New Lunar Year, New Valentine's Day

Kung Hee Fat Choy! Happy New Year ... Year of the Metal Ox, 2021

 

Every February around this time of year, an envelope shows up in our mail box. I look forward to the white envelope encasing a beautiful card and a bright red envelope with a crisp $1 bill inside. Red envelopes are a traditional Chinese gift of good luck and wealth for the new year. 

This red envelope starting coming from a woman I've known since we were girls growing up on O'ahu. Sharon became a realtor, and when la coyuntura, the situation, or moment in time came for me to sell our family home I turned to her to do that. She was, and probably still is, good at that. The decision to sell my family home has come with many contradictions and emotions since 2004. Regrets and reasons entangle. Yet, this season does come with more understanding and hard work. 

La Coyuntura is rarely a simple path, would you say, Aurora? I learned the meaning and application of this Spanish word thanks to writer Aurora Levins Morales and her book Medicine Stories. As I sit at the keys, on a day where my incredible immune systems once again embraces me with messages, whispers from my heart tell me how to spend time healing and wholing myself. 

Story medicine is one of the best sorts of care I know. Knowing about good books, and a good story do so much for my immune system. Sophie Anderson's enchanting book The House with Chicken Legs is helping me from the inside out. Anderson's version of Baba Yaga and her house with chicken legs is my new lunar year and new valentine's gift. Passages like this, blend with the tincture of Motherwort that allies with my racing heart that no longer will be calmed with medication. It is a different experience to be calmed and encouraged to open to many options at the same time, rather than this and not that.

"Yaga houses," says The Old Yaga, "are clever and loyal. If they know what their Yaga wants, they'll do everything they can to give it to them. Like my house grew me a laboratory, and walked me all the way here...I think your house made you alive because it wants you to be happy."

Could I believe a house to be so magical? 

When I have been lost the tools and methods for finding my way have been varied. When I made that decision to leave my childhood home, it never occurred to me my house was helping make that decision with me. But now, my heart knows differently and while the whispers have always been there, perhaps I have become old and young enough to hear them.

For today, and this new year, new valentine's day I thought I'd assemble some thoughts from friends and family. In July, 2020 when I was celebrating the whole of the month for Pete's 4th of July birthday I sent an email asking people: "If you were lost would you use a compass?"

The responses were as varied and different as each of these people are different. Different gifts. Different red envelopes. I've edited some of the answers and left the names secreted to preserve privacy. Some of the responses are lost somewhere in the email winds. They were wonderful. Thank you for them.

Here are a few I did find. Happy Valentine's Day. 

" i never get lost now because i have tattoos on my feet with the 4 directions and the ancient spiral which is the movement of air, energy and water on the planet...but if by some chance i do get lose momentarily i will ask a woman for directions."

" If I was lost I would use a pie, trying a sliver of a piece for each direction. A taste from north,  a feast in the east, savory in the south and finishing the rest in the west.  Pie Pie me O my to be such a lucky guy."

"So I never really understood how to use a compass and growing up on a island there was no need for a compass anyway so why bother. There was either mauka, makai, north shore, windward, diamond head and ewa. And if I'm going someplace I've never been, I always ask people for landmarks including service stations, stores, anything that added information to where I was going... For me these days if I get lost I call it a "field trip"  but I'm never that far off the grid. Hmmmmmmm. Interesting..."

How about you, would you use a compass if you were lost? I'd love to hear your story. And if there is a story about your house and her/his magic I'd really love to hear that one.