To be colonized is to become a stranger in your own land

Walking home from the coffee shop balancing my old roommate's handmade dishware in my arms, I tried to channel what I imagined being a waiter would feel like to balance opening doors and holding my coffee while also making it up two flights of stairs with out dropping these precious gifts she left behind for me on her way out to LA to start a new life. A memory bubbled up, as memories often do, and I struggled with my conflicting emotions as I navigated doors and years of doing hard labor and ironwork along my path.

My freshman year of college, I was moving back to Sarasota. I had been born there, and some part of me knew I would be going back. One of the top art schools in the U.S. sprawled along the beaches there, and I had been accepted - it was the only school I had bothered to apply to. I have vague pictures of a house with a window between my older brother's room and mine, where we would signal to each other after everyone went to sleep. My mother took me to dinner at The Columbia in St Armand's Circle, where she had been a waiter during my infancy, and eventually met and fell in love with the father of my younger siblings. She had worn a bow tie and slacks like the men and refused to be called a waitress, and told me later that they had to leave in part because they couldn't avoid run ins with the Cuban Mafia for much longer, possibly because of my step father's drug trafficking and addiction.

My mother recognized some of the waitstaff during this precollege visit, exclaimed excitedly the name of the latino woman who brought us water. As my mom described who she was, I saw a pained recognition crystalize across the other woman's face, and my mother gestured to me, bragging about bringing her daughter here for college, asking about the other woman's daughter. She barely glanced at me, with my blond hair and blue eyes and fair skin, choked out a few words in broken English and walked off as soon as her task was completed. As my mother giggled and crooned about how they used to do coke together when I was a baby, I watched that woman signal a different waiter to attend to our table, and I sat in contemplative horror at the strange innocence that so defines my mother. How was it not obvious that this other woman was embarrassed, possibly for still being in the same work environment, or her own relationship with her children and college, or maybe her memories of that time are darker than my mother's, who was able to walk away and not have to face starkly different fears about surviving, how could none of that flit through her mind, somewhere behind her somewhat vacant eyes?

On the way out my mother had an extended conversation with the Maitre D', while I stood on the sidewalk and watched from a distance, trying to figure out what felt familiar and what was fabricated in my sense memories of this place. As she collected me and we left she told me he had offered me a job if I ever needed one, and she threw her head back and laughed good and hard at the thought of me being a waitress, like I was too soft to be able to handle something like that.

I have thought about that moment a lot over the years of being on and eventually running construction crews, almost every time I get on a forklift, so many strange moments where I have exceeded the limitations in my mother's view of what I could be capable of.

She obsessively hoards all of the awful student work I tried to throw away, bad ideas or overworked and with tiny arms and such, the beginnings of all artists. My siblings tell me about the paintings lining the walls of my childhood home that I hope to never step into again. My little brother even stole one of those paintings once, to my glee - and he received the strangest, quietest phone call from my mother who claimed it was worth some obscene amount of money ($15,000 I think?). I don't know what picture of who or what I am lives its rich life in my mother's eyes, all I know is that anything that undermines it is a threat to whatever narrative she has crafted, and it amazes me that someone could move through their lives or look at their children with such an overwhelming blindness.

I think it makes some parts of my natural expression harder to lean into, picking up a pencil to draw carries with it the weight of potentially fulfilling my mother's blind desire for me, like it is not truly mine somehow. And I fight to be noticed for other kinds of physical prowess with a ferocity that is somehow related to needing her ideas of me to change, to recalibrate around something real - battles I bring in every day to work but are being fought for a ghost, an idea of what a Mother should be, for a child I buried in my body a long time ago.

I can't even do simple tasks without thinking about the box she thinks I live in.

Set from MFA Film Thesis I did Production Design for.

Time has been expanding lately

Watching the guy across from me on the subway as he watches everyone around us, considering small details and interactions, I can't help but wonder if he isn't some invisible celebrity, like a renowned particle physicist who's face we are unfamiliar with. His innocuous clothing, smart hiking shoes and full, clean backpack with a little bottle of antibacterial soap hanging from its pocket made me think of an adjunct professor, maybe attached to Columbia or something. I notice this idea in my head of how a physicist behaves, constantly observing the world around them, seeing quantum mechanics manifesting in the inane conversations going on around us, in the contents and rustling of grocery bags, the timing of laughter and the ratios of bodies sitting to standing and how they inherently affect each other by the vacuums they create. I imagine my movement teacher as seeing the world in similar all encompassing refractions of information, the sway of someone's hips, small axis' of everyone's movements, forces rippling up through spines from one footfall to the next, information like a flood.

All of a sudden I wonder what I notice. I had a teacher in college who had us draw from memory regularly, to remind us that we think we know what everything looks like, until you actually pause and look at it. What an interesting thing to know about myself, that I've never considered - what do I notice as I move through the world?

The physicist across from me looks to see what I am looking at, I think we both know we are observing each other at this point. Being observed also makes me hyper aware of my physical expression, it's hard for me to know if I am performing a little as I take in the sense of what I am presenting. Dirt marks from work wrap around my legs and my big beat up jacket with the steel shop I used to work for embroidered on it communicate some kind of history, one that I imagine seems unrelated to my pale skin and heart shaped face with sharp librarian glasses and large blue eyes. I love being dirty on the subway, an unintentional dissonance, my desire to break all of the rules and prove everyone's ideas about the shape of the world wrong - I often watch people size me up, or glance at my face, then the steel shop name and my face again, trying to figure a story that makes sense to them.

I watch a red and blue pill roll around on the floor under his foot as he watches me.

Untelling a story: Reflection for week 3

As far as I deviate from familiar landscapes and their respective maps when guiding another's body in and out of form and space, I'm finding their ideas and relationships to certain shapes are tied inextricably close together. It's not that I'm surprised by these tangled balls of yarn, but that I feel very much like I'm furtively tugging at strings in the practice/person unfolding on the mat in front of me. I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for.

My use of inhales to notice/exhales to move has shifted towards exhales to respond, since even the lack is a response in its own way. As the student listens inward, I've talked about the possibility of trying something else if it didn't feel quite right the first time they responded. I think starting class with a conscious internal conversation, a simple game of choose-your-own-adventure might help students start to develop a vocabulary of their own deeply individual sensations that no words may exist for - something that may be really important (I suspect) for students to eventually perceive the amount of agency available to them inside of more traditional asana.

At various moments during my student's practice, when they chose the path of familiar shapes, I asked what story they were telling at that particular moment. And I asked again in other places, along the way - much the same way yoga teachers often have to remind some of their students to breathe, both are such important things to notice, to fill our bodies with, no matter what the shape we've poured it into. That was remarked on, how interesting it was to have their awareness called to their idea of something rather than a body part, how all of it gets lost just like the breath sometimes when focusing on what their body looks like from the outside. How strange it was to notice in themselves how present the stories were, guiding the choices they made inside of their practice. Sometimes they realized they had no idea where the story they were inside of, in the moment I asked them to notice, even came from in the first place.


xo

the light brightens almost imperceptibly

XX.
Journeys
states of being
precipice
charging forward
cacophony of people
history, words, voices
boundaries, limitations
walls
doorways, windows


XXI.
Stories swirling around me
mom constantly rewrites hers to keep herself safe
I was programmed to be an object
I'm falling apart
A hand on my ribs telling me to soften
Where is the maze? Am I in it?
To rewrite my script, I have to seek out
the source, the code, the core
I have to walk right in to what I've been containing,
avoiding.


XXII.
There is almost nothing more delicious in my mind
than a warm night wrapping itself around you

When I lived in Richmond, I loved the heat with all of my body
wandering past lush gardens in the dark, on the phone,
or alone
I spent a whole year there, in the Fan district
near Museum Row
walking past the statue of Robert E. Lee
on my way down Monument Avenue to the laundromat

The most amazing coffee I've ever tasted
roasted in a nearly invisible space
across the street from the 7-Eleven

my roommate
was the mother of the person I was dating
She apologized frequently for how her daughter treated me
and I kept her company while this person we both were trying to love
traveled for work, too busy to care about either of us.

There was almost never a need to turn on the lights,
the sunshine poured itself through the ancient scum on the windows
wrapped itself around the moldings,
the towers of stuff owned by this woman
dusty, useless

As time rolled on, I caught the mice and released them back
into a neighbor's garden
and convinced the roaches to be a little less brazen
I unearthed her kitchen sink
and then, eventually
her stove

We began a game of filling up trash bags to take to goodwill
Slowly, we could see the walls again
so we bought paint to put on them

In the slow release, the floor became available for sweeping
and the decades seemed to have piled up in the corners of every room
In my confusion, I sorted through the quarter sized flakes everywhere
trying to figure out where they might be coming from

I realized they were the evidence of the psoriasis that consumed her whole body
Years and puddles of dead skin
shed but not gone

I can't help but suspect, in my secret heart
that they are a clue about feelings,
shame
about her children, her life
a previous husband
the damage he caused
even though he looked the part

eating her up from the inside.

Love me like the Earth itself

 

 

 

 

All we wanted when we harnessed the power of Agriculture, was a place to put down our own roots. To leave our mark in Space and Time, to grow wide in all directions, but also to know ourselves, separate from everything else.

All we wanted was it All - strawberries in Winter, to be forever young, to never know Cold.
Freedom from the constraints of nature, of our ancestors, of time... even as we reveled in their riches.

Maybe we did not know the nature of what we wanted.

Any other time of year, these past few balmy December days would have been deemed beautiful, perfect. Why is it anything less than that now?

Because it isn't following the rules?
Because it is Unusual, Unfamiliar?
Because, maybe it is becoming too familiar?

How fiercely we cling to traditions honoring these ancient relationships - between seasons and harvests, stories of survival and familial warmth, of resilience in the fine articulations of soul and flesh that carved pathways through dark times, cold times to here and now - but we have long since moved beyond those relationships' ability to regulate our lives. Tradition feeds economic structures now, instead of our hungry hearts; motions we blindly repeat instead of things that inspire us to act.

What will Winter mean when it is a story we tell our children?

When our children's children live in a world of eternal warmth, will a creeping coolness strike fear into their hearts because it is too Unfamiliar?

Instead of the inward turning, Loss-of-our-Leaves, Death of Identity that Winter asks of us, perhaps we are now required to live inside the identity we've crafted for ourselves. Have we not clamored for most of our history to find our way back at the Gates of the Garden? - for Eden too is eternally warm, where everything fruits out of season, a place where time does not pass and we never age. A place where our only responsibility is to not question Authority.

How desperately we have toiled as the Human Race, to replace the Laws of Nature with technologies to Manifest our every Desire. Closer and closer it comes, out of our own mythologies, to walk amongst us.

Why then does it strike us with fear?