Wednesday, August 8, 2012

"Do you know the way to Cold Mountain?"















Something to listen to.  Thanks to Meng-hu at Hermitary for bringing this to my attention.

Those are Poor Man's Orchids behind my Amaryllis plant that decided to bloom a few days ago after not blooming for seven years.

My days have been full.  Still reading my favorite blogs on a daily basis but am in quiet mode.

Just finished reading The Long Walk:  The Story of War and the Life That Follows, by Brian Castner.  Not any easier to read than What It Is Like To Go To War, by Karl Marlantes, but well worth reading to  get a sense of what soldiers and veterans of our current wars are experiencing.

Now I'm re-reading The Spiritual Life of Children, by Robert Coles. Here's an excerpt:

"Here, for example, is what I eventually heard (in 1975) from a ten-year-old Hopi girl I'd known for almost two years:  'The sky watches us and listens to us.  It talks to us, and it hopes we are ready to talk back.  The sky is where the God of the Anglos lives, a teacher told us.  She asked where our God lives.  I said, 'I don't know.' I was telling the truth! Our God is the sky, and lives wherever the sky is. Our God is the sun and the moon, too; and our God is our [the Hopi] people, if we remember to stay here [on the consecrated land]. This is where we're supposed to be, and if we leave, we lose God.'
Did she explain the above to the teacher?
'No.'
'Why?'
'Because--she thinks God is a person. If I'd told her, she'd give us that smile.'
'What smile?'
'The smile that says to us, 'You kids are cute, but you're dumb; you're different--and you're all wrong!'
'Perhaps you could have explained to her what you've just tried to explain to me.'
'We tried a long time ago; our people spoke to the Anglos and told them what we think, but they don't listen to hear us; they listen to hear themselves, my dad says, and he hears them all day. [He was a truck driver]. My grandmother says they live to conquer the sky, and we live to pray to it, and you can't explain yourself to people who conquer--just pray for them, too. So we smile and say yes to them all the time, and we pray for them.'

... she had seemed a quiet, aloof girl who never had much to offer during our discussions at school, and now here we were standing on the side of a gentle hill near her home, and she was taking 'nature' quite seriously and letting me know that we are also part of that 'nature,' not outside it as perhaps I thought."

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for this post. by happenstance i reread Cold Mountain last week, the little black copy shown in one of the frames translated by Watkins. Red Pine, first time I have seen him, love his translation. Close to finishing Matterhorn. And too the Hopi's wisdom. with appreciation, kjm

Anonymous said...

What that young girl knows already about the sky and the anglos takes my breath away.

am said...

Synchronicity at work (-:

I found this just now:

http://kyotojournal.org/interviews/redpine.html

am said...

robin andrea -- mine, too.

Goat said...

Beautiful little video - and some awe-inspiring beards!

am said...

Reminded me of your mountain walks in Korea and some of the temples you have visited.

What I liked especially was the cartoon at the end.

Thanks for stopping by, Goat!