Asakiyume mita

Yesterday morning I saw a construction across the asphalt path that runs through the common area in our neighborhood. It was a long stick, and leaning on the stick were smaller sticks and twigs, bits of lichen-covered bark, and moss. It looked as if ambitious small-scale beavers had decided the path was a flow of water and were attempting to dam it.

Later in the day I was passing by again, and three little kids, two boys and a girl, were happily at work on it. It was, they told me, a bug city, complete with bridges, roads, parks, districts--everything.




This morning Wakanomori and I found it expanded, so I took a video:



They were all so wholly engaged with the work, excited and happy, feeding off each other's ideas.

What White Horses, Nazca lines, pyramids, citadels, or hanging gardens did you get up to creating in childhood? Or now, for that matter?

Over on Mastodon I was made aware of the existence of this beautiful little zine, done in the traditional way (all printed on a single sheet of paper), Meditations with Insects: An Art of Noticing, so I decided to order it.

It came in a brown envelope with drawings of a beetle, small bird, and owl on it, and the sender was "Unfolding Connections."



It was everything I hoped for and more. The main text directs readers to quiet, curious attention to creatures often ignored or disliked:



And then, wonder of wonders, there's text on the reverse side, too: quotes about recognizing and appreciating the presence and wisdom of other beings--unfolding connections to make ;-)



That quote has a typo, but it's the one that got me choked up reading it aloud to Wakanomori.

I really loved this one, too:

"the world is full of persons
only some of them human
and life is always lived in
relationship with others"

--Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World

The creator, Kristian Brevik, has a Patreon, and he also makes lanterns of sea creatures that when lit up show the creatures' skeletons. Seems like a very cool guy.

And here's a photo from a week or so ago of some bright yellow coltsfoot pushing up through the leaf litter.



... I offer these as necessary nourishment in the harrowing landscape we're navigating right now.

The cashier was friendly, chatting with people as they came through. The woman ahead of me was buying just icing in a squeezy tube--two tubes of it.

"You decorating cookies? I love decorating cookies!" the cashier said. The customer allowed as to how she had a special recipe for cookies that used cake batter, and yes, she'd be decorating them, and the cashier seemed genuinely thrilled to hear it.

This cashier, she was quite pretty. She wasn't super young--not a high school student or a college-aged kid--but she wasn't old either. Maybe early thirties. Maybe mid thirties. She had expressively draw-on eyebrows, sort of 1920s style, long and arching. She had pale-ish skin and eyes, a wide mouth, and oiled curled hair that was dyed a deep auburn.

So I was quite tickled when it was my turn and I saw her name tag read JOLENE.

Jolene, I don't know if you'd be my man's cup of tea, but I think you're the best!

(I drew this picture of her.)

So nowadays, if you're pregnant, there's an app that will tell you how big your baby is, week by week, with fruit and vegetable comparisons (lentil sized, grape sized, lime sized, and so on). There is a website for this, too.


I found this out because the tall one's girlfriend (I'll call her "the sea spirit") is pregnant! And they have been keeping track of the pregnancy this way. And now that they're out of the first trimester, I can talk about it ;-)

Anyway, I find these comparisons very fun if sometimes a bit ??? I've been making felt pins for each week, starting with week 12, so the sea spirit can wear a different one as the pregnancy progresses.

Week 12 is a lime, 13 is a pea pod, 14 is a lemon, and 15 is an apple.

(... I know! These things come in various sizes. I know some apples that are twice as big as others. And are we talking key limes or...?)



Week 16 is an avocado, 17 is a turnip, 18 is a bell pepper, and 19 is a tomato (specifically the website says an heirloom tomato (?))

(I know very few tomatoes who are bigger than a good-sized bell pepper, but okay. If you're wondering where the bell pepper is in the photo, it's the pale orange one, because the website had an orange bell pepper and I'm apparently very suggestible.)



Week 20 is a banana--not in terms of weight or volume but length. Week 21 is a carrot (same stipulation). Week 22 was a spaghetti squash--and I cried foul. Spaghetti squash are huge and weigh way more than the 1 pound they were saying your baby weighs at this point. I made a delicata squash instead. And then week 23 was a mango. Have you ever seen a mango that was bigger than a spaghetti squash? I rest my case. My attempts to represent all the subtle gradations of color--from green to red!--that you can get on a mango resulted in this Halloweeny Frankenmango, but eh, you win some, you lose some.



Next up is an ear of corn! I've begun work...

You know the cloth bags you can get that come with an attached tiny sack that you can stuff them into? (ChicoBags are one manufacturer--that's what I have.)



(When you're using it as a bag, you turn it the other way out so the attached pouch doesn't show.)

The other day I was using mine, and the guy who was putting my stuff in my bag for me seemed especially interested in that little attached pouch.

"Clever, isn't it," I said. "It means the bag folds up really small for you to carry it."

"It's also perfect for holding hot peppers," he said.

And then I saw that what he'd been doing was carefully inserting the two hot peppers I'd bought into that tiny pouch.

ADORABLE!

For the daily prompt thing I'm doing, I ended up going down a rabbit hole about windmill sails and came across this story of a miller who restored the last of what used to be many windmills--"the highest concentration of windmills in the Iberian peninsula"--on a mountain in Portugal. Here he is with his windmill in 2019:


Photo by Maria Rebelo Photography; resized from the image at the blog post

He's using the mill to grind ancient wheat grains; he says ants prefer wheat grains that don't have pesticides.

Oh, and those clay pots hanging on the arms of the windmill? They are each tuned to a note in the key of C Major, and you can hear what they sound like in this soundcloud file.

Yesterday some wet snow fell, and also yesterday, we got a delivery of propane. Afterward, when I went outside to check my tanks, I found that the delivery person had left us a tiny snowman on a metal saddle that's supposed, in the summer months, to hold a hose (we don't actually use it for that).

It's a charming snowman!

The delivery person was doing their rounds, filled up the tank, and then took the time to make three wet snowballs and stack them--voila, snowman.

I have no way of thanking them--and indeed, if I somehow were able to get a message through the corporate bureaucracy, it might backfire and they might get in trouble for not HURRYING RIGHT OFF TO THE NEXT DELIVERY. But I was delighted. Happy too for them, that they were in a cheerful mood that made it possible to do this fun thing.

It was a peak linguistic delight to listen to a presentation, given in Portuguese by a charismatic Colombian researcher named Mayra Ricardo Zuluaga, on a film she and a Tikuna scholar (meaning, in this case, a scholar who is Tikuna) named Sandra Fernández Sebastián had made about huito (in Tikuna, é), the fruit that's so important in Tikuna culture. It makes a deep, blue-black dye, and painting this on you confers protection and blessings. It's used on babies for this purpose, and in coming-of-age ceremonies and at other important events. (And/but it can be given more casually, too: I got to grate huito, squeeze the pulp, and dye my hands with it.) The film was in Spanish, with some phrases in Tikuna.

huito/é (screenshot from the film)


grated huito/é (my own photo)


I really loved both the film (which you can see here) and Mayra's talk (which you can see here). Mayra describes going to meet Sandra with all the focus of someone educated in the European-heritage way, and Sandra got her to slow. down. The two spent time together, got to know each other, and Mayra got to learn in a different way. "Reading for the Magütá (autonym for Tikuna) doesn't begin with books, it begins with the body," she said, and "a child reads the threads of the forest."

reading the threads of the forest (screenshot from the film)


And Sandra says about maintaining the Magütá/Tikuna language, "If one doesn't talk the language, well, one loses the land,** because our mother tongue is the way we communicate with those spirits who don't speak Spanish."

Sandra harvesting huito/é (screenshot from the film)


I found a PDF made in conjunction with the film which contained contact information, so I sent a thank-you email to the two creators, and Mayra wrote back! And she linked me to more language-learning materials, records from an online class offered a couple of years ago by a French researcher. Who of course conducts the class in French! I had laugh (and thank my lucky stars I learned French in high school). A bouquet of languages to learn another language.

The butterfly is a blue morpho--if it opened up its wings, you would see the brilliant blue. And the pink wall is one wall of the Museo Etnográfico in Leticia. (screenshot from the film)


...In the European-heritage way of learning things. While meanwhile, with my friend and tutor in Leticia, we go slow, and I learn through friendly conversation. We're a continent apart, so we're not walking together, but we ask each other, "What are you doing right now?" "Numa, tacu tai cu u?" (there should be bunches of diacritics on those vowels, but my teacher is pretty haphazard about them, and I'm not sure with my ears about what they represent, so... ) or "What are you cooking?" "Tacu tai cui feim?" And then we answer each other, and we get a big laugh if we're cooking the same thing, which has happened.

**she says "territorio," but she's meaning everything that goes with territory/land: connection, sense of self, tradition, way of living.

The other day when I was harvesting some milkweed, I found a monarch chrysalis on a leaf. From what I've read, the caterpillars prefer to make their chrysalises elsewhere (for example, there was one on the siding of my house--sadly, that one never hatched).

So I put the stalk in a sheltered place and waited with trepidation to see if it would hatch. We had three days of rain. Today, it's gloomy, but not raining. And I went outside, and instead of a chrysalis, there was a monarch female, resting from her emergence. And her wings look just fine ^_^

chrysalis on a leaf



newly emerged female monarch butterfly (you can see the discarded chrysalis lower down)

In order for me to learn how to say things in Tikuna, my teacher sends me short recordings over WhatsApp. I then save them in files on my phone and computer and listen to them over and over and try to copy what she's saying.

These recordings are so, so charming, they always make me smile. She starts off with good morning, good afternoon, good evening (in Spanish), and in the background there may be music, or kids playing, or the sounds of cooking, or the sound of rain, or birds and insects. Sometimes she's whispering because she's sending me a message late. I never realized how VERY QUIET my own environment was until I started getting these lively recordings--such a gift.

And then there's how she frames what she's teaching me. She had just explained to me how to say "I want to eat pineapple (followed by fish, and then grilled chicken--"I'm getting hungry!" I told her), and next she wanted to tell me how you would ask someone "Do you want to eat pineapple?" She introduced the phrase by saying, "When you want to ask someone if they want to eat pineapple, for example, your niece, your child, your uncle... [brief pause], your husband ... [another pause] your dog, your grandfather, your grandmother, you ask--" ( want to know how to ask it? )

I was grinning and grinning at that very broad and inclusive list. She's very close with her nieces and her boyfriend's nieces; I'm not surprised she put them first ^_^