Saturday, November 15, 2008
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Book on the rights of the child
loving and safe family.
Libre expresion
Education respectful of culture
Right to organize
The end!
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Chapter 14
April:
7"30 pm. I took one look inside the overcrowded microbus (the last of
the day), announced to the driver that I would ride up top, and hefted
my weight up the vehicle's skinny welded ladder before his machismo
could forbid it. There I found myself in the company of three obreros
flattened out on their backs, hiding from patrolling police. I joined
them, curving my spine between spare tires and heaps of rope,
brakelights illuminating the heels of our boots all cutely alined
along the steel roof rigging. We pattered and puttered small talk.
Appreciating the heat of eachothers' bodies warding off the biting
wind rolling down the mountain and I, remembered (as if I had ever
forgotten) what each majestic night looks like as it rolls from one
side of the horizon to the other.
October:
Every now and again, actually every week or so, sometimes every few
days, lately daily: the power goes out. The town is submerged in a
delicious darkness. People swarm the stores in search of candles and
just as quickly disappear behind closed doors. It is then that I can
walk the streets and look at the stars at every turn dodging the beams
of headlights stabbing their way down the streets. Chasing the opening
and closing spaces of anonimity and night as if they were gigantic
soap bubbles. It is so rare the opportunities that I have to move
freely without being confronted by hundreds of blank stares and a
report later that day from a total stranger telling me exactly where
she heard that I had walked that day.
There are many descriptions of stars, so many analogies to the cloudy
milky way, the total gallactic exhalation of Jehovah that unveils
itself as the clear blue day daily dissolves it is not worth adding
another. But I will say that in all these writings there is one thing
that is wrong: The sky is not black. The sky is a deep and turgid
blue, colored as the center of a mother's eye as she looks at her
nursing child. Black illuminated from behind by the blue flame of
Life in love with Itself. The dark that holds us and awaits the fire
of our creation as it shows us a diamondstung universe, sparks flying
off its own.
Chapter 15
And now, with a fungal infection, intestinal infection, and flea
infestation, I appear to have collected the set.
Chapter 16
They numbered about 400: the women who came down from the villages to
march for March 8 International Women's Day.
Brown skinned women barefoot or in thin plastic shoes. An indigenous
woman wears all of her wealth on her body: a typical costume sells for
a bare minimum of 750 quetzales (over a hundred dollars) and up to
various thousands. The blouses in our region of the highlands carry on
them approximately 20,000 tiny intricate stitches in various shades of
wine, burgandy, black and deep grape revealing the contours of the
surrounding mountains and symbols of local mythology. Around the neck
opening little black velvet triangles are neatly adhered with red
thread so that, if you happen to look straight down at a woman selling
vegetables in the market, her perfectly pulled back head of black hair
looks like the center of an eclipted midday sun.
Women tie a bolt of cloth around their waists with a flower
embroidered belt so tightly that the curve of their lower bellies pops
out because here, (mercifully) a curving feminine belly is a sign of
fertility and grace. The cloth of their corte in its most traditional
presentation is actually 4 pieces of navy cloth whose hems are bound
together so tightly by bright thread that it looks as if it were one
piece of cloth with an off center cross tranversing its length. The
center of this cross is typically arranged to sit just left of center
on a woman's left hip and falls just below the knee. It says a lot
about a people's value system if they are willing to spend three
months or more of their earnings on a single set of clothing, clothing
that sets them apart and subjects them to inhumane discrimination
because it defines them as member of a race people who together still
follow the rhythm of daybreak and harvest moons. A people that have
been under attack since 1492 and still haven't knuckled under. I look
at their polyester clad mestizo half brothers slaving away for an
overcomplicated Chinese cell phone and draw some pretty harsh
comparisons.
Me and my 2 coworkers scurried around with gunny sacks full of lilac
rice paper flowers between these women pinning them in their hair and
helping them blow up lilac colored balloons made special for the
occasion. The language barrier can be pretty steep as the majority of
people here reject Spanish as a form of communication. My K'iche is
lousy and serves only to eek out a few cheap laughs. Neverthless we
got the job done.
And so it began: the march. Women lined up in phalanxes in their
separate groups representing their communities. I set to work
distributing two gigantic puppet eyes (complete with brows), an
enormous puppet nose, two sailboat ears, upper and lower lips of a
giant face puppet to 7 women. In my artistic mind these marching
pieces perfectly conjoined to form the face of a Titanic woman. In
reality: they looked like a drunken Dali painting staggering down the
street: one eye higher than the other, the two parts of the lips
lagging eachother by about fifteen feet, ears wiggling in the
breeze....
People poured out of their homes, churches, and schools to watch the spectacle.
I stayed with the our other gigantic creation: the 20 foot wide bird.
Manuevering the four women who supported its weight around the adobe
and concrete corners of town, trying to keep us all vaguely in line
with eachother (though at times we came out looking like Kentucky
Fried chicken heaped together in the boxy streets)
The dream bird occurred to me as a possible way to bring to light the
hopes and dreams of women in the community. In our workshops they
scribbled their thoughts on long flowing strips of translucent lilac
and pink plastic that I stapled to long bamboo poles forming plumage.
The bird's head was quite a struggle: its three foot long beak
constantly gave in to the demands of gravity and plummetted to the
floor. The damn thing finally came together the night before the march
over two liters of shitty beer with a patient friend (The incomparable
Mr. Mu Son Chi) who sewed the cardboard pieces together with plyers
and rusting wire.
The creation "flew" in front of a banner that read "To dream alone is
just a dream, to dream together makes reality." (In essence, this
beautiful and simple phrase says it all doesn't it?)
The women converged in the munincipal theater for music and tamales,
sweaty and needing to regroup. There, in all its glory pieces of the
face puppet (AKA women organizers of the march) climbed onto the stage
and spoke one at a time: the ears "We deserve to be heard" The eyes
"We deserve to be seen as subjects and not objects" The nose "We
deserve to breathe in an environment of peace" The lips "We have the
right to free expression." I smiled. This is what art ought to do:
through one single work all the women present could hear themselves
speaking.
Chapter 17
When everything that grew between you and another human being is
flash burned to the ground and ashes rain. Color bleeds out of the
environment. All falls to grey. A leaden screen in still frame. There
is no sound. You watch the world move from the black branches of
charred trees and its noise doesn't reach you: the silence within
presses in on your ears. Nothing reaches you. Reverberations of
conversations held through touch, through making love, ricochet
voicelessly through your body seeking exit via destruction. Memory
embedded beneath skin. The inaudible screams the unborn make when
they know they will die: a hope, a desire... "Born in a night to
perish in a night".....
I passed months in this way, pacing the anteroom of my own alchemy:
struggling to amass the force of will to live completely in the moment
(if only for a moment) before my mind would drag me back into its
infinite imagined sacharine endings. Discipline.
In Spanish the word for grieving is "luto" from the Latin "combat
between two" A mortal combat between that the part of your mind that
has accepted losing someone you loved and the whole weight of your
being that won't, that kicks and screams around its corpse trying to
give it life again. When your heart breaks in two and the two sides
line up daily to go to war;
the struggle to turn the silence of the space within into an ally.
People would say "Ojos que no ven corazon que no siente." Eyes that
don't see, heart that doesn't feel to explain away the undoing of a
relationship that lasted over two years of my life. I found it to be
the opposite: when my eyes can't see all of my senses sharpen
themselves and pour over every detail of what I left behind: the scent
of greasy pink Mexican bread and coffee, the smell of his blue soap,
alone in bed: crisp morning air stealing his warmth out of pelling
flannel sheets and the sound of water falling on the shower floor, the
feeling of his lips departing from my forehead and the tender hush
they left in my mind, light catching in the narrow roots of his black
beard making them look almost translucent.
I find we do not siffer from not receiving the love we crave. We
suffer from having the love we bear turn into shades of blue inside of
us. Iceburgs beneath water. Morasses of snow. Barren and beautiful
landscapes of isolation.....
.
April:
7"30 pm. I took one look inside the overcrowded microbus (the last of
the day), announced to the driver that I would ride up top, and hefted
my weight up the vehicle's skinny welded ladder before his machismo
could forbid it. There I found myself in the company of three obreros
flattened out on their backs, hiding from patrolling police. I joined
them, curving my spine between spare tires and heaps of rope,
brakelights illuminating the heels of our boots all cutely alined
along the steel roof rigging. We pattered and puttered small talk.
Appreciating the heat of eachothers' bodies warding off the biting
wind rolling down the mountain and I, remembered (as if I had ever
forgotten) what each majestic night looks like as it rolls from one
side of the horizon to the other.
October:
Every now and again, actually every week or so, sometimes every few
days, lately daily: the power goes out. The town is submerged in a
delicious darkness. People swarm the stores in search of candles and
just as quickly disappear behind closed doors. It is then that I can
walk the streets and look at the stars at every turn dodging the beams
of headlights stabbing their way down the streets. Chasing the opening
and closing spaces of anonimity and night as if they were gigantic
soap bubbles. It is so rare the opportunities that I have to move
freely without being confronted by hundreds of blank stares and a
report later that day from a total stranger telling me exactly where
she heard that I had walked that day.
There are many descriptions of stars, so many analogies to the cloudy
milky way, the total gallactic exhalation of Jehovah that unveils
itself as the clear blue day daily dissolves it is not worth adding
another. But I will say that in all these writings there is one thing
that is wrong: The sky is not black. The sky is a deep and turgid
blue, colored as the center of a mother's eye as she looks at her
nursing child. Black illuminated from behind by the blue flame of
Life in love with Itself. The dark that holds us and awaits the fire
of our creation as it shows us a diamondstung universe, sparks flying
off its own.
Chapter 15
And now, with a fungal infection, intestinal infection, and flea
infestation, I appear to have collected the set.
Chapter 16
They numbered about 400: the women who came down from the villages to
march for March 8 International Women's Day.
Brown skinned women barefoot or in thin plastic shoes. An indigenous
woman wears all of her wealth on her body: a typical costume sells for
a bare minimum of 750 quetzales (over a hundred dollars) and up to
various thousands. The blouses in our region of the highlands carry on
them approximately 20,000 tiny intricate stitches in various shades of
wine, burgandy, black and deep grape revealing the contours of the
surrounding mountains and symbols of local mythology. Around the neck
opening little black velvet triangles are neatly adhered with red
thread so that, if you happen to look straight down at a woman selling
vegetables in the market, her perfectly pulled back head of black hair
looks like the center of an eclipted midday sun.
Women tie a bolt of cloth around their waists with a flower
embroidered belt so tightly that the curve of their lower bellies pops
out because here, (mercifully) a curving feminine belly is a sign of
fertility and grace. The cloth of their corte in its most traditional
presentation is actually 4 pieces of navy cloth whose hems are bound
together so tightly by bright thread that it looks as if it were one
piece of cloth with an off center cross tranversing its length. The
center of this cross is typically arranged to sit just left of center
on a woman's left hip and falls just below the knee. It says a lot
about a people's value system if they are willing to spend three
months or more of their earnings on a single set of clothing, clothing
that sets them apart and subjects them to inhumane discrimination
because it defines them as member of a race people who together still
follow the rhythm of daybreak and harvest moons. A people that have
been under attack since 1492 and still haven't knuckled under. I look
at their polyester clad mestizo half brothers slaving away for an
overcomplicated Chinese cell phone and draw some pretty harsh
comparisons.
Me and my 2 coworkers scurried around with gunny sacks full of lilac
rice paper flowers between these women pinning them in their hair and
helping them blow up lilac colored balloons made special for the
occasion. The language barrier can be pretty steep as the majority of
people here reject Spanish as a form of communication. My K'iche is
lousy and serves only to eek out a few cheap laughs. Neverthless we
got the job done.
And so it began: the march. Women lined up in phalanxes in their
separate groups representing their communities. I set to work
distributing two gigantic puppet eyes (complete with brows), an
enormous puppet nose, two sailboat ears, upper and lower lips of a
giant face puppet to 7 women. In my artistic mind these marching
pieces perfectly conjoined to form the face of a Titanic woman. In
reality: they looked like a drunken Dali painting staggering down the
street: one eye higher than the other, the two parts of the lips
lagging eachother by about fifteen feet, ears wiggling in the
breeze....
People poured out of their homes, churches, and schools to watch the spectacle.
I stayed with the our other gigantic creation: the 20 foot wide bird.
Manuevering the four women who supported its weight around the adobe
and concrete corners of town, trying to keep us all vaguely in line
with eachother (though at times we came out looking like Kentucky
Fried chicken heaped together in the boxy streets)
The dream bird occurred to me as a possible way to bring to light the
hopes and dreams of women in the community. In our workshops they
scribbled their thoughts on long flowing strips of translucent lilac
and pink plastic that I stapled to long bamboo poles forming plumage.
The bird's head was quite a struggle: its three foot long beak
constantly gave in to the demands of gravity and plummetted to the
floor. The damn thing finally came together the night before the march
over two liters of shitty beer with a patient friend (The incomparable
Mr. Mu Son Chi) who sewed the cardboard pieces together with plyers
and rusting wire.
The creation "flew" in front of a banner that read "To dream alone is
just a dream, to dream together makes reality." (In essence, this
beautiful and simple phrase says it all doesn't it?)
The women converged in the munincipal theater for music and tamales,
sweaty and needing to regroup. There, in all its glory pieces of the
face puppet (AKA women organizers of the march) climbed onto the stage
and spoke one at a time: the ears "We deserve to be heard" The eyes
"We deserve to be seen as subjects and not objects" The nose "We
deserve to breathe in an environment of peace" The lips "We have the
right to free expression." I smiled. This is what art ought to do:
through one single work all the women present could hear themselves
speaking.
Chapter 17
When everything that grew between you and another human being is
flash burned to the ground and ashes rain. Color bleeds out of the
environment. All falls to grey. A leaden screen in still frame. There
is no sound. You watch the world move from the black branches of
charred trees and its noise doesn't reach you: the silence within
presses in on your ears. Nothing reaches you. Reverberations of
conversations held through touch, through making love, ricochet
voicelessly through your body seeking exit via destruction. Memory
embedded beneath skin. The inaudible screams the unborn make when
they know they will die: a hope, a desire... "Born in a night to
perish in a night".....
I passed months in this way, pacing the anteroom of my own alchemy:
struggling to amass the force of will to live completely in the moment
(if only for a moment) before my mind would drag me back into its
infinite imagined sacharine endings. Discipline.
In Spanish the word for grieving is "luto" from the Latin "combat
between two" A mortal combat between that the part of your mind that
has accepted losing someone you loved and the whole weight of your
being that won't, that kicks and screams around its corpse trying to
give it life again. When your heart breaks in two and the two sides
line up daily to go to war;
the struggle to turn the silence of the space within into an ally.
People would say "Ojos que no ven corazon que no siente." Eyes that
don't see, heart that doesn't feel to explain away the undoing of a
relationship that lasted over two years of my life. I found it to be
the opposite: when my eyes can't see all of my senses sharpen
themselves and pour over every detail of what I left behind: the scent
of greasy pink Mexican bread and coffee, the smell of his blue soap,
alone in bed: crisp morning air stealing his warmth out of pelling
flannel sheets and the sound of water falling on the shower floor, the
feeling of his lips departing from my forehead and the tender hush
they left in my mind, light catching in the narrow roots of his black
beard making them look almost translucent.
I find we do not siffer from not receiving the love we crave. We
suffer from having the love we bear turn into shades of blue inside of
us. Iceburgs beneath water. Morasses of snow. Barren and beautiful
landscapes of isolation.....
.
 Reply | Reply to all |
) |
|
:
7
Chapter 18
Snapshot:
Riding in the back of a pick up truck above the cloudline curving
around mountains as if they were crumpled patchwork quilts of cordoroy
green growing vegetables or brown rows of earth waiting to explode
into life.
Snapshot:
Swimming upstream between two jungle canyon walls my few possessions
tied to my waist by a scarf. The way that light bounces in narrow
spaces picking up every bit of color it can find and turns up their
volume so that you can feel it humming in your temples: a peach melba
sunday melted and covered by vines reaching down to touch the water's
calm skin. I feel like a crocodile with my eyes barely above the blue
black green line of water ahead of me reveling in adventure and
wiggling my four short limbs to push forward against the cool current.
Snapshot:
Riding in the back of a pick up truck above the cloudline curving
around mountains as if they were crumpled patchwork quilts of cordoroy
green growing vegetables or brown rows of earth waiting to explode
into life.
Snapshot:
Swimming upstream between two jungle canyon walls my few possessions
tied to my waist by a scarf. The way that light bounces in narrow
spaces picking up every bit of color it can find and turns up their
volume so that you can feel it humming in your temples: a peach melba
sunday melted and covered by vines reaching down to touch the water's
calm skin. I feel like a crocodile with my eyes barely above the blue
black green line of water ahead of me reveling in adventure and
wiggling my four short limbs to push forward against the cool current.
| |
Chapter 19
Standing hip deep in the flow of time and paying attention:
A girl is sweeping
The sky wide open
Flowers clutch little mantillas of dew beneath their chins
Bells, irises, geraniums
My mind empties itself of all that keeps it moving in circles
and fills with birds and roosters
Rain falls in gentle patters on the roof
and smells of cold.
Today I send the world my imperfect love
upturn my palms flat and receive the same,
Spread my fingers to let it keep moving
because, when held, it burns.
Chapter 20
By some really god awful stroke of karma I have managed to rent a room from not one but two remarkably crazy old widows here in Guatemala. I thought I had it bad in my first community. I really did. I thought, in moving to my second community that I was going to find some blessed respite from the constant onslaught of obsessive compulsive histrionic house cleaning widows... Oh I was wrong.. Oh so very wrong... I should have taken a hint when, trying to arrive to my new home in Zacualpa, the tuk-tuk driver (a sort of three wheeled taxi) said nothing but "Oh..... Really....... I know where she lives...." The tone in his voice getting slightly distant... Slightly damp. I should have taken a hint when I told people where I lived they all got slightly quiet...
And so began my aquaintance with Madame Psychopants.
As it turns out I got shacked up with the town nut thanks to my well meaning nun friends who overestimated my sainthood (I remember one similar occaision when, as an 8 year old, I walked around on tippy toes in long pants in front of an old cowboy so he would think I was older and that I could handle a faster, and thereby more fun horse.... Later that day I kicked his damn rodeo nag full on the flank and sent her wailing into a dead run. The old cowhand galloped along side me grabbed me by the collar and tried to pull me onto his cutting horse. I panicked, leapt off and narrowly missed getting kicked in the head... This of course does not mean that I walked tippy toes in front of the sisters but I am always on good behavior, I think they overestimated the size of the fruits of my spirit...)
Madame Psychopants' son visited the first month I was there. When he left I lasted exactly 4 days before leaping off of her dead run of mental instability. In the end it was rather comical how jealous she was of her house. She slowly went about trying to take away my ability to perform the most basic functions of living...
It began by throwing the clothes I had hung up to dry in the rosebushes or on the woodpile to rot....
Innocent enough.....
It proceeded to kicking me off the dining room table as she was only renting me space in my room and not her table...
And then... randomly stealing my sheets and blankets off of my bed just before I came home from work at 8pm to kindly giving them to someone to wash (at my expense) and expecting that I would find somewhere else to sleep in the cold night. She entered my room at 6 am the following morning, surprised to find me there sleeping.
It progressed.....
Counting how many times I used the microwave...
How long I was in the bathroom...
Turning off the water to the shower....
Lying saying that the shower was broken and that I had to bathe in a tee shirt outside with buckets..
Pounding on the door while I was in the shower saying she had to use the bathroom and enterring only to throw water on the floor to wash away my evil gringa-lity.
Standing outside my door flipping on and off the light outside my window muttering to herself that my use of candles was going to smoke up the room. Forcing me to blow them out...
All of this occurred while battling an epic flea infestation, prepping and completing a mural in one week (about 10+ hours of work daily) with indigenous women from the surrounding communities who came down to paint with beautiful babies tied to their backs.
I succumbed to the thought that if I killed her I could hide her in her houseplants. Madame PsychoBitch. Luckily I went to visit another friend of mine (a beautiful nun from Chiapas, my age, who recently renounced her religious vows and is currently passing her final days of 12 years of religious life. We sat around with a guitar singing Mexican folk songs for her birthday. One of witch (a well deserved typo) sang of the delight of a man upon hearing of the death of his mother-in-law who he had long desired to turn into a lizard so he could throw stones at her....
Our bellies simultaneously errupted into uncontrolled laughter.
Chapter 21
To be a clown takes no special effort. Clowning is just being yourself but a very specific part of yourself. While your whole body fights for its daily bread these little guys survive inside your secret garden nibbling on rose petals. They are magical creatures who believe that a neck tie can lasso the moon. They climb invisible ladders, fall off, get back on and keep climbing because they know that anything is possible. Their magic rests in Never Ever Ever EVER giving up along the way.
A clown hides none of their feelings and offers themselves fully as they are. The world can forgive everything from three classes of creature: a child, a pregnant woman, and a clown. I have had the luxury of getting to know my clowns this year. There are two that run around in the center of my spirit and I have a feeling that more are on the way. My youngest is named Campanita. She is about 4 years old and is horribly shy. One Mondays and Thursdays her favorite thing to do is watch bugs while wearing scuba goggles; the rest of the week she likes to tie towels around her neck and leap off buildings onto fluffy clouds. My other clown is 16 and is named Mayonesa. Mayonesa is a barely veiled version of myself: she wears funny knee socks, tells really bad jokes and laughs at them..... alone, can communicate telapathetically with her ratty teddy bear sidekick (if only just to hear herself talk), and is so tragicly intense that everybody within earshot cracks up before she even opens her mouth. Her magic is in being so completely and unapologetically herself, warts, stinky feet, wanton impulsivity and all, she opens space for the rest of us to do the same.
As I have gotten to know my own clowns (and taken them out for the occaisional playful afternoon in rural villages and public squares) I have gotten to know other people's clowns and I have even gone out to help wake up (AKA theatrically train) the clowns within rural indigenous Carribean youth (see chapter 12). Clowns are tricksters, we know that reality is based on consensus and like to put whoopee cushions on everybody's seat before they sit down to take the final vote. It is very serious play. I forget the name of the leader of the Merry Weathermen when asked what he would do at the 1968 democratic convention in Chicago he replied "We are going to levitate the Pentagon and make it spin around faster and faster until all the evil spirits come flying out of it."
He wasn't joking.
We face a grave danger as humanity...... Anaesthetized by the constant drip of a reality we didn't choose for ourselves we forget that we are the music makers and dreamers of the dreams. Even in our struggles to cooperatize, to unionize, to autonomize we become automatized and forget that the best way to destroy the system is to plant roses in the cracks of its foundation, in the minds of we the people crushed beneath its weight. I mean we must reclaim joy as a birthright, have the courage to be happy (a deeply political act if you think about it), reclaim our innate creativity to create the world around us, and renegotiate the contracts that form the dimensions of the spaces that hold us. Art is both a means to the end and the end. .
Chapter 20
Syncretism:
Midnight. Mayan priests burn offerings in a small concrete oven in front of the cathedral sitting at the highest summit in town. At dawn their women run hands over rosaries worn smooth by years of miracles given and taken between husks of corn.
Chapter 21
Drop off Huesos' family in Guatemala City: Zona 18: El Limon. THe worst colonia in the worst sector of one of the worst cities in Central America. About an hour before we go in another bus driver is murdered for refusing to pay "taxes" to the local gangs. This means trouble. This means another strike. Transit will stop yet... No one seems preoccupied. Everyone is continuing with ther business. My friend (lover?), Huesos, shows me where he used to like to play in the dirt as a kid and he looks half sadly at the bands of children scurrying between the tightly packed concrete houses on the edge of the neighborhood hill's steep drop off. They have no place to go but here or worse, over the edge, where the cardboard squatter settlements begin. He has the eyes of his mother: they are dark brown and intractably hard making the smile lines around them seem like lies. She and I talk as any two Guatemalan women: what medicine cures what, the importance of the church, pouring over the small tower of aging photgraphs that comprise the history of a single mother whose life has been held together by her rosary. She never smiles and seeths criticism at her son who let his hair grow long, scratches a living from his art, left the church and rejected the rut El Limon laid out for him. He barely looks at me not wanting to give his mother the impression that he has at last found a wife. We move leave before night begins to fall; the view of the city is beautiful in the way that the red sun diffuses through thick grey smoke between mountains of the barrios, every inch drenched with sadness, struggle, and violence. By the end of the week the gangs will be moving onto this block to demand "war taxes" from the residents. It's one of the last blocks not to have gotten shaken down. I bend down to say goodbye to my lover's (friend's?) niece, a budding and gangly artist, run my thumb down the side of her 10 year old cheek and tell her to keep doodling and wink.
And suddenly it occurred, later, lying in a hammock gazing up at a long generous eucalyptus tree, that a sort of rapture fell over me. The way that light turned around the curves of its grey trunk speckled with hundreds of eyes, limbs and the feeling of two great rivers of good and evil flowing through and mingling inside my body, joining my rivulets of both. All the crazy shit that I have lived assimilating in a moment of profound bliss:
The amazing gentleness of men who raped and murdered dozens of innocents
The sputtering politics of an old soldier... dangerously quiet.... who still talks of the Berlin wall and the threat of the Russians. A captain with a heart stopping 2 year old daughter running her tender hands over his cheeks.
The heights and depths of ugliness and beauty and knowing that no they cannot be split...
Mercy and Malice...
It came down upon me in a sudden gust. Blasting through my every hiding place and all I could do was laugh, I throwing my head back so my arc of white teeth showed on my mouth's pink wrinkled cieling. He would take this as a sign that I was falling in love with him and run. I would take it as a sign that he was clueless and be all the better for it. It had nothing to do with him. He had tried so hard to carry me to the sublime, as a man's body can sometimes do to a woman's, but he never could. I didn't love him. And in that moment the floor fell out from under me. I floated through space and, in my rapture, remembered my zen master's two fingers waving in the air in the same position as Christ imparting a blessing "Not two" he crooned shaking his head "Not two..."
Epilogue:
I am drawing to a close in this long rambling retrospective. I think of all the faces I have grown to know in my time here, the warm company of Latin women, the powerful leaders whose examples I have taken to heart..... My firebrand nun friend Ana Maria who flips off bad drivers, dances with dogs and babies, shares homemade cherry moonshine, confronts angry vigilante lynch mobs in the middle of the night to singlehandedly prevent them from burning criminals alive, etc. She has taught me, by xample, that to be completely oneself is have a lived experiece of the divine. Her counterpart is Alba, my boss, a devout envagelical who, diplomatically and forceflly shows up day after day to do the work of transforming her town. She wears lipstick, has two children, periodically diets and is the most gifted popular organizer I know. She taught me how to engage in the tricky long term organic process of building alliances between people through flowery letters, thoughtfulness, and on occaision, feminine wiles. She has taught me, in the flesh and with infinite patience that "a true revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love."
And so I return to this love where all things begin and end. If you are reading this you are one of the people I am connected to in my life, someone who is important to me and someone who I miss. I fear, in all this movement of my life that I will lose touch with you and as such lose touch with what really matters. Yet in the same I am trying to bring something into creation, an ideal, I am fishing for the language of a litany. Boycotting the apocalypse. I want to get more people looking up at the stars, naming themselves and finding eachother in the constellations of our shared human condition. And in all of this I am running risks (as my aging ovaries and thin soled shoes remind me) of walking so far down the dark path of the unknown that, even if I turn back, I will not find things as I left them.
There are two eternals:
Change is the first. Even God dies. A little boy asked me the other day, brain-blastingly astute for his 8 years, if god dies when the generations die. Yes, I answered, in a sense....
The cemeteries of K'iche Indians are nothing more than open fields filled with little mounds of dirt complete with stone slabs where families come to burn a candle, spread flowers and women kneel to wail for their dead every first of November. There are no nameplates: families remember exactly where they laid to rest their loved one and keep coming back to the same location until they too perish. Every now and again on the thin paths between the burial mounds there is a very large bump of earth and you don't know whether it is disrespectful or not to step on it but you do anyway because you have to keep walking. These are the true dead, those who have been forgotten, for whom no one comes to burn a candle.
Connection is the second. We are never separated. We will walk this earth together until death do us part and even then, if the above is any example, we are intertwined in the memories and lives of the people we have touched. I carry all of you with me and send you my prayers. There is a room with a candle lit waiting to welcome you when I see you again, to share a moment and water the little gardens that grow in the spaces between us. To share the changes of the time we have passed apart and know that we will always be moving forward together
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
