Dear friends,
I wish you all a very healthy, happy and prosperous New Year. I wrote the
greeting in the title from memory. Is any word wrong?
Today I met Ben and The Great Wall, our favourite restaurant. Lee-Ann, oneof the family who own it, always brings a big pot of Chinese tea when we come, and if I'm really lucky she has fragrant Jasmine tea. She told me of a new shop
in the shopping centre that only sells teas, and only the best. One of those
teas is white tea. Lee-Ann said that is the most healthy of them all. Do youagree?
Today she arranged to have a message in Chinese characters written on two
envelopes that Ben mailed to David. You should see the incredible stamp thatwas on one of the envelopes. It was so large that it took up almost a fullthird of the large white envelope, and is beautifully designed and printed.
Very colourful and tasteful, the highlights are two large and stylized
Chinese dogs. The kind that often look rather like lions and guard the
entranceways to temples in your country. Would anyone like to tell me aboutthose wonderful dogs? I would like to hear more about their significance ifanybody is willing to write about it. :-) They are majestic looking and
strong. I don't think they would let any bad person pass if they could helpit!
Ben was up at 5:30 am and away to the office soon after that so he is tired
this evening. It's ten to 8 pm and he's been in his bed for an hour. Healways works best in the morning, so its reasonable during this beginning timeof rushed work for him to be "early to bed, and early to rise" as Benjamin Franklin advised. The rest of the little saying is "makes a man healthy,
wealthy, and wise."
As for me, my Chinese New Year's resolution is to put my health maintenance ona more steady schedule. I've started today by walking for ten minutes aftereach meal. They say the 30 minutes of walking is needed most days to keep us healthy, and it seems easiest to do it in ten minute increments after meals.
You probably imagine that I walk outside. Wrong. I have a treadmill. Too bad
it isn't hooked up to a grain mill or something, so that my walking could bemore productive for something other than health.
The reasons I walk indoors are many. First, when the weather is bad I can still
walk. Second, when there is automobile exhaust pollution, or wood burning pollution in the air I can still take the exercise. The next reason has to do with the times of sunrise and sunset. Here where we live is quite high up on the globe. That means that our sunset and sunrise times vary a lot during the year. It
can get dark as early as 4 pm in winter and in summer not get dark until 10 pm.
Sunrise varies similarly. As I prefer not to walk in the dark, so the treadmill again is the answer. The last reason is that the there are sidewalks here where I live, and the roadways are hilly. I prefer to walk on the level and I don
't like to walk along the side of the road. So that's whyI invested in a treadmill.
Are any of you Metal Horses or Fire Oxes? Ben's the Horse, and I'm the Ox.
What do you find the prediction for your year to be? We could compare as theyear passes to see if we have any similarities in fortune. What do you think
about that? Or is it quite impractical because we live in such different places
?
I'm lucky. I get to celebrate at least three New Years if I want. :-) The first is the one on January 1, the second is the Chinese New Year, now. The third
is the Baha'i and Muslim New Year on March 21, the first day of Spring.
So I wonder how well I'll be doing with my Chinese New Year resolutions when theBaha'i New Year arrives? That's when I'll check on my progress.
There have been so many calendars. Ours was originated for us by The Bab. It consists of 19 months of 19 days, and 4 or 5 intercalary days. The names of the
months are each attributes of God. The days are the same attributes in the same
order. There is more to it, such as 19 years makes another grouping, and so on
. But I don't want to go into that here. I just thought you might be interested to know a little bit about a different calendar that you may not have heard of
before. It seems that March 21, the first day of spring in the solstices may have begun with the prophet of God, Zoroaster. It seems a reasonable time to me
to begin a new year. More reasonable than just after the
Winter solstice began on the 25th of December. But Christmas and then the New Year do brighten up the dark days of winter enormously. January 1 New Yearhas an ancient history back to at least the Romans, I think. January being derived from Janus, the imaginary god of time, depicted with two faces. One facing
forward and the other back. Quite a nice symbol, I think.
Well, right now I want to consult a search engine to look some stuff up. Mainly
what the Chinese have to say for fire oxes and metal horses. :-))
So my dear friends, I wish you strength, health, warm family and friends, successes in your endeavours and all the way around, an excellent Year of theDog.
With much affection, Mary