Fate of the Lhapa

In my four and a half years in the jungle in Zambia as a young child there was a Witch Doctor who I remember clearly. He has been with me all my life - though I had a strong feeling he passed on in 1997 - I went to my cottage alone and fasted (only water) for 3 days and helped him, his spirit on the journey to the Great Oneness.

My memories of him and his power and his work are entirely different to the New Age posturing of so called "Shamans." From my own tribal African vantage, I understand the difference between the pose and the reality. "Shaman" seems to me to be about power, and is sold as such in workshops and books and New Age CDs et al; whereas, the traditional Witch Doctor or Medicine Man or Woman is about healing, and it is a most difficult path of great responsibility for the chosen practitioner.

Last week, as part of a Planet Earth film festival, I saw the film this trailer advertises of three Tibetan Lhapa who are in their elder years living in a permanent refugee camp in Nepal who do this difficult work with illness and Spirit. They may not have heirs to their calling since the signs of Lhapa have not appeared in any of the younger generations in any of their families, which is why they requested a documentary to remember them and their work.

It is a beautiful little film, shot in natural light. The Lhapa are disarmingly open about the traditional Tibetan Medicine they are doctors of. The Lhapa hold nothing back in their sharing of their understanding of what they do, the processes involved. Perhaps to us it may seem superstitious, though we also in our Western medicine use a set of metaphors to explain bodily and psychic processes in terms of illness and cure and we should understand that they are only sets of metaphors and are no more or less valid than the ones the Tibetan Lhasa use to describe their treatments.

The Lhasa give themselves fully to the work they do; more than this, they give themselves over to the spiritual calling of the healing processes. It takes its toll on them; it is not an easy calling. That they live hard lives is quite evident, though they do not see themselves this way.

The Lhapa become gods while they heal, the deities enter them, this is an incredible sight to see. It's not about 'power' either. The Lhapa take no personal credit for the healings.

It is a difficult calling, to be a Medicine Man or Woman, and nothing at all like what New Age therapist types propose. There's no glamour in the true Medicine Way. You don't become more powerful and able to command life and those around you with your psychic force; rather than a display of special powers, the real Medicine man carries the heavy mantle of a healer who heals by exorcising disease, who takes on the ailment to expel it. Who continually works to understand the ways of the spirits in their interaction with the human and animal and plant worlds.

This is in striking contradistinction to advertisements I've seen for workshops and whatnot with New Age healers that appear perfunctory and rather imperious.

The sentences in these ads have a 'feel' of business talk and of someone who is an 'expert.' Yet I well know from exploring some of these offerings that an (often not very thorough or self-reflective) intellectual knowledge of various traditions doesn't thereby accord the moral and emotional wisdom that should accompany the teachings. Their aim is to convince others to spend money on their modes of healing, their workshops, their retreats. Healing is a game being sold.

Compare this to a Lhapa, whose kindness and compassion radiates, you can see that in the trailer, yet there is a humbleness that surely comes from not identifying with the healing forces. And for whom healing is a very real and difficult path that must take great moral courage to stay on.

But you, my gentle reader, know this better than I do.

--
When we read, we should be intensely alive: the writing "a ball of light in one's hand."
Ezra Pound

NaNoWriMo 2008

Aiming for 2000 words/day, should reach 50,000 words before the end of the month or have a few days for crises'; NaNoWriMo is exuberant, hell, a way to drive yourself |insane|.

NaNoWriMo begins...

Yes, I've begun NaNoWriMo - 402 words so far, only 49,598 to go! No plot, no outline, allow oneself to compose a story unplanned! Discover it as you go. Why not, I ask. Why not?

Is this fun? I don't know. I'm surprised too. Where this character came from, I have no idea. But here he is - Moedello. And onwards...

My site at NaNoWriMo is RubiesInCrystal.

I'm writing it on Google Docs (which some of you have heard me rave about). I'm sure I'll be posting bits on this blog throughout the month. The first beginning...





No beginning. Mœdello, I tell you this. Remove the concept of beginning. Everything develops out of something else. Coming into fruition or withering away, seeds set a long time back, perhaps when the universe developed out of something else. No ex nihilo.

Take off your monk's garbs, leave the Order. Forget the salvation of the timeline. Without beginning, there is no end.

It's a gentle truth. Whatever we are will become something else. We live in continuums. Going all the way back and all the way forward. Nothing is wasted and nothing lost.

Even black holes, which suck everything in, disappearing past the event line, the horizon of being. Which then evaporate. We think they're gone, information lost, trajectories lost, where there was is now nothing, impossible to conceive, inconceivable. Yet transforming, evaporating from disappearance.

Perhaps we are an evaporated black hole. The disappeared who are here, a living universe.

Drop your robes, Mœdello. Unstring your rosary in the garden. I am not a wanton woman tempting you.

I'm only writing this to discover time, the passing. Because I respect the time that our grammar weaves, teaching our minds generations after generations. Organizing our memories, too. Timelines. Enfolded complexities of living.

If I could understand where you're coming from I'd go there too.

Or perhaps only visit. Bringing my past to meet your future.


The horses were white and galloped powerfully, muscles and nostrils and flank hair and hooves. Were they in a pasture or were they a memory?

You came from Italian stock. From farmland. You gave up the soil for the dry run of Ecclesiastical words. Hearing, breathing the scriptures. Predictable shadows on the walls. Walking by pillars every day, upheld. Comfort in the predictability of the hours of the days that repeated themselves without interruption and were unlike the cycles of farming, dependent on the weather of the seasons and the market. When the rains stopped, the famines began. The horses died. It was cracked and dry.

You all went away, there was no food. The friar on the street of the city where you stood shivering took you in. The friar who offered you his robes. You were thin but he fed you and taught you to mime the sacraments with him.

It wasn't that you didn't believe what the Church offered.

I never said that.

veil of sky

whitened edges and solid infinity above, the clear, blue, serene sky,
this day when the veils between worlds thins

Nanowrimo this year?

With the impossibility writing has been presenting for me these last months, I wonder if joining Nanowrimo this year would be a good discipline and challenge?

The first year I began where I was, and let a story unfold. Of course the manuscript is huge and unwieldy! I've never edited it into something more reasonable. Though it's possible that the urge to do at least one complete rewrite will overtake one indolent day.

Nanowrimo begins Nov 1st - enough time to decide.

The first one began in a temp job matching files to original ledger entries in a vault at a funeral home in Vancouver. A natural title was Book of the Dead, and I incorporated a couple of other texts, the Egyptian and the Tibetan ones, into the writing.

That was fun, discovering each day what was to happen, and layering the text with references to other texts.

We build on ourselves.

I find it inspiring to be among those who are running their own writing races separately but together as a group - last year of the 100,000 who enrolled world-wide, 50,000 participants made it to the finish line.

It's interesting to reflect on my own Nanowrimo path. In 2004, "Book of the Dead," was more of a 'novel' and 50,000 words; in 2005 my writing was shifting to prose poetry and I wrote that year's in smaller numbered segments that I still haven't finished but it came in at 50,000 words and then I spent a few days reading it and deleted a third of the manuscript, never mind (the first pages can be found at my art website here); in 2006 my writing moved even more towards the poetry end of the spectrum and while I wrote "EnTrapped WOR|l|DS" in November of that year I didn't enroll it in Nanowrimo since it's only 17,266 words, and too short for the contest, but poetry's like that - though it is a completed manuscript, which made me happy.

I wonder where this one might start and what the writing style might be?

The Keys

If I take off my readers, can I write? A disjuncture between life and writing, or that I want to hide? Without seeing the keys or the screen. Write blind. Behind where words form. The words that shape reality even as I speak them.

Glide through the world of words with a dancer's ease. My body is a word, a gesture, a line scrawling across the horizon of time.

Am I purple, or aubergine? A curve of a back before a computer, hitting keys I can't see?

And how many mistakes before we get it right?

And how many times are the crystal glasses broken before we can---drink, see, touch?

It's cyclical, the years go on, some good, some bad. There is no will to it. Whatever you want to happen happens; you are a consequence of your past; and each day is a surprise thrown up by the fates of fortune.

When I sat down to write I knew nothing,
and less now.

slats

water drizzles over slats
onto rocks

iron ivy
crawls over the lamp

I'm tired
of the restriction
of vulnerability, sensitivity,
injury

walking in the warm,
light rain

before the seasonal cold
sets in

I look out through slats
hiding or revealing myself

or you do

rocks become water
that float away

____

Tired of protecting my knees when I dance, I didn't. For a number of weeks. Bending low, I used my knees, experienced the freedom of a fuller movement, bliss. My knees are now so sore I'm on Ibuprofen, which helps reduce the swelling, constantly and a prescription anti-inflammatory, as well as icing them fairly frequently. So this poem, the first I've attempted in what seems like a long time, was triggered by that, tired of the iron ivy on the lamp, not wanting to protect one's sensitivity, and whatever the emotional corollaries are, the rocks are water that float away.

ps I think I have a 'stretched' tendon, that it's just a regular sort of minor injury anyone who participates in sports or dance gets. Not serious and with a bit of pampering it'll heal fine.

But an interesting process in terms of our emotional proclivity for protection of our sensitivities.

[Okay, okay... last night I danced with my jingly silver belly dance belt over a black danskin at Tam Tam like a dervish. Shhhh...]

[No, no. I arrived late, 10:30pm or so, to a dark hot dance studio of drummers after seeing the Tibetan Lhapa documentary, changed into black sweats, danced, realized that there were only a few dancers, some as old as me, and so I put on the belly dance belt and let go, it was fun, I left around 12:30pm, some people thanked me for dancing, said it was beautiful, and walked home by myself, arriving home at maybe 1:30am; this pattern is normal, I go, dance, rarely join the group for food after. Arrive alone, leave alone. Now what that had to do with emotional corollaries, who knows.

It's all connected though, isn't it. :)]