roosters!

today i saw roosters in the parking lot of my elementary school. they did not like being stalked by me.

moon cakes all around

happy moon festival, y'all. it's a time to watch the full moon w/friends + family + eat lots of food, of course. here in abq i wouldn't know where to get a moon cake, but lucky for me, i have an uncle in taiwan who decided to start shipping them to me every year. thanks, uncle #4! 


my mom says that back in the day of mongolian oppression, chinese ppl used moon cakes to pass messages to each other about secret resistance meetings. so i guess moon cakes were an old school version of twitter. damn those mongols! they couldn't hold us chinese ppl down though- just look at how good today's chinese government is at oppressing other ethnic minorities (see previous post on displaced tibetan monks). sigh.

monks- live on tour!

three days ago, a group of monks from the Gaden Shartse monastery in Tibet arrived in abq. these guys have been criss-crossing the U.S. for the past 15 months + they have 3 more months to go before they return to India (where the monastery has been relocated, thanks to the Chinese invasion of Tibet- damn Chinese government!). 


my first thought when i heard they were coming was: poor guys. i don't know much about Buddhist monks, but a non-stop traveling tour of performing one's sacred dances + prayers for 18 months seems like the exact opposite of what a monk would want to do. their website (www.gadenshartsecf.org) explains that the monks tour in order to promote cultural exchange + raise funds for their monastery but it seems more like a test of how well they've learned their lessons on emptiness, compassion, mindfulness, etc. on the other hand, maybe it's a little fun- some of these guys have been in monk training since they were 10. maybe they like being out of the monastery. maybe they get to play video games + eat pizza + watch "jersey shore" while they're on tour. 


                  the monks set up shop in the Maxwell museum of anthropology at UNM for a couple of days as they created a sand mandala honoring green Tara, a female deity. the sand is made from crushed marble and dyed with poster paint. the symbol for green Tara is in the middle of the mandala, surrounded by four doorways + lotus blossoms. lotus blossoms are big b/c they grow out of mud + muck, illustrating humans' journey from people muck to enlightenment. that's all i remember from the explanation.







after three days, the monks performed a dissolution ceremony for the mandala.  i went to watch the dissolution. the monks chanted, played instruments, + sprinkled some sand from their home monastery on the mandala. then they swiftly swept all the sand into a pile in the center of the table. later, they would take the remaining sand + pour it into the closest moving body of water, the rio grande river.

















the room was packed. i was able to wiggle in between two people upstairs to get a view. after the monks swept up the sand, they immediately started scooping it into teeny nickel plastic bags, which the head llama handed out to the crowd. clearly they'd done this many times; the fastest monk (top left in photo) had the movements down to scoop, flick, seal, + toss. he was tossing filled bags so fast, he looked like he was dealing cards in vegas. 

the most fascinating part of the ceremony for me was watching mr. head llama passing out sand baggies to the crowd. ppl approached him with their hands cupped in front of them- when else do we take this position? if someone hands something to me, i take it with one hand. kids at my elementary school do hold out cupped hands to receive snacks, like goldfish, but this is because you get more crackers that way than if you only held out one hand. each person in this room was only getting one bag of sand, so the goldfish principle doesn't apply. curious.


i stayed till the very end. as i left the parking lot, i saw the monkmobile, an unmarked white van, pull out in front of me (they did not cut me off). someone screamed, "WE LOVE YOU ALL!!" as they headed towards the rio grande. 

TOD: the obeisant vine

those of you who've ridden in my car know that my musical tastes tend to stick to the commercial cotton candy fluff that's played on pop + R+B stations (though last month i started working my way thru a pile of 90's rap CDs- masta ace, edo g, jurassic 5, warren g). today's TOD (track of the day) is definitely un-commercial + un-fluffy. eric fenn used it in one of his urban contemporary dance classes at ODC (odcdance.org) + it worked its way under my skin. the artist is helios, a guy in portland, oregon; the track is "the obeisant vine".


the obeisant vine

don't you wish your feet were hot like these

i love having a roommate who lets me paint his toenails! hard to tell from the photo, but he's sporting metallic green polish with shiny hearts on top. what you're feeling now is called jealousy.

the hoodoo that you do

a hoodoo is a funny-looking pile of rocks. lots of hoodoos at tent rock national monument; they're the skinny rocks sticking straight up from the ground.

not so many pics of clouds today; they were mostly one big woolly mass of dark gray. instead, striped, textured rocks:

so very cool to look at, but after half an hour of hiking up this canyon, i maxed out on rocks + got tired + started thinking about dinner. i would've turned around and gone back to the car, except there was this girl ahead of me on the trail- maybe 10 years old, wearing glasses, long braids, + a backpack. i told myself i'd keep going as long as she kept going. unfortunately for me, she barreled thru the trail straight up to the top, which meant i did too, which meant a two hour hike. i wish they had abridged hikes for ppl like me w/short attention spans, a cliff notes version. but i guess it's not about rushing thru the hike, it's about the journey, blah blah blah. enlightenment is so very far away from me.

OOJ: gaga + beyonce

today's OOJ is a couple videos demonstrating two extremes. first, her majesty the queen gaga performing "speechless" on a 10-foot grand piano raised 20 ft in the air supported by what looks like giant tree roots. what's it like to play piano with your feet dangling in the air? i want to know. even tho i don't prefer her music, i adore her theatricality + i wish ppl in everyday life accessed + flaunted their inner flamboyance more often. gaga does this whether she's on stage or not; therefore, she is a queen.
gaga speechless

and at the other end of the pendulum swing, we have beyonce doing a run-thru of "one + one" in the green room before she steps on stage at "american idol". it's unproduced, unedited, unrehearsed (well, it *is* the rehearsal itself)- nothing but pure melody + musicality (don't listen to the lyrics). i'd swallow this video just so i could play it on repeat in my head all day long. 
beyonce 1+1