vamped Ramona, grinning.
    Ralph was thinking hard.
    “How about this? Loudest hollering for one. Tree breaking for another. Then rock pitching. Foot prints, the biggest and best! Disappearing skills. Fishing bare knuckle style, biggest fish wins. Window peeping to scare. I’d have to keep the grin off my muzzle for that one. Some of it can be done right here. Some of it would have to happen other places. Maybe Maeve could be the judge of some of these items,” Ralph said.
    “What day do you think would work,” he asked.
    “Let’s say day after tomorrow. We don’t want those guys to have to work too hard to keep the day and place straight,” said Ramona, “they can be a little basic upstairs.
    “I’ll get ahold of Maeve and talk her into it. No problem. She will love it. Poking that long black beak into forest business is bread and butter to her,” added Ramona.

    And so, it was done.

    The appointed day dawned bright and cool. Ramona made a pot of oatmeal with raisins and nuts. They ate breakfast and waited around a nice little fire at the stone circle outside the home cave. The seating logs were pulled invitingly close to the fire, ready for company.
    We shall call the first arrival Melvin. Young adult male, only six feet tall, but very wide. He is totally black, skin and hair. It’s hard to see expression on his face. He took a seat on a log and accepted a bowl of oats.
    Then there was Larry. He is a little careful of his appearance for a Squatch. Reddish with a pink face. 7’2” and angular. He takes a seat, making sure the log is clean where he is to sit. Does not accept a bowl of oats. Ramona’s eyebrows go up a bit, but she doesn't speak.
    York is next. He is the scariest of the bunch. He is 8’ tall. Grizzly colored with rough scraggly body hair. He doesn’t bother to speak. He just sits waiting. No one really wants to sit by him. He sports the famous aroma to a degree.
    Lastly, and latest, is Ferdy. He is every Squatch girl’s dream. He has a silky light brown pelt and dreamy dark eyes. He is about 7’ tall. He is about Melvin’s age. Young guy. Good manners, considering. He takes a seat on a log and does accept a bowl of oats. Ramona looks upon him with approval.
    Twigg is fit to be tied. This is the most exciting day of his whole life, minus those picnics with Thaga and his mom.
    Maeve is watching over the whole scene avidly from a convenient fir branch overhead. She is ready to judge. Her eyes are bright and beady.
    Ramona taps on her cooking pot with her wooden spoon, for attention, and speaks.
    “As you all know, this is just a friendly contest for fun. We all want to stay friends when it’s over. So, try as hard as you can and have the most fun you can!! Maeve, here, and I will be the judges. We will keep score and let you know at the end.”
    The guys all look at each other thinking “right, we’ll see about that girlie.”
    To begin, one by one all five uttered their finest and most terrifying screams.
    1.Melvin, low and menacing. Not the loudest.
    2.Larry. Great carrying power. Rather screechy.
    3.York. Two competing tones. It was awful. Like throat singing. High and low, but rather local in impact.
    4.Ferdy sounded like singing. Not scary. It did carry though.
    5.Ralph. He sounded like two gorillas tied to an elephant. He gave it his all. High and shrill with a rumbling undertone. It bounced off distant hills.

    Then there was Tree breaking. Of great interest to Maeve.
    1. Melvin silently pushed an 8” diameter tree over, exposing the rootball.
    2. Larry. Stood between two alder trees and pulled them toward himself like Samson. It looked great, but they never did break. They just swished back and forth.
    3. York went over to a rotten Doug fir about a foot and half thick and broke it off about five feet above the ground.
    4. Ferdy did about the same with a smaller tree.
    5. Ralph knew he had to do something special. He strode over to York’s tree, picked it up, put it across his shoulders, and shrieking hideously broke it over his own shoulders. Then he winked at Twigg.

    Rock throwing was next. They all traveled downhill to the river for this one.
    1. Melvin chose a smooth black river rock, football sized, and threw it down stream where it landed with a huge splash.
    2. Larry picked up a piece of broken granite, the size of a loaf of bread, and tossed it upstream. It splashed water back on him.
    3. York let out a roar, waded out into the river and fished around. He found a big slippery rock shaped like a sort of flying saucer, then he flung it sideways into the forest where it tore the heart out of a small maple.
    4. Ferdy looked around the riverbank for a few minutes. His rock was a nice grey pebble about the size of a basketball. He threw it downstream also. But it didn’t go as far as Melvin’s rock.
    5. Ralph, just to be different, grabbed a nice round black one about as big as his own head and bowled it down the riverbank into a large boulder where is made a mighty crash and struck sparks!

    Then they all made footprints in the sand. There was no contest. Ralph has the biggest feet in the world. Twigg was right there watching everything.

    Since they were already at the river. One by one they dove in and went fishing. It wasn’t the season when salmon swim upstream, so they had to content themselves with trout. Each of them got a nice trout. Larry didn’t like being wet, but he got one too. Ramona took the trout into her handy basket that Thaga had made of little strips of bark. All five trout were about ten inches long, more or less, depending.

    For the next feat Maeve had to follow each contestant to a location where there was a window to peek into.
    1. She followed Melvin to the ranger’s house. The ranger wasn’t home. So, he went to the ranger station and leered in the window on the door. The ranger cussed and threw a heavy notebook at the door. Melvin left. That was his disappearance bit too.
    2. Larry, with Maeve, found a camp where there was a pickup with one of those campers they put on the bed of the truck. There was a young couple in the camper. Larry knocked until they opened the door. They did scream deliciously! Then he slipped off into the woods doing a very slick job of disappearing.
    3. York, with Maeve, found a car in a parking lot near the official campground. A lady was napping in the front seat. York took hold of the bumper and picked the front end of the car up and then dropped it. The lady woke up, took a look at him, and screamed almost as loud as he had in the beginning. Then he vanished very nicely into the underbrush, crouching down so she couldn’t see his head as he left.
    4. Ferdy and Maeve went looking for a likely victim. They found a guy sitting on a folding camp chair talking to a camera. Ferdy crawled up behind him and then suddenly popped his head up over the guy’s shoulder and let out a big “wuff” sound and a snort. The guy fell off his chair and screamed like a whole girl scouts troop. He spilled his beer too. Ferdy got up off his hands and knees and vanished over a small rise, in fine style. Maeve was impressed, and she said so.
    5. Now, Ralph isn’t all that scary. So, it was hard to come up with something. This is what he decided to do. He was cheating a little, but the other guys would never know. He rambled over to Thaga’s house and put his big mug in her kitchen window. He made a terrible face and winked. Thaga screamed very convincingly, while laughing and Maeve heard it. Then Ralph vanished like a pro.

    Everybody was getting pretty hungry and tired by now. So, they all headed back to the clearing by the cave, with the handy logs by the fire. They were all laughing about the day’s adventures and didn’t care anymore about who had won. Maeve had an opinion about who won but managed to keep her beak shut. Then she flew off to wherever Maeve calls home, which is still a mystery.

    Ramona had cleaned the fish and speared them on small green branches and put them over a small fire to cook. She had also made a big pan of corn bread over the fire while she was waiting for them to come back. It doesn’t take long to cook a trout so soon everyone was sharing some trout and cornbread and some of those beers Ralph keeps under his log out in the woods a few hundred feet from the cave. Even Ramona had a beer.
    Twigg conked out and Ralph had to carry him in to bed.
    Then the adults talked around the fire until about midnight. It was a clear night so way up high in between the trees they could see stars.
    Melvin, Larry, York and Ferdy each headed back to their own places under cover of darkness quite contentedly.

Taking It Seriously

The photo is the entrance to the art college at the UW, where I used to have a roundtable every morning in that coffee shop.

It's a good principle, to give your head a rest once a week. So I didn't do anything Saturday, just some general maintenance. Some cat combing. 

I didn't even think about any of my continuing dramas. 

Nevertheless, I wanted to greet you this Sunday. To the best of my ability I pray blessings and peace with joy today for all of us.  

Jessie Speaks At Last

 

   They named me Jessie, just like the outlaw. I hope I wasn’t a disappointment to them. I don’t think I ever righted the right wrongs, the right way, or the wrong way for them maybe. Perhaps they had never heard of the outlaw.  That is entirely possible also.
        I’ve never been much of a talker. I am a reader though. I read too much probably. That’s why I was visiting the bookstore initially, getting ahead of myself here.
        People always ask me why I left the Res and how I ended up in western Washington state of all places for a member of the fabled Dine’ people. Of course, the question is asked differently depending on who the questioner is. I guess it’s a long story by now, and somehow, like Ouroboros that loopy worm, lunching on its own tail, I ended up right back on the Res. 
        My parents were what an old Assiniboine friend used to call “blanket cases.” Real Indians. Fry bread, deer meat, no electricity, the whole bit. I looked around myself while growing up and I thought that I would like to see something else.  Maybe just for a while. I knew I could always come back to Arizona. So, I decided to pick a place and start college courses. I chose a community college in the smallish city of Everett. It was a nice fit for a country boy. I hadn’t decided on a major.
        Why did I pick the upper left corner of Washington? Well, for a change. Everything was different there. The climate, the landscape, the people. The way of doing things was way different. A person was expected to be on time. Things like that.
        I found Beth working in a bookstore near the college.  She was different also; from any girl I had ever known. I just kept going back to the bookstore until she took me seriously. We were married there in Washington. We lived up there for ten years. In those ten years I became a furniture maker after a few years of apprenticeship. I gave up on college. I liked building things.
        Another question is why did you go back down to the desert, to Arizona? You had a life up north, why change it? That question delves into the central drama of our lives.  We moved because I was willing to bet that I could make us disappear on the reservation among my family and the greater tribe.
        Why did we need to disappear? To put it simply, Beth was in trouble.  She had been picked up and held by some extra-legal black ops creeps.  In fact, they injured her and it was a literal miracle that she survived the experience.
        Why did this happen to her, a harmless lady working in a bookstore? Unlike me, she is a talker. She talked to anything that would talk. In the course of all these conversations she ran into a character bragging about some secret takeover operation with a local headquarters. She did not welcome his advances and he became angry with her. It’s my opinion that he is the one who brought her to the attention of his operators/employers. They didn’t want their operation talked about and she was talking about it. Those are the bare bones. Simple as that.
        Moving back down here was like going back in time. Some of the urgency of northern life just had to fall off of us. Things just move slower here. It’s all personal. There is more space here. Everything is further apart. In time and space. There is an older logic at work at least part of the time. Myth is alive here, and lively. My Washington friends would be astounded at the things here that are real, but uncanny at the same time.
        It was my elderly aunt, my father’s sister, who had vision enough to welcome us when we appeared at her door unannounced. She is a lady with vision. You could say that anytime and would still be true.
        We fought some battles. But eventually our trail went cold, and we ceased to matter to anyone but ourselves and Julia Chee, and the rest of the family. What a blessing that was and is. Oh yes, I know blessing when I see it and feel it.
        Our greatest blessing is that after all this time God gave us a child. Julia Maria Nez.  We call her Emmy, so we aren’t addressing two Julias all the time. She is our greatest joy. There is a great deal that could be said about Emmy.

All of it...They haven't taken my phone yet.docx

So. It's Friday

 And it's one of those open thread days. May 3, 2024. May it be a blessing to us all and all we love.

Happily In The Center of His Will.

Friday (n.)
sixth day of the week, Old English frigedæg "Friday, Frigga's day," from Frige, genitive of *Frigu (see Frigg), Germanic goddess of married love. The day name is a West Germanic translation of Latin dies Veneris "day of (the planet) Venus," which itself translated Greek Aphrodites hēmera.

Compare Old Norse frijadagr, Old Frisian frigendei, Middle Dutch vridach, Dutch vrijdag, German Freitag "Friday," and the Latin-derived cognates Old French vendresdi, French vendredi, Spanish viernes. In Germanic religion, Freya (q.v.) corresponds more closely in character to Venus than Frigg does, and some early Icelandic writers used Freyjudagr for "Friday."

Gifts For Emmy

 

          “Hey, Emmy,” said Jessie one day that fall, “let’s put our coats on and walk down to see what’s in the mailbox!” Walking to the mailbox, down the long drive, with her father, was one of Emmy’s favorite things to do.

          “Yes! Can Honda come?” said Emmy happily, running to the low hook in the hall where she could get her own coat.
          “Of course, Honda can come.  He is our dog, and he must come with us,” said Jessie with an agreeable smile. Together they put on coats and hats because it was getting chilly in the shadows on those fall days.
          Aunt Sarah had called the house and warned ahead of time that a package was coming for Emmy. But she didn’t tell what it was, so they all had to wonder together. Beth hoped that it was something practical.
          Outside, it was beautiful, like a painting, with a glowing sky, mysterious shadows, and rich fall colors. A little wind fiddled softly with the dead corn stalks. The air was immediate. Fresh. Cold. Soon there would be frost in those shadows.
          Man and child, accompanied by half-grown dog walked slowly down the driveway taking time to look at everything. Yellow leaves were scattered loosely on the ground. A crow spoke to them briefly, then flew off. Emmy kicked up some dust. Honda ran away and then ran back. They could smell wood smoke from some neighbor a long way away.
          The Chee’s old place had one of those big rural mailboxes that can accommodate a largish package. When Jessie pulled it open they saw some letter mail and a box with Emmy’s name printed on it. She was not able to read her name yet, but Jessie told her it was her name when he showed it to her.
          Emmy was able to carry her package part way back up to the house, but then she got tired and gave it to her father who stuck it under his arm as they made their way back up.
          Inside, Beth and Julia waited for the mail and the rest of the family. Coats were hung up neatly. Honda took his usual spot by Julia’s chair and Emmy waited impatiently. Billy wound himself around her feet where she stood expectantly.
          Finally, Jessie sat down on the sofa and cut the box open with his pocket knife. Inside were two tiny Navajo style velvet dresses. One was red with rich multicolored embroidery.  The other was deep blue with some silver designs. There was also a hand knitted dark blue sweater in about a size six, so that it would fit for several years. Apparently Aunt Sarah had skill in knitting, which surprised even her mother. Women with no daughters of their own often long for a little girl to dress up.
          Emmy was thrilled. She modeled both dresses, then chose the red one to wear for the day, with the sweater, which was a lovely cardigan with a lot of surface texture and bone buttons.
          “Emmy, we must write a nice letter to Aunt Sarah together,” said Beth. “These are very fine gifts! We must thank her.” “OK,” said Emmy.
          “You look just like me when I was little, Emmy,” said Julia. “Let’s go outside where there is room, and I will show you a little dance my friends and I used to do together long ago!”
          Outside, Julia took Emmy’s hand so that they could stand side by side, and she showed her how to do a simple little progression of steps. They practiced for quite a while, until they were able to do the steps in unison. Emmy’s cheeks were pink, and her eyes were bright. Julia took a little rest, leaning on her cane for a few minutes.
          Emmy thought she should go show the hens her new outfit. She ran over to their fence, and she showed them the dance steps she had just learned. The hens watched but didn’t seem very impressed.
          While she was absorbed with her dancing she was being watched from above. High in a tree, bare of its leaves, a white raven turned her eye downward.  In her beak she carried a pretty blue thing.  It was the very same pretty thing that she had found here months before. She sensed a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. She was pleased.

          She floated silently down to the child, just barely moving her great white wings as she drifted. She landed with a little thump, for she was a large bird, right in front of Emmy. When Emmy stopped dancing to watch her, the bird laid the pretty thing at her feet. She looked intently at the child, produced a few knocking sounds, and took off. In a moment it was as if she had never been there at all.
          Of course, Emmy picked it up. She thought it was very pretty too. It was silver with a large oval of turquoise laid into it. The turquoise stone appear to hold a tiny landscape.
          She walked back to Aunt Julia and said, “a big white bird gave it to me Auntie! Look! So pretty! Look!”
          Julia took the earring into her small dry brown hand. She was silent and tears came to her eyes, for she remembered it very well indeed. It was her own dear treasure, given to her by her mother, who was given it by her mother. It had been a gift from her mother, when she married John Chee. How it was lost she never knew.
          “Emmy let’s go show your mommy and daddy your earring. I have another one just like it, honey.  I think that you should have them both  when you are a little older, perhaps when you are married!”
          First Emmy climbed the two steps and ran in the doorway, then Julia followed slowly with her cane. Remembering that a white raven had been her grandmother's spirit animal, she was filled with gladness and her heart was thankful.

The whole shebang so far; They haven't taken my phone yet.docx