Read.This.Book.

I'm getting ready to finish the book we've been reading in Book Club this month. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down follows a Hmong refugee family living in California that has an epileptic daughter- and the clash between their animistic culture and the Western world of medicine. It's reminded me of the numerous differences between Western and Eastern culture- especially in dealing with the soul of a person. While the Hmong family wanted holistic treatment, which included dealing with the spirit of a person, American doctors only treated the physical and usually over-medicated.

There were a lot of sections that got me thinking....where a Hmong should bury their placenta (or their 'soul-jacket') after birth, what animals to sacrifice during different rituals and how to cultivate opium poppies in the hills of Laos. But the most beautiful concept came up yesterday.

This is an excerpt about the qeej, a tradition Hmong instrument used in funeral rituals to send a soul back to its jacket:

[The idea that a qeej, whether bamboo or plastic, can 'speak' to its audience- for example, by giving travel directions to a dead soul- is not a metaphor. Four of its six pipes represent the tones of the Hmong language, and Hmong who have learned to understand the qeej can decode actual words 'sung' by the resonating pipes. Just as they do not make the conventional Western distinctions between body and mind or between medicine and religion, the Hmong do not distinguish, as we do, between language and music: their language is musical, and their music is linguistic. All Hmong poetry is sung. Several other musical instruments, called 'talking reeds,' similarly blur the boundary between words and melody.]

I absolutely love this! So many Western philosophers and intellectuals would love to communicate in a way that resonates with people and have the impact that many musicians have. Western musicians connect with people but don't always have a specific concept to communicate. I love that this instrument combines the two- that there is no distinction between language and music, or the physical and the spiritual. So beautiful!