• Tag Archives kachina
  • He Lives

    Summer                                              Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    By God.  I’m beginning to feel human, here in my own skin, awake.  No, not enlightenment, in fact, I don’t even think I want enlightenment, but recovered.  Feels pretty damn good thank you.

    Had no takers on the Kachina spotlight.  I’m not a carnival barker for art.  When I go to a museum, I like to wander, reflect, not get pulled into a conversation by a stranger.  The tour, that’s something else.  People choose to go along, to have a companion who guides their experience.  I like that.

    The Anishinabe to Zapotec tour though had 10 including two docents.  We had a lively and interesting conversation about the Kachina, the house screen, the Valdivian owl, and Chalchiuhtlicue.  We finished with the Lakota ceremonial dress and the Whiteman.

    After the A to Z Roy Wolf brought two friends and Judy, his wife, to see the Matteo Ricci map.  We had a good conversation about it.  They all had Jesuit connections.

    Back home tuckered out from 2+ hours on my feet.  Long nap and out to eat with my sweetie.  We sat next to a table of 40-50 somethings who were out on a date.  The table talk included a lot about the scumbags they’d left and the things they didn’t do:  no dancing, no dining out in public and not anything normal like hanging out at the mall.  Wish I’d had a tape recorder or a note pad.

    Now I’m back with a few free days ahead, only a China tour coming up next week, a tour type I enjoy with a group, a Chinese language study class, I’ve done before.  Bee day looks like Sunday.

    Kate gave Ray, the kid who mows our yard, a packet of comb honey and promised him a jar when we extract.  He smiled.


  • Museum Work

    Summer                               Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    In Hopi culture Ruth would now have a total of 8 kachina dolls, each in a place of honor and used to explain to her the symbolism of the Kachina personated by Hopi dancers during their 6 months residence on the mesas.  Gabe would not yet be included in a kiva, but that time would not be far off.  In these ways the Hopi faith tradition passed from parents to children.

    I had four people at the kachina doll spotlight and two on my tour.  Plenty in my world, perhaps not in the museum’s.  Lance and his mom, Jan, went on the tour.  We started with the kachina, moved to the wonderful housescreen from a Tlingit clan house and stopped by the Olmec mask, the ball game clay figure and the Valdivian owl, a newby like the kachina and the housescreen.  From there we saw the Lakota woman’s fancy dress with its turtle motif and looked in general at the objects there, then ended with Whiteman’s wonderful modern piece.  The heart line idea, that a line connects your heart to your mind and that it’s shape reveals your ethical and personal development hit home.  Jan asked Lance how he thought his heartline was.  Profound.

    Back home, tired and ready for a nap.


  • OK. Here’s The Guy To Blame.

    Summer                            Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Ruth and Gabe have napped, like Grandpop and Granma.  This means they have considerably more energy.  Gabe covered a complete circuit of the patio to front door run, moving as fast as his stubby little legs and slightly forward leaning motor could take him.  I was in hot pursuit.  By hot I mean dew point that is absurd from a Minnesota perspective.  Gabe did not seem deterred.

    Ruth and Grandma, in other news, had feathered boas and performed various short versions of 1920’s flapper era music.  The show moved upstairs only a moment ago.

    Jon has the trailer attached to his car.  It will travel to Colorado and not return except under unusual circumstances.  He needs it for his remodeling and his fledgling custom ski business.  It’s absence frees up space in the third garage bay.  I know, I can’t believe we have three garage bays either.  If you come to our house from the west, it looks like we are pets of three internal combustion driven machines who have the big home.

    Due to a spotlight event tomorrow and an America’s public tour immediately after, I’ve had to study while the grandkids are here.  This morning I read the material on the butterfly maiden kachina and this afternoon I read about Tlingit culture and house screens.  The Hopi faith tradition fascinated me as I learned more about it.  They have a tradition of peaceful living, living that consciously seeks a balance with the natural world and all living things.  The Tlingits have a similar perspective.

    In listening to a set of lectures titled Religions of the Axial Age, I’ve learned that it may have been Zoroaster who pushed Western culture away from a natural, earth centered faith and toward a pantheon, adherence and propitiation of which had a direct correlation to eternal life.  Which was, at least according to this guy, also a Zoroastrian notion.  By developing the notion of a messiah, an end-times judge, and, along with it, the idea of an apocalypse, Zoroaster stuck us with the linear understanding of time.

    (a tower of silence where zoroastrians exposed their dead to vultures and decay)

    Give me the kachinas who come back from their home in the San Francisco Peaks for a six month period beginning around the winter solstice ready to help out.  Makes much more sense to me.