We have roots
we branch out
we blossom
we bear fruit
like trees
what lives
we are!

SKY HORSES

The typhoon cutely named Shanshan, that was supposed to roll playfully northward at a harmless distance from Japan's Pacific coast like a meteorological panda cub, turned out to be a sky-sized Clydesdale that for much of the night put its big shoulder against our house and pushed the kind of push that makes you hunch up your shoulders and squint your eyes in expectation of a wall giving way.

I got my first inkling of its muscular approach yesterday evening when in the very calm weather at Kyoto Station I tried to change to my regular train and there wasn't one. There was quite a crowd there, and the shy lady announcer (who, it was clear, had unexpectedly been given the task) was nervously making whispery announcements about something or other over already blurry and inadequate speakers: "Mbwabwangssskkllklklffffttttmlorgshwaflangblimmmana, we apologize for any inconvenience…" (I could identify the last part by its rhythm and syntactic placement).

Turned out there was a train, sort of, down the track a ways, just sitting there. The usual train is 8 or 9 cars long, for a thousand or so people; this was a four-car train for much of the population of central Japan. I lived in Tokyo for several years during the days of the white-gloved, rush-hour commuter-pusher-guys, so I know how to weasel into a jammed train doorway, and I did. It wasn't pretty. Not much room to breathe afterward, though. Trouble was, about 50 people jammed on after me, till I thought I could hear train rivets popping.

Then we just sat there on the track, getting to know each other. According to what I could decipher from subsequent announcements, this train would only go halfway to my station (because it might get blown off the tracks if it really got out into the open on the elevated section). That was the first I heard of the wind.

At last we started, slowly, and traveled slowly, until a long time later - after a lot of ouching and public anguish - we finally arrived at the small terminal station all hermetically compressed into a mass of public unity. Then there was another jam as central Japan got off onto the tiny platform and went out into the weather to try and get home. I could have walked home in a couple of hours, but fortunately Echo wasn't out teaching yoga, so she could pick me up in the van.

Then up on the mountain the Clydesdale started pushing. It was interesting throughout the night. This morning we woke to what I call a pacing rain, that happens in the contrasting calm before and after typhoons: the rain is falling steadily, the uniform drops widely and evenly spaced with a bit of delicate fancy to them, like the steps of a well-trained horse, pacing along down the air.

Outside, everything around the house is in a different place; our roof looks like a cedar pincushion with branches wedged under the tiles. Now there's a stir of a normal breeze and a glitter of sun. Time to get out and clean up the stable.

DEEP IN THE SPIN BUNKER

You can bet Rove and the Elephant Gang are thanking their lucky stars for the GOP Spy Bill as they use their slick new terrorist communication-screening capabilities to the max to scour every Democratic House member phone call, every Democratic email, every Democratic live chat, every Democratic bank account, every Democratic hotel and bedroom in search of just one crumb or even hint of gay/pedophilia/adultery/alcoholism/bestiality/malfeasance/jaywalking, anything they can spin counter-Foleywise to any extent since, according to internal GOP polling data, they're looking at losing 20-50 house seats in November if Hastert remains as Speaker, which would mean a Democratic majority with the power of impeachment and trial, and they know where that will lead. Bet they're working 24-hour days in that spin bunker, all in service to you and me. The results should be out soon.

Is the comma over yet?

DO DEER EAT ACORNS?

While enjoying my tea early this morning, I was gazing with a pruner's pride out the big kitchen window at the newly trimmed trees and bushes that line the road when my eye was caught by some movement beyond, in the newly cleared land across the way. A little focus revealed that it was the Baron himself, browsing along the seemingly bare ground.

Even though the land has been cleared for human sale (human asking price for 1200 tsubo (1 acre; a very large piece of land in Japan) of rural residential mountain land w/potential lake view = 36,000,000 yen, around 300,000 dollars, which gives you an idea of how expensive land is in Japan. For flat suburb land, 10 or more times that; for city land 20 or more times that).

In any case, whatever the human price, the Baron still clearly holds fundamental title to all the ground around here; he was browsing pretty comfortably over there on a mere speck of his holdings, only now and then leaping for a millisecond in starkly absolute fear before concluding it was only a falling acorn or something, which must be exhausting (though it seems to have worked, over the eons), every few other seconds raising his head to scan the ever-hostile surroundings of the infinitely wealthy. I wondered what he was browsing on over there - everything had been graded flat only a few days ago - couldn't be anything there but acorns; do deer eat acorns?

He looked to be in good shape: plump and sleek for winter, no mortgage, 100% equity, an impressive fur coat and a majestic set of antlers with which to conduct his business, he looked very prosperous casually surveying his estates, which spread far wider than a mere human acre; indeed, they have no borders. He dined for quite a while on the finest deer cuisine in the neighborhood, then wandered off in aristocratic hauteur, without paying a yen.

That's the kind of class you have to be born to.

GOING FOR THE GOLD

Kaya heads for the finish line...

VISIT TO ANOTHER WORLD

On rainy Sunday we thought we'd go to some other kind of world than the one in the headshaking news, so we went to where everyone was smiling even in the rain, where kids played freely, where everywhere we looked was beauty and simplicity. We did this by driving north for about 45 minutes to a mountain village called Hata that we hadn't even known existed until we heard about its festival via the local grapevine.

We hadn't known Hata existed because that's the way the villages founders wanted it: secrecy and inaccessibility were key factors in the village's beginning nearly 1000 years ago. Hata is one of those villages in central Japan that were created back then in locations chosen for their remoteness. They were established by ochimusha (defeated warriors) in the aftermath of the great climactic battle of Dan-no-Ura, chronicled in the Heike Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike). Following disastrous defeat, surviving Taira clan warriors, their families and other battle stragglers fled for their lives to distant, hidden places that they'd known about here and there in central Japan - and likely had kept in mind in case of just such an eventuality - unsettled mountain fastnesses where they would not be found and hunted down, and where their descendants live still.

In this little village of some 30 families, where the locals says there are more monkeys than people, the folks were having their village festival on Sunday, an event not much advertised beyond the local area, so we left this world and went there, a beautiful secluded mountain village often used these days as the setting for many traditional-type Japanese movies, since a lot of this original beauty has been erased in modernized Japan, but these people had been isolated and self-sufficient for so long that, for example their centuries-old, lovingly arranged and maintained terraces of rice paddies were included in the book Nihon no Tanada-Hyakusen (100 Japanese Rice Terraces), the only ones in Shiga Prefecture to earn that distinction. And so Hata became famous.

The road into the village, now a single-lane paved road along a stream between two mountain shoulders, was originally only the stream through a steep defile, the well-hidden village therefore easily defensible by only a few against an army. And so they've lived there for nearly a millennium now, along upward winding roads lined with old and new farmhouses flanked by rice paddies terraced along the natural topography, the tall trees and mountain ridges shaded into distances by the rain and mist…

There beside a temple grove loud with the sound of the rain the villagers were gathered in the festive way beneath canopies where many were selling local goods, salt-broiled trout and other fish, rice cakes, miso, carved gourds and other local crafts and, as a sweet for the kids, baked sweet potatoes baked on the spot.

The big event was the scarecrow contest (naturally crucial in a place even more subject to the wild than where I live) for which there were 13 entries prominently on display in a small rice field commandeered for the occasion: a startlingly impressive samurai warrior in full regalia, a leaping clown, Godzilla climbing what looked suspiciously like the Empire State building, an ostrich ingeniously fashioned of wild grasses, a glitzy peacock made of something metallic very deftly cut, that I'm sure crows hate as soon as they set eyes on it, and a few effective variations on the conventional.

We walked along up the curving road past the houses and fields, watching the scenery change with every step, then wandered back the same way, leaving much yet to be explored on other autumn days. Echo bought a broiled trout at a discount, and they added a fat salt-broiled Ayu as a bonus. On our way out one of the village elders smilingly handed us some auspicious rice cakes, one pink and one white, to take home and toast later.

THEY CALL IT A DEATH SHORTAGE--
I CALL IT INCREASING ELDER CLOUT.

"In the scientists' projections, the ongoing increase in average lifespan is about to be joined by something never before seen in human history: a rise in the maximum possible age at death.

Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward 'engineered negligible senescence'—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have 'a good chance of success in mice within ten years.' The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. 'In ten years we'll have a pill that will give you twenty years,' says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. 'And then there'll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born.'

Even this relatively slow rate of increase, he says, will radically alter the underpinnings of human existence. 'Pushing the outer limits of lifespan' will force the world to confront a situation no society has ever faced before: an acute shortage of dead people."

I don't know about you, but I'm ready to wield some collective wisdom.

The Coming Death Shortage

PRODROME OF THE 'OCTOBER SURPRISE'?

"If you believe that those in the know use insider information before major events then you might be interested on the HUGE number of October 6th put options for the big indexes...

Make no mistake - something wicked this way comes, and the smart money has already taken preventative steps."

GRUB GRUB

Last summer in my hurry before leaving for the states I sectioned and stacked a half-cord of oak where it was most convenient at the time, beneath the plum tree, and obverse to the prevailing wind. As a result the wood couldn't dry adequately, so the wood beetles and fungus-cultivating ants renovated it into an insectivoral Beverly Hills Grand Hotel. In further consequence, this morning I was out early continuing the task of stripping the damp bark off the sections under the watchful eyes of butterflies, dragonflies, a frog in his niche in the deck joinery, and Dr. Crow, who was up in the chestnut tree burbling over the prospect. He knows that whenever I do this I uncover handfuls of fat white wood-beetle larvae, some the size of Wichetty grubs, that dine on the oak cambium layer and into the wood itself, and when exposed just fall to the ground and lay there invitingly, like crow antipasto.

When I first started splitting oak around here, splitting trunks 2 feet in diameter at the time, a villager stopped by to watch and commented that if I found any of those big white oak grubs, they're really delicious, a traditional local delicacy, like Osuzumebachi (giant hornet) larvae. I passed on it at the time and have since continued to do so, though the grubs are as big as shrimp, and I'm sure that in a time of no food they'd make quite a tasty (and organic) gumbo. Anyway the Crow family has known all this stuff for eons, and he couldn't wait for me to leave his restaurant.

As I was working I kept hearing the acorns fall on my upmountain neighbor's ceramic tile roof, causing me to recall that unfortunately for my neighbor he hadn't thought, before he built his log house, to cut down the big oak or at least the branches that right overgrow the roof; and for a number of weeks this time of year, the crafty old tree releases its thousands of acorns one by one (like a machine gun if it's windy); the hard nuts strike the roof here and there like bullets, rebound all over the deck and against the glass doors, making a nutty racket 24 hours a day, waking my neighbor up at night. And of course the pattern of acorn ballistics is completely random, which is much worse; he lies there waiting...

Our chestnut is now also doing the same thing - something to be careful of when you walk under the tree - and its spiky missiles are much larger, thudding on the deck and rebounding off the big glass doors on two sides of our house, which can be startling in the dead silence of evening, but very considerately the chestnut does this only for a few days, and not during the night. Or maybe I sleep too soundly...

Enough of these musings; getting hot as we near noon, time to have lunch and let the good Doctor enjoy his antipasto.

SHOPPER'S GUIDE TO PESTICIDES IN PRODUCE

"The Environmental Working Group (EWG) ... is a not-for-profit environmental research organization dedicated to improving public health and protecting the environment by reducing pollution in air, water and food. For more information please visit www.ewg.org."

via Metafilter

BE A MICROFINANCIER

I’ve always admired Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, which provides ‘microfinance’ loans to poor individuals who seek to better themselves but aren't considered credit-worthy by standard banks. A beautiful idea.

Late last year I found a site called kiva.org, which arranged for small loans (by western standards) by folks like me to needy entrepreneurs in developing countries, the loan to be paid back at no interest. I joined right away, but since they had just started they were only working in one village in Uganda, and had run out of loan applicants! Yesterday I received an email from them, saying:

“We now have a large number of low income entrepreneurs from 12 countries in need of loans ... And each week, our local partners post more entrepreneurs - I hope you can come back to www.kiva.org and make a loan - and please tell your friends.

It’s been an incredible first year at Kiva and we thank you for being one of the first people to register for our service. Hope to see you on the site!

Thanks,

Matt

Matt Flannery
Co-founder and CEO
Kiva.org
Loans That Change Lives”

So I'm telling you, my friends. The great thing about Kiva is that you decide who to make your small loan to, and you can ‘recycle’ your repaid loans. This is not charity that winds up who knows where, but funding that goes where you think best; and just a small amount can make a huge difference in many lives, as you can see at the link just above.

An interview with one of the founders of kiva.org

LONG KNOWLEDGE

Heading down the winding road this morning under lowering mountain clouds as the sun was just dawning above the lake, its long rays edging sideways into the dark wedge of space beneath the thick clouds, I was perfectly placed to receive the gift of fresh light livening all the dew the night had draped on the mountainside, to behold in slopes of diamonds how each blade of grass, each seed, each leaf, gathered and held its share.

On a certain type of grass about a foot high, fine hairs held the dew in drops so small as to make them all seem a cottony vapor; patches of that grass stood out like glowing clouds of mist hovering in place just inches above the ground. Each type of grass I saw, each plant, coddled the dew in its own way: the clusters of spider lilies scattered along the roadside cupped the silver beads in the narrow curls of their glowing red blossoms, stringing others in evenly spaced crystal orbs along curving scarlet tendrils tipped with gold...

Though each of these individual plants was now existing for its first and only time, there in plain sight was the long knowledge that each of their line has gathered of early autumn in these parts, what is to be expected in this anciently recurring brief turn of weather, what to do with the happening, where and how-- to ensure that each drop of dew is separately held so it doesn't run lost to the ground but remains possessed, nestled, cradled, held close to vitalize seeds or evenly strung out like beads to wait their turn at nourishment, each of that whole mountainside of dewdrops holding in itself the sun, shimmering in that moment of down-mountain breeze from out of the darkness...

May we hold as closely the sunlit dews of our own lives...

EXPRESSING THE SENSE...

Shinzo Abe, now the Prime Minister, seeks to make Japan a more "normal country."

"Off to a fast start in setting up his Cabinet, Abe stocked the new government with conservatives on every issue from the economy and foreign affairs to defence and women's rights."

Closest to Abe in the new inner circle is Foreign Minister Taro Aso (whose family industrial dynasty's use of wartime slave labor he has never acknowledged)(funny how 'democracy' brings these people to the top), known for his hardline stance toward China.

It is said that much about Japan will change (revert?) as soon as Abe - democratically groomed for the Prime Minister's job since childhood - sets the stage for the new Japan by altering the world's only peace-affirming constitution so that Japan can have a "normal" army just like it had before and its restless neighbors can relax in the knowledge that all their worries have been well founded... Clearer friction: just what the world needs now.

"From today, I will start building a new Japan," says Abe. Maybe he and Aso could start off on both feet by responding to this army-related matter:

109TH CONGRESS
H. RES. 759
2D SESSION

"Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Government of Japan should formally acknowledge and accept responsibility for its sexual enslavement of young women, known to the world as 'comfort women', during its colonial occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s through the duration of World War II, and for other purposes."

WHAT DON'T THEY WANT US TO SEE?

"Drive fishing, the method of killing the dolphins, is criticised as particularly cruel. Off the coast fishermen surround a pod (group) of dolphins. They lower long metal poles into the water and strike them to create a wall of sound that scares the dolphins and confuses their navigational skills. In Taiji, the dolphins are then driven into a shallow cove and a net across the mouth of the cove prevents escape. The next day the dolphins are herded into another cove away from prying eyes and camera lenses and are killed with knives or stabbed to death with spears. Japanese officials state that the dolphins die quickly and with minimum pain. NGO observers say the dolphins clearly suffer a prolonged, excruciating death. [In fact largely for use as pet food and fertilizer.]

Until a few years ago, the hunts were carried out in public. Now, due to increased interest, tarpaulins over and around the cove mask the killing, cliff paths overlooking the cove have been put out of bounds, and photographers are chased away...

Such incidents and the hunts in general rarely appear in the Japanese media..."

The Good and Evil of Hunting Dolphins
by Deborah Mantle

Further info:

Save Taiji Dolphins Campaign [What is being hidden]

One Voice

The Ecologist

With thanks to Jeff Bryant...

WILL THE NEXT ELECTION BE HACKED?

"...one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the
president of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in
Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming,
Urosevich was personally distributing a 'patch,' a little piece of
software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. 'We
were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system,
which it didn't do,' Hood says. 'The curious thing is the very
swift, covert way this was done.'

Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be
certified by the state. But thanks to Cox's agreement with Diebold,
the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. 'It was an
unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the
state,' Hood told me. 'We were told not to talk to county personnel
about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was
very unusual that a president of the company would give an order
like that and be involved at that level.'"

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

As an aside, it will be interesting to see if gas prices fall until the November elections; then there's Karl Rove's 'October Surprise'...

CHERRY DREAMS

Late Saturday afternoon Mr. H. - the fellow who's been clearing the land above, as per my Monday post - stopped by to tell me he'd just cut the last of the trees he was going to cut on that land, he was now finished, and that I should go get whatever wood I wanted to take before the trucks came on Sunday afternoon to clear everything away.

I went up there asap early yesterday morning and found that in addition to some slim 'leggy' oaks, Mr. H. had cut a number of wild cherries, causing me all alone there in the forest to jump up in the air and click my heels, sort of a reflex action I exhibit upon seeing wild cherry logs for the taking, lying there in shining splendor right before my eyes.

So there I was again, chasing the deer away from their beds and for most of Sunday bucking, hauling and splitting logs to stack in front of the deck beside all the other wood I have to split for this and next winter, which I went on doing until the sunlight no longer served, then to dinner and bath and sleeping like those wild cherry logs out there.

Wild cherry is one of the finest firewoods there is; I know I keep saying that every time the subject comes up here, but it deserves saying each time, because each time I cut wild cherry it cuts so sweetly and fragrantly, and each time I carry it it smells so invitingly, and then there's the friendly musical tone it makes when tossed upon its fellows in the woodpile, and the even more beautiful note it makes when dry and ready to give back the heat of the sun in my stove, and the look of the wood itself, its heft and solidity, and then when it burns (and it burns well even when not fully dry) it gives off that fragrance again, burns hot and long right down to the finest ash-- wild cherry wood just, shall I say, knows exactly what it is doing in every respect.

Oh, and did I say that wild cherry wood splits as though it thought you'd never ask.

O-HIGAN

Today is officially Shubun-no-hi, the autumnal equinox (also called O-higan or simply higan), brought first to mind for me (as usual) by earlier swathes of crimson higanbana (lit.: autumnal equinox flower; cluster amaryllis; spider lily) rising here and there on straight jade stems along the downmountain roadside (I saw the first one there 3 days ago; today they're blooming in my garden, 500 meters upmountain from there), and in cloudy red patches of eye-catching brushstrokes placed in random genius along the slopes of the just-shorn rice paddies, making the entire scene an astonishing work of art far bigger than the Louvre... But I never knew there were also white higanbana...

Such are the small but deep rewards of living just another day.

Conservationists, Scientists Outraged by Japanese Dolphin Hunt

Jet full of lives
streaks its way to China
beneath uncountable galaxies

PICKING BLUEBERRIES ALONE

Having at last to notice by the sheer force of blueberry blue that the remaining clusters of berries are now ripe - I've sort of been avoiding the blueberry bushes because they remind me of hungry little hands reaching in to pick the ready berries only a few weeks ago, and of the delight it was to watch those faces light up at the first taste of blueberries fresh-picked with your own new hands - I am obliged to pick the berries with a bit of blue heartache, knowing how much the grandkids would have enjoyed plucking these plump blue jewels and chewing them up on the spot, their faces shining with blueberry light...

In my own older hands reaching in among the reddening leaves I see the new little hands reaching in, and as I chew the fresh berries on the spot I try to taste the blue richness with all the childhood I can muster, to see and feel and know it all new again, and I do-- I succeed, to my surprise; I return for the length of the taste to when I first savored new blueberries - it's all still there in me somewhere - and thanks to the grandchildren for that inspiration, though I'd still rather they were here to do it new.