Blissing

K. David Harrison: Emerging Languages, Emergent Knowledge

K. David Harrison: Emerging Languages, Emergent Knowledge

"As we celebrate UNESCO's International Mother Language Day, on February 21, 2011, we should treasure humanity's astonishing linguistic diversity, and work for its survival and expansion."

The Beloved

At my 9-day training at The School for the Work, I did my usual M.O., which is to create an obsession with someone. Sometimes it’s a woman, in which case, everything she does will annoy me. More often, and this time, it’s a man. This made some kind of sense since I was there to relieve myself of my obsessions with another man. What better way to do that than replace him with someone new?

The Work (.com)

I went to a relationship workshop in Salt Lake City this weekend given by Byron Katie. Parts of it were very deep and I realized I have a lot of work to do on my relationship with my grandmother. She died 7 years ago, but she lives on powerfully in my head. I pretty much hate her. I realized that if she's gonna live in my head, that I want her to be someone I love.

White Tigress Calling

A scary, profound thing happened today. I was driving on University Ave. and on the freeway overpass there was a teenage girl and an older woman, probably her mother, struggling with each other. They looked Chinese to me. A young man was passively looking on. It took me a few seconds to realize the girl was threatening to jump onto the freeway below. She was crying, and the older woman looked so pained.

Don't Despair of Global Warming: Practical, Positive Help

[Cross-posted at DailyKos]
There has been some scary news lately--Darksyde's post about how Greenland's glaciers are melting at a faster than expected rate, humans are no doubt causing global warming, etc. It can be difficult not to feel hopeless and despairing. A couple of friends have gotten seriously depressed after seen An Inconvenient Truth.

That got me thinking about the classes I took with Joanna Macy a few years ago. I hope that I'm not insulting her with my cherry-picking of her great teachings, but I do want to help people stay positive.

Mushroom Cloud Over Vegas? Divine Strake Test Blast 6/2

[Cross posted atDaily Kos]
According to the WaPo on 3/31:

A huge mushroom cloud of dust is expected to rise over Nevada's desert in June when the Pentagon plans to detonate a gigantic 700-ton explosive -- the biggest open-air chemical blast ever at the Nevada Test Site -- as part of the research into developing weapons that can destroy deeply buried military targets, officials said yesterday.
The Nevada Test Site is on Western Shoshone land. Most media reports have left out the information that this test is in violation of a U.N. decision.

Indian Country Today reports

[This] test would be in direct violation of the recent decision of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. CERD, in the decision made public March 10, urged the United States to ''freeze,'' ''desist'' and ''stop'' actions and threats against the Western Shoshone...

...Chief Raymond Yowell, of the Western Shoshone National Council, said Western Shoshone are opposed to any further military testing on Shoshone lands.

''This is a direct violation of the CERD finding and an affront to our religious belief [that] mother earth is sacred and should not be harmed. All people who are opposed to these actions by the U.S. should step forward and make their opposition known.''

James Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) said in a later retracted comment: ''I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons.'' Tegnelia also said it would be the ''largest single explosive that we could imagine.''

But is it a nuclear test after all? A very thorough timeline of coverage at Disarmament Activist reviews the ambivalent communications with the DTRA, as well the connection to "bunker buster" nuclear bombs, and, given our threats against Iran, their possible use against against nuclear sites there.

What is a bunker buster? For that matter, William A. Arkin reveals our government's crazy, ill-formed nickname regulations. And, this is what a strake is.

Although various reports online state that the test has been postponed, yesterday I called Dante Pistone, the public information officer for the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, who said that the test is still scheduled for 6/2. They have sent a letter to the D.O.E. requesting environmental impact information.

And, just because I rarely see his contact information in blogs, as well as because we need to, the Shundahai Network suggests contacting Donald Rumsfeld to comment:

Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
1000 Defense Pentagon
Washington, DC 20301-1000

As well as,

Defense Threat Reduction Agency
Attn: james Tegnelia
8725 John J. Kingman Rd.
Stop 6201
Fort Belvoir, VA 22060-6201

800-701-5096 dtra.publiaffairs@dtra.mil

Cross-posted in my diary at

Footbinding,Part 2--The Women in my Family

Although I’d always heard that Chinese women had bound feet in the “olden days”, for some reason it had never occurred to me
that any of my female ancestors had them. It wasn’t until after all my maternal ancestors had passed away that I asked a cousin about it. She said that my great, great grandmother was the last woman to have bound feet in our family. Luckily, I was raised by my grandmother and she had memories of HER grandmother. One story stands out. If my grandmother ever did anything wrong while growing up, her grandmother would never beat her or say anything in anger, she would just make a gesture that later ended up being used on me—drawing the index finger downward on a child’s cheek to say, “shame on you.” She is the only gentle relative I’ve ever heard of or known.

My great grandmother, the first girl to have big feet, was a cruel woman. She was born in 1900. She was very regal and intimidating. My cousin told me that sometimes she would wake up the kids in the middle of the night and start beating them for something they had done two weeks prior. Or worse, throw a bucket of water on them while they slept. She was probably addicted to opium, although all I know is that they had a special ma jong room in the house that had a big hookah in it. How did she get so mean?

My ancestors were herbalists. My great, great grandmother was known to spend most of her time on her knees sorting herbs. (Was it too painful to be on her feet?) The story of how her daughter ended up with "big" feet goes like this: My great, great grandfather traveled around a lot trading herbs as the Sichuan province is renowned for its special herbs that can be found nowhere else. He therefore heard news that footbinding was going out of style before the people in the village did. So, he didn’t bind his daughter’s feet, and got a lot of flack from the other villagers who teased him.

Bless him, bless him. But, with this unbinding, a thousand years of oppression, inexplicable suffering and resulting anger were also unbound. Neither Chinese, nor, after emigration, American culture, acknowledged or allowed space for women’s anger. My great, great grandmother, bound and oppressed, was gentle. My great grandmother, with her free feet, was vicious and cruel. Her daughter, my grandmother, could be cruel, but not quite as vicious. She found power through her drop-dead gorgeous beauty. Later in life she became bound up by her multiple plastic surgeries and the restrictions of her fundamentalist Christian church. Her daughter, my mother, left me as a newborn with my grandmother. For 25 years, she was the classic co-dependent wife of an alcoholic man who wasn’t my father. She was a compulsive liar. She developed a severe eating disorder. Her anger had become more inwardly directed. All of my maternal ancestors were unbound but still hobbled-- by their rage and sense of powerlessness rather than their tiny, broken feet.

Next: My Footbinding Legacy.

Footbinding, Part 1--A Short History

Footbinding was a fashion, a fad that went horribly, horribly wrong. It started about 1,000 years ago when a dancer with small feet performed in the Chinese imperial court atop a giant lotus sculpture. Women in the court started binding their feet to make them look smaller and create “golden lotuses”. As per usual, it spread to the masses, and not long thereafter, girls from the ages of 3 to 6 had to have their feet bound if there was any hope of them getting married when they were older.

Many times there were infections and toes would fall off or become gangrenous. As described in Aching for Beauty, by Wang Ping, the only feminist critique of footbinding by a Chinese woman that I’ve come across, the foot needed to be, “…small, slim, pointed, arched, fragrant, soft and straight…for about two or three years, little girls go through the inferno of torture: the flesh of her feet, which are tightly bound with layers of bandages day and night, is slowly putrefied, her toes crushed under the soles, and the insteps arched to the degree where the toes and heels meet. Loving mothers turn into monsters that beat their sobbing girls with sticks or brooms, forcing them to hop around to speed up the rotting flesh and make sure the bones are broken properly. When the feet are finally shrunk to the size of a baby’s—three inches long, half an inch wide in the front—they are completely deformed…All the tears and pus, all the decay and broken bones are hidden under the elaborate adornment of the shoes, which are never taken off, not even in bed. Yet violence is traceable everywhere: the odor of dead flesh seeping through the bandages, the tiny appendages that barely support the frail body.”

A mother was not allowed to loosen the bindings no matter how much the little girl cried or begged. This was proof of her love for her daughter. She had to save face for her daughter’s wedding day, when everyone would look at her feet and judge whether she would be a good wife or not by the size of her feet. Look at your hand and imagine a grown woman’s foot fitting into its palm. Not all women had 3-inch feet, 4-, 5-, and 6-inch feet were also common. Men would marry women based solely on the smallness of her feet, having never seen their faces. Sometimes they married women old enough to be their mothers, just because their tiny feet were renowned. Books were written about the erotic pleasures of tiny feet. Every aspect of them was eroticized—the way they smelled (apparently cheesy), the way they felt in the hand or in the mouth during intercourse, the way they made a woman teeter as she walked and how watching her evoked a sense of pity for her helplessness, how they looked like both female and male genitalia, how to insert a penis into the arch, the beautiful embroidered silk shoes shaped like lotus or lily leaves, the hoove-like animal-ness of them, etc. Footbinding had by then become something much deeper than a fad; it had become a reflection of the culture’s tastes and sensibilities in food, art, sexual practices, as well as its control of women.

Next: The women in my family.

4,000 Years of Patriarchy Sucks!

I am so raving mad right now I could drool. Today I was at a lesson with a Chinese male teacher, who, every so often, starts ranting about how much he loves exercising, and how I should, too. First thing wrong with that is he’s bought into the idea that because I’m the size I am, I don’t exercise. Second, why is he commenting on what I do with my body? I know, it’s a cultural thing. A teacher is allowed and expected to convey all his wisdom upon the student, without dissent. Today I’d had enough and said, “What makes you think I don’t exercise?” He went into a long lecture about how he thought that I was fine, but I should do “more”, that I’m very beautiful and life will go better for me if I’m thinner, and ultimately, he’s only saying what’s right for me, and really his information is not just coming from him, it’s coming from the heavens! I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian cult, and I just don’t play that, “God says” crap anymore. I stared at him, although he was expecting a nod, because I couldn’t have said anything “nice” if I opened my mouth, and he moved on. He’s only been in this country for a few years, but how could he not know that I know that my life would be easier if I was thinner? Like no one's ever told me to lose weight before. How do I explain that I love myself so much and it took so long to get there that I'm not going to risk becoming someone who runs to the bathroom and pukes after dinner just so I can have a so-called easier and better life? That I don't need to attract men in order to get them to do my bidding to feel powerful or to get what I want? I got in my car to drive home and started thinking about the Chinese men in my life.

I have a Chinese healer who just yesterday was telling me that I was very lucky, that I had a lucky face, and that everything would turn out all right and not to be sad or depressed. He’s a master with herbs and I feel better for taking them. He’s also very attached to me being smaller. Every time he massages me, he notes the size of my belly, saying how much smaller it’s getting. Of course, he thinks it’s because of his treatments; I think it’s because of my being so completely stressed out lately, some of it good stress, but some bad. He started telling me that I had a very good heart (agreed), that I’m beautiful (beholder, etc.) and that I was very nice and sweet (he’s on shaky ground there), and then says I’m not like some other women who are like tigers. He scowls. I just smile and say thank you. If you’ve ever watched Karate Kid, you know how we treat our elders and teachers. Again, we listen and even if we disagree we don’t say anything. Always respect. It was ingrained or beaten into me as a child, and I admit it has served me well as I come into contact with indigenous elders from other cultures.

To top it off, there’s a former lover, the only Chinese man I’ve ever dated, who because I’m back in the dating pool again, thinks he ought to get in on some of the action. Unfortunately, back then he said some things about my body that really *broke* me, for a while. In spite of a lot of work on my own, the wounds didn't start healing until another man loved all those things, and *told* me repeatedly how he loved them.

As I drove, I got so sleepy I couldn't wait to get home and crawl into bed. A few miles later I realized my sleepiness was actually my anger, repressed!

Ahem. I understand that after 4,000 years of patriarchy you might not know that the tiger is a Goddess. In fact, I also know that when you call a woman a “white tiger” you mean to say she’s a sexual predator. She has sex with men and then kills them. I know that chamber pots are shaped like the gaping mouth of a tiger. You piss into the mouth of the goddess. If a girl is born in the year of the tiger, her parents will often lie and use the year after or before instead. In the 1950’s a bounty was paid by the government for tiger “pests”.

But actually: the White Tigress is alive. She is the primordial earth mother goddess of China, Xi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West. Two thousand years ago her devotees were legion. One thousand years ago, you neo-confucians diminished her by binding her feet. You made her the wife of some other god. You put her statue in a dark corner of the temple. You told people not to worship her because she’s not that powerful. You let her decay.

She is angry. She isn’t trying to kill you. She has sex with you so you can die and be reborn. It’ll feel like dying but you won’t. She is unbound and she is stalking the streets. She is big, the biggest cat on the planet, and she has big-ass unbound feet, and she is NOT fucking nice! I wear her symbols, along with the Guan Yin medallion. Alas, the available ones are indirect and derivative --“nice”—the peaches of immortality that only Xi Wang Mu can confer. I wear her colors in my clothes and in my hair. They are the colors of masculine and feminine coming into balance, white and black, tiger and dragon, death and rebirth, yin and yang. Don't watch out, just watch.

My Journey with Guan Yin

I've been resistant to Guan Yin, AKA Kwan Yin, ever since I found out who she was. Reason? I don't know any Chinese women like her. All the Chinese women in my life are strong, fierce, scary, sometimes cruel, woman-warrior-types. Guan Yin, in my mind, was too nice, too soft, too stereotypically feminine, and....downright WIMPY! What could she do for me? I'm not asking her for anything! My life has been rough, how would she know what I'm going through? And why didn't she help me way back when?

Then, a couple of months ago, I saw a book called the Kwan Yin Oracle. I dismissed it as some made-up new age crap, without even looking beyond the cover. The next day I was tending the fire in my fireplace, and as I was coming back up I banged my head really hard on my altar. I have many things on my altar, but the only thing that moved was a Guan Yin statue that my teacher had given me. I watched as it slowly wobbled and then crashed in a bunch of pieces on the floor. Oh sh*t, what have I done now, I thought. What do I do with the pieces? Did Guan Yin feel she had to sacrifice herself to get my attention?

The day after that, I was cleaning my office and found a box from a Chinatown jewelry store. I opened it and inside it was a Guan Yin medallion! I had no recollection of buying it or stashing it away, or who I'd bought it for. I knew I hadn't bought it for *me*. Now, this is a solid gold bit of metal, and must have cost at least $100! How could I forget buying something like that?

OK, I start wearing the medallion more often, and then I go back to the bookstore and, this time, I pick up the Kwan Yin Oracle book and realize it's written by a man who has written some really great I Ching books, that I own! The last kicker: The Kwan Yin Oracle is the fortune telling sticks used in temples. Shake a tube of numbered sticks until one falls out and that's your fortune. Guess what? I have a set of these sticks, given to me by my teacher! I never used them because the booklet that came with it is so crappy.

OK, I get it, I get it. I'm still skeptical, but I'm wearing the medallion, and I'm open to a more compassionate, gentle Chinese feminine bhodisattva (hi Jenny!) spirit to come into my life. The picture is from Dazu, near my ancestral home. She literally has over 1,000 arms, and is tucked into a beautiful grotto.