AncienTrails

Fall                                                              Harvest Moon

Another brilliant blue day, with slashes of orange and red, sky filled with high white clouds. These northern fall days expand the mind, let it reach out beyond the horizon, taking the breadth and height of it all into the soul, the inner life growing proportionally.  No problem with this season growing longer.

Lights out at the MIA this morning.   I wasn’t there, but apparently security gates came wheeling down in the galleries and the place went dark for an hour or two.  Very dark in certain areas.  I imagine the Japanese galleries and the Pacific Islands and the Islamic and maybe Southeast Asia would pitch black.  They have no window light.  None.  Wonder which images came to life?

Our afternoon tour got delayed because the kids were at the Children’s Theatre, attached physically to the museum, and it went dark, too, delaying their show.  This was a big group, 153 kids altogether.

Since I’m taking a class on mythology, it’s worth recounting here a frequent occurrence at one of my favorite objects:  the Transformation Mask by Kwakwaka’wakw sculptor Richard Hunt. (both pictures from the MIA website)  I tell a story about Raven, who had white feathers, then met Gray Eagle’s daughter, fell in love and visited her father’s dwelling.  Raven finds the sun, the moon, the stars, water and fire inside Gray Eagle’s lodge, steals all of these things and gives them to the people who have been living in darkness.  In spreading fire he carries a brand in his beak and his feathers are burnt.  That’s how Raven became black.

I tell this story as it is and leave it.  Most of the time, some kid asked, “Is it real?”  In return I ask, “What do you think?”  Usually kids accept the story as “real.”  I don’t press this interpretation, but I happen to agree with them.  It’s true because it explains the birth of the Raven clan and its totemic animal.  In this sense, too, it is real.  As real it gets.