Mountain View Obon Odori 2015

San Jose has one of the largest Obon festivals in the Bay Area, put on by the Buddhist church I attend. I was in San Diego last weekend when the San Jose Obon Odori was happening, so I attended Mountain View's festival instead.

First, a few words on Obon. I'm going to paraphrase the description given by The Buddhist Churches of America but you can view a more complete description on their website.

Obon is a time to celebrate our loved ones who have passed on. Some traditions of Buddhism believe that it is a time when the spirits of our loved ones can return to spend the day with us, much like Mexico's Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertes). In the Jodo Shinshu tradition, that belief is viewed more as a superstition, and Obon instead is a day of celebration, Kangi-e ("Gathering of Joy"). We celebrate our gratitude for those who have moved on, as well as those still with us, and all who have made contributions to our lives. It is a time to remind ourselves to live with compassion, patience, and joy. Obon Odori, is a name for the collection of special dances done by all at the Obon festival.

The Obon festival is held separate from the Obon service so everyone can respect the more solemn side of the occasion, as we all know how hard losing someone we love can be even though we can be grateful and joyful for the time we did have with them. Our service was this last weekend, so I didn't have to miss it.

The guest speaker spoke of joy and gratitude, for our loved ones and for our precious, impermanent lives. Below is a poem he read and passed out, reprinted from Discovering Buddhism in Everyday Life, by Reverend Marvin Harada. It is a poem by Scott Morris.

I have ALS- and I am grateful.
I am grateful to retire early to be with my family.
I am grateful I have family and friends that are so
supportive and hopeful.
I am grateful I can still walk and get around.
When that is gone-
I am grateful I can still use my hands to feed myself.
When that is gone-
I am grateful I can still breathe and laugh and feel.
When that is gone-
I am grateful I had a wonderful life.
And when that is gone-
Namoamidabutsu

Namo Amida Butsu can be literally translated as "I take refuge in Amida Buddha". Without getting too lengthy, let me just say that it is my very novice understanding that Jodo Shinshu Buddhism does not translate the historical Buddhist texts very literally. Amida Buddha was not the historical Buddha that walked this earth hundreds of years ago. That was Shakyamuni Buddha. It is important to note here that all Buddhas are human, are not gods, not the son (or daughter) of any god, and do not possess mystical powers.


It is said that there is a Buddha who basically reigns over each universe, and there are millions of universes. Amida Buddha is the Buddha who reigns over the Pure Land, a lot like heaven I guess, but for every living thing and every living person, regardless of personal beliefs.

But the Jodo Shinshu tradition believes that the scriptures (as well as scriptures from all religions) have stories and symbols in them that are not to be taken literally. These stories are told to us because they contain a lesson, and it is up to us to incorporate that lesson into our lives.

Amida Buddha is a symbol of compassion, and the interconnectedness of all beings and things. We recite Namo Amida Buddha to immerse ourselves in this collective compassion from which all things are made. Yes, there are parts of life we consider bad, things that are painful. But everything just is. There will be pain and suffering, and sorrow. But there will also be joy, peace, love. None of these things last forever, they are like the wind- just passing by.

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
-Mary Elizabeth Frye

The choir sang the above poem for our service as well, in Japanese.

A really good resource for those looking for a simple, easy to understand glimpse into Jodo Shinshu Buddhism is the book "Ocean" by Kenneth K. Tanaka.

Onto the Obon festival!

A friend of mine from church plays in the Chidori band that plays for a lot of the Obon festivals in the area (among other things) and invited me to the Mountain View festival. It's open to the public, free, serves lots of food, drinks, has games and raffles, Taiko drumming (you'll see in a second), and of course the Obon Odori- dances.


When I first arrived, the Taiko drumming was going on.

I love the drumming, super cool. Unfortunately I arrived at their last number, but that's ok. Off I went to explore the grounds.

I have to say, the place was mostly food. I should not have eaten before coming, even though it was only a light meal. I still made room for beef teriyaki, sushi, and an Italian soda. They had all sorts of food, not just Japanese.

They had cultural displays and games as well.

Their hondo (temple) appears quite a bit larger than ours.

I didn't go inside. They opened it for a short service to talk about the meaning of Obon, but the band was playing outside and my friend said it was much like the service we had had that morning.

The band set up and played for a half hour before the dancers came out.

Occasionally there was a large uproar from the Bingo hall.

The band had a variety of singers, from traditionally clad to "J-Pop".

Finally it was time for the dancing. Ten traditional songs and dances were performed. Dance instructors took to the stage, and then everyone was invited to circle around and dance. Most wore Kimonos or Happy Coats, some knew the dances well, some not. There were old and young.

Here are a few clips of the dances, sorry for the amateur quality.

Bah...ok, you only get one. The other two (including my favorite one) are too large for blogger, and I'm not totally hip on how to go about editing video.

Anyway, I had a really great time. I didn't dance, as I just wanted to take it all in and see what goes on. Next year I would like to go to some of the dance practices so I know at least partially what I'm doing before joining in on the dancing next year.

Photography Run!

I do my own adventure runs. The local Road Runner Sports has tried to recruit me for their adventure run on several occasions. I have a couple problems with that. First of all, I run 4 days a week and that is apparently plenty for my body. And since I only run 4 days a week, each of those runs needs to be a quality run. Training with a purpose. This leads me to the second issue. I do not run for fun.

When I told the manager at RRS that I do not need another training run during the week, he said "Oh no, this is not training. It's just for fun."

Then why would I be doing it?

If I am so strict and particular on all 4 of my runs each week (most are at different paces depending on the training plan), why on earth would I lace up my shoes a 5th day....just for fun?

You know what sounds fun? Not running. Watching a movie, reading a book, swimming in a river, stand-up paddle boarding (soon!), eating chocolate...or eating pretty much anything, maybe riding my bike, taking a nap, drinking coffee....

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, my homemade, solo adventure runs. Fridays are adventure runs. It came to my attention at my last half marathon that I have transformed into a true flat-lander. I never thought I'd see the day. I used to charge up hills, passing everyone who beat me on the flats.

But now I live in the valley and all my training runs are flat. That had to be remedied. Which meant I would have to get in my car and drive to the hills. If the hills wouldn't come to me, I would go to them.

If you remember, a couple weeks ago I ran up to English Camp at Almaden Quicksilver County Park. Without my camera. Of course there were bright purple sweat pea flowers lining the old stone chimney on a clearing at the top of Church Hill. Of course there was a momma and baby deer munching on shrubs just 20 feet from me. Of course there were old ruins of buildings that I had no way to take a photo of.

Today I brought my camera. I would hit up Hidalgo Cemetery by way of English Camp Trail and Yellow Kid Trail, stopping to take photos of English Camp, Spanish Town, the cemetery, and hopefully the humongous rotary furnace somewhere up by Spanish Town.

I got to the park early because I know it gets hot on those trails. After two weeks, I expected the flowers to be gone, as flowers don't last very long in this climate. I parked my car at the Vichy Spring as the parking lot to the trails wouldn't open for another hour.

Quicksilver park used to be home to a quicksilver (duh) mining operation. Pretty lucrative I guess. Quicksilver is also known as mercury, and it was used by gold miners to extract gold efficiently from ore. Without quicksilver, extracting the gold was costly and inefficient. So it was pretty darn important.

So mercury is everywhere out here.

As I approached the trail head, I saw a sign that wasn't normally there and hoped it wasn't closed for some sort of mountain biking event. Nope.

Oh, well that's nice.

I don't know if I'm big enough for a mountain lion to think twice about eating me. I never run outside with headphones on, not that mountain lions make much noise on approach. But I was running alone.

Two female runners came down the hill and saw me reading the sign. One informed me that they've been running here several times a week and haven't seen one. And they didn't see one today. The other told me to be careful.

Hum. Lovely.

Up I went. I thought about how I could simultaneously scare a mountain lion away while managing to get a good picture.

Up ahead I saw a flock of wild turkeys. That was a good sign. If there were smaller critters than me out and about, it was a good sign that I was not about to get eaten. It's not like the mountain lion is looking at these tasty little birds and thinking "You know, I think I'll wait around for something bigger and more difficult to come around. I'm not that hungry, I can wait."

The turkeys refused to pose for a picture. Sorry. I tried.

I turned off the main trail up English Camp Trail. Here we go. Off the beaten path. Totally getting eaten now.

I saw two little bunnies in the path. Good omen. Not anyone's breakfast yet.

My garmin beeped that it had lost satellite reception. What?!

Yes, I am that girl that stops and waits to collect satellites. I decided now was a good time to take a bathroom break, came back and it was still collecting satellites.

Finally we were good to go. I continued up to English Camp.

I was right about the flowers, pretty much. There were a few, but nothing like two weeks ago.

 An old tin building. There are picnic tables up here as well as a place to park your bikes, and a place to park your horses.

 The old Mine Office and Map House.

I turned to walk up to Church Hill to see about the flowers around the chimney, bummed to not see the deer in the brush, and I looked up and saw this:

 He stood and stared at me while I attempted to take the perfect picture.

Meh, they turned out alright.

He walked into the brush and I continued cautiously up the hill. Deer aren't a ton safer than mountain lions and are better left alone.

Here are some of the flowers I was talking about, although not nearly as striking as they were a couple weeks ago.

I came back down the hill and saw the little buck was joined by a friend. Two bucks stood munching in the grass. By the time I readied my camera, one had walked away.

Back down at English Camp:

I went up the hill a tad until I found Yellow Kid Trail, a small single track that nearly assured I would be eaten by a mountain lion. I reconsidered for a second and then followed it. We all go sometime, right? Not far into the trail, a ton of quail scattered....see....still safe.

 Along the Yellow Kid Trail, you can see the valley socked in by the morning inversion layer.

Just outside of Spanish Town (apparently no buildings remain of Spanish Town, so this is something else):

I would just like to point out that this building had poison oak growing out of its foundation. That alone makes it uninhabitable.

So apparently this is Spanish Town:

 And that glowing ball of fire is the sun. I believe the power lines were not original to Spanish Town.

The only thing that survives of Spanish Town is the cacti (apparently imported by them), the hanging tree (which I did not find) and the cemetery.

Almaden Reservoir down there, which I think I may have posted pictures of before from the downhill side of my Hicks Road rides.

Leading down to the cemetery.

I guess there are no longer any remains (I could be wrong) and definitely no headstones. But here's something.

I was just over 2.5 miles in, so it was time to turn around. I looked around at all the oak trees but was unsure of where the hanging tree was suppose to be. As I got back up into Spanish Camp, I looked around again for this ginormous rotary furnace (I mean, it's huge, you can't miss it) but didn't find it. I considered going around the next bend, but that can be hazardous as I have a tendency to stretch that a bit much. I always like to see what's beyond the next bend.... at some point you have to draw a line. Next time. Next time I will find the rotary furnace (which was apparently right there) as well as the hanging tree.

This here is a chimney:

I don't really know much about it at this point. But it's very prominent from the Hacienda parking lot and park entrance.

There's the parking lot....way down there.

A closer look at the chimney (thanks to zoom):

Some mining paraphernalia down by the parking lot. 

And then across the street from the park entrance:

The purpose of the Friday runs are to get some hill work, commune with nature, and have an adventure. They aren't very fast but they are challenging and, dare I say, fun. Not only are there many more trails at Quicksilver to explore (hopefully sans kitty cat), but there are other parks to check out as well.

Well This is Awkward

I was reading my Bicycling magazine, specifically an article on CO2 pumps. They can be a little fussy, and if you do it wrong you've still got a flat tire and you're out of CO2. I myself have wrestled with these things (CO2 pumps inflate your bike tire by using compressed CO2 which saves you the body strain of attempting to hand-pump your tire up to 120 psi) to about a 50% success rate.

The article had a select list of CO2 pumps that explained the pros and cons of each. The last one on the list showed a dual pump: part hand pump and part CO2 pump. I had a vision. At the base of my hand pump is something that almost resembles a dial. Could it be my hand pump is also a CO2 pump?

I jumped up from the couch to check it out. My first observation was that my hand pump was not on my bike. Hum. I have done two rides apparently without my hand pump on my bike. Kicking myself now.

I found my pump and flipped it over to view the dial type thing on the bottom.

Well. What's funny is, if I didn't share this with you, I could keep my embarrassment to myself and no one would ever have to know. But then again, embarrassing stories are interesting.

So....it turns out there is a high pressure switch on the bottom of my hand pump.

Let me explain.

Mountain bike tires use a fairly low air pressure (40-50 psi maybe). Road tires use a high pressure, like 110-125 psi. I have a road bike. The idea is that in an effort to not waste CO2 cartridges, and get the most out of a cartridge, you first pump up the tire with your hand pump until you can pump no more, and then you switch to compressed gas and it finishes off the tire.

This dial switches the pump from a low pressure (high volume) pump to a high pressure (low volume) pump. Mechanically I'm not entirely sure how that works, but that's not important. What is important though, is to have the dial switched to the correct setting.

I spun the dial to see which setting I had it on currently.

Ha! Yep. 0-40 psi. Hmmm. So I'm thinking- pressure vs volume. I bet if I had that thing switched to the correct setting, I would be able to inflate my tire a little more easily. Makes me think back to all those times on the side of the road where I pushed as hard as I could and wondered how people with less upper body strength ever manage to inflate their tires.

I bet they use the correct setting.

This Beautiful Life

My only regret is that I have no pictures of today to share with you. Well that's not true. I suppose I could share pictures of my food with you, however odd it may be that I have pictures of my food. And yes, I should be doing homework. But I got about midway through my lab report on measuring wavelength of light by means of a diffraction grating, and I got to project two which was a mess of data, and just had to call it quits for the night.

So here I am.

I have recently taken up yoga, and with my current schedule being what it is, I have managed 9 days straight of yoga. I didn't mesh well with the yoga at my gym (meathead gym) so I just erased the thought from my mind. But it was undeniable that I needed to increase my hip and ankle flexibility, made obvious to me by the sports medicine physician at school. I tried to make stretching a habit, but with gym and running in the morning before class, I was always rushed for time. And how could I stretch after school when my muscles and ligaments were cold and tight again (heat wave not withstanding)?

My friend Shelly, who is always doing some crazy form of activity, informed me she had just gone to Bikram (hot) yoga and was totally hooked. I hadn't considered going elsewhere for yoga- probably because I would then be technically paying for two gyms (not to mention the free gym I can go to at school). It just didn't make any sense.

Or did it?

Who really goes to yoga studios? The real ones I mean? Not me. I go to meathead gyms that have multiple squat racks.

So I googled it. I hemmed and hawed for a couple days, and then picked one that had a 3 week unlimited yoga trial offer for $40. What a steal!

Let me tell you. Yoga is expensive. For real. The drop-in price for one class is $20. And that's fairly typical. Thankfully this place also has student discounts in case I want to come back after my 3 weeks are up (which I will).

Anyway, 9 days straight of yoga....and my feet have gone from torn up, to blissful, to broken, to blissful, all in just over a week. Yoga works your feet. For real. My feet are not used to having to be strong and hold myself up while stretched or flexed. When we wear shoes, our feet don't really have to do any work. The shoe does it. Boy are my feet getting strong now! So much so that I have just ordered my first pair of barefoot (5-finger vibram) running shoes. That will obviously take some time to transition to, so all my training runs will still be in my regular running shoes (which I actually just got an outstanding new pair that I love) and then start adding a quarter mile here and there in the five finger shoes. Anyway, more on that later....when I actually get them. You'll get all the details, I'm sure.

So Friday's are trail run days. Because it turns out I have lost the ability to run uphill. Because I'm a flat-lander now. Looking back at old training logs, I realized that while on the crew, 3 out of 4 runs per week were on substantial hills, since I would run at work, and no matter which way you go there, there's always a mountain. Only my long runs were on the flat valley floor by my house.

I live in a valley now. But at sea level. Fantastic. I actually have to drive to find a hill to run on, which is sorta lame, but I make it work.

I decided to add a weekly trail run to my routine so I can be sure to get my hills in. My first choice was just what I was already familiar with from riding my bike around and knowing which trail systems were by my apartment.

New Almaden is an old quicksilver (mercury) mining town that has been converted to a park with a fairly extensive trail system. Reminds me a little of Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego. Big trail system smack dab in the middle of the city.

The past couple of runs at New Almaden have been up the old mining road (aptly named Mining Hill Trail). It looked easy on the map. No. It's just up. Somehow always up. Today I decided to be brave and take the trail up to the old English Camp. They're clever with the naming. English Camp Trail.

It was a little brutal. But in just over a mile and a half (still at fairly low weekly mileage), I found the ruins of the English Camp. I stopped my garmin and walked around and explored....and cursed myself for not bringing my phone to take pictures. I went up the little 0.1 mile "Church Hill Trail" to an old stone chimney. The only remaining portion of some sort of building (perhaps a church given their trail naming convention). An old weathered wood fence wrapped around it to keep visitors from getting too close. Bright purple wild sweet pea stretched out along the base of the old chimney. The sun was just starting to peek over the hill. Dammit Carrie.

I considered going back to the car to get my phone. I thought of the great deal of effort that would take. I sighed. I was just going to have to take a long good look and keep it as a memory. I took in the quiet for awhile, then walked down the hill. There was a scuffle in the brush and I looked over and saw a momma deer and her baby foraging in the grasses and shrubs. She looked up at me, considered for a moment, then went back to eating. I stood and watched. Baby perked up and was slightly more concerned than mom. Big huge ears stuck out from his small head. He ducked behind a bush and I watched for a few more minutes as they peacefully munched, just 20 feet from me. I could hear the momma chewing the fibrous material between her teeth.

After awhile, I left them alone and explored what remained of the other buildings, then jogged down the hill, greeting hikers as they came up- all of them surprised that someone would run this hill.

I got home and made a delicious breakfast (and to make up for lacking photos of the run....).

We've got two eggs, a peacharine (peach/nectarine hybrid), some little heirloom tomatoes, and a few slices of brie.

I may or may not have had popcorn as well (like an hour later...and natural made in the pan).

I went to yoga, and then came home and started in on my lab report.

For dinner I had this:

First course was a salad of kale, golden beets, heirloom tomatoes, mushrooms, and feta cheese, and a glass of merlot.

Second course was turkey meatballs from Trader Joe's (no cooking during the heat waves of course, so this was microwavable).

I considered having some watermelon and brie for third course, but I'm not really very hungry and it's past my bedtime now anyway.

The weather has cooled down nicely. I had to use my portable air conditioner for two days, and then it just magically cooled down. I like to think that my days of hot yoga are also helping me cope with the heat. Anything is a more pleasant temperature than a 98 degree room, kept at about 50% humidity while doing chatarangas and downward dogs, and warrior 1's. Or plows of all things.

One more week of class and I get summer vacation!!!!