• Category Archives Asia

  • Latin and Asia

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                   Waxing Wild Moon

    Kate and I reviewed our work on chapter 5 in Wheelock this morning.  Then 2,000 words on the novel after the nap.  Workout.  Sierra Club legcom conference call.

    I’ve been reading my fourth Qiu Xiaolong mystery, The Red Mandarin Dress.  These are Chief Inspector Chen novels, set in today’s Shanghai.  They are interesting mysteries, but even more, they are a window into the struggle between the Maoist era and the contemporary one, a period when revolution ruled the land transformed into one in which to get rich is glorious.  These are not easy transitions and they have happened in the blink of an eye in the long history of China.

    Asian art and asian culture, especially Chinese history, philosophy and literature have, for a long time, had my attention.  In my volunteer work at the MIA I have been allowed to indulge my interest in Chinese, Japanese and South Asian art.  This has led to more and more time with asian history, especially Chinese and Chinese poetry.  A casual tinkerer in these vast domains, I have only skimmed the top of a way of life radically different from our own, Western culture, yet, even with its differentness, still more like us than not, the human experience inflected, not the human experience transformed.

    As I’ve watched the Winter Olympics, it doesn’t take a scholar to notice that its largely a northern hemisphere event.  Yes, there are the odd Australians, New Zealanders, but for the the most part it’s North America, Europe and the Asian countries.  Just another way in which we are more like than unlike.


    Art and Culture Asia Sport World History 📎and tagged

  • Don’t like the weather? Tough.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                               New Moon (Wild)

    We have more snow.  Not a lot, maybe a couple of inches.  It makes the whiteness fresh.

    Some folks have begun to complain that this winter has gone on too long and that this snow insults us.  The weather is.  It neither goes on too long, nor stops too soon.  Our food may run out before the winter ends, but that’s our dilemma, not the weather’s.  Our patience may wear out with weather too cold or too snowy or too icy, but the weather comes and it goes, our attitude toward it is what needs to change, not the weather.  The weather may wreck our garden, ruin our crops, or give us bounty.  Again, the weather causes rain, heat, drought, cool days and hot nights, what use we can make of them or what harm they may create for our horticulture or agriculture reflects our needs, not those of the planet’s air and water circulation systems.

    Better for us to adapt ourselves to the changes, to find in our lives the place for adjustment.  As Taoism teaches, we need to align ourselves with the movements of heaven.  This is even true of our political work.  We need to act politically in a way that utilizes the forces and realities of the moment rather than railing against their injustice or patting ourselves on the back for their justice.  This too is aligning ourselves with the movements of heaven.


    Asia Faith and Spirituality Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Ordinary Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                              Full Cold Moon

    In just two days those of us who follow the Celtic calendar will celebrate the coming of Imbolc.  I’ll write more about it on Monday, but I wanted to note here the difference in timber and resonance between post-Epiphany January and the holiseason just ended.  We move now into the ordinary days, days when the sense of expectation and sacred presence relies more on our private rituals, our own holydays.

    In my own case, for example, Valentine’s Day lends this time period a certain magic as its pre-birthday spirit invades the present.  Also, for me and my fellow Woolly Mammoths, this next week marks our annual retreat, so we get ready for it, this time again at Blue Cloud Monastery in South Dakota.  It is, too, for those with any presence in the Chinese world, just a couple of weeks before the beginning of the spring festival, or, as we know it here, Chinese New Years.  This year it begins on my birthday.

    Imbolc, too, has sacred resonance and its six week period marks the beginning of the growing season here as seeds for certain long growing season vegetables like leeks must get started.


    Asia Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel permaculture 📎and tagged

  • Art and Nature, the Nature of Art

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                          Waning Moon of Long Nights

    In to the Sierra Club for a meeting about legislative work.  The scope of the Sierra Club’s work is impressive, including legislative work at each session of the Minnesota Legislature and scrutiny of the government’s stewardship of our natural resources in between them.  There is litigation work, the primary one right now being the Stillwater Bridge.  There is also the regular work of educating members, the working of the Issue Committees and regular outings.  Perhaps most important of all is the attention of thousands of members to both the particulars of environmental work in all parts of the state and to the developing field of issues, e.g. climate change, renewable energy, efficient public transportation, green planning, work with labor unions for Green Jobs, even climate mitigation strategies to help position Minnesota well when climate change happens.

    After that I went over to the MIA to check on my mail box, nothing in it.  Good.  After I went in there I began to wander through the museum, as I used to do in the days before Collection in Focus, before Docent training, just wandering.  My first stop was the wonderful collection of Chinese paintings that have been up for a while.  Taking them in and meditating on Taoism as I looked, I began to muse about a work that might have the theme art and nature, the nature of art.  Some interesting ideas there.  My favorite collection remains the Japanese, and within it the works on paper:  ukyio-e especially.

    It felt good to be in the museum without a task at hand, or a purpose, other than spending time with the objects.  I could do more of that.


    Art and Culture Asia Faith and Spirituality Great Work Politics 📎and tagged

  • Excluded Queen, Clean Fins

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                       Waning Summer Moon

    The smoker worked.  Mostly.  The bees have had 2 to 2.5 months of breeding, brooding and comb building.  There are a lot more bees than there were in April when Mark showed me how to load a box a’ bees into the first hive box.  Weekly I’ve checked each frame, when there are three hive boxes on as there is now, that means checking 28 frames each time.

    The bee’s propolis had welded together many frames this time, so prying them apart proved more difficult than it had the first weeks.  With smoke to discourage angry bees each frame came out with minimal interference.  After checking a few frames in each hive box, I put the top box on the bottom, left the middle one in its place and put the bottom one of top.  If I understand it correctly, this encourages the bees to continue producing brood, making the colony more healthy for the winter while also expanding their honey base in the honey supers where the queen cannot go.

    In this way the colonies survival over the winter gains a higher probability while still allowing the bee-keeper to harvest some of the honey flow.

    Today, after the hives, I cracked the case of the outside air conditioning unit, took it off and sprayed off the literal blanket of cottonwood fibers that had collected around the fins which guide air past the cooling coils.  I could have done this three weeks ago, but I forgot about it.  It’s not fun for me since it involves lot of little screws, a cantankerous body of sheet metal that must line up with the holes just right and more bending than my deconditioned joints can stand.  A good prod to get back to the resistance and flexibility work as well as the aerobics.

    I tend to emphasize the aerobics since the heart and circulatory system and the respiratory system tend to cause death if not tended with care.  That’s only half of the battle though, the other half is having enough strength and flexibility to live the life time saved by regular aerobic exercise.

    The cantankerous sheet metal awaits.  I’ve written this while letting it dry off.  This all falls under the British category of estate management.  Where are all the servants again?  Oh, that’s right.  They are me.


    Asia Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • The Tea Ceremony on Tour

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                 Full Flower Moon

    Two tours this morning.  The first, a Visual Thinking Strategies, for third graders from Maxfield school in St. Paul went well.  The kids attention petered out after about 45 minutes and we went on search of things they found interesting like guns (flintlock rifles) and a painting of a small dead boy wearing a dress.

    The second, a public tour, had the Museum given title, Steeped in Tradition:  a tour of Chinese and Japanese art.  I thought, well, why not talk about the origins of the Japanese tea ceremony.  We began in India with Vishnu and the Ghandara Buddha, stopped by the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara in China and smaller statue of the Buddha, then went into the Taoist gallery.  After the Taoist gallery we visited the Song dynasty ceramics for a Chan Buddhist inspired tea cup, then onto Japan for our fine statue of Amitabha Buddha, the Buddha of the Pure Land.

    We first hit the tea ceremony proper with the shoin audience hall, used by Shoguns as well Buddhist abbotts for ceremonial occasions including the first, elaborate, large and showy tea ceremonies.  After that we went to the tea wares gallery to look at tea cups and discuss the notion of wabi-sabi.  The tour ended at the tea-house and brief walk through of the purpose of the tea ceremony.  There was only one woman on the tour but she had an interest in Asian art and knew something of China and Thailand.

    Back home.  Nap.  Now, workout.


    Art and Culture Asia 📎and tagged

  • Indian Princes and Japanese Peasants

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring               Waxing Flower Moon

    Another computer problem averted by cyber wizard William Schmidt.  If you had tried to access the files from February 2005 to October 2007 in ancientrails, you would have been met with a not found error message.  An e-mail to Bill and he not only had the problem managed, but helped me relocate the files on my own computer.  I knew they were here somewhere.  Thanks again, techno-mage.

    Morning workout, a bit of legislative blogging for the Sierra Club and lunch.   My movie of the moment for my workouts is the continuing saga, the Maharbarata.  I’m on disc 7 of a lot more.  Each disc has six episodes.  This is one long story.  It interweaves gods and humans, demi-gods and demons with the history of India, providing along the way morals and folkways.  Just today, for example, Dhorydan, a contested crown prince, got this wisdom from Bhisma, “No.  Just because you are elder does not mean you will become king.  In India merit is most important.”

    Yesterday I finished an early Kurosawa film, The Hidden Fortress.  It featured a running gag with two peasants who act almost as clowns.  It was crisp, the copy, a Criterion Collection dvd, pops.  The story involves a period when Japan consisted of warring kingdoms.  A princess of a defeated people escapes with a loyal general.  Their adventures as they try to leave their home territory for shelter elsewhere constitute the movie.


    Asia Cinema and Television GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • The Chinese People Need To Be Controlled

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring             Waning Seed Moon

    Back from Wishes for the Sky where I helped visitors read scrolls written in a callipgraphic English that looks, at first glance, like Chinese.  There were some ahas, some head scratching.  One guy, when told that organizers said Chinese had the most trouble with reading the scripts laughed and said, “I must be part Chinese.”

    The Mississippi river was high, but the Harriet Park Pavilion, in which the inside part of the event took place, had several disconcerting marks on the wall, labled with high flood marks for various years, most of them well above my head.

    I had a chance to have nice chat several folks Scott Simpson, a guy he knows who plays Native American flute and Ming Jen, one of the organizers of the event.  When asked about Jackie Chan’s statement reported in the press  yesterday, “The Chinese people need to be controlled,” Ming Jen surprised me by agreeing with him.

    Her rationale surprised me and made me humble once again about my ability to sense things from within a particular cultural perspective other than my own.  She voiced a concern Jackie Chan had, too, saying that Chinese people were individualistic enough.  With as many people as their are in China and the economic unrest created by economic freedom she feared more freedom would create potentially chaotic situations.  Besides, she pointed out, during the Han and T’ang dynasties, the controlling government was feudal in nature and highly centralized, but poetry and the art flourished.

    China’s culture has a patriarchal and dynastic tradition stretching back literally thousands of years.  Democracy does not necessarily fit well within that tradition and, she implied, is not necessary for the Chinese people to flourish.

    Another aspect of this, I realized while we were talking, was the experience of Chinese culture between dynasties, usually following, as Ming Jen pointed out, weak emperors.  Those time periods were chaotic, violent and the people suffered.

    Always pays to ask someone from within the culture for their point of view.


    Asia Politics 📎and tagged

  • Is There Such A Thing As An Individual Bee?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring             Waning Seed Moon

    The bee hive essentials are in the red car and they come out today.  The bees themselves arrive next Saturday by semi.  Mark Nordeen told me last year’s delivery came during an April blizzard, hit a patch of ice, rolled over and killed all the bees.

    This will be my first year with the bees and I’m looking forward to learning a lot about them.  The notion a hive mind has, I know, fascinated my step-son Jon for a long time.  It gets its intellectual legs from the performance of bees and ants and other social insects who as individuals can only accomplishments small increments of a larger task, the survival of the hive, but together they ensure the hive’s endurance through time.  The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  Here’s a question:  Is there is such a thing as an individual bee, or, rather do we have multiple flying macro-cellular organs of a single entity?

    It’s a chilly start for the Wishes for Sky day, but I got an e-mail that said dress warm and come.  So Minnesotan.

    That reminds me.  I read the inscription on an early Zhou dynasty kuei (a ritual food vessel) and one of the kids on the tour, a young Chinese girl said, “That’s so Chinese.”   This kuei was made in the 10th century B.C.

    Gotta get ready.  Unload the hives and plant some peas before I take off for St. Paul.


    Art and Culture Asia Bees 📎and tagged

  • A Long Learning Curve

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring             Waning Seed Moon

    This morning Chinese language students from the St. Paul Central class of 2009 came to the museum.  They were bright kids, interested.  Mostly in their third year of study, they have learned little about China’s history and culture.  My tour introduced them to the bronze tradition, the history of the five major calligraphic styles and ended with an examination of literati culture in the Ming dynasty.

    Working with bright, engaged kids makes touring a pleasure as it was this morning.   Many of the kids were Chinese and some spoke Chinese well.

    This was the beginning of a much longer learning curve for me on calligraphy.  I want to appreciate Chinese painting from within the Chinese aesthetic framework as well as  learn some Chinese characters along the way.

    As a docent, I appreciate the flexibility it offers to devise self-directed areas of study, then try them out on a live audience.  Go back and revise.  Learn more.  Try again.  Those of us with omnivorous intellectual appetites are well-suited.

    Sleepy.  Time for a nap.


    Art and Culture Asia 📎and tagged