Planetary Ecopoet of Twenty First CenturyNanao Sakaki has emptied the Milky way by gobbling stars!

Nanao Sakakis wit is becoming a meme. Friend of the Beat poet Ginsberg and Gary, he was a great fighter against nuclear reactors, and environmental pollution. He fought to protect coral reefs and atolls, gardens and forests, alternative thinking and the Earth. He was more absurd than any Zen master and the planetary poet that Heidegger envisaged. Nanao Sakaki was born on New Years Day in 1923 in Kagoshima, the southern most city on Kyushi island. He was the seventh son and the youngest in the family. Nanao means seventh son and Sakaki means evergreen. He joined the Japanese Navy during the Second World War and worked as a radar analyst. He identified the American B-29 bomber carrying the atom bomb for dropping over Nagasaki, on his radar screen, while working at the Izumi Air Base, 100miles from Nagasaki. When Japan finally surrendered, his senior officer ordered everyone to prepare for the mass suicide. By providence, one of the juniors turned on the radio. The Emperor Hirohito was addressing the nation. The Emperor commanded that there was no need for soldiers to commit suicide. That is how Nanao survived a certain death and he became an itinerant observer of the woods and the deserts, bars and the villages. For 15 years, he travelled across Japan and worked to create a network to preserve the Japanese tradition and culture. In the process, he also learnt English, Chinese and various European languages. He was an avid reader. He became wanderer poet in the vein of Basho and Issa. He begged, slept on pavements. Sometimes, ate the left over food from the incessantly and often said, Buddhist shrines. He would walk

 No matter how many kilometers one has walked, no matter how much knowledge and experience he has gained, if he cannot make a good cup of tea, he must go back and walk again. During 1960s, his friendship with Beat poets Alan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder flourished. During same time, he founded a banyan Ashram on Suwanose,a small island in Ryukkyus archipelago. In 1969, he first visited USA and since then turned into a global itinerant. John Brandi in his Foreword to Lets Eat Stars writes about his ecopoetics like the animists, he pays due respect to very old trees, rivers that sings, stones that speaks, and the ancient breaths of typhoons putting oxygen into the sea. He would love to catch grasshoppers, slap mosquitoes, watch dhatura blossom, eat ferns, pick mushroom, and fall asleep under shooting stars. He would go to party of young people in New York City after a reading to benefit the fight for the Shiraho coral reef in Japan. It was 1985, and he did a somersault into the room to the utter surprise of all present and smiled, Growing old is a gift! That was the spirit that he summed up in his poem, Break the Mirror: To stay young, To save the world, Break the mirror.

He was the purest wanderer of our time like Basho. He never aspired for money and would say: Wind for mind, Just enough! Gary Snyder says about him in the Foreword to his work, Break the Mirror(1987),

This subtropical East China Sea carpenter and spear fisherman finds himself equally at home in the desert. So much so that on one occasion when an eminent traditional Buddhist priest boasted of his lineage, Nanao responded, I need no lineage. I am desert rat. But for all his independence Nanao Sakaki carries the karma of Chungtzu, En-no-gyoja, Saigyo, Ikkyu,Basho, and Issa in his bindle. His work or play in the world isto pull out nails, free seized nuts, break loose the rusted, open up the shutters. You can put these poems in your shoes and walk a thousand miles

He died on Dec. 22, 2008 at the age of 85, almost 86 and friends congratulated him on his death. Only Sakaki could have made it possible for poetry to reign supreme over transitory flesh-capsule. John Brandy termed him Desert rat, Global Citizen. Planetary poet, desert wild man and as a walking continent all of his own. I miss the opportunity to walk along with him. Never mind, few years later, I will catch up with him somewhere in the Andromeda where he would have shifted after eating all the stars of the Milky Way and cutting the centre of the galactic black hole. He must be feasting on crab nebula and mushroom clouds from the supernova explosion. Mycophagous Sakaki movement(gaman)! is mushroaming the universe. Sakaki epitomized the spirit of fun and eternal

GO WITH MUDDY FEET

When you hear dirty story wash your ears. When you see ugly stuff wash your eyes. When you get bad thoughts wash your mind. and Keep your feet muddy. Nanao Sakaki

Break the Mirror In the morning After taking a cold shower .what a mistake. I look in the mirror. There, a funny guy, Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin, .what a pity. Poor, dirty old man!

He is not me, absolutely not. Land and life Fishing in the ocean Sleeping in the desert with stars Building a shelter in mountains Farming the ancient way Singing with cayotes Singing against nuclear war__ Ill never be tired of life Now Im seventeen years old Very charming young man I sit down quietly in lotus position, Meditating, meditating for nothing Suddenly a voice comes to me: To stay young, To save the world, Break the mirror. Miracle Air, wind, water, the sun all miracle. The song of Red-Winged Blackbird miracle. Flower of Blue Columbine miracle. Come from nowhere Going nowhere

You smile miracle. A Sand Poetry On a coral sand beach Plumed egrets footprints Little ringed plovers footprints. On a beach rock A blue rock thrush morning song chu-i-ri chu-i-n chi chi. A gathering of Hermit crabs Who loves their commune so much These huge footprints are mine? chu-i-ri chu-i-n chi chi. Every footprint is a song The song of life Painted on the sand Painted in the air chu-i-ri chu-i-n chi chi.

Real Play If you have time to chatter Read books If you have time to read

Walk into mountains, deserts and oceans If you have time to walk sing songs and dance If you have time to dance Sit quietly, you Happy lucky idiot!

In The Next Life I Will Be Wiping the windowpanes of my humble shack, a dirty dust cloth in my hand, endless blue sky over my head. At the forest edge where narcissus are already in all their glory, where wild boars bite off various trees' roots every so often, where I stand, piss, and murmur. In the next life I will be a dust cloth lapis lazuli colored. As a dust cloth, making myself dirty I clean up windowpanes, kitchens and toilets, and I also wipe out discrimination and wars.

If ever the world really exists I start polishing it from my tiny corner. If ever eternity really exists I make it brilliant at every moment. The more I work, the more I become pure lapis lazuli color just like today's sky. Ten days after winter solstice the mother sun is shining bright. All of a sudden, a gust of north wind blows the dead leaves from the trees. Look, something coming down! With our luminous star behind red wings flutter. What is that? Hawk? Flying goblin? UFO? Wow! On the palm of my hand I catch the monster a withered red leaf of oak. Living in the flower garden of the sun's red corona

biting off the rainbow's roots forever someone murmurs In the next life I will be....

Jan 2, 1998/ Izu Peninsula, Japan Nanao Sakaki

Nice Meeting You Underground deep Fossil cave dark You sit down Might be midday. Someone comes in You cant se him, hear him, touch him Still someone with you for sure; Is he friend or devil? You dont care All the same You smile He looks blank I burst into laughter Nobody Wave after wave!

Desert Rat, Planet Citizen

From Nanao or Never

Blackberry Books (2000)

How to best describe fellow wanderer, planetary poet and desert wild man, Nanao Sakaki? After seventy-five years on the planet, Nanao is very much alive, of good health, walks with a quick, deliberate stride, is tanned and footloose. He looks and smells of the desert, skin rubbed with sage, hair washed in spring water and brushed into a ponytail, rucksack perfumed by the sweet incense of pion coals. Equally, his presence brings the salted flavor of deep-water straits, foaming breakers, atolls and fjords hardly on the map. These geographies have merged in Nanao. He is a walking continent all of his own. Known worldwide in small and varied circles for his embodiment of crazy wisdom and spirited non-conformism, Nanao jumps stars and rides typhoons, is a great miso-soup chef, loves moonflowers and pickled ginger, stout beer and fiddlehead fern, roaring water and Magellanic clouds. He's talked with dinosaurs, walked into volcanic craters, survived in caves, faced the Siberian wind, tasted the cool bodies of mermaids, made love under the burning sun. At the time of this writing Nanao sports a long white beard and covers his head with a floppy Chinese fisherman's hat. Recycled Italian hiking boots, cushioned socks, zoris, t-shirt, sweater, windbreaker, a pair of tough sewn shorts and baggy cotton trousersenough. Daypack, knife, binocs, watch, magnifying glass, notepad and fountain pen; plum extract, water, dried fruitenough. All of these to which Nanao might add:

"Wind for mind Just enough."

Nanao means Seventh Son. Sakaki is an evergreen tree, sacred in Japan. He was born in 1923 into a middle class family in a village on Japan's southernmost island of Kyushu. His father, in the cloth dying business, went bankrupt when Nanao was seven or eight. "My first lessonnever trust money." The family practiced Pure Land Buddhism, though religion has always roused suspicion in Nanao. "Namu Amida Buddha, Namu Amida Buddha ... from babyhood I heard this sound. Always somebody chanting. When my father was washing my body: Namu Amida Buddha. At the bus stop: Namu Amida Buddha. So tiring! Chant to be happy in another life, that's all." Once, when asked if he belonged to a particular sect, Nanao frowned, pondered and replied with sparkling eyes: "Maybe whitewater." Nanao has lived and died a few times in this life. At age two he caught pneumonia, a case so severe that his uncle warned his mother, "Prepare the coffin, by noon tomorrow he'll be gone." His mother held him all night long until he recovered, but for many years his health was weak; he couldn't walk and run like others his age. Later, living on hardly anything, he

peddled newspapers, worked odd jobs for merchants, began to take long walks and swim. His father, a writer of light verse, introduced him to Issa's haiku. Someone on his great grandmother's side translated Leaves of Grass into the first Japanese edition. After the Second World War, Nanao tried working in iron factories but it wasn't for him. He began to wander Japan's ruined landscape, begging, sleeping outdoors, sometimes salvaging dinner from food left on shrines. He taught himself languages, read eastern and western classics, hung out in ghettos and backwoods, and generally took to the road as iconoclast scholar of trees, flowers, rivers and mountains, as well as of villagers and their songs, artists and their crafts, farmers and their soil, bards and their sake dens. In this sense he was, and is, akin to those Japanese poet-wanderers of old: Basho and Issa. Riding out to the Zuni Shalako ceremony one winter, ice freezing the wipers, mesas whitened with snow, my seven year-old son, Joaquin, was sitting between the two of us. I was at the wheel, Nanao co-piloting with Japanese folk songs and stories. The first tale he told was about a battered Renault given to him in San Francisco. Not knowing how to drive, he simply sat in the front seat asking passer-bys if they wanted a caruntil he was free of the possession. The second tale he told was about being drafted into the Japanese Navy during World War II. As a 22 year-old, he was stationed at Izumi Air Base, a hundred miles south of Nagasaki. One day he picked up a B-29 on the radar screen: "Due north. 30,000 feet high. 300 m.p.h. Three minutes later someone shouted, 'Look, a volcanic eruption!' In the direction of Nagasaki I saw the mushroom-shaped cloud with my own eyes." This story became part of his poem, Memorandum. But on this first telling, snow whipping across the windshield, the whole world a white out, my son's eyes widened. Nanao was graphically describing the size of the cloud, explaining how he how he and his companions had climbed out of an underground hatch, looked to the sky and thought Mt. Fuji was erupting.

"You mean you were the enemy?" Joaquin asked. "Yes. Enemy!"
Nanao was Joaquin's buddy. How could this be possible? The absurdity of war, powerful men pitting one race against another, the stupidity of it all, was never more poignantly condensed than at this moment. By 1959 Nanao had walked Japan extensively. His wanderings inspired others to do the same: quit the competitive neck-break up the corporate ladder, abandon the money struggle, rejoin the world, participate in the daily doings of the laboring class, learn the faces of flowers,

eat from tide pools, study the soil with farmers. "But one thing," he warned those who might follow on his trail, "No matter how many kilometers one has walked, no matter how much knowledge and experience he has returned with, if he can't make a good cup of tea, then he must go back, walk again!" In the early Sixties Nanao crossed paths with poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, with whom he would correspond, visit and maintain a lifelong friendship. He also founded The Banyan Ashram, an experimental community for young Japanese seeking an alternative lifestyle. This was on Suwanose, a tiny, tropical island in Japan's southernmost Ruyukyu Archipelago, he In 1969 he made his first trip to North America. Mountains, deserts, native peoples, and back-to-the-land communities were at the forefront of his focus. I first met him in the California Sierra Nevadas. It was in the early 70s and I was about to take residence in New Mexico. On his world itineraries, bumming a ticket here and there via friends, organizations or an occasional university, Nanao would repeatedly visit the American Southwest. I was fortunate to be on his list of contacts, and my little house on the Rio Grande north of Albuquerque served as a good base. On one of his visits I was sitting at my desk when a crack of thunder shook my chair. At the door was Nanao wearing a big smile: "Time for spine alignment!" Usually we would bird watch in the bosque by the river. Or head into the high desert: Chaco Canyon, Ashislepah, the Hopi mesas, Monument Valley, Caon de Chelly. Or to the mountains: the Jemez, Sangre de Cristos, Sandias. We would set up a modest camp, tell stories, walk, climb a peak, explore a canyon, pick up fossils, eat ferns and mushrooms, swim, slap mosquitoes, watch a datura blossom slowly unspiral at dusk and fall asleep under shooting stars. In the early 1980s I published Real Play, Nanao's first book of poems and sketches. We finalized the production in the New Mexico high desert, sipping a mild hallucinogenic tea. In his introduction to the poems, Gary Snyder wrote: "the subtropical East China Sea carpenter and spear fisherman found himself equally at home in the desert, so much so that on one occasion when an eminent Buddhist priest once boasted to Nanao of his lineage, Nanao responded, "I need no lineage, I am desert rat." Along with Suwanose, Nanao affectionately described the arid, light-emblazoned Taos highlands as one of his favorite places on earth. "Huge desert meeting high mountain. Same feeling as wide ocean meeting volcano." Gradually, his travels took him from continent to continent, and his own poems, bound and sewn into beautiful books, slowly caught up to him. Here's one of them:

If you have time to chatter Read books If you have time to read Walk into mountain, desert and ocean If you have time to walk sing songs and dance If you have time to dance Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot
Friend of bristlecone pine and salamanders, threatened rivers and taiga, snowflakes and purple gentian, kangaroos and the aurora borealis, Nanao has a few enemies too: dams, nuclear power plants, multinational logging industries, star wars proponents, thick-headed careerists. His extended family begins with trilobites, dandelions, salamander, turkey-vulture, solar flares, flying squirrels, condors, pampas grass, oriental cuckoo, grizzly bear, wild persimmons, angelica flower and fiddler crab. Like the animists he pays due respect to very old trees, rivers that sing, stones that speak, and the ancient breath of typhoons "putting oxygen into the sea." Once, bedding down after a visit to Hopi, wrapped only in a thin blanket at the base of a scraggly juniper, Nanao peered out at the star-blanketed desert and exclaimed: "Part dream, but at the same time, part real very solid." Whenever he knocked, the door opened and time stopped. I was thrust into a loop of beauty brought alive by his smoke-flavored presence, his eagerness to cook, feast, drink, laugh, tell stories, catch grasshoppers, quietly write, make long-distance calls, go for berries and mushrooms, listen to Sudanese singers, Jamaican reggae, the San Juan Turtle dance, guitars from Zaire, Aboriginal didjeridoo, or the deep-down drone of Tibetan chant. He loved a good joke, appreciated down-to-earth talk, hated sentimentality, shunned awards, thought religious robes smelled of money, disliked sycophants and was invigorated by challenge. The mountains would perpetually call. It didn't take much to pack. Nanao would buy a yam for each of us, a few packages of soba, some garlic, greens, and ginger. No tent needed. The constellations were a better covering. In New Mexico we could walk the southern ridges early in the season. The Organ Mountains, the Gila, the Manzanos were already warmed by the desert. As snows melted, we would work our way gradually north: to the Sandias, the Sangre de Cristos, the Spanish peaks, the Weminuche Wilderness, Uncompahgre Peak, the Colorado Rockies.

For awhile in the 1980s, Nanao lived in an old school bus parked high in the firs above Taos. He prepared quick, excellent Japanese cuisine over an outdoor wood fire, often supplemented by mushrooms gathered in wet mountain ravines. He was a planetary citizen, alleged to no flag but instead to the "thundering rainbow" that colors "life's beach sunshine orange." He disliked book-learned Westerners' over-romantic admiration for things Japanese, especially the tea ceremony. His own ceremony consisted of hand raking a spontaneous mat of spruce needles close to an outdoor fire. His guests would sit on them (preferably not in the lotus position) while he boiled water in a banged-up pot hung over aspen coals on a blackened tripod. Fine quality sencha tea was briefly steeped in a bamboo strainer and poured into whatever mug, cup or bowl was on hand. The rest followed naturally: slurp in silence, sharpen the senses, listen to a chattering squirrel fight off the jays. Make merry. On one of Ginsberg's visits, Nanao created a simple appetizer which he would repeat many times over the years: shaved daikon, glistening white on a blue plate, topped with dried bonito flakes, a sprinkle of tamari, a dusting of toasted nori. This was eaten with chopsticks, washed down with nut-brown ale. Nanao, a thin-bellied creature by nature, remarked that people should be taxed by the size of their bellies. Allen, looking somewhat like an old Benares guru, harmonium along side, belly protruding from loose, white Indian cotton shirt, gave a quirky, half-surprised smile. "So where's that leave me?" Nanao once showed me how to wear a Japanese fundoshi, a simple, one-piece loincloth. Many years later in Taos he presented me with a fundoshi of my own, asking if I remembered how to tie it. I didn't, so he had me strip and re-learn the art of wrapping. Laughingly, he suggested I wear it to the supermarket next time I went for an avocado. Leaving Nanao's schoolbus hermitage, I started down the path whenlike the ghost of the 8th-century Chinese sage, Han Shanhe stuck his head from a window of the bus and waved me back.

"You forgot your footprint!"

At age sixty, Nanao had yet to ride a horse. One spring we went with Ed Black, a Navajo guide, on a three-day horseback ride into Monument Valley. Rising and falling on the back of his little Indian ponypointed beard, knit cap, scarf, binocs, day pack, canvas jacketNanao looked like an ancient mariner. He compared galloping over the sand to skimming Japan's warm-water reefs on a small boat. One morning the wind turned into a fierce gale. Ed Black sniffed the air, buttoned his collar and eyed Nanao with amusement. "Okay, cowboy, let's see how well you take the wind! Let me see you roll a Bull Durham one-handed on a bronc in a blizzard!" Nanao didn't understand a word. He just rode straight into the blowing sand, saying:

"I don't mind wind. Wind feeds earth, wind feeds fish. Wind feeds my bones!"

Within a few minutes the sun had become a rusty blur. Nanao became a phantom lost in swirling dust. As his horse spooked and whinnied, his comical silhouette tilted to and fro above the saddle. Like a Mongolian shaman disappearing between worlds on his spirit journey, Nanao had become exactly what he often said of himself: "just a shadow." At the campfire that night, Nanao expressed the sensation of his ride. "I felt my spirit being carried away." He talked about journeying in the real world. "Two good reasons for travel: strong temptation to get away from self, and strong need to evolve through change. Too many people just looking at magazines, dreaming about a future, but never making a change." He cited the American Indian and the Australian Aborigine as "original people" who looked to the stories of their ancestors for wisdom, and to their own intuition to solve problems. He talked about dreaming, one of the ongoing, effortless actions of the mammal brain. From dreaming issued reality. From dreaming came change. Dreaming could help you through the world. Luci Tapahonso, Navajo poet and storyteller, says that her people gain strength in their daily lives from "the old stories of our ancestors that have been told since the beginning of time." The distant relatives she refers to are so far back through the various worlds of creation that one might visualize their stories as beads on a necklace wrapped around time itself. Acoma poet, Simon Ortiz, has written: "Pueblo people are aware of their present reality because they possess and live within a cultural heritage that confirms for them everything they need to know about themselves. Passed from generation to generation through oral tradition, this knowledge ensures that existence will always be meaningful. There can be neither beginning of life, nor present actual reality, nor a continuance without the mythic." According to Nanao, evolution implies the ability to quiet the self so that the ageless wisdom of the elders may find place. He once said evolution relies on the ability to step out of the self and help others with an unprejudiced hand. "We don't need a guru to learn compassion. We are born with it. So many people talking about empty life, meaningless world. Is the world empty? Or are they?" In 1985 Nanao and I were sewing together 333 copies of Inch by Inch, a chapbook of his translations of Issa's haiku. One of the better-known haiku in the collection goes like this:

Just as he is he goes to bed and gets up the snail

I thought the snail showed Issa how simple life could be lived. No possessions, no unnecessary baggage, no fashions to worry about. "Yes, that's a good understanding," Nanao chuckled. "But maybe Issa also wondered, Why? Why the snail is that way and I am this way? Such a moment makes life wide. Most humans miss the snail. They are too busy filling themselves, going to schools, thinking about money, trying to get experience or caught in relationships. No need to be slave of each other. Or money. Or experience. Always we can jump over experience. Many think experience, experience! But it's not true. When we are separated from our experience we wake up." Near Monument Valley, there is a maze of stone where mountains separate from earth and dawn brings you close to heaven. The sinuous canyons of Tsegi, Dowoshiebito and Betatakin are riddled with smooth arches, flesh-colored alcoves, weeping grottos, and Anasazi ruins where past and present merge. A sandy wash leads out to the cliff dwellings of Keet Seel. Hiking that eight-mile arroyo with Nanao was one of the few times he talked about poetry. "Keep it simple. What you can't remember doesn't belong." He said he began with a thought, an image, a little story. While walking he fine-tuned its rhythm to breath counts, footsteps, a circling hawk, the careen of a swallow, the weave of lizard tracks in the sand.

Every footprint is a song the song of life painted on the sand painted in the air ...
At Keet Seel we explored the stone dwellings left by those who migrated to the present-day Hopi and Rio Grande villages. "No future, no past," Nanao said. The ancient kivas of Keet Seel were exactly like the ones in use at Taos or Tesuque. At our feet were broken chips of shell no different than those adorning present-day Pueblo dancers. The songs were here too. The huge stone alcove above us held the voices of not vanished people, but singers that Nanao and I heard only a week before at the Santo Domingo corn dance. In that ceremony, hundreds of villagers in full regalia filled the village plaza to the sound of drums and chanting. As thunderheads mounted, the music strengthened; one gave force to the other. The crowd swelled, too: European tourists chatting in their own languages, locals speaking Spanish, visitors from nearby Pueblos speaking Tewa, Towa, Keresan. And Navajos, too, in black cowboy hats, satin shirts, velveteen dresses, decked with strands of turquoise and silver. The smell of chili stew, fry bread and coffee permeated the air. A Ferris wheel and carnival rides had been set up across the irrigation ditch, near the whitewashed church. Crafts sellers from nearby Pueblos were selling pottery, jewelry, and woven blankets. Mayan people from Guatemala, a Huichol couple from Mexico, and two Quechua brothers from Otavalo had also set themselves up under plastic tarps among the locals.

As usual, there was an invitation to enter one of the village houses, a flat-roofed adobe with a pile of gnarled juniper near the door. We sat down at a huge table with a family and their assorted guests. I won't forget those faces: wrinkled grandfathers wearing scarlet headbands and turquoise earrings; young dancers in ceremonial kilts; children decorated with body paint sipping Pepsis; mothers in calico aprons. Before us, the table was spread with clay bowls of squash and beans, roasted corn, steaming vessels of red and green chili, mounds of freshly baked bread, sliced watermelon, plastic pitchers of Kool Aid, cake and coffee. Looking about me, under low ceilings, uneven walls, and a small doorway opening onto the plaza filled with dancers, I could have been hundreds of years back in Keet Seel. Likewise, standing in the ruins of Keet Seel, I could easily fast forward to the Santo Domingo corn dance. There were a couple of rangers working at Keet Seel, living in a hogan-shaped residence. One evening they invited us to use their sweathouse, primitive but in good working order. We laid out our bedrolls, sipped miso soup, and, when we returned to sweat, noticed three horses and a pile of gear at the ranger's house. Three Washington officials had just arrived. Two of them were Park Service filmmakers, the other a federal lands administrator. They were here to light the ruins with candles and film them as if they were back in the times of the Old Ones. Rather hastily the filmmakers proceeded to unpack their cameras, boil and purify a pot of water, dig out their tuna fish sandwiches, and eat. After our sweat, we joined them. The administrator scanned Nanao up and down with a rather baffled look and decided the safest course was to regard him as just another Japanese tourist. Trying to make conversation, he glibly inquired if Nanao had ever heard a coyote.

"Oh sure," Nanao said, "Many years ago." "Where?" "In Tokyo." "But there are no coyotes in Tokyo." "Yes, I heard them," Nanao reiterated. "On very good LSD."
At the end of the evening, that same official, having to be coaxed into a sweat lodge by his companions, insisted that he leave his boxer shorts on. "You can do that," the attractive young ranger smiled, "but I don't recommend it. You'll be very uncomfortable; the elastic tends to get hot. You might come out of there with a wrap-around tattoo." Nanao last passed through New Mexico in 1998. It was a good, brief time for us. He seemed fit as ever, sinewy and strong. We hiked eleven miles into and out of the mountains on a trail that gained nearly 3000 feet as it ascended a ten-thousand-foot ridge. The altitude bothered him only a little. I asked him why some feel better as they get older. He said age settles us in. "You see more deeply, feel more deeply. So you are lighter. When you are young you are too

busy escaping, holding yourself too tightly. When you are old you are not trying to run, not rebelling. You are quieter, you listen. Everything talks to you, all is alive." We passed clusters of Apache Plume, silvery pink among gnome-like boulders. "Rocks dreaming ... maybe of becoming flowers. Me dreaming ... maybe of becoming rocks." Later, on a tough upgrade through flowering cactus and mountain mahogany, soon turning to thickets of oak and deep stands of ponderosa, Nanao bent low to wild geraniums and shooting star. "Hello, I know you. But I forget your name. So sorry. Will you tell me who you are?" Climbing steadily, adjusting the breath, finding pace, Nanao talked about climbing Sakurajima as a boy, a very active volcano behind Kagoshima City. He talked about tangling with octopus in the East China Sea. Then he spotted more flowers. Penstemon, columbine. "Hello (bowing). I know you. You are old friend for me. I think you are called Old Man's Beard." Cresting the ridge, we met a group of hikers eating their sack lunches. Silently they munched, not knowing what to make of this strange apparition before them. Nanaowiry, tanned, wearing shorts and floppy hat, white beard wisping in the windpaused and looked far into the horizon. "Oh wow! I can see New York City. I can see Wall Street. I can see Atlantic," he exclaimed, gazing over the cloud-dappled eastern plains. A few days later, we joined a friend for a meal of shaved daikon, salad, and grilled tuna. After a few rounds of stout ale, Nanao suddenly broke out with this wild idea for "completely new language." What he proposed was a minimalist international lingo composed of no more than a thousand words; word clusters, to be exact, like the heads of wild yarrow. Each cluster would consist of "the best, most original expressions to be found in languages like "Qechua, Icelandic, Tewa, English, Japanese, French, Tibetan." Nanao proposed that the first word in this new language be taken from Bahasa Indonesia: sama sama. "Same same, and at the same time thank you, too. We are all the same people. Shakespeare's time. Lao Tzu's time. Chaplin's time. Anasazi's time. You are my face I am your body, sama sama. I thank you, you thank me. That is the first word." On the heels of that I added a phrase given to me by a Tewa speaker on a flight out of Albuquerque, 30,000 feet over the painted caves of archaic hunters, Venus riding the wing. We were talking about love and longing. I asked her what the Tewa word for love was. "I give you my breath," she said. That is how we say "I love you." On an end-of-June scorcher, 104 in the shade, I sit at my desk in cool-adobe seclusion. Sunflowers gasp in the blaze, a roadrunner perches stationary on the wall. Apricots are filled with delicious, sweet heat; the first jalapeos are ready for harvest. Water trickles up from the

ground, through the basil, into the wells around the tomatoes and pole beans. Pink hollyhocks spire between silver chamisa. Tufts of seed float through the air. The grasshoppers are here, too, the same endlessly hungry critters that Nanao once suggested eating. As I reread my travels with him, the moments of work and play, the nights of silence and song, the road trips full of revelation and wisdom, I wonder what closure I could possibly offer? Punctuation doesn't quite fit this pilgrim of sand and sea who compares old age to "sky blue turquoise," the friend who once doctored me through a broken heart, handing me his latest writing with an earmarked page:

Walk down the gorge Something within the abyss Waits for you in hiding. Go!
Perhaps the most fitting closure, other than a flake of jasper or a splinter of dinosaur bone, is a poem by Nanao himself. It was written nearly twenty years ago, a reminder that what we see, what we name, how we suppose reality to be, might just as well not be. What is a mountain? How far away? Is it all just illusory suspension of mist and sand, riptide fossilized in the mind's eye?

WHY Why climb a mountain? Look, a mountain there. I don't climb mountain. Mountain climbs me. Mountain is myself. I climb myself. There is no mountain nor myself. Something moves up and down in the air.
Sources, other than my own notebooks or casual interviews with Nanao, include:

Nanao Sakaki, Real Play, Tooth of Time Books, Santa Fe, 1981 Nanao Sakaki, Inch by Inch: 45 Haiku by Issa; Tooth of Time, 1985 Gary Snyder: introduction to Real Play; expanded for Break the Mirror: the Poems of Nanao Sakaki, Blackberry Books,1996 Rex Lee Jim, ed., Dancing Voices, Peter Pauper Press, 1994, (Luci Tapahonso) Mary Peck, Chaco Canyon: A Center and its World, Museum of New Mexico Press, 1994 (Simon Ortiz) Taped interview with Nanao Sakaki and Jeff Bryan, May 1998

Origami fun, interesting fold, form, crease Symbolizes the Japanese custom. Art

Folded Expressions

Haiku Poetrys Origami. Coiled Shakti Kundalini Origami. Oceans gurgle Tsunami Origami. Clouds fold Tornado

Origami. Relativistic physics Of folded space-time Origami. Bashos frog splash Merging waves Origami. Consonants fold Vowels hold Origami. Old age skin Times Origami. Occupy protests Democracys Origami. Paperless folds On paper Origami. God Advaitic

Origami. Memory Neurotransmitters Origami. Death Lifes Origami.

Gender Child Female Age (Years) 2-3 4-8 9-13 14-18 19-30 31-50 51+ 4-8 9-13 14-18 19-30 31-50 51+ 1,000 1,200 1,600 1,800 2,000 1,800 1,600 1,400 1,800 2,200 2,400 2,200 2,000 Sedentary Moderately Active 1,000-1,400 1,400-1,600 1,600-2,000 2,000 2,000-2,200 2,000 1,800 1,400-1,600 1,800-2,200 2,400-2,800 2,600-2,800 2,400-2,600 2,200-2,400 Active 1,000-1,400 1,400-1,800 1,800-2,200 2,400 2,400 2,200 2,000-2,200 1,600-2,000 2,000-2,600 2,800-3,200 3,000 2,800-3,000 2,400-2,800

Male

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 follows an approximate recommended ratio of 3:1:1, or 60% carbs

20% protein 20% fat

Your Total Daily Calories 2,000

Recommended Maximum Grams of Carbs

Recommended Maximum Grams of Protein

Recommended Maximum Grams Fat

250g Per Day50g Per 125g Per Day25g Per 55g Per Day11g Per Meal Meal Meal 1000 cals/day 500 cals/day 500 cals/day

1,400

175g Per Day35g Per 87g Per Day17.4g Per 38g Per Meal Meal Day7.6g Per Meal 700 cals/day 350 cals/day 350 cals/da

1,600

200g Per Day40g Per 100g Per Day20g Per 44g Per Meal Meal Day8.8g Per Meal 800 cals/day 400 cals/day 400 cals/day

2,400

300g Per Day60g Per 150g Per Day30g Per 66g Per Meal Meal Day13.2g Per Meal 1200 cals/day 600 cals/day 600 cals/day 50g Per Day10g Per Meal 450 cals/day 72g Per Day14.4g Per Meal 650 cals/day

1,800

225g Per Day45g Per 112g Per Meal Day22.4g Per Meal 900 cals/day 450 cals/day

2,600

325g Per Day65g Per 162g Per Meal Day32.4g Per Meal 1300 cals/day 650 cals/day

1oz=28.35gm

Calories in Fruits per 100 Grams Calories in Apple 56 Calories in Avocado Pear 190 Calories in Banana 95 Calories in Chickoo 94 Calories in Cherries 70 Calories in Dates 281 Calories in Grapes Black 45 Calories in Guava 66 Calories in Kiwi Fruit 45 Calories in Lychies 61 Calories in Mangoes 70 Calories in Orange 53 Calories in Orange juice 100ml 47 Calories in Papaya 32 Calories in Peach 50 Calories in Pears 51 Calories in Pineapple 46 Calories in Plums 56 Calories in Strawberries 77 Calories in Watermelon 26 Calories in Pomegranate 77 Calories in Vegetables per 100 Grams Calories in Broccoli 25 Calories in Brinjal 24 Calories in Cabbage 45 Calories in Carrot 48 Calories in Cauliflower 30 Calories in Fenugreek (Methi) 49 Calories in French beans 26 Calories in Lettuce 21 Calories in Mushroom 18 Calories in Onion 50 Calories in Peas 93 Calories in Potato 97 Calories in Spinach 100g Calories in Spinach 1 leaf Calories in Tomato 21 Calories in Tomato juice 100ml 22 Calories in Cereals per 100 Grams Calories in Bajra 360 Calories in Maize flour 355 Calories in Rice 325 Calories in Wheat flour 341 Calories in Breads per piece 1 medium chapatti 119

1 slice white bread 60 1 paratha (no filling) 280 Calories in Milk & Milk Products per cup Calories in Butter 100gms. 750 Calories in Buttermilk 19 Calories in Cheese 315 Calories in Cream 100gms. 210 Calories in Ghee 100gms 910 Calories in Milk Buffalo 115 Calories in Milk Cow 100 Calories in Milk Skimmed 45 Calories in Other Items Calories in Sugar 1 tbsp 48 Calories in Honey 1 tbsp 90 Calories in Coconut water 100 ml 25 Calories in Coffee 40 Calories in Tea 30

1 kcal = 4.184 kJ. A joule is the energy expended when 1 kg is moved 1 m by a force of 1 Newton The energy values are 17 kJ/g (4.0 kcal/g) for protein, 37 kJ/g (9.0 kcal/g) for fat and 17 kJ/g (4.0 kcal/g) for carbohydrate
Fat Total carbohydrate kcal/g (kJ/g) kcal/g (kJ/g)

Protein kcal/g (kJ/g) Eggs, meat products, milk products: Eggs Meat/fish Milk/milk products Fats - separated: Butter Margarine, vegetable Other vegetable fats and oils Fruits : All, except lemons, limes Fruit juice, except lemon, lime# Lemon, limes Lemon juice, lime juice# Grain products: Barley, pearled Cornmeal, whole ground Macaroni, spaghetti Oatmeal - rolled oats Rice, brown Rice, white or polished Rye flour - whole grain 4.36 (18.2) 4.27 (17.9) 4.27 (17.9) 4.27 (17.9) 4.27 (17.9) -3.36 3.36 3.36 3.36 3.55 2.73 3.91 3.46 3.41 3.82 3.05 (14.1) (14.1) (14.1) (14.1) (14.9) (11.4) (16.4) (14.5) (14.3) (16.0) (12.8)

9.02 (37.7) 9.02 (37.7) 8.79 (36.8) 8.79 (36.8) 8.84 (37.0) 8.84 (37.0) 8.37 8.37 8.37 8.37 8.37 8.37 8.37 8.37 8.37 8.37 8.37 (35.0) (35.0) (35.0) (35.0) (35.0) (35.0) (35.0) (35.0) (35.0) (35.0) (35.0)

3.68 (15.4) * 3.87 (16.2) 3.87 (16.2) 3.87 (16.2) -3.60 3.92 2.48 2.70 3.95 4.03 4.12 4.12 4.12 4.16 3.86 (15.1) (15.1) (10.4) (11.3) (16.5) (16.9) (17.2) (17.2) (17.2) (17.4) (16.2)

Rye flour - light Sorghum - wholemeal Wheat - 97-100% extraction Wheat t - 70-74% extraction Other cereals - refined Legumes, nuts: Mature dry beans, peas, nuts Soybeans Vegetables: Potatoes, starchy roots Other underground crops Other vegetables

3.41 0.91 3.59 4.05 3.87

(14.3) (3.8) (14.0) (17.0) (16.2)

8.37 8.37 8.37 8.37 8.37

(35.0) (35.0) (35.0) (35.0) (35.0)

4.07 4.03 3.78 4.12 4.12

(17.0) (16.9) (15.8) (17.2) (17.2)

3.47 (14.5) 3.47 (14.5) 2.78 (11.6) 2.78 (11.6) 2.44 (10.2)

8.37 (35.0) 8.37 (35.0) 8.37 (35.0) 8.37 (35.0) 8.37 (35.0)

4.07 (17.0) 4.07 (17.0) 4.03 (16.9) 3.84 (16.1) 3.57 (14.9)