THE LOTUS

Shortly before I invited guests to dinner two weeks ago, we received another original glass piece from Karen Bourque to hang in the dining room window, a beautiful picture of the lotus flower composed of pink pearly shells, amber, and green glass. Karen, who lives in Churchpoint, Louisiana, has created glass pieces for numerous homes throughout Acadiana and large, commissioned pieces for the Louisiana Book Festival and the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Karen explains that in this latest picture she tried to capture the lotus as a universal symbol, the primary theme being one of rebirth and purity. She drew the symbolism from Buddhist and Hindu traditions --the symbol of the fully-opened pink lotus, which is considered to be the true lotus of the Buddha.

In the legend that accompanies Karen’s work of art, she says that the pink pearly shells used for the petals of the plant strengthen intuition, sensitivity, and imagination, adding that they also attract prosperity and wealth. The amber which she used for the flower’s stamen is believed to be a healing stone and brings blessings. It also helps dreams to become reality and calms those who suffer from hyperactivity and stress. An added bonus: the amber transmutes humor and joy, two qualities that should be a part of any household, especially at the dinner table!

We love the three glass pieces that hang in the dining room, especially when the morning light streams through the windows and illuminates the various glass colors and stones imbedded in the pieces of art. The green colors in this latest work of art are particularly brilliant all day.

The Lotus was a gift to my friend, Victoria Sullivan, who is a botanist and who has spent endless hours programming and designing my books of poetry for her independent press, Border Press. She writes about the lotus plant in Why Water Plants Don’t Drown, a book about water plants for which Susan Elliott of Pinyon Publishing rendered the lovely illustrations, which was published by Pinyon last year.

In this biological and ecological text, Vickie relates that the pale pink flowers of sacred lotus are the largest and most spectacular of any water plants. A “floater,” as Vickie calls floating leaf plants, the lotus is native to India and is widely cultivated. She writes: “Buried seeds of the sacred lotus found in Manchuria were able to germinate after 200 years, and seeds may survive hundreds or even a thousand years.” Karen loved Susan’s colorful interpretations of the plants in Why Water Plants Don’t Drown and was inspired to render several botanical glass representations after reading this book about aquatic and wetland plants.

Karen says that in the Christian religion, the waterlily, a variant of the lotus, was presented to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation. It also represents enlightenment and is associated with the consciousness of those people who have reached Nirvana. Most of her glass pieces contain stones, gems, and colored glass that represent spiritual values—creation and regeneration are recurring themes. She encases the written explanations for the art work in a transparent sleeve that accompanies each piece she completes.

In the fall when we return to New Iberia, we hope to make our annual pilgrimage to Churchpoint to view Karen’s latest work and to visit with her and her husband, Darrell Bourque, former poet laureate of Louisiana. Darrell’s latest book, Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie is currently making a big splash in Teche country. Salut to all of these talented artists and writers!

AN ENCOUNTER WITH PEDIATRIC RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS DISEASE

Three summers ago, my grandson Joel, who is now ten, and my daughter Elizabeth traveled from California by train to visit with me in Sewanee, Tennessee. Joel stepped off the train at Birmingham, Alabama with a fever of 102 degrees, smiling wanly, and his mother informed us that he had contracted a virus during the three-day train ride. After we reached Sewanee, we put Joel to bed, and I awakened during the night when I heard him coughing in the next room. He said to me, with an almost-adult resignation, “I’m always sick.” The following morning after his arrival, he complained of not being able to feel his feet and said that he couldn’t walk. “The doctor says he has growing pains, and everyone else says this also,” Elizabeth explained, but nonetheless, we were alarmed. I rubbed his legs and feet with Biofreeze and set him up to watch cartoons for a day or so. Joel was a real sport about this mysterious malady, and when he vowed that he felt better, we set off for Gatlinburg to spend a week at a mountain resort. After a few days he rallied and even went swimming several mornings in a heated pool. By the time he and his mother left Tennessee, he seemed to have overcome the virus that had caused him to be unable to walk for a few days.

Joel came into the world as a preemie, and his mother suffered preeclampsia before she delivered him. He has always had a small frame and inherited the family allergies, including asthma, but none of us were prepared for the diagnosis that he received a few months after returning to California from his Tennessee visit. Pediatric doctors at the University of California in Los Angeles determined that Joel has the chronic, non-communicable disease of juvenile arthritis, a disease that lasts forever. Thank God his mother home schools him, and he’s able to catch up with his schoolwork after he experiences episodes of this condition. During an episode, he often has to resort to the use of a wheelchair because his ankles and knees are swollen, and if he puts pressure on these swollen places, he could permanently damage his joints. Despite these episodes, Joel remains a cheerful ten-year old with a lively interest in lizards, snakes (he’s the one who owns a corn snake), swimming in the backyard pool, basketball, and storytelling, but he often laments that his handwriting isn’t up to snuff because his wrists are so swollen he can’t form letters properly.

Recent findings about juvenile rheumatoid arthritis indicate that almost 300,000 children in the United States have been diagnosed with this disease and it's at the top of the list of chronic childhood diseases – the onset of it claims more victims that juvenile diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy combined, which is a formidable and alarming statistic.

The alarming factor is that pediatric rheumatoid arthritis diseases don’t receive research funding at the federal level or through private institutions that can compare with research funding for other childhood diseases. Leukemia, juvenile diabetes, muscular dystrophy, and cystic fibrosis receive hundreds of millions of dollars funding for research purposes, while pediatric rheumatoid arthritis disease research receives only two million dollars yearly!

The message is that one of the pediatric diseases that afflicts 300,000 U.S. children (1 in 250) is a disease more prevalent than the diseases I mentioned above, but it’s severely underfunded by research agencies nationwide. I’m writing this because I hope that other mothers and grandmothers whose children and grandchildren suffer from this juvenile condition will write to their congressman or other governmental official and request that they back funding for research to discover a cure for this autoimmune disease, or that those parents and grandparents will write to the Juvenile Arthritis Association to find out how they can help raise awareness about the need for research.

We’re hoping that when Joel comes for another visit, his mother won’t have to unload an entire suitcase of medications or that he doesn’t show up with a raging fever and unable to walk so that he can enjoy visits with his relatives in Louisiana and Tennessee… better still, we hope that one day he won’t have to be reticent about signing his name because his handwriting bears out the severity of a juvenile disease that was overlooked or because most people thought he had “growing pains.” 

ON THE ROAD AGAIN…

Christ Episcopal Church, Rugby TN

While searching for serendipity on the Cumberland Plateau, we made a trek to Rugby, Tennessee, a town on the northern part of the Plateau lying within the Clear Fork and White Oak Rivers.  This unincorporated village was once the utopian dream of Franklin W. Smith who planned to relocate unemployed factory workers from the industrial cities of the Northeast to the woods and mountain air of Tennessee. Smith recruited a Brit to join him in his dream named Thomas Hughes, an English social reformer and author known for his classic, Tom Brown's Schooldays.  Smith abandoned his dream, but Hughes actively pursued the idea of building a Utopian paradise in northern Tennessee. His intention was to build a class-free, agrarian community in which citizens engaged in cooperative enterprises, and I might add, governed by strict temperance. Established in 1880, Rugby, for a brief time, was known as an Eden on the Cumberland Plateau peopled with British emigrants and those of Scots-Irish or Welsh descent, along with a few Germans and African Americans.

The utopian community suffered from severe winters and droughts in the summer, followed by a typhoid epidemic that decimated the population. The demise of the community was also complicated by the fact that most of the inhabitants were gentrymen unsuited to manual labor. Immigration to Rugby ceased, and by the 1920's, the total population had declined to 125 people of largely Appalachian descent. However, the town never became a ghost town, and by the 1960's, a young man from Deer Lodge, Tennessee named Brian Stagg had formed the Rugby Restoration Association, which later listed the town on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, twelve buildings have been restored or reconstructed according to historical standards. 

We ate lunch in the town's only restaurant, the Harrow Café, and I tasted a genuine Shepherd's Pie, the first I've sampled since I left Iran back in the 70's. Following lunch, we visited a print shop that still produces hand-lettered circulars and ads but doesn't publish the former weekly, The Rugbeian.

One of the most interesting buildings in the village is the Thomas Hughes Library, which boasts an original 7,000-volume collection that has remained intact within the structure since 1882, the oldest free public library existing in the US. today. It includes the original collection, furnishings, and early checkout records and is painted its original three shades of gray. Film that blocks ultraviolet rays has been applied to all the windows, and the building has no air-conditioning. Had this been a Louisiana collection, it would have long ago been destroyed by humidity and mold.

Old Victorian library at Rugby TN

Another building that attracted us was Christ Episcopal Church, built in 1887, with original hanging and wall oil lamps that have been electrified. Services are held at 11 a.m. each Sunday, and the original walnut alms basins are still used to collect offerings. Our tour guide told us that the little church has attracted many converts who have moved into a new subdivision called Beacon Hill where the newly-built homes must be architecturally compatible with Rugby's historic structures. 

The day after our visit to Rugby, we drove to Berea, Kentucky, known as the Folks Art Capitol of Kentucky and home of Berea College, the first interracial, co-ed school in the South. The town was named Berea after the city in the Book of Acts, and one of the town founders, Rev. John G. Fee, was an abolitionist who felt he was called to spread the gospel of love, which included the freeing of slaves. His mission was to promote equality for men and women of all races through learning, service, and labor. Today, eight percent of enrolled students from countries outside the U.S. attend Berea College, and a sizable percentage of the student population is Black. Berea was founded on the vision of an egalitarian society where all students could achieve their academic goals, and the college is also known for its "no tuition" tradition.

Dulcimer group practicing at Berea Tourism and
Welcome Center

When we visited the Berea Tourism and Welcome Center located in the old L&N Train Depot, we found serendipity in the Madison Dulcimer Group, one of whom was a Haik related to Ted Haik of New Iberia, Louisiana.   The group, composed of four dulcimers and one ukulele, discovered we lived in Louisiana part of the year, and promptly set up the sheet music to "A Cajun Waltz" and played it for us, then performed "Amazing Grace" as an encore. 

The ceramics, woven goods, pewter, jewelry, and woodcraft on sale in Old Town Artisan Village, Kentucky Artisan Center, and College Square in Berea offer a dizzying array of folk crafts where the creation of these crafts are also demonstrated within many of the shops. We weren't surprised to learn that Berea has received numerous awards from national and international publications, including being named one of "America' Best Small Towns" for several years. We regretted that we weren't able to stick around to hear some of the music performed by the Black Music Ensemble from Berea College, the Bluegrass Ensemble, Wind and Jazz Ensembles, and the "Jammin on the Porch" summer concert on Thursday evening.