The A to Z Challenge is on! Hello and welcome to my Main blog. My name is Rose Anderson and I’m a romance novelist. Join me and more than 2279 bloggers and authors as we blog the alphabet throughout the month of April. My daily posts will be mostly history with some science topics here and there. I’ve chosen subjects that tickle my fancy, I hope you will find them interesting too.
Keep the topic rolling! If you have comments or questions, add them at the end of the post. I may not know the answer off the top of my head but I love research and would enjoy discussing my topics further. Comments can be made just below my bio in the tag section.
*FREE* If you enjoy reading scorching romances with unique twists and characters full of personality and depth, scroll down for a free chapter sampler. Find my book trailers in the tabs above.
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Today’s Calliope’s Writing Tablet post is brought to you by the letter K ~
K for Kokopelli
I’ve said before that I am a drummer. My husband and friends gather regularly to make music together. Besides a variety of drums, we have all sorts of percussion instruments and unusual rhythm makers from all over the world. Sometimes we make music indoors, other times we drum and dance in the moonlight. As we have the largest yard to accommodate such a gathering, we host full moon drummings at my house. That includes the notable Blue Moon — those extra moons in the year. More times than not we entrain when we really get going — that is, our brains synchronize. Some future post I’ll explain the science behind that. One of the strange things about entrainment is the ability to all stop together without any lead up to let you know the music is winding down. It also leaves you feeling rather high to have your brainwaves mingling with other brainwaves. Gotta love science. 😀
It was after such a brain bonding on a full moon night that I saw something on the moon.
People often see things on the moon, images like the rabbit, the man in the moon, the sitting woman. Depending what image your culture says is there, that’s what you’ll see, just as we see things in cloud formations. This flight of fancy is called pareidolia. There’s a science in this too. Humans are hard-wired to look for faces. I suspect it has to do with bonding as in baby and mother bonding. But I digress. Back to the moon…
So on that wild drumming night the moon was huge and bright, so bright in fact that at 2:30 in the morning you could hear birds making little chirping sounds as they tried to determine if dawn had come early. I looked at that moon and saw him. It wasn’t the rabbit, the woman or the man in the moon face. It was Kokopelli. I was seized with an overwhelming case of surety that told me that sometime in the past, an aboriginal storyteller in North America looked up and saw the dancing flute player.
Ive scoured the web looking for a comparable moon to show here and gave up after so many pages of images. Online images don’t show a clear Kokopelli. This is a rough attempt to show what I saw. It takes skill to draw with a computer’s mouse and that’s a skill I just don’t possess.
Who is Kokopelli?
It’s said Kokopelli is a Kachina, a spirit being in the pantheon of Southwest Native American deities known for music, dance, and mischief. The ancient Anasazi considered him a god but his origins are thought to be older still. Ancient rock carvings and paintings, a.k.a. petroglyphs, date him at 3,000 or so years.
Depending on which peoples you ask, the humpbacked dancing flute player has different meanings attributed to him. Generally, this kachina is thought to carry a sack on his back like a traveler or trader. In legends, the sack carries everything from unborn babies to seeds to other gifts. His flute is said to be a nose flute (yes there really are such things). The melody on his flute would bring rain, melt snow, and the change the seasons.
In keeping with those babies on his back, he’s also associated with replenishment and fertility. Some of the petroglyphs show him dancing with a substantial erection. Legend says when Kokopelli played his flute everyone would sing and dance all through the night. Come morning every maiden in the village would be with child. There have been no such surprises for my drummer friends.
Here’s an example of the nose flute
My son gave me his head cold for my birthday last week. Needless to say, I’m writing this through a brain fog. Sorry for the late post.
Tomorrow it’s Funday Sunday and on Monday ~ letter L!
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**NEW THIS WEEK** on my satellite blog!
http://calliopeswritingtablet.blogspot.com/
It’s Day6 in the Authors in Bloom event. It highlights those things authors do outside the fiction. We garden, we cook, we craft etc. One of the more unusual things my husband and I have done was lead wild foods programs for Chicago’s Field Museum. For this event I’ll be sharing my recipes. Do stop by. You may have delicious ingredients waiting in your backyard!
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It’s the final stretch in the 100 Things Blogging Challenge!
For nearly 100 days, 
I’ve posted from my chosen topic: Words on the Verge of Extinction. Just 1 entry to come!
Here’s one for today:
Essomenic (adjective 1771)
~showing things as they will be in the future
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See what’s happening on the RB4U blog today
http://romancebooks4us.blogspot.com/
Our April contest is on. We’ll have 3 winners and a lot of prizes to split among them. http://www.romancebooks4us.com/
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Love Waits in Unexpected Places –
Scorching Samplings of Unusual Love Stories
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/333971
Download your copy of my free chapter sampler!
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calliopeswritingtablet.wordpress.com 
Kokopelli is my favorite of the different Kachina’s. I love music so it’s fitting that I see him in what I do. 🙂 Thanks for sharing and I hope you feel better soon!
🙂 Thanks. I’m on day 3 and still feel yucky. I’m drawn to Kachinas myself. I like the little ones who dwell inside unpopped popcorn. They get mad when you heat their home and leave in a huff. That’s a post for another day. 🙂
Rose, I watched and listened to the video. The music was haunting. Thanks for sharing!
You’re welcome. The thought behind the nose flute is playing that way makes the music more sacred. It’s believed exhaling through the nose is a cleaner breath than through the mouth.
What a fantastic evening that must have been – love that image on the moon and the stories behind it. One of the most amazing sounds (and sights) I saw last year was a Celtic drumming band here in Scotland and they’re going to figure briefly in the novel I’m writing.
Our drum nights are always a blast. How fun that you’re putting the Celtic band in your novel. 🙂 I love Celtic music of all sorts. I stumbled upon a Breton musician several years ago. Alan Stivell is his name. He plays a Celtic harp. Apparently when he was young his father, who repaired instruments, gave him an authentic antique Celtic harp in pieces. He’s been playing ever since. The harp is huge. I mention him because Breton music figures briefly in my novel because I heard him play. We writers get our inspiration for everywhere, no?
You have me curious about your novel. I love Celtic Music. I have a show by Celtic Woman on my DVR.
I only got into romance to learn the ropes on, Ray. My magnum opus is a completely different work of fiction. 🙂 Celtic Woman is great music. You might enjoy Donnal Lunny.
Is there any talent you don’t have? My family is talented, but I don’t have any really developed. As I have gotten older I have lost it, but I used to be able to know what people I was conversing with were thinking and even gave answers to questions they had not asked even though I heard the questions in my head.
I have a daughter who is an excellent artist and photographer, she is also an Indigo child as is one of her daughters who is a cellist and loves to do bead craft. My daughter was in a regional art show in her junior year in high school. The judge was one of the experts from the Smithsonian. My daughter one third place in the show for her triptych. The judge bought the picture and even paid for packing and shipping.
One of my sons is a guitarist and a guitar builder. He is a member of the American Society of Lutiers. Robert Fripp from the Band King Crimson gave a seminar in West Virginia several years ago that my son attended. The tuition was $600.The following year my wife got a phone call, “This is Robert Fripp, is your son coming this year? If he comes he won’t have to pay the tuition.”
Oh my goodness yes, there are many things I wish I knew how to do. Play fiddle for one. I wish I had a head for math but I’m discalculaic so that’s forever out of my reach. Knitting and crochet are two more skills I wish I had. But I love to learn so I’m always on the lookout. Some things mesh with my creative side and some things are simply information. How happy I am when I find something that brings the two together! I’m a dilettante in the truest sense of the word. My kids are the same. My husband’s interests lay mostly with history and biology. The three of them can remember everything they’ve ever read, and that just blows my mind. Mixing that recall with our eclectic interests gets us into some pretty wild dinner conversations!
It sounds like you have a very creative family too, Ray. A triptych maker, a cellist, and a lutier that caught the eye of Robert Fripp! Too bad we’re not neighbors. 🙂
You might have a more active mid-brain. That’s the portion that predicts and reacts to the immediate future. I would imagine your genes came from a skilled hunter if your ability to anticipate was so keen. That would sure be an evolutionary edge. 🙂
Interesting. I will have to look into that. The longest range prediction was who I would marry. I grew up in the state of Washington. At age 12 I dreamed I would marry a woman from Georgia with red hair done up in the old Southern style ringlets. At age 22 I married a woman living in Virginia who was born in Georgia when her dad was an Army Air Force airplane mechanic for Gene Autry. A couple of times when we were first married she did her hair the same way as in my pre-teen dream. What is even more odd is that her childhood pictures look exactly like the older of my two sisters and our oldest daughter.