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SUMMITS

I love mountains. I have a special love for the Sierras, the Rockies, the Sangre de Christos...
Here is the finest mountain-lover's book I have seen in many years.

Amidst these evocative prints by woodblock master Tom Killion, an artist rooted in the great early woodblock masters of Japan, are timeless word-vistas by John Muir, that early great lover of these mountains, and poems and journal exerpts by Gary Snyder, who later followed the same trails to new places. All shared here in exquisite vintage from Heyday Books. Enjoy. Climb. Summits await.

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BUSH REQUIRES DIGITAL ENHANCEMENT

Which makes me wonder: is he maybe just a low quality GOP graphic?

THE OCEAN RUNS RED

Understandably, there is very little coverage of this in Japan. Every year during Japan's traditional dolphin-hunting season from September to March, the ocean runs red before the villages where fishermen still practice the so-called "Drive Fishery." One of those villages, earlier also notorious for its annual dolphin slaughters, has learned another, wiser approach.
Here are some details on the continuing dolphin hunts and what you can do.

A LEAF

After Kaya left a few evenings ago, as I was emptying my pockets before going to bed I found a leaf that she had picked up on our afternoon walk that day, from among all the other leaves lying on the ground. I suppose she had picked it out because of its unusualness in being half crimson and half bright yellow, the colors divided right down the middle of the leaf, had picked it up and given it to me, I had looked at it, and remarked upon it, and thought and I suppose said, in the brief instant of attention young children allow for such things, how special it was that she had seen the very beauty in that particular leaf among all the others. Then I had put the leaf in my pocket and forgotten about it as we continued on our walk. When I found it in my pocket that night, I put it on the table beside my bed. Now for the days since, each time I go to bed at night and each time I rise in the morning the beauty of that leaf, at first so bright and attention-grabbing, has begun to fade a little bit as the red weakens toward brown and the yellow does too. Soon it will be the one color all the other leaves have become, so is grabbing my attention in a different way. It is a little record, there, of the life of all things, once in their greenness, thence to their fullest beauty, that falls in time to the beginning children give to us.

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BAFFLED AT GULLIBILITY OF INDIAN DOCTORS BAFFLED BY MAN WHO CLAIMS NOT TO HAVE EATEN FOR 68 YEARS

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VERRRRY INTERESTING...

This bizarre story sank without a major media trace, which is unbelievable, given America's tabloid appetite; can't imagine such a thing happening during the Clinton administration. No wonder though, why it was buried so completely...

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TIME AND WISHES

Nothing makes you start thinking about time like the shockingly peaceful aftermath of a dervish young granddaughter, when you find gingko leaves on the desk, acorns in the corners, beanbags behind the stove, weeds in the vase, persimmons on the chair, interesting seeds and twigs everywhere.

Took that thinking with me on the train to the city this morning and realized looking out the window into the mist of the rainy day swirling by how much time has passed in my own life, born before WWII and the bomb, when Japan became the enemy; milk and bread were delivered by horse cart when I was a boy (many tales there), and all us young kids had jobs of our own: delivering papers before dawn in howling winters of upstate NY (many tales there too) or sweeping leaves off sidewalks or shoveling snow or delivering groceries or stacking mom & pop store shelves---we had no tv till I was 12 or so, we listened to radio and what a thrill it was---

Remembered that in high school I studied Latin and Spanish, then Mandarin Chinese in the military, later Russian and Japanese and smatterings of other languages as I made my ways around the world (Americans today are pretty much monolingual and mononational), yet in college I remember being amazed at seeing a Xerox machine on tv, and now computers and cell phones, practically constant progress---we have advanced so far in so many ways, yet fallen behind in so many others---

Remembered my own great grandmother, a tiny white-haired lady sitting in the sun on the porch with me at her feet when I was about 7 and she was 100, talking about before there were automobiles. She had been born before the Civil War, was sixteen when Lincoln was assassinated, lived through the two big 20th-century wars, heard of the A-bomb, and reaches all the way to me here today. How I wish I could talk to her now!

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REPORT HITS AMERICAN IGNORANCE OF WORLD

"We desperately need to understand other countries and other cultures--friend and
foe alike. We are unnecessarily putting ourselves at risk because of our stubborn
monolingualism and ignorance of the world."

---The Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad

SECURING AMERICA'S FUTURE: GLOBAL EDUCATION FOR A GLOBAL AGE

Excerpt:

"On September 11, 2001, an international threat of which Americans were largely ignorant did more serious damage to the homeland than any foreign power had managed to inflict since the attack on Pearl Harbor. No one who lived through that terrible day will soon forget the anguished, confused questions that we all had to process: Where did this come from? How could anyone want to do this to us? We all recall the tickers rolling across the bottom of our television screens asking speakers of Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto to come forward. It was a very painful and public admission of how little we knew about the Arab and Muslim worlds.
It is not just the Middle East of which we are ignorant. As a nation we suffer from a pervasive lack of knowledge about the world. There have been periods, indeed entire eras, in our history where Americans have relished their isolation from the world. Some have made speaking only English a point of national pride instead of a disgrace. Never mind that the schools of most countries, rich or poor, teach at least two languages to their children. In the most prosperous nation on the planet, with the most extensive system of higher education, we are notoriously inept at imparting languages to our youth."

Full Report [PDF file]

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FIST IN THE AIR FOR THE BEEHIVE DESIGN COLLECTIVE.

The beehive itself is here. Spread the word.

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I haven't raked this much

since I was-z-z-z-z...

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JAPANESE SCIENTIST WANTS TO KILL MORE WHALES BEFORE THERE AREN'T ANY LEFT

Tadasu Yamada, curator at Tokyo's National Science Museum and no doubt recipient of large research grants from it would be interesting to know where, says "The results from research whaling supported our research." "Knowing how many different whale species exist would aid in their conservation," he adds, like the US general in Vietnam who destroyed that village to save it.

Commercial whaling was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1986, but a special provision lets Japan catch whales for "scientific projects," such as finding whales to count, by killing up to 400 a year. Yamada wants a bigger number; thousands and thousands would be good.

Environmentalists and anti-whaling nations have criticized the absolutely not hunts as commercial whaling in disguise. But that is patently untrue, since most of the whale meat completely coincidentally resulting from Japan's absolutely crucial research is eventually sold to restaurants to help cover the program's costs until they run out of whales. When that happens at least we'll know the names of all the cetaceans that no longer exist, so our descendants can put them in alphabetical order or something.

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DEMOCRACY STILL LIVES IN AMERICA

Senate sees Bush Energy Bill for the kickback it is, rejects multibillion dollar subsidies for big oil and gas interests. How about a tenth of that to the growing penniless elderly and homeless populations of America?


[In her comment hereto, M Sinclair Stevens of WordsIntoBytes correctly points out (at interesting length) that the bill wasn't rejected, but stalled; still, democracy isn't flatlining yet.]

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THE LITTLE EXPLORER

Kaya (whose bed is covered with acorns), just back from her walk with Echo, came to me at the computer, held out her closed hand and proudly placed into mine four crumpled bright-yellow gingko leaves. Naturally, I was effusely thankful one, two, three and four times. Not long after I heard myself saying to her "No Kaya , don't bite the keyboard..."

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AMERICAN DIVIDE

Superb essay on splendor and loss in the state of America by one of America's greatest novelists in any genre, James Lee Burke. If you haven't read him, start with The Lost Get-Back Boogie, then move on to The Neon Rain, where the wondrous Dave Robicheaux makes his first appearance, and continue from there. You'll be glad you did. Check out the rest of James Lee's site, too.

ABOUT THE STARS

Kaya is back with us again for a couple of days. Before her bath, took her out onto the deck to see the big bright starworks in the clear night sky, turning round and round up there. Unexpectedly, she laughed and laughed at how wonderful it was, and I had to agree with her.

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SAVE THE EARTH -- DUMP BUSH

Bobby Kennedy Jr. at Salon, trying to save for tomorrow's children what Bush is selling out to his pals.

Also see this interview with Kennedy for more on the environmental travesty now under way, whose price will be paid by our children.

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KAYA'S DREAM

This morning at breakfast I asked Kaya why she'd awakened in the middle of the night, did she have a bad dream, she said yes, so I asked what the dream had been about (I'm supercurious about the dreams of very young children). She answered: "The sun was crying."

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NEW WHALE SPECIES ANNOUNCED BY JAPANESE SCIENTISTS WHO HAVE KILLED A LOT OF THEM

It's all in the name of scientific research, not to mention big bucks per kilo.

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OPEN EYES OPEN

Came home from the big city last night and found upon entering the doorway that Kaya was visiting, she'd heard my motorcycle coming up the mountain and was already yelling my name to come and sit down and eat, I asked her how were her newborn twin sisters Mitsuki and Miasa, she answered: "crying." Soon to be 3 years old Western style, but already 3 years old Oriental style, she'd been brought (with her hair all nicely trimmed from Shichigosan) to visit by her other grandmother, whose hometown is just at the southern end of the Lake. Kaya would be spending a couple of days with us. Excellent reason to go out on some new walks today, take Kaya to my newfound berry patch, gather some wild persimmons, pull down some wild gourds for decorating, delight in how a child delights in everything, refresh myself in the wonderful ability to find evernew in the familiar. I pointed to some leaves that were now the bright yellow she'd never seen them being, she recognized them anyway, from our last walks when they were green: "mukago," she said, and began looking for some to put in her pockets already bulging with acorns and acorn 'hats.' But we'd gotten all the mukago the last time. No end to acorns, though, like there's no end to the new; all you have to do is keep your eyes open while they're open, the way we're born to do.

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THE BIG STONE BALL

As you rollercoaster up and down along this fascinating adventure of years we call a life, there are some adjustments that involve nothing more than simply getting out of the way of the big old fait accompli rolling right at you like it's a big stone ball and you're Indiana Jones. To take one small but deep recent example, every time I turn the corner on the stair landing to go upstairs I'm still not used to seeing the raccoon hugging the bannister with his (her?) big tail hanging down.

Now I know that many of you alert and finely discerning readers will note the considerable semanticorhetorical disparity between "Big Stone Ball" and "raccoon hugging the bannister"; that is my admittedly awkward attempt to represent the breadth and bizarrity of the class of adjustments to which I refer. To be more precise yet general, you've got kids. You love them. They grow up in about an hour and move away, start families of their own in the major human ongoing.

Thereafter time goes collectively faster for you, but particularly slower. Then one day some time after the kids have moved out you're clearing the old shelves upstairs, you open one of the largish boxes you find there and suddenly behold some of the stuffed toys the kids used to love, many of which toys you so carefully purchased (would she prefer this rabbit with glasses, he this goggle-eyed penguin?) after much consideration all those--yes, in fact, decades ago now-- and here comes the Big Stone Ball rolling toward you and you're wearing a fedora.

That happened to me the other day for the first time, the stuffed-animals-in-the-box scenario. There in the box as I stood on the chair was suddenly Officer Dawg in all his glory, with his badge and blue police hat still on, though a bit squashed, there was the cinnamon teddy bear that had caused such commotion one Christmas morning 20 years ago, there was the Nekobasu (cat bus) from Tottoro, with the little red-eyed gray mice for running lights, there was the baby raccoon with the grabby arms that held onto things, and don't look at me that way, I just couldn't put them back in that box; they deserved better, and so did I.

What else could I do but put the nekobasu beside the computer where every once in a while I can look over and see those bright golden eyes and that insanely optimistic smile and remember stuff that happened back then, and cinnamon bear had to go beside the door to the bedroom for when the grandkids visit, and who could deny Officer Dawg the right to resume his official position looking out of the big bowl at the top of the stairs for a laugh at bedtime, and raccoon of course had to hold on to the bannister sliding down head first as always, so that every time I go upstairs I am freshly and startlingly reminded of how near I really am to what can sometimes seem so far away.

That's what the Big Stone Ball is for.