Dragon Letters #19
Capricorn Moon 🌕 Lunar New Years Edition
January 30, 2022
“Follow your curiosities, their synchronicities lead to your Flow.” — Ixchel Lunar
Hola my dear ,
Apologies, for the late hour. We had a 12-hour power outage today (thanks Merc Retro)… The Moon moves into Aquarius at 3:30am. Tomorrow evening is the new moon for the Lunar New Year tomorrow. Wednesday Mercury moves direct. 🙌🏼
I’ve been debating with myself whether I need to start publishing my Dragon Letters as a blog for easier reading. Sometimes I feel they could be much longer if I was writing for page format rather than email. If you have an opinion, reply and let me know…
This Lunar Dragon is dancing with a pearl as struggles from Asian lifetimes emerge in beautiful weavings through these past couple of weeks. Past and Present come together to remind us of our tragedies and dip and twirl us in hopes of imaginative and resilient Futures.
Every moment we are given a fresh opportunity to shift our relationship with the Future with our Wild Presence now. If we don’t, we seem to repeat our actions in 80+ year cycles called a saeculum (which are oddly in rhythm with the Uranus cycle of 82ish years).
As a neuro-emergent that dreams patterns, sees lifetimes, hears the future, and feels emotions in living color, I watch Time merge, freeze, and evaporate like water changes states from liquid to solid and gas and back again.
As we wander through this weaving (which is a bit of how my wanderings lead to these Dragon Letters), we are reminded to follow curiosities as they beckon synchronicities which leads to your Flow.
What curiosities are you following?
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
xo Ixchel
(keep scrolling or you’ll miss the good stuff….)
Decolonize War
A few weeks ago I saw this article pop up about a favorite photographer, Dorothea Lange’s censored photos from California internment camps. I was curious because dear family friends were subjected to life in the camps.
I was 8th grade when I learned about this awful history. But I didn’t learn about it from teachers where I should have. I learned about it from our family friend, Kage Endo, while having dinner at their house. There was a discussion between Kage and my dad and the camps were mentioned. I had this visceral feeling from the body language of them both, an open secret.
I interrupted and asked what they were talking about. Kage told me and my understanding of the world was forever shifted.
So, yes, when I saw the headline, I clicked and looked through the photos, searching for the familiar.
In 2016 I was reading Isabel Allende ‘The Japanese Lover’ and planning a trip to Portland, Oregon. I decided I would visit the Japanese Garden and finish reading the book there as an immersive somatic experience. Having pieced histories together around my family’s relationship with the South Pacific, Japan, and the aftermath of WWII, I have been deeply curious in forgiveness, PTSD and healing.
My grandfather served in the jungles of Papua New Guinea during WWII where hewrote to my Grandma Bea every day. I only got to read his half of the conversations, the censored V Mail to her, because he had to burn my abuelita’s love letters to dry his socks and stay warm.
My Grandpa Jack was a huge favorite to all the Asian kids at my elementary school in Sacramento. He would come to repair the boilers which heated the floors of the school. When he arrived all my friends would run with me to greet him. The attention made him smile, something I missed as he got older, after my dad was killed.
This charm that he had followed him on his travels throughout Central and South America. In Chile he met my adopted sister Kyoko and her husband Kazu visiting from Chiba City. He took their photo for them and they became fast friends. They always came for Xmas holidays because it was such a magical Time at our house.
My grandparents’ home was full of Asian mementos. The fine bone China was from Japan, where my dad served in Osaka during the Vietnam war, bringing home beautiful silks for my abuelita to sew magic. The first gift I remember from my dad was a two-inch Japanese doll wearing a kimono, kept safe in a tiny glass dome.
Neither man ever willingly spoke about the wars.
And yet I’ve known nothing but kindness from every Asian person I’ve known, despite what my homeland did to their countries and them if they lived in the US. Why is that?
In a recent podcast from Adam Sommer with Edward Tick, Tick talked about his thoughts on why the Vietnamese integrated their trauma after the war there, framing it not as victory, but liberation from a millennia of occupied colonialism.
So when I heard Ruth Ozeki’s interview with Ezra Klein talking about these issues along with Interbeing and how she, like me, hears things that aren’t there, and Time as a Being, I knew I was going to be reading and getting lost in another novel soon.
I rarely read novels anymore. I find it really difficult to stay grounded in reality. I can get very immersed in Flow when reading. So much so, I lose the ability to feel hunger or what day it is. So, I usually reserve novels for vacations, hence finishing ‘The Japanese Lover’ in Portland.
A well-written novel is like a 8 ball of cocaine to an addict, a complete dopamine hijack. As someone that protects my dopamine for curiosity, I like to give myself space on the other side for the dopamine crash that inevitably comes from finishing a great book.
Growing up in a very multi-cultural community, hearing many languages on the playground was such a rich way to experience the world. I was grateful for the families of my friends where I was welcomed and fed regularly.
My blood sister Mona’s family owned China Hut on our corner. After school we would go there and eat pork bao and make shrimp fried rice (don’t tell the health inspectors there were 8-year olds cooking in the back).
My mom was vegetarian, so this was a big no-no. But I was a latch-key kid, so what she didn’t know was probably inconsequential. Eventually, she found out and I got told to go straight home from the bus from then on out.
When I saw Lisa Ling was returning to TV to host Take Out, an Asian food series on HBOmax, I was stoked. I dearly miss Anthony Bourdain’s travels. And Lisa and her sister went to my high school in Fair Oaks, CA. We shared the same Time/Space/Place. If I hadn’t tested out at 16, we likely would have met and become fast friends because we “different” kids usually found each other.
One of things I haven’t mention much in these Dragon Letters is all the Asian influence from my childhood. Reflecting back about this week was a place of intersection in my binary, divided family. Both sides of my family loved and appreciated Asian culture (and, thankfully, The Beetles).
On my mom’s side Lunar New Year was very present through being part of the Grateful Dead’s traveling shows. She’s a Deadhead. And the Grateful Dead have celebrated Chinese New Year ever since I can remember.
That made me wonder why. Today I was able to trace back those roots to an early Acid Test, the three day Trips Festival of 1966 where the Dead played with several bands and the Chinese New Years Lion Dancers.
I found out from Stewart Brand, one of the organizers of that event, that he had a friend at Stanford who was a Lion Dancer and invited them. The Dragon chasing the pearl through the audience became a tradition at the Lunar New Year Dead shows.
Oh, and if you’re curious about Interbeing and why Thich Nhat Hanh is being remembered by so many this week…
Before my abuelita died in 2003, I was accepted to a doctoral program at CIIS. Joanna Macy was to be my thesis chair. I was going to continue my studies in Interdependent Co-Arising, learning Pali with Dr. Rina Sircar so I could read early Buddhist texts about the conditions for what Thich Nhat Hanh made known as Interbeing. His work sought to clarify a 2500-year old teaching from the Buddha.
I had promised my grandmother when I put the PhD on hold (to care for her as she was dying from end stage liver failure) that I would eventually get my PhD. I haven’t made good on that yet. My hope is that the work I’m channeling into the world will merit an honorary degree because unless I mint some NFTs, my nearly $500k in student loan debt (and growing due to capitalized interest) has not been worth my educational investment of trying to improve BIPOC numbers in higher education.
Woven through this practice of Wild Presence is Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on Interbeing, as well as Joanna Macy’s connecting the Buddhist teaching to systems theory. I’m forever grateful to both for their wisdom and insight.
As I’ve waited for the power to come back on after a transformer blew early this morning, (the last one blew on a Dragon Letter Sunday two weeks ago — what’s up with that?!) TikTok served up this video on local biologies and menopause talking about how our bodies’ local environments and cultural epistemologies and ontologies get a say in how we experience life. Our relationship with Time/Space/Place is always co-arising.
If you’re stuck, short on Time, or just completely burned out, I can show you practices for re-membering your wild presence to bring you back to Interbeing in Flow.
Thank you for weaving this Dragon Dance with me. xo 🐉
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I was raised and bore children on the traditional, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, CA) and Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento and Fair Oaks, CA), past, present, and future. I also write, work, and live in the highland forest of the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Totonac, Nahua, and Mexicah, past, present, and future, in what is known as Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico.
P.P.S. I do not live or consent to the colonial impositions regarding the construct of Time. I also practice honoring rhythms of work, play, and rest so that I can serve you with embodied presence and with loving care. This means I may take several days to respond to your requests and questions. (h/t Eva Glamaris)
P.P.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. It’s an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
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