The Melting World

And why not fight the power?, as my son suggests above in his thrift store find of the month and his Linus shirt. Those in power are typically pretty boring, from what I’ve seen at a far distance…and they usually have horrible taste when they re-design whatever building they purchased for some horribly unoriginal business […]

20,000 strong!

photo by Koizumi/flickr I found this quote by a young man with autism today while online, and I loved it: “We are not born to suffer. We are born to thrive. If you live in a dry area and your garden receives little water, you plant plants which like dry soil. But when you are […]

************** “…half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.” –1933, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, while living alone 7 months in Antarctica– ************** My sister is caring for my son for the weekend. Fact: these two nights are the first time in over five years I have had the opportunity […]

“Trying to own water makes no more sense than trying to own love –it is the flow that matters.” -Sarah Ruth Vangelden, Yes! Magazine (Winter 2004) On May Day my family all packed up and headed to see the big May Day celebration at Powderhorn park. About 30,000 people celebrate in the park every year—and […]

Here’s a pic of Masa and Elizabeth in the afterglow of May Day celebrations.

Call your senators and representatives and call this man some think a president for a virtual march to protest troop escalation. Stop Bush from causing more death and destruction. More information at http://www.moveon.org/ A recent search on Google for images of the people harmed and killed by this illegal war makes me feel even more […]

Racking the bane of the same idea, scribbling a compulsive list of materialistic desires. His brain jogs with the noontime zest of a jackal munching on the flesh of ten ripe melons. The rushing yacht of naught transports him to a tropical island, where a life lived naïve deserves the most acerbic cocktail. Made of […]

A hiatus from blogging occurred, due to unstoppable flows of forms, databases, and meetings and greetings and fare-thee-wells. My son has finally been seen and checked and officially diagnosed, and now, maybe now, people will start to help him to grow into his full bloom. I still have a gazillion other forms to fill out […]

The past weekend I took a brief trip to Tokyo, and it’s such an enormous, chaotic, mad elephant compared to our slow and peaceful existence in the Hokkaido mountainside. Oh yes, I was glad to come back to fresh air and quiet, but I really love Tokyo, too, for its vibrant energy and for its […]

–An injured horse flees the US bombing of Baghdad– (Image taken from here) I was asked about six months ago how I can be an anti-war idealist in light of what horrible things happen in our world. I was asked how I can say, for example, that war is wrong, when it was the way […]

“If you zoom in too close, a spiral appears to be a line…” I’ve said this before, and now I realize it’s my life. The ties you think should have been broken or at least disintegrated after so long an absence hold firm. The prodigal daughter takes a road that ends up where she began. […]

anonymous artist – Outsider art exhibit at local library I haven’t had the chance to get to this place lately. Been traveling about and reading books on the treatment of the peasant class during the pre-modern and modern era of Japan. Once again, I am opening my eyes wider to what is in the hidden […]

A small painting by me of St. Nina Simone, The High Priestess of Song (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003) Pianist, Composer, Performer, Arranger, Singer Nina Simone’s voice is inseparable from my growth as a human being. In my days as child, listening again and again to the haunting rendition of House of the […]

Today Ota-sensei, an Ainu language teacher, came to my cross-cultural class to deliver his version of Hokkaido/Ainu history, Part II. Although I think what he said had a lot of importance for the students, I was dismayed to see most of them doing other schoolwork, sending text messages on their cell phones, or whispering with […]

In my cross-cultural seminar this past Friday, I had the privilege of having Chisato “Kitty” Dubreuil give my students a slideshow/talk comparing Ainu and Native American political histories. She is the only active Ainu scholar who is an expert in Ainu art history, Japanese art history, and Native American & First Nations art history. She […]

For the first time in late September I saw a place where hot spring waters are harvested for the many hotels dotting the Mt. Fuji landscape. The scene looked like my Catholic childhood imagination of Hell: yellowy scarred stains next to smoldering thick pools of spoiled oatmeal, yellowish-white fumes twisting and groaning like ghosts, the […]

This weekend is the 50th anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder the night of August 28, 1955, in Money, Mississippi. If he were alive today, he’d be 64, probably a grandfather, though we can never know, sadly, what he might have been. Here’s some links to read more about him and the reopening of his case […]