My new year is a gong that's still ringing.
On December 31st, I held an End of Year Lunch at my house, and invited the Art Theatre. This was a party for Leonid, and people who support his work.
We are sitting in my empty living room. In the center is a long low table draped with a bright turquoise and orange Australian cloth. Candles. A fire. Buddhist incense. Tall windows framing taller cedars. Peace.
"This house is not a home," said Leonid. "It is a church. You live in a church."
This is how my home feltThe kitchen table was full of potluck foods. Taiwanese traditional New Year's vegies. Cantonese noodles. Yugoslavian gibanice (cheese quiche) & hot apple pie. Caesar salad. Texan frito & chili & sour cream pie, the chili still bubbling in the crockpot. Japanese soba soup, served steaming hot at the table -- vegie for vegetarians, chicken for the rest -- with seaweed. American sweet-potato pie & whip cream. Belgian chocolates. Organic Fuji apples & red grapes, crumbly blue cheese, Jarlsbeg cheese, sharp cheddar cheese, walnuts, and cashews. To drink, Martinelli's apple cider, Thomas Kemper's grape pop, some kind of Porter beer, Wolfschmitz vodka, Chinese ginseng tea, Tetley's English black tea, and Aquafina water for all.
Warm hum of conversation. A few rooms for silence. One room looks out three walls of windows onto forest. "The best room in the house," said Radmila.
We take our places at the table and sit, grateful for the cushions. The conversation is a braided flow of Russian and English, splashed with Japanese and Serbian.
"It was a very non-American meal," said one guest afterwards. "We all sat at one table. We were all in the same conversation. We spoke from the heart, about important things."
I stripped cushions off the green couches and set them around the table, to eat Japanese-style. Twelve places were laid, eleven people sat. "Who was missing?" I asked Leonid that night. "Who was supposed to be in that empty chair?" "How do you know someone was not there?" he said.
We went around twice. The first time, everyone said something about 2005, the year just ending. Then a liesurely half-hour pause, with refills and soup. Then around the table again, each person saying what is coming in 2006. "What you say, you will get," said Leonid. "Please, speak very concretely." Wes, from Vladivostok, interpreted.
I said that by the end of 2006:
- my theatre book will be finished
- I will have slow steady control of my money
- I will be 90 pounds lighter
New job was ringing in my head, and
Love but I feel those are coming on their own.
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2005 was the year of death to me. With theatre turning to dust and smoke, I couldn't see why I was alive. My new venture, the thing beyond theatre, kept starting and stopping. Working on myself was like working on an abandoned garden -- pulling off leaves, untangling roots, pruning branches. Whole trees and forests were getting uprooted. But on the outside, I saw little change except for my eating vegetarian and my house getting cleaner. Each time we cleaned, the rivulets of golden floor snaked a little further.
"You can't go upstairs," I told the party guests. "It's not clean yet." But it nearly is. The bathroom is clean. The nook is clean. The bedroom, now becoming a sitting room, is half clean. "I've been here 35 times and I've never seen the upstairs," said Ian. "Do you want to see it now?" I asked. "No," he said. "I want to see it when it's done."
2006 is the year of life. The hard invisible work of 2005 will start to show in 2006. Our venture has found its feet and is growing softer & steadier. I am involved in theatre, helping with Leonid's
Seagull. There is more cleaning to do.
I am getting a grasp on the formless Way. It is nothing but ethics.
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After dinner, I passed around a basket of eggs. Beautiful tin eggs, copied from Russian Faberge eggs, made in England, which I bought in Denmark.
Tin eggs, copied from FabergeWhen Leonid chose his, he recognized both the egg and the picture on it. "This one is mine," he said with satisfaction. "I know this egg."
Leonid's egg, the Imperial Cameo Egg
The Faberge original, also known as the Catherine The Great EggHenrik Wigström, Fabergé's last head workmaster, created the Imperial Cameo Egg for Nicholas II to present to his mother, Maria Fyodorovna, on Easter morning in 1914. Vasilii Zuev, a designer employed by the firm, painted the pink enamel panels after French artist François Boucher. The cameo scenes are outlined in seed pearls and accented with sprays of diamonds. The large central panels represent the arts and sciences, while the smaller panels personify the four seasons. It features Catherine the Great, who prided herself on being a patron of the arts and sciences.
My egg
The original Lilies of the Valley EggInside each egg were several small gifts.
- an I Ching card
- small booklet pages interpreting the I Ching card
- a rough paper with Chekhov's "Only the truth can heal, only the truth can cure" written on it
- a red string wrapped around the Chekhov paper
- a candle to light on the first day of the year
- a Dove milk chocolate
- a mint chocolate
I led us in a purification ritual, using the red string and some grasses, so we would sleep cleanly & purely that night, protected as we entered the new year. Then we ate the chocolates and relaxed, as I played the Adagio from Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata.
My I Ching card, "The Receptive"My card said, "All creative endeavors can now come to full fruition," as long as I maintain balance and continue steady effort.
I have been approaching situations since then, remembering that I am The Receptive. I catch myself halfway going,
Don't push. Receive. If we embody our qualities, we are:
The Traveller, Development/Gradual Progress, Ascension, Enthusiasm, Inner Truth, Revolution/Shedding, Before Fulfillment, Peace, The Power of the Great, The Receptive, Turning Point/Return. 
Leonid's card, The Traveller =========
After everyone left, Jeff and I sat talking. I hadn't seen him in weeks. He has been housesitting. The phone rang. It was Paul & Leonid, inviting me to join them at the Shinto shrine's midnight New Year's blessing service. "Yes," I said. Jeff and I talked another hour, he opened his egg --
The Power Of The Great To Tame -- and I left for Capitol Hill.
Shinto is a Japanese religion. "Older than Buddhism," says Yoko, who says that New Year's Eve in Japan is a quiet day of reflection. "In Japan, no one can get into the shrine for the New Year's blessing" she said. "We just go in long lines to the outside. Only the priests are inside." In both countries, the blessing services are offered all night, starting just before midnight.
An hour north of Seattle is one of the few
Shinto shrines in the U.S., the
Tsubaki Shrine in America. We entered by walking through a 30-foot-high Shinto shrine sign made of whole tree trunks.
It was dark, cold, clear. "Oreeon," said Leonid. "Cassiopeia," said Yoko, pointing to another. We ladled water over our hands, left hand first, then some in our mouths; prayed; bowed. Our path wound past golden Miyazaki lanterns, to a roaring caged outdoor fire. I could hear the river in near-flood. Lit by Leonid's and Paul's faint blue cellphones, we walked down to its rocky banks. The river was blackness, the sky a paler black. Each tree looked mystical. I felt like I was standing inside a Miyazaki film. It's one thing to watch Chihiro cross the bridge to the house of the Spirits. It's another to find myself on that same bridge.
The Tsubaki Shinto ShrineWe entered between two stone lions.
(I stopped just now for a bean-and-cheese burrito. Our vending machines at work now have vegetarian food. Here's a bow of thanks to whoever is responsible for that.)
We waited upstairs in a meditation room on tatami mats, where we were served hot tea and knelt in small murmuring groups. When the time came, they led us downstairs to the temple, where we knelt in front of the altar. Well, Paul and Yoko knelt. Leonid and I, less hardy, sat on small folding-cot chairs on that blue cloth to the left.
Inside the shrine temple room (haiden)
People receiving New Year's purification blessingAfter the service, we left the main temple room and walked through an anteroom where we were served a sip of something alcoholic, and given the chance to buy amulets for specific blessings. Ours looked different than the ones shown below, but felt similar. I got the amulet for "Life Compass." Yoko got a white arrow for the year, to put in their house.
Shinto amulets of blessing & protectionEach Shinto shrine is for a particular god. This one is for the god of artists, who is a woman. She does belly-dancing, music, all the arts. Her husband used to be a god of war, but after watching his wife belly-dance and do the arts, he got calm and now he is the god of peace.
Then we drove back to Leonid's apartment, where he baked hot cabbage piroshgis, served with fresh blackberries and strawberries. I, having been awake 43 hours, fell asleep by the heater. Paul awoke me the next morning, and I drove home. Wet roads, 7:30am. The new year.
