CELEBRATING THE EQUINOX

A group of Native American Women from the Northwest have made it a goal to protect a herd of albino buffalo. The picture makes them look golden, but in real life, they are white and much desired by hunters.

The Grandmothers of the White Buffalo Lodge came to Murphys to perform a ritual "Turning Of The Turtle" native ceremony to recognize and celebrate the Equinox on Sept. 22nd.

After the ceremony was completed, everyone gathered to a feast.

In recent years, interested people have joined the Grandmothers in their cause, and my neighbor, Jan Stewart became a Grandmother four or five years ago. She hosted this gathering, along with neighbors like myself.

Jan invited one Grandfather to this gathering, John Weaver, a naturalist who gave an eloquent presentation about his totem, the vulture. "I wanted my totem to be a raven, but the vulture spoke to me, raining down feathers in my path. He spoke of the bird as a cleansing creature. He repeated an ancient Indian legend about the vulture sacrificing its beauty by flying into the sun an getting burned when it moved the sun farther away from the earth to protect man. Then he invited each of us to pick a vulture feather to take home.

He gifted Jan with a little stuffed white buffalo.

Grandfather John also brought a selection of beautiful polished rocks for all of us to examine and touch and discuss.  Here is a small part of his collection.  But, I dally, on to the ceremony.

Each person is smudged before entering the ceremonial grounds.

Then anointed with essential oils, a mixture of favorites from all of the Grandmothers.

We gathered in a ring around the turtle.

Owl kept guard.
The ceremony of turning the turtle is sacred and no pictures are allowed. In essence, the turtle is made from earth untouched by human hands. Grandma Tanya stated she got her soil for turtle from Luli Ani, if my ear caught the name of gopher correctly. It is taken up with a trowel or basket and made into a turtle shape with rock legs, tail and head. In the ceremony, the head points West for fall.

During the ceremony, each person placed a small bouquet on the turtle's back and thanked the spirits for giving us the bounty of nature, or prayed for a loved one present or passed. We sang several songs, trying to follow along with the unknown Indian words. Then people got up and danced, shaking their gourd rattles, or drumming their animal skin drums. It was a fascinating ceremony and done with much reverence. Then four of us tied a bag of herbs on each pole representing North, South, East West, blessing the earth and praying for the harvest season  or "fall".

As we looked up from our fine dinner, a beautiful pink cloud sailed overhead.

Guests were invited to select a gourd from the table before we left.


Jan has painted a gourd for her coffee table and has much to display her dedication to being a Grandmother of the White Buffalo Lodge. Two years ago, she made a trip to visit the buffalo and meet with the Grandmothers in their territory.

SHANGAI

As we get ready to disembark from the Li River (cruise highway of 10,000 tourists), we see more civilization, bigger villages, and more activity.

Close to the village, we notice bamboo boats with cormorants and while Vicki  describes the treasures of the Li, a 1500 year old banyan tree, a Phoenix Tail Bamboo, (an evergreen), and a blind mandarin fish that lives inside of a rock cave, I’m excited about seeing a cormorant fisherman in action.

The port is  busy with many boats docking at the same place.

From our boat, we can see the fishermen on shore with their birds.

The fishermen have a daytime occupation, getting paid to have their picture taken. They fish at night. Vicky angrily tells us, “do not pay them”. I get a good picture of this fellow because another tourist has paid him and he is posing for her.

If you try to photograph them without paying, they turn their backs to you.

I managed to sneak another shot. At this village, where many  tour boats disembark, vendors of all types swarmed us and Vicki asks us to wait until we get to the Yangtze Market  in Shanghai .  We plow through the throng to our waiting bus.

The next morning, we bus to the airport for our next stop at Shanghai. On the way, we see farmers working the fields. They harvest two crops per year, one in March and another from July to November. They still hand cut rice with a sickle. We ask to see a rice paddy. Vicki stops the bus. It is harvest time, but you can see new plants growing in the right hand corner of the picture.

In America, it would all me mechanized. Here people work with rudimentary equipment, hand threshing  hulls from the rice.

Rice plants look like grass; how the people farm is more interesting than the plant itself, and we move on.

Shanghai looks like a futuristic city. It is regarded as a baby city since it is only 200 years old. This is the place where able-bodied men were kidnapped and brought down to the river and put to sea. They were  forced to work on an ocean-going vessel. What was once an opium shipping port in the 1840′s to the 1930′s, with only 100,000 population, and a wild and tawdry reputation,  has become the biggest container shipping port in the world. Now 21,000,000 people live here in an extremely modern city where the Hang Po river and the Yangtze flow through the city of  huge ships and sprightly boats sporting lighted billboards facing the city at night.
We take a city tour by bus. Michele, our city guide,  points out the biggest skyscraper in the world, yet in 1964, no Shanghai building was over ten stories high. They have more skyscrapers than New York City and Hong Kong. Chinese people want to be the biggest, the tallest, the fastest and the best, yet we see business people riding what seems like a million bikes. Some people are licensed to drive cars on Mondays and Wednesdays, others on Tuesday and Thursdays. We see one man carrying a full sized bed on just an ordinary bike. The loads people carry here are legendary. My disk is full and I have no more pictures  until I can buy another disk. So many photo ops of  Shanghai I missed.  The Wedding Cake building, a Soviet building from 1952,  looks like a wedding cake.
Michele takes us to the BUND, Shanghai’s financial district with multiple banks and financial institutions with a sprinkling of old buildings mixed in. China’s  Wall Street. She explains that Shanghai is the business center of China, like New York is the business center of  America. One member of our group visited Shanghai twenty years ago. She said they found one hotel that would take foreigners and no restaurants. People were still wearing black sack cloth peasant clothing and you had to eat from a stand. In China, people over 80 and children under 20 speak English.
Vendors swarm the tourist spots wherever we stop. They sell rip off watches, hand bags, shoes, you name it. Michelle warned us not to buy from them but one member of our group bought a Mickey Mouse watch and before the bus pulled away, it fell apart. She laughed the hardest at her own folly.  The universities here are considered excellent. Michele sang a folk song for us before departing.
I finally get to a photo shop  after lunch to buy a disk, but the city tour is over. The food is bland compared to the marvelous spicy and different tasting specialties we tasted on the road.

And, I finally got a picture of a mother with her child in the split pants, defying the governments directives. Not many years ago, this woman would have had no choice but to obey.
More tomorrow.