Tuesday, September 28, 2010 I'm going rootless. I've sold my house. Move-out day is October 15, and, as of today, I don't yet have a forwarding address.
More than 20 years ago, the local parks and recreation department offered a class in tai chi. I was the only student who enrolled. The instructor, Brandon, would have had every right to cancel the class, but he didn't. Brandon and I met once a week for six weeks and he introduced me to both qigong and tai chi.
Brandon used qigong as the prelude to the tai chi, and I interpreted qigong as a warmup.
Below is a video with a morning set of qigong movements. I like this video because there's no chatter other than the intrusive sound of the ocean waves, which I turned off.
I always like the story of one of my favorite movements. It goes something like this:
The sun comes up
You push open the window for a better view
You spread the curtains wide
You reach down and gather the sunlight
Toss it up into the sky
Pull what falls to your abdomen and rest your palms there
In my emerging meditation practices, the qigong movements help me focus on my physical being in its parts and its whole, pulling me out of my brain's incessant talk talk talk.
Sweet potatoes. Longmont, Colorado. June 2023. Credit: Mzuriana.
The original source, from Al Jazeera, about "troubling work conditions for North Carolina laborers" who harvest sweet potatoes is no longer accessible. Here is a November 2015 replacement source from NPR: Behind Your Holiday Sweet Potato Dish, Hard Work in the Fields.
2010 Yambilee poster, Yambilee Festival Building, Opelousas, Louisiana
I was standing in line at my neighborhood grocery store the other day,
and a man came up behind me with only one item to buy, so I invited him
to move ahead of me. A happy consequence is that he noticed the two
gigantic sweet potatoes I had among my stash, and this sparked a memory
for him.
Yam sign outside Yambilee Festival Building, Opelousas, Louisiana
When he was a kid, he dug up sweet potatoes during the harvest from, he
said, first thing in the morning til the end of the day. It was terrible
hard work, he said, but at mid-day, the labor was suspended for a large
meal, which gave him energy to re-commence with the work in the
afternoon. The man allowed as how it made him feel strong and good. ...
though I suspect this is more how it feels to him in retrospect than at
the time.
The man observed that digging the sweet potatoes is no longer necessary, as there is a machine that can do it now.
Yambilee Festival Building, Opelousas, Lousiana
Recently, I've been buying sweet potatoes in bulk because the price at
my local grocer is so giddily low right now and I love the durn things. I
bake two racks of them at a time, skin them, distribute them into
portions, then freeze the portions in freezer bags.
Sweet potato chips, Louisiana
The man's story got me to thinking about sweet potato agriculture.
The American leaders of sweet potato production, in order from largest to smallest, are:
North Carolina
California
Mississippi
Louisiana
Louisiana State University produced the video, The Sweet Truth About Sweet Potatoes, which focuses on commercial sweet potato agriculture, from planting to harvesting and curing:
Based on what I've learned in the above video, I'm thinking the sweet
potatoes I'm buying today are those that were harvested last year.
What I see in the LSU video about commercial sweet potato agriculture in Louisiana is at odds with the troubling work conditions for North Carolina laborers
that I'm reading about [in 2015]. In the LSU video, I see mechanical harvesting
(which conforms with what the gentleman at the grocery store told me),
but the reports about North Carolina refer to hand-harvesting, which is
where labor abuses come in.
North Carolina Sweet Potatoes [said] this about mechanical vs. hand-harvesting [at the time of the original post in 2015]:
"Sweet potato roots are turned up on top of the ground by a side
angle disk plow and partially exposed to aid the workers in picking and
sorting. Sweet potatoes are very susceptible to damage at harvest;
therefore hand-harvest is preferred over mechanical harvesting. ... To
harvest, the field rows are usually plowed with a modified disk or
moldboard plow with a spiral attachment. Roots are then hand harvested
and graded in the field. Sweet potatoes can also be dug by a chain
digger or a riding harvester that conveys the roots to a sorting crew
using a harvest aide. Potato harvesters are sometimes used to harvest
sweet potatoes but damage is usually unacceptably high."
Even though Louisiana might use mechanical harvesting, and therefore
maybe there aren't all of the same labor equity concerns here as in
North Carolina, there is still a question about how commercial farmers
in Louisiana protect workers during and after pesticide spraying.
Just as the movement builds to protect people from second-hand smoke in
businesses .... when we have an opportunity to do so, let's encourage
our food suppliers, legislators, and local, state, and federal
regulatory agencies to create and enforce safeguards to protect
agricultural workers (and their families - and consumers) from unhealthy
work and living conditions (when provided by the farmers). Some
advocacy and regulatory organizations include:
Adult coloring books aren't anything new, of course. Coloring can get us into a flow, allow us to relax. There is also the idea of coloring to practice mindfulness and meditation.
There are legions of mandalas out there to color, but that's not where my interest lies. I like birds. And I like drawings I can color to completion in less than half an hour.
There are also coloring books that self-brand as "mindfulness coloring books." A mindfulness coloring book by Emma Farrarons drew me in right away with the cover's smple and soothing waves that would suit me well:
What coloring tools work well for this mindful coloring?
Art Therapy Coloring recommends what we should and shouldn't use for adult coloring books. The following is among the shoulds:
Colored pencils
Colored pens
Gel pens
Fine tip markers
Watercolor pencils
There are online coloring apps for touchscreen devices. I've looked at a few, but I want to spend less time on electronic devices, not more. So for now, I will let that option rest.
I ventured into threading again while in Tucson. Ouch.
In my search for past posts that touched on waxing, threading, plucking, or razoring, I uncovered one from 2014, in which a stranger in Louisiana uttered this proposition to me:
... there were 15 giant storks.
Huge. One alighted, then disgorged food into the mouths of two gangly
"teenagers." I watched, agog. A short walk further, directly before me,
another tree filled with storks. Walking underneath (glad I had my hat
on), I looked up and counted more than 10 oversize nests. As with the
Bale Mountain forest, this was the stuff of medieval fairy tales.
Around the corner-ish from my temporary digs in Istanbul, I got my whole face threaded. Amazing how that works, cause you wouldn't think it would.
In Rustavi, Georgia, there were a couple of rugged waxings at a local
salon. Yeow. But speaking of Caucasus Georgia, the Georgian women have
spectacular brows.
Here's one woman's experience getting her brows done in Nice (waxed) and Palestine (tweezed).
The repetition in the Rosary is meant to lead one into restful and
contemplative prayer related to each Mystery. The gentle repetition of
the words helps us to enter into the silence of our hearts, where
Christ's spirit dwells. The Rosary can be said privately or with a
group.
I'm agnostic, but the value of "entering into the silence of our hearts" resonates.
While on this mental journey, my road journey put me alongside two women who create jewelry with beads. One woman I already knew; the second was a woman I met in an Alaskan airbnb. The former was a colleague from my time in Caucasus Georgia - following our tenure there, she traveled to Ghana to learn about beads in jewelry-making. The latter has created jewelry with trade beads for decades.
Thus the natural turn of study onto the use of beads in a meditation practice.
I paused my draft of this post to poke through my cache of broken jewelry pieces for beads that I might fashion into a circle for meditation. I discovered I do have the beginnings of something. I am enthusiastic about what I will create.
Once upon a time, I read a magazine article by a man whose hobby was to travel to different parts of the world while
history was being made in those exact parts. When the Berlin Wall fell,
for example, he scooped up his kids and they flew to Berlin from the US
to be witnesses.*
I've often thought about that practice, it's damn cool, but how many of us have the means to do the same? Not me.
Well, not me on such a large stage.
But I can be a witness to some historic events, and the recent
fall of a blessed pecan tree was one of them. When I say blessed, I mean
the Virgin Mary appeared in this tree during the 1970 and 1990s,
prompting many folks to visit the backyard of a house on Larry Street,
where the pecan tree stood.
I couldn't get over there for a few days, and I was a little worried
that it'd be all chopped up by the time I did get there. But it wasn't,
and I was even able to chat with the owner's caregiver and grown
daughter.
Blessed tree, Opelousas, Louisiana. June 2015.
And the daughter let me take a stick that came from the blessed tree.
Personally, I don't put much truck in these kinds of things, but I don't
demean them, either. Blessed sticks are no less magical than
nutritional supplements, juicing cleanses, or Warren Buffett, and we
know all those things to be holy.
It feels good to have this stick from a tree beloved by many people, and some day I'll come across someone who needs it.
Blessed tree, Opelousas, Louisiana. June 2015.
I like the intimacy between the sacred and mundane in the picture above -
a holy tree with pretty offerings, next to a stubby, cheery barbecue
grill. There's a little flavor of the magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude, where the impossible and the possible get along just fine.
There's nothing I can add to what the article covered, except for one
thing: I asked the daughter if it had been a good pecan producer in its
day, and the immediate response was a chortled no!
I am pleased to offer a cat pic (!) on this blog, thanks to the blessed
tree visit. She bewitched me into taking her photo and publishing it
here, that green-eyed temptress:
Opelousas cat on Larry Street. June 2015.
*This reminds me of a sci-fi story where people from the future came
to the past and rented rooms in a - let's call it a form of airbnb -
house somewhere in Italy. They knew this particular house in this city
in this country would have a commanding view of the sun going supernova
or something, and they wanted first row seats. .... Then there's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
one of the books from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where
people can travel far (really, really far) into the future, just before
the universe collapses, but have a good meal first.
