Mono Monday. : : Quan Yin

After constant reminders that we have had no significant rainfall this winter, the serious rain finally started and it has been raining steadily since midnight. We are now being warned of possible flooding. I think the weather people have realized that since we all seem to like to talk about the weather, they might as well make it seem as exciting as they can....

I'm not sure quite how it happened, but somehow I found myself dusting the floor to ceiling bookcase we like to refer to as 'the library'.  Perhaps it was the fact that Dana pointed out the spider webs festooning the upper shelves well out of my reach.  In keeping with my resolution to live in the moment, and the fact that I have been meditating on the question of possessions and their importance, what began as a boring task soon became quite pleasant. 

Each book has a memory attached to it, as do all the odds and ends that have found their way to the shelves in front of the books. Dusting them gave me an opportunity to think about each one and it's importance to me. We didn't have the same luxury of time that I do now when we  moved five years ago. Heaven knows why these things made the cut but I suspect it has a lot to do with memories and associations.

The City of Thieves by David Benioff caught my eye, partly because of the wonderful cover illustration but also because it was such a good story about a generally awful event...the siege of Leningrad. I took a picture of it and sent it to a friend who I thought would like it. She told me that David Benioff was the show runner for "The Game of Thrones". There are hundreds of volumes there, each with its own story...books from my parents' collection, two family bibles...my grandfather was a Presbyterian minister...a shelf full of travel books, another of nature guides. I wonder if we are the only people in the world to have a guide to animal scat? There are works of  fiction and non-fiction, art books and a very old set of the complete works of Mark Twain.

Quan Yin, the goddess of compassion is a classic Buddhist goddess, a bodhisattva.  Her name translates as 'she who hears prayers....' the jade statue of her has stood somewhere in my house for as long as I can remember, yet I'm really not sure where she came from...

There are also : elephants, diplomas, a little orange car with wooden wheels (hand made by OilMan's grandfather) Beautiful handwoven Pomo Indian baskets with geometric patterns, tightly woven enough to hold water (given to my grandfather by parishioners) a roughly carved and painted wooden brahma bull which I bought in India and a seated woman in a sarong and elaborate headdress, intricately carved in Bali. There are Kashmiri boxes, Royal Copenhagen figurines of a boy whittling and a girl knitting,  pottery made by my friend Marcia, a Craftsman style tile of Mt Diablo made by the daughter of a friend especially for our fireplace in Berkeley, a Santo Domingo Pueblo figurine of a storyteller, lap filled with children (I chose it specifically because the storyteller, atypically, is a man), a beautiful little lozenge shaped box painted robin's egg blue inside, made by Blipper Philipo, and the oft photographed clock which belonged to my grandmother. She died when I was quite young but I have always felt a connection to her. Perhaps it is significant in some way that despite numerous efforts to fix it, it keeps stopping at ten minutes to one. I love the sound of chime, but I think it must be time to silence its voice.

Squeezed in with all this are photographs: me standing in front of the Taj Mahal, OilMan's sister holding Dana's son Peter when he was just a few months old...an especially poignant picture since she died of cancer soon after....There is my father in his navy uniform, my mother with her lovely smile and  a towheaded OilMan when he was about four years old.

It took me hours to complete this task, but it was a pleasant few hours as I contemplated each object and speculated upon why those particular objects wound up there.

*I put a picture of the entire thing in extras.