July 30, 2010
July 29, 2010
--"Goodnight
Moon", text by Margret Wise Brown
Goodnight
Moon:
...Goodnight room
Goodnight moon
Good night cow jumping over the moon
Goodnight light
And the red balloon
Goodnight bears
Goodnight chairs
Goodnight kittens
And goodnight mittens
Goodnight clocks
And goodnight socks
Goodnight little house
And goodnight mouse
Goodnight comb
And goodnight brush
Goodnight nobody
Goodnight mush
And goodnight to the old lady
whispering "hush"
Goodnight stars
Goodnight air
Goodnight noises everywhere
--"Goodnight
Moon", text by Margret Wise Brown
July 28, 2010
July 27, 2010
I went in search of a
new friend (as of last summer) and his life partner which I required a
negotiation with. I wanted to speak to him face to face and this way I figured
we would get to know the truth about each other in the middle of communication.
I set out on foot with a loaf of homemade organic bread and a smile on my face.
I figured it would take only about thirty minutes to find my friend and ask him
one question but I’m beginning to realize that things of any delicate nature
require more time and effort than I’ve been considering lately – especially
with this amazing pack of wolves who are in conflict over power amongst each
other.
“Are you going
canvassing?” A small-framed white male in his early thirties asked me point
blank.
“No, I am not going
canvassing.” I answered him back with the same authority his question
commanded.
“Why not?” He looked
directly at me.
I stopped to consider
the possibilities and any good enough reason why not go canvassing. “I don’t know
why not canvassing?” I answered after what seemed like an eternity. His
question cut past my right ear and I felt his breath upon it. I had no bull
excuse in me, so I didn’t front.
We made conversation and
sat down on two comfortable outdoor chairs facing a beautiful forest green wall
covered with ivy. Sooner, than not the ivy will change and that will be a
distinguished feature signifying that the season will turn from this into that.
The young man conveyed
to me, “I’ve been fighting devils.” I didn’t bat an eyelash. His body language
was relaxed and his mind was sharp. I-went-there-with-him because to be an
intellectual means to have an open mind and I have that to give so I give it
willingly when I make time. I believe in finding the common threads that bond
us to other living breathing organisms. Bonds such as scientifically,
psychologically, emotionally, biological and any general conversational
perspective that takes us down a verbal road to convey something significantly
greater than our egos or our faces. I didn’t dismiss him at all because I know
only fools are arrogant enough to pretend that they know everything there is to
know about spirituality, demons, gods, hate and love.
“I maneuvered my body
this way and that way.” He shifted to his right and then to his left then he
sat back down on his chair. “I did this to prepare for a forceful kick with all
my might.” And he kicked the air with all his might to show me the way he did
this over a fire pit. “I only got one chance to kick the devil I saw inside the
fire.” He sat down and relaxed into his chair.
“You only get one
chance.” I repeated after him.
“I hope that when you go
to battle your demons that you breathe, drink water and eat a little something.
Do you carry water with
you?” I asked very politely because I didn’t mean to sound like a wet nurse
rather like a woman talking to a man.
Any journey, trial and tribulation, any quest must be taken care of on a
full and watered stomach in my opinion. (Even still I’m losing my taste for many
foods as of late and losing too much weight too quickly I understand that-that
sometimes is a struggle in itself.) “No, I’m not eating much lately. I’m
putting my body through a test.” He said. I nodded. I’ve met many religious
middle-eastern and Indian men whose cultural and spiritual challenges and
traditional values of fasting are serious and thoughtful so I wasn’t weird-ed
out in the least.
I looked at the young
man and said, “When I’ve fasted in the past I’ve done it with water and mate.
The Andes peoples’ tea drink.” He nodded. “I used to take off to the woods for
a week at a time and I’d say prayers to the Gods, fast and then feast on the
last day then return to civilization. The next time I fast I’d like to put my
body through another fast when I prepare for pregnancy. It’s good for the body
to know its limitations.” I continued openly and without a stitch of fear about
what I was talking about. This used to be one of my fears to be too intimate,
culturally intelligent and non-commercial in conversation while in public for
fear that it just wasn’t kosher in the American system. Not like in third world
countries where I’ve been able to stop along the side of the road and meet
fascinating and wonderful strangers and have conversations about the stars, the
universe and mankind.
“I try NOT to go into
battle or into my day on an empty stomach. My demons are very different from
yours. This is the beginning of my journey into a second transition from young
woman to grown woman. I’m off to battle sarcasm, cynicism and arrogant cruelty
– especially from those I’ve known far too long and have gotten comfortable
with me in a certain role in their lives. I’m no longer a servant I’ve finally
transitioned into a warrior like many of my people. People who know all too
well about spilled blood and strong ties to their ancestors.” I didn’t take my
eyes away from him for an instance while I spoke of this intimate life changing
revelation. I watched the contour lines of his eyes for any change and there
was none.
I have what’s coming to
me and its rich because when you are made to suffer cruelty from those closest
to you the Gods know. THE GODS KNOW. I can hear a lie a mile away, I can sense
insecurity like fire and I can see low self-esteem eat away at people’s faces.
Most importantly, I know a spiritual phony when I sense him. I also know a
coward and a selfish leader. I know the kind of power men seek and its
weaknesses. I know all too well because that was my first American war – that’s
who I fought. I’ve fought two other wars in childhood, but it’s different as an
adult. It’s different. It’s much more refined and brutal.
“Sometimes, I see
horrible images.” He looked away.
I looked away, also.
“Like something coming out of something’s a__, right?”
We burst out laughing.
“Seriously, have you
learned how to run like an Indian?” I raised my one eyebrow.
“No, I haven’t yet.” I
looked at him, “I suggest you do, because when you see that s___ coming - run
and run like an Indian it’ll save your life. That s___ is not only there to
scare you and it will but it’s there to paralyze you. Then you’ll become weak
to your own life. Those are your demons and you will have to fight them, but
they’re not real.” He falls completely silent for the first time. I struck a
chord like an arrow through the heart because I spoke my truth and truth like
that is difficult to come by.
He pondered something;
(Could this be true? Could, they - not be real? Are they only fabrications of
himself, the universe and his ancestors? Perhaps, his ego? What? Could it be a
possibility that he is fighting his deepest fears?) Absolutely. He knew this to
be somewhat true. I thought; ‘Well, if I battled insecurity and low self-esteem
in my first American war then you can definitely battle demons coming out of an
a__ inside a fire’. If I would’ve had a choice from the Gods I would’ve chosen
his demons over mine. Mine corroded and chipped away at my heart for years.
Now, well, a transformation has begun to take flight and I will never doubt myself
again for as long as I live because that has been my greatest down fall.
“Have you ever seen the
part in Harry Potter where the teacher asks of his students to imagine
something ridiculous and out comes a large spider and the little girl says her
magic spell and she imagines roller skates on every foot of the spider? The
spider disperses around the room without being able to get its legs under him.
Do you know that scene?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“Well, your demons are
no different if you give them power then they will take it. If you take away
their power by envisioning the silliest of things then you will win over them.
Remember laughter is the weapon over any demon. Intrinsic or extrinsic.
American culture isn’t taught that in schools but many fables will teach that.
It’s clear like night and day. Fear them if you must but don’t let them take
over you because frankly they’re only there to test your will and strength.
Everything is a test until you pass and then you begin all over again. The nice
thing is you won’t have to live through your deepest fears and insecurities
twice. Once you learn your lesson you learn unless you go back for more and get
licked by your own subconscious mind.” I could see it all over his face that he
had to give it a good thought.
“What’s your last name?”
I openly ask. He hesitated to give me his last name as though I was going to
steal it from him.
Quickly I said my last
name and genuinely smiled at him. “I’m of that clan. Those are my Finn people.”
His entire body relaxed
and he tells me his last name.
“Who are your
ancestors?” He responded “Irish, Italian and _______.”
I laughed hard. I swayed
forward on my chair and grabbed a strand of my long hair and pulled it back
away from my face.
“The smartest ladies
I’ve ever run with are your people. The Irish ladies. I know that when I run
with a pack of Irish women I’m not going to die that day. So I entrust my life
in their hands and I can’t say that for everybody else but I like following the
lead of almost any sober, smart and intelligent Irish Alpha female.” He smiled
and understood the deep felt sentiment.
He told me a little bit
about the Irish mysticism and the rich spiritual cultural background of some of
his people. I have nothing but reverence for all those ancestors of his who
came before him, and he – himself, who someday will become an ancestor to some
other young intelligent man like himself or I only hope to a girl – a girl
would benefit from his non-mainstream methods.
“My ancestors sometimes scream
at me.” He brushed away sweat from his brow.
I leaned forward and
laughed harder still. “You’ve got something in common with the Chinese
ancestors. I hear they are just a real dog when it comes to the screaming. My
Chinese friends have shared with me that they carry their ancestors with them
anywhere they need them to go and sometimes there is just too much yelling from
too many old people who want their way.”
We smiled at one
another. We understood the many complex and intricate aspects of spiritual
culture. He got it that he wasn’t speaking to a fool about serious matters of
the heart of spirituality and I held the same regard for him. I thought him
brilliant and passionate which is a rare combination. It’s thrown around a lot
but rare. The only thing I can think of that he might want to refine (if he
wills it) is his timing of conversation specific to a time and a place because
there is always a time and a place for everything and the time seemed right
there and then only because it was me I was willing to speak of demons and
battles in front of perfect strangers always guiding the conversation back to
the philosophical – otherwise, I’m sure he gets dismissed as the young and wise
man he truly is. I could tell that he tends to want to cover a lot of deep
ground as quickly as possible and these are delicate topics that require focus,
attention and patience – especially time.
Anything of any delicate
nature requires transitioning into, being in it and transitioning out of it.
“Imagine, if we could
use more than ten percent of our brain function?” He asked.
“imagine?” I asked back.
“I’ve heard accounts of
Buddhist monks who go and sit in the freezing Himalayan mountains with only one
sash covering their entire bodies and they sit and say prayers, as they do this
they can begin to raise their body temperature while they meditate.” He stared
at me and I stared back. “Do you know about this?” He asked. “Yes, I’m
acquainted with this history and people of this region.”
“We don’t know
everything there is to know.” He sighed and sat deeper into his chair.
I sighed and sat deeper
into mine.
It was time to go.
We stood up and thanked
each other.
Ciao.
Gabriela
P.S. May your people
have your best interest at heart – otherwise those are not your people.
July 26, 2010
“Be kind to unkind people - they need it the most” - Ashleigh Brilliant
“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why do we (as a whole)
consider kindness a weakness in the American culture?
We consider hard work an
admirable quality but why not kindness in the way we consider a
multi-trillionaire to be simply spectacular even if he is a complete tyrant.
We live in an age in
which our ideals and values about the world do not exactly line-up with our
moral compasses. Why is it - that being human can be so difficult sometimes?
Kindness is something I
have given a great deal of thought and the kindness that I practice with Native
brothers and sisters is quite different from that of Black folks, Caucasian
people, any race for that matter and my people. You might think, but isn’t
kindness the same as every other principal and to be shared with all?
Ultimately, yes. However and nevertheless, it depends more so upon the soul of
the receiver than the soul of the giver of kindness. By the time one has chosen
to send out a little kindness the deed is done.
A wise man in our
contemporary age ultimately realizes that we live in a cynical, patronizing and
sarcastic time. Therefore, when kindness is indeed presented it is found with
profound genuine graciousness because that is her sister in nature and her name
is graciousness. Even though it sounds feminine these are the real warriors in
nature. These are fighters who step out
onto the world each day; Open doors, say thank you and your welcome to complete
strangers. Kind people, who - in friendships will always drop what they are
doing when a deserving friend calls them in need and requires their assistance
and help.
Kindness is always
having greater consideration for others and their survival. It can only be
willed by the strongest of any clan, peoples and cultures. It’s easy to see how
weak any culture is by its cruelty. It’s easy to see a crumbling culture
watching it from outside. It’s simple enough to measure up a weak foundation.
Finally, it’s more difficult to give kindness to a complete mean person than
the sweetest elderly lady at the bus stop who truly wants to share half of her
sandwich with you because she thinks you’re too thin. That is kindness that is
easily accepted and returned.
I can give food,
resources and kindness to perfect strangers and feel completely human about
myself. I’m mainly challenged to giving kindness where I have very rarely seen
a return in adult friendships they don’t compare to the early years. I’ve had a
few male friends mainly in my twenties that I wished a large boulder would of…
Or something would scratch their faces off… You get the point. Anger,
disappointment and hatred for their rude dispositions and lack of consideration
in friendship to their female friends.
In other words, I’ve
known complete dogs. I’ve known it and they’ve known it and well that’s just
the truth of the matter.
“I hate them and I think
that I always have deep down inside but I have never had the guts to admit it to
myself.” I wake up one morning and went into a lengthy diatribe that my husband
knows all too well.
Immediately, my husband
saw selfishness, ego and self centeredness in three of my male friends when we
first got together. At our wedding reception I had one male friend of five
years refuse to shake my husband’s hand. ‘What the hell are you doing here if
you don’t want to be here.’ I thought to myself. That’s not kindness that’s
just alcoholic rudeness. My closest male friends had to get drunk before coming
to our wedding reception. What did that say about them and their lack of
judgment? Enough.
For example, this person
who’s called themselves my friend only requires me to do services at the very
last moment when he’s in a pickle. I’ve chosen to help and I have, but this
person is not the first person who comes to mind when I have close intimate
friendships. This is a person who after I invited them to my wedding they said
to me over the phone, “Do I have to come?” I choked over the very words and said,
“No, YOU DON’T HAVE TO COME.”
My heart was broken into
billions of pieces because I had made every damn effort to go to every damn
party, concert and every stupid social event that he’d put together over
fourteen years of my life. In that moment I wanted every moment of my life with
him - back. I had wished that I had never met such a cold and cruel human so
disenchanted and apathetic about the most important day of my adult life –
Sometimes, people are rotten miserable pieces of mierda that require love and
also serious boundaries. I’m becoming better with boundaries. If I say “no”,
damn it I mean “no!” Otherwise, it’s no different than dealing with a rapist.
They don’t get it through their skulls. I’ve always been strict with boundaries
unless it is acknowledged by between parties what is going to take place, but
others have not been very good with their boundaries of me. I’ve said,
“enough”, “stop”, “no” and people have continued to advance upon my boundaries
so all there is for me to do is to find my exodus and leave forever.
I made the best of our
time together but just like anything in nature there is always an ending and a
new rebirth in the following season. Recently, I thought – I THOUGHT I wanted
his company about three months ago but this man still can’t return a single
call unless it’s about him. I’m waiting for him to return my simple phone call
and to say, “How are you? Is there anything I can do for you? Do you need a
friend?” I don’t require a friend at this moment but it would be nice to be
asked after fourteen long wasted years. Not once has it occurred to him, “My
friend may just need me since I have sucked the soul out of her.” I’m leaving
that alone and I think the problem is that I’ve never needed him as much as he
needed me. So, I allowed for him to take me for granted because ultimately I’ve
always been the stronger of the two and yes, he has never been my equal, my
peer nor my friend but I have been his in ways that only true friends can be.
I’ve shed blood for this man when others only saw him as a sex symbol or an
idiot.
Ultimately, anybody can
get sick of the bull and decide to go down a much different road, because a
journey of mierda stinks and I set out to bush whack through my beautiful life
and see the sites by daylight and not by dark.
Relationships are
difficult. I write about these types of relationships because the only people
I’ve known to consider kindness a weakness are my white middle class male
friends. I know better. No matter how refined a white middle class male may be
I know a few things about them by the way they speak down to their women folk.
Especially, if they’re intellectuals. These are dangerous people who are only
dangerous to themselves. The users, consumers, and takers of the universe, but
very rarely the producers of anything real valuable like natural beauty
(sitting in silence in a room without having to prove anything), stories to be
told (by listening to others) and showing up when they are needed most
(conquering their inner demons because their friends need them not because they
need to have a need met.)
Now, I have all the real
friends in the world that anybody should ever need.
Finally, I have good
friends whose lives I’m in touch and who if I haven’t e-mailed in a few months they come looking for
me or I go looking for them over e-mail, phone calls or in the human form. I
have people who no one except my husband has ever met and people who I guard
closely because my alliance and loyalty is to the death.
These are people, who I
don’t share openly with other people (because I’m a selfish dog); I know people
in Thailand, Portugal, The Czech Republic, Spain, Canada, Mexico, India,
Ethiopia, China, Japan, North Korea and not to mention up and down Central and
South America and Wrenshall, MN, Nevada, Iowa, Colorado, California, and
Seattle, Alaska, North and South Dakota and not to mention all the major cities
in the United States (If I were to die poor and destitute tomorrow the only
thing I know is that I’ve known their faces and I’ve called them out by name,
Mis Amigos, My Friends.)
These are people from
all over the world who opened up their hearts to me and I opened up my heart to
them and who I truly trust as my brothers and sisters. People who’ve shown me
more kindness and wisdom than people I’ve known almost my entire life. How does
that happen? I can imagine many of you snickering as I write this now. I know
that some of you are in jungle huts, German pubs and classy bistros tonight as
I write this-this morning all across the globe and you tune into this tiny
little blog and you must be laughing your lives off because we’ve already
discussed all of this before. May your way, your culture and your deeply felt
sentiments guide you to continue to be the wise and kind people I know and
love.
I have truly always
conducted myself with ut-most kindness and respect with those closest to me and
even with strangers. Even if it’s been difficult to give kindness because it’s
seen as a weakness I have granted it not for my sake but for the sake of those in
need of it. I’ve given of myself, I’ve given of my soul. I’ve given of my
heart. In my most destitute hours, I’ve wept all alone in my twenties without a
single friend in the world except one man who came to me by chance in the
middle of a hot summer afternoon behind the Uptown library and comforted me in
ways no other friend ever had. He listened to me and understood my plight at
that time. He understood my struggle to survive at the age of twenty-seven and
the need for one person to believe in me. He gave me everything he had that
afternoon and I believed in his kindness as sweat dripped from our foreheads
and perfect strangers stepped over us.
I believe in kindness
because it was this man who drove hundreds of miles to be at my last premiere.
If it only had been my husband, this man and myself in the theatre that night I
would’ve screamed for joy. I kissed him and I continued to kiss him because I
was beside myself that this man had made all the effort of kindness in the
world to accompany me in a strange journey. Unfortunately, we did not have a
lot of time to see each other. In those glorious moments I understood him
better than I’d understood any type of kindness before him. This man, I will
carry him around in my heart until the day I die and this is a man of several
men who my other white male friends don’t know and I hope to god that some day
they can all stand in the same room together and look at each other in the face
because it’s easy to stand in any room and see whose got your back and who doesn’t.
It’s easy to see the kindness in their eyes opposed to complete greed and
self-centeredness.
Gabriela
P.S. I wish you complete
and total unconditional agape love from your friends. May you never be taken for
granted as age and wisdom find you. May you never allow for those closest to
you to think of you as weak simply because you are kind.
July 23, 2010
“Stress is nothing
more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.” ~ Richard Carlson
It’s later than I
thought it was.
I’m tired from a long
week of work, people, places and things.
I had an amazing week,
but I was too busy.
I’m trying to slow down
my life.
So Eric and I are ready for
a movie.
It’s one of those nights
which it all comes together after bathing and clean pajamas.
Next week I’d like to
blog about an alpha woman I met – who I’ve become acquainted with.
I ended up meeting some
of the most interesting, real and some generous folks when I have travelled
with this woman although I haven’t always agreed with their lifestyle choices.
Yet, some are sketchy, hustlers and cons.
I wish you a safe
weekend filled with love and surrounded by those that have your best interest
at heart as well as lots of laughter and much relaxation. May your week come to
a crawl and the weather be as perfect as it always is. For those brothers
working long hours – may you enjoy and bring meaning to everything you touch as
well as the safety you bring to any stage building.
Ciao.
Gabriela
July 22, 2010
"Each friend
represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it
is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
-
Anais Nin
“We lived in Sudan for six
weeks. We drove half an hour to the relatives and back each day. Sudan is not
cheap and neither are taxis. People take wheel barrels of money to the store
just to buy a loaf of bread. The currency doesn’t make sense and everyone knows
it doesn’t make sense but change is slow.” She sat on the couch as we held a
glass of water in each of our laps. “Mon and Dad live in a one room house which
now they are moving to a new one and I’m so happy for them.” I took a drink
from my water. I sat there and imagined the Saharan desert.
“We send money each
month but it just never seems to be enough and our American dollar doesn’t
stand a chance to the Euro.” I nodded as I very well understood this. “Women
like Hilary Clinton are considered men over there. It’s difficult for them to
phantom a woman with that much power. So whenever she goes to the country the
men treat her like a man.” She flashed a quick smile and we both understood the
very complex cultural dynamics she was getting at.
I was thrilled to listen
to a first account of a Sudanese wife especially coming from my friend of
twenty three years. We’d grown up together on a fourteen mile long peninsula,
care free and aware of the miles of dunes along the shores of Lake Superior. We
are two women bonded by our youth, topography and early teenage friendship. I
entrusted my life to her so many years ago that to sit across from her all
these years later is everything. It’s like it was yesterday. My friend is aging
beautifully, just beautifully.
This tall and lanky
beauty rode her bike all throughout the city of Minneapolis. Her tall frame is
willowy and crafted to perfection which creates nothing but a large smile on my
face. She wore two long earrings in each ear with several adornments half-way
up her ears and a hoop through her nose. ‘Oh, Gods she truly turned out to be a
beautiful WO-MAN’, I think to myself. It’s obvious that not only is she a
beauty but also she is intelligent and kind. She lets me be who I truly am and
I swear like a sailor and we speak of our travels. We chill, we hang and we are
respectful in each others’ presence. We spoke openly and frankly as only two
grown women can about being in mix-interracial marriages and the blessings that
come with that but also the many cultural misunderstandings.
My dear friend she is a
Scandinavian by design and so is my one-hundred percent Finn husband. Her
husband is Sudanese and she knows very well what I am. A chill relaxed human
unless provoked and then holy cow it’s time to go home. Aside from our temperaments
when provoked each one of us deals with stress, anxiety and negativity in the
same manner as our cultural stereotypes would have us. My friend and my husband
go very quietly and still while her husband and I have a tendency if angered to
want to aggressively speak out against the injustices of any culture.
We laugh about all of
the silliness that comes with living and making marriages work to those so
different from us. We speak about boundaries and I get into an explanation
about relationships. “I was not able ‘to-go-there’ with certain boyfriends in
my early twenties. I met men who were beautiful, intelligent and amazing but
they were all drowning. I’d try to jump in and save them but then sooner or
later I understood that I was being dragged in with the undertow and rolled
around while being pushed deeper under.”
I looked at her directly
in the eye and I said, “I couldn’t live that way so I had to swim out and from
under the man.”
She nodded and the look
on her face told me that she understood everything that I told her about my
earliest experiences with men. “I understand that. That’s a good example
actually.” She said to me and took a bite of the homemade bread. In that moment
I was proud of myself that my friend thought the example was a decent one
because the example came to me as I spoke. Reaching and grabbing at thin air
for any significance in meaningful words. We spoke of serious matters but we
also laughed a lot because we knew that there is nothing much else but a good
laughter to carry us through years of lives endured. She and I have been
running into each other for the past three years but this week was the very
first time that she’d been our royal guest in our home. She rang the doorbell
to our first floor flat. I invited her in, she left her bike in the entryway
and we walked through our Boston row flat – I showed off every nook and cranny
that came to mind and she presented herself as the most of pleasant guests
genuinely interested in what I had to show her. She asked questions that had
never occurred to me about the structure of the house.
Not only was I grateful
for her genuine disposition and company but I was also learning so much from
her perspective. She was nothing but a grown woman before me and I could do
nothing but be a grown woman with her. “Was it your family that you saw when
you returned to Central America?” She asked with nothing but child-woman like
curiosity. I loved her in that moment for having the courage to ask such an
intimate question about the seven year journey it took to find my people.
“No, none of them were
my blood relatives. It was like walking through a dream. For some reason I
understood them and they me. I knew everything I needed to know about my
heritage the moment I stared at them in the face and they stared back at me.
All I’d known since ten years old were white faces but to look into the face of
people who looked exactly like me was like stepping through a magic mirror. I
couldn’t do anything but sit on the dirt floor and stare.” I forgot to tell her
that my father was a Salvadorian and that my entire Indian heritage is centered
in that region of the world but that I am also of Costa Rican descent.
She stepped into the
kitchen and I began to boil some potatoes for my first ever made egg salad. I peeled
the eggs that I had boiled earlier in the morning. She sat in one of our
kitchen chairs as so many of our closest friends have done so before. As we
conversed I got out the mayonnaise and the ingredients to add to a bowl of egg
and potato. After I drained the potatoes I mixed everything in. I handed her a
tiny little spoon for her to have a taste. It was okay. It was a bit bland but
I know that Scandinavians like their food bland so I left it as it was and I
prepared my homemade bread on a platter, I pulled out cherries from the
refrigerator and placed them inside a smaller container and set it down on the
table. I went back into the kitchen for butter. I sat a proper table before
she’d arrived and there was nothing more to do than to welcome my dear old
friend to my table without any drama, ulterior motive, malice or insecurity.
I was honored by her
presence and her understanding of the world.
Before we finished, I
walked her to the door and I sensed that we liked each other as much as we had when
we were girls. We’d go and hang out at Grandma’s Sports Garden in Canal Park.
My friend is the same age except that she was two grades ahead of me. Like I
said the girl is brilliant. When I was in eighth grade I paid for a fake I.D.
and I never looked back. She was tall and I was curvy so no one ever stopped to
check out our I.D.’s all that closely. We’d hang out with some of her older
friends and go dancing. Of course these older friends could always drive and
for some reason they were always older and Black men. These men never showed
any attraction towards me so I would head for the dance floor and I would catch
up with my friend later on in the night. After bar closed we’d hang out in the
parking lot until it was truly time to go home or we’d - who knows?
Those were magical times
come and gone and I would never want to redo those old days of my youth but
they were worth it and those were days that I shall not forget for as long as I
live because they were formative years and it was this woman who shaped some of
my most deeply satisfying quench for new experiences.
Cheers to old friends,
new ones and the ones we are trying to make and understand even if we can’t see
quite clearly unto them sometimes. I wish you, life lasting friendships in the
same capacity of those that I’ve made throughout a lifetime of trust, loyalty
and consideration.
Gabriela
July 21, 2010
I’m plagued by the
Scandinavian Green Man -- it’s not even
of my people. My people have a trickster also, but this isn’t it.
We head north on Lyndale
Avenue towards downtown Minneapolis, at a stop light on 24th Street
and Lyndale Avenue on my right I saw an old school mate sitting outside a local
coffee shop enjoying the hot mid-morning sun and I smiled once went by. That
was more than eleven hours ago now. On our morning drive into my husband’s
office I noticed that since Monday afternoon the lines on the road had been
repainted. I was amazed and enjoyed the newly visible lines that created real
driving lanes.
I couldn’t help but
smile a wide smile as I stared at the yellow solid painted lines and the white
dashed lines on the road. I’d been waiting for that moment since the first week
of May 2004 when I first moved back to Minneapolis. I wasn’t sure if we’d have
to wait another six years for the lines to be repainted when I first started
driving this summer to and from my apprenticeship. Here we are now and it’s not
even September yet and the streets of Uptown are being repaired. I felt
grateful and thankful for the simple repairs to the streets but truly I felt
thankful that the city of Minneapolis had not forgotten such a lovely inner
city neighborhood.
Now, if only the big
potholes on the corner of Lyndale Avenue and Franklyn Street would be taken
care of (right in front of Rudolph’s) then we’d have something to look forward
to as we head into cold weather driving. That was a treacherous pothole to
contend with all throughout the spring and it’s still to this day as I headed
North on Lyndale for the second time of the day and onto 94 East headed to
Lexington Avenue in St. Paul.
It was an afternoon full
of driving from Minneapolis to St. Paul and back again by way of Marshall
Street to a 30th Avenue South on Lake Street. I took a right onto
the Avenue around 5:10 P.M. tonight and pulled up to a private garden. Quickly
I set up the camera and got to work on the time lapse. I began my sequence of
shots. A series of wide, medium and close up stills with seven seconds of video
of each plant.
I’ve planted zucchini,
squash, pepper, three tomato plants and a handful of corn -- although I came to
find out that I planted the corn improperly. I’ve been waiting for the corn to
pop up anytime soon for the last four weeks but I doubt this will occur. I see
a cluster of thick grass that I can’t decipher as grass or as corn. Who knows
what will grow there but I continue to photograph it just in case its corn then
I don’t want to miss out on its growth cycle.
On my way home from the
garden I headed west bound on Franklyn Avenue. I came to a long stop light on
the corner of Park Street and Franklyn Avenue I turned my head to the left and at
a bus stop I watched a sea of Black parents and their beautiful Black children
in strollers waiting for a bus. Across the street I watched with the same
curiosity another sea of beautiful and peaceful Black citizens in blue scrubs
waiting for another bus.
I continued driving and
eventually turned left on Portland Avenue. I saw Somali women and their
beautiful children in their driveways getting into caravans. Further on down
the Avenue I saw the mothers and their beautiful Latino – Chicano – Indian and
Black children sitting out on their front stoops. I felt blessed to be amongst
so much beauty in the world. I took a few deep breaths and I felt deeply
homesick for my Tierra Firma. In that moment I wanted to go home to my Tico
people, my Indianas in the mountains of the rain forest. When I got home I
closed my eyes for a few moments while I concentrated and visualized the
mountain path home. I wanted to hear my name pronounced correctly where the
accent truly belongs and the letter R is actually rolled.
As of late my eyes trick
me into seeing puffs of clouds in the shape of Central and South America always
both continents appear to me in the clouds. I know this must be an instinctual
desire when I start to see my homeland in the clouds but I can’t help but
desire it. A place in my heart burns to speak to an elder -- any elder outside
of this American culture. I want someone I actually trust and respect to walk
me through the spiritual rituals of bewitchment. As silly as it may be to most
Americans ultimately I believe in only what I can touch, hear, see, taste, and
smell. I believe in reason and logic and above all else standard mathematics
and social physics which I was taught at the University. If I’m having
challenging periods of change in my life than I look to nature to guide me
through these times of growth, change and learning.
I try to make sense of
the world through a prism of perspective in the following of ways: what, where,
how, who, when and why. I have the capacity and skill of any intellectual mind
and the laziness of a Taurus child born in May. I believe in the Gods and the
ancestry of any peoples’ history. I’m also beginning to understand the presence
of magic. I don’t create nor pretend to know any type of magic, but I know it
exists in the world. I also don’t pretend to be a healer, a shaman nor a
medicine person. I don’t like leadership roles or responsibility for others.
Yet, I found myself bewitched in the first part of the summer. I’m coming out
of a dark and deeply felt sleep. I can see clearly through many layers of
miscommunication, misunderstandings and mainly the pulse of trust weakens and I
want to head west. I want to get as far away from the bewitchment as possible.
Right now I have one too
many responsibilities scheduled for the summer so the next best thing is to
head for the Black Hills and try to find an Indian brother or sister as soon as
possible, to walk me through my sleeping darkness. I know they will know what
I’m going through and what I speak of even if I have difficult time writing
about it. Actually, I have no ghost stories. I have never seen a ghost, or
played around with white or black magic and much less with that freakish game
the Ouija board. I’ve stepped out of rooms and gone outside when people have
played such a game. I believe in the fine degrees of separation that veil us
from this world to the next. Even though I have never seen as much as a speck
of dust I’m also not arrogant enough not to consider other realms of reality
and possibility. I don’t ponder such realities but I sense that they exist and
nor do I want to be a part of them since making sense of this life is complex
and difficult enough.
So I’m in search of not
just any one who can play-make-believe with the values of the ancient ones but
who actually understands the human condition deeper than most humans can. I
don’t believe in fortune tellers, wizards or prophets in the sense of those who
foresee the future. I believe that what is to unfold will happen naturally via
anything from photosynthesis to kindness and understanding for our fragile
existence. I believe more in a plate of rice and beans than I would in all of
the religions of the world combined. I believe in the power of nutrition in one
mango alone than a recited prayer from memory. I believe in the power of the
sun more than a vastly empty political or marketing tool.
I believe in many
aspects of being alive that I put my entire faith upon more so than just
believing for the sake of believing but I’m not stupid to disregard other people’s
strong believes of faith as their own. I’ve met crazy religious, greedy,
envious people out in the world. They’ve carried a wide-eyed look of
competition, jealousy and control. I know who their god is and I have not
judged it especially in bouts of anger and random verbal violence.
I think about these
perfect strangers I have encountered over the years and I respect them in their
own right, but it doesn’t mean that I want to stick around to see how their
lives unfold. I want to speak to a deep listener, a deep lover of the world, a
deep guide and a deep human who knows greatly about the power of control. I
want to talk to them about smoke and mirrors and the power to deflect conflict,
misunderstandings and a great urge to run as far away to another corner of the
world if only for a while to get away from a con-artist.
I had the funniest
thought yesterday. I thought, “I could board a plane tomorrow morning and
arrive in Hong Kong by night fall.” I could. Then what? I don’t really want to
be in Hong Kong because something deeply spiritual tells me that I must stay
here for now. I must endure the lesson and so I stay if not for any other
reason than that of a garden and for the purpose of filming it weekdays at five
and if anything that is my one and only true responsibility although I do have
many other more pressing matters in business that do call to me on a daily
basis. I end my days at this private garden and I wonder, ‘Why here? Why not anywhere else in the world?’
I’m wishing you a
peaceful night, if nothing else.
May you be loved,
understood and unconditionally looked out by the gods of gods and not the gods
of men.
Ciao.
Gabriela
P.S. It was truly
difficult to write about something so deeply intimate to me. Tomorrow I’ll tell
you about my amazing three hour lunch date I had with an old-school
neighborhood friend. I learned to make my first-ever batch of egg and potato
salad on my own.
July 20, 2010
-
“Don’t let the bastards
get you down.” My friend looked at the road as he spoke.
We sat out on a curb
next to his house. I looked into his face and I could see twenty years of
history between us but today I truly saw him for the nice and kind man that he
truly is. We’ve just recently
reconnected after many years of life, lost, love and patience gone by. I was
happy to be sitting under the hot midday sun and I tried to quickly tell him
what I’d been going through amongst perfect strangers.
“Okay, I won’t.” I meant
it with my whole heart – not like a child but like a woman who believes in
sunrises and sunsets.
I called my friend up
earlier in the morning and asked him for a bit of his time. At noon he planned
to walk to a local record shop and so I made the plan to join him on his
journey and tag along. We planned to walk the two miles through his beautiful
St. Paul neighborhood and back to his house again. I looked forward to the
walk, to chill company and to get as far away from my daily routine which had
me bewitched and coming back for more confusion.
We set out – my friend
with a backpack strapped to his back and me in flip flops. We looked at gardens
and houses with history in them. We talked about the recycling of certain
plastics, the tragedy of pizza boxes not being a recyclable item and the
possibilities in creating a plastic that could hold a hot enough substance to
eliminate the pizza box.
‘Brilliant!’ I thought.
Truly, a thinker with the patience of an inventor but more importantly who can
return with some kind of intelligent thought about the actual processes and
methods in better usage of recycled goods and reusable materials. I thought,
‘If I had a billion dollars today I’d hire his brains tomorrow.’ I liked
talking about the most random things on our journey. This is a true man. This
is a man who can see right through the middle of anything and still keep his
balance. I liked him already as I did when I was twelve except with more
respect because I know myself now in ways I didn’t expect to when I was that
tender age.
“Gentlemen, one question
for you, please. I’m sorry to be such a dork but where would I find music
tapes.” I asked the two nice men behind the counter. They were all genuine
smiles and I thought, ‘Gods, they’re beautiful.’
“Across the street with
our records.” One of the men gave me a straight answer.
I looked out the window
and looked for the second shop across the way, “I’ll catch you later.” My
friend knew where I was going.
I crossed the parking
lot and a major Avenue in St. Paul. I had to be careful of the heavy traffic.
After a while my friend
crossed the street and met me at the second location. We stood and stared at
hundreds of labels of music tapes displayed across the length of a warehouse
wall. We started at the letter A and made it half way over. “Okay, I’ve got to
get out of here.” I looked up and my friend held a stack of tapes. I held four
tapes in my hands. I held two Grant Lee Buffalo tapes, Eggplant and Fungo
Mungo. I used to know a girl back in the East Coast who when we were freshman
in college she introduced me to Grant Lee Buffalo and for over a decade now I
haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to such a band. The young woman and
I had a fallen out at the tender age of nineteen but today at thirty-three with
a sense of power I went ahead and purchased the tapes with a slight grin on my
face. I had conquered old demons.
“Let’s take a different
route home.” Said my friend and I let him guide the way. On our entire walk I could
not get my bearings and so I blindly trusted him to show me the way and I was
completely at ease. Not once did I worry or have to keep track of streets and
avenues because I knew that he knew his way.
We came across an ice
cream and hotdog stand and my friend offered to buy me something so I asked for
a classic hotdog then he ordered a small ice cream. His ice cream came with
pineapple mix in it and my mouth watered as soon as I saw it. We sat to eat at
a small table and bench with spilt ice cream sticky from the sun. The spilt ice
cream sat between us and I enjoyed my amazing hotdog. I inhaled it and
immediately I wanted another. We talked about tyrannical vegans and I did not
realize that my amazing friend was so anti anybody telling others how they
should live their lives. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re no different than
Christian fundamentalists.”
I agreed whole
heartedly, laughed and slapped my knee hard with the palm of my hand. I know, I
know.
“Without blowing any
smoke up my a--. How do you know I’m direct?” I asked my friend.
“I just know.” He
answered. “It’s about knowing how to uphold your boundaries. Not letting any
one walk all over you, right?”
“Yes.” I knew all too
well that he knew me all too well. Well enough to know, that - not much does
get by me or that I let it even if I don’t say anything at all in those
moments. I know the same thing about him, too.
We got back on the road
and along came by a Christian fundamentalist who politely insisted that I take
her literature and I graciously did. We had seen the very same woman earlier
handing out pamphlets to teenagers as we quickly crossed a park. I could tell
my friend wanted nothing to do with it and completely ignored the woman in her
early fifties. “She caught up to us anyway.” I smiled and leafed through the
literature.
We crossed another major
street and we came to admire a warehouse.
“Just bear with me. I
have these dreams. These huge dreams of opening a film studio in a forgotten
end of town where nobody knows it’s a film studio and running it like a
warehouse front.” I stared at the beauty of a building in front of me.
“You could fit your sets
in something with the length of that first building there.” Said my friend.
I sensed that he took me
as seriously as my husband does and I adored him for knowing me well enough to
know that when I set my heart to something I normally make it happen even if it
takes me time and energy to gather up the money and resources. I have no doubt
in my heart that someday I’ll be inviting my friend over to shoot a stop motion
picture with all of his role-playing miniatures.
We got back to his house
and by the time I was ready to leave we sat out on his stoop and listened to
fire sirens whiz by his house. We made plans to see each other the following
day. I liked that he had a forgiving nature, a sharp tongue and his beautiful
woman taking a nap upstairs.
I liked his amazing
woman. A mature and kind spirited woman just like my husband is.
“Jealousy, pride and malice
can really get in the way of living a life.” He said to me earlier-on in our
walk.
I nodded. I understood
perfectly well what he meant.
We said our goodbyes and
we bumped fists.
I arrived home with
hope, light and a blessing marked upon my heart.
I’m me again and today I
won a battle against perfect strangers.
I decided to get away
from their world and manmade illusions and notions about others.
I’m ready to be home
alone again and to drive a hard bargain because all I know is that tomorrow will
bring a new perspective and today was necessary for my human condition. I’m me
again! I’m whole and nothing can tear me away from myself.
I love old friendships.
You don’t have to explain anything to anybody. They just know that you need
their love and that I’m willing to give it in return without questions asked or
ugly remarks made. I’ve come home all over again.
Ciao.
It’s past midnight but
this is today’s blog.
Gabriela
July 19, 2010
I got up on a soap box
and I wrote a lengthy e-mail to a man I met two summers ago.
Last summer he was my
mentor and apprentice boss.
On Friday I ran into my
former friend and I asked for ten minutes of his time so I could present him
with information. I told him all that had transpired and I finished with, “I
feel like a dork.” He extended the palm of his hand and I reached for it. I
felt a human under my hand and I loved him more in that moment than I ever
loved him before. He understood me to the core of my skin and he also
understood how difficult it was for me to go to him. He began to speak with
passion, anger and sadness and I listened to him. He was incredibly mad that
his pack wouldn’t leave him alone. He was angered by people who made it their
business to be in his. He told me that there was nothing more for him to say to
my old mentor and the community. He said that he had nothing more to say and
everything that he needed to say was said before but no one listened and so he
was in fight mode. I got it. I got it all very well because I’ve watched this
community of people bend the will of others by forcing them to believe and do
as the rest believe and do. I thought, ‘Wow! This is exactly like American high
school.’
E-mail is something that
I use as a weapon when I need to protect or shield myself. Sometimes, I’m incredibly intimate without
the verbal ability to say what’s been floating around in my brain so I sit down
to write and I mean every word of it. I use the e-mailing system to convey deep
sentiments that were captured all too quickly and never resolved. I can use
e-mail like a dagger pushing it in deeper than necessary. I’ve given tongue
lashings in my e-mails but mostly only as a test to those I thought deserved it
and put me in uncompromising situations like the edge of an emotional cliff.
I’ve thought, ‘What a thoughtless person. Why would you do that? Why do you
have me hanging out at the edge of your cliff?’ I got back to them through a
means of black and white arbitrary meaning so profoundly direct there is no
room for misinterpretation. I also write friends brutally honest and touching
letters like an intimate kiss between friends.
I love the written
language as my Mayan ancestors before me did. I love the recording of arbitrary
events, places and people. I love to write about conflict, inside and out. I
love to write about the intricacies of malice, inconsiderate behavior and the
misuse of power. Inside the written words there is no room for bullshit. It’s
so clear cut like the sharpness of a knife and I go into the world like a
warrior man and I scream and yell inside myself and I’m ready for battle in my
war paint. I mean business and I mean to haunt for meaning and beauty. I don’t
touch anything I can’t bring meaning and beauty into the world because for all
the destruction created in the world some darkness must be left alone and
weakened by its own dark force.
“He’s been that way for
a decade.” My old mentor says.
“And you just excuse his
rude behavior?” He looked up at me and stared.
In that moment I wished
he knew me better. I could see it in his eyes and his people’s eyes that I’m
considered an outsider and I don’t front because I am an outsider. I think,
‘Why is it that I know you and you know so little about me?’ The way I act and
the way I feel are very different in social constraints. His people are people
who assume the world of anybody so it’s difficult to be moved to speak openly.
They assume they know the answers so they very rarely ask questions. I mirror
their ugly behavior to give them something sour to taste of their own making
but I do it ever so tenderly as possible.
I’ve met people in the
world with fewer opportunities, less food, less education, less everything and
they have seriously given their shirts off their backs because they believed in
spiritual hospitality. I don’t want their shirts off their backs but some type
of social grace not cultivated out of the dark ages would be nice.
I spit fire in my e-mail
and my friend dodged it and I was proud of him for being himself and being able
to gracefully walk around it. What else is there to do with fire but to get
away from it or become it and that’s exactly the reaction I was hoping for. I
did not write an intimate e-mail I wrote an angry e-mail with purpose for
vision.
I was hoping to go back
to a place where we weren’t so intimate with other people’s private affairs not
because I don’t want to but because we’re not that close as a pack member and
especially when considered an outsider. The duality doesn’t work. I’m expected
to have all of the respect as any outsider but to take on intimate problems
within their clan. It will not do. I’m looking in and I’m not looking to make
it my business about who did what. I’m teaching him his place with a traveler.
I’m teaching him that it’s not okay to unburden the traveler with the personal
affairs of a clan until the ritual of the traveler accepts to become a part of
the pack and to run alongside his new brothers and sisters but till this ritual
takes place I have no desire to run with this pack only to hang back and watch
the destruction brought upon by their darkness, self-loathing and envy of each
other. I’ve worked alongside this pack but they are not of my people and I’m
not their people, not yet anyway and I may never be.
May you travel with
safety and with love in whatever pack you run alongside.
May your community speak
kindly of you and love you.
May they have the
courage to speak to you directly or to seek out wisdom and not gossip.
May you be listened to
as I’m sure you already listen to others go on and on and on. What a pity.
May you be unconditionally
loved by the agape love of men and women in the world.
Ciao.
Gabriela
July 16, 2010
I look forward to a warm summer night. Perhaps, a little
dinner out - anywhere - in the town with my husband, later ice cream and a movie
on the couch to round out the day. I’m still looking forward to this
moment. In an hour I’ll drive to pick up
Eric and then we’re going to share, laugh, unwind and discuss intimate details
with each other about each other’s week. Eric’s been on my mind all day since
the day got off at early dawn.
I crossed the Iowa border and back again in less than
twenty four hours. I went. I left in search of my friend and I found her. We
laughed, we told stories of our youth and we looked at each other in the face.
“My dad is being cremated as we speak.” She said to me and I looked only at her
and directly at her and I understood HER loss. Her loss in this world. I loved
her so much in those moments. We shared in vino and a little food. We waited
for her husband-to-be to get home from work.
There is my cell now. My husband is calling.
I’m going to stop working now and wish you a splendid
weekend.
Ciao.
Gabriela
July 15, 2010
Crossed
the Iowa border.
Good
night.
Ciao.
Gabriela
July 14, 2010
Stairway to Heaven
By Led Zeppelin
There's a lady who's
sure
All that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to heaven
When she gets there she knows
If the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
And she's buying a stairway to heaven
There's a sign on the wall
But she wants to be sure
'Cause you know sometimes words have
Two meanings
In a tree by the brook
There's a songbird who sings
Sometimes all of our thoughts are
Misgiven
Ooh, it makes me wonder
Ooh, it makes me wonder
There's a feeling I get
When I look to the west
And my spirit is crying
For leaving
In my thoughts I have seen
Rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those
Who stand looking
Ooh, it makes me wonder
Ooh, it really makes me wonder
And it's whispered that soon
If we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn
For those who stand long
And the forests will
Echo with laughter
Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, ooh, whoa, oh
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow
Don't be alarmed now
It's just a spring clean
For the May queen
Yes, there are two paths you can go by
But in the long run
There's still time to change
The road you're on
And it makes me wonder
Aw, uh, oh
Your head is humming and it won't go
In case you don't know
The piper's calling you to join him
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow?
And did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind?
(Solo)
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The truth will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll
And she's buying a stairway
To heaven...
________________________________________________
“Happy Birthday! Come in! Come in!” She said to me a
decade ago while holding open a college dorm-room door.
I was delighted and stepped right through her door. Her
wild green eyes smiled wide and I couldn’t help myself but to do the same.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” She pointed at the most
beautiful yellow chiffon scarf with little red budding roses on it. I removed
the scarf and as soon as I saw what it was I forgot all about the scarf. Still
yet I distinctly remember the flow of the scarf as it quietly hit the floor
around our bare feet.
I was so moved in that instance by her thoughtfulness I
cried inside my skin and I didn’t even let her know my deepest emotions. I did
let out some laughter and then a shriek but not a tear. I simply just stood
there and stared at the machine for what seemed like years. She said directly
to me “I had my pops looking out for one of these at auctions for you”. She
boldly smiled with the confidence of a job well done. I ran the very tips of my
fingers across the metal keys and immediately I wanted to sit down and write
out my life story for her without any of the sadness in it. I wanted to become
the editor in chief to my very own poetic justice just to show her that I, too,
was a daughter to the wind.
This green eyed cat woman has seen through me, under me,
above me and in me. In my darkest and loneliest of years at the university as a
junior and senior she was only a freshman when we first met but she was a hell
of a lot wiser than anyone else I’d ever encountered. She was a mother I’d
wished for all those years ago in a strange little orphanage in the mountains.
When I stop to think about it she was born when I was only four years in
existence and the universe danced in those days that followed her birth. The
moment I met her face I knew her voice of something timeless and ageless like a
classic anything especially a beauty. She’s been my friend my entire life and I
had wished for her to come to me only as a child could in all those layers of
sleepy sweat on hot jungle afternoons.
One year after we met - I had my face cut open and closed
back up again and stitched like the hem of a skirt as a tumor was removed. I
was terrified and silent in my existence. I felt like I was dying and silently
I continued to scream inside my skin. I felt dark and vastly ugly in my deepest
profoundness. In many ways a part of me died on that campus by the art building
near the water. A part of my young adulthood ghost still lingers there on late
and cold October mornings down by the rocks near the rowers who silently pushed
their way backwards gliding across a silver plate of hopes, dreams and desires.
We sat in the only alternative coffee shop in town and
did torturous hours of homework upon homework. “Tell me the story. Tell it to
me again, please.” I’d ask her to tell me the history of people, wars, places
and time. So gracious was my friend with her time that she’d tell me the story
again of how WWI and WWII came to be. She’d talk about war strategies, mode of
transport and how the weather played out a huge character in the making and
ending of those two war stories. My eyes danced with delight as I picked a
point in the distance and concentrated on her words while she spoke I saw films
come to life inside my focal point of view. I adored her most when she did this
for me.
We’ve had and lost some friends in common along the way
to forgotten concrete jungles and suburban soccer-mom rage. We’ve made meals together, shared in wine and
told of places we’d go. This is a woman of many who believed in me long before
I ever had the courage to show anything to anyone. I was so afraid of failure
and success in those fruitful days of my twenties and she understood them all
too well just as she could understand anyone’s plight that’s how large her
heart is still yet to this day.
My friend e-mailed her closest friends spread across wide
continents and shared with us that her father peacefully passed away on Sunday
after battling over ten years of cancer. My friend wrote, ‘He died at home at
the farm surrounded by my mother and all of his children…’ I received the news this morning because the
e-mail had bounced earlier on Sunday and I thought stupid-bloody thing while I
re-hook up to a Wi-Fi connection.
I headed 65 northbound. I’ve had a car packed and ready
for the great outdoors. I got out to the woods late yesterday and said prayers.
Last night I shed a tear while I prayed and walked through the woods. I said
silent prayers to the Gods late into the evening and then I dropped dead with
sleep in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere. Last night I slept
harder than I had in days. I woke up at 6:30 this morning and headed south on
35w. Much stretch of road was before me in the early morning hours and I
dreamed of my friend. I wanted to touch her. Hold her face in my hands and
stroke her hair. I wanted to smell her and be near her in the same room even if
she was doing absolutely nothing.
I wanted to be at her parent’s farm just like we did all
those years ago. Her lovely beautiful piece of Earth which she comes from
in-and-of this Midwest vast land. I desired for her to know that she was greatly
loved by so many. I wanted her to believe in the love and even though only
two-hundred and twenty miles away I felt like it was a whole world apart and
still yet I could remember her smell like it was yesterday.
I continue to check e-mails while in route she
called-out-to-me and if she were truly to need me I would go to her in one of
her deepest hours. If I know anything about her it’s that we don’t ask for help
especially when we need it most and we endure our pain silently and foolishly
alone. Even though I’m far more self centered than she I can’t bring myself to
grieve openly as I used to.
The pain of a lifetime of loss all comes flooding back at
me again and I remember why I don’t let tears escape down my face in my darkest
hours when flowers need to be ordered and arranged at the house, a casket needs
to be transferred and Sunday’s best needs to be laid out along with the dishes
while the body is prepared for a funeral service. I understand all these
details and the tiny sandwiches still need to be put on the table and even
though no one’s really ever hungry at a funeral the women do their best to put
on a brave face and take care of the food. Eventually, someone will eat that
last and lonely looking sandwich with the crust cut off.
I mourn the loss of my friend’s father simply because I
love her so much and even now I can see her taking care of everyone else that
is in so much need and I think who will take care of her when they’ve all gone
home? Who will sit with this green eyed cat and watch her lick her paws after a
long day of family gathered to mourn, loved ones who’ve shown up with more egg
salad than anyone knows what to do with and tissue being handed out like it
were cotton candy. Even though this is not my personal loss like with the two
beauties we buried this spring my Grandmother and a child in Utero I still take
it very personally because let’s be real-real loss is loss to the world at
large.
“Aren’t you going to try it out?” I stood over the 1936
Royal Typewriter and thought of William S. Burroughs’ writing and his “Naked
Lunch”. We leaned in and learned together how to feed a sheet of paper through
the roller. I began to type when I got to the end of the first row a little
bell rang to let me know it was the end of that row. Ding! I pushed the runner
back to the beginning of the line and I start all over again. For a decade I’ve
been doing this action and the only real reason why I’m any kind of half sorry
writer is because she made one of my dreams come true. Her father made one of
my dreams come true. He went out into this vastly world of men and found
himself a letter making machine for a young woman who desperately wanted a
metal writing tool but had no idea where to find one. I’ve never been more and
greatly honored by a gift as I have been by “Maricel” - My typewriting-girl. In
other words I named my typewriter Maricel.
I love you, baby girl.
May your father rest in peace for the duration.
May you find comfort in the happiest of memories to those
lost to you in this world.
Much Respect and love for my family – my people and my
loved ones as night begins to fall over the woods.
Gabriela
July 13, 2010
“Life is either a great adventure or nothing.” –
Helen Keller
“We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every
day with new experience and character.” – Henry David
Thoreau
I walked into a room full of ambience where silver
candelabra-sticks flickered red at the tips.
Green and yellow fiber optics hung just above the candelabras
and it set the mood for a private party of about fifteen guests from many
different walks of life. Immediately, I was taken back to a place where we’d
run around in our old stomping grounds and bring in the early morning light at
Sophia’s in Boston. The establishment no longer exists but that’s where we
sweated, bounced with the rhythm and understood the intensity of Latin dancing
to its highest form.
I entered this room, crossed it and turned right midway,
stepped up onto a slight platform and sat down on a bench surrounded by yellow
and dark brown satin cushions. Immediately I made myself at home. ‘I’ve come
home’ I thought to myself. The owner stopped his dancing, came towards us and
patiently took the time to answer my questions. The Greek olive skinned man
answered, “Yes, this is my establishment.”
“Is it a private or a public establishment?” I asked full
of curiosity. “Public, I’m the owner and we’re closed. I hope you enjoy your
time here.” I bowed my head and I was gracious and grateful to be in his lovely
club. Immediately as I saw him cross the room I knew he was the owner. I knew
because his walk left nothing to chance and he was confident about his
surroundings with the air of knowing every nook-and-cranny only as an owner of
any creation can.
I sat in a nook divided by white sheer curtains and I
looked to the left of me and to the right of me. I saw two other nooks within
the same style furniture and curtains – across the way there were four other
nooks in the same fashion and beyond two dark curtains entered another room
with spectacular art on the walls and a woman’s bathroom so comfortable - my
acquaintance and I stopped to chat about photography. The white sheer curtains
made me feel as though I were back in the Central American tropics. The lovely
white curtains radiated a soft purple glow from the bar and I smiled at myself
in a mirror with the same warmth of the room.
I asked the Greek gentleman for water and his staff
graciously took my water bottle into the kitchen and refilled it with ice.
“Gracias,” I said to the young man for his effort when he returned with water.
I’m impressed that it was no big deal to simply ask for a common courtesy such
as water. My dad once said to me, “You can tell everything in a man by the shoes
he wears and if he can graciously welcome anyone into his home.” If you stop to
consider the way a man welcomes others while in his own establishment then you
begin to realize the type of familia he comes from and what the women of his
family are like.
I measure leaders of communities by these two very
sentiments alone especially if submersed in a Euro-centric culture. I’ve met
many multi-millionaires in this life time to know better than to assume that
not one has ever been like another. Money, power and privilege grant them the
luxury of time and the sentiment of graciousness. A man who’s worked hard to
get where he is in life never takes it for granted how little resources others
have available to them because he knows all too well that he could lose it all
in the blink of an eye and with the bat of an eyelash.
I took a few moments alone to myself and slow down from a
night full of dancing and amazing street style intelligent conversations. I met
a group of grown men just outside the Fineline earlier in the evening and we
talked about the differences in alphas, betas and omegas in general to each
other. They wanted to know who I considered to be the alpha in the pack and I
tried to explain their body language – they tell me I’m right-on and I said something
like - it’s in the first five seconds that
I could tell by the way you stood which was which. I was apprehensive to
answer which one was the alpha for no other reason that I felt on-the-spot and
I didn’t want to get it wrong. I could tell they had a history together. I
liked them from the moment a gentleman with a Mohawk put out his arm and I took
it and he gently pulled me into their group. It was a perfect conversational
dance with perfect strangers. They were nothing but perfect gentlemen and a delight
to talk to. I was fascinated and blown away by their graciousness in
communication to each other and to myself.
I’ve held close relationships too many fortunate men
through private schooling, business and friendship. I’ve never known a wealthy
man to turn someone away knowing the common laws of hospitality which date as
far back as The Empire of David and Solomon (c.1000-930 B.C.). I’ve been turned
away by much American impoverished culture but never by any other third world
culture. Interesting how American poverty turns strangers away at times but not
any other worldly poverty because it’s the difference between life and death.
Those who struggle to survive consider this a daily life.
Excerpt from “Ancient Israel” by Roland de Vaux:
3. The Law of Hospitality
and Asylum
{Hospitality, we have
said, is a necessity of life in the desert, but among the nomads this necessity
has become a virtue, and a most highly esteemed one. The guest is sacred: the
honour of providing for his is disputed, but generally falls to the sheikh. The
stranger can avail himself of this hospitality for three days, and even after
leaving he has the right to protection for a given time. This time varies from
tribe to tribe: among some it is ‘until the salt he has eaten has left his
stomach’; in big tribes like the Ruwalla of Syria it is for three more days and
within a radius of 100 miles.}
I grew up treating our guests like royalty in my family’s
household. As a grown woman I still treat my guests sacred because there is no
alternative to survival. I’ve been in homes that I felt nothing but the ability
to breathe and to be myself. I’ve been
inside homes and significant places with dignitaries of state who‘ve been
nothing but selfless to me as a stranger with very little for resources while
travelling through their lands. People who if asked would’ve taken their shirts
right off their backs not because it was mandatory but because it was a just
cause. It was a way of life, culture and survival in their part of the world
where resources were limited and people had to depend on each other for
survival and ultimately there is no other stronger bond such as that.
I can only imagine how people must have extensive needs
and wants from a successful man such as this club owner. In another place and
another time in life I would’ve loved to have asked him many questions about
his journey to success. I would've loved to have been selfish with his time and
truly had known a sliver of this brilliant mind. No fool can run a successful
club in any metropolis without making sacrifices, enduring hardships and
logistical nightmares. It takes a smart business man to make his club run.
As we prepared to leave I felt tired. I touched the owner’s
back gently and thanked him as he stood at the door waving goodbye to his
guests. I thanked him for his munificence. “If we are never to meet again then
thank you for your generosity.”
He said, “Come on Friday – we’ll see each other again.” I
know I won’t be there anytime soon– especially not on Friday when it’s open to
the public because I’m a home-body. I never assume that I will see people
again. I simply don’t assume it. How can I? When the world is such an immensely
small place and we barely know our neighbors.
Tonight was unique in that I was open, sometimes I swore
like a sailor and at other times I was extremely polite. Like I’ve written
before: If I’m polite to you then I don’t
know you and most likely I don’t care to. If I’m chilling and tranquillo
with ‘my home-people’ then most likely I’ll stretch out and take up some space
because I trust you with my life and that is everything in the world. I’ve been
entrusted with others’ lives and that’s when I look to the sacred. I was myself
in this man’s beautiful establishment and I wanted nothing more from him than a
glass of water and information. I could sense that this man is used to having
people need far more from him than that.
Truly it was an adventure of a lifetime.
I wish you adventure, peace and understanding as you come
across many beautiful strangers.
Ciao. Goodbye.
Gabriela
July 12, 2010
“Love me when I least deserve it, because that's when I really need it.” -
Swedish Proverb
“You know that you are in love when the hardest thing to do is say
good-bye!!” –
Unknown
“There are two sorts of romantics: those who love, and those who love the
adventure of loving” - Lesley Blanch
---------------------------------------------------
Plot Summary for
Jennifer does not fit in. A total misfit, she's as wacky as a teenager can be. Goth-ed out with multiple piercings, tattoos, and dyed hair, she listens to strange music, watches vintage TV, eats primarily chocolate and self injures. But now high school is over and she needs a job. Can she possibly have anything in common with the overweight middle-aged man in the haberdashery window? He gives her a job, not to mention a real friendship. - Plot Summary from IMDB
Like I’ve written
before: I did not go to film school to become a film critic. I went to film
school to learn-how-to-learn-to make films. I paid my dues and some. My hundred
thousand dollar film school education served more like a finger painting degree
than a financial portfolio.
Nothing more nothing
less. The higher the pedestal the harder the fall so I will not be a film
critic in these personal blogs. For those of you who know me extremely well if
you ever want to talk shop I’ll reach as far back as I can into the dusty areas
of my cerebral and intellectual scholarly archives.
“My
First Mister” by Christine Lahti is a 2001 release which unfolds as any love story does with the
exception of an extraordinary contemporary twist involved in the rather dynamic
storyline of two emotionally involved lovers and even though these two
exceptional characters not once go to bed with one another the love for each
other is as strong as any sexually filled drama.
Albert Brooks’ character is Randall or for short
‘R’ while Leelee Sobieski’s character is Jennifer - 'J'. These two
unlikely characters meet through a series of touch-and-go miscommunication and
misunderstandings like any great love courtship in any film.
Jennifer is a character of seventeen and
just having completed high school she’s desperate to find a job - any job.
Nevertheless,
her outer appearance makes it difficult
for her to be taken seriously much less hold a relationship to any friend of
the male species.
Randall is a character in his late
forties who is secretly dying from leukemia. Both characters strike the most
unlikely friendship by having Randall take a risk in hiring Jennifer to work in
his clothing shop. Jennifer not only shows that she can be organized in her
work but that she is considerate when she wants to be and also quite bright and
intelligent.
This film struck me to the core. Simply
because the times have changed and so has fashion and the overall attitudes
about interpersonal relationships in relationship to meeting and falling in
love with others.
I have to admit that I would not be the
married woman that I am today if it were not for films like “My First Mister”.
I went through a rough period from fifteen through twenty three (make it
twenty-eight when I met my husband fourteen years my senior). I already knew
who I wanted to be early on but I was pulled and pushed into so many different
directions that were not my own. I did not want to be a corporate flunky nor a
flunky at all for that matter.
The culture I grew up in was full of
pressure to succeed and to become something – not someone – not a human with
desires to learn, create and be. I learned that I had to always be doing
something and that if I was idle then I was lazy. So I took great shame in
wanting to sit in coffee shops all day long and read books or hold politically
heated discussions with my other intellectual peers who were just as angsty as
I was.
Many decisions lay before me at that
time in my life. I felt pressure to perform like a monkey with a banana trick
so the more pressure I felt as a young woman the more nervous and stupid I
became in relationship to others. I don’t think it was endearing whatsoever. I
wanted out of my skin and into another – thank the gods for the ability to shed
skin. Finally, thank the Gods I shed my old skin and grew a new one in my early
thirties. I became very honest and less crazy about my crazy family dynamics
and lack of support from wealthy people around me and very little understanding
for the plights of young women in America. The world is indeed a cruel place
for any young insecure women trying to morph into swans. I don’t think there is
anything easy about metamorphosis yet the outcome seems to be a lovely one with
cocoons and butterflies I think it applies to swans as well.
I was too insecure at the age of twenty
three to hold a proper relationship with a man I met and fell in love with at
that time in my life. I was twenty three and he was fifty-three. I was entering
my senior year in college and I was working as a dish washer at a local Indian
restaurant that summer. I had just gotten over an episode of melanoma and I had
a two inch scar on my left facial cheek. I was mortified by what it looked
like.
I shed many internal tears over that
scar on my face of all places but then I became a pachyderm about it and
decided not to sweat it. At the time I thought I possibly may not find a
potential mate because of it. How silly when I look back on it now, but it was
real at that time. I was in pain and it was a type of pain that one endures in
silence and alone. I was dirty, sweaty and grimy all that summer but I
was also inside my world of a walkman
and all the Cure music I could stand in an eight hour shift of dishwashing,
bike riding and writing.
If it wasn’t for music I would’ve never
made it through that long hot and sweaty summer in a hostile kitchen where the
cooks looked more like angry Arabian Knights then Indian cooks with huge chips
on their shoulders. They hated everything about America and American people.
What I couldn’t understand is why they stayed if they hated it so much? It’s
more rhetorical than anything else.
I remember my feet hurting all the time
and I kept forgetting to lock-up my bike. I really couldn’t ride the darn thing
properly so I walked it everywhere rather than riding. I kept wishing that it would
get stolen all summer but no one wanted my bike. I wanted out of my life. Every
day was a chore and a distress. I wanted to be thousands of miles away from
home and anywhere else in the world. Thank god I don’t have to redo my life but
if I knew then what I know now. I would’ve of packed a backpack and hit the
road at that time in my life. Yes, Sir! I wouldn’t be scared of the world –
that’s for sure.
I thought I wanted a cushy corporate job
being somebody with other people who were somebody’s. Until one day a man
approached me sitting outside a café in Canal Park. I was re-reading Ulysses at
that time and trying to make my way through Finnegan’s Wake which to
this day I still have no idea what that book is about or what James Joyce was
on when he wrote the book.
I was approached by a rather well to do
business man in the area. He asked me if I’d like to meet him for dinner at a
local restaurant and I said, “Yes, but not Indian food.” We spent most of that
summer together. Talking mostly. Not once did we touch except for awkward hugs.
I did not know yet at that time how to conduct my body. I had spent much time
alone and in the presence of the great outdoors that I really didn’t know how
to act seductively and if I had tried I know I would’ve done something silly
like fallen off a chair or tripped over my very own feet so I stayed put and as
still as I could.
I was turned on and deeply touched by
this man who was an avid rock climber and who’d read so many German literary
books I’d never heard of. He spoke fluent German to me and I was delighted by
all of it. I wanted to give of myself. I wanted to
give but I didn’t know how to. I was too
inexperienced and young when it came to romantic emotions. Funny that for a
young woman who’d loved romance films I never knew what to do with my hands and
my body when it came to being physically attractive. So I sat awkwardly and
hoped for the best.
I was in the company of a gentleman. Not
once was sex ever brought up between us and not once did the thought run through
my mind until a middle aged woman took me out to dinner and said to me, “I’ve
been informed that you’re dating _________. Do you know that he does this often
with other young women?” I didn’t know and I didn’t know why the hell she was
being such a ____. I sensed jealousy in her comparison.
I wasn’t much anything to look at in
those days but the Gods had been generous and given me plenty of body to work
with. I stared at her large hanging breasts and thought about how much they
longed to be touched by a man’s hand in her three hundred pound frame of fat. I
felt pain at the gossip and furious at her unkempt body. If she wanted to get
laid then why didn’t she just do it rather than ruin my amazing life in those
fleeting summer moments with that man I had given my soul to? She was not to be
trusted with the matters of the heart.
I went back to school to finish up and
we continued to e-mail into that long and cold winter. Then both our e-mails
came and went less and less as time moved on. I moved back to the East Coast
and started working in motion picture and met many other different types of men
who dined and wined me, but it was never the same. My first mister was
extraordinary, kind, generous with his time and resources. I was in heaven and
I was respected and loved just as much as I cared for him and I loved him
dearly and passionately.
May you remember your first mister and
hold a special place in your heart for former lovers. They do make us the very
people we become even if the experience wasn’t the most stellar these are our
first loves and never to be taken for granted.
Much Respect.
Gabriela
July 9, 2010
“Dancing is wonderful
training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going
to do before he does it.” -
Christopher Morley
“Dancing: the
vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.” - George Bernard Shaw
“Dancing in all its
forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing
with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be
able to dance with the pen?” -
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is
made.” - Ted Shawn, Time,
25 July 1955
The floor was hopping with Salsa, Merengue and Latin
dancers last night at 1st Ave. My husband and I went to the 7th
Street Entry to see a drummer friend of ours perform his magic and truly this
man is a gifted musician. I was honored to meet with him after the show, sit
with a beer and talk it up. At one point I leaned in and I said to my friend,
“Why aren’t you famous or some huge rock star yet? You’re a kickass drummer.”
He smiled then laughed, “I’m working on it but like
anything else it takes time and money.” I understood perfectly well what he
meant. I loved his rock show and it was worth every second that we could spare
to be there.
I’ve told many people this before, “I’ll put on the table
what I can offer. Take it or leave it”. By that I meant I will show up to
people’s performances and live shows in any way that I can. I’ve sensed some
people’s annoyance at me that I’ve only been able to make it to the closing act
or last song of a set but the thing is this: Sometimes they haven’t even known
that I’ve driven two-hundred miles just to see them live in the human flesh to
do their magic just for that moment.
It’s meant the whole world to me to be there in that
present moment for only a few escaping notes, lines delivered and poems
recited. I’ve had close friends tell me that they’d make it to my premieres but
no show and you know what I get it-it’s annoying. I have friends whose shows I
don’t attend because frankly it’s a mob and once you’ve sat in the corner of a
green room with strangers for photographers then you’ve sat in most green rooms
with newspaper photographers, fans and friends – that’s nice but not my cup of
mate. It’s better to have rice and beans at our place and relax with papaya
juice and un postre como flan y vino.
I’d rather not say anything and just fly in rather than
make a huge spectacle as to why I’m late. I’ll make it even if it’s a
treacherous adventure to get there, observe, take it all in, learn and
congratulate the performer then quietly fly out. Witnessing a performer, their
performance and medium is not about the performer or the audience appreciator
but rather about the art itself and whichever moment it unfolds.
I’ve been so goddamn proud of people everywhere all over
the world. I’ve flown into funny little places just to watch a performance even
if it’s only considered community theatre by some people yet
it’s as huge of a big deal as making a pilgrimage to the Vatican City or a pilgrimage
to Mecca. If I can make it I’ll be there. I don’t pass up art
especially created by people I know and even more so by those that I love. It’s
a great honor!
I’ve watched some people’s careers unfold over a period
of fifteen years. People who’ve made a name for themselves and more importantly
who put food on their tables and a roof over their heads because their
professional artistic careers pay for it.
There is no feeling to express a prouder moment than
going to the bank after a successful show, performance, concert or distribution
deal and putting in several thousands of dollars made by your own
two-hard-working hands.
The first time I made a corporate short I went to the
bank with fifteen thousand dollars in my hands and before I entered the bank I
sat down on the curve and wept. The week before that I’d been fired from a
horrible newsroom job that only paid $9.20 an hour and a week later I was
depositing fifteen thousand dollars into my checking account. That’s the world
for you.
In one year at the horrible newsroom job I would’ve made
a whopping $19,136 and don’t forget taxes. In one week’s corporate film work I
almost made what I would’ve slaved away in one year of horrible newsroom bull.
Wow! I thought I was going to have a heart attack right there and then on the
sidewalk.
The rewards are numerous and sweet in the arts, but the
journey is an extremely disciplined one and at times when in youth - at times,
when bored and lonely - one, must realize that it only gets better with age
(I’m just saying). Everything has its flip side. It’s been worth the ride for
me as I’ve heard so many other artists say that it’s been worth their ride for
them as well even if they’re barely making it by they would not chose to do
their lives differently and that’s the difference between a hobbyist and a
calling.
We made our way into the main room at 1st Ave
and took in all the sounds, movements and lights. The ladies all looked
beautiful in their summer dresses and two inch heels and the men were handsome
in their strong yet relaxed demeanors. Some couples were as great as any
professional Latin dancers. We watched the dancing from a candle lit table
underneath a stairwell. I was in heaven.
I have a tone-deaf ear and I can’t count to save my life,
mind you I tried playing a violin for four years and to no avail I stunk. I can
read sheet music I even have some excellent muscle memory in the placement of
my hands and the pizzicato of a violin. Yet
no one ever sat down with me and literally showed me a count until last night
maybe I was just supposed to know it maybe it was too obvious.
No wonder the nuns yelled at me year after year. Oh, the
frowns from many teachers got so old and all that yelling in my mid twenties
while trying to learn the damn violin. I can hold the instrument like a pro but
it’s not worth anything because I can’t get a great sound out of it or a
constant tempo.
My husband knows music. He played in many bands while
growing up even went to band camps. I did not. I sailed my summers away while
he created music so last night he figured out why I cannot partner dance,
because I can’t keep a count. “You’re an amazing improvisational dancer!” I’ve
been told before but I’ve also been told by men all over the East Coast, “But I
can’t dance with you because you switch it up too much.” I go with the rise and
fall of the rhythm not with the count.
So as a young woman there I was on the dance floor full
of couples and it never bothered me to be alone I always wanted to meet a man
who’d command a presence and man-handle my body to submit to the counts. I
never met such a man until last night after we pulled into the driveway my husband
who towers over me by a foot and a half took a hold of me and danced with me
while he counted in my ear. I’ve never blushed harder and felt more comfort
than in that moment of my life.
I’d said to my husband earlier in the evening “if you can
harness this wild horse into submission then you’ve got yourself a dance
partner.” He raised his one eyebrow and I waited for him to ask me to dance but
not once did he get up from his chair all night long. I was impressed by his
patience and Finn restraint. I want to learn to Tango with my husband so badly
but I figure I’ve been patient for four years what’s another four years?
I’m wishing you laughter as I laugh right now thinking
back to all the men I broke with my patience and stubbornness because I could
not be broken like any wild horse. It takes trust to learn to do anything new
especially getting to trust the smell of another.
We’ll be meeting and playing with an old school mate of
mine. It’s probably been about twelve or fourteen years since I’ve laid eyes on
my beautiful young friend.
I so look forward to her smiling eyes and her amazing
intelligent husband’s social commentary on life. Oddly, enough Eric and I ended
up running into her husband about three weeks ago at a house warming party and
got to meet with him outside the context of my old friend and immediately I
liked him. I knew she had chosen a man well for her future love and offspring.
I was so proud of them.
I hope you enjoy your weekend. I hope you make time for
lots of laughter, creative play and relaxation – I know we will. I’m off to
weld for four hours this afternoon.
Gabriela
July 8, 2010
“There is no time for
cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves
no other time!” - Coco Chanel
“A woman is closest to being naked when she is well
dressed” - Coco Chanel
“Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it.
Passion goes, boredom remains.” - Coco
Chanel
“Look for the woman in the dress. If there is no woman,
there is no dress.” - Coco
Chanel
“Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It
is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.” - Coco Chanel
“I can see the difference between a thousand dollar pair of jeans and a twenty dollar pair of jeans by simply looking at the stitching. There isn’t much of a difference in the look but there is a great deal of difference in how they’re worn by a woman. She moves differently, she feels differently, she is different in a thousand dollar pair of jeans.” My sister said to me as we entered Jasmine Sola on Brattle Street in Cambridge about four years ago.
I know basic fashion fundamentals only because my sister
went to school for fashion design in Florida and has lived and worked in the
fashion industry of Boston since 2004.
Recently in my thirties I’ve become partial to fashion
not simply for the sake of it but for the pure joy and function of it. As a
teen and in my early twenties I dressed very much like a feminine tomboy in
large corduroys and T-Shirts and great tennis shoes – this is not to say that I
still don’t while gardening, skateboarding and grocery shopping or while doing
chores.
There is nothing wrong with that, since there is always a
time and a place for a comfy pair of pants and a T-shirt. I don’t like to wear
logos of any kind if I can help it unless it is a graphic – especially a comic
book graphic that mostly only geek boys get its significance – although geek
culture has become mainstream culture as of late.
I never really liked beautifully made clothing while
growing up because I saw it as a nuisance in the sense that I wanted freedom of
movement and the ability to play without worrying about dirt, tears and
daintiness. I was a wild child in my late teens and early twenties and I wanted
to be able to climb over fences, go underneath bridges and photograph whatever
caught my fancy.
“Should we stop in?” asked an acquaintance of mine one
cool spring day. We walked into a small and quaint couture shop on the corner
of 1213 West 24th street and Hennepin Avenue. Immediately I smelled
well-taken-care of fabrics, love and patience in that shop. The owner asked us
if we needed any help and we said we were only looking.
I’d been looking for something to wear to our 2009
premiere but nothing had caught my eye. We browsed and I loved all of the
fabrics my hands handled. Suddenly there she was hanging in a simple and
elegant plastic wrapping – my dress. I knew it the moment I spotted her. She
was a beauty and I could barely contain my excitement. I tried her on before we
left and asked the owner to please hold the dress for me until the very next
morning.
I didn’t have to plead or feel embarrassed that I was not
about to purchase the dress in that very moment. Like any sophisticated owner
to a couture shop she understood the significance of the following morning – I
would show up with the only intent in purchasing her beautifully made dress.
She knew I was serious and so there was no need for her to tell me her store
policies on holding a couture dress of all things to be purchased.
In her very own beautiful hand writing the owner wrote
down simply my first name on a white small piece of paper and attached it to
the hanger and it made it official that-that dress belonged to me and only me.
I’d never been so proud in my whole life to have my name attached to such a
couture dress. The owner’s handwriting made me think: ‘This is a woman who
handles things delicately, a woman with strong and beautiful fingers’.
I bought my school clothes on Newbury Street every year
before the first day of school before we’d return to Minnesota on the last
possible week of summer before school started so I’d grown up knowing expensive
clothing – just the smell and the touch of it is different than my Rag Stock
purchases downtown Duluth which I loved that place just as much as I did the
shops along Newbury Street even if they came at a higher price tag.
As a young person I could tell a cheap fabric made to
look expensive and expensive fabric that looked and was expensive. I’d been in
Armani, Betsey Johnson and many haute couture shops along the Eastern Seaboard.
I liked popping into shops to look for the sake of
looking as a youngster, but I never had the money for a hundred dollar T-shirt
much less did I care to buy one at that time and probably could have but I
didn’t know the difference in good fabrics vs. great fabrics – I was more
concerned with books and political ideals than with clothing but I did like to
look at fashions on the street. I spent many hours wandering in and out of
shops with beautiful things that I never thought I’d buy in this lifetime or
the next. Objects are not that important to me; it’s more in the craftsmanship
that I can relate to something real made with two-hard-working hands. I’m glad
I’m not a hoarder by any means or I’d collect museum pieces and the entire time
they’d probably sit in some air purified room and in glass cases and I wouldn’t
know what to do with them. I think hoarding must be this way.
I’d never bought myself a couture dress as an adult woman
– I had couture clothing in the back of my wardrobe as a teen and into my
twenties and never wore them but the moment I tried on that dress I knew it was
made with a specific body type in mind and that body type was mine – especially
two years prior to that time period when I’d gone through a difficult time in
my career and gained a whopping fifty pounds in 2007. Still, yet in 2009 I was
struggling with the very last of those pounds. Now, looking back at that time I
feel lucky to have come away barely unscathed from the claws of stress, anxiety
and barely any relaxation of that time in my life.
I stand at 5’1” and 150 pounds today and I carry
incredible amount of muscle as my Mayan ancestors did. I have fat on my body
but I consider it well proportioned throughout my body. My ancestors were good
at carrying large loads of anything for long distances and uphill. I was built
like an ox and in such a way for ancient survival with curves and breasts to
feed a village in time of need.
I know what my body was made for now after so many years
of feeling ugly because I was told so and simply because I was not small like
many of my Nordic sisters whom I looked to for guidance but much of their diets
left me half starved and crazy with hunger. I never understood salad three
times a day and nothing else. I felt the deprivation all the way down to my
bones and so I had to stop dieting early on as a teen and face the fact that I
was always going to have slightly more curves than most Scandinavians.
It hasn’t been until the last three years since I met a
beautiful tiny sister who has taught me so much about intelligence, Black
culture, body types, men and food. I don’t always understand her but she has
in-her-own way helped me get through my toughest weight gain of my life – not
once did she belittle me but rather she understood my struggles and still does.
Half the battle is losing the pounds the other is to stay plateau.
The only real reason why I took off the fifty pounds
after three years of walking four miles Monday through Friday is because I woke
up with my ankles, knees and hips swollen and in severe pain not to mention the
back pain from gaining another two under garment sizes. I knew that wasn’t a
life I could lead. At 200 pounds in 2007 I was suffocating in my small Mayan
woman’s frame. I felt like I was on fire all the time.
I have a sweet tooth but even more so I have a sweet eye
and I love beauty so I’ve worked hard in the last three years to get my body
back because I’ve fallen in love with sewing and my goal someday before I die
is to make couture clothing for myself that is so well made it fits like a
glove and I’d like to be asked someday even if it’s just my husband while at
play, “Where did that dress come from?”
Proudly I’d like to be able to smile and silently raise
my one eye brow and say, “Would you believe it if I told you that I made this
to fit like a glove especially over my breasts and hips?”
That’ll be a proud moment in history for me, but for now
I continue to sow by hand because I was taught to embroider at the orphanage
and so I spent four long years embroidering anything that I could get my hands
on so I could escape other smelly kids, severely crazy catholic adults and
their judgments.
What a life!
Que Vida.
I’m wishing you beauty in your world as you work
comfortably in your body and clothing all of today and every day. Clothes are
powerful it can mean so much or so little.
Gabriela
July 7, 2010
“A
light wind swept over the corn, and all nature laughed in the sunshine.” – Anne Bronte
When I returned to my friend’s private garden yesterday
the Squash were squashed. The tomato plant I picked out of the garbage can and
replanted was actually thriving and the other two tomato plants were healthy
and growing. I could see the Zucchini popping up from the ground and the corn
is nowhere to be seen yet.
At five o’clock in the afternoons each day I try to take
at least one photograph for the time-lapse I’ll be working on all the way
through October. A time-lapse is a series of single photographs that eventually
create one sequence and cut together to create a fast action-motion to look at
a passage of time in quick successions.
I can already sense that I’m off on the time-lapse for
two reasons it’s rained often and the other I haven’t taken a picture every
single day at the same exact spot so at this point it’ll be lucky if the visual
outcome of the time-lapse doesn’t look more like a bumpy car ride than a plant
growing out of the ground. For all of my efforts in growing vegetables I did
not set up the glass contraption that I wanted. I broke the glass for one and
for another I had difficulties with the placement of the glass because of dirt
and sunlight.
It’s been the most interesting scientific experiment I’ve
undertaken yet for the purpose in filming any significant amount of B-Roll. I
don’t mind the process of the time-lapse and the natural element in patience to
care for and watch plants grow.
I’d never grown anything until last summer. I must’ve
missed that chapter of learning in English as a Second Language classes. But
no, seriously, my boss that I did an apprenticeship with last summer commanded
me to go to his farm and prepare the ground for his vegetables. I labored for
ten hours that day carrying large barrels of dirt back and forth from his
backyard to his front Garden. It felt more like a scene out of the Karate Kid
than my life ‘wax on wax off’ I kept saying to myself and smiled from time to
time. I’d never been so tired or exhausted as I did at the end of that day
after only the gods only know how many barrels of dirt I must’ve shoveled and
carried.
I’d never before literally planted a seed into the earth
with my own two hands nor did I really know what to do. My apprentice boss
walked me through the process. At first he seemed a little annoyed to have to
explain something that was so simple to him but then I think he understood that
I was open minded and willing to work right alongside him. I wanted to know
more. I was intrigued and so he was willing to take the time to bring me out to
his farm one hour north of Minneapolis and I was sent there on a bi-weekly
basis to water the tomato plants as often as we could even though we were on
the road much of the summer for his work building stages for national musical
acts.
I usually take on one apprenticeship a summer for three
months to learn a new viable skill.
This summer I’m on my eighth apprenticeship as a welder
and reconstructing a former Guthrie Theatre stage. I’m learning to rework
rusted metal and refurbishing as fast as my hands will work.
Last summer I helped run a rigging company anything from
payroll, ground rigging, paperwork, scheduling, crews, e-mails and sitting in
on meetings with the bosses of concert venues. The stage company rigged for
concert venues large and small acts around Minnesota such as the Basilica Block
Party, 10,000 Lakes, Float Rite concert venue and other First Avenue and
Theatre productions as well as soundstage work for music videos. I learned a
great deal and no, I’m not looking to get into the business of rigging and
stage construction. It takes a great deal of energy and time on location.
I’ve been on stages as they were being constructed from
the ground up and then torn down after the shows. It was fascinating and back
breaking work. I’ll never forget that experience for as long as I live. Never
will I forget it as I sat underneath stages and listened to the musicians play
for thousands of venue goers. It’s become my favorite place in the whole world
to take in any concert. My apprentice boss was dealing with back cancer at the
time and needed as much assistance as he could and I did work alongside him
anywhere from ten to sixteen hour days either at the warehouse / soundstage or
at a concert venue.
I’ve worked and been welcomed to sit on sets of many
major motion-pictures and met many famous actors and actresses, directors and
producers so to be real close to these country star people wasn’t anything new
to me as well as many more National acts that I’d never heard of before and yet
these were the clients we rigged for under my tutor’s wisdom and business
teachings. Last summer when Madonna’s stage collapse occurred I was proud to be
a part of a crew of men and women who made damn sure that didn’t happen on
their watch.
My first apprenticeship so many years ago held the
awesome responsibility of caring for forty sled dogs. It was a hot summer and I
awoke at four thirty in the mornings up at the Gunflint Trail. I was instructed
to never eat before feeding the dogs. So, I’d prepare their food in a
particular way the musher had shown me and I’d scooped food for each dog as
they tried to jump on me or barked from on top of their dog houses. The only
times the dogs were semi quiet was when they were eating or running the trails.
I was given the usage of a sled-on-wheels in which I
could make my daily runs with the dogs. I had to take turns running different
dogs with different energies, skills and abilities. Sometimes, the combination
of dogs made for a winner team and other times it made for pulling my hair out.
The dogs knew their way around the backwoods and surface
roads a hell of a lot better than I did. I once fell asleep in the sled and
when I awoke we were back at base camp. I was a little embarrassed but very
proud of the dogs. We’d had encounters with moose so I was relieved and much to
my surprise there had been no conflict with moose that afternoon while I slept
soundly away in that sled in the sun. I can’t say that it happened ever again –
I’m very aware of moose power and energy. They can take you out any place,
anytime they desire if provoked.
Much of the time I wasn’t the alpha if anything I was a
passenger on their ride, but they needed to be run and so I ran them and it
took the better part of the day. By the time I was done running the dogs ten
miles each team of ten it would be time for dinner and then I had to feed and
water them again before ever feeding myself. It was definitely a production.
I loved that summer and I look back upon it quite fondly.
I loved getting lost with my lead dog a husky with two different color eyes who
understood my body language so well I never had to use verbal language to
communicate with him. It was as though he had known my soul my entire life and
he could read me better than I could read myself. I’ve only once run a team of
dogs in a winter sled; much of my experience is based on summer runs so I never
got to know their full potential as runners on the snow.
I loved every single one of those dogs like my brothers
and sisters. I cried when I had to leave them and go back home at the end of
that summer. I cried in the car for hours and I promised myself never to fall
in love with anything that dear to me while I apprenticed, but that’s a joke.
It’s difficult for me not to fall in love when I become passionate about the
work I’m trying to accomplish. I loved them and I would’ve died for them out in
the woods if that’s what it would’ve taken to ensure their survival. I was
absolutely head over heels for those huskies as I’m head over heels about
working with metal.
My other apprenticeships I’ve worked clearing trails in
the middle of nowhere, investigated the topography of the land, swamps and
other noticeable landmarks. I’ve apprenticed as a prep cook in Kalamazoo, MI as
an organic cook for daily meals for hundreds of children learning to grow
organic vegetables and made huge composting boxes for the purpose of organic
waste. I can’t say I had time to grow anything except prepping for the next
meal and the next. I learned how to make some tasty dishes.
I’ve worked as an apprentice baker, prep seamstress and
also as a youth worker with children of low-income neighborhoods through a
method of positive conflict resolution through constructive play and theatre.
I’ve apprenticed in the public school system of Duluth,
MN as a teacher’s aide while helping 6th graders who could not read
at that stage in the game to learn how to read before they left grade school.
These were children who had severe learning disabilities or who were constantly
hungry, irritated and occasionally violent but never with me because I held my
clear boundaries with them and I loved all these children in the same way that
I had loved the sled dogs. I’ve been lucky to have fallen in love many times
over.
I’ve been a lucky person to be introduced, welcomed and
be made a part of these microcosms of worlds for only a few months but months
that changed my life in the most of significant of ways. I’ve been honored and
I’ve honored others through hard work and no complains, anger or whining.
I’ve been profoundly changed by these apprenticeships.
The gods know what they’re up to. I do live an extremely down to earth and yet
glamorous life. At times, by day I’m covered in dirt and patched jeans and by
night a certain occasion may call for evening ware and the woman who worked
with dirt earlier that day is then transformed into a woman in a couture dress
and high heels. The daily transformation is wonderful and I like to change it
up as well.
I’m wishing you beauty, adventure and much learning in
your daily lives. A whole day is still yet before us.
Gabriela
July 6, 2010
“Through dangers untold and hardships
unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to
take back the child that you have stolen, for my will is as strong as yours,
and my kingdom is as great - You have no power over me.” (From the Film Labyrinth)
A man yelled something at my husband and I - while he
crossed a walking bridge. We carried groceries in each hand, my husband
quickened his pace and I followed it. I looked back and yelled urban “Wassup?”
for “I’ve notice you”.
The Native brother was obviously intoxicated and under
the influence of a hard drug. He quickened his pace and continued to yell
obscenities at us as he followed. He closed the gap by the time we made it to a
stop light and crossed. He crossed the street on our heels. We crossed again
and he crossed with us. He continued to yell. “The clown is just behind us” I
said to my husband and he knew that I was referring to the film “It”.
I said the magic words - the only words that came to me
in Ojibwa in that moment and the man stopped on his tracks and I heard him say,
“I’m gone.” He made a sharp right as we continued straight ahead. “What the
hell was that all about?” I asked my husband. He shook his head.
I haven’t been aggressively followed home since 2003 when
I worked in Canal Park in Duluth. I kept turning around to yell at the bastard.
“Go home!” “Leave me the hell alone!” for one mile I yelled to no consequence
by the time I got to the local downtown library. Finally, I took out my cell
phone and dialed 911. The near-by police in the area showed up quickly and
interrogated the man.
I stood on the sidewalk and watched as he made excuses to
the cops. Ultimately he admitted to not taking his meds and living on the
streets and that he heard the voices and he couldn’t help himself. The police
man and woman both placed him in the back of the cop car and that was the last
that I ever saw of the man. I quickly made my way up the street and behind the
bowling alley to 14th Avenue West. I was shaking in my boots still
yet when I arrived home all those years ago. Now, mentally ill people don’t
face me because ever since the state hospitals closed down we have them all
over the streets and homeless. Way to go! That’s what my generation received as
youngsters coping with a mentally ill sector of population sleeping in parks,
doorways and bushes. Way to go! You can tell that-that guinea pig project did
not go well for society at large. I don’t believe in the incarceration of the
mentally ill – we’re too smart for that but I do believe in contemporary
methods of clinical analyses and providing services and resources for those who
are mentally ill and homeless. Facilities do need to be provided for two
decades of overt mentally ill homeless wandering our streets making difficult
for working citizens.
“What would you do if you encountered the clown all alone
on the bike path?” My husband turned and asked me late one night while reading.
“I would stand my ground and fight it. Why? What would you do?” I asked with
curiosity. “I would get away from the clown.” I frowned at myself because the
very thought did not occur to me and I think: ‘Isn’t that smart.’
My husband and I are very different animals. When I’m
threatened with my life I get angry and when I get angry I get verbally
confrontational. I don’t get mad very often but when I do I see red and holy
cow if you ever want to be a witness to that type of anger which is not only
justifiable but also a vehicle to ward off men with threatening intent I’d
suggest stick around for the show because my entire soul takes over in a fight
or flight response and all there is to do is to fight for my life. In me there
is very little alternative in the sense that hormones, chemicals and the fight
response kicks in. I’m talking survival now, not daily living. Sometimes, you
meet the most rabid dogs in the strangest places.
I become a grizzly bear and there is nothing else to it
while my husband is mostly quiet and remains quiet during a threat yet he is
anything but stupid I can see it in him that his brain is processing at a
thousand miles per second. Eric is an incredibly smart man with a genius I.Q.
who figures out how to trick the clown and to get away from it.
I may not be any real threat to anybody else but I will
dual to the death if need be and I can’t say that I’d feel bad for any sorry
bastard that would perpetuate that in me. I made up my mind in 2006 that I’d
kill any man who threatened my life with potential bodily harm or violent
crime. There is nothing else to it I made up my mind when a man broke into my
apartment and stole three year old painkillers from an old shoe box in my
closet.
It wasn’t until my husband asked me to please get away
from the clown - ever since last summer since the Soo Line assaults in the
wealthier part of town that I have learned to spot public nuisances and taking
the first exit out of sight. If I don’t have to fight then I’m not going to
only if I have to.
I don’t purposely go looking for trouble, but when you’re
a pedestrian, bicyclist and any kind of bipedal traveler it’s easier to
encounter more difficulties on the street than if you’re sheltered in a two ton
vehicle.
In 1996 when I lived on the East Coast I made it a point
to go in and out of South Boston on my skateboard. Beantown is indeed beautiful
but - Southie - at that time was yet another world in itself just like Gary
Indiana is to Chicago. Maybe, the real estate value has gone up since in both
parts of each city because they are truly beautiful as a landscape.
I met and got to know a group of street riders through a
group of gutter punks I met while taking pictures under bridges. I met great
skateboarding men and their street dogs whose main purpose was to defend their
masters to the death. I didn’t get what the big deal was with all the hustling,
macho crap and territorial gangster stuff but it was real to them as real as my
camera was while I snapped away photos of graffiti and asked a million
questions about their lives down by railroad tracks.
I didn’t wish to live like them nor to become like them
and they understood this very well but I did require their knowledge of street
riding and that was my main intent to learn. So in some ways I became an
apprentice and learned everything I needed to know about street riding. Nine
years later in 2005 I skated my way through Gary Indiana even though there were
gun shots on the streets and my producer at that time kept yelling at me to get
into the god damn car but it was those men of Southie who’d taught me to skate
through anything especially through huge cracks on the sidewalks.
I wasn’t having it. I know a hood when I skate it and
nothing will shake my confidence this is not to imply that I’m an idiot and go
looking for trouble but I know my freedom and I skate because it’s my god given
birth right. I skate because I understand a real threat by the distance of
sound. That day in Gary Indiana I skated through a symphony of gunshots just
six blocks down the street and I wept inside my skin as I pushed myself on a
skateboard through dilapidated and boarded up buildings, houses and abandoned
places that once held dreams of a better tomorrow.
The men of Southie and the men of Gary all have one thing
in common across all neighborhoods of America in that they are men whose main
survival is to keep up with a world that’s left their communities economically
far behind decades ago. These are neighborhoods and pieces of land that are
forgotten to the world and very few will remember anytime soon because they’re just
too dark to shed a bit of light no different than any other ghetto and
reservation in the history of mankind. The main purpose is to keep their people
in and to let very little out as way of cultural information, hard ships and
heart ache. I understood these men without ever having to grow up with them as
kids but as young adults and as freshmen in college, technical schools and
craftsmen.
It was because of these few men of Southie (wink-wink)
that I learned never to fear skateboarding through any neighborhood. I was
told, “Girl, you’ve got a weapon, you carry a two by four and don’t you ever
forget it.” I was horrified and stupefied at the sight of blood and lots of it
when I saw two men fighting with their boards. It was the same sight as two
moose fighting with their antlers and hoofs.
I’ll never forget the sound for as long as I live yet I
understood in that moment the power of what I carry in my hands. I don’t forget
it every time I get on my “Desilu”, my skate-girl (I named the skateboard as
well - yes, it has a name, thank you). I understand that I carry a weapon like
any other weapon and I’m not afraid to use it when it comes to defending my
survival and especially the survival of anybody I love. You learn environmental
wisdom with time.
I was shaken by the Indian’s aggressive pursuit yesterday
evening and I could tell he carried something on him by the way he walked. If
it wasn’t a gun he carried then it was a knife. My only true consolation is
that my dad once said to me, “If you ever carry a gun, be prepared to die by
it.” I understood what he said to me that day. I’ve never been sure of two
things in my life as I was last night. One, I will learn to shoot a gun other
than just the squirrels at the farm. Two, I will learn to fly a plane.
There is power in the very knowledge of knowing how to
handle oneself. We were threatened last night but I also knew that he had no
power over us and I understood in the deepest regions of myself the value of
his Ojibwa language and that his ancestors were watching him just as much as
Eric’s Finn ancestors were watching over Eric and my Mayan ancestors were
watching over me.
All three of us had something powerful going for each of
us. I can see bullshit a mile away and his ancestors were not about to take on
ours because that’s not who they were even if the Indian was lost, confused and
hardened by the world. His ancestors were not about to lose their heads over it
because they knew very well the negative outcome that could’ve occurred on the
sidewalk yesterday. I could sense we were sloppily being hunted down like prey
but not any less aggressively than any other animal when they hunt.
I was more afraid for my husband than I was for myself. I
can handle the thought of dying I’ve been prepared for it all my life but when
it comes to my loved ones I can’t say that it hasn’t left deep wounds every
time I’ve experienced it.
I wish you safety in your world as you make your way
across today.
Gabriela
July 2, 2010
“May the sun in his
course visit no land more free, more happy, more lovely, than this our own
country!” - Daniel Webster
“I prefer liberty
with danger to peace with slavery.”
- Author Unknown
“Raise your right hand.” I did.
On May 1st, 1989 a judge Naturalized my sister
and I along with five other strangers in downtown Duluth’s courthouse. We were
dressed in our Sunday best and two of my closest neighborhood friends and three
schoolmates came to witness this life changing event.
I went through the Naturalization ritual at the age of
twelve and at that time I understood some of its significance. I understood
that I got to get out of school, I wore tights that pinched my hips, shoes with
a small heel that hurt my feet after an hour of standing in them and an
Easter-Sunday dress with a pink bow on the front that kept blowing in my face
while taking pictures outside.
I was a twelve year old little girl still yet fascinated
by the Television, our record player, easy accessibility to the toilet and
every single appliance in our house.
Our kitchen was full of post-its saying the vocabulary
words of each object. The point was for me to properly enunciate the word,
spell it out and then I could use the object of my desire like a fork after
saying “f-f-f-o-r-k”. The process was humiliating and infuriating. I felt like
a monkey performing a banana trick. Perhaps, to this day I can’t spell very
well because the humiliation of having to say and spell the word “spatula”
every time before using the damn thing created a stubborn streak in me to want
to never spell at all yet I never lost my love for learning how to relate in
English and the usage of all those magnificent words.
Those were humiliating days; Days of the school bus and
clueless about social norms amongst white middle-class children. Rules about
where and where-not to sit depending on your social status and whether the
“cool” kids liked you or not. Loud and bullying children so goddamn privileged
they had lost their sentimentalities and kindness to sarcasm.
The humiliation of people spitting while they spoke was
severe and bizarre. Sprinkled saliva on the front of my shirt while people
shouted at me in English because - well, I’m not sure, if they thought I was
deaf and dumb or simply just English as a Second Language speaker which in this
country they’re both in the same. I remember it clearly because this went on
for several years until I lost my accent. It profoundly grossed me out but it
taught me a lot about cultural assumptions.
I’d lose myself in a world of daydreaming to escape loud
talking people who repeated themselves all too often and spoke only about the
weather. I was not bitter or lonely at this time in my childhood only confused.
I was intrigued by fashion, makeup and Barbie dolls. I used to cut off the hair
to my sister’s Barbie dolls and put real makeup on their small faces. I did
that for hours on a Saturday morning. I loved Bugs Bunny and everything it had
to offer – it was a story without language and I could take a brain from
learning and rest my mind with hilarious cartoon like antics.
I got through those first two years by locking the
upstairs bathroom door, climbing into a dry tub and leafing through Garfield
comic books. It was comic books that brought stories to my life very much like
the oral-telling traditional stories the Mayan women told me in the first six
years of life before four years of orphanage food, Catholic guilt and
regulations. Yes, I had a whole life before I went to an orphanage.
On my birthdays we tried having piñatas parties but some
other teens stood around bored-stiff like wooden dolls without any excitement
in the world – so I felt silly in my cultural endeavor – it wasn’t about how
old we were it was about how hilarious it was. I wondered, ‘Why is everybody in
such a hurry to grow up?’ They needed to be orchestrated in order to have fun
because by that time they had outgrown many aspects of laughter and they were
simply too cool for it. I could see it in their faces that they were counting
down the minutes when their parents could tell them it was time to leave this
god forsaken teenage wasteland ritual of hitting a candy stuffed donkey with a
stick. What can be funnier than a donkey exploding candy from its butt? Broma.
Joke. Chiste. I wanted to burst out laughing many times but instead I stood
very still and watched other kids as we looked around to see who would be the
first one to give it a whack. It wasn’t until the kids who were forced to go to
birthday parties had left that my friends came out from the woodwork and went
to work buck-wild hitting the life out of our teenage piñata filled years. We’d
giggled and shook with laughter at the fun we thought we were having with
something so silly as candy protruding from the in-seams of papier-mâché.
I met some of the most and amazing kindred spirits in
Elementary School, Junior High and High School. Children who are now adults
with their very own beautiful children. I learned honesty, mischievousness and
sharing from these little girls. They smiled often at me and so I’d smile back
at them not able to communicate in fluent English how much their company meant
to me. Some of these little girls and I spent many a summers lying around in
the dunes of my backyard staring at the sky while I listened to them speak in a
foreign language.
I got into Anne of Green Gables the novels at that time
and the whole world changed for me. The Wonderworks PBS Canadian series came
out shortly after I struggled through those books. Even to this day I measure
my friendship success to those adventurous novels. I’ve been lucky enough to
have had many Anne’s in my life. I’m more of a cross between Diana Berry and
Gilbert Blythe.
As I look back on this time period of my life I’m greatly
moved by the many lessons I encountered. I lived in a private world of Spanish
speaking inside my head but my outer world was a gibberish language that I
could only make sense through people’s body language. I wanted to belong but
with a history so unordinary to these other children I carried a harsh look on
my face; silence or laughter were the only real emotions I could clearly convey
to a world where pale eyes and light skin were all I saw.
I wondered why not too many other people looked like me
and I tried to find my features in anyone I could find remotely of color. To no
avail it wasn’t until I was thirty years old that I saw a cave painting of my
Mayan ancestors and I sat down and shook with delight. I was looking at a pure
exact image of my face in those ancient cave paintings. I’d come home! I knew
myself and the search for my people was over. I remembered where I had come
from and where I had been. I was lost wandering in a Nordic forest of unknown
cultural subtleties and different body language.
At thirty-three I’m damn proud to be an American and
Costa Rican citizen. I’m an adult that would die for the right to freedom of
speech until the end of time. I’m an adult who gets angry at pictures of people
burning the American flag. That is a symbol of disrespect because too many
people before me died for the freedom to bear that flag. Burning a flag in
America doesn’t have the same signifiers as burning a flag in other parts of
the world. Every country, people and cultures are different I’ve come to learn
about those specific regards.
We’re at war and it’s a silent war. A war thousands of
miles away, but I keep the faith that our American troops will come home sooner
than later. I keep faith that these young Americans will not give up on our
Motherland due to all of the insanity, cruelties and difficulties they’ve
witnessed in war.
I love what this country stands for: grocery stores,
convenience, organics, long johns, clean laundry and streets, stop lights,
spatulas, alarm clocks, more than one pair of socks and underwear, calendars,
laptops and the freedom of speech.
“I believe in two principals I’d live and die for.” I
tell a friend (one, but I won’t discuss the second) this winter while standing
on my back porch. “I’d sacrifice everything for freedom of speech”.
‘It doesn’t seem like you really mean it when it comes to
the freedom of speech’. He said to me.
I wanted to reproach him, but then I remembered that even
though we have a decade behind us - he and I do not have two decades behind us
as most of my pre-teen neighborhood and elementary school mates and I do. I
shrug it off and intellectually explained it to him but I held back the rest of
my personal reasons as to why I’d sacrifice my life for the right to speak.
I’m intense when I write because even as a child I
clearly held a writer’s voice and not that I profoundly understood this gift
until about three years ago and now that I’m blogging once again after a three
year hiatus I’m even more dogged to use this literary voice inside this
literary vacuum to convey some of the deepest of sentiments.
As an adult I finally understand the American pride that
so many displayed during the first Gulf War, right after the 911 attacks and
now as we live in silent war.
I’m wishing you an amazing Fourth of July.
May you co-exist peacefully and happily amongst your
loved ones, friends and familia.
I’m ready for a long-long weekend.
Gabriela
July 1, 2010
“As you learn to
Freeze-Frame highly-charged emotions, you also learn to communicate directly to
people without the extra voltage that can cause them to be defensive, while
frying your nerves and draining your energy bank.” - Doc Childre
“English is the
perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of
what to say.” - Garrison Keillor
“I don’t want to talk to you right now!” A grown man said
to a grown woman. Immediately I’m ordered to obey like a dog not to caca on the
floor. I hadn’t even uttered a single word. What was that?
“Good day” would’ve been more appropriate amongst adults
but no! At least preserve silence – if you can’t speak to others then don’t,
however. Don’t assume that anybody cares to converse with you just because
you’ve physically made yourself present. What is that? I’m in the habit of
nodding at people and peacefully going about my business if I’m too tired or if
it’s too difficult to communicate with them in that moment.
The man’s words left a sour taste in my mouth and all I
wanted to do was spit them out. I restrained my own violence because I knew all
too well that I had more power than him when communicating to others in regards
to them. It took me a decade to hone my communication skills and I was greatly
annoyed by my intellectual peer. I thought that he should know better but
obviously he didn’t.
‘Why are you so privileged to communicate in such a rude
manner?’ I thought and grew completely quiet. I finished my task, gathered my
belongings and left my apprenticeship for the afternoon even though there was
much work to be done.
I went in search of my other respectful male friend and
his soul mate at the community garden. We have a blast together. We cover many
diverse topics as we work together but mainly we laugh hard no matter what
we’re doing with our hands as we unload organics from a bus.
On the walk over to my friend’s my thoughts grew dark
with anger and disappointment at the very intelligent and quite rude grown man
he was in those fleeting moments. ‘He’s always like that!’ I’ve eaves dropped
on people talking about this very man in such a manner. Most of them seem
annoyed yet they excuse the rude communicative behavior.
I haven’t had the chance to address the injustice or to
converse about it directly with this grown man but my silence doesn’t
necessarily mean that I condone it either. If anything my silence means that
I’m ready to strike and that I’m dangerous because I have to hold my tongue
otherwise my words will be full of poison. I’ve grown weary of him and my
respect for him diminishes yet once again for the third time in two years.
This is not to say that I can’t forgive nor that he
doesn’t have a chance to redeem himself but I must be respectful because I must
- it is to say that I trust less when I’m cut down, undermined, marginalized
and minimized especially when I’m being patronized. All I wanted to convey was
a “hello”. I acknowledge that you exist. How funny is that?
If he’d been a lover in my younger years I would’ve
slapped him hard across the face with my words not for the sake of sheer
violence but for the purpose to awaken him from his enchanted spell. I’ve never
slapped any man or woman in my life – so it’s really neither here nor there but
it makes for strong passionate writing. I don’t believe in real-life-action
violence except in art, films, books, music, in painting and to awaken the soul
from its deep slumber. I believe in art-violence if only to portray the very
real tragedy of it.
All I could think was ‘Get away from him before you
strike him dead with your words and leave him gasping for air.’ My intent was
not to hurt him but I was hurt myself so I wanted to hurt him in-return just to
give him a taste of his own poison. I’m a snake. What more is there to say? If
you don’t know the representation of a snake in the Chinese mythologies of
their zodiac then all you can relate to is the one and only story of ‘Adam and
Eve’ and that’s a rather Western train of thought for Chinese zodiac. I love
reading a horoscope from time to time. Why? Because, it’s mindfully relaxing to
me? Who doesn’t need to chill out with something fun from time to time?
I thought:
‘What on Earth is his
problem?’ and in that moment I understood his problem. I understood that he was
bitter at life in general, angered by injustices brought about to him and his
loved ones and guarded to no avail.
‘Why is he so rude to
almost everybody he encounters?’ I considered the alternatives. ‘Why is it that
when he feels bad he has to control communication?’ I considered the
alternatives. ‘Why can’t he simply be cordial at least polite?’ I considered
the alternatives. ‘I’ve been instructed not to speak three distinctly different
times in a four week period and why is that?’ I considered the alternatives.
‘Why is it that only in America people consider-it okay to have enough entitlement
to tell others not to speak?’ I considered the alternatives. ‘Why has he become
such a curmudgeon at such a young age?’ I considered the alternatives. I can
now answer my very own questions. I’ve considered the alternatives.
Communication or lack thereof is the root of all evil
amongst men and women. I did not write amongst men or simply only women but
rather I mean to imply amongst the sexes. Men don’t care about details as much
it seems only the larger broader picture while women pay closer attention to
detail and tend to want to talk about every aspect of it more so than men do.
I believe that either by birth right in fairy tales or by
self appointed grandiose gestures one does – One, ‘giveth’ and ‘granteth’ the
permission to speak while in communication to others. What is that?
I have yet to contemplate this further. The thing is
this: How can you really like someone who is disrespectful in communication?
You can but it makes it very difficult to want to love their soul much less
befriend it. My truest of friends don’t yell, swear or cut me off when we are
in communication much less in conflict nor I, do it to them and if I do I’m the
first one to apologize because it’s not right to yell at others and I know the
very essence in the difference between right and wrong as most grown adults do.
Last year this man yelled at me in front of a close
female friend of his and I felt ashamed and embarrassed for his friend not for
either one of us. He yelled at me over something stupid and after she left I
had to directly address the issue with him and this is all I said, “The people
in my life who I love and respect have never raised their voices at me nor do I
at them. I suggest that you do as well.”
He’s never yelled at me since. The way I see it is this:
You can yell at me but I better be on fire, at the edge of a cliff or my
shoelace stuck to a railroad track, but that’s about it. Look at me, I’m a
grown woman. No need for that.
I left. It took a whole year for me to have enough energy
to return. Here I am. Here I stand. Here. I. Today. It’s easier to run away
just because it is - rather than confront it head on. People take up so much
energy. After meeting with people in conflict I normally go and find a little
nook to hide in and simply breathe, drink tea, light a candle and pray.
May you find peace and resolution in many of your
conflicts as today unfolds especially with people that you’re drawn to and you
can’t explain why.
Much respect to you and the world at large.
Gabriela