Thunderstorms

The rain is relentless. It will continue for the weekend while Kami recovers from his ballsy procedure and we watch movies I checked out of the library. We are pretty fast watching all of the Johnny Depp movies ever made. Someone at work gave him a cookie frosted to look like Captain Jack Sparrow, but it is a mystery who.
I have lots of details to arrange as organizer of a fundraising party in two weeks: kite-making supplies, marimba music, banners made of balloons and leafy branches. Will the health department allow us to sell tamales? Do I need to buy a badminton net at Target to string the decorations onto, in the absence of any other space-delineating structures on the grass? If it rains, then the simul-fiesta for Radio Ixchel's transmitter is not going to feel much like a party. These events call for signage and then more signage, and task-assignation: I need to make pretty boxes for the money to go in, and then clearly mark them with signs.
Yesterday I talked to a repeat caller to the helpline at the women's center. I was so nervous because it didn't go well between us once before. I have to try so hard to give her the kind of support she wants- not advice, just some myserious and elusive "clue" for how to stay in her center- all the pressure threatens to make me draw a blank, and it is no cakewalk. I've noticed that these callers, people who are lacking face-to-face connections in their lives, are very much in their heads. They always ask "WHAT DOES IT MEAN" and seem to want answers to the greater mysteries of life. I want to find some way to convince them that this isn't really what they need to know. That understanding what it means and why usually isn't what allows us to change in deep ways. Accepting that we can't know, but that we can have faith in who we are and where are now anyway, can. Learning "from experience" isn't learning "what it means," but perhaps learning to let go of that search for a singular meaning. "What do my feelings mean?" is sort of like an oxymoron.
Other callers are easy. They just ramble, and I let them. Once I tried to stop the stream of random information, but now I just let her go on. I'm not her therapist, and she's calling just to tell someone what's up- not get to the root of things, so I don't force it. I like how the women's center is an evolving entity, that everyone learns from and creates equally. As co-creators, we have to be careful about imposing our views and rules on anyone, even if we think it's for their own good. This means listening to people talk about how aggravating the cat is, or how confusing their phones are, or how alienated they feel from the screen of numbers they are forced to stare at all day at work without having an interpretation of these people and their problems. Sometimes a screen of numbers is just a screen of numbers, and all she needs to hear is that she will find her way through it. but her thirst for encouragement is bottomless. If anyone knows any good, pat encouraging phrases, I would like to collect them so that I won't have to feel that dreadful hole in my stomach the next time she asks for it.

Warming up

Music is drifting into the apartment from the sound system at the school fair at the Peabody School. It's a great variety of songs. Now one of those full-lunged, deep-throated country women singers is singing what must be a fairly popular song, to electric guitar and climactic chord changes. Kami has spent the morning on a "calculation," one that he has managed to make a breakthrough on, in one morning, after his postdocs couldn't do a thing with it in a month. He says it's exciting, but will take years to prove. The air is cool after our half week of heat, when the humidity came overnight and has now left again. Our air is utterly changeable, here at the crux of a massive airstream from central Canada on one side and the northerly Atlantic on another. I find it vulnerable, to be always and unpredictably at the mercy of whatever will blow in next.
So I entered a poetry contest again and don't have to use this non-existent site to share my intensity with the world.
I sold a piece at Open Studios, it was called Door and I am feeling seen and recognized there as well as in my budding activities as a "therapist." A woman who comes consistently the depressoin support group says she wishes I could be her therapist, that I'm exactly what she's looking for! I told Terry and he said I want you to really feel nourished by that.
I have decided to start writing consistently again, why not warm up here? The commitment I need to make is to a time each morning where I just be in my body and whatever comes up. This is where I experience my divinity. It is my life's work. If I am to share it with others, I need to have really done it with myself. Get up and ground, and breathe and see what news things I can feel. I did this today on Robin's porch in the sun and I felt like a priest doing an ancient ritual. The ritual of slowing down and coming down into the present moment.

Zip, Mrs. Emma Peel, owners and friends

The names of dogs that frequent next door...Emmie P., affectionately.
Lou and Lourdes came to Pam's house and we all stayed up much too late. I impressed L & L with my cocktail-making savvy.
Later Lou asks Robin about me "Can we keep her?" If only Lou would move in downstairs, we could have a real full on community here- help taking out the trash and everything. But the rent is too expensive- Why Peter Kim??!!

that does it for me

So I have been trying to figure out what is the THING that I ought to be doing in the evenings instead of getting lethargic and reading in bed; what is my project, other than playing with Kami when he is never as available to play as I would like? It seems to be emerging slowly, the strands are coming together, the way that my desire to work on behalf of indigenous people and their languages and my art can inform each other. I need to be assured that whatever is meaningful enough to me to do with joy is meaningful to the world.

Poets, artists, philosophers
hold the keys to the living
breathing aliveness of a culture
hold the spiritual warp intact
breathe into the heart with
a persistent sigh,
peering into the unknown
probing for its faintest heartbeats
listening to the last words of
every moment.

I might be organizing a party to raise money to buy a transmitter for Radio Ixchel: a community radio station in Sumpango, Guatemala, where Kaqchiquel is endangered. The government stole their equipment (since they're "illegal") and they have been off the air for close to a year. I called people today to get testimonials for grant-writing, and the people I work for were very pleased. In fact, the notion of gender equality receives no mention in the social milieux EXCEPT on the community radio station human rights program, where it is making a difference. Just talking to these people, learning about their situation, asking about the use of the language clues me back in to the kind of service I want to be doing. I go back to thinking that the best art has to be political, that the work that is most worth doing is in direct service to people whose cultures are threatened.

what?

This blog is like an experiment for me. Without telling anyone where it is, will anyone find it? Will anyone care about a stranger's life, without photos (I need to fix that)? I think about it and I am sure they will be turned off when they see the word therapy. Who in the world wants to read about that, even if it is a sensational, sex-positive, energetic life in the body type of therapy? I wish I could explain how bioenergetics feels like coming home, feels like the lifechanging commitment that will become my mindfulness, but everyone needs to find their own way, I suppose, to the thing that excites them most. I know that writing is the hardest for me, harder than going to therapy. I know if I did it regularly it would become easier, like it did before when I did 300 words a day. The sad thing about writing is not having an audience- perhaps never having an audience for those thoughts, which makes it feel so solitary. I guess that is the draw of blogging- there is, potentially, an audience. That possibility of connection is exciting. Also with visual art, you can just put it out in your house and someone eventually will have a reaction to it. But all those fragments of poems and poems waiting to be shown to someone someday? They are just sitting there.

Hatching the egg

Easter was fun. We had a small brunch party with our upstairs neighbors and friends, collaging and hiding eggs, drinking prosecco and eating all day long. The core of the party- four of us that were in it for the entire day- went to the tracks near here where I collect old metal stuff, we put a bunch of big spirals and stuff in the car to make a sculpture garden in the back garden. Much adventure- and surprise!- was had. Russell at first couldn't believe what I really had in mind was for us to haul out junk- it took a while to sink in and he kept laughing about it. Pete took pictures of what couldn't be carried out and seemed to have discovered a new playground. He really wanted to do something with the old industrial size laundry cart. We told him he needed to come up with a class project involving the tracks.
My first show is May 5-6 at the Somerville Open Studios. I've finished the pieces I had committed to for myself, and now have time to clean up and make some new things, and think about exactly how to do the installation.
I can't seem to decide what to identify myself as anymore. Last year on the tax forms, I put writer, this year artist. I have too many interests, and too much freedom, to be any one thing so far. But one day I think I will stop all this back and forth, and be relieved to have found the routine that I can rest in. Sometimes I think maybe it would be good to be a professor, at least there you know what you are committed to every day, and it does matter to other people. Working for free, working anonymously, you live in your own little elf world and scurry around inside of it alone, building things that are invisible and hearing things that no one else hears.

Take out the Trash

Last night we went to see Peaceful Warrior at the Kendall Theatre, our friends Randi and Chas had free passes. We had time for a game of pool beforehand- our couplehood against theirs- and they won, we talked about therapy, whether therapists can "cross the line" in telling you how you are, since all they know is what they see of you... apparently their couples therapist said something that really pissed Ran off. I wanted to know what it was, since I need to know this stuff if I become a therapist- i said i thought it might be okay for a therapist to piss you off sometimes: they are trying to reflect you, and there are plenty of things about myself that might piss me off if someone else told me about them. But I think saying that therapists "don't have the right" to tell you about yourself because they only know you so well is based on maintaining a certain amount of distance in the encounter, distance which ultimately might not serve the purpose...
Anyway I loved Peaceful Warrior, I read the book a long time ago and it was exactly as I had pictured it while reading. It was much better than infomercial-esque "The Secret" or "What the bleep do we know?"... I wish it would get more attention. The only cheesy thing about it, Kami said, was all the long focus on athletic training. But that was the guy's dream; I found it exhilirating to watch. The whole question of whether Socrates was real or not came up in the movie, whereas in the book I think you are convinced he is real the whole time, there is no question. I came across a quote this morning that reminded me of this dilemma, Anatole France said "Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when He did not want to sign." The movie gave a me a renewed sense of faith in the magic that is at work in every moment, if we only can turn to it and believe in it. Every moment is an opportunity for transformation, for revising our beliefs about the nature of things, for letting go of more of the habitual crystallized selves that stand between us and our vast potential. I would watch this movie again, I would buy it for my future kids. Now Kami calls me his Socrates. We need to close the gap between our past selves and what they believe/experienced and what is possible and real now. For me therapy is the place to learn how to do this.

Hungry Ghosts give us Wine

Yesterday we did the feeding the hungry ghosts ritual, a tibetan space clearing used in BTB Feng Shui. As soon as we finished, Ollie was hanging over the railing of our back porch looking down on us, asking if he could help himself to a drink. When we unpacked the bottles we had bought at the (fancy new) liquor store where we had stopped for the express purpose of buying the rum for the ritual, there were two bottles of wine that we hadn't picked out and didn't seem to have paid for. A gift of gratitude from the hungry ghosts who knew they were about to be fed? We drank the most expensive one, a montepulciano and this morning my lips are dry and stained in patches, and I have a headache that started pretty early into the night, but my eyes seem larger than usual. I think going out for coffee is the best thing to do, maybe from there I will even make it to my studio to start pouring wax into my pieces for Open Studios.
I am so thrilled that my dear friend Lourdes de Leon is coming to visit this weekend (I have some good tequila that has been waiting for her). She is responsible for linking me up with my Tzotzil Mayan family, and I get somatic memories of smoky Chiapas morning air when I realize that our connection stems from that place. Lourdes just published an award-winning book about language socialization in Zinacantan called La LLegada del Alma. How is it that a child becomes a self, a social being? I wish psychologists and anthropologists would talk to each other more. It is spring break at Harvard so I get a break from Social Cognition class. The longer I stay as an auditer the more interesting material for conversation I acquire. Kami is really suspicious of the whole conscious/unconscious divide that social psychology is embracing these days. The whole "the mind is a machine with no driver" concept doesn't sit well with me, I wonder where, in that case, creativity, or a sense of fulfillment, or meaning in life at all could exist?

march snow

My friends have been telling me I should start blogging for awhile, "because you have such an interesting life," so I'm finally doing it. I resisted at first, because I thought I had a limited supply of writing in me, and I thought writers wrote in order to (eventually) get paid for writing. Why give it away for free? But then I realized that there are a lot of people out there hungry to read about other people's even relatively boring lives, so why not mine? It's time to get on the bandwagon.
I'm at my internship volunteer job at Cultural Survival. I have been trying to see if I can figure out what kind of equipment is used for low power radio broadcasting, so that I can guess at what the Spanish items are that the community radio stations in Guatemala have listed that they need, so that I can potentially find them online and help them try to get equipment cheaper than they can in Guatemala. Nobody on this end of the project has the technical know-how to do this, so it's all one big experiment- and I'm the one dinking around. Outside the sun is bright but there are piles of snow everywhere. I'll walk over to the Cambridge women's center for my shift soon, answering the helpline and facilitating a certain order of things there, as someone has to at all hours. Sometimes I want to quit all this running around, but on the days when I don't do it, I feel lethargic and sometimes can't even make myself go dink around at my art studio, or at home either. I become a listless consumer of my free subscription to Yoga Journal and no longer think I could write better articles. I think I'm getting over my temporary aversion to yoga. A Mexican friend in my dream asked last night, "How do you think a bioenergetic approach to yoga would go over?" I was so proud of him for being on top of this.