I am one who knows how this blogging experience can change a person, for I have been profoundly changed. Later this month it will be six years since I began synch-ro-ni-zing. While it is my spiritual practice to write, and my creative play to take photographs, is it also an act of rapt listening to sit in the blog "theater" where you, my blog friends, share your own explorations. I evolve, much as a result of our engagement with one another.
Within just a couple of months of starting synch-ro-ni-zing, my outlook was transformed by one blogger. When I had just a couple of family members reading my blog, including my sister Ginnie who explained to me the ways of blogs, having published at In Soul for a year already, M.A. Rauf stopped in from India for a warm and welcoming visit. Ginnie had taught me to reciprocate blog visits as part of bloggy etiquette, and so I visited Rauf's Daylight Againafter that first greeting from him. ("Rauf" — or "rauf" as he prefers — is pronounced "rah-oof.")
There isn't a way to summarize Rauf, or his blog! But I can say that he is a stunning photographer with heart, a writer with compassion and deep respect for those who are "untouchable" or otherwise downtrodden (you will see this for women in his photography), a lover of science, and a fervent lover of his India, with all her complex layers and intricate arts. He opened my eyes to atrocities; he encouraged me to think for myself. His humor, honesty, irony and sometimes outrage over what humans do to each other—including at home in India, and in the U.S.— shook me out of comfort. His love and compassion taught me to see people differently. He took over where my big brother Bennett left off when he passed away, whose worldview had shaped my own, environmentally and politically. He teaches me tips about photography, too, like Bennett.
Rauf doesn't blog much now, a real loss to me and his many followers from all four corners of the world. But he still takes photographs on his travels around India, and he still rages against agri-businesses that threaten not only all of our health, but the very lives of farmers in India who literally cannot survive financially and consequently commit suicide as families. When you watch this YouTube slideshow I made of a sampling of Rauf's images (please watch, it's just six minutes), observe the faces of his subjects, who cannot resist his charm: even Mother Earth smiles when Rauf lifts his camera.
Today is Rauf's birthday (January 8; it's already the 8th in India). Even though he and I have never met in person, and may never meet (though I hope that one day Don and I will get to India to meet him!), he is my brother. Happy Birthday, Rauf! This is a small "thank you" for the gift you are to all who know you. Watch full screen to be wrapped in the photos, and listen to "Time Remembered" by the Bill Evans Trio.
In December we saw an installation by visual artist Jitish Kallat at The Art Institute of Chicago called Public Notice 3. (The Art Institute's page about it is here.)
In thousands of LED lights, Kallat spells out words on the risers of the stairs in the Woman's Board Grand Staircase — an open, radiant space. The brightly lit words were intentionally designed in the five colors of the United States Department of Homeland Security alert system. At first, seeing the neon-like letters mounted on the Beaux-Arts stairs felt jarring. The Art Institute is my favorite museum, and the multi-directional staircase under a skylight has always been a magnetic center of the million-square-foot building where I love to sit and watch people, listening to the echo of voices and footsteps. Once I learned the content of the words illuminating the risers, I read up and down and watched people climb, descend, sit, stand, and snap pictures. We were surrounded by words like stock exchange tickers (though not in motion, and not driven by commerce).
Kallat said, "Treating the museum’s Grand Staircase almost like a notepad, the 118 step-risers receive the refracted text of the speech. I see Public Notice 3 as an experiential and contemplative transit space; the text of the speech is doubled at the two entry points on the lower levels of the staircase and quadrupled at the four exit points at the top, multiplying like a visual echo."
What speech? The words Kallat mounted on the stairs were spoken by Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda to 7,000 delegates more than 100 years ago, in the first attempt to address religious tolerance worldwide: the First World Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. (Detailed synopsis of the Parliament at Boston University's Encyclopedia of Western Theology's site here.) This art installation was opened last year on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack, September 11, 2010. Part of what captured Jitish Kallat's imagination was the fact that the gathering of delegates of different faiths in 1893 in the museum's Fullerton Hall happened also to be on September 11 that year. Below is Vivekananda's speech, words that light the steps of the grand staircase like prayers rising and falling, adjacent to the hall where he addressed the hopeful delegates. (The building of the Art Institute was built for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair — officially the World's Fair: Columbian Exposition — with the agreement that it would house the Art Institute thereafter).
When you get to the last sentence of his speech, what do you feel?
Swami Vivekananda's speech to the First World Parliament of Religions, September 11, 1893 in the Art Institute of Chicago's Fullerton Hall:
Sisters and Brothers of America,
It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.
My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."
The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me." Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.
After reading this speech, I feel as I did when I woke up early Monday morning, before Don, to his hand written note from the night before after he'd heard the news and I was in bed. I feel: empty. Not joyful. Not sad exactly. Not hopeful, not hopeless. I'm somewhere floating in a noxious ether of mystery. How have we come to this? How did we get even further away from Vivekananda's closing wishes in these decades since he spoke them?
To watch and listen to an 8-minute video of artist Jitish Kallat's interview with the museum curator about his installation, go here.
Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—
And I love the rain.
Me in Central Park, April 2009
I appreciate the childlike pleasure in rain of Langston Hughes' lines. When do people learn to dislike rain? When I was little I played outside in it, stomping and sploshing in the wade-able gutters. Or I played indoors—Chinese checkers, Sorry, Scrabble, crosswords and word searches, or "house." I created divine and elaborate "mansions" with folios for walls, and my mother's jewelry boxes for furniture. (An open necklace box makes a perfect Davenport sofa for a paper doll, and embroidered handkerchiefs make elegant bedspreads.) Having to stay inside the walls of our house during inclement weather made us focus our creative attentions differently, and it was no less enjoyable to me than running in yard games or riding my bike 'round and 'round the block. In fact, I preferred the quieter play and bodily stillness of the cozy indoors, though I broke into somersaults and head stands if there were too many rainy days in a row.
I've been looking into poetic forms this poetry month. Part of me likes the "walls" and constraints of formal poetry like sonnets or villanelles. Focusing on a limited range of words that rhyme, or fit a certain metric, points my focus on what's inside me that wants to be written by eliminating the clutter of unnecessary material, and illuminating language choices in a smaller more limited range.
In these wanderings I discovered Oulipo. This "workshop of potential literature" (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) was begun by a loose group of mathematicians, mostly French, who seek "new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy."
I played their N+7 game, remaking a couple of poems. (It's sometimes called S+7; N=Noun, S=Substantive.) What mathematicians and I like about N+7 is how it's both fixed and random. (How thrilling to have something in common with mathematicians.) What you do is this: Take an existing poem, like Langston Hughes' "April Rain Song" and replace each noun with the noun seven entries after it in the dictionary.
The point is to shake up language and open it up. What crazy new potentialities do you see? What do you discover about the original poem? What thought paths or inspirations reveal themselves like beckoning white rabbits down a hole, or songs of larks that make you pause and listen? I confess that besides these intriguing questions, I just really enjoy the nerdy pleasure of opening the dictionary and seeing what the seventh word away will be! By the way, you can eliminate all the words with the same root as your noun. So, for instance, I jumped past all the entries with "rain" in the word.
When I performed an oulipo on "April Rain Song" I was so happy that the noun replacing "rain" was "Rajasthani" because I remembered my dear friend Rauf's blog post about the manly herdsmen of Rajasthan and Gujarat who wear lots of big gold earrings ("Macho, Macho Jewelry"; Rauf let me borrow his photos below). For me, this game didn't "undo" Langston Hughes' poem, or poke fun at it. It shed light on his method of repeating a word for its sound, like continuous raindrops. The nouns that come seven entries after Hughes' nouns, in their fixed yet random aspect, blend into interesting play of syntax and word meaning. There is something synchronous and wondrous about the result. After reading Rauf's blog post about these shepherds, I see the "aqua" turban, I hear the "lumber-room" of the herded animal feet beating and mouths bleating like a rhythmic drowse-inducing lullaby, and I see the "poorhouses" of the Gujrati herdsmen in their fields of hard work and survival. And although the penultimate line of the oulipoem seems nonsensical, I hear the skill (sleight) of the sonny-herdsman, playing a shepherd's song that hovers around him like a shining halo (nimbus) in a dusty pasture at the end of a long, hot, sunny day.
By the way, Gandhi was born in Porbandar in Gujarat. Gandhi said:
"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the atomic age—as in being able to remake ourselves."
Photo by rauf at Daylight Again; Rauf knows how to shake things up
Aqua Rajasthani Sonny
An Oulipo N+7 response to Langston Hughes' "April Rain Song" — replacing each noun of Hughes' poem with the noun seven entries away in the dictionary
Let the Rajasthani kiss you.
Let the Rajasthani beat upon your heap with silver liquid drowse.
Let the Rajasthani sing you a lumber-room.
The Rajasthani makes still poorhouses on the sierra.
The Rajasthani makes running poorhouses in the gym.
The Rajasthani plays a little sleight-sonny on our roomette at nimbus—
January 26 is Republic Day in India ~ A day the whole world celebrates the power of non-violent civil disobedience.
~ ~ ~
Permit me to synchronize that with a poor artist's rich sunflowers on a postcard my daughter sent from Amsterdam some time ago. You don't need a lot of money to create something beautiful. In fact you might be very poor financially. You might not ever make a living at what you do best.
Vincent van Gogh
Sunflowers, repetition of the 4th version (yellow background) Oil on canvas, 95 × 73 cm Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
~ ~ ~
And a winter field clipped of its corn looking "like a man's badly shaved beard"* might be where power waits under a white winter sky that will come to life under the heat of the summer sun. Just a plow, soil, seed, sun, rain ~ and a new field of corn will rise up ~ Just like that.
With the right combination of elements an impossible alchemy is possible.
Golden.
Don't forget it. - -
* simile borrowed from Guy de Maupassant's Miss Harriett - -
Photo by Ginnie of her "Gathering Wisdom" bronze sculpture in October getting packed for her move to the Netherlands last month; NOTE: the sculptor is Mark Hopkins - after a couple of you thought Ginnie sculpted it, but quite frankly, she is artistic and soulful enough to do this kind of work, believe me. I am adding her avatar, below, which she drew when she was a teenager. It was my idea to make it her blog avatar. I don't know what I love most about it - the free girl, the forward motion of the whole image, the sillhouetteness, I don't know, but I have admired it since I was a little girl, maybe longing to be as free as that.
Remember if you can the first time you heard the word blog. Weblog. Web log. We blog. I think my first time must have been in 2005 when my sister Ginnie started hers. (I call her "Boots" because when she was born she was tiny, her booties went all the way up to her hips, and the doctor said "She's all boots!" That's her photo, above, and the blog post about the lady is embedded in Ginnie's name under it.) Blogging hadn't exploded yet, and I just wasn't very interested. I didn't even visit hers that whole first year, I really didn't get it. What's a blog? Even so, I tried to convince our decorator sister Nancy to start one too, picturing her beautiful designs on a pretty site that would reflect her talents.
Finally in January 2006 feeling inspired by Ginnie's In Soul blog because she did such a good job chronicling her life in words and photos, and I always liked journaling (though I didn't stick with it), I went out shooting pictures of the snow, came in, picked out a Blogger template (Minima Ochre), uploaded a photo of our spruce tree, et voila! -- instant publication -- what a rush! On January 21 I will have posted here every three days for four years, something I couldn't have known I would stick with at the time, let alone turn it into an outlet for writing practice and a new hobby of photography.
I've noticed a lot of reflective end-of-year and new-year blog posts about how blog friends are real friends. I couldn't agree more, and I also wonder what we imply with that statement. Maybe we feel some guilt that we don't have more face to face contact with people nearby? More on that in a minute.
These days online newspaper columnists have blogs. Celebrities and authors have them. What is it with blogging?
Is it that in just a few minutes you can fly over oceans and continents and meet a man in Chennai, India who tells you a story about a young girl named Priya saving him from wild dogs in a lovely tribal village near Varagaliar forest? That post needs to be made into a children's story and picture book. Through stunning photographs, humor and wit, rauf opens our eyes to Indian culture, to Nature, to what is not right with India's society and ours too, and he also shows what is so very right with humans, by being the right kind of human. I hope one day Don and I can shake hands with rauf in Chennai-Madras, with the smell of curry and diesel, the yells of street vendors and humidity so high my hair frizzes up like bird feathers - oh, kinda like Priya's, below. Please do browse rauf's posts and photographs, but be gentle on him because he hasn't had as much time to blog as he used to, and comments might frighten him as much as wild dogs!
Photos of Priya by rauf
This is what we owe each other. To speak honestly, to listen quietly, and to connect. When we live like this, our life is a prayer. I could not have predicted that in four years of contact with bloggers I would travel so far and learn so much - about specific places in the world and in space, about humanity, about myself, and that I would become more curious.
Don's turkey and chickens
I've watched my husband Don raise chickens and turkeys, gathering information for months, and blog about it. He researched some of his most valuable knowledge from other chicken bloggers - including Susie - who knew what they knew from personal experience. That is so helpful when you've read what you can at the official information sites, and now you just want to know what works and what doesn't.
I reconnected here at sync with an old high school acquaintance who is now a dear friend from whom I've learned much about the world: Loring.
Riding along with Bob, I rocketed into the night sky with conjunctions and fireballs.
I've imagined joy and mischief with future grandbabies reading stories and seeing photos shared by Susie, Oliag, Cottage Girl, Nancy and Bella Rum.
Each of you who visits synch-ro-ni-zing, I have felt you, here in my heart. I get new inspiration every day. Thank you for what you do, for helping shape this world, this gift of possibility.
I am happy to report that at least five of these dear friends are real. Don is my husband: real. Ginnie is my sister: real. Loring is my hometown neighbor and classmate: real. I've met dear friend Susie twice and Sanna once, and it felt like old home week: real.
As for face time with locals, I actually think I may get enough of it with Don's and my big families and my 1,000 academic advisees. But something Patricia told me in a comment got me to a gorgeous web site that supports reestablishing oral stories, to connect people with each other and the earth, called the Alliance for Wild Ethics - "a loose group of folks around the world who all share a common aim to rejuvenate a wild, animistic, participatory culture that honors the whole boisterous community of earthly life -- plants, animals, woodlands, rivers, winds, and thunderclouds -- as our real neighborhood." Apparently the site is somewhat dormant now, according to the founder David Abram, that is until he releases his next book in August. But it's worth exploring even in dormancy (like a woodland in winter). In 2010, thanks in part to Wild Ethics, while we're meeting here in our digital salons I'm going to remember to keep eye and hand connection with people and Nature firsthand.
Here's to being more wild, more free, more connected. If you have time please listen to Andrew Bird accompany himself on violin - while he sings - about becoming "this animal" in the official Rolling Stone released stop-animation video directed by Lisa Barcy.
Anonanimal
See a sea anemone, the enemy see a sea anemone And that'll be the end of me While the vicious fish was caught unawares In the tenderest of tendrils
See a sea anemone, the enemy see a sea anemone And that'll be the end of me, that'll be the end of me While the vicious fish was caught unawares In the tenderest of tendrils
Underneath her tender gills I will become this animal Perfectly adapted to the music halls Oh and I will become this animal Anomalous appendages, anonanimal, anonanimal
Anonanimal, anonanimal Anonanimal, anonanimal
Hold on just a second Don't tell me this one you know I know this one, I know this song I know this one, I love this song
Hold on just a second Don't tell me this one you know I know this one, I know this song I know this one, I love this song I know this one
Underneath the stalactites The troglodytes lost their sight, oh The seemingly innocuous plecostomus though posthumous They talk to us, they talk too much
See a sea anemone, the enemy see a sea anemone That'll be the end of me, that'll be the end of me Vicious fish was caught unawares In the tenderest tendrils
Underneath her tender gills and I will become this animal Perfectly adapted to a music hall I will become this animal Anomalous appendages, anonanimal, anonanimal
With the onset of autumn, I remember that I have china. "The Holidays" are around the corner with all that feasting - the first being Thanksgiving in November when we'll welcome Don's family to the farm. I will be digging into the china cabinet for bowls, cups, plates, pitchers and platters to serve mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, candied yams, coffee, and pumpkin pie.
I collected the cups and saucers, above, from different antique shops because I loved the rosebud handles. Once I fell for the first set, it was not easy to find more. This was before eBay.
This egg cup is a good excuse for making soft boiled farm fresh eggs Friday morning after Thursday's Thanksgiving feast. My set of Spode buttercup belonged to Grandma Olive, then my mother, and now to me. When I pull them out, I feel I am touching my women, and their hands are now my hands.
No matter how humble the home of a woman is, she feeds her family on dishes. On special occasions she will spend extra time chopping, mixing, cooking and filling her best ones with feast-worthy delectables. If her mother used those dishes before her, their value goes deeper. And if her mother's mother used them before her, serving food in them is an even greater joy.
Every ladle of food - from the thinnest soup to the heartiest meat - becomes food for the soul as well as the body when family and friends come together and multiply memories and generations through celebration.
My sister Nancy gave me this Irish Belleek butter dish that looks like an Irish cottage. It is so lightweight, it feels like you are holding a seashell. You can tell it is European because it is square, not oblong, for the European shape of packaged butter. I cherish it as a gift from my sister as well as for the link to Ireland where I have fond recollections and connections.
Everyone in the world deserves to eat well, to live well. In photographs of the world's poorest communities, I have seen blue tarp shanties set up with style, neatness and grace. There is an instinct within us humans, in women especially, to nurture the family. This nurturing is for the body, the soul and the heart. When she feels her dishes are beautiful, the food is appealing, and that she is bringing her loved ones together at special times to create new memories and remember old ones, it is worth every chop of an onion, each whisk of butter and flour for a roux, all the stirring of thick batter for cake, all the rolling out of pie dough for custardy pumpkin filling, the kneading of bread dough for yeasty buns, and every heartfelt anvil of stress over the possibility that everything won't get done or taste delicious. There are many men, like Don, who also feel these instincts and spend hours in the kitchen out of a desire to nurture loved ones.
What follow are from a big heavy wonderful book called The Way We Live by Stafford Cliff with hundreds of photographs by Gilles de Chabaneix, showing how people live around the world. I chose some pictures of people preparing food, as well as dishes.
Romania
Bangkok
Sweden
Provence
Sweden
And this final photo is not from the book but was taken by rauf near Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India. When I saw this at his post in February I was so touched I had to stop and be quiet. This is a mud hut, and the woman of the house designed and built the wall mounted dish rack herself.
It is where she has filled the cool cavities of 18-pound Thanksgiving turkeys with stuffing in her fists. It is where she bathed her babies, their soapy skin so slick she was terrified they'd slip and gouge their heads on the faucet, yet they cooed at her unafraid, blinking and sputtering when she rinsed their heads with cups of clear warm water. Cabbage heads and cauliflower heads were washed here too, and fingers of carrot scrubbed with a stiff white brush. Teapots and soup pots filled. Flower stems clipped before layering them and their velvety heads in water-filled vessels. Here in soapy water she broke her favorite glass rotating her hand inside, and she watched the perfectly sliced V between her knuckles blossom and point at her heart candy apple red, then blood red, then wick into the fine rivulets of her skin. With a turn of the faucet handle, cold water instantly streamed to cleanse the cut, as it had streamed, washed, rinsed, and filled dozens of times a day, every day, for decades.
Indoor plumbing has brought water into this farmhouse kitchen for 80 years. She is one of only two thirds of the world's women who can turn a faucet and receive a rush of water right into sinks in their homes. The rest are lucky if they can gather clean water from a pump a mile away and carry it in red plastic jugs on their heads back home, spending hours a day on just this simple collection. Some only pray for adequate access to clean water. Some = over a billion.
You might think a person has to be able to read to go to college. You might assume students need to understand the language of the teacher, or of fellow students, to succeed in school. You might envision that children who herd cattle by day would be too tired to learn how to build water pumps at night. You might just think that a woman who didn't finish primary school could not possibly become an engineer in six months, or teach someone else to become one, and you might be wrong.
When Don and I watched a pieceabout India's Barefoot Collegeon the PBS Lehrer Report the other night, we sat dumbstruck. (Please, if you have 9 minutes, click on "a piece" in the previous sentence and watch the streaming video.) Maybe you've already heard about it. All notions about illiteracy and education are turned on their head in the 20 Barefoot College field centres around India started by Sanjit "Bunker" Roy.
-
Bunker Roy himself was born in what is now West Bengal and schooled at Doon Schooland St. Stephen's Collegein Delhi. He has won several awards for Barefoot College, including the Schwab (for social entrepeneurship) and the St. Andrew's Prize(Britain's largest prize for the environment).
He was influenced by Gandhi's philosophy of sustainable development. Roy said:
There is a mistaken belief that illiteracy is a barrier to the rural poor developing themselves with skills of their own. In other words a rural poor farmer, weaver, potter, leather worker, blacksmith and other artisans, because they have never been through a formal education system are not capable of producing high quality products with a marvelous eye for aesthetics and form. In the rural areas of India today, for instance, there are endless examples of rainwater harvesting structures for drinking water and sanitation still being used today that are hundreds of years old - constructed when there were no architects and engineers.
Bunker Roy started the first Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan, in 1972 after the 1966-67 famine killed thousands in Bihar state. Since then his colleges have trained villagers without paper qualifications to install and maintain solar electrical systems, hand pumps and tanks for drinking water. I could not believe my eyes as I watched village women work on intricate solar panels, taking meticulous detailed notes to study the codes and tiny parts, simply by watching their teacher do it and communicate with hand gestures.
Barefoot solar engineers have installed solar photovoltaic (SPV) home lighting systems and fabricated produced solar lanterns across 10 states of India. The results include:
Solar electrifying 870 schools across the country.
3530 solar lanterns manufactured at the College.
28 remote and inaccessible villages in Ladakh have 40 Kws of solar panels that provide three hours of light in the bleakest winter to 1530 families.
In Leh and Kargil districts, solar energy initiatives have saved a total of 97,000 litres of kerosene.
392 rural youth including women trained as barefoot solar engineers with absolutely no aid from urban professionals.
350 villages and hamlets(clusters) have been covered where a total number of 12000 households have been solar electrified.
195,000 litres of kersoene saved, by replacing generators and oil lanterns with solar power.
All solar panels have been installed, maintained and repaired by the village people without the assistance of any paper qualified engineer.
The college has also instigated vibrant health care centers administering biochemic medicines (developed out of, but different from, homeopathy):
Since 1986, the Barefoot College has been using biochemic medicines. Many village men and women, most of whom have just a primary education, have been trained to administer biochemic medicines. This is fairly easy and does not need advanced academic qualifications. And since biochemic medicines have no side effects, these medicines are also quite safe.
in Tilonia, it is the children’s parliament, an elected body of girls and boys between 10 and 14 years of age that is responsible for making sure that schools are run properly—an ingenious way of giving children a hold on their own lives—and that of their villages.
Women have been empowered to participate in the local economy and infrastructure, and to lead other women.
Women are very active in the college. Here women gather in a village square to raise their voices in protest against cases of rape. Girls heavily outnumber boys in the night schools and many of the engineers trained in the college are women. One of the most successful solar lamps in use in villages in the area was designed by a woman using local material going to waste. Women have been going from village to village to gather support for developmental measures such as building local dams.
I am deeply impressed with Roy and his vision for helping people help themselves, including setting up rain water harvestingsystems in many Indian villages. But I am flabergasted - and humbled - by the women, children and men themselves who learn and build the mechanics of these and solar electrical systems, and serve each other in order to strengthen themselves, their families, their communities - and the environment!
I'm nursing a head cold. Time to make ginger tea (chukku coffee and tea in India I found out from rauf when I posted this recipe in February 2007). On his way home from school Wednesday Don rescued me by picking up fresh ginger.
Ginger Tea
3-4 thin slices fresh ginger (unpeeled is fine) juice of 1/2 - 1 full lemon 1 garlic clove, peeled and cut into 2-3 chunks (optional) 1 dried red pepper (optional) honey to taste hot water
Garlic has healing properties, and I love the taste, but leave it out if you don't like it. Dried red pepper helps clear congestion, but again, just ginger, lemon and honey are wonderful. Lemon with its vitamin C is great for a cold (maybe helps the cold end more quickly, well probably not in this small dose - but it can't hurt, and it tastes good!), honey is soothing on the throat, and ginger is nice on the tummy when you get all that yucky drainage. Lesley introduced me to this tea as a cold remedy last winter, and I fell in love with the flavor, even when I didn't have a cold. Now that colder temps and cold viruses are upon us (well, not in Australia, Letitia), it's time to share the comfort again.
I was in Chicago with five friends for the weekend to celebrate Inge's birthday, happy me! It's just a 4-hour drive, and we don't get there often enough.
Inge's sister flew in from Germany, and three friends from Minneapolis took the low cost intercity Megabus, which turned out to be a 13-hour nightmare Friday of three miles forward and two miles back through the flooded plains of Wisconsin. Horrible! I hope they're home by now, since the bus driver for yesterday's return trip didn't seem to have a clue about the floods and after 4 hours on the road last night they were headed BACK from Milwaukee toward Illinois!
But we had a fantastic couple of days in the city, with gorgeous blue skies.
I had never seen the stainless steel bean sculpture by British (but Bombay-born) Anish Kapoorcalled "Cloud Gate" in Milennium Park. (Please click on the link in "Cloud Gate" to see the bean shape, which I didn't photograph.) It's inspired by liquid mercury, which I remember playing with as a kid when a thermometer broke. Do you see my reflection, below? (Sorry, I don't know why the image doesn't enlarge when you click on it. That feature is so inconsistent for me!)
The weekend was clouded for me big time by the death of Tim Russert. I still can't believe he's gone. No one will be able to take his place. And in one of the most stimulating presidential election years ever!
I added a closer picture for you, Sharon. Me in the bottom right wearing my new $7 linen skirt from Filene's Basement.
I suppose it's partly because of reading the wabi sabi book that an overhauling mood is upon me. My clothes closet got done. I mean completely emptied, sorted, and only what I absolutely want and wear back in. All other piles disposed of properly. Almost.
Following the flow, after looking for that quilt in storage in the barn, I suddenly had 3 tubs and one trunk full of fabric and quilt pieces in the house.
I sorted by color.
What will I do with all this fabric, now that I don't quilt any more? My hands and wrists are weak now, and they ache if I do too much close needle work.
Oh, looking through the folded cotton fabrics took me down Memory Lane.
Dresses, doll clothes and a Wizard-of-Oz Dorothy Halloween costume I made for Lesley.
Old curtains, even some from Istanbul (that small yellow and taupe flowered print in the yellow pile, which was in our kitchen there). I need to tell you the story behind this fabric some day.
Old pieces that were my mom's, like the two doilies on the same pile, which I remember from my childhood.
Silks and linens from Thailand, China and India, brought as gifts to my parents by the foreign students who lived with us when I was in high school.
Even a sari that must have been given to my mom, although I don't recall her ever wearing it. I'd like to get a blouse made for it and wear it myself.
We had many Indian friends, and they were so generous giving gifts to us.
I found this skirt at the bottom of one of the bins, a sorry place for a treasure whose value I can't even begin to understand. I bought the British (Liberty, I think) fabric somewhere, in the States I think. I took it with me to Istanbul and had a tailor make it into a skirt that I wore and wore. As I hold it in my hands now, I think it may be one of the most precious things I possess.
Oh, and look what I found googling "Liberty fabric": J Crewcame out with Liberty fabric skirts last year. Styles always come back around, eh? And oh by the way, this is one of those full skirts I was admiring earlierfrom the Paris show. Won't I just be the cat's meow wearing this vintage skirt (if I can lose about 1 inch from my waist)?
I think I know what I want to do with some of the fabric: braided rugs.
+web.jpg)
