Standing like a tree in the rain
Tai chi in the park this morning with the regulars: four aunties and Mr. Huang, who is ninety-one and still has the straightest spine in the whole park.
It drizzled, so we skipped the form and did zhan zhuang, standing post. Knees soft, arms rounded like you're hugging a big ball, and then nothing. Just standing, twenty minutes.
My grandmother used to say the tree doesn't fight the rain. It lets the water run down to its roots. I thought about that with rain running down my sleeves and into my armpits, which was less poetic, but I think still the point.
Feeding Grandmama's lodestones
In my dresser drawer there's a red flannel bag that used to live in my grandmother's. Inside, a pair of lodestones. Lodestone is natural magnetite, a stone that pulls, and in rootwork we keep them for drawing good things close: steady work, good luck, people who mean you well.
You feed them. Fridays I take them out, say a few words over them, sprinkle a pinch of magnetic sand so it bristles up on them like little whiskers, and dress them with a drop of oil. Then back into the flannel.
Grandmama said a fed stone is a working stone, and a hungry stone gets lazy. I've never once let them get lazy.
I put my grandmother's pendulum in a spreadsheet
Background: engineer, skeptic, but my farmor's brass pendulum has a strange track record in our family. So I ran an experiment.
Setup: 200 yes/no questions with answers I could check later (coin flips, sealed envelopes my sister prepared, next-day weather). Half the time I knew the answer while asking. Half the time I didn't.
Results:
• When I knew the answer: pendulum 'correct' 91% of the time.
• When I didn't: 52%. Basically a coin flip.
So the ideomotor effect is real, and my hands know what my head knows. Case closed, right?
Except here's the part I didn't expect. During the trials where I knew the answer, it started moving before I'd consciously decided anything, like it was showing me what I believed faster than I could think it. Which made me wonder whether my farmor was ever asking the pendulum to predict the future. Maybe she was asking it to tell her what she already knew, underneath the worry.
Last week I tested that the honest way. I'd been going back and forth on a job offer for days. Held the pendulum, asked 'Do I want this?' and it swung a hard yes before I'd even finished the sentence. I sat there laughing, because the spreadsheet would say that's just my own muscles. And yes. That's the point. I'd been ignoring them for a week.
I took the job. Farmor would have said 'I told you so' in Swedish, over coffee. Still a skeptic. Slightly less smug about it.
Pebbles that become a boulder
Many shrines in Japan keep a sazare-ishi, a big lump of rock made of small pebbles cemented together over ages. It's named for an old poem about little pebbles slowly growing into a great boulder, with moss covering it.
I'd never take a stone from shrine grounds; those belong where they are. But on my last visit home, at the river below my grandmother's village, she pointed at the water and told me to choose one. I picked a small grey pebble and wrapped it in washi.
It sits below my kamidana now. Some days it reminds me of patience. Some days it just reminds me of her hand, pointing at the river.