Frantic February

What a banner week the calender is having: almost everyday a holiday. This is so intense, it's no wonder February gets cut short. Who could stand more hoopla than we've got now? Just look at Chinese New Year. It was February 10 and maybe also February 6--astrologers cite both, but the celebration definitely goes on 14 days. In San Francisco the big bang parade isn't until February 23.

So there's a lot of Gung Hay Fat Choy going around. This evidently has become the preferred Chinese greeting, May you get rich, instead of thet old-fashioned one: May your rice never burn. I suppose if you get rich, you can eat out, so burning rice is not your problem any more.

February 10 was also Tet, the Vietnamese New Year with fireworks and foods galore.

February 11 was Tibetan New Year, Losar, so for several days Tibetans have been running around eating momos (dumplings) and long noodles (for long years/life) and wishing everybody Losar Tashi Delek. Tashi Delek, meaning "may all go well for you"  is the greeting those in diaspora adopted as the culture's namaste or shalom or salaam or aloha. Monastery altars are piled to the max with food, flowers, tormas and juice boxes as well as pots of wheatgrass, for the bounty of the coming year can supposedly be measured through the omen of how high the wheatgrass pushes itself up in the pot. And so nobody has to sit and watch it grow, there's lama dancing in brocades and wooden head masks.

For Vietnamese, Tibetans and Chinese, this week ushered in the year of the water snake. This is supposed to make us think: yin, quiet intelligence, quick strike. It should also make us think: Eek! Snakes are bad news, venomous creatures, so it shouldn't be surprising how treacherous snake years can be. They've brought us Sept 11, 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 people, the crushing of the 1989 Tianamen pro-democracy protests and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The 1929 stock market plunge that heralded the Great Depression also occurred in a Snake year.  I'm warning you. Now is the time for keen awareness on all fronts.

The fact that this is a water snake year is supposed to temper its intensity. But frankly, the words water snake just make me think of plumbing. That's why I called my plumber to say: Gung Hay Fat Choy, even though he is an American, of Greek descent. Why shouldn't he get rich? And why shouldn't I do whatever I can to maintain a tight relationship with someone critical to my well-being. Wouldn't you want a plumber to respond the minute your toilet starts to act up or your sink overflow?  I want all clogs snaked. I hold the plumber right up there with the great Mahakala, the fierce black skull wearing deity who removes obstacles. You can't be too careful, especially in a year that portends disaster.


Already the next day in headlines and televised images from the State of the Union booming out of DC, we could all see what disaster to be on the lookout for, what the French call the idee fixe, the habituation the Buddha called the essence of Samsara.. Not ironically, it was Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, another excuse to blot out reality with excessive merriment as winter eases up, or as I like to put it, another day of binge before the six Lenten weeks that must have been the model for all those diet to get into your summer clothes binges we have now.

February 12 was also Lincoln's Birthday. It's gotten pretty thin and bearded like the man himself. It used to be a holiday but it isn't any more because that day of the week kept moving around the calendar. Evidently having a holiday that could fall on Tuesday or Saturday annoyed people who prefer their ideas totally fixed--seems to be a convenience to them not to have to rethink anything. We hold the ice cream and cake because Lincoln no longer gets a birthday party on his day. He gets crammed into President's Day, which falls on some Monday or other in the middle of this month, Monday being the preferred day the stuck minded find convenient for a made-up holiday. 

Stuck-minded, or fixed face, is of course a perfect description of the party of Lincoln, the Republicans as they revealed themselves on his birthday. They don't much seem to like new years or new holidays or new ideas or new anything any more. Impermanence undoes them. They've been saying the same damned thing over and over now for years, droning on and on hoping somebody will finally believe them just to shut them up. You don't have to be the Buddha to diagnose how badly they like, ahem, to stick to their guns. 

I am still half blind from detached retina surgery, but wondering if I am the only person who sees with the third eye that there is essentially no difference between these crackpots of the Tea Party--how's that for sly phrasing --and the Al Qaeda/Taliban we are so busy stamping out with drones. Drones: you know, those quiet, quick strike, venomous air snakes. Don't both the Tea Party and Taliban want to enslave women, destroy governments, glorify violence and guns and the worst sorts of machismo? Don't both want to damn and turn back the flow of time and its changes? Aren't both so blinded by an inchoate rage--rage being all too easily mistaken for a sign of life because it makes you feel so slive--they're happy to use scorched earth tactics, destroying everything to get what they want? Aren't both what the Buddha would have called fixated, attached and thus kicking up a blinding blizzard of hellish karma? Since we learned this week that killing American terrorists is not on the taboo list, why is no one suggesting Obama drone these drones too?Is it because although they are dangerous diehards they are our dangerous diehards? ( see story about the broken cup a few weeks back.)

An ugly explosive mess, the states of the Union, but take heart because today is all about hearts. It's Valentine's Day, good old February 14. Right here when everybody's had more than enough of winter's dark chill, we get a holiday about the bright warmth of love. Suddenly everything all snow white is covered with blood red...red hearts. Eros' arrows, maybe the original unmanned drones, are flying all over the place starting fireworks to make our life blood race. Get us revved for renewal and spring and keeping the human race running.

And of course because every holiday in our consumer culture requires shopping, today's the sweet heart day for chocolates and flowers. What joy to the world, what pacemaker for even the heaviest heart: chocolates and flowers. Who wouldn't want chocolates or flowers? Well, I am sorry to say, apparently all of us who care about the environment, other people and the future. As too many investigative reports have told us, all those roses by the dozen are coming up from Ecuador and Colombia where the vital rain forest is being cleared to grow them. And they're being poisonously died those absurdly unnatural non-rose blue and green and bright yellow colors for no good reason at all.

Now, today of all days, horror of horror, comes a report that all the drugstore and department store chocolate in those heart shaped red boxes is tainted with the blood and sweat of over two million African children trapped in horrific slavery to pick the beans that produce it for enormous, who cares, international corporations like Nestle and Hershey. We can't even enjoy a guilt-free Kiss anymore. And those dancing M & Ms? They are as evil as Simon Legree. 

All this thrust upon us, just when we had to stop giving out those tiny, brightly dyed sugar hearts that conveyed messages like Be Mine, or I'm Yours because giving those lovable little treats to tots was essentially giving them diabetes. And who wanted to do that?

There isn't even any solace left in sending your Valentine a card. The Post Office is about to call it quits, starting with Saturday delivery.  And some locales like San Francisco have already called it quits on paper. Just yesterday the cashier at a well known boutique asked me if I'd mind putting the bulky sweater I'd just bought in my purse because the city had now banned using paper shopping bags. (Don't start me on that short sighted stupidity.) This follows the trend of charging you for a printed paper bill. So goodbye Hallmark hearts. At least Charlie Brown won't have to die of disappointment reaching into the mailbox on February 14. One disaster averted.

This dissing of chocolate, flowers and cards is of course probably great news to everyone not expecting to be anybody's Valentine. It's going to help ease a lot of imagined hurt and self-doubt. But then of course, this whole idea of Valentine's Day is rooted in absolutely nothing and totally made up. Whether it was by Chaucer or Brits five centuries later is not known for sure. Only that there was no single St. Valentine martyred in the name of romantic love. There was perhaps a Roman zealot Valens (valor, power) martyred on February 14 for refusal to renounce his love of Jesus but that seems to be about it. Here it is again, your friend, emptiness.

It's my guess, and only a half blind guess right now, that the Brits didn't have a New Year like the Asians do to break up the dark, cold monotony of winter and craved a bit of bright, warmth right now, the sort you can get from a flame of love. The sap rises, the blood revs, the clogs get cleared. Spring is coming with its promise of renewal, rebirth and full bloom. Amid the fireworks of sprouting buds and leaves, we can get full of heart and rich in hope. And happily forsake chocolate because it's swimsuit time and we have to avoid disaster this year.

P.S. Next week is Washington's birthday. Remember him? The politician who supposedly said: "I cannot tell a lie." 


~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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