fables

pig and buffalo

i don’t remember quite well how we got there (we were talking at some point about how our names get deformed in american-english) and i’m sure that being hungry and just having the time to grab some (healthy and not so healty) snacks had something to do with it. anyways, let me introduce you to… pig and buffalo. they are really sweet (just make sure they get fed on time). my head was already filled with stories of bears, turtles, horses, slugs, cats… – for which i’ll probably never find the time to write them down – and now there are pig and buffalo adventures. quanti animali vivanno con noi…

blood

Michael joked about the fact that Leta told him he might as well move his practice to Washington street. He’s in town only one day a week, and today he was treating Leta, MarÃa and myself. In fact, he added, at this moment his Santa Cruz patients boiled down to two groups of friends, one of them concentrated around our house. His practice is currently in a room in one of the older buildings on the main street, Pacific Ave. The room is in a corridor that could figure in a film noir set in the 1930s; each door could lead you into the world of a detective reading his newspaper and smoking a sigaret, or that of the lawyer smoking a sigar in the green light of the bankers lamp on his desk, both of them waiting for the rich client with a briefcase of money to arrive. Did i mention that some of the rooms have no windows? And in those that have, the blinds keep day light out. The door to the room Michael uses one day a week opens into a different world all together; one that for some bizarre reason invokes Russian-Mongolian memories in me, although the room is merely about trying to create some sober kind of Chinese atmosphere i guess.

(and the corridor is decorated with old images of Santa Cruz like these…)

The session last Friday had been particularly heavenly relaxing, still in a celebration mood, as Michael didn’t miss out on having two of his patients on the same day with the same birthday. We continued bear conversations and i ended up telling him stories from the Trans-Siberian and Mongolian express – so it seems that the things that go through my mind in that room eventually find their way to our conversations. He talked about this travels and longer stays in China. Just when i got eager to tell him my story of the mad goat at the monastry near Ulan Ude, he wanted to know about religious freedom for Buddhists in Russia and Mongolia – a subject i’m slightly less enthousiastic about than the mad goat.

Today was different. The music today was particularly insisting monotonous Chinese – Tibetian – Mongolian something. When he asked me how i was doing, i didn’t do the “fine and it’s getting better” routine. I don’t really know why i do that – something about not really wanting to engage, remain on the surface, avoiding lectures, etc. It probably defeats the purpose of a medical visit. Although in a medical context i somehow prefer to think: okay, do your technical stuff on my body, but leave me out it. Don’t ask me too much, don’t expect me to open my mouth too much, let’s get it over and done with. Although that’s a bit of an understatement, with some doctors i tend to sabotage the technical part as well, like indeed not opening my mouth at the dentist (the number of times my mother had to beg to open my mouth when i was in the dentist seat; she still pratically kidnaps me for dentist appointments…). Anyway, i tell Michael: frankly, the muscles in my shoulders do NOT feel any better than last time, maybe even WORSE. (VoilÃ , there you go.) He was sweet actually. First giving me some Buddhist wisdom. These things are not linear, you know, many steps forward are followed by steps back. And don’t get upset with not being relaxed, that doesn’t help at all. At this point he made me smile; okay, today my muscles and i are just bad and that’s it and we’ll get treated. Then he started feeling and decided that from his perspective the muscles actually felt better. At least i can distinguish the actual muscles, he said, it’s not one block of tension. (I decided on the spot that i would not visualise myself as a turtle this time.) He does his massage and this time there are no (animal) stories, we don’t speak. Apart from one moment when he says: “You’re fighting me today.” What can i say, don’t take it personally.

At the end of this session which felt quite different from the other ones he scrutinizes me and asks some questions. Then comes the verdict: blood deficiency. And an advice to eat meat and take “Ba Zhag San Women’s Precious” pills. Still bugged when i got home, where i was met with sheer enthousiasm by Leta. “I can get you the pills for half the price, you might just get full advantage of living with a licensed acupunturist, me too i’m blood deficient or at least i was and it took three years for it to go away, and i still think of myself as semi-blood deficient because i have the tendency, it’s because we use our brain a lot (oh… is that the place blood goes?…), let’s sit down and talk about this…” Hm, sounds like we’ll be having a blood deficiency party in the house. And more than that: Leta looked at me with sparkling eyes and a knowing smile and said: “Yes, i feel it, this is what brought you to Santa Cruz, to discover your blood deficiency and get rid of it.” Quite a new insight about what i’m doing here. I wonder if i should mention it in my Marie Curie report. Coming to think of it, i’m sure Marie Curie was blood deficient as well.

bear encounters

I have a number of images, impressions and memories of Yosemite from when we visited with my family, i was 7 years old at the time. What i remember most, is the excitement in the car as we were driving all the way to Yosemite valley. Excitement because i was told that there might be bears, and i was sure i would meet one. In the end i didn’t. I remember how impressed i was by the big rocks and big waterfalls (and i must say that, unlike the garden and the rock in front of our Tarrytown house, they still looked very hugh this time), but the non-meeting with the bears definately left some disappointment lingering on up till this day.

So this visit, i felt, was an opportunity to do something about that profound childhood desire. Bears are indeed all around you in Yosemite in the repeated signs, warnings, obligatory lockers for food, etc. You are now in bear land, said one of the forms (once more calling visitor’s attention to their mortal fate…) which i had to sign for our stay at Camp 4. Brilliant, i thought, that’s exactely where i want to be. Remains the art of actually meeting a bear.

When i went to sleep under the starry sky on our second night, i realised that there wasn’t so much opportunity left for such a meeting to occur. And then there was the golden chance… marÃa, already tucked away in her sleeping bad in the tent, called me saying she discovered she still had half of a granola bar with her in the tent. Whether i could take it and bring it to the foodlockers. Sure. But once i had this golden granola bar in my hand (with honey, imagine…) my thoughts went other directions. I even tried it out: the granola bar on my improvised pillow next to my face. Couldn’t this be my perfect meeting opportunity with a bear?

I didn’t do it in the end. With all the signs and warnings we already had been exposed by then, it seemed such an irresponsible thing to do (just for individual indulgence into individual bear pleasure…). Oh well. So the desire to meet a bear remains…

lucky

Arriving in Yosemite. When we finally got to our tents in Camp 4 i was happy to be sleeping so close to the earth and being able to look at the stars in the sky. The tiredness of having finished the article in the morning hours before leaving. Being together in a group without having found a way of speaking truthfully to each other, even about the things each of us desired to do, let alone about how to puzzle these together. A deep sleep which brought purpose and luck, so that in the morning i knew that i had to call the stables in the valley and see if there would still be a possibility to join one of the horse trail rides. By noon i was on a horse called Lucky.

It’s been forever since i’ve been riding. The ride was open for “beginners” with less than 10 hours of riding – a criterium which put me in the category of “advanced”, where i don’t feel i belong. Nothing spectacular in terms of technicalities, nor any galloping in open space. (Still, we first had to watch a small video showing all the possible accidents that could happen, and then sign a paper in which we declared that we understood that we could die. After all, this is America in the grip of an economy of insurance… ) Pretty much a path along which one horse followed the other.

This was my first horse trail of such a kind, with a “western” style (in contrast to “English” style) sadle and riding techniques. It was enchanting. Immersed in the immense beauty of Yosemite. The horse trail took us along the Tenaya creek to the Mirror Lake and its meadows and back; a trail that brought us passed the Half Dome on the side where the granite was dramatically split in half, thousands of years ago. The water of the creek and the lake came straight from the melting snow up in the Sierra. The horse trail had only been open for 2 weeks now, while usually they would have been open for almost a month this time of year. The stables higher up in the mountains were still closed, while usually they would be open by now. As we were riding, one of the guides, Bill, explained that in all the time he’d been working in the stables in Yosemite – three months every spring and summer since 1975 (i realised later on that he must have been there when we visited Yosemite with my family in 1979) – he hadn’t see a year with so much rain and snow like this one. When i went to the Visitor’s Center later on, an eldery grey-haired woman, who radiated sheer passion for the national park in which she worked, declared the year to be “disasterous”. The amount of roads and passes that were still closed, without even a perspective on when they would open. She shook her head in dispair. It’s true that water poured into the valley from all sides with such abondance and such violence – whether this spring is exceptional or not, it is very impressive. Bill saw connections: the exceptional snow and water was paired up with the slowly drying up of Mirror Lake and the surrounding creeks. Soon enough the snow at the source of the creeks would be gone; since the valley’s underground is granite, it holds no water at all. And to Bill it seemed that, as the summers go by, the time span in which the creeks are dry gets longer and longer. In the Visitors Center i learned that this “vein”, or canyon of the valley was somehow the youngest, therefore providing an image of how the others were some thousand years before, and by mirror image the rest of the valley reflecting what the Tenaya Canyon would become.

But there was more to the ride than the beauty of the nature surrounding us. There was the effort of riding a mountainous terrain on a horse – a new thing for me. The way the horses slipped constantly: the sound of horseshoes hitting and sliding on rock, and the way their bodies jerked as if the slide came unexpectedly. Probably they were just moving to keep themselves in balance. Learning how to move my body and weight in order to climb or descend with Lucky, and not just be a heavy backpack he has to carry along.

And there was still more to the horse trail. As i was settling into Lucky’s rhythm and taking in the beauty of the nature around me, my thoughts started to take me to the crossing of the mountains by those pioneers of the 19th century who pushed America’s frontiers westwards. This wasn’t the first time i was thinking about those journeys, only some weeks ago when i flew back from Washington i had been absorbed by such thoughts. The Denver-San Jose flight took us over the Rocky Mountains in sky that remained cloudless till the very westside of the Sierra Nevada, that is until the plane hit the west coast clouds. For hours i looked down in fascination to the range of mountains that those pioneers had crossed. My eyes kept on frantically discerning possible routes from many kilometers above, only to find time and time again that the imaginary trail i saw would come to some kind of dramatic dead-end. I kept on imagining the horses and wagons needing to turn around, to search for another trail. Stories of this west-ward travel had accompanied me during my flight from London to San Francisco in the beginning of this year, as I was reading Joan Didion’s Where I was From. The Sierra Nevada as the most dreaded moment in the pioneer narratives Didion talked about; Independence Rock which was named as such because those who didn’t reach the rock by the first of July had no chance of reaching the passes before snow closed them. There’s something about reading or thinking about such narratives when flying to California, and then there is something else about thinking about them while doing a horse-trail in the Californian mountains.

You could say that Lucky and i were a good match. When we were still at the stables waiting to start the trail, i knew that Lucky wanted to drink some more water – he had made that abundantly clear – which i figured he should be able to do. The result was that we came in at the very end of the trail, as Bill was waiting to close it. It was Bill’s job to make sure that nobody fell out of the trail or was left behind. But soon enough a horse with a temperament started kicking the horse behind him, which scared at least two horses who began messing up the trail. Bill needed to leave his closing position to calm the horses down, and to help the riders to keep a better distance. “Will you be fine?” he asked before he left. Sure. The only thing was: Lucky prefered to go kind of slow, and i wasn’t in a hurry either, so as we were strolling along we gradually lagged behind the trail. I was just immensely enjoying our solitude when Bill got back us. “I don’t know if it’s Lucky or if it’s me, but we’re kind of slow,” i said. By way of explanation, not apology, cause i didn’t really feel like changing our rhythm. “Ah, don’t worry”, said Bill, “Lucky is not slow. He’s safe. Doesn’t that sound better?” We laughed, and i liked it a lot. I remember thinking: i need to tell this to Chaim tonight – we’re not slow, we’re safe. And with even more trust in Lucky i let his reins totally free when the terrain was a bit difficult. When we needed to descend he sometimes just stopped for a little while, and i limited my role in these moments to saying: “Lucky, you just go down when you want to”, which he eventually would do. When the terrain was easier and flatter i had to exhort him a bit because clearly we lagged behind quite a stretch. But Bill, on his impressive mule (they are more confident on mountainous terrain) never told me to hurry up. He would also linger behind, sometimes next to us or just in front, and we both looked a bit doubtful to the riders ahead who were pushing and pulling on their horses. I really got lucky that day.

Another session with Michael Alexander, my favorite Russian bear. Okay, the Russian accent (remember, only audible in my ears) is wearing off. But we did talk about bears this time, i’ll tell you in just a minute. First there were his massaging hands, and as they touched my neck and shoulders, he laughed once more: “Such tiny shoulders and so many knots and tension – still carrying all the problems of the world around you on them?” I do my usual response: “It’s getting better, it’s definately been better since the last massage.” As he seems to be using all this force on my shoulders (“Hmmm, i can’t make them respond to my usual tricks…”), his fingers pause on one spot in particular and he says: “I know there’s supposed to be a muscle in there, only it feels like a bone.”

As i lay on the table slowly moving in a state of full relaxation, i start visualising the bone, the bones, my shoulders and back as a bone, and before i know it i see myself as a turtle. Yes, i think, it makes all the sense of the world, to have that kind of shield, that kind of house, always with you. And yes, to move with that kind of slowness. My mother used to call me a slug when i was a child, because of how slow i can do things (do you remember, mama? and imagine this, i’m actually at a university now which has a slug as its mascotte. the yellow banana slug, of which i desperately, desperately need to find at least one by the time yoran comes to explore the territory… his disappointment would be unbearable). True enough, but make it a slug with a house on her back, make it a turtle. And then there is the new animal in my life, Chaim, a kind of turtle. Considering the power of visualisation, i’m sure i shouldn’t have been visualising becoming a turtle when the bear was using all his might to loosen up muscles that felt like bones on my back. But there was nothing to be done against it. I sense the beginning of a whole series of fables featuring the turtle and the bear coming out of these massage sessions.

And zen (and later Leta told us that Michael was a practising Buddhist) and bones brought another animal to my mind: a mad ram. Once more, strangly enough, memories of the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian Express came back to me in that room. Ulan Ude, the last stop and big city in Russia before the train crosses the border into Mongolia. Not far from the city, a monastry which is the centre of Buddhism in the Russian Federation. We go to visit the monastry, in the middle of a landscape that already hints at the vastness of Mongolian horizons, all of us feeling much in need of a zen moment. Remember that strange moment, Lotte and Wim? As soon as we enter the grounds of the monastry, a ram on the other side looks up from the grazing and the other things the rams were doing, and starts running wildly straight to me to slam its horns against my knee. Again and again and again. Causing much laughter around me, while i was getting really angry & disturbed by the animal, until one of the monks came and took the ram away. That kind of crushed my hope for a zen feeling that afternoon, meant the beginning of an enormous bruise on my leg, and was perhaps a bit of a lesson that one shouldn’t connect a hope for some kind of zen feeling too strongly with an actual space such as a Buddhist monastry.

But back to Michael. At the end of the session, I told him that maria and i would go camping in Yosemite next week. “Ah, Yosemite,” he smiled, and talked about how beautiful it was, how he loved to go there. Was it my first time, he asked. No, i replied, i had been there as a child, but i was only 6 years old, so it would be discovering it all over again. (Oh my god, now that i’m writing this i suddenly think of the possibility that the same thing might happen as with revisiting the house were we used to live in Tarrytown, NY: that everything looked so much smaller than in my memories. Oh, imagine, the rocks and trees in Yosemite might turn out to look small after all…) I add that at the time my sister and i had been excited by the idea of meeting bears, but in the end we didn’t. Ah bears, he replied, you never know in Yosemite. A good friend of mine, he continued, was once taking a shower on one of the camping sites, one of these open air showers, and all of a sudden she looks up and sees the paws of a bear on the metal construction holding the curtain, and a bear’s head curiously looking at her. She started screaming her lungs out, which scared the bear who tried to get away as fast as he could, clumsily tearing the whole shower construction down, leaving the woman not only frightened and screaming, but also standing naked on the camping site… Oh those bears.

russian chinese massage

He’s the best in town, Leta told me, and she should know. She just graduated in Chinese medicine, and he used to be one of her teachers. He does not live here, but once a week he comes to town and does a day of regular clients. So i phone him and tell him i’m a housemate of Leta and if it would be possible to have a massage (still too afraid to do acupuncture). Michael Alexander – i couldn’t help making it sound Russian in my ears.

Introduced through Leta in more than one way. By the time i get to his working space, he knows the story i had told Leta earlier this week. About the massage i got at the Community Bodywork Centre, which was good but especially the second time the context got on my nerves. A massage that gets on your nerves kind of defeats the purpose. It was okay as long as she was actually giving me a massage, but as soon as she started talking i felt my nervous and muscular system protesting. She felt like sharing her diagnosis, along the lines of: “So you’re new in town… hm, yes, that explains the tension in your shoulders. It’s all about communication. When you’re new in a place you need to connect to how people communicate. What about coming to the dance church we have here on Sundays? So you can loosen up a bit.” All of that wrapped up in a very new agie language, and did i already mention that it got in my nerves? It boiled down to a new age take on migration & assimilation: you come here, you better learn the lingo and mix in. The kind of thing that makes you want to say: hey, do you know what i think of your way of communication and your dance church? But i said nothing, retreating into a consumer attitude as my defence: i’m paying you for a massage, not for some cheap new age talk. (no, i didn’t actually say that, i only focused on that thought and tightened my muscles)

Leta, taking her profession seriously, had laughed at the story and said that there was a lot of that around. Michael is nothing like that, she announced, he has a solid (Chinese) medical training, and one feels the difference. So today i went to his cabinet and met this man who seemed like a big Russian bear to me. I only actually saw him briefly before i was flat on my belly on the massage table, so from that point onwards the image of the Russian bear became larger than life, materially supported by his low and deep voice. Whenever he tells or asks me something, i can’t help but hear it with a Russian accent. The pieces of the room i see through the face-sized hole are dominated by Chinese-styled furniture. Much is red, and as in my head it mixes with Russian fantasies and Russian red, i find myself floating somewhere in the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian express.

The massage is indeed brilliant. When he first touches my shoulders he starts laughing. “Waaw, that’s a lot of tension for a body as small as yours to carry. So you decided to take the stress of the whole world around on your shoulders?” (with a Russian accent) I smile – which he doesn’t see of course. Although his knowledge of bodies makes me hesitate now, maybe a smile shows on the whole body? I tell him that i’m more careful about that since a little while, but this (very Russian) laughter tells me he is not convinced.

His hands have such a sofisticated knowlegde of the body. It is truly amazing how he immediately finds those spots where tension is accumulated. Just in case i would start taking that skill for granted, his fingers stumbled a little bit when looking for one of those spots in my knee cavity. And i could immediately feel how precisely right all those other places he put his hands on were.

“Are you a vegetarian?” (with a Russian accent) Well funny that you should ask, i tell him, cause i’ve been for the longest time and a month or so ago i stopped being a vegetarian. “Good, I encourage that.” (with a Russian accent) I ask him why, already on the defensive about theories claiming that vegetarians miss out on some food elements. He explains that it’s about the texture of the muscles, that over many years muscles of vegetarians get harder, tougher and more unflexible and vulnerable to muscle problems and tension. Never heard of that, i tell him. “This is not much discussed about outside of Chinese medicine,” he replies, “and especially here people don’t like to hear it”. (with a Russian accent). And in contrast to the words of the woman of the Community Bodywork Center invested in what “people here do”, i believe him. Hm, how much one’s openess to the framework and vision of the hands that try to heal you matter. Ready for a bloody red steak now.

farfalla

ed arrivata, la farfalla,

in the good company of a gardian angel…

fishy business

This space has remained blank for more than a week now, as a kind of tribute to the dead fish i suppose — in any case because i was unable to actually write down the bad news: our fish died. Sahar woke me up with this bad news on Sunday morning. The gentle Chinese man was right, and we kind of killed a fish. Reading the comments on the last entry i guess that some of you felt it coming… Yes, we got the fish in an Iranian shop. Not the nice Iranian shop we first went to, that in fact did not have any fish. Teh shop-keeper advised us to get a plastic fish. He showed us paintings of haft-sin – at least 7 symbolic objects which start with an s in Farsi – that his son made while he was on the front in the Iraq-Iran war. A soldiers’ way of doing haft-sin. Not there, but in a smaller Iranian shop with a shop keeper we didn’t really trust, who waived away concers about bowls and chlorine and water temperature and assured us that he had been keeping a whole bunch of fish for more than two weeks now.

What more can i tell you about our fish? We didn’t get to know it well, and then i’m not really sure i understand these creatures anyway. The shop keeper had put a black bag around the transparent plastic bag to make it easier to carry home, and to me it seemed that the fish needed light so we got rid of the black bag. And to me it seemd that the water was too cold, so i held my hand against the bag. Maybe that killed the fish. And as we walked home, we passed Macy’s and still needed some stuff for our Norooz preparations, so the fish visisted the whole of Macy’s from the 8th floor till the basement and back to the 8th again. Maybe that killed the fish. And then we developed a grand plan of going to Central Park after Norouz and free the fish in one of the ponds. Maybe it overheard us, dreaded the idea and committed suicide. When we finally got home and put the fish in its bowl (with declorinated water) it definately seemed anxious and restless.

Oh, the Chinese man was right. Setareh was right. Do you know what the fish symbolises in the haft-sin? Life. Oh dear.

haft-sin preparations 2

haft-sin preparations 1

Okay, where to start. We need at least one goldfish for haft-sin. And we wanted to visit China town and then go for the fish in the Iranaian shop, but unexpectedly we ran into this fish shop in China town with all possible brands and sizes and colors of fish. After we made our aesthetic decision, the sweet Chinese shopkeepers refused to sell it! After decades of easy gold fish shopping for Norouz, for the first time Sahar confronted the challenge of fish RIGHTS… and she was lost… So in the middle of China town we found ourselves up against the Animal Liberation Front, disguished as fish shop keepers. The man, so friendly and entirely dedicated, explained to us, the ignorant, that the cute little bowl we wanted to buy would make the tiny fish we wanted dizzy and frantic. Mind you, we were having this conversation in a small shop that looked like an aquarium Ã nd was filled with aquariums overpopulated with fish. But of course we didn’t want to make our tiny fish dizzy and anxious. As we were thinking about the possibility to get a bigger fish bowl, the man kept on discouraging us: we would need de-clorinated water or the fish would die, and a water warmer cause we didn’t want to put the fish in cold water, and… Sarah had no clue that preparing the whole haft-sin business would be so difficult and ethically challenging… And if you’re still a bit lost by now with what exactely we are doing in New York these days: in a few days it is Norouz, Iranian new year, and to celebrate we need to set haft-sin which means a gathering a number of things on the table which symbolise all things good for the new year.

So in the end the Chinese man and woman, who were such sweet-hearts, flatly refused to sell us the fish, reluctantly sold us an (empty) bowl, and advised us to go home and think about it a bit better, taking a lot of pride in their dedication not to sell fish to the ignorant. Our New York haft-sin adventure continues… sahar & sarah