M’kehla and Sam are spastically ecstatic-teh Rowan is home!
M showed her delight by tackle-hugging her friend to the floor every five minutes or so and S showed his by stabbing her in the back with his new sword. 
She looks pretty happy about it all though. What’s a few bruises and a flesh wound or two between friends?
Lisa and I bought our extensions yesterday. Eva’s suggestion of Western Beauty Supply was right on key-crazy store has aisles and aisles of hair, all shades and colors, kinky, straight, real, fake, braided…
I got three different shades to go with my three different wooly, sparkly, grassy green dryad yarn. It’s going to be so fun bein’ a wacky wild long-hairy-haired nymph for Burning Man! Woot!
Now, just have to have a braiding party…
I made this illustration for a party I’m hosting this weekend for my Burning Man camp, Flow.
Yay Flow! Can’t wait to flow the f— out of Seattle!
…and this is what came of it. The Wedgewood Alehouse will never be the same again.
The man who was the foundation of my world as a child is passing out of this world. Dado Shan(formerly known as Chechoslovakian immigrant, Miroslav Pavich), the guru of the commune I grew up in. He’s 93 and cancer is claiming him, stomach-first.
It all seems so far away, the days when I was a gangly little girl in the woods, listening entranced to his marvelous stories, or bouncing on the wild pony of his knee. He was the self-annointed king of our commune and for a time it seemed a magical and wondrous world. He was the essence of everything brave and true, courageous and genuine. We even swore by his name when we made a solemn, heart-felt promise, it was a Dado’s Honor.
That was before his son died of cancer, bit by bit and we were growing up, out of our wide-eyed hero worship and things began to break and grow dark and twisted.
The cracks widened and the sticky, stinky pieces of the puzzle began to protrude as we(the commune brat pack) grew up enough to challenge the way of things(why was this one man in charge of everything?), to peek into the realms of adulthood(what was going on with our mothers? Why were they so enthralled? Where were our fathers?), to want to venture into the teenagery world(Oooooh, Sting?!)-and that was strictly forbidden. One by one, we left and he got angrier and angrier-warning us of certain destruction(drunken whores on the street, I believe was the doom prophesied us girls) should we not listen and stay with him.
So, here I am with this confusing misty memory of the sweet, loving, wise, Saint Nicholas-like(complete with bushy white beard and mustache) father/grandfather juxtaposed with a paranoid, embittered, often cruel and emotionally abusive tyrant.
And here I am an adult, in a completely different world-the one I’ve created, found, chosen, grown into. A mature(well, ahem, reasonably mature) woman, with a nine year old son, friends, family, lovers, an expressive, juicy, artistic and creative community.
And Shan is dying. What do I do with that?
I don’t hate him. I did for a while, when I was a much younger woman and things were cut of a simpler cloth. I’ve seen and experienced a lot since then and I know that people aren’t evil demons or pure angels. He’s just an old, old man who’s lived a long, long life and done some very good things and some very bad things.
I loved him so much when I was a kid. I still love him, it’s just not an idyllic love anymore. He was a magnificent character, a charming, dynamic, heroic, powerful, generous sweetheart of a man and an absolutely loony, tyrannical, selfish, abusive mess of a human being. I cannot absolve him of the pain he caused me, my sister, my mother, my friends… But I can forgive him.
Dado Shan, may this passing bring you peace. May your spirit be free. May you join the buddhas and bodhisattvas and learn to teach without grasping and twisting and harming beings.
I won’t be there when you die, but I’m thinking of you and I love you.
Thank you for holding me when I was little, for telling me entrancing fireside stories, for walking in the woods with us, for giving my mother a safe place to raise us when she was a hapless young hippie with three children and no place to go. Thank you for the beautiful and terrible childhood that made me who I am.
Farewell,
Zan
Everett experienced some serious swashbuckling this weekend. ‘Twas thick with pirates, tall ships, swords and games.
Satyr and I discovered this magnificent motley monster on a walk in Carkeek Park today. It has an incredibly intricate array of textures and colors, crumbly charcoal black massed around so smoooooooth silvery white knobs and bumps, crusty brown bark and soft furry green moss… That’s why I’m not a realist in my art-nature will humble you every time. Amazing how a tree can be half dead and rotten and half vibrant, alive and green and still so damn beautiful-if it was human like us, it would be a gross, shambling zombie!
…You walk into your local bookstore and meet three Masaii warriors!
Sam and I stopped by Third Place books the other day and there they were, all decked out in deep red cloaks and gorgeous beadwork, showing a slideshow of Masaiiland.
The question/answer period was fun. A lot of people asked about killing lions(the warriors used to have to kill a lion to prove their manhood-in their young teens!). Boys Sam’s age are in charge of massive flocks of goats and my favorite question was an old lady asking how old the speaker was. He said: ‘How old do YOU think I am? I have no idea! We’re born and we die, we don’t count years.’
Apparently, you can go visit with them at the Woodland Park Zoo, where they have helped create a new Massai Journey Exhibit. The Zoo has developed a close connection to the Maasai region, giving about $10,000 and members of its own staff for construction of two classrooms in the Merrueshi Primary School in Kakuta’s village five years ago. In the last two years, the zoo has raised about $24,000 toward a waterholes restoration project in the drought-ridden region.
You can also join a tour of Massailand itself-which is one of the things the warriors are doing now that they’ve come to understand killing lions may be manly, but isn’t such a good thing environmentally.
It took every mantra I know to put the Sam to sleep tonight. Would that it had worked as well for me! I was yawning my way through Medicine Buddha by the time he finally succumbed, but now he’s mumbling sleep gibberish and here am I, braiding and unbraiding endless strands of thought, all ajumble in my heedless head. Sometimes having a sapient brain is SO much more trouble than it’s worth.
The rain calls me out, I step onto my little balcony, feel it’s myriad tiny, thrilling caresses chill against my bed-warmed skin. It tickles me, lures me to shed these human pretenses, step by step, down my stairs, past my sculptures and paintings, over the slate and out the door.
Slipping through the lush, wet leaves of my tomato vines, lapping the raindrops fresh and sparkling in the streetlamp’s gleam. Striding by the static, meaningless, lumpish shapes of cars and slinking down the street with all the surreptitious sovereignty of a cat. If a cat could be so delighted, so one with the water… Perhaps a tiger might know the urge to frolic so.
Velvet pawsteps, smooth muscles rippling, sliding from shadow to shadow in a way that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the power, majesty and sheer enjoyment of inhabiting such a sleek, dynamic body, born to leap and slash, pounce and roll, stretch and drowse…
Those yappy, whining dogs next door wouldn’t stand a chance.
Or maybe I’d simply soak up the dripping, let pure, sweet osmosis pull the rain in, plumping every cell in my skinny frame until I tower over these puny dwellings humans huddle in. Laugh as the clouds fluffed against my face and soaked my hair. I’d step over the Church of the Watery Tart(OK, so it’s actually the Lady of the Lake, but really, what else can you call a church which erects a giant rocket over it’s Virgin Mary?) and set out on a glorious artistic mission.
Perhaps I’d carve Rainier into a giant, snowbosomed goddess and give her the Spaceneedle for a scepter. Or pluck all fifty thousand Starbucks from their streetcorners and recycle them into a giant mermaid to gussy up the waterfront. I s’pose I could really get too big for my britches(if I had any on) and hop over to the East Coast, snag the Whitehouse, wade the Atlantic and take the good old boys for a personal, face to face, heart to heart tour of Iraq.
Feh.
A girl can dream. And it’s about time I did.
‘Nite y’alls.