From the Rift Valley to the Tip o’ Tierra del Fuego......Seasonal Greetings to yer, one an’ all!
A couple of months ago I shared my views about multilevel marketing (MLM) or network marketing, as it is sometimes known. I expected a few brickbats and bouquets and what I got was more or less right on the bacon. Among the correspondence was an e.mail from my old friend Raylene Radiance, who splits her life between Hong Kong and Maui, and who once in a while has been known to seek her fortune via this particular form of direct selling. Now this isn’t her real name exactly, nor anywhere near the one she was born with, but it is close enough to give you some idea of where she’s coming from. While Raylene, as her name implies, is of a sunny disposition, even optimistic by conviction, she is no New Age airhead. She is New York Jewish, her grandparents out of Russia. She trained in modern dance with Merce Cunningham and is a published playwright. She studied for many years at Arica with Oscar Ichazo, a metaphysical teacher of note from Chile, and has sat at the feet of John Lilley and Claudio Naranjo, vaguely in the same tradition, in Hawaii and she attempts to live her life along the lines of what she learned from such luminaries and life as it unfolds for her. In case there’s any doubt in your mind, I like and have quite a bit of respect for Raylene and what she has to say on things.
So when Raylene says to me:
“I know what you think about MLM, and I would normally agree with you, BUT..... I have found this company with the most marvelous product that is REALLY REALLY different.....”.
I don’t just say:
“I’pritheee , Sweetie, pull the other one, it hath bells on’t.”
No, I say gently,
“Really? Tell me more”.
And not only that, I go on to check out this company and see if it is all the things my talented friend Raylene says it is.
I was just about to share what I had found out with you all when I was shocked to note that though I’m writing this on the 17th December (the night before deadline, natch), this issue of Bali Advertiser doesn’t hit the streets until CHRISTMAS DAY!
Well, weird I may be but nobody could call me odd.
There’s no way in the world I’m going to beat you about the head with MLM on the day that the Church has decided Jesus was born. I have far too much respect for the spiritual tradition of my ancestry and far too much respect for the commercial investment people from all traditions have made in the event for that. So instead I’ll just say:
“
BUON NATALE, y’all!”
and for those of you who haven’t rushed out on this festive day to make sure you get your copy of the Bali Advertiser......
“
TOP ‘0 THE NEW YEAR, T’YER!”
Any of you who are waiting with bated breath to find out the skinny on this exciting commercial opportunity to make your fortune with an MLM company which is quite unlike all others and sells the most marvelous product that is REALLY REALLY different will, I’m afraid, just have to preserve yourselves with all the patience you can muster ‘til another day, when all will be revealed.
“
I’m Dreaming of a White.......”
All of which got me thinking a few nostalgic thoughts about Christmas. Actually, I only get the least bit nostalgic at this time of year when the weather is cold and since this particular Northern European male has spent over half his life in tropical or sub-tropical climes, whether it be in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere, you won’t be too surprised if I tell you I don’t get too sentimental on the subject. But I do get twinges of it........usually when I go to a shopping mall somewhere in one of our great Asian capitals, with air conditioning which’d freeze the cobblers off a brass monkey. Here, to piped muzak from massed choirs pre-pubescent angels catching Santa doing naughty things with mummy while dashing through the snow in the shadow of a giant plastic pine tree from Taiwan, I can sometimes enter into the commercial swing of things. At such times my beloved, who shares the same burgundy passport and some of the same sentiments and who originally comes from a country a little to the South of mine, murmurs thoughtfully, “wouldn’t it be nice if we had a real European Christmas one year?”. It would, but it hasn’t happened yet. In fact in ten years we’ve only visited Europe once, and that was an offshore island many wouldn’t even consider European. And I don’t mean Ireland. Somehow our lives seem to be spent in Asia, in Australasia and America. Ah well..... one day.
Celts & Anglos Downunder
Christmas, they say, is a time for family - so of course my thoughts naturally put me in mind of my first ex-sister-in-law, who lives in Auckland and with whom I now have a few things in common. Among other things she writes books. Her last one I found very interesting. It was all about ritual and the celebration of nature and the heavens above. By comparing the Maori and Aboriginal sacred or ‘holy’ days, equinoxes, solstices and the like, to the co-opted pre-Christian ones in Europe, it was quite amazing how much more relevant they became to the Southern hemisphere. When I think of all those Anglo-saxons and Celts, whose ancestors were transp..... I mean emigrated, to the lands of the Southern Cross and who spend their Christmas lunch under the blazing summer sun in the barbie pit or on the beach, dispatching sizzling turkeys plus trimmings, all washed down with local claret and fortified wines of one sort or another, I am awed by the signal service my ex-sister-in-law has rendered her compatriots of European extraction. After all, given a couple of hundred years or so you’d think you might get in sync with the place in which you live, mightn’t you? I mean, we were all Out of Africa once upon a time, and we’ve all changed, haven’t we?
Oh! Didn’t We Ramble.....
Paleo-biologically speaking we are all of us terrific wanderers and some of us are still going strong. Before you get me wrong, I do mean that in migratory terms, not what you look like or your habits. Penning the blurb for a new journey we’ve put together to hang out with the tribal elders in New Zealand next year I was struck by the huge differences in time, distance and culture between peoples who eventually end up pretty much in the same part of the globe. The Maori and the Aborigines being what I had in mind. Some people say the Australian Aborigines never came from anywhere. They always were, where they are now. They just drifted North with the continent as it separated from Antarctica. Of course in those days Antarctica was a rather more hospitable place and you could take your pick whether you wanted to be a South American or an Australian as things got progressively parkier in the auld sod and these two continents slowly set sail Northward.
Personally, I reckon that’s stretching things a bit. I reckon they were Out of Africa a bit ahead of a lot of us and took a little walk around the Indian Ocean littoral, the earliest of them ending up in Oz anywhere between 60,000 to 90,000 years ago, with the latecomers getting there as recently as 12,000 years ago. Not all made the whole trip, some tarried on the way. Have you noticed how the peoples of what was Dravidian India can look pretty similar to some Aboriginal Australians? I’ve seen the odd fakir or two who passes muster too.
Now your Maori is a very different thing. He only ended up where he is now 800 to 1,000 years ago. But what a traveler! What a sailor! Whenever he and his old lady came Out of Africa, he wandered across the Eurasian land mass and settled down on the coast of Southern China, until about 3,000 years ago. Then, the itch took him, or maybe the Han were getting a tad pushy, and he takes off for Taiwan, drops down through the Philippines and into what was the East Indies, where some turn left through present-day Indonesia and back up the Malay peninsula and on into Thailand and Cambodia. They too left some folk along the way and I guess some of their descendants are still up in the hills here in Bali. Others of their kin just came back to Bali a few hundred years later and pushed their country cousins a little further up the hill and into the crater. Names to conjure with though, Golden Khersonese, Srivijaya, Khmer, and the great Hindu-Buddhist civilisations of South East Asia. Talented folk.
Rift Valley to Tierra del Fuego
Now the guys who turned right, kept on going all the way along the coast of New Guinea, not stopping too much or penetrating too far in land, ‘cos the existing tenants had been there a while, knew a thing or two and were none too hospitable, except when it came to their diet. When they ran out of island they just kept on going out to sea. In the end, sailing far out into the Pacific, almost all the way to South America. Quite something that, Rift Valley to Easter and Pitcairn islands. Somewhere along the line they got to be called Polynesians as opposed to or as well as, Austronesians, Lapita or proto-Malays. About 1,000 years ago the ones who were hanging out in the Marquesas, or thereabouts, must have over-populated or something (it is a South Sea paradise after all) because a bunch of them took off in their canoes, heading a couple of thousand miles down South over open sea, because legend had it there was a land with a long white cloud down there somewhere. After another 500 years the same thing must have happened again as another bunch of wakas took off North for Hawaii.
I guess the only ones who’ve got that beat and clear winners of the Ramblin’ Rose Award for Terrestrial Peregrination are...... and let me hear it for, those hardy and wonderful folk of..... Tierra del Fuego. Out of Africa, diagonally across the Eurasian land mass, hang on a bit for an ice age or two, then over you go, across the Bering Strait land bridge and a leisurely stroll heading South through the North, Central and South Americas.
Isn’t it extraordinary where a few thoughts about Christmas can take you? Anywhere in the world really.....
And coming back to Christmas, may you have a very happy one.
We live in interesting times, that is for sure, so may you learn to enjoy that, if you don’t already. May the New Year bring you joy and maintain you healthy. May our beautiful island live in peace and thrive, in as many diversified and un-
tacky ways as we may devise.
Insert quote:
Given a couple of hundred years or so you’d think you might get in sync with the place in which you live, mightn’t you? I mean, we were all Out of Africa once upon a time, and we’ve all changed, haven’t we?
