And at another tap of the drum begins a performance impossible to picture in words, something unimaginable, phantasmal—a dance, an astonishment.

All together glide the right foot forward one pace, without lifting the sandal from the ground, and extend both hands to the right, with a strange, floating motion and a smiling, mysterious obeisance. Then the right foot is drawn back with a repetition of the waving of hands and the mysterious bow. Then all advance the left foot and repeat the previous movements, half-turning to the left. Then all take two gliding paces forward, with a single simultaneous soft clap of the hands, and the first performance is reiterated, alternately to right and left; all the sandaled feet gliding together, all the supple hands waving together, all the pliant bodies bowing and swaying together. And so slowly, weirdly, the processional movement changes into a great round, circling about the moonlit court and around the voiceless crowd of spectators.

The Bon Odori dances are part of the O-Bon festival honoring the dead, who return to visit their families at this time of the year. The festival is celebrated on the 15^th day of the 7^th month in Japan (July 15; although in some parts of Japan it’s celebrated on August 15), but it used to be celebrated on the full moon of the seventh lunation in the Chinese calendar, which would be the full moon of July 25, which is also the Moon of the Hungry Ghosts. Like our Western festival of the dead, Halloween, this holiday mingles several elements: the traditional end of the summer retreat for Buddhist monks, the Full Moon of the Hungry Ghosts, and a midsummer lantern festival. The dances were designed to welcome and honor the spirits of the ancestors; one can see that reverent and otherworldly aspect of the dances in Hearn’s description.

A few years ago, my friend, Susan told me about the O-Bon festival held at the Betusin Buddhist Temple in Seattle. And I finally got a chance to see the dances. My first impression was that they were not particularly gliding. And they are not silent: each is accompanied by recorded music, which is played on a loudspeaker, accompanied by a drummer. The crowd gathers in the street and makes a long shuffling circle around the yagura, a temporary stage set in the middle of the street, from which the dances are announced and where the drum is placed. In Seattle, everyone is invited to participate, even if you don’t know the dances, and so the crowd is diverse, with people dressed in traditional summer kimonos and people in jeans and flipflops, some who perform the dance elegantly, others who look lost and are always off the beat.

Some of the dances are quite playful and whimsical. The Wikipedia article on Bon Odori describes some the various dances, some of which are quite old and others which come from popular culture, for instsance, the Pokemon ondo. Another website, which calls the Bon Odori dances, the spiritual dance in the midsummer night (I love that phrase), describes and provides videos of several types of bon odori dances.

I was a little disappointed in my first Bon Odori, although I enjoyed the friendly crowd, the camaraderie of the dancers, and the generosity of the Buddhist temple which opens its doors to make this festival possible. It has the atmosphere of any small community event, complete with princesses (beautiful young women wearing tiaras and kimonos), food booths, a beer garden, a display of crafts (including ikebana arrangements and bonsai trees), and little kids sitting on the curb to watch the dancers lining the street.

But this year, I attended the festival again with my niece, Shayla, and this time I really did see the gliding dances of my fantasy. Perhaps this was because the temple sponsored practice sessions during the weeks before the event (you can see one in this You Tube video) and more of the dancers knew what they were doing ahead of time. Perhaps it was because of the elegant grace of the dance leaders, women in pink kimonos who walked alongside the dancers, demonstrating the movements.

But suddenly, I could see how the gestures were intended to welcome and honor the spirits. I watched the dancers move slowly along the street, in a gliding, undulating line. And I saw all the elements Hearn saw in 1895: the swaying, the supple hands, and most of all, that sense of otherworldliness. No silence, but the beat of the drum and the repetition of the movements that began to have a trance-like, hypnotic effect. I even got up and danced to one song and felt I had truly honored the ancestors.

This video was not taken in Seattle but at the Bon Odori at the Senshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles. I think it gives you the feel of the dancing. In LA, they were dancing in concentric circles, which creates an interesting effect. Several of the dancers are very elegant and attentive to what they are doing; others have that dazed look of people just trying to keep up. And from time to time, passers by, oblivious to the camera wander by, making you feel like you are there.

To honor the sixth new moon in the Chinese calendar, the Lotus Moon, I’m posting a photo I took of the water lilies in a pond at Volunteer Park.

I had just been to see “Fleeting Beauties,” an exhibit of Japanese woodblock prints (including the famous Hokusai “The Wave” which I sometimes claim as my logo because of my name) at the nearby Seattle Asian Art Museum. I imagine I was influenced by those designs when I composed this photo.

I always spend at least one day during the month of the Lotus Moon, on the lake, in a rowboat or kayak, admiring the water lilies that thrive in Lake Washington.

If you want to learn more about water lilies and lotuses and the distinctions between them, read the article I wrote on the lotus as the flower of July.

Like many historical holidays, Fourth of July seems to have co-opted many of the symbols of the earlier celebrations at this time of year. For centuries at Summer Solstice, people stayed up all night, dancing around bonfires and rolling burning wheels down the hillsides, to honor the sun. On Fourth of July, we set off pinwheels in the street (evoking the circle, the symbol of the sun), wave sparklers around in the darkness (they look like the embers dancing up from a bonfire) and gaze at fireworks blazing overhead late into the night.

Many families spend the daytime hours on Fourth of July, at parks and lakes, enjoying a picnic lunch and eagerly waiting for the sun to set on the longest day of the year. We worship the sun and may pay for our devotion with sunburns.

Both Midsummer and Fourth of July are associated with heavy drinking. In fact, Fourth of July is one of the deadliest holidays in America due to alcohol-related traffic accidents. The traditional Fourth of July BBQ combines many of these elements: drinking and fire and spending hours outdoors with friends and family.

Midsummer has always been a time of revelry and romance. A Swedish proverb says “Midsummer’s night is not long but it sets many cradles rocking.” The Fourth of July places a little more emphasis on family than on coupling, but there’s no denying the romance involved in lying in your lover’s arms in a grassy park while watching fireworks burst overhead.

Of course, there are many differences between Fourth of July and Midsummer. Midsummer festivals also celebrate flowers and herbs, and often include the element of water (which we acknowledge here in Seattle by setting our fireworks off over Lake Union). Still, when I’m annoyed by the drunken crowds or frightened by the sound of firecrackers exploding, I remind myself this is just the traditional way to celebrate the height of Summer and the glory of the Sun.

For instance, Debra Redalia sent me a link to her blog, Rooted in Nature, and I loved her last blog entry about a new web site she discovered, Gaisma, (the name is Latvian for “light”)which provides stunning graphs showing the amount of sunlight at different times of the year. I’ve found this information on other web sites but not with such clear visuals.

I played around with several scenarios, including my location (Seattle) and Costa Rica near the equator. In Costa Rica, the difference between the amount of sunlight at Midsummer and Midwinter is 1 minute. In Seattle, it’s 7 and 1/2 hours. I like sunshine but I’m not sure I would like living in a place where the amount of light was so even all year around.

Photo of Golden Gate Park taken during my recent trip to San Francisco.

At a table in the lounge car

I took the train to San Francisco to take a one-day workshop on distilling essential oils from plants with legendary herbalist, Jeanne Rose. And I chose the train for two reasons: 1) taking the Coast Starlight is on my list of things I want to do in my lifetime and 2) I hate air travel and I wanted to find an alternative mode of transportation.

Before I left I envisioned the train as a sort of coffee shop where I could sit with my laptop in front of me and read and write, while gazing out the window at stunning scenery. The stunning scenery was there (except for half of the 22 hours it was dark so no scenery whatsoever) but I couldn’t really plug in my laptop and use it at my seat because I had an aisle seat and I didn’t want to drape the cord over my seat mate. And there was no wifi on the train.

My seatmate was a guy named Ted who’s on his way to meet his wife with whom he’s going to drive a semi trailer full of cooking equipment across country for Amma’s summer tour. We chatted for hours. He was as distracting as the scenery. And over dinner I met a man who was born in the same hospital as I was, in the same year, and grew up about a mile from where I grew up. He kept all of us (you’re seated at communal tables in the dining car, unless you’re a party of four) captivated telling stories about the five years he lived in the woods with his wife and kids after he got back from Vietnam, building a log cabin by hand, going out every day to forage and hunt for their food.

But I do have several complaints about the train, besides these pleasant distractions and beautiful scenery (waking up at dawn to see the silhouettes of palm trees against the golden sky—enchanting!). There is no privacy—every conversation you have—by cell phone (which is frowned upon) and with your seat mates or table mates, is overheard. It is impossible to sleep in a coach seat (perhaps it is possible in a window seat but I couldn’t get the conductor to assign me one despite the fact there were plenty in my car).Of course, there are sleeping cars but they are very pricey, especially for a single person.

In fact, the train discriminates against single people. If you’re a couple, you have seats side by side and can sleep draped over each other. But the conductor sat me next to another single person rather than giving me a window seat because he was “saving” those seats for the couples who might board the train later. Also the tables in the lounge car were reserved for two people, which meant I was scolded for sitting at a table with my laptop. I must admit most people used the lounge car as an opportunity to meet and talk to new people and the most interesting conversations were going on all around me. One woman was practicing her Spanish with a Spanish speaker.

However, I’m one of those introverts who is totally drained by too much socializing. I need my time alone to recharge. So the train is not really ideal for me. Also I am no good without sleep and I’ve never been able to sleep in cars or on airplanes, so it’s likely I cannot sleep on a train, even if I had one of those coveted window seats.

I arrived in Oakland totally fried, way too tired to think. Now it’s two days later and I’m sitting in a charming little coffee shop one block from the Haight and three blocks from Golden Gate park and drinking a great latte (all the lattes in San Francisco are served in glass carafes! very European). And doing all the writing and reading I thought I would do on the train.

Tomorrow night I get back on the train for a 22 hour trip to Seattle. I thought about ditching the train and buying an airplane ticket but I just can’t convince myself to get on an airplane. Not since I’ve seen what it’s like to travel along the ground, seeing the landscape through which you’re passing, the junkyards and the fields of grass, the glacial rivers and the back yards of little wooden houses, elk in the meadows and deer in the woods.

For the past month I’ve adopted a new practice of writing down at least one unique moment in every day. I already keep track of my appointments in my calendar, and my accomplishments in my journal. And I record phenological events, year after year, by noting events, like the linden trees that are just beginning to blossom, in a Book of Days.

But I was looking for something different to record in the weekly planner, Leaves from the Tree of Time, that I created for 2010 and so I decided to start recording unique moments, those moments in each day, never before experienced and not likely to be experienced again.

I’m enjoying the fruits of this practice. It helps me notice what is going on around me in an entirely different way. I know poets who write a haiku every day and photographers who take a photo every day (I love Doug Plummer’s daily photos; also the photos of Cate Kerr). And I also benefit as a writer from the time spent choosing just the right words to capture these images as if they were snapshots. In that sense, they are like haikus. I am trying to capture a particular moment (not always seasonal or natural) but in as few words as possible.

Here are some of my favorites:
April 6: A guy walks into Online Coffee and announces that Jesus blesses all of us
April 7: Pepe (the Chihuahua) licks a cherry blossom fallen in the parkway
May 1: I startle a crow, so close I can feel the wind from his feathers
May 2: A bald guy reading by flashlight behind three umbrellas in the doorway of the shoe shop

My recent trip to the beach was full of unique moments. Here are a few:
May 8: A black swan flies over my car on the Astoria Bridge, going south
May 8: Steam rising from the asphalt, sunshine on rain-soaked pavement, Route 26 between Astoria and Portland
May 8: After the rain shower, a coyote in the bushes shakes water off its fur like a dog, Route 26 between Portland and Astoria
May 8: Crossing the Astoria bridge north, it looks like I am driving into the sky
May 9: Floating on my back in the swimming pool, overhead white clouds float by in a blue sky, four birds fly by, high as the clouds and going the same direction. Long Beach, Washington
I spent this past Saturday at an Environmental Writing workshop sponsored every year by the Burke Museum. There were many unique moments in this day as well, for instance,

The pink blossoms in the hawthorn tree after the red-winged blackbird has gone.  Union Bay (once know as Tucked Away Inside), Seattle

I had even read one of the many earlier novels written about the very Pendle witches on which Mary Sharratt focuses. As with many earlier novels about witches, they are portrayed as evil women who gather in covens to plot the destruction of their wealthy neighbors.

The Pendle witches were victims of one of the first waves of witch hysteria in England, when James I came to the throne, following the death of Elizabeth I (who had her own astrologer on staff, the famous Dr. Dee). James had written a book called Daemonologie, calling for the denouncement of witches and describing how to recognize them.  The lurid imagery in this book informed the subsequent trials during which over 500 English men and women were condemned and executed.

I also read the books written by sociologists and historians trying to explain the witch craze. Unlike the fiction writers (who chose the most lurid of details, like naked dances around midnight bonfires, and thus accepted magic as real), these mostly academic writers never considered the possibility of magic. Instead they pointed to changes in society, like the dissolution of the monasteries which had provided care and healing for the sick, and the additional burden on society of the old and sick, especially older widows with no visible means of support. Accusations of witchcraft were blamed on cultural changes, misogyny and greed.

Sharratt has taken the middle way. She absolutely accepts the fact that Bess Southerns (also known as Demdike), the most notorious of the Pendle witches, the matriarch of a family living on  the edge of poverty, known throughout the area as a blesser, could heal the sick with charms, what Sharratt calls Catholic folk magic. She quotes several of these in the book; they remind me of the equally fascinating jumble of Catholic saints and pagan charms found in Carmina Gadelica, a collection of hymns and incantations collected by Alexander Carmichael in the Hebrides during the 19th century.

Sharratt also accepts as valid Demdike’s belief in her familiar, who sometimes comes to her as a beautiful young man, sometimes as a brown dog or hare.  Sharratt based her descriptions of the magical practices of Demdike and those accused with her on the account of the trial written by a court clerk. In deciding which elements to use in her story, she had to discern the true beliefs from wilder and more sensational statements which were probably coerced during the interrogations the accused underwent at the hands of the local authorities.

While Demdike first uses her powers for positive purposes, eventually she is asked to use her powers to harm and to repel, for instance, to protect a daughter from the unwanted advances of a nobleman’s son. Gradually she becomes as feared as she is appreciated. All the time, Sharratt makes it clear how precarious is her very existence and that of her family, totally dependent on the good will of others, as she has no property of her own, choosing to live in an abandoned, and reputedly, haunted stone tower. It reminded me of the homeless people in my urban neighborhood.  Contact with their poverty evokes hostility and fear as well as pity.

Sharratt captures the atmosphere of the place, the flavor of the time, and the sound of the language, both the dialect of Lancashire and the tone of conversation. She tells the story from the point of view of Demdike and her grand-daughter, Alizon, who tries to resist the pull towards using magic, but ultimately brings down the authorities upon her family when she curses a peddler who refuses to show her some pins and he falls down, paralyzed, obviously afflicted by a stroke. The language is colorful and authentic throughout, with a lilt to it and many old-fashioned expressions, for instance, “I made to follow,” “Upon a dark moon,” “Well important it was, that someone remained to tell young folk that the world hadn’t always been the way it was now.”

I asked Mary if it was hard to write the story, knowing the end, that Demdike, her daughter, and her two grandchildren would be tried and die, condemned as witches. She said; “Although it was harrowing to write of the injustice they suffered, it was my duty as a novelist to serve their memory and bear witness. And not just that—to me, their story is transcendent rather than purely tragic.”

If you’d like more information about Mary’s book, she’s created a beautiful book trailer available on youtube: Daughters of the Witching Hill. I’d love to hear about your favorite historical novel and why you love it.  And if you post your comment below, I’ll send one person, chosen at random, a copy of Daughters of Witching Hill.

Cesare, Parese, Time Alive

I wanted to use my beautiful Calendar Companion weekly planner in a way that would help me capture the essence of each day. I already have a Book of Days in which I record phenological markers, like when the locust trees begin to leaf out, or the first dandelion gone to seed. So I came up with the idea of using the weekly planner to record a unique event on every day: something that had never happened before and I didn’t think would ever happen again.

This rather casual decision had an unexpectedly delightful effect, by shifting my attitude away from expected pleasures. While in my Book of Days, I’m recording natural phenomena, in my Unique Event log, I’m more often noting human actions. For instance: April 5: A guy walks into Online Coffee and shouts “Have a blessed day. Jesus has risen.” OR March 14: The violin man outside the QFC was playing the guitar tonight. Other times, however, they are natural events like March 25: The leaves on the tree across the street are the exact same color as the bricks of the apartment building. Perhaps my favorite so far: April 7: Pepe (the Chihuahua) licks a pink cherry blossom that has been dropped in the parkway.

Of course, there are mnay unique moments in a day. That is more and more obvious to me (a creature of habit who loves routine). And I am especially intrigued by noticing what I find significant enough to record. I’d love to hear about the unique events in your days.

This year I thought I was going to give up TV (which is what I gave up last year, though I returned to it fairly quickly afterwards). But then I signed up for Christine Valters Paintner’s Lent class at Abbey of the Arts, and realized that instead of giving something up (as I was schooled to do during my Catholic childhood), I was going to acquire a new habit: a daily spiritual practice.

Christine’s class focuses on the Benedictine practice of lectio divina, that is, reading a sacred text each day and allowing it to resonate within (listening with “the ear of the heart,” as Benedict wrote). While reading about this concept in Christine’s book, Lectio Divina, I realized how seldom I really listen (which is probably why my experience of listening to the plants was so profound). I’m usually preparing an answer or adrift in a sea of my own thoughts. And I thought about how deeply the people around me, particularly my daughter, want to be heard. She’s always talking, but probably because no one’s listening. I think she would be shocked, and possibly a little terrified, if she realized I was really listening.

Listening doesn’t mean responding, so I have to curb my desire to be useful and to give advice. If my desire is to fully hear, to seek to understand, to allow my heart to be touched, that’s enough.

So I’m listening for Lent. What are you doing for Lent?

Pussy willows had always seemed mythical to me. They didn’t grow wild in Southern California. We only saw them when we went to the Farmers Market in downtown Los Angeles which we only did when relatives came to visit. The pussy willow branches came wrapped in plastic. When brought home and put in vases, they remained frozen in their fuzzy bud stage.

But on this tree, I saw all the stages in their development. First, tender milk-white buds. Bristling green catkins came next, which were gradually frosted with yellow pollen before dropping from the tree to litter the sidewalk in soggy clumps like so many used condoms. And, as I thought about it, I realized this tree was in a constant wave of orgasm as each little flower puffed out its pollen and then collapsed, spent.

It amazed me that I had walked past this tree for years (I’ve lived in my neighborhood for 14 years) and never noticed this miraculous transformation. (To give me credit, this whole cycle is over in one month; for the rest of the year, the tree is rather boring:either bare branches or green leaves.)

The goat willow tree surprised me again this year when I realized there is another stage in its development. Before the milky white buds appear, the ones we think of as pussy willows, they have to push through the brown caps that have protected them through the winter. Right now the sidewalk is covered with those light brown husks, like so many tiny insect shells.

It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance…. To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired. Thoreau.