Mind, Body, Soul

E GIRERA E GIRERA
SI GIRERA IL CUORE MIO
GIRERA IL LA TERRA
GIRERA LA MIA VITA
UN GIORNO LUI SI SI CAPRIRA
UN GIORNO LUI SI TI CAPRIRA

What’s up with the Italian today? I don’t know. I am distracted. When I’m distracted, I tend to speak in tongues. Strange? Yeah it is. Stranger still: I don’t even know Italian.

Sometimes you see something so stunning, so bright that it blinds you for a moment. You see the potential, and then you say things or do things that are clumsy or dumb. All of a sudden, I am 16 again, 5 foot 9 inches tall, at 129 lbs. I am wearing golden rimed glasses and in a memory I hear the dentist telling my dad that I needed braces. I am the last to be picked for the baseball line up. What happened? I was a superstar in a not too distant 6th grade. I am a superstar now! Why do I feel like I’m an adolescent school boy again? I feel myself wanting to retreat to the places that I found solace at: the art room, where I could draw and paint in solitude; the chess club where I find others seeking safe battles on 12’’ by 12’’ boards; the biology club where Linnaeus spoke to me in the secret language of Latin and Greek. Better yet, get lost in the forest. Or even better, the sea. Mother Nature is kind and never judges her son.

I did indulge myself in the waters of Lau Lau Bay yesterday with good company. It was beautiful. My new friends are beautiful. Today though, I thought I should have some time by myself. A little bit of quiet is what I thought I needed to once again balance my mind, body and soul. I put forth a days schedule in order to find balance in all three areas rather than just getting lost in a DVD and eating ice cream and spicy Japanese chips. No. Too many unhealthy Sundays have been lost that way.

Mind
It has been a while, but I needed to sort my working library of Crustaceans (namely, my crab head collection). Crabs are some of the hardest invertebrates to identify and label to amateurs because they are so diverse, with too many similar details, and I usually have only a few resources at hand. So, I labored a good part of the morning getting some identifying and labeling done.

I’ll share one with you: Matuta lumaris or the Burrowing Sand Crab. The neat thing about this crab is that its dactyls are all flat and paddle-like, like a swimming crabs’ (family Potunidae) fifth dactyl. The dactyl is the last segment of a pereopod (the crab’s leg). Its legs help the crab to quickly burrow in the sand. Although I have never seen one alive on Saipan, I have been able to collect some crab heads (cephalons) washed up on shore. My good friend John S. tells me that the Burrrowing Sand Crab is not yet recorded in our area by his marine biology colleagues and that I should turn in a sample to a museum. Neat, huh? Yeah! This is what I needed for my mind: a little bit of science!

Body
It has been a while since I practiced the pugilistic arts. After my mental exercise, I thought I’d get some physical exercise to get my heart pumping and the sweat running. Nothing makes me feel more alive than beating up a heavy bag before noon on a Sunday. Well, that’s not true really. All you’ve really got to do is to get me outside (or a cup of hot java) and I’ll be much alive. But, like I said it has been a while so it felt real good to move. Sure enough, I lost some technique, power and speed. What makes it worse is that I was really never too good at boxing. So today I sucked even worse.

I picked up some boxing lessons here and there a few years back when I was nursing a broken heart. My intentions were to “fix” a few things with my hands this time around which is something that is a far cry from my true character. I was just tired of being the sucker; the nice guy whom everyone stepped on; my niceness often interpreted as weakness. Man, it felt good beating something up and I visualized whose wigs I was going to split. After a while though, I felt that my anger was eating me up inside just as fast as I was developing my skills. Sure, at the time I wasn’t ready to forgive yet, but this wasn’t me. I was always more of the philosopher rather than the warrior: the open hand rather than the fist in the hand greeting that the Chinese martial artists presented to each other. After I realized that I was being consumed, I put the hand wraps and gloves down for a while to soul search. I prayed, and asked to be able to forgive and to be forgiven. I haven’t split anyone’s wig yet, so I guess I found my balance without violence. No, it’s not violence. It’s the “sweet science” as Leibling said. I am a scientist after all.

Note to self regarding Body: No more Davidoff Entreactos. You can celebrate your friend’s memory without sacrificing your lungs. Secondly, eat. You need proper nutrition to fuel your body. Your anorexia (the inability to eat, not A. nervosa the condition) is not from cholera.

Soul
What to feed the soul? Well, reading is usually good. My friend Greg, told my friend Bev about Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin Books). He lauded its contents, and so did she, so much in fact that it became one of the books assigned earlier to a book club that I joined later. So I decided to grab Bev’s copy.

I heard lots of comments amongst my circle of friends and the friends that are members of the book club. These comments made this autobiography seem like a self-help book instead: “Oh, we need more of India don’t we” or “I am so in Bali right now!” Gilbert writes about how her divorce, successive break up and depression that followed led her to seek pleasure in Italy, devotion in India and finally balance in Indonesia. I thought I’d give it bit of a read and finish at least Italy, a 154-page chapter.

It was difficult for me to read this chapter for obvious personal reasons. Of course, to get the whole story, I needed to be introduced to the struggles (the aforementioned divorce, break-up, and depression) first before the triumphs. So, I struggled through the all too familiar hurts with the author but saw her slowly finding and being comfortable with herself little by little as she indulges in the pleasure of the language, the food, and the people in Italy.

I won’t give too many details from the book for people who would like to read it. Plus I am not done yet. I couldn’t tell you if “I am in Bali” or if “I am so in India.” But now that I read the first chapter, am I in Italy? Am I seeking Italy? Am I missing Italy? Am I in someone else’s Italy? All I can be sure of right now about me is that I am more comfortable in my own skin now more than in any part of my history. I am a superstar.

Note from the book for the Soul: "Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend."

Ah, Italy! Maybe, that’s why I sang to you in Italian? Ciao, cara mia.

Thanks for letting me share.

The Beachcomber

Spondylus salape': Non-classic colors

On an earlier post, I mentioned that the classical Spondylus salape’ beads are usually orange in color. Most people are convinced that the Spondylus species that the ancient Chamorro artisans fashioned into orange beads are Spondylus varius. I am not too convinced yet if this is all that correct because of the varied species of the thorny/spiny oysters that are found in our waters. Classifying or naming a specimen using pictures from a shell book or even from Internet sources is a difficult task. Expert and amateur taxonomists alike can attest to this challenge.

One of the people I “talk stories” on biology with is a good friend and former colleague Dr. John S. He looked up in the Micronesica (the University of Guam journal of natural sciences of Micronesia and the region) to find that we have have present in CNMI waters: S. varius, S. multimuricatus, S. nicobaricus, S. squamosus and S. violascense. At times I wonder if I should have been a taxonomist because of the way I want to catalog/classify things in nature. You see, I want to be sharp enough to pick up any Spondylus shell fragment and say to a certainty that this is what it is. I know: NERD!

So how does this all translate to the pendants that make? Again, the classical Spondylus salape’ are mostly orange and I experimented with other fragments that I found that are what I call non-classical in color.

I call this salape’, Korason, the Chamorro/Spanish word for heart. It has a beautifully striated red color. The toggle is from a smaller fragment that I found that matched Korason’s colors surprisingly well.

This next piece is Papakyo, which means stormy in Chamorro. The word pakyo is very similar to bagyo, the Tagalong word of the same meaning, which hints to the Austronesian language link between the Mariana Islands and my mother islands of the Philippines. I am sure that Papakyo is a Spondylus squamosus which has an unmistakable dark maroon color. I picked up this shell fragment after a small tropical disturbance in the area hence the name. Papakyo has a rectangular toggle cut from the same shell fragment.

The piece below I named Putitainobiu after the Chamorro name for the flower Bougainvillea (puti=pain, tai=not have, nobiu=lover). I used to paint acrylics a lot and orange was a difficult color for me to utilize. I am convinced that only the Creator, the Master Artisan himself, can put pink and orange together and make it work this beautifully.

One day I was cutting a beautifully colored shell fragment with soft pink and white striations. In handling it, I knew this piece would polish quite nicely. My mind raced though, troubled by some odd news and some deep wounds caused by the remembrance of a recent break up. Although I was outside on a beautiful day, under the shade of a kind mango tree and a light breeze cooling my bare skin, my cutting was disturbed by what was effectively turmoil inside. I knew I had to calm myself down and focus on the task of creating.

You see, I somewhat believe that there is something to energy, be it positive or negative, and how it affects things you touch or handle, and in this case create. I know this is all hokey to Western science, and maybe even some Christians would think it a bit odd too, this theory of energy transfer. Well, although I can’t really explain it or prove anything I can personally say that I know there is something to it. Just for an example though, so you don’t think I am all weird and everything, when I practiced massage on Guam a few years back, I’ve experienced feeling ill after treating some clients that were really in bad shape. A number of experiences like that convinced me not to treat anyone if I was feeling out of tune (physically, emotionally, mentally, etc.) as well, so that I don’t transfer any negative energy to the client.

Anyway, although in cutting an inanimate object such as a shell fragment is not the same, I tend to apply the same personal theory. I’d like to approach the art of creating like a Zen Japanese sword smith who undertook their task with great solemnity, and purity of heart and mind, undergoing fasting and ritual purification before laboring in the art of metallurgy. Well, my mind should at the least be clear and positive anyway.
So anyway while cutting this particular piece, thinking about a friend who came back from vacation as a single woman really bugged me. I took it a bit to heart since I at the time was mending a broken heart and although I never really met the former nobiu, I thought their relationship was all good. It made me think of how fragile relationships really are and how many things could go wrong. But I know that there are reasons for breakups and they are usually for good reasons. I had to dig deep to not be so bothered and accept things that I couldn’t do anything about really.

So how did I get rid of the internal drama and perform the task at hand? I focused on who my friend was. Although we don’t spend a lot of time together, I know that she is special. I firsthand see that she is well loved by colleagues, the kids that she teaches, the drama team she’s a part of, and so on. I think they also call her, the Northstar, since her unwavering character is a good reminder to all of us what beauty really is inside and out. She is a real beauty, as is this piece of salape’ that I made with her in mind. This one is called Mai-Rhea. Isn’t she lovely?

Thanks again for letting me share.

The Beachcomber