A Revelation
It's often a matter of where to begin?
That's why it's taken this long to begin at all. When one begins to trail the long tail of origins while still tracing the road ahead, stumbling to also feel the ground of the present, without clear foreseeable end, yet always clearly looming. Again and again where to begin grabbing? Instead, here, I decide to begin releasing.
Born on a year mystifying for its beginnings, endings, and releases in the world I dare not fail to consider the responsibility of a conscious unfolding from seed to bloom, despite my petals trembling in their fight to open.
Born to a single mother in the borderland, crossings are many for the two of us. Although, not two as the knot of the umbilical cord continues to hold us as one. "Had I not been born," is a cruel thought that was transplanted in me to live with guilt built on the premise that mother could still hold her memory, presence, and deepest love. Instead, she chose me and in turn I chose to believe I had to deny myself for decades in return to serve the debt. I now say
BASTA.
ENOUGH.
Like Jesus, I was the chosen one. Raised the nine yards Catholic I convinced myself after every novena prayed that I was destined to sacrifice myself like mother. As we chose my life at a very particular point in time within a geography privy to a kind of violence towards women where I would cellularly come to fear my body. I would come to feel it as an unescapable betrayal, a morbid death sentence written in deep red blood along the dry edges of a once flowing river only ever full of my best efforts to, if not, escape it, surely abnegate it. All while countless childhood album photos will reveal I was over and above all that a buoyantly luminescent child. At least in all the moments in between the cries and wails disconcerting enough to have me live up to claim the nickname Llorana. A play on Joan - lloran -llorana. 'A' at the end, marker of one tragically - triumphantly female.
My origin is grief and my grief since the beginning has been portrayed as a fascinating ancient myth of feminine seduction and terror. I was born with a sensitive and unruly temperament that was hard to fathom. A thread that continues to horrify and fascinate most in a world decreasing in patience, attention, compassion, and space while simultaneously growing in hunger, speed, detachment, convenience, greed, and cruelty.
It's taken as much time as it has effort to learn how to seize romanticizing my sufferring. This process began only after I left the borderland of El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juarez, CH in 2011 for the promises higher education in the Windy City of Chicago made. It was at this critical point of my life where I had enough distance to inevitably be forced to reckon with the many fervent "Why?" and "How?" to make my way back. It wasn't all so conscious as much as the mind has incredible faculties when it comes to need and protection. I would come to learn how breakdowns, when seen clearly, are actually breakthroughs. They are loud inconvenient cries and wails demanding attention. Demanding prayer in the thought trails of philosopher Simone Weil, "attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love."
The blistering heat of the borderland desert didn't provide the necessary resources for my loved one's to be able to recognize a profound need for attention-prayer-love for themselves nevertheless beyond. It has never been anyone's fault. We all were raised parched. Starving for wealth and power on the surface. For true nourishment at the depths no one in my lineage has been encouraged to dive into. As much as the terror in my cells once held the power to coerce me to turn myself into easy prey, the deeper, essential part of myself has held strong to an inner solar light. Unyielding-unwilling to lay out as carnal sacrifice for hyena feed is the core of my will. I still try to grapple with the source of how I chose to follow the unknown, grueling, yet over time, rewarding path that has unfolded this past decade at a time when I felt so hopeless. I made a desperate and life-changing decision when I put distance between the narco war fueled funerals and "who wore it best - who is fat and who is not, who has not and who has a lot?" pretenses of love and care that serve as the heart of the twisted familial bonding of my memories along with the fragmentation of my mother's mind and her ultimate split from reality.
Through this ride of integration I reflect on disintegration as the necessary catalyst to start the ignition down the winding healing road. Healing is not without duality. In spite of the so called growing pathologies, boxes checked, narco-prescriptions, side-effects coined as new symptoms-new diagnosis, more narcotic prescribed, psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitalizations, late night ER visits, rehab centers, therapies and therapists, rape kits, police reports, slut-shaming, and fetishizing assigned to my files I, like art, would and will endure. I would break through and through until one day I cracked open completely. There I stood hugging a tree in the middle of Palmer Park in Logan Square Chicago. The ice was thawing. There were signs of Spring. Tiny, but you could breathe the hope. I had my face buried with waterfalling tears streaming into its bark as I felt my mind doing unusually wicked things. The narcotic spurred neurotransmitter haywire conjured dark ideas and plans I no longer wished to believe nor execute. I cried to the tree in my arms all of my woes aloud. I hugged it and it held me. I thought I had completely lost my shit standing in the cold crying out loud to a tree. When in reality I had just found it. A tree and the brisk air around brought me what I had been looking for. Sanity in the midst of a mad world. If one is of the world, thus in it, so easy for sanity in to become inverted. Insanity. Separated and one is in sanity.
Always the moments in between the ins and outs of institutions: educational, psychiatric, rehabilitative, medical, religious, and spiritual is the where I have gathered the most invaluable - one of kind knowledge and insight into the scope of the resilience that shapes the mind-heart-body that is and will only ever be mine, in it's resemblance to yours. This has been the highest form of education I have achieved. I have earned the entire alphabet right beside my name and letters often fall off or short and so I keep searching A-Z.
These revelations are a mere surface of the substance that chronicles the form and formation of the unpaved path. Paved often blindly and boldly, if not recklessly (depends who and when you ask) because in my deepest vulnerabilities I have often not been well equipped to protect myself from being stooped so low by formal and traditional systems not usually capable nevertheless interested in trying to understand the idiosyncrasies of exceptions. There is no time. Time is money. Be exceptional, not an exception- whatever the costs and casualties as in the way of wars - we are taught such that as an exceptional exception there will be no road, no other option other than forging a vision in the midst of the dark for one's own. This makes one never a victim. Always one with a foot in systems that form structures and a foot out - in the fringe. This is a true gift for vision.
Within the darkest saturation of this darkness I have encountered the light of my voice - its intensity is ancient, ancestral, plural, androgynous: gender contextual, and ineffable like the beauty of Mother, the body of all of our limbs. Can you feel yourself in this vastness? I reach out to touch you there. As I confess I'm thrilled by the vastness: excited and terrified. Feel us close. Even closer as I won't waver in commitment to spite the tremble. I will collect and/or create shapes, movements, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells to express suggestive imaginings. I will. I will. Until I no longer will to live. Hope to die. I will one day. I hope to be ready. I hope not soon. Not now.
11 years of healing + growth have transpired enough for me to begin to feel the water vapor rise out of my stomata.
Art and I found each other only much later in life, age 22, within a therapeutic context. The last time I had held color in my hands was kindergarten. I give thanks to the undomesticated feelings that led me to this encounter. I now consume my wellspring of feelings in hopes of alchemizing colorful primordial soups seasoned in herbs of meaning. For you, for us, for Mother. In hopes we can all dance the whole pot of beauty and terror contained within, its spills.
I don't consider myself an embodied human life as much as I consider the process of embodiment a life, not a style. A life - wonderous, rigourous, and ordinary in this commitment I've chosen as my bondage of pleasure. So I ever more continue to search to embody this energetic force that takes root simultaneously down at the feet and coccyx and up beyond the crown of the head. Hairy, gestural roots search sinking into the Earth center, reaching the skies beyond. In each conscious moment inching closer to a warm, energizing solar truth - our inner power.
I offer thanks to the vital presence and nourishment of many crucial masters, mentors, and guides. Each one of them has come along with their unique ingredients and flavors at essential moments along the pilgrimage I embarked on utterly parched and starved. Some have cracked me open almost instantly in a spirit of tough love. I have hated and rejected them for it only to thank them later in an infusion of love. Others have held, contained, and nurtured the most vulnerably desperate parts of my formation and surrender patiently, gently over up to decades of work together. They have taken many forms, some plural at a time, simultaneously as animals, insects, creatures, plants, flowers, landmarks, places, relics, memories, dreams, and most complex have been the human reflectors: both dead and alive whom I would be amiss to not site as the ones who have soiled me the most.
Diego Piñon in my gained intimacy with the light-shadow, subtle-shameless, ephemeral-eternal side of personal/transpersonal archetypes + the ritual practices and quotidian expressions of conviviality which have opened me up to return to re-form cultural roots and, always in all ways, provoke the world.
Minako Seki in my beyond looking, intently seeing as a kind of deep intuiting of the world under a holistic micro + tele scope in order to include the minute ordinary as grand extraordinary antennas to the interconnection with all that is in the energy of in-out/up-down/bouncing-falling. Always in a spirit of wonder and play.
KJ Holmes and Sara Zalek in my improvisational trust and submission of utter abandon under the guiding light of the stars, planets, moon, seasons, tastes, constitutions, elements, asanas, energetic vortexes and their themes that call for deep explorations, infinitely sought and found within the soma that is our anatomical and cosmic body.
Linda Mary Montano in my daring to break grounds in the on-going effort to blur the line between art/life, a path you seminally lit the torch movements ahead. In my weaving of spirit at the heart of the creative process.
Jody Hojin Kimmel Sensei in my ability to inhabit my divine feminine: Virgin, Mother, Crone as a precursor to the practice of gentling and Tonglen in a world so tough and withholding. My capacity to make love with light in the many shades and seasons of the creative process. To not try to control the muse, to let it pass through us at its organic rhythms and to understand the nuances and marvel of haptic relating. To see into the intimacy of things beginning and never-ending with the breath. In the still quiet of the seated posture and the full embrace of the Dakinis in the sky to know one is never alone.
Dr. Shana Mehta in my capacity to listen, to be with the good, the bad, the ugly, the wonderful, and respond to the messages and queues of my body, feelings and deepest longings as a receptacle for transmuting all that absorbed from the bodies, feelings, and longings beyond personal boundaries. To encounter, ALLOW, befriend, and integrate my shadow as much as my light so I can feel so empowered to offer guidance to other seekers of integration along their journey.
The list could go on for seasons. I trim off with
Gloria Anzaldua and Andrea Dworkin who I attribute my queer radical feminist thinking to in our shared Libran birth constellation 9/26.