My Sarah, prior to meeting me some thirteen years ago, led a life filled with enough drama and pathos to fill approximately six and a half movies of the week. Born in Cluj, Romania in 1950 to a Rom (Gypsy) mother and a Russian Jew father (who met in one of Mr. Hitler's Holiday Camps) and given the name Anna Sarah Alexshevna Derashenko, the little girl who would one day be my wife was soon to learn that this is a cruel, cruel world.

She Spent her formative years in the post WWII Europe of Romania, Germany and England. One of the horrid highlights of her younger years occured in Frankfurt, where she was attacked in a dark alley and stabbed in the ribs by a sinister couple driven to such outrage by unknown motives. She escaped their grasp and their hungry blade ultimately, of course, but bears the signature of both in the form of a two inch scar down her right side.

Things did not get any better from there. Soon after the family (mother, father, Sarah, younger sister) moved to San Francisco in the early 60's, Sarah and her younger sister, Louise, were orphaned when their mother, long ill, died of leukemia and their father, Alexis, followed his wife out of this life shortly thereafter. Sarah, separated from Louise (who ultimately returned to the Old Country) was adopted by one of her mother's sisters and her wealthy American husband. Things might have improved for her a bit here if the aunt in question had not decided to play the evil stepmother role to the hilt. The troublesome relationship with her aunt/stepmom proved a major influence in Sarah's life, which from this point went on to include (among many other things, of course. I have no intention of writing Sarah's biography here. She would have to start her own blog or write the autobiography she has been considering for the real and complete story to emerge.) marriage and children well before the age of 18, many years of self medication, a short modeling career, and a number of husbands who got their hands and hearts burned by a woman stirred simultaneously by wild Gypsy blood and a sick heart.

When Fate brought the two of us together in 1989, Sarah had nothing from her past that was not carried in that injured heart or in her mind. The things many of us take for granted such as family photos, heirlooms and family itself had all been left behind in the constant comings and goings of her life before me. We were together many years before I even met her youngest daughter, Molly. The rest of Sarah's family, dead or living, has long been for me nothing but the stories I have heard of them. Without even photographs to accompany those stories, their faces were indistinct in my imagination.

Now, thanks to a cousin Sarah has only just contacted in an effort to reconcile her past, I have not only some faces to go with those stories but a photo of my beautiful wife celebrating her first birthday! There is no doubt that the three pictures below, offering me a glimpse into a part of my Sarah's life that I have not been privy to before, constitute one of the best Christmas presents I have ever received. I can only hope that you, dear reader, enjoy them, too.



-Sarah's mother, Josephine. Probably taken in Romania circa 1920 something-





-Sarah's sister, Louise. Taken in the U.S. circa 1960 something-





-Sarah on her first birthday with her aunt (not the wicked one) Georgette. 1951-

Despite the fact that we are struggling just to make ends meet, I have taken the small financial plunge and upgraded this space to Blogspot Plus!

Bear with me, please, as I learn what ropes there may be to learn.

I feel your waves upon my beach,
an invitation
to shake these lonely mountains loose
and like lost Atlantis
sink. . .
. . . to the bottom of your ocean,
into your fathomless deep.

-for Sarah-

(originally published in the East and West Literary Quarterly, Winter '92)

To Jesus on His Birthday

For this your mother sweated in the cold,
For this you bled upon the bitter tree:
A yard of tinsel ribbon bought and sold;
A paper wreath; a day at home for me.
The merry bells ring out, the people kneel;
Up goes the man of God before the crowd;
With voice of honey and with eyes of steel
He drones your humble gospel to the proud.
Nobody listens. Less than the wind that blows
Are all your words to us you died to save.
O Prince of Peace! O Sharon's dewy Rose!
How mute you lie within your vaulted grave.
The stone the angel rolled away with tears
Is back upon your mouth these two thousand years.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1928 -

Earlier this month, I touched upon the idea of Bigfoot as an aspect of an archetypal wild man. Now, as we move headlong into the Christmas holiday, I bring you:

Santa Claus: Last of the Wild Men

Summarizing her book of the same name (available at Amazon) for Fortean Times (in an article originally published two years ago), Phyllis Siefker paints a fairly compelling portrait of the "jolly old elf" as a modern adaptation of a fertility god/wild man possibly pre-dating homo sapiens.

As the Christmas season engulfs us, Santa Claus, Father Christmas, and their international counterparts beam at us from every medium, hawking earthly treasures to delight our loved ones.

As we watch this portly figure entice us with baubles, we are witnessing the last remnant of the oldest sacred figure that exists, for Santa's past is full of ancient mysteries, with a depth few imagined. In the Middle Ages he was a Wild Man, a beast-man who jousted with knights in Merrie Olde England and dashed through Germanic streets during Carnival, frightening children and adults alike. In the Sixth Century, he was a beast-god so powerful that Pope Gregory the Great chose him to be Christianity's poster child for evil � the cloven-hoofed, goatish devil figure that persists even today. For millennia before that, he was worshiped as a god whose annual death was a necessity for life on earth itself.

And to all a good night, indeed!

Thanks to The Buddha Project (one of many new blogs on my ever growing roll to the left) for highlighting this story about the "Tibetan Festival of Compassion" currently in progress in the Indian capital of New Delhi (Sarah tells me the name has recently changed). His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself will be delivering the keynote speech - "Compassion: An Antidote to Terrorism" - on the last day of the festival.

While reading the story linked above I came across this description of the festival, a single element of which disturbed me not a little:

To the casual visitor, the venue of the festival being held in the Indian capital for the first time presents a purely cultural picture. Stalls cater to anything from Tibetan medication to meditation and friendly faces are all around, including that of Dolma Tsering, selected as Miss Tibet at a modest beauty pageant at Dharamsala in October.

If you are unable to determine what is wrong with this italicized picture, I will isolate it for you:

. . .selected as Miss Tibet at a modest beauty pageant at Dharamsala in October.

While I want in no way to detract from the more than important message of compassion His Holiness will be delivering on December 18, I must say. . . a Tibetan beauty pageant!?

As the event in question ocurred in October this is rather old news. My shock, however, is quite fresh since this is the first I've heard of it. For anybody reading this who is unaware:

I believe beauty pageants to be rituals of sexual objectification sprung from a patriarchal world view that is anachronistic at best. At its worst, the force of this Dominator mode is deadly (can you say fascism, suppression, war?).

The organizers of this event obviously don't agree with me:

"The Miss Tibet beauty competition will bring Tibetan culture forward in
time," the event organisers told the BBC's Outlook programme.

- BBC News, Thursday, 8 August, 2002 -

Responding to an official denouncement from the Tibetan Prime Minister and general claims from critics that the competition was "un-Tibetan", pageant producer Lobsang Wangyal offers the following:

"Our religion is from a foreign country," fumes Wangyal. "Buddha was Indian. Our food is Chinese, our clothes come from Mongolia. We have always borrowed from other cultures. A beauty pageant is just one more thing."

- Time Asia, October 21, 2002 / VOL. 160 NO. 15 -

Perhaps, Lobsang, but ask yourself, "What would Buddha do?" At least in the cases of Chinese cuisine and Buddhism you were getting the respective creams of China and India! Beauty pageants are the dregs at the black bottom of the worst of Western culture. Mr. Wangyal hopes, supposedly, to improve the plight of the Tibetan people with this competition.

The actual leaders of the Tibetan people, like me, don't approve of his methods:

"The Tibetan government feels that it is against the spirit of the teachings of Buddha," Thupten Psamphel, spokesman of the Tibetan government in exile, told Reuters. "The whole purpose of Buddhist civilization is to liberate the ego from the tyranny of the human body."

-LatelineNews: 2002-10-12 -

If any good does (or has) come out of this beauty competition then it will not have been completely bad. But exploitation of women is not a step forward, Mr. Wangyal. It is a big step back.

Related reading: Women In Theravada Buddhism

While channel surfing the other night (AT&T digital broadband) we stumbled upon The Crow: City of Angels and, despite the fact that both Sarah and myself were completely underwhelmed by the first movie, we watched for a few minutes before moving on to something more worthwhile.

Those few minutes have remained in my memory, however, due to a line uttered by the undead anti-hero of the film. As he wreaks his vengeance upon some lowly murderous thug, The Crow, in response to the thug's plea that he was only following orders and had no choice but to commit murder, makes the following pained observation as he dispatches the creep to the great beyond:

"You always have a choice."

This line has stuck in my head because it echoes a truth that revealed itself to me in the not too distant past.

Each of us, indeed, has a choice. Boiled down to its essence, this choice is between Good and Evil. These terms might seem a bit dramatic for most of us but I hold that they are appropriate, and that this choice is one made daily. Yes, that's right. . . we are dealing with choices of Good and Evil on a daily basis.

Consider, please, these twin verses from The Dhammapada as translated by Juan Mascaro:

Hold not a sin of little worth, thinking "This is little to me." The falling of drops of water will in time fill a water jar. Even so the foolish man becomes full of evil, although he gather it little by little.

Hold not a deed of little worth, thinking "This is little to me." The falling of drops of water will in time fill a water jar. Even so the wise man becomes full of good, although he gather it little by little.

We have the option of acting and interacting everyday in ways that are positive, constructive and beneficial to ourselves, the people around us and the world in general - whether it be something simple as helping a blind man cross the street (assuming he needs or desires help) or complex as disobeying rules you know to be wrong - or not.

I think this is what The Crow was trying to tell the poor sap who crossed him. Of course, he might have followed the path of his own logic and refrained from compounding violence with violence by murdering the murderer. But The Crow as a non-violent pacifist would be another movie. . .

Bigfoot is dead?

Long live Bigfoot!

While I have maintained an active interest in Bigfoot news and lore for some years now, I have never been one to argue either for or against the actual existence of such a beast. With the recent passing of Bigfoot hoaxer Ray Wallace, and the posthumous assertion by his son that bigfoot accompanied his father to the grave ("The reality is, Bigfoot just died. . ."), I feel a need to speak up on behalf of the big hairy guy who has been haunting our imaginations if not our woods for millennia.

Ray Wallace may have introduced the hairy man to the modern world back in 1958 with his good natured pranks as Mark Chorvinsky states:

"The fact is there was no Bigfoot in popular consciousness before 1958. America got its own monster, its own Abominable Snowman, thanks to Ray Wallace,"Mark Chorvinsky, editor of Strange Magazine, told The Seattle Times.

The fact remains, however, that Bigfoot and his kind have roamed the landscapes of mythology (and, perhaps, reality) for as long as we have been walking upright. As wild man and animal person he has lurked at the fringes of cultures around the world. Certainly the native peoples of North America knew him under many names, Sasquatch the most recognizable. They have known him in China for a very long time as the Yeren and in Australia he is called Yowie. He answers to Alma in Russia and, of course, Yeti in the Himalayan ranges.

In the Pacific Northwest, where Mr. Wallace's family claim their loved one "created" big foot, the "creature" that would one day acquire that name thanks to Mr. Wallace was making news long before 1958. In 1884 a mysterious ape-like creature (either a young Sasquatch, a chimpanzee or a complete fabrication depending upon whom you get the story from) was captured by railroad workers in British Columbia and later named Jacko. 1924 saw the infamous Ape Canyon attack, in which a group of miners were allegedly terrorized by a group of ape like creatures near Mt. St. Helens.

Even now reports of sightings, encounters and mysterious footprints continuing to accumulate around the globe. I'm sure they will continue to do so in spite of and because of people like Ray Wallace.

And what are we to make of these stories? What we will, I suppose. I tend to think that if and when the Bigfoot mystery is ever solved, we will pull that wild man from the woods and find that he looks a lot like the recently departed Mr. Wallace, after all, and a lot like you and me.

Life, that diligent poet

Life, that diligent poet, day by day
Scrawls his work upon us
In blood and tears and sweat and spit
Until our time is measured in years
And we are covered in lines that he has writ.
Death, contrary, is in no hurry
To share her darker verse,
Saving the craft of her rhyme
For a quieter time
When we are more likely to enjoy it.

- R. Cody -