the cassandra pages

A Young Rwandan in Canada

Eugène Kwibuka is a 22-year-old journalism student from Butare, Rwanda, who stayed in Montréal for six weeks covering the war crimes trial of Désiré Munyaneza. He's been chronicling his experiences in a blog. He says he loves the idea of Canada's changing seasons and finds the country beautiful, and he's amazed by being able to drink tap water, use wireless internet, ride on excellent roads, and have electricity that works all the time. But he notes that people aren't necessarily happy, even though they have big houses and lots of possessions: the stress and loneliness in western society were immediately apparent to him. He's surprised that even well-off people don't have live-in maids - something that's common and affordable in Rwanda - and that parents have to worry about babysitters for their children.

Can you imagine a person living alone in a huge house in which you find more than two television sets, more than two cars, more than two sitting rooms, and many other things?

And I was interested that he picked up on some colloquial expressions in English that say quite a lot about our society:

Sayings like "there is no free lunch in North America" and "feed the goat" show how capitalist a society is. The first means that people here work hard to eat and buy things... By the term "feed the goat," I learned that people here work for big companies that keep demanding big work and they are considered as goats to be fed anytime...I always wonder what would happen if companies stop employing people who are living in a house they haven't paid for yet? Doesn't it stop them from paying the mortgage? Would they be sent from the house?

Second Thoughts

If I were to stop blogging as a "fast" from technology and my online world, it would not be because I'm burned out (I'm not) or don't have time (I have enough -- barely -- but enough). It would be a spiritual/psychological experiment, and frankly I'm suspicious of that: I'm not sure it would be honest in my case, and it's not what I need to do in order to achieve a greater sense of balance in my life. There's little I dislike more than spiritual posturing, and while giving up what you love can be a genuine spiritual offering, it can also be totally bogus.

My blog does feel like a two-way street: I try to give my best effort in what I post here, and in return I get a lot from you. The community is definitely my secondary motivation, after trying to write as well as I can about the things that feel important, and I know from what you've written to me that this blog means something to a number of people. I'm not into playing games; Cassandra has a certain amount of integrity and she'd like to maintain it!

A couple of things have come to the surface as I've thought about this. One is that a particular frustration right now is not with my own blog, but in being limited in the time I can spend reading and commenting on other blogs. I feel like I'm letting my friends down when I don't visit regularly and don't comment. So if that feels like it's you, I'm sorry. I'll be back, but this summer I am very pressed and my online time is limited. Chances are I'm reading your blog in big chunks, like once a week, and maybe not being able to comment. I've also been keeping all online correspondence to a minimum, simply for lack of time: if that feels like it's you, I'm also sorry.

Another is frustration over writing in general. I need to spend more of my writing time on some of the bigger projects that I've been wanting to move ahead on - the collection of posts about my father-in-law needs a lot of work, for example. I want to get back to writing some poetry again too. So I'm spending some of what used to be blog time on other writing projects, and that re-distribution feels better. But I have very limited time for creative work in general right now, and for the kind of meditative self-care that this past weekend reminded me I must include in my daily life.

Being self-employed means that summer is not vacation, and in our case there is always a lot of additional work as our clients gear up for fall. I'm grateful to have work, and necessarily concerned about getting it all done. And even that comes second to being a wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, and friend in real life to the people who are closest to me.

When I started this blog, I tried hard to post daily and I still think that's the best way to build and sustain readership, but right now I simply can't do it. The current 2 or 3-times- a-week schedule may even be too much this summer, but I promise to maintain the blog because I see it as part of that balance and self-care - I'll post photos when I can't write much, and look for other ways to create more time and openness in my life. Thank you for being such faithful readers, and I hope you'll hang in there with me! I expect things to ease up in the fall.

Birdsong and William Baffin Roses

After more than four solid years of blogging, I'm seriously considering pulling the plug on Cassandra and most of my online activities for a month this summer. Call it a fast, a break, a retreat...whatever. It's not that I'm feeling tired of writing or uninspired; in fact, I feel rather the opposite. It's that I think it would be good for me to feel what it's like not to do this for a while; to see what then comes to the surface. Lately I've been intentionally changing my diet to a more cleansing, lighter mixture of foods. I've been doing yoga in the mornings and getting more exercise. I already feel better: lighter and healthier and more energetic. Now I am wondering about my intellectual diet.

Spending the last 24 hours in a remote area just above the border at the home of a friend - a rustic Alpine-ish place totally without electricity,  with a pond and beautiful gardens backing up on a mountain - has made me think about this even more. Eight of us made a communal meal - salmon cooked on an outdoor fire made of wood gathered in the forest, and various vegetable dishes and salads brought by all of us - and ate on a screened porch overlooking the garden while the sun went down over the mountains. No lights, no other dwellings could be seen; the only sounds were those of the forest, a bullfrog, the springs feeding the ponds, and the birds. It was well after dark by the time we finished the cheese course and the grapes; we ate our the dessert of chocolate cake and fruit salad, and drank our coffees and tisanes of lemon ginger tea and dried Chinese hawthorn fruit, served in an old blue and white German teapot with its own votive-heated base, by candlelight while the moon moved in and out of gathering clouds. After cleaning the kitchen, lit by a gas lamp, we all repaired to the fire behind the house, on the edge of the forest, where we drank the host's strong homemade blackcurrant eau-de-vie and sang songs - French Canadian ones in honor of St. Jean Baptiste Day, the national day of Quebec which we were celebrating, and American spirituals. I felt as if I had stepped into a John Berger novel.

J. and I spent the night in our tent, near the pond, listening to gurgling water and frogs, and woke up to birds singing everywhere with the first light. It began to rain, lightly, then harder; we crawled out and put the fly on our tent, dozed and listened. At 7:30 I went up to the house and had a cup of tea. Then our host, a Jungian psychologist with a long interest in Eastern religion (though he's an Anglican we know through the cathedral), led four of us in half an hour of yoga followed by silent meditation, in his small wooden meditation hut. Then we had breakfast, the white tablecloth scattered with bright pink petals from the climbing roses glorifying the white stuccoed south-facing wall of the house.

Our host had just come back from several weeks at an ashram in France, and the talk at dinner included sharing various thoughts and experiences about meditation and monasteries - Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic, Orthodox. We spoke about the challenges and rewards of solitude and silence, of city and rural life, of institutional religion and the personal spiritual path.

I am still thinking about all of this, and also not-thinking: still absorbed in the feeling I had last night, and this morning in meditation.

India's Future

The Market is a Donkey is an article by former BBC journalist Mark Tully in OutlookIndia.com. The author discusses India's economic growth and asks whether India, which has always has been characterized by a non-Western comfort with duality, must inevitable conform to dogmatic emulation of the West in its effort to become a world economic power.

"India traditionally does not write full stops because it understands the uncertainty of certainty, it prefers the middle road, and believes in the perpetual search for balance. So, the answer to any question can never be final, no theory should be closed to questioning, and no policy should be taken so far that it creates imbalance. The West, on the other hand, tends to see things in black and white, to look for certainties, and so to lurch from one extreme to another."

"The most obvious evidence for this contrast lies in the different attitudes to religion. R.C. Zaehner, who held the chair at Oxford India's philosopher-president S. Radhakrishnan once held, wrote, 'Hindus do not think of religious truth in dogmatic terms.... For the passion for dogmatic certainty that has wracked the religions of Semitic origin they feel nothing but shocked incomprehension.'"

The article goes on to examine what has happened to Indian socialism, and to compare this change with what has happened to British socialism: a fascinating and brief foray into the topics discussed in the author's new book, India's Unending Journey: Finding Balance in a Time of Change.
---
I confess to feeling very ignorant about India. None of us can focus on "the world" anymore; in recent years I've tried to learn a lot about the Middle East, Iran, and Islam but I'd never call what I know "expertise." India remains, for me, a great enigma in spite of the reading I've done, the films I've watched, the Indian art I've studied and loved, and even the Indians I've known. India lies between places I know more about: the countries just mentioned on one side; China, southeast Asia and Japan on another; even Russia stretching across and above - and its religion and culture and cuisine all occupy that place too. India's culture has certainly been influenced from both sides, but perhaps even more, India has influenced them. So this is something for me to think about, and perhaps begin to address.

The article above came to me from a new friend, K., who promises to teach me more about where he came from. I'd be interested to hear from readers who have compiled India reading lists: what are your recommendations, beyond the obvious?

Poster

98

Monday was my father-in-law's 98th birthday.

We took him and his friend C. a lunch of kibbeh baked in a tray, yogurt soup, raw vegetables, stuffed grape leaves, string cheese, olives, taboulleh. C. brought a small cake, with lemon curd in several layers, beautifully frosted in plain white with the inscription: "100 - 2!"

He wasn't at his best. The day before he'd gone out to a restaurant, invited by close friends, and whenever he does anything like that it exhausts him for a couple of days afterwards. When we arrived he was unfocused, and not terribly interested in what was going on; he held out as long as he could without using his hearing aids because it's easier for him to just tune everything out. "Phone calls all morning!" he announced, as he made his way from the bedroom to his chair, groaning. "Everyone's calling! How did they know?"

While J. talked to his father, reading him congratulatory messages from friends and family he'd quietly contacted a few weeks ago, I tried to make some space to work in the terribly cluttered kitchen. On the counter, there were half-consumed tubs of yogurt (that's how he swallows his pills), bread crusts, piles of paper napkins, clean dishes that hadn't been put away, pots and pans, big carafes of water and tiny plastic cups that the nurses bring pills in. And innumerable other objects and food items; you don't want to know about the refrigerator. We had fixed all the food at home; I put the soup on the stove and heated it very gently so the yogurt in it wouldn't curdle.

One of his good friends and neighbors arrived, smiling and a bit bent over, with a plate tied with a ribbon on which rested a pile of perfect, just-picked grape leaves. She handed them to him; he said a curt thank you and remarked, "My birthday was supposed to be a secret. How did the word get out?"

"Well, happy birthday!" she said.

"It was a happy day for my father, not for me!"

She scolded him for saying that and grimaced at me. I took the plate and apologized softly, "It's not a great day - he'll be very happy about this tomorrow," but she wasn't upset. The very old are crafty and clear-eyed; nothing fazes them. She shrugged and advised me to put the plate in the refrigerator before she said a cheerful goodbye and left.

"Come out of the kitchen, Beth," he called. "I don't want you to work, but I can't do anything to help."

I told him not to worry, that I'd be right over. He was asking J. to explain who a message was from; J. shot me a glance as if to say he couldn't believe his father couldn't place this person; I couldn't believe it either. It's the sort of thing he's always remembered, even when other facts were dropping through the cracks. Even more telling was the fact that he wasn't even embarrassed about it - he used to be adept at covering up his occasional memory lapses. Not today.

Leaving the soup on the stove, I picked up a bud vase with several garden roses in it and took it over to him. "I brought you some real roses," I said, handing him the vase. "This one came from a bush I transplanted from your house in Pomfret. See, they smell good!"

He dutifully sniffed at the roses and handed the vase back to me; I put it on the tray near his chair. His June birthday is always associated in my mind with bouquets of white and pink peonies and Siberian iris - the garden flowers in bloom in Vermont right now - and with wild roses. When he came to my garden, he always used to wander around looking at the flowers and bending down to smell the hardy roses, and he always said the same thing, with a satisfied smile: "They smell 'rose'." Other sensory experiences were exclaimed like that too, without the English "like" - "It tastes strawberry!"for his favorite flavor of homemade ice cream, or "It tastes coffee!" for the little cups of Arab coffee we'd sometimes tease him into drinking, even though he said it kept him up all night. He valued roses as a gift, mainly because they were expensive, I think, but always said he preferred garden roses that hadn't had the scent bred out of them - and that was because the smell reminded him of Damascus.

He didn't say anything this time, but that was all right; J. and I had both realized we were performing a ritual that might be mostly for ourselves.

C. had arrived, so we all sat down and ate, first the platter of vegetables and cheese, out of which my father-in-law picked some Lebanese cucumber wedges, but nothing more. "There's yogurt soup," I told him when I got up. "Do you want your kibbeh plain with rice, or in the soup?"

"In the soup!" he said emphatically. "That's the only way to have it!"

C. was still eating stuffed grape leaves. "These are good," she said.

My father-in-law shook his head dismissively. "These are made with rice only, not meat."

"They're still good," C. said, and turned to me - "Did you make them?" I shook my head no, grateful I hadn't.

"The ones with meat are better," he said, as if to put a final period on the discussion. He looked over at C.:  "You aren't going to pick any grape leaves for me at your place this year, are you."

"I don't want to get poison ivy and it's all over there where the grape vines are."

He seemed to have forgotten already that there was a large stack of new leaves sitting in his refrigerator. "I guess I'll have to come and do it myself." We all smiled, and this time he seemed to engage with us. "We have a saying in Arabic," he went on. "Only your own nails can scratch your itch!"

He took another spoonful of the soup and raised his eyebrows in my direction. "This is very good!" he said, approvingly. When he'd finished I asked him if he wanted more, or if he wanted some rice or taboulleh. He shook his head. "No, this is what I wanted, I am finished." The rest of us ate some more, and then brought out C.'s cake and a bowl of beautiful big cherries she had also brought; I made three cups of tea; J. took some photos.

C. put a huge kitchen knife on the table beside the cake; she said it was all she'd been able to find in the drawer. We waited; he didn't seem to realize we were waiting; I picked up the knife and handed it to him: "Here, why don't you make one cut and then we'll serve it." He took the knife in both hands and made a cut through the middle of the cake - "Like this?" he asked.

"Perfect," I said, and we all clapped. "Happy birthday."

We all ate small pieces of the cake, which was delicious. Suddenly my father-in-law raised his head and said, "I wish William were still alive. He should be here!" We asked who William was; he didn't seem to mean his youngest brother, who was certainly very much alive, if not present. "My childhood friend William," he explained. "He was my best friend - he was killed not that long ago, you know, in the civil war in Lebanon  - and on my birthday my parents would send a cart to his house and he would ride in it with me back to our house for a special dinner. Like a coach! Our families lived near each other, in the Protestant section."

"Is that your earliest memory?" his son asked.

"I remember William, and the Orthodox patriarch, who I liked a great deal and who alwaysy looked for me as he passed our house on the way between tea at his sister's and the afternoon service at the Orthodox church. Those are the earliest memories." He went on eating, taking careful small bites of the forbidden cake, and then looked up again, grinning. "On the day I was born, my father's friend met him in the street. 'Where are you going?' he asked. 'To the hospital,' my father said. 'I have a new son.' 'Then let's go measure his head!' said his friend - he was a sort of poet-philosopher and was one of those men at the time who believed the size of a person's head meant...you know...and the two of them went together and measured my head - and it was..." he waved his hand, laughing... "all right!"

We all laughed: proportionately, he has the biggest head of anyone I've ever known, and it seems to be in no danger of diminishing.

Garden after Rain

Summer Evenings

Eighty-degree days have brought summer nights. Slow-moving fireflies appear and reappear over pale moonlit peonies and wild roses in our Vermont garden; the air is damp and still and scented with cut grass, or hay if you venture beyond the edges of the village.

On our last night in Montreal this week we met friends for a picnic at Lac aux Castors - Beaver Lake - on the far side of Parc Mont Royal. Schools of overgrown goldfish shimmered under the surface as we walked around the man-made lake. Groups of Hasidic children - the girls in long dresses, the boys in white shirts and black suits, wearing yarmulkes and long sidelocks - played not far from their mothers. We went to the far side, on the sloping lawn, and sat under a tree waiting for our friends, while an Asian man and his child flew a big kite and a group of Rastafarians set up a picnic on a nearby table. A middle-aged man rode up on his bicycle, sat on the grass, and smoked a large joint; a cop rode by on his own bicycle, paying no attention at all. Couples read, ate, walked through the trees, slept in each other's arms. Our friends arrived and we shared a picnic of cheese, bread, wine, stuffed grape leaves, kibbeh, strawberries.The sun set; the man with the bicycle watched it through outstretched fingers, held in front of his eyes. We tossed a frisbee, talked, drank the remaining wine.

Music wafted from the pavilion on the other side of the lake, and we could see a large group of people gathering on the terrace outside. "It's folk dancing," we finally decided, and since we all needed to go home in that direction, we walked around the lake again and stopped to watch the dancers, perhaps fifty in all, arranged in a circle, holding hands. In the center was the teacher, a diminutive French woman in a white blouse and full, knee-length, dark blue skirt; she wore white ankle socks and what looked like tap shoes, with low heels and a strap across the instep. Diana and watched for one dance, and then got up and joined the circle. I concentrated hard, trying to understand the instructions and imitate the teacher's movements. It had seemed to me, as I listened, that the group was mostly Jewish, and much of the music Israeli, but the dance we were learning then was French. The dancers joined hands and we moved to the right, letting go, turning backwards, rejoining, then putting out hands on each others' shoulders and making steps forward and back, dipping down on one leg. Again and again we began, following her words, and then the music. "Un; deux; vit-vit-vit," she intoned, smiling, "avance; l'arrière; maintenant à gauche..." The dance ended; we let go; it was time to leave. The music was still playing as we made our way to the car.

--
Last night, on a hilltop in Vermont, we had dinner with an old friend. There had been deer in the meadow when we drove up, and they had watched us, only their alert ears visible above the tall grass. We had drinks outside, until the black flies drove us in, and then ate cold potato-leek soup and curried chicken, bread, salad. I cut up fresh peaches and strawberries for dessert, and we went into the living room with the bookshelves full of music and the old, black Steinway, and talked about old times and people, and then watched a DVD of our friend's music  - a violin concerto and a piano concerto - being performed earlier this year in Moscow. On previous visits, over the past year and a half, he had played me parts of the concerti from the unfinished scores; it was wonderful to see and hear the music played by virtuoso performers, and watch our friend come onto the stage at the Rachmininoff Recital Hall, beaming.

We walked to our car across the black back lawn, under the trees, and emerged beneath a sky ablaze with stars. Heat lightening pulsed along the horizon; the only sounds those of late-night birds and insects. We leaned against the car and silently gazed overhead; fireflies danced in the bushes, accompanying the memories slipping back into place, like pages of a just-studied picture-book now being turned carefully from the back to the front before being replaced on the shelf. "Some things last much longer than you, and some much less," the night seemed to say. "So be here, now."

Artichoke

The softening takes hours,

for it's a spiny thing, wrapped

tight and scaled in curved

green shields quite unafraid

of blades --

but scissored, steamed,

stiletto-less;

its armor loosed;

the inner leaves so

obediently yield --

each taste a

succulence, each

petal-weight

a step from earth

to silk

to sky.

Fruit today, please

Summer is coming. So last night, while it was still cool, we biked down to Chinatown and ate at Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot. It was an experience.

This franchise is very popular in China, although reviewers say the food is not entirely Mongolian-authentic. The restaurant was filled with Chinese customers -- other than the two of us, there were two Russian guys, and a couple of Caucasian tourists who looked like they weren't sure their choice had been such a good idea. We had fun, but let me tell you, all I want to eat today is salad and fruit!

All the tables have a clever built-in flat cooktop; that's where your hot pot goes, full of a chicken-based broth "flavored with 60 special Chinese herbs and ingredients". You can have mild, spicy, or half and half, which is what you see in the picture above. I fished around in my bowl: in addition to about a dozen whole cloves of garlic and large slices of ginger, there was indeed a flotilla of unidentifiable roots, nuts, pods, seeds...whatever they were, from the very first sip the broth tasted delicious. The spicy one was VERY spicy, almost too much for me, and I like spicy food.

So once your pot of broth is simmering, the server brings two plates, one of very thinly sliced beef and one of lamb. You take a slice and cook it in the boiling broth, and then eat it; when you're tired of eating meat (they will keep bringing it until you tell them to stop) you go over to an all-you-can-eat buffet and bring back more ingredients: large prawns like the one I'm holding; fish; tofu; fish balls; seaweeds; all sorts of greens; noodles; lotus root; fried cuttlefish and baby octopus; shitake and cloud ear mushrooms; tiger lily buds; quail eggs...and many more things I couldn't identify. Everything you cook contributes to the flavor of the broth, which is eaten at the end as a soup. Our waitress cautioned us to eat the meat and then fish and then tofu and greens because it was much better for our health that way. So we did. But as we found, the greatest danger wasn't the food order, or the spiciness, but the actual heat of the cooked food -- we both burned our mouths repeatedly. There was lemon-flavored ice water, strawberry juice, orange juice, and very refreshing plum juice - that's what's in the glass by my hand. And for dessert: sliced melon, oranges, pineapple, little layered and frosted cakes, and sesame balls.

I don't think I'd go there often -- too much food, too heavy on the protein -- but it was fun, and would be even more fun to do with a bunch of friends. For a group, you can get a big bowl of broth, and everyone around the table shares it.

We biked home - uphill, and glad of it. I think one should be a Mongolian sheep herder to eat this sort of thing on a regular basis: as for me, I can't tell you how good a fresh peach tasted this morning!