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Thanks for the quote! The one on if you pick a religion you are separating yourself from the rest of the world and creating violence I totally agree on! I wish I could put it on my FB but I live in WV and people would jump ALL over me for that quote! But I agree and appreciate you sharing it!

Thank you for adding me :)

Thanks for the invite!

Thanks for the friendship, James.

Woah.........A writer..thank you so much for adding me..it's my great pleasure to have you as my friend here.. I am really fascinated by people with great mind..I always look up to them ...Salute to you...:)

Hi James~! Thanks for your friendship :D

Thanks for the add! M.D.

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

Carolina wrote: "Hello! Thanks for the friend request!

Feel free to come anytime. We love visitors hehehe. Do you have an idea of where would you like to visit?"

Wherever the best mangos grow.

hi james, this is ascension coronado rodriguez author of 'la casa bruja' meaning witch house in spanish, la casa bruja is about an alien raising the antichrist boy, this is a fictional book, i base this book off of my curse. my birthday is on 6/6/60 and my name ascension means to rise, coronado means man with the crown,crazy huh. i figured all this out when i was ten years old it reaked me out i had to see a priest. thank you for adding me to your circle of friends take care.

Aloha wrote: "Hi ジェイムズ・N. パウエル, thank you for the friending. Your biography and interests are amazing."

I've been so fortunate in my life to have been swept along in an endless wave of love. I've oodles of friends in Japan. My prayers are with them every moment.

Hi ジェイムズ・N. パウエル, thank you for the friending. Your biography and interests are amazing.

Paula wrote: "i was reading some Octavio Paz poetry, and i remember you!

Entre Irse y Quedarse

Entre irse y quedarse duda el día,
enamorado de su transparencia.


I've not read that poem before, which surprises me. I adore Paz's affiliation with liminality. "Entre Irse" reminds me of the following poem, one of my favorites:

CARTA DE CREENCIA

CANTANTA

1

Entre la noche y el día
hay un territorio indeciso.
No es luz ni sombra:
es tiempo.
Hora, pausa precaria,
página que se obscurece,
página en la que escribo,
despacio, estas palabras.
La tarde
es una brasa que se consume.
El día gira y se deshoja.
Lima los confines de las cosas
un río obscuro.
Terco y suave
las arrastra, no sé adónde.
La realidad se aleja.
Yo escribo:
hablo conmigo
—hablo contigo.

Quisiera hablarte
como hablan ahora,
casi borrados por las sombras
el arbolito y el aire;
como el agua corriente,
soliloquio sonámbulo;
como el charco callado,
reflector de instantáneos simulacros;
como el fuego:
lenguas de llama, baile de chispas,
cuentos de humo.
Hablarte
con palabras visibles y palpables,
con peso, sabor y olor
como las cosas.
Mientras lo digo
las cosas, imperceptiblemente,
se desprenden de sí mismas
y se fugan hacia otras formas,
hacia otros nombres.
Me quedan
estas palabras: con ellas te hablo.

Las palabras son puentes.
También son trampas, jaulas, pozos.
Yo te hablo: tú no me oyes.
No hablo contigo:
hablo con una palabra,
Esa palabra eres tú . . .
......

As a poet-philosopher Paz realized more than most the dangers of reification, how subtly words freeze worlds into fixed categories, which are then accepted as the real. And he is aware of his responsibility to break down those worlds so we can view life anew. So the gaps between things are extremely important as a kind of fluid vinegar to melt away ossified meanings. I greatly admire his El Mono Gramático, for the same reason.

El Mono is set in India, where that gap is conceptualized as Sandhya.

http://slowloveblog.blogspot.com/2010...

He takes up the theme of reification again in the following lines, which seem borrowed from Chuang Tzu:




Words are uncertain
and speak uncertain things.
But speaking this or that
they speak us.
Love is an equivocal word
like all words.
It's not a word.
said the Founder:
it is a vision,
base and crown of the ladder of contemplation...
To love is to lose oneself in time,
to be a mirror among mirrors.






If anyone is following this conversation, there follows an English translation of "Entre Irse"

Between going and staying...

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

Translated by Eliot Weinberger
Etiquetas: Octavio Paz

i was reading some Octavio Paz poetry, and i remember you!

Entre Irse y Quedarse

Entre irse y quedarse duda el día,
enamorado de su transparencia.

La tarde circular es ya bahía:
en su quieto vaivén se mece el mundo.

Todo es visible y todo es elusivo,
todo está cerca y todo es intocable.

Los papeles, el libro, el vaso, el lápiz
reposan a la sombra de sus nombres.

Latir del tiempo que en mi sien repite
la misma terca sílaba de sangre.

La luz hace del muro indiferente
un espectral teatro de reflejos.

En el centro de un ojo me descubro;
no me mira, me miro en su mirada.

Se disipa el instante. Sin moverme,
yo me quedo y me voy: soy una pausa.

"Whose woods these are I think I know."

- Robert Frost


A contentious line, because it doesn't stand alone . . . Dark, behind it, the trees have standing, and those who know the spirits of the trees . . .

Dark behind it rose the forest, rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,



Rose the firs with cones upon them; bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water, beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
There the wrinkled old Nokomis nursed the little Hiawatha,
Rocked him in his linden cradle, bedded soft in moss and rushes,
Safely bound with reindeer sinews; stilled his fretful wail by saying,
“Hush! the Naked Bear will hear thee!” Lulled him into slumber, singing,
“Ewa-yea! my little owlet! Who is this, that lights the wigwam?
With his great eyes lights the wigwam? Ewa-yea! my little owlet!”
Many things Nokomis taught him of the stars that shine in heaven;
Showed him Ishkoodah, the comet, Ishkoodah, with fiery tresses;


Showed the Death-Dance of the spirits, warriors with their plumes and war-clubs,
Flaring far away to northward in the frosty nights of winter;
Showed the broad white road in heaven, pathway of the ghosts, the shadows,
Running straight across the heavens, crowded with the ghosts, the shadows.
At the door on summer evenings, sat the little Hiawatha;
Heard the whispering of the Pine-trees, heard the lapping of the water,
Sounds of music, words of wonder; “Minne-wawa!” said the pine-trees,
“Mudway-aushka! said the water.
Saw the fire-fly Wah-wah-taysee, flitting through the dusk of evening,
With the twinkle of its candle lighting up the brakes and bushes,
And he sang the song of children, sang the song Nokomis taught him:
“Wah-wah-taysee, little fire-fly, little flitting, white-fire insect, little, dancing, white-fire creature,
Light me with your little candle, ere upon my bed I lay me, ere in sleep I close my eyelids!”
Saw the moon rise from the water, rippling, rounding from the water,
Saw the flecks and shadows on it, whispered, “What is that, Nokomis?”
And the good Nokomis answered: “Once a warrior, very angry, seized his grandmother, and
Threw her up into the sky at midnight; right against the moon he threw her;
‘Tis her body that you see there.”
Saw the rainbow in the heaven, in the eastern sky the rainbow,
Whispered, “What is that, Nokomis?” And the good Nokomis answered:
“ ‘Tis the heaven of flowers you see there; all the wild-flowers of the forest,
All the lilies of the prairie, when on earth they fade and perish,
Blossom in that heaven above us.”
When he heard the owls at midnight, hooting, laughing in the forest,
“What is that?” he cried in terror; “What is that,” he said, “Nokomis?”
And the good Nokomis answered: “That is but the owl and owlet,
Talking in their native language, talking, scolding at each other.”
Then the little Hiawatha learned of every bird its language,
Learned their names and all their secrets,
How they built their nests in summer, where they hid themselves in winter,
Talked with them whene’er he met them,
Called them “Hiawatha’s Chickens.”
Of all beasts he learned the language,
Learned their names and all their secrets,
How the beavers built their lodges,
Where the squirrels hid their acorns,
How the reindeer ran so swiftly,

Why the rabbbit was so timid,
Talked with them whene’er he met them,
Called them “Hiawatha’s Brothers . . .



~ * ~

i am not talking about the maori! i am talking about the samoans, fijians, tongans...i am not talking about just the native of nz but the pacific people who are over takin nz

I am not so sure we disagree, we are just talking apples and oanges. You voice a certain unease about the native peoples of New Zealand. Whereas I voice a certain admiration of the pre-European-contact ways of atoll dwellers who lived in ecological balance.

Apples and oranges. So we should make punch and have a drink. :-)

James wrote: "

Well, I am concerned mostly with the low-lying Pacific atolls and their peoples. Not the high islands such as New Zealand. This is because the atolls harbor small and delicate ecosystems. Even ..."

lol that's an interesting read! i have obviously offended u and i wont appologise because i don't see my fault but i am sorry that you can't see what i see. it's hard for me to explain - and quiet frankly - don't really give a damn to explain.

yes i have read that book, amongst other books about NZ.

what i have just read is mainly about the past. Yes european have caused a lot of troubles in the beginning but they are trying to fix things now. It would be so much better if the pacific people co-operate. some of them do, but not enough!

lets agree to disagree huh?

Well, I am concerned mostly with the low-lying Pacific atolls and their peoples. Not the high islands such as New Zealand. This is because the atolls harbor small and delicate ecosystems. Even a slight rise in sea levels, and their fresh water supplies are polluted. A little more rise in sea level, and they are gone. Their populations will have fled to Honolulu, Australia, Los Angeles, New Zealand. Many are only a couple of feet above sea level. Entire nations of atolls. These fragile systems are the canaries in the coal mine of global warming. They are quiet delicate. Yet some Pacific atoll cultures have inhabited those atolls sustainably for many centuries, even millenia -- until they had contact with European colonists who destroyed their traditional ways. Even some high islanders, such as the Tikopians, made difficult choices in order to live sustainably. But, they made those choices and they thrived. The rest of the world should model itself on that kind of wisdom. Because we must realize now that the globe is really just like those small, delicate atolls.

I live in America, and we are one of the most greedy consumer nations on Earth. If global warming is caused by humans, we are major contributors. So, we should learn from any cultures that have lived sustainably. I mean, when you really look closely at atoll cultures and small island cultures, they would have been overun centuries ago if they had not controlled their populations. They would not have had enough food if they had depleted their lands.

On the high islands, such as New Zealand, the inhabitants did not need to be so ecologically circumspect as on the atolls, which are so small and ecologically vulnerable.

So, what I admire is SOME of the atoll cultures and the ways in which they were able to thrive on their very small islands w/out destroying them. Of course they did not have cars and so on before European contact. Their needs and lives were simple. They did not need to work eight-hour days in order to live their lives. When the Europeans and others came, they really did not understand these cultures. European diseases killed off very large percentages of the native island populations. The islanders had no immunity to these diseases. Also, before European contact, the natives did not suffer from any sexually transmitted diseases. All the early acounts of Tahitians found them to be healthy both mentally and physically. However, like Native Americans, the native islanders who survived often had a very difficult time adapting to the ways of their conquerors. They felt they could never really fit in to European culture, and yet their own culture had been largely destroyed and most of their friends and family had died from diseases.

Yet, I still feel we can learn from their ecological wisdom, although much of that has been lost by modernization and colonization.

I would invite you to look at this not only from your perspective, but also the perspective of scholars and of Pacific islanders. I would recommend K. R. Howe's Where the Waves Fall. And also any of Célestine Hitiura Vaite's novels. She is really the first Tahitian novelist. You can learn a lot about native-colonialist interactions from her writings.

One must be careful about usng pejorative comments such as "lazy." Different cultures have different values. In Daoist culture, for instance what we call "laziness" is a great virtue. One of the great heroes of Daoist literature is a character with the name of Do Nothing Say Nothing. You can read about him if you click on the following link:

http://www.universal-tao-eproducts.co...

I would say, first of all, take a look at your own footprint on this small and delicate planet. You can do it right here http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/in...

This will tell you how much land area YOU take to live YOUR lifestyle, and how many Earths there would need to be if EVERYONE lived YOUR lifestyle.

Although I try to live frugally, I was shocked to learn that with the current population, if everyone on Earth lived at my level of consumption, it would take 1.5 Earths to sustain us all.

After you have seen that number, then consider that many Pacific island peoples lived sustainably for centuries before contact with Europeans, who destroyed their very beautiful cultures and much of their ecological wisdom and took away their lands at gunpoint. Consider that the French and the Americans, who are not "lazy," detonated atomic bombs on Pacific islands, completly traumatizing not only those particular islands. The radioactive poison has been slowly creeping up the food chain
into the poisson cru that the French invaders of Tahiti so like to cook up.

Also, some of these atoll nations will be the first to be destroyed if the sea levels rise even a little. So these peoples really have the moral authority to address global warming more than anyone.

They are the canary in the mine.

One other point, if you are researching the earlier history of a culture, it is often better to do so at a cultural remove from the modern-day version of the culture under consideration. For example, present day Indian scholars studying ancient Indian culture are often not as accurate as Western scholars. For instance, suppose you want to do a study of one word, Indra, in the Rig Veda. Well, the meanings of Indra in Vedic Sanskrit are very different from those in Puranic Sanskrit, Classical Sanskrit and in Hindi and other Sanskritic tongues. Whereas it is difficult for an Indian Indologist to free his mind of all the cultural meanings that have attached themselves to the word Indra over several thousand years, the Western Indologist has no such prejudices.

In addition, many cultures and languages die daily. Often tribal peoples, if they want to revivify their language and customs must seek out the help of a Western anthropologist who is perhaps the only living repository of that knowledge. I took a walk with a Colombian tribesman a few years ago. It took us about an hour to walk 100 feet, because he was describing all the medicinal and mythological dimensions of each plant along the way. He added, however, that the knowedge, which has always been part of his tribe's culture, is now vanishing. The kids are interested in American TV, not herbs.

So, my point is that you must think twice before allowing your perceptions of the present-day post-colonial tragedy of the Polynesian peoples to prejudice your opinion of the dignity and wisdom of their traditional cultures.

When Robert Levy was living among the Tahitians, one night he was sitting quietly at the side of the lagoon with the villagers he was studying. Suddenly, across the sky, they saw a bright light streaking. It was man's first satellite, Sputnik. Everyone was in awe. After a long silence, one Tahitian villager spoke up. "We Tahitians could never do anything like that," he said.

However, Tahitians also do not make nuclear weapons. Traditional Polynesians did not pollute the earth as non-"lazy" peoples do. They lived in closer accord with nature.

By the way, being Vietnamese, you should be proud. Vietnam has one of the lowest per capita ecological footprints. New Zealand's is pretty high. The country with the lowest per capita ecological footprint is Afghanistan, though not with all those Hummers and tanks zooming around in it these days.

It is difficult for us living on continents and on high islands to really understand what is happening, really in our souls. We do not feel we are threatened. But talk to Draconiams Oppo, who resides in the atoll nation of the Maldives (you will find him in my list of "fans.") He had a foretaste of what rising sea levels will do to his homeland when the large tsunami washed over those islands. "Those were sad times," he writes.

We should listen.

< img src="http://images.barnesandnoble.com/imag..." /> By the way, you might find this book intriguing: Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story. It is about a New York editor who marries a Maori she meets during a bar brawl while vacationing in New Zealand. Having married a Maori, she grapples with many of the feelings you write of.

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson’s marriage to a Maori man. As an American graduate student studying literature in Australia, Thompson traveled on vacation to New Zealand, where she met a Maori known as “Seven.” Their relationship was one of opposites: he was a tradesman, she an intellectual; he came from a background of rural poverty, she from one of middle-class privilege; he was a “native,” she descended directly from “colonizers.” Nevertheless, they shared a similar sense of adventure and a willingness to depart from the customs of their families and forge a life together on their own.
In this extraordinary book, which grows out of decades of research, Thompson explores the meaning of cross-cultural contact and the fascinating history of Europeans in the South Pacific, beginning with Abel Tasman’s discovery of New Zealand in 1642 and James Cook’s famous circumnavigations of 1769–79. Transporting us back and forth in time and around the world, from Australia to Hawaii to tribal NewZealand and finally to a house in New England that has ghosts of its own, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All brings to life a lush variety of characters and settings. Yet at its core, it is the story of two people who, in making a life and a family together, bridge the gap between two worlds.


Publishers Weekly

In this unusual hybrid of history and memoir, Harvard Review editor Thompson examines the historical collisions between Westerners and Maoris through the lens of her marriage to a Maori man. As an American grad student in Australia, Thompson met her husband-to-be, known as "Seven," while on vacation in New Zealand. She was petite, blonde and intellectual; he was large, dark and working-class. Yet within a short time, they had married and started a family. Their relationship, and her scholarship, took them back and forth across the Pacific, until they finally settled in her family's New England home outside Boston. Thompson's deep knowledge of the history of Europeans in the Pacific allows her to trace the misunderstandings and stereotypes that have marked perceptions of Polynesians up to the present day. A sensitive observer and polished stylist, Thompson is never dully tendentious or dogmatic. The narrative moves smoothly by way of well-told anecdotes both personal and historical. At times, Thompson covers so much territory-there's a stray chapter about her family's interactions with Native Americans in Minnesota-that it can feel like she's trying to do too much, yet her prose never disappoints. Seven, the man at the center of the book, remains pleasingly opaque, as if Thompson is saying that we can never know completely even those we love best. (July)

http://globaljusticeecology.org/conne...

othere than that i totally agree on the global climate thing! i'm extremely upset with about the animals at the poles, they are on the verge on extinction if this keeps up. and the amount of ice breaking away from the antartic is scary! one of these days we (new zealand) are going to loose our Steward Island!

Thanks for your clarification. I understand now what you had in mind when you said you were studying Religion. In the US system when we say 'Religion' the tendency is to mean 'Theology,' usually taught in private universities with a religous affiliation, whereas Religious Studies is taught in public (and some private) universities that do not have a religious affiliation.

Religious Studies is not really an autonomous disciplines, but, like your Science of Religion, draws upon philology, anthropology, linguistics, art, sociology, psycology, philosophy, theology, history. I studied at the University of California Santa Barbara, which has quite a rigorous program. For instance, one must have a primary language (for instance Sanskrit or Chinese or Pali or Tahitian) as well as a secondary language (French, German, etc.) under one's belt, and these are just prerequisites. You have to be able to read primary texts and then all the secondary literature.

I am not sure what it is people get out of the internet. I liken it to my relationship with popcorn: so insubstantial that it can be addictive. The line between wanting more popcorn and having had too much, does it really exist?