Beautiful Little Bells

Some thoughts and memories inspired by the Mexico trip I just completed.

Northren Chihuaua:
I left the Paquime hotel in the early hours of the morning because it was too noisy for me to slep. I moved to the Casas Grandes Hotel where I slept peacefully and was able to use the connection 'inilambrica" to connect to the web with my lap top.
I found the owners of Cassas Grandes Hotel friendly and truly helpful. The hotel is pleasant and comfortable.
I have seen my sensitivity to noise as a problem. Problem or not it is important that I attend to it. When I accept the ongoing reality of that sensitivity and deal with it realisticaly my life and energy flow beautifully.

The fine people an respecters of quite at Hotel Casas Grandes in Casasa Grandes in Chihuahua, Mexico to the museum at Paquime. I found that museum well worth visiting and suspect you would to.

The Museum returned me to the beautiful little bells.
While at the museum I was reminded of a story that i have related on the pages or perhaps on another blog.
I am no longer sure where I heard this story which so well helps me to feel realities of pre-Columbian North America. I could have heard it in New Mexico but think that I was told it while on a driving trip in Nevada.
I stopped at a roadside stand stand run by Paiutes selling fireworks. A grandmother and her granddaughter were running it. There were few customers at the time and we got to talking. There was another woman there of about the grandmothers age or a bit older. She is, I believe, my source for this story.
It does not seem like a Paiute story to me and the woman telling it may not have been Paiute. My memory of it is imperfect, but it does seem that it took place in what is now know as the America Southwest. It is a story of happenings that took place before the people had heard of Spaniards, Mexicans, or of people like me. It had happened long ago, but not so very long ago.
It was not a story of beginnings or origins, but one that had been remembered.

A people came into the land. A people that the people of the land had not known. Men, women, and children came into the land. A people who knew things. A people who stayed in the land for a time and married among the people there. One thing that they knew was how to make beautiful little tinkling metal bells. They taught some of the people how to make those beautiful, powerful bells.
One had to find the rock and earth which was mother of the metal. It was not easy. One had to find the the soft green translucent stone that helped the fire bring out the metal. The metal stone and the green stone had to be broken and crushed and mixed together and heated until they were almost like water. It was not easy. The metal was beaten flat, shaped, and decorated. There was another way too. It was not easy.
These people form the south who knew things moved on. They had stayed and then they left. Maybe toward the north east. But they left bells and knowledge of the bells and some of themselves with the people.
The people no longer made the bells, but had not forgotten them.
There was more to the story. More about the the beautiful sound of the bells and more about a young girl and other things I have forgotten. I haven't forgotten the bells and I imagine their sound.
At the Paquime museum I saw those bells!
I saw them.
They were small and more beautifully made and decorated than i had imagined. One sensed their power. They seem to be made of a tempered copper and were truly more beautiful to look at then I had imagined.
I also learned that some time in about the 1300s the people there had felt int necessary to move north and had done so.
So, much for "old wives' tales."
My eyes are moist as I write.

Stereocilia

• Zebrafish regenerate them all the time.
• You have them in your ear.
• Loud noises break them.
• They are small hair-like cells.
• You have about 16,000 of the in your left ear.
• The respond to vibrations to help you keep your balance and to determine where a sound is coming from.
• Can you tell where a sound is coming from as well as ever?
• Soft noises cause these hair cells to shift at their bases.
• Loud sounds can cause them to break.
• Once they are gone, they never grow back in humans.
• Stereocilia damage is a cause of tinnitus.