Hoppin' John rings in (another) New Year

Dear Sister,

Another year gone, the wheel turns again.  I find myself on an island that gives an embodied illustration of the term 'tropical paradise' and you are a stone's throw from Appalachia.  The husband is watching college football play-offs (I'm told it is the first year that the college teams are using a play-off format to prepare for Championships) and Alabama's Crimson Tide has been playing all evening.  They've just lost, the announcer informs me, but it brings to mind the hot sweltering summer days, nights of fireflies who taxi fairies in the woods, and early mornings harvesting (ok.  trailing our mother while she harvested) field peas on the farm.  I remember the dictionary I bought from the thrift store in Birmingham on whose cover some previous owner had scrawled "Roll, Tide, Roll;" I remember my six-year-old self, even less enamored of organized sports than my current self, who for perhaps the first conscious time, defaced a book and wrote in response "Please don't roll."  I remember the older self who found humor in the childish script refuting the sentiment with such firmness and such politeness.  You are on the northern edge of what can be considered 'southern cooking" and I have long and ago bypassed any Southern affiliation, claiming a home in the sub-arctic; and still:

This New Year's, as every New Years, nearly since I can remember; I cook Hoppin'John, a mixture of collard greens, turnip greens and kale, cornbread... and drink a glass or three of champagne.  Four thousand, four hundred and seventeen miles away, I know that you cook Hoppin' John, and three thousand, one hundred and forty four miles away, our mother cooks the same.  The years in the deep south have given me instant at-will access to the accent of a southern belle, and a lifelong practice of cooking Hoppin' John on New Years Day.

Across the cotton fields (whose post-harvest dried husks adorned our Yule tree as kids), the tradition of Hoppin' John eaten on New Years Day to bring luck in the new year and greens for good fortune rings across the years and across the many many miles. 

I imagine that you, like me, cook based off of the "Sundays at Moosewood" cookbook, with handwritten notes in the margins modifying the recipe.  This year, I read the recipe from a photo on my techno-magic-space-phone, and modified it again to match the ingredients of my in-laws Hawaiian pantry.  And its still the same.  Traditions such as this (watch out! I may possibly be getting maudlin from the consumption of champagne), link us across the years and across the miles; they speak to the past which helped create us, the future we will create, and the bond of sisters....

May the new year usher in three hundred and sixty five brand new days of joy and creation and love and success and laughter and great good fortune for us both!

Love,

your sister.

April snow in Alaska

Dear Sister, 

Last night was my husband (your brother now!) and our mother's birthday.  We went out to dinner in Fox, and I took this picture of the April snow we're having.  With the twinkle lights and the evening skies, it could have been midwinter, but it was warm enough to want to frolic in the flakes and catch them on my tongue.  It snowed all through the night, and is snowing still...

You gave me 'snow flower' earrings for my birthday, beautiful pearl petals strung together.  My middle name is April, so I think you might have catalyzed this happening...

much love, 

your sister

New year, new month, new post?

I sit here looking at the calendar, and realize that January is half way over.  The moon that was new on New Year's Day is waxing now, and will soon be full.

We dreamed dreams of blogging weekly, EACH, and here it is two weeks later and nary a post.  Oh, life and your way of filling with activities, dreams, and goals.  I've been focusing, of late, on opening a Reiki healing practice out of the yoga studio where I teach.  Spending time with marketing and business planning.  Visioning.  And when I'm not teaching (or working or business developing or taking OMazing weekend workshops or rolling out my own mat), I'm reading.  Reading with a mug of tea.  The crafting and the cooking have been nonexistant and a necessary sideline, respectively.

I've been reading books on spiritual development, on Reiki, on the energy body, on fascial anatomy, on yoga asana, yoga philosophy, yoga teaching and on the Tarot.  I envy you sometimes, being in grad school.  I want to study yoga and ALL the many ways it interacts with the human, the ways it affects our psychology, physiology, anatomy, energy, soul.  I want to know all about neuropeptides and endocrine glands, about synapses, fascia, nadis, meridians, tendons, agonist and antagonist muscle groups, the brain chemistry of anxiety, lungs, diaphragm, breath.  I want to dive into learning about yoga the same way you are diving into spanish literature.  With a one pointed focus, a drishti.

And then last night, I watched the Tudors, drank a beer (ok, it was 2.  I forgot how much I like a good ESB), and then read a romance novel.  It was indulgent and lovely.  I think my Darlin' Man was relieved to see me step off my spiritual high horse, I was too.  But it doesn't stop me from wanting to read an anatomy book this evening.  Maybe I'll accompany it with something a little stronger than tea.  Live a little bit on the wild side.

.... and for you, the semester begins?

Exhale: hurdles jumped.

Dear sister far away,
       I'm sorry that there is a stack of half-written letters to you sitting under the sewing machine behind the computer on my dining room table.  I'm sorry that our tuesday lunch-for-me, morning-for-you phone call was more hit and miss than a habit.  I'm sorry that it's been my turn to write here forever and ever.  I'll do better next semester.

     But I'll see you on Sunday!  And we'll have all of the conversations that are on backlog: teaching a college course, your trip to Anc. and reiki training, the million ways to use apples in the fall time, and how fall here refuses to end, in the most sparkly light-frost at night sort of way, how different is is cooking for two.  We'll make paper snowflakes and watch the aurora, and talk about ideas, just for the sake of their beauty.  We'll trudge down by the Tananananana's twisting lacy shores, and fall back into each other's lives for a moment.


And then I'll come home and go back to this:

These cranberry lemon rolls wrote a draft for me, I swear

And you'll inhale.  And on the exhale, your spirit will move the air and it will come find me.  And next semester?  Next semester we'll do better.

I love you forever.

Letters and Snow

I got a letter in the mail.  Handwritten words on paper.  Paper that had traveled thousands of miles, winging its way across an ocean, and a continent or two.  Bringing me the thoughts and feelings, the mind matter and heart matter, of a dear friend.  Time and distance are funny things.  As are sentence fragments.  Time and space though, they are collapsible.  And expandable.  As are sentence fragments, come to think of it.  Einstein intuits that time is merely a way create order and structure, healthy boundaries, for matter.  Time exists so that everything does not happen at once.  The sort of limitations that allow for creativity and manifestation.  But even then, a photon exists only in the now.  At the speed of light, time collapses again. 

I thought to write a letter back tonight,  but instead I read about anterior lines of myo-fascial stress conduction and sagittal flexion.  Perhaps I'll write that letter tomorrow.  There will be much in it of congratulations, and also the good kind of newsy gossip.  It will be written much as I write this:  back to a warm fire, dark night outside the window, cats curled, and keys underneath my fingertips.  Only the keys will be those of a much older keyboard, one from the 40's, and my keystrokes will place ink on paper rather than pixels on a screen.

I love them both: word thoughts placed on to a space betwixt and between, located in the always already now and accessible from anywhere – this little blog space of ours in the great sea of inter-netted twining; and the word thoughts placed on tactile space, tangible, traveling through air and across land, from one hand to another.  Winter is upon us here in the north after a welcome, if ominous, extended warm spell of rainy fall.  With the snow and the dark and the stars comes a sense of calm and peace.  A sense of settling.  Time is no different, really; yet I somehow feel I have time to write this when I haven't for weeks.  I'm drawn, as ever, powerfully to my loom, to my studio, to the heart fires and hearth fires of kindred souls.  Limitations feel constructive, supportive, and liberating rather than confining.  And somehow, in the dark and the cold, it all feels possible again. 

It snowed in Fairbanks...

Sugar maple canopy

... and I spent the afternoon reading in the Arboretum, under a fully green sugar maple, surrounded by red spider lilies, black eyed susans, and the hum of the mass exodus of people from campus in the late afternoon.  It was the first morning that I snagged a cardigan on my way out the door, it still being in the low 60's when I jumped on my bike and headed for the font of knowledge that is the red-brick oasis of UNC.

Red Spider Lily

Not to be confused with Spider Woman
(whose arch-enemies were Morgan le Fay and the Brothers Grimm!)

I've been cooking good things much less than I ought, sister dear, and I'm not sure why.  I spend so much time procrastinating from my mountains of reading that I should be rolling in beautiful platings and multi-ingredient wonders, but it's more likely that I'll get home and sauté some broccoli, or eat left over soup from the weekend.  It's a little sad...  I really do need to do better.  But instead, I spent this last weekend talking about thinking about writing about listening in the L2 classroom, and my gerunds just got the best of me.
The last few weeks (until the last few beautifully glorious days) I was jonesing hard for the touch of Midas that is fall in Fairbanks, trying to convince myself that the night air being perfumed by honeysuckle made up for missing the wash of color that is the transubstantiation of the birches (birch? are we sticking with that?).  That old king is somewhere laughing at my avarice, I know, but it is just so beautiful!  I stopped being jealous though, and it wasn't the snow (just ask my office-mates, they were a little shocked at how much I was longing for it)... it was walking to the library to return a book today, and seeing down the brick path between two buildings a bed of blooming roses, framed by the yellowing leaves of a row of locusts... It's my turn for the best time of the year!

Honeysuckle dreamin'

In celebration, I'm going to go read about fatal jealousy, violation, and defloration.  Because grad school.
Love n stuff.

Love in the Moonlight

Mmmm, cantaloupe!  Warm from summer sun, vine ripened and slightly damp from the earth…  I’ve been told of a melon strain being cultivated here in Fairbanks, from seeds of Russian farmers.  I’ve yet to see or taste it.  I hope to find the seed one day, and plant them in my greenhouse.  Cantaloupe was my very favorite fruit when I was little.  I remember my father teaching me about puns, the treasure hunt to find the secret other meaning of words and phrases.  And I remember the day, maybe 5 years old, sitting at the dining room table (the maple one now in my fathers lab/studio, its surface scratched by the hard use of a lifetime of family meals and projects), with a slice of cantaloupe and a spoon.  For a few minutes, moments? I couldn’t eat it.  I knew then, with the sure and blinding clarity of the very young, that if I took this bite of my most favorite food, I COULD NEVER RUN AWAY AND GET MARRIED.  I’d been listening to the sad ballads out of Ireland, the ones that speak of fateful love between ladies and highwaymen.  I’d begun to dream of the romance of eloping, the secret thrill of defying conventions, the surprise of coming home with my new husband.  And in that moment, I knew I had to either abjure cantaloupe for the rest of my life (oh terrible prospect!) or resolve to never run away and get married.  So I took my budding stubbornness, my urge to defy conventions and rebelliously resolved that I was going to eat my cantaloupe, that my parents would have to love and respect and approve of whoever I chose to marry. They would just have to deal.  And if my parents loved and respected my choice, then I’d never need to elope!  That next juicy bite of chilled orange sweet fleshy melon goodness was my defiance, my demand and my dare.

Next weekend I’m marrying two of my dearest friends in the world.  They actually did elope, last fall, for a courthouse wedding.  But the power of friends and family, of community, of love as the force that brings people together urged them into having a grand reception party this summer.  Preceded by a ceremony in front of family and the closest friends, at which they've asked me to officiate.  So this week is all about crafting decorations: buntings and signs sewn mostly of thrifted clothes I've collected and cut up for cloth over the past many years, party planning, and welcoming far-flug family and friends.  And then on Saturday, I get to hold sacred space for two beautiful souls to affirm their love for and commitment to one another.

Driving into town last night, the just-shy-of-full moon hung low over the hills. Breathtaking.  It seemed equal in size to hills it rested upon.  It glowed like a giant pearl in the sky, against a backdrop of periwinkle, pink, lavender, blue, rose sky.  What is the full moon bringing you?