Laughing Knees

When I came across Andy’s reference to the new Swiss instrument called the “Hang” (pronounced like “hung”, meaning “hand” from the Bernese Swiss dailect) or “Hang Drum”, I was immediately enthralled. So much so that I think I might even save up to buy one. Now I have three instruments (besides the guitar that I’ve been playing for about 33 years and have a reach a plateau that I want to grow beyond, perhaps next learning classical guitar or flamenco) that I really want to learn: the hang, the duduk, and the quena. I am not the most coordinated finger artist around, though, so I don’t know how well I can learn to play the hang, but I would really love to learn. The only problem with acquiring one, though, is that until this year you had to contact the only builders of the hang in the world, Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer, directly by snailmail and then go to Bern, Switzerland, to handpick one. It seems this year they may be starting up shipping them again, with the third generation of the design, the integral hang, which doesn’t require each individual instrument to be picked for its unique tuning. From the things I’ve read on the internet so far the popularity of the instrument is going through the roof! There really still is magic in the world.

Thanks so much Andy.

More information here, here, and here.

Some of my favorite YouTube recordings:

And this site (in Japanese), by Hayato, has an impressive list of YouTube recordings.

I wonder if it’s possible to hear the instrument live here in Japan somewhere?

She glances down at the edge of the lake and laughs.

“Look, there’s ice along the shore! Wonder what it would feel like to dive right in?”

“It’s early April, E., the water must be freezing!” I reply.

E. looks over her shoulder and winks at me.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid to get in?” she asks.

“Afraid? No. Just that water that cold is dangerous.”

She crosses her arms in front of her and lifts her sweater over her head. Then she unbuckles her belt and slips her jeans down.

“What are you doing?” I ask, incredulous.

“Do you need to ask?” she says.

She continues removing her clothing until she is standing stark naked beside the car, her clothes tossed into the front seat. Her white skin shines in the overcast light, her breasts large and heavy, her skin tight with goose bumps. I stare at the scut of her dark pubic hair.

She laughs, then turns and jogs down the path to the edge of the lake. I stand there like a little boy, feeling silly.

“Come on!” she shouts. “What are you waiting for?”

I think she is nuts. I know she is nuts, because no one in their right mind would take off their clothes in this weather, and even more nuts for considering going for a swim in ice water. And yet, watching her, waving her arm from beside that grey, wild looking lake, she is the most beautiful woman in the world.

She stops waving and turns toward the lake. Naked and pale, I shiver just imaging how cold the water must look to her. Then she steps forward and dives in.

The ice is paper thin and shatters with the impact of her body slipping through. I see her buttocks angle toward the sky like the back of a dolphin and then disappear in the metal grey waves. For a moment the surface of the water closes over her and a stunned silence follows, then, a few meters further out, her head breaches and she is shouting, screaming for joy, waving her arms wildly. She arches back and dives in again, a pale seal playing in the water.

I stand there hesitant, knowing a thing or two about hypothermia and just how dangerous these water are. I’m not just being cowardly. But one of the things about E., why I love her and feel such great joy with her, is that she know a thing or two about being alive. I have never met anyone who takes her daily experience with life so firmly by the horns.

“Hey! You going to let a GIRL outdo you? Water too cold for you?”

Okay, that does it! I throw off my clothes and, tiptoeing over the sharp rocks and feeling the cold wind slap my skin, dance down to the edge of the lake. A stray wave laps over my bare foot and sends me leaping back. Damn cold! E. is waving from the water, but looking decidedly less glowing.

“Hurry up! I can’t stay in here much longer!” she shouts.

Taking a deep breath and jump forward and sink up to my thighs in the freezing waves. The water is so cold it takes my breath away. I stand for a few seconds, breathing hard.

“Nice view!” E. shouts.

“Give me a sec,” I shout back.

Taking another deep breath I wade further out letting the water engulf me up to my chest. The cold hurts, like an angry hornet, gripping my naked body in an iron vise. Nothing to do but to go for it. I close my eyes and leap.

The world crashes about my ears, crushing icy fingers gripping my temples and scalp, bubbles frothing like soda, my limbs dashing through it like knives, and all the while, behind it all, I can hear the thumping of my heart. A hot drum working in the gelid darkness. Somewhere I rise and break free, gasping for air, and a wild, uncontrollable glee bursting from my lungs.

E.’s fingers and arms, then the rounded warmth of her torso and legs, find me and cling to me. Our bodies entwine, seeking communion in a cold indifference. Our lips press together, hungry, laughing, our teeth bumping, our tongues pressing together.

I can’t stop shouting, and treading the water together, we revel in the splashing and bobbing of the waves. We spy another couple strolling by and pausing for a moment to stare at us before hurrying on. We whoop with laughter after they are gone.

“I’m really getting cold, M,” says E. “Let’s get back to the car.”

We dog paddle back to shore and holding hands rush back to the car. The air feels almost warm after the lake. E.’s lips have turned blue and she is shivering. I retrieve a big towel from the trunk of the car and vigorously rub E. down. We get in the car and turn on the heater, splaying our hands in front of the vent to feel our blood tingle back to life.

“Phew!” mumbles E. “That was really crazy!”

It takes a long while for the warmth to course back into our veins, but we are feeling drugged with warmth by the time our car pulls into her apartment driveway.

“I could really use a hot shower,” I say.

E. leans over and kisses me, hard. “How about a nice, long hot bath together?”

Like Hiro from “Heroes” I closed my eyes and the next thing I knew I was standing downtown in Manhattan, the yellow cabs bustling past and all the noise and hubub of New York all around me. I was back in America! It’s been a long way since all the craziness of the tragedy and my refusal to have anything to do with this country. But family is family and you can’t be angry forever. It was time to return and take stock. So here I am at my mother’s apartment in uptown Manhattan, trying to get over jetlag, but joyous at the empinada I ate yesterday evening and the friendliness of all the people on the streets, but most of all to see my mother again. Living across the ocean from her really makes distances hard. And such a relief to open the door and see her standing there.

The big surprise was immigration at Kennedy Airport. Instead of a reenactment of the horror stories that everyone around the world is grumbling about, going through immigration and customs was actually pleasurable. The immigration officer was playing Christmas music on his iPod, with little speakers to fill his cubicle. He gave me a big smile and was a friendly as can be. He asked about Japan at this time of year and wondered if it was cold and people celebrated. Then a song came on the iPod, one by Josh Groban, and the officer lit up like a Christmas tree candle.

“Have you heard of him?” he asked. “Man, a voice like an angel! You’ve got to listen to this.” Then, in spite of all the exhausted passengers waiting on line behind us, he turned up the sound and closed his eyes as the music flooded the immigration hall. I stared at him as if I had entered Wonderland. This was the fearsome American immigration?

Within fifteen minutes we had made it out to the arrival lounge. Ten minutes later a shuttle bud driver drove up and asked us if we wanted to go to the city. Two other passengers, a Japanese woman traveling alone and a Colombian who lived in Atlantic City were huddled in the van together, heading for Port Authority in Manhattan. Bobbing to Salsa on the van CD player we all laughed and shared stories of Japan and working there. I had forgotten how easily Americans speak to each other.

With a quiet night of sleep behind me and a rather warm, sunny Christmas Eve morning to wake up to, the start has been wonderful. I guess as always it is important to just take the steps out of your door and let things come as they may. My brother arrives from Boston this evening and then we can really start laughing and enjoying each others’ company.

I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I hope you have warm and memorable time with your own families. Deep peace and quiet hearts to everyone.

love,
Miguel

One of my readers (Thanks Shah) pointed me to some of my old posts that I hadn’t read in a long time. One of the them, “Waking to”, which I wrote on February 2, 2004, surprised me with the way I used the language. I had always thought of myself as a terrible poetry writer, but this was something I felt I could actually be happy with. Some of you may have read it before, but for some of you it might be new. Tell me what you think.

Waking to

Here, let me murmur a bit about the light today, the falling of heat
like a rain of down from some passing flock. The passage from sleep to
that soft transfer of thought didn’t stop at the window. I stepped out
and showered in peace, wings of stillness rising and falling about me,
where only yesterday the air shook with trepidation. I waited in the
bated morning, expecting a voice to shatter the emergence of it all,
but the interval lasted, pregnant with silence. For a time it was just
as I imagined, me and clouds scratching by overhead, heading
north-northwest. Speed or a trendy displacement had no place in that
brief perfection, as if I was given a reprieve. But I dared not blink,
lest, in that eternity of blindness, time forsook me, and the slow
ghosts of change failed the quickness of my eyes, too slow for
remembrance. Even to mouth the news turns the encounter to dust, so,
as I speak, the light is lost, sifting through wire, long, powdery,
and loved into absence.

A friend (thanks Artturi) sent me this video. I was really moved by it though I had already known the story and the statistics.

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I am in the midst of researching how to create a magazine-style blog and will be moving Laughing Knees over to a new server, possibly on new blog software (I’m using WordPress and like it, so may stay with that, but I am also looking at TextPattern, Nucleus CMS, BlogCMS, B2Evolution, and Expression Engine… If I can get the multiple blogs showcased on the front page feature of WordPress working, then WordPress will probably be where I’ll stay, mainly because I’m familiar with it and it is very well supported, but setting up my idea for the site design with one of the other platforms is in many ways much more straightforward and easier, so we’ll see. I like Expression Engine the best of all these platforms, but if I am going to move on to including a few commercial things on the site… I want to sell some published things like books, illustrations, and higher quality photographs… then Expression Engine can be quite expensive initially. But it may be worth it. I tried out TextPattern for Laughing Knees for a while, but the development is so slow that it doesn’t seem to be keeping up with what is going on. I don’t want to spend all my time coding things. I used to do that, but I just don’t have the time or will any more. Though, TextPattern is truly elegant….

It will be good to get the blog settled in one place with a server that I like and to finally start moving on with the other ideas ideas I’ve always had for the site, like fictional stories, essays, photos, illustrations and cartoons, tutorials, a few concentrations on some of my hobbies, like ultralight backpacking, bicycle travel, photography, books, ecological housing and communities, and wildlife, all of which I’d like to write up more static, permanent pages for. I’d even like to record many of the songs I’ve written and sung so that people can listen to them. All of it takes time, of course. But I’m slowly getting there.

I will continue the photo series of my Europe trip soon. I just finished a long stint with tests and class preparations recently so I’ve not had much time outside of school beyond stumbling back home, heating up some soup, and falling into bed. Tomorrow I, finally, get to leave the area and go on a two-day hike, to celebrate my birthday (Nov. 26, 1960… erm, no I am NOT crying out for attention!!!), and try out my new and long-awaited Mariposa Plus backpack. After years of spending and wasting money on lots of other more expensive, heavier, and ultimately unsatisfactory packs, the one that originally caught my eye, but which I shunned for the fancier stuff, finally came home. Trying it out three weeks ago and packing it on and off with different loads for different seasons and different climates and terrain, I think I’ve finally found the pack that does exactly what I want a pack to do, basically meaning that it holds my light selection of gear and disappears on my back without calling attention to itself. I think I’ve gotten most of my other gear pretty much worked out, including switching, for most walks, over to a tiny, woodburning stove that will eliminate the need for carrying gas cannisters and allow me to learn more about making fires while at the same time being environmentally safe, a pair of sturdy, but light hiking shoes with more thickness in the insole than the shoes I used in the Alps this summer, which caused quite a lot of swelling and pain on the rocky descents, and reverting, from the miserably cold and wet film of plastic of my expensive Montane Superfly to the heavier, but more protective and reliable Paramo Cascada jacket. Sometimes lighter isn’t always better. And sometimes it’s nice to just wrap up inside something warm and dry, no matter how heavy it is. And I guess I’m just tired of spending so much time thinking about gear all the time rather than being out there actually walking and losing myself in the woods. After all, I didn’t start going for those long walks all those years ago so that I could get wrapped up in what I was walking in; I went out there because I forgot all that. There were times when I’d emerge from the woods and stand there blinking in surprise, wondering where I had stepped out into.

Of course, a lot of what all this concentration on going lighter has to do with is being able to go encumbered, and that is thanks to the evolution of my gear selection and hiking and camping techniques, along with a quantum shift in how I approach being outdoors, ever since I read Ray Jardin’s “The Pacific Crest Trail Hiker’s Handbook” and later, his “Beyond Backpacking” and after that discovered the Backpacking Light site and community in its early days of its refreshingly new ideas and a number of other sites, like the now dormant Joe’s Ultralight Backpacking”. Walking with camping gear is actually fun now, no longer a burden and source of agony. The only thing that keeps me from truly enjoying the climbs and descents is being out of shape. If I work on that, well, there are a lot of mountain trails I want to explore!

From this point bushcraft seems like the likely step for my evolution, learning to go even simpler and discovering further what it means to live close to the elements. Of course, I want to balance this with a healthy understanding that with all our billions on the planet it is no longer responsible to go around chopping down trees and killing animals for sport. But there is something about knowing exactly where your food comes from and why animals behave the way they do in different environments and that you will be all right if your lightweight pack actually does fall off the side of the cliff (something that actually happened while I sat eating lunch with a friend… one moment we were sharing a tangerine, the next, his pack had disappeared in the clouds below) that calls to me and seems to remind me of what it means to be alive and why we have these brains in our heads and noses on our faces and hands on our arms. Whenever I see videos of the Inuit going hunting or the Saan discovering a buried gourd for drinking water, I just have to think how ignorant the rest of us are about basic needs.

I often wonder if the simple test of having to find food for the day, of having to concentrate on survival rather than how to screw your neighbor, brings people together more than other way of life possibly can, simply because we cannot survive alone. Maybe that is why I love the mountains so much; up there you are definitely not in charge. You have to give way and watch yourself, you have to make sure your partners are all right, you have to rein in your ego and do your best to get companions to share and cooperate. Coming back from a difficult mountain trip always humbles me, and all the crap of jockeying for recognition in a company, of people scrabbling to tell other people what to do, of accumulating too many belongings, of constantly being sullen or apathetic or lazy or inconsiderate all come across as alarmingly anti-life. I don’t know how close I can get to living with less and learning to get along better with people, but I want to at least try. It’s part of what will help us survive in the mess we’ve created.