The Lesion Journals: Top 5 Reasons Why MS SoftServe Rocks

The Lesion Journals: Top 5 Reasons Why MS SoftServe Rocks: Coming soon to a computer near you - MS SoftServe! In the event that you haven’t heard about the amazing work my buddy Amy Gurow...

Racists' Anonymous - in response to the Zimmerman Verdict

 In response to the court verdict acquitting George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin... (Why? One very eloquent black man has explained "why" here: )

Race was at the core of this case and race it why it became a symbol of such great weight and meaning. To us Trayvon Martin was not just murdered, he was martyred. In death he bore witness to the racism and oppression that blacks and other people of colour experience every day. Why was Trayvon Martin threatening to George Zimmerman? For the same reason that I am threatening to the mothers who claw their children back when I smile and wave back to them on the bus, the men who watch me like hawks when I pet their dogs on the street, and the staff who follow me in their stores. Everywhere I go I am a threat, an outsider, an other. I am a threat because you see me, or at least some of me, yet somehow you do not see this. In Trayvon Martin’s death and George Zimmerman’s trial the world, for a moment, saw. For a few short seconds all eyes turned upon a racially motivated crime, upon a black boy killed for blackness itself. But now the world has turned away because the court has comfortably ruled that blackness really is threatening and you really are justified in keeping watch for it in your communities and resisting it with deadly force. We were wrong, it seems. You will not see.

You will not see his martyrdom because it is woven into the frabic of your privilege, the cloth that the world has tied around your eyes. I will see it every time I look in the mirror, because in my brown skin is the crime for which Trayvon Martin died.

From "An open letter to whites about the black community and the Trayvon Martin case" on The Molinist blog

And here is what I say:

I acknowledge that racism exists.
I acknowledge that white privilege exists.
I acknowledge that I benefit from white privilege, and that I am a carrier of the social-cultural virus that is racism.
I acknowledge that I did not choose to be racist, but that I, and I alone, and responsible for the work of deprogramming my racism.

I have, in fact, been racist my whole life. It wasn't a choice I made. It's the way I was trained to see the world. The way I was trained to see reality. It wasn't a choice that anyone before me made either... my family is Good People. We all get along pretty well too.

We are not gun-toting right-to-life'ers; we all generally think that the KKK is fucked; many of us have lots of friends who are people of color... some of us are republican, some of us are Christian, of us are liberal, some of us are atheist, or even pagan. We are not war mongers, and though most of us might not identify as pacifists... our family culture is definitely to be lovers, not fighters.

Those in my parents generation lived through the Civil Rights Movement, and they were trained that Discrimination is Bad. The were trained that Racism is Bad. They were told, Don't Be a Racist. And so that's what they did... laws were made, and policies were put in place to stop people from being racists.

Those in my generation learned about the Civil Rights Movement in school. We learned how the United States used to be racist. How schools and neighborhoods used to be segregated. How people used to be judged on the color of their skin... we learned about how bad things used to be, and how it's sooo much better now... because we have laws and regulations and policies to protect minorities...

But did those laws and regulations and policies really fix anything? Did they actually do anything to stop people from being racist? Or did they just villify the idea of racism... and steal away the grass-roots movement, the real healing process... steal it away from the people and turn it into the prerogative of the bureaucracy... "It's not my job to stop racism... that's what those laws are for..." "I'm not racist, I'm a good person!"

But we are still racist. We are still acting out white supremacy. We are still complacently supporting the ideals and values of the KKK. And what does white supremacy culture look like? Oh, but it's subtle... subtle to us who live inside it, and see the world and the fabric of our reality through its lenses...

White supremacy looks like this:

“I visited Borders Books three or four years ago. I went to buy a book of poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, an African American poet. When I couldn’t find it in the poetry section, I went to the help desk and was told that it was in the African American section, five or sex shelves near the front of the store on which all types of literature by Black people had been placed. In another part of the store, in a similar setup, was the Gay and Lesbian section—literature of all kinds written by gay and lesbian folks. (I forgot to check to see where they had shelved James Baldwin, who was both Black and gay.)

[…]First, I realized that my sister, for example, was unlikely to encounter anything written by someone gay or African American unless she purposefully searched for those shelves, so her learning was curtailed by Borders’s marketing approach. Second, by organizing books in this way, I think the store was assuming that a reader would want something specifically by a Black author, as opposed to just reading a good novel that happened to be written by an African American.

Third…the rest of the literature section was not labeled “straight white fiction." Seriously. So a customer could go to the literature section and look through all the books, never aware that all she or he was seeing was fiction by white authors. The pernicious privilege is: simply don’t include the Other, and then act as though the picture is complete. In a sick way, it is brilliant.”

~ Frances E. Kendall, Understanding White Privilege

White supremacy is when a black friend of yours talks about their experience of racism in some small way, and you explain to them how racism has actually ended, about how the oppressive actions they experienced were not actually racism, how they're just being oversesitive.

In the words of one eloquent black man who has gone to great effort to translate himself to a white audience:

I want racism to end but almost as much I want to stop being told by whites that it has. I want every white person I ever complain to about the years of piling slights, the extra hours at airport security, the half-seen glances from across the bus from eyes that fearfully refuse to meet mine, to respond with compassion and credulity and not to even think about explaining them away or ‘informing’ me that racism died with Rosa Park or MLK or whatever and they would know. I want white people to stop questioning my experience of racism, to stop defending every offender as ‘just doing his job’ or ‘just doing whatever.’
[...]
Here’s the thing: it’s not about you. You are not the one who is slurred, you’re not the one who is refused service, and you’re certainly not the one who is shot in the street. It’s about us. I want you to acknowlegde that fact. To recognise that I experience racism.From "An open letter to whites about the black community and the Trayvon Martin case" on The Molinist blog

 White supremacy is any time we see a black kid walking through a white neighbourhood and assume they don't belong there. White supremacy is that I, as a white kid, could get arrested for shoplifting at the age of 17, and essentially get a very literal "slap on the wrist" by a community board, where a black girl would have had much worse consequences. White supremacy is acted out in our policing and court systems, but also in our schools.

Students of color face harsher punishments in school than their white peers, leading to a higher number of youth of color incarcerated. Black and Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of those involved in school-related arrests or referrals to law enforcement. Currently, African Americans make up two-fifths and Hispanics one-fifth of confined youth today.
The American Prospect, by Sophia Kerby

White supremacy looks like this:

1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.
The American Prospect, by Sophia Kerby

And like this:

U.S. population by race

U.S. inmates by race

Among men born between 1965 and 1969, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks had served time in prison by their early thirties. Among black men born during this period, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999.   -P.A.P. Blog // Human Rights Etc 

White supremacy is the criminalization and villainization of black men. "But," we say, "isn't there a very real reality there...? Isn't it true that those neighborhoods... those populations... those people are inherently more violent? Isn't it just part of the culture...?"

HELL FUCKING NO IT IS NOT. Violence and drug use... those are symptoms of depression. Symptoms of PTSD. Symptoms of the systemic and ongoing oppression that is being enacted on those communities. If we want to reduce crime, the solution is not putting more people in jail. It is exactly the opposite. PUTTING LESS PEOPLE IN JAIL WILL REDUCE CRIME AND POVERTY. Because when 1 in 3 black men is imprisoned in their lifetime, it becomes legal to discriminate against them. It becomes impossible for them to get a job, impossible for them to find housing, nearly impossible for them to turn their lives around to become stable, contributing members of the community in the way that the government, the way that white supremacy says they should...

And the incarceration is a self replicating, self-sustaining downward spiral of oppression, depression, destruction of communities.

 So yeah, there are big fancy statistics that show clearly, without a doubt, that America is still racist. That we are still oppressing black people and people of color, systematically, institutionally...

But I'm a Good Liberal, I'm a A Good Person, and I was taught to Not Be Racist in elementary school... I'm not responsible for all of those black men being in jail...didn't they just "make some bad choices"?

 But race has nothing to do with one's prevalence for criminal behavior. It has nothing to do with it. White people are just as likely to do drugs, engage in domestic violence, shoplift, and steel as people of color are. "But what about gangs? Don't they promote a culture of violence and crime?" Once again, that's a defensive mechanism, a very reasonable and understandable response to an ongoing campaign of violence and war being waged against their communities.


The unavoidable truth is that people of color simply face harsher punishments in the justice systems, and more intense interference and scrutiny by police in their neighborhoods, than white people do.

So again, I'm not a cop... and I'm not a teacher... and I'm not an employer... and I'm not a judge... It's not my fault that all of those black men are in prison. It's not my fault that George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin... I live in Seattle, after all, and that happened in Florida...

Except that I am responsible for the programming that I carry. I am still responsible for my actions. My complacency in the death of Trayvon Martin looks like this:

[paraphrasing: A white woman has a conversation in passing with a random man...] "I really like this library--" he said, and I said me too! but he was still going "--because there aren't a bunch of black boys here, so I don't have to worry about my bike getting stolen."
[...]

This man did not have the same struggle for words. He saw the shocked look on my face and was quick to sputter, "I mean, don't get me wrong, I like black people. But other libraries have gangs of these kids roaming around, stealing things and causing trouble, and I just don't want my bike stolen, you know?"

These kids. You know.
[...]

I was scared, and I didn't want to offend him, but as hard as it is for me to tell you this, in that moment, speaking up was less important to me than avoiding an uncomfortable conversation. So, however quick, I made a choice, and it was to stay silent.

Silence kills people. Ideas kill people. Allowing a narrative of the dangerous black boy to perpetuate in my white presence kills people. I made the wrong choice, and I am ashamed. [my emphasis]
From an absolutely brilliant blog post that I highly recommend anyone read all of: "White People" by Katie Prout

 And I, too, am ashamed, because I have been through this exact same scenario more times than I am even conscious of. And the question is how? How do I take responsibility for that? How do I stop being complacent? I have the same answere as Katie Prout: WE TELL THE TRUTH. WE BE BRAVE, AND WE TELL THE TRUTH.

We tell the truth even when it's awkward. We tell the truth even when it makes us feel uncomfortable. We tell the truth even when it hurts someone's feelings. We tell the truth even when there are risks.

The truth is that white people are just as likely to commit crimes as brown and black people. The truth is that people of color walk through the world every day feeling the wounds of racism and oppression in all of the little tiny ways that we don't even realize exist. The truth is that the Scary Black Man is a person. And his life is every bit as precious and important as mine.

The truth is that every time we villanize someone... the Scary Black Man... the Drug Addict... the Criminal Thief... every time we create an Other, somewhere down the line our story results in real death.

The question, is not "How do we properly punish Zimmerman?" because I do not believe that punishment works. Punishing Zimmerman won't help end racism any more than imprisoning all of those black men stops violent crime. That said, finding Zimmerman guilty of murder could have been a powerful message saying that this behavior is not acceptable. Instead, we condoned his actions. We said "yes, it was reasonable for you to assume that this kid was dangerous based on racial profiling."

But the real question is "How do we heal?" How do we support the oppressed communities of color in healing from their decades of trauma..? How do we heal ourselves from the decades-long trauma of being racist? The trauma of being the villain? One place is to stop villanizing everyone. We villanize the Scary Black Man, and we villanize the Corrupt Police, and we villanize the Gun-Toting Racist... but all of that villanization and "justice" and punishment... it just keeps perpetuating the same cycles of violence.

HOW DO WE HEAL?

We begin by listening. We begin by acknowledging uncomfortable truths. We begin by forgiving ourselves. We begin by breaking down any and all construction of "other-ness". This is not to say that we ignore cultural differences. I am not advocating "color-blindness". Only that we see our wonderful, amazing diversity, and all of the beautiful different ways that people can be in the world, and celebrate that and respect it, and also know when any of us suffers, we all suffer. While all of those black men are in prison... while all of those communities suffer in violence and chaos caused by decades of oppression... I can have no peace. My healing is not complete without their healing, and my prosperity is meaningless without their prosperity.

Villainizing Zimmerman won't help us heal. He needs healing as much as any of us. But his healing is not the responsibility of the black community. His healing is my responsibility. It is the responsibility of his community. But most of all, it is his responsibility. Villanizing racism and equating it with the most extreme, most violent version of itself will not help us heal. We heal by bringing it out into the light, looking at it closely and understanding it. We heal by acknowledging its existence.

Racism is indeed a socio-cultural disease. It is an addiction. As a white person, I see how my complacency in the racist system is another way in which I have been trained to oppress myself. And like forgiveness, healing it is not a light-switch that I suddenly get to switch off and then be done. It is an ongoing, lifelong process. It is a process of being open and vulnerable. It is a process of allowing people say to me "This behavior you just did, it was racist." And it is a process of becoming brave enough to say these things myself, when appropriate.

But none of this can be accomplished without compassion and forgiveness. Because without those, we just continue perpetuating the cycles of violence... and each of us begins with choosing to have compassion and forgiveness for ourselves. For our deepest, darkest demons and monsters.

Layers of privilege, and the word "bitch"

Ok so there's a little story that's been stuck in my head. It's the story of how I got from a point of being defensive about my act of cultural appropriation, to realization, understanding, and gratitude to the people who were calling me out. 

Nobody is asking me for this post, but it's stuck in my head and I gotta get it out.  Because there's a lot of white people out there who just don't understand and I haven't been brave enough to go and bring up this conversation with them, like,

 "Hey, you remember when I was doing that art project, and we talked about it, and we were both like, 'naw, dude, that's totally fine.' Yeah, remember that? Well just so you know, it actually wasn't fine."

I haven't been brave enough, because the reaction I expect to get from many is basically this: "What? No, you're crazy!" Because the thing I wasn't brave enough to do in the first place was to ignore all of those other privileged white people who gave me all sorts of layers of excuses, and I wanted to hang onto the threads of approval from the few indigenous people who thought it was fine, who liked the art, who appreciated all of my consideration.

So in the first place, if it is a grey area, it was never my place to argue the nuances of it.  That discussion belongs to the people whose culture I was appropriating. As a white lady with privilege, looking for ways to proactively de-construct and de-program my white privilege, it's my job to respect and uphold the most sensitive interpretation of that boundary.

And here's why: (bear with me, it's a story) 
In the midst of my defensiveness, while I was spending a few days indulging in emotive petulance - even at the height of my self-justification - I just kept having flashes of the feelings I get when I try to call out dudes for various versions of sexism and male privilege, and the way they brush me off, all defensive and like, 

"Naw, I'm not sexist, you're being over sensitive."

And I thought about how shitty and shut-down that makes me feel. I thought about the nauseating punched-in-the-gut-feeling I get whenever I hear someone (of any gender) use the word "bitch" as an insult or negative curse.  And I do hear it, OFTEN.  And every time I hear someone say it, it hurts. 

[I am skipping the work of explaining why "bitch" is such a hurtful word to me, but a friend and blogger has eloquently explained it in detail here "On the Word Bitch". I highly recommend her writing.]

I usually don't call men out on using the word "bitch". Because telling a man that he is sexast is a scary thing to do. Because they get all angry and threatening, like, "What??? What the fuck are you talking about?"  Or are supremely dismissive, which is often much worse. I don't usually put the effort into checking someone unless I am fond of them and feel like I have some investment in my friendship with them. I don't put the effort into checking people unless I have already have some respect for them.

And the thing is, that's often when it hurts the most to be dismissed. Some crotchety old dude who mostly spends time immersed in violent male culture of some sort, like, say the construction industry (a violent male space I have way too much experience in)... I don't have a lot of expectations.  A guy like that uses the word "bitch" and it's easier to brush it off.  But when some liberal, perhaps an activist guy, perhaps someone I think of as an ally... someone I feel safe around... bandies about this word... well that especially stings. Or this dude talks over me in a conversation, or ignores my opinions in deference to some other dude, or wants to hit on me or flirt with me in "professional" space, or say something about my appearance and be all like, "what, it's just a compliment, can't I give you a compliment?" 

When a guy who I think I can feel SAFE around exhibits some sexist thing... I think: ok, well I'm friends with this guy, that means it's safe for me to check him. It's safe for me to say, "Hey, I think you're being kinda sexist there." And I hope he'll respond like, "oh thanks for letting me know, I didn't realize that was a thing". 

But more likely, the response is something like, "Phfffff.  Whatever, you're just being oversensitive." [insert dudely diatribe about the feminist conspiracy to disempower men].  And very rarely do I respond further.  I usually don't argue much, I just mutter something like, "huh, your experience of reality is different from mine..." and let it go. 

Because I don't feel safe. Being shot down once, I'm not likely to put myself out there and push the issue. Partly, that's just me... direct conflict is intensely difficult for me to deal with. A lot of that is Seattle's passive-aggressive culture... a culture of avoiding direct conflict.  'Cause let's face it: white people [the dominant culture of wealth and privilege] in Seattle seriously cannot handle direct conflict.  We'll do almost anything to avoid it.

Another layer is my conditioning as a woman - conditioning that tells me to Always Be Nice, Don't Make Other People Feel Bad, Your Opinion Is Less Important Than Other People's Feelings. Conditioning that perpetuates the sexist programming that makes those guys think it's okay for them to insult each other with the word "bitch", or to refer to some fierce person who intimidates them, or whom they want to belittle. 

[Here there could be a whole separate blog post about aggressive male conditioning giving men permission to make other people feel uncomfortable all the time... rewarding them for imposing their thoughts, opinions, dominance on others... I don't quite have time here.  But this other lady wrote a great post about it...]

And then there's the further layers of hurt and betrayal I feel when I hear women use the word as a negative insult... and it can be so much harder to call them on it, because they often feel entitled, or they've internalized so much oppression and sexism, that they're even more dismissive of the conversation than men are.

Anyways... me and my passive-aggressive self don't generally push it much.  If I do call someone on sexist language or behavior and it's batted down, I usually don't have the energy to counter. I shut down. I feel a little less safe around that person.  I close myself off and share myself less.  I may still be friendly, but I'm usually less excited about trying to hang out with them.  I certainly don't allow them into my sacred space.  I trust them less. 

And maybe that dude is on their own time, doing their own work. Maybe they did hear my words, but they weren't brave enough to acknowledge it in front of the other dudes... maybe they'll come around to the realization slowly... but by the time they do, I've already felt shut down... I've already decided that I'm not as excited as I thought I was about being friends with them... I still trust them less.

So I thought about all of this. And I thought about all of the people who were writing angry comments about how much bullshit I was perpetrating making dreamcatchers.  "It seems like a grey area..." "I think I'm being respectful..." and a whole bunch of people said,

"Oh hell no. You are in, fact, being a privileged white jerk." 

And at first I got defensive, at first I started to say, "well actually, no, it's fine, and let me explain to you why..." which is exactly what dudes do when I tell them I think they're being sexist and they try to explain to me when and where it is appropriate for me to feel offended... they try to define my experience... And you know what?  No one gets to define my experience but ME. 

I realized, "Oh shit, I'm doing the same thing that those privileged sexist dudes do. I'm doing it to these people of color and indigenous people. Huh. No wonder they're pissed off at me..."

I am learning... I am a slow learner.  De-programming my white middle-class privilege is an act no less profound than dismantling and re-assembling the fabric of my own reality. It can be destabilizing. It is pretty scary [where there is fear, there is power]. My process is slow, and often messy. I happen to be a little more melodramatic about it than some... But it also feels like freedom. And it is sooo much better than staying asleep, sick, complacent...

I try to remember this feeling and have compassion for the dudes when I tell them they're being sexist assholes... But sometimes the energy of getting up the gumption to confront people on their privilege uses up all of the energy we have for being gentle. Which is why, when people get pissed at me, I try very hard not to be defensive, I try to listen carefully to what they're saying. 

I could have done better at that this last time, with the dreamcatchers.  And that is why I ended up needing to apologise. The same lessons get repeated over and over again until we learn...

Maybe this experience and writing this post will help me be more proactive in calling people out on their privilege. Maybe it will also help me be more gentle about it, understanding that it's big work to tell someone to reconstruct the foundation of their perception of reality... Because while I understand the anger that many people feel about all of the layers of oppression.... and I generally agree that the anger is valuable and valid... I personally don't have the energy to be angry all the time.  But I think I do have the energy to be gentle, and take on the work of helping to teach privileged people to see through other's eyes.

And certainly, it has taught me to be more responsive to people telling me when I am crossing a line, violating boundaries. 

Lessons Learned from traveling in Colombia

Many of these lessons came out of work I did during an ongoing series of Ayahuaska ceremonies. At one point, while talking with a friend named Makensie, we were wondering "How do I carry this home with me?  How do I go back to the place where everyone expects me to be the way I was before, and be this new person I am now?"

And I remembered meeting another traveller who had written himself an epic manifesto of his intentions for his trip, and I remembered wishing I had done that for myself starting out my own trip. 

And in talking to my friend Makensie, I thought, "well let's write ourselves manifestos for going home and taking out lessons with us." 

So we did.  And here it is.  It feels especially right for me to re-write this here and now, as I think I need a reminder. 

LESSONS:

• I am not broken - I do not need to be fixed 
• (neither is anyone else, nor the world)
• No part of human activity is outside the ecological systems of the earth - including violence and destruction
• THINKING is the opposite of consciousness - to Dream and to follow our Dreams is to be truly awake and present
• input from dad: "thinking is a tool" which is true!  still not the same as consciousness 
• In order to change the world, all we really have to do is to DREAM - to heal ourselves, enable others to heal themselves, to learn how to embody love 
• But we cannot be awake until we are finished sleeping... 
• When we dream of violence, we create it in the world

HOW I CARRY MY LESSONS AS I WALK:

• I sleep until I wake up
• I dream my dreams, and follow their lead
• I dance/play/do yoga every day
• I am conscious of the flow of energy around me and I dance with it
• I do what I feel like
• I speak my mind without worrying about making other people unhappy or insecure (because sometimes, the act of asserting my boundaries might be offensive to others, and sometimes being offended/hurt/insecure is the work that other people are doing and I do not need to take on responsibility for that)
• I remember that Listening, Thinking, and Speaking are three different activities that cannot be done at the same time
• I do one thing at a time
• I pursue open, loving relationships with people am attracted to without a sexual agenda. 
• I move at my own pace
• I AM MY AUTHENTIC SELF
• I practice communicating without speaking
• I embody love

I have purposefully written these strategies down in present-tense action-doing grammar.  I certainly haven't yet internalized all of these things, but they are goals and guidelines for how I want to actively take responsibility for the course of events in my life.

Hmmm.  Repetition.  I am a slow learner. 

Second half of my travel blog...

Ok so it´s been a good long while since I´ve updated...

I am [was] in the town of Salento, Colombia.  This place is sort of like a magic fairy land... It´s in the low mountains of Western Colombia.  Salento is definitely a tourist town, but in the sort of way where you show up, and you think, "holy shit, this is amazing, I want to bring everyone I love to this place...!"

I came here straight from a Hari Krishna farm about an hour away.  The Hari Krishna farm had sort of a weird vibe [more analysis of that for other posts], so I ran away for the weekend, with two nice dudes from Portland.  Austin and Travis are lovely, and when they said they were leaving the Hari Krishna farm, headed for this magical place called Salento, where psychedelic mushrooms can be found in the cow paddies all ´round the town... I decided to tag along with them for the weekend.  What I found was waaay more than I expected, though.

When I started out this journey, I set an intention to seek out and explore healing sanctuaries.  Well, I didn´t really have any idea how to find them, and after the melodrama of loosing my shit in the first week of my trip, and scary intimidation of being in a foreign country, and language barriers, and upfront and intense experience of intense misogyny and being harassed on the street simply for being female... I had sort of lost the thread of that intention.  While I was still at the farm outside of Bogota (where they have solid internet), I was stressing myself out with neurotic anxiety, trying to figure out WHERE AM I GOING AND WHAT AM I DOING ON THIS TRIP???  I bounced back and forth between trying to find a gig teaching art to kids, deciding whether to spend money on Spanish lessons, going to the jungle, going to Ecuador... OMG, so many potential options!  At various points, I nearly hyperventilated. 

And then I landed in Salento... and my first night there, chatting with another person at the fabled hostel nested in the middle of mushroom-sprouting cow fields... I heard tell of an Ayhuaska ceremony... Now, I´ve heard a lot of things about this "drug", Ayhuaska.  It´s culturally equivalent to Peyote, which is used by shamans in the deserts of North America.  But Ayhuaska is a jungle plant, grows only in the Amazon.  And in order to brew and administer it, a person is supposed to be a fully trained shaman.  It´s NOT a recreational drug.  In fact, for those using it without the right intention (healing, spiritual exploration), it often just make them nauseous and vomitty.  It makes most people nauseous and vomitty, but also gives you visions about the world and it can teach you to understand yourself.

And so, with only a day´s notice, I found myself signing up for this ceremony.  I was a little nervous, since I´d heard horror stories about opportunistic people rounding up a gang of gringoes, handing them a cup of ayhyaska brew to drink, and then abandoning them to the experience without support or guidance on the journey... But the people at the hostel assured me that this ceremony had no relation to those stories.

And in fact, they turned out to be right.  What I had found was a healing sanctuary.  A healing sanctuary of indigenous, South America culture and spirituality. That's pretty much what I had been looking for. At this point, I was a little more than a month into my trip, and even though all sorts of other amazing places in South America were pulling at me, I realized that this place... well there was no way I could find another equally good place to hang out within my small remaining time window of two months. 

The best part about the maloka and community surrounding Taita Carlos in Armenia is that fact that there are all sorts of healing communities I could have found... including farms and monestaries and yoga centers... but the main issue I had with most of those places, is that they were run by rich (by local standards, at least) white people from the US or Europe, who had gone to cheap, "unstable" countries, and are working to "teach & develop" the local people. Well, as much as I'm sure those people have good intentions, they're also full of privilege, racism, and bullshit. I hadn't thought this all through totally before this trip, but it was there in my head, and I'm very glad I ended up where I did.

What I liked about the healing community of Taita Carlos is that it is a place where the travellers are students of the local people, and the local people are in charge, and they are consciously inviting foreign travellers to come learn with them.  This is a crucial distinction, and will certainly inform the course of my future travels.

So, there are lots and lots of stories I could tell about my experiences at this healing center; some real, but more fantastical.  But I don't think I'm gonna write them all out in this blog.  I will turn them into fantastical stories and paintings and art.

So now I am home. I've been home for about a week. At this rate, I've got a continuing backlog of nearly a whole month on my blog, and sometimes thinking about all of the things I want to write about stresses me out... But mostly I'm working to practice the lessons I learned from my experiences. 

Apology

This apology is specifically in regards to these two blog posts, discussing an art project that I did in Spring 2012, and several pieces of which were hanging publicly in a radical community space this spring. 

Bicycle Dream Catchers and Cultural Appropriation 

Dreamcatchers and Cultural Appropriation, Redux

I was wrong.  All of my arguments about why it was ok for me to make and display and sell dreamcatchers were justifications for actions that, deep down, I already knew were wrong.  Because the thing is, I was violating my own integrity, and I knew it.  I was violating the stream of own own consciousness as I have expressed it in this very blog...

"For those arbitrarily given a position of privilege: to support and promote individuals of marginalized groups, those who have been experiencing the most intense oppression for the longest time, is a deep act of protest.  One so deep that it may start out feeling uncomfortable - like a protest against our own selves.  But only in learning to let go of that power-over privilege can we really be free to find the power within ourselves.  The power of interdependence and individual autonomy."   Jan 2012

 So to all those People of Color, and People of Indigenous Heritage, and the White Allies, who called me out as doing harm, I have only this to say to you:

I apologise for not listening sooner.  I apologise for not listening in the first place, when I wrote the first blog post.  I aplogise that it took me an entire week of listening this time for me to hear what you were saying.

And most of all, I apologise for having tried to use my own spiritual journey as a justification for bullshit.

At this point, my intention for the dreamcatchers is to reduce the prices enough to make them sell-able and affordable, and then give whatever profit I make from that to the Chief Seattle Club.  For those that still don't sell ('cause, well, I have a lot of them...) I might turn them into random art installations in the woods.

Additionally, I want to say thank you. Even though your anger was scary and painful at first, thank you.  Thank you for reminding me of the boundaries of my own integrity.  Thank you for holding me accountable for the privilege and racism that I carry, and teaching me how to walk with respect. 

So that is all I have to say to the people who were calling me out.

But to the white people, and all of the people who thought that this was a non-issue, who helped me write my justifications through conversation and encouragement, I have lots to say, because I want you to understand why I have come to this place.

And the answer is that it's not about me. It's not about my stifling my voice, or my spiritual journey.  It's about listening. It's about the fact that when I speak, my voice is amplified by my privilege. And out of respect, I need to modulate my voice. And when someone tells me that something I'm doing is violation, it is my job to listen and respect - not to start explaining to them why, "well actually, I have every right to do this thing [insert examples of every time I try to call-out a guy for violating my boundaries and he gets defensive]". 

Lessons learned from my journeys with Ayahuaska:
Speaking, Thinking, and Listening, are three different activities. 
Do one thing at a time.

In fact, the part where I tried to use my own spiritual journey as a justification for my right to make and sell dreamcatchers might have been the most offensive part. Because if I am really sincere, if I really do want to understand the spirits of this land, and if I really aspire to the kind of Knowing that I was talking about... then the first step is to hold myself the strictest levels of respect for the violations that occurred in the past.  Because I carry the heritage of the violence done by my ancestors.  Because healing takes time...

And because we don't learn a lesson just once.  We learn it over and over again, each time in a different layer, or a different context.

Because Healing & Forgiveness [deprogramming my internalized racism] are not a light switch or a button that I hit once and say, "ok that's done".  They are a practice.  A practice of learning a new way of walking. 

I'm not done writing about this.  Because judging by the number of white people I talked to who simply didn't understand why this would even be an issue, and then helped me produced infinite arguments about why it was just fine... we have a lot of work to do. 

Dreamcatchers and Cultural Appropriation, Redux

*** This post is a lot of defensive justification for being called out on things I actually already knew were bullshit. I'm keeping it up as an act of transparency, and also because I hope that the whole process I went through might be helpful for anyone else in a similar position as me, struggling with similar questions.  HERE IS A LINK TO MY FOLLOWING APOLOGY ***

So questions of cultural appropriation have come up again, surrounding some artwork I have made (original post and links to the art here).

And in general, the contention that people seem to have is with this part here:

Most discussions I have had with people of color or people of native decent, who have spent any time thinking about this issue, expressed the plea/rebuke "just don't do it".  Expressed the heartfelt belief that there is no "non-damaging" way for someone of the dominant culture to appropriate from an oppressed culture.

People say, "and yet you did it anyways, and you are full of racist, colonialist bullshit."  At first, I felt hurt and defensive - mostly because a lot of me agrees with them...

I really want it to be a "complicated, fuzzy gray line". 

But let's get one thing straight:  I'm not arguing that I'm not racist.  That's a given.  In fact, I'd go ahead and say that I and every single person in my family is racist.  This is not to assume that we are bad people, or that we made a decision to be that way.  But that we are programmed by the dominant culture to make certain assumptions about reality - about human nature.  To make certain assumptions about people of different ethnic and economic backgrounds.

And the question is how do I, as an individual, take responsibility for that? 

But please, for a moment, allow me to step back from the issue of my individual privilege.  Because in the case of me, a white middle-class artist, there is another layer - the layer of my spirituality.  The layer of my own ethnic cultural heritage.  I am a witch.  I am a worshipper of the earth, and of nature, and the energy and animals of this greater, living organism. When I pray, I pray to Gaia. Some would call me pagan (a word that simply means "not christian").

And where are my own religious traditions, where are my holy people?  Where is the unbroken line of wise-women and healers?  For the most part, it doesn't exist - or it is so deeply hidden underground that I haven't been able to find it.  They were burned.  Burned at the steak.  Hunted down and murdered by the Spanish Inquisition.  My people were amputated, violently, from their relationship with the land, and convinced that our religious rites were evil devil worship.  Our wise women were turned into the most reviled, most shameful villain of stories and fairy tales: the Wicked Witch, ugly, unlovable, evil.

And for me, as I and many, many others work to resurrect my own cultural heritage... the heritage of wise women, the heritage of knowing the land in which I live, and having a relationship with the spirits here... I often feel like a feral child.  Like one who has been running out in the wilderness, lost and starving.

When I have had the honer to participate in religious ceremonies of native people in North or South America, I often had the feeling of being indulged by gods... by civilized adults who have taken pity on the feral child and allowed them to come inside.  I do not intend that to sound petulant at all, either.  I am learning more and more to shut up, listen, and observe.  Learning more and more to see the subtleties of the ceremonies, to see how the seemingly small details of a ritual make a big difference in the flow and control of energy.

Learning to see how spiritual knowledge is the technology of an advanced civilization. 

Why do I, as a white woman, need to look to the religious ceremonies of indigenous people?  That's "their space". Am I fetishising their culture? I am certainly on an ongoing journey to resurrect my own cultural heritage of tribal nature worship.  I work on this every day, and I participate in larger communities of people who identify as witches, identify with the heritage of European paganism.  But in the ceremonies we make, I often feel a sense of... hmmm... a sense of not knowing what we're doing.  Making things up as we go along. And there is a precious holyness to that, too. It is precious and exquisite and perfect, and there are so many wise women that I have deep respect for as my elders and teachers.  But there is still that feeling...

And in many of the indigenous ceremonies I've been to, there is this deep knowing.  A certainty, that I long for.  The certainty that comes from an unbroken chain of ancestors, of knowing your family line so far back it goes to your creation story, and being taught the ceremonial protocols of that family. The certainty of knowing how things work, of understanding the flow of energy.

And in some ways, indigenous people have that privilege over the colonialists - the privilege of belonging to the land.  I am very conscious of the genocide, conscious that so much has been lost, conscious that the genocide against the indigenous people of North America is still going on. Conscious that many, many people of indigenous decent feel ripped away from their culture, and children are stolen from their families.

And the dreamcatcher... that shape... I think it is the shape of the universe... I think that shape is a geometric representation of the math that holds reality together...and I want to investigate it the best way I know how - through artwork.

But the idea that I am taking up the space of others whose voice is suppressed is intensely compelling to me, and I want to take that lesson to heart. Again and again I learn the lesson of "shut up, listen, observe."

As for those dreamcatchers: I am not going to make myself famous with them, and "indigenous looking art" is not going to by my identifying style as an artist (nor was that every my intention). But I'm not going to destroy them, and I'm not going to stick them in a hole. Maybe they exist for the purpose of provoking uncomfortable conversation.

Sierra Nevadas del Cocouy... food thoughts, and enchanting those I meet with my art

2013.03.29

Surfing around Couchsurfing.org, I discovered an event posting for backpacking in Sierra Nevadas del Cocouy.  And I signed myself right up, really without knowing any solid details about the trip.  It seemed like a great deal to me... someone else was doing all of the planning, and all I had to do was show up. 

Lorena, the lady I found on Couchsurfing.org who is organizing the trip, is an industrial engineer, and the same age I am. She friendly and funny and sarcastic. She is smart and loves to be in charge and have all of the details at her fingertips but she is also a little insecure and chaotic in a combination that I find instantly endearing. Within moments of walking into her house, I feel like we are friends. She lives with her whole family, which would be weird in the United States, but is totally normal in Colombia – and I find the set-up somewhat enviable, as I begin to see the closeness of family relationships in this country.

Lorena and I both sort ourselves out before heading to the bus station to meet her other two friends – who have also never met each other – for the trip. The bus ride is long and uncomfortable. But we arrive at the town of Cocouy, and track down our guide company just fine.

We are all four of us packed into an SUV for the drive out to the park. A small, thin dude tucks himself into the jump seat behind the back seat without saying much, and we head out down the long, rough road to the park base camp. As we sort ourselves out and head down the trail, the small thin dude turns out to be our guide, Juan Carlos (Juan is a very common name...).

Juan Carlos is average height and thin, and he starts out quiet terse. Clearly it takes him a little time to warm up to people. As we get to know him over two days of following him around the mountain, he opens up a bit and turns out to be funny, intelligent, and full of energy. The sort of dude whose resting state is stillness, like a lizard. But he has infinite stamina and can, at any point, jump into bursts of incredible speed and agility, or sarcasm... He is indigenous, and tells us that he was born in the town of Cocouy. He is fierce, but I imagine him to be a very playful father – we met his wife and one year old son at the house of the guide company before we left town.

The five of us (four tourists and one guide) spend the next two days walking all over the park. The second day JuanCarlos takes us up to The Pulpit, which is a place that is high enough to have snow – very exciting for people who live at the equator. Cocouy is incredible.

On this trip, I opted to bring all of my own food, and not rely at all on the guide company's provided meals. This turned out to be an outstandingly good move. It sometimes boggles my mind how incredibly bad the food is that they served. Breakfast really amounted to fried egg with fried hot dog (salchicha... a signature food). Dinner was a watery potato soup. 

The friends I was with had also brought their own lunches for the trip, white break and canned cream of chicken, some salted peanuts, and sweet things. Ok, the sweet things were Bogadillo, an incredibly tasty red paste made of guava and sugar, often with caramel goo inside... they great. But the other food, I want nothing to do with. I brought a bag of carrots, apples, pears, a quinoa flake & chia seed mix, salami sausage, cheeze, and some fresh hearty greens from the farm I had just been at. Also some sweet corn pancake things from the store.

And I felt so good! While I am currently not in tip-top physical shape (i've been a bit lazy that past few months...), and I'm generally pretty slow walking up hill, I had lots of energy to keep me going throughout the day. David, the one dude in our group of tourists, would charge up the mountain super fast. He is a very athletic dude. But even he would be solidly exhausted by the end of the day when I was still coasting on a nice, even burn.

And so here's the thing... me and my privileged United States self made a point to go out and get the latest, hot-shit health food for this camping trip. Quinoa, chia seeds, and fresh vegetables. And the thing is, people here don't know anything about that. Here in the place where Quiona & chia seeds come from, people don't eat them. They aren't easily available.

At one point as we were stopped for lunch, Joan Carloas mentioned that in the small indigenous community he lives in, in the hills around the town of Cocouy village, they ate a dog. The three city kids I'm with all gasp in horror, while I look at Carlos and nod, thinking “I would eat that, if I was at someone's house and that is what they put on the table...”

Juan Carlos barely eats, and he hardly ever drinks water. His lunch is a large can of sausages, and nothing else. He seems to be the sort of guy I meet often in construction crews, they guy who is lit from fires of energy from within, and just keeps burning, no matter what sort of fuel is thrown in.  He walks up and down a huge mountain, at some of the highest elevations in the world, every day of his life. He is fully adapted to his home climate. And yet, I wonder, what kinds of chronic illnessness exist in his community, from mal (bad) nourtrition. I wonder how these illnesses compare to the illnesses of malnoutrishion in the United States – wherein malnoutrition equals bad noutrition, not just a simple lack of calories.

As I self-rightously congradulate myself on my healthy and delicious food choices (I am most definitely not well adapted to this terrain, and am happy with my normal routine of eating every two hours), I wonder again about the ways in which people are trained to oppress themselves. And I wonder again at the perceived privileges of United States culture.

While we chill out at the lodge in the evenings, I bring out my watercolor paints and try out painting the mountain landscape. I'm not too pleased with my results, but the park staff finds the landscapes of their beloved mountains especially charming. Particularly enthrawled is a 12yo girl named Renee, who I think is helping her mom at the park while she's off from school (this is Holy Week of Easter, a BIG DEAL here...). I lend my paints to Renee on our second day of hiking, and as we set out, she is happily sitting down for a day of ARTING.

At the end of the day (the day we are meant to catch another night but back to Bogota), Juan Carlos takes stock of our walking speed and energy, and suggests that we have him hire some horses to cary our bags back to base camp, and we can take a shortcut route there. Realizing that we, as a group, are pretty slow, and that all three of my Bogota friends need to work in the morning, I go along with this new plan. I check in with JK about how important it is for me to get my paints back from Renee.

This is one of those times when I'm floating along, chaught in the current of momentum of my group. If I had really taken time to check in with myself, I would have easily realized that I wanted to stay at the park for a few days, and keep painting. I would have realized that I really wanted to walk back to the basecamp to see the painints that Renee did with the paints I leant her. I would have realized that all of the park staff really like my paintings and wanted to buy one for themselves, and that I could have had a great experience selling/gifting artwork to the people there...

But on the other hand, my credit cards, which were lost, and where hadn't arrived before I left Bogoto Friday afternoon, were waiting for me at the hostel in Bogota... and the idea of staying in this small town with only the cash available to me in my pocket, while my cards sit on the hostel check-in desk... and not to mention the energy of breaking out of the stream of group momentum... And I didn't stay. I allowed myself to stay in the stream of momentum and be whisked back to Bogota on another overnight bus...And on the other hand, I was rewarded with some incredibly stunning landscape and views to hike through.  

I wished I had stayed in Cocouy for an extra couple days. I wish I had even just walked back to the lodge to see Renee's paintings and give her encouraging words about her art... but I told myself I was Being Responsible by hurring back to get my cards... Also it is EFFING COLD in Cocouy – it doesn't matter how close you are to the equator, when you're at 4,000 meteres, it's damn cold.

And so I left. And as much as I can justify my reasons, I feel like I have unfinished business in the Sierra Nevadas del Cocouy. I feel like I left a piece of my karma there, somehow. I probably won't ever go back... and if I do, I doubt anyone there will remember me. But it's hanting, all the same.

observations of privilege

2013.03

I'm on a bus! A bus from Bogota, heading for Pereira. Because Colombia is really big... it takes a pretty long time to get from one major city to the other. This bus ride is estimated to take 7hrs (but I've heard some people say it might take up to 10 or 11...). On the one hand, sitting on a bus for that long isn't great.

But on the other hand, it's such a great opportunity to do all sorts of things! I have this super laptop here in front of me, with a full battery and no internet connection, so I can write-up this blog post. I also have some pants with me whith a big giant hole in the butt (from sitting on rough rocks while hiking), which need some mending. And plenty more photos to sort through.

Lorena is the lady who posted her backpacking trip on couchsurfing.org, which I got to sign-up for to join her and her friends. I went to hang out with her at her family's house last night, and she filled my mp3 player up with Spanish reggae and ska music (and a little James Brown)!

The on-bus entertainment is a black and white movie from the 50's or something, about Jesus. That's interesting.

Passing through the suburbs of Bogota in this nice [expensive] bus with big huge windows offers me another great opportunity to learn more about this city. Again I'm leaving, but expecting to come back. Next time, I'll get to stay at my friend Lorena's house with her family, instead of in a hostel. And I'll probably get to hang out with Eduin again.

Ok, now for some more general observations about Colombia and my trip...

[sidenote: I'm trying to stop referring to myself, people from the US, or the country I'm from as “America”. Traveling so much in Canada and now South America, I've realized how insanely ego-centric it is for the United States to assume that it's the only really significant country in “America”. America refers to North and South America, and includes at least 20 different counties.]

Colombia is a solidly middle-class country (by United States standards). According to Emilio, one of my fellow US wwoofers at La Juanita, this booming middle class if fueled by selling oil to the United States. Yes there are affluent areas of Colombia, contrasted with areas with more poverty. There are rural farming areas to, and those areas don't necessarily overlap with poverty. And I'm sure that statistics would show a much higher population of poverty in Colombia than in United States, but maybe that is more a matter of perspective, than of “happiness”. One night at the farm, us three US wwoofers were sitting at the dinner table complaining about US healthcare... after enduring this for a bit, Felipe, our Colombian host, interrupted us saying, “you guys need to realize that you have a huge privilege just being able to discuss this. In Colombia, if you get sick, you either have money, or you die. End of story. There is no safety net.” And that was a sobering reminder for me.

In general though, I find much more similarities between Bogota and cities in the United States than differences. Perhaps it's because that's what I expect in some way – I expect that humans all over the world are generally more similar to each other than different. Or perhaps it is because of the pervasiveness of corporate consumer culture. Some of the companies are different here, but the race to have a bigger pile of the correct “stuff” seems very similar. One thing that really surprised me at first, (maybe it shouldn't have, but it did) is that your average Colombian city person is, for the most part, indistinguishable from a North American city person.

What I mean is, people identify with the culture of the conquistadors – not with the culture of the vast and advanced indigenous societies that have been occupied, oppressed, and repressed (Eduin and I had a long and detailed conversation about this concept in particular). This is surprising to me because there is much more integration between the conquistadors and the indigenous communities here than in North America. Maybe it is some racism programmed into me, but part of me is sincerely surprised to see all of these people in Colombia – most of whom are brown and obviously related to at least one indigenous person in the past three or four generations – surprised to realized that all of these brown people identify as white. To me, it seems to shed some light on the way in which people are programmed to oppress themselves... it seems to shed some light on the so-called “privilege” of people in the United States.

One big similarity I see between Colombia and United States is unhealthy diets. Now in Seattle (and most large coastal cities in the US), there is a special culture of healthy eating, a growing fetishization of organic, local, small-scale farming. And I think this is amazing. This culture seems to be just getting started in Bogota, with farmers and community organizers like Felipe, and his friends around Guatavita, and lots and lots of growing urban farms all over Bogota. And in the United States, the “healthy, organic, local” food craze is still a niche market – globally powerful, but niche nonetheless. The vast majority of United States citizens eat a pretty shitty diet, composed mostly of processed fast foods, monoculture potatoes, chemically grown and manufactured corn and wheat products, and waaay too much meat, grown in horrible soul-killing factory farm conditions. Most United States citizens are malnourished (meaning badly nourished, not that they don't get enough calories...). And here, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that malnourishment – the kind that causes mass obeisity – is caused by NOT EATING ENOUGH RAW VEGETABLES.

And the diet of your average Colombian is not much different. But the funny thing is that here in South America, in Colombia, this is the ecosystem of all of the new fancy, hot-shit health foods that many people in the US are now coveting... these health grains, the saviors of the US health food craze, they come from the Andes mountains. And in this case, I find the contrast really obvious, because wheat is, literally, the grain of the conquistadors. The Spaniards forced indigenous farmers to destroy their quinoa and other crops, and replace them with wheat from Europe. According to Felipe, the popularity of these grains in the US market actually creates an opportunity for farmers here to start growing their traditional grains again in an ecologically viable way.

So my point here is not to distort the reality or Colombia culture, or to convince anyone that it is “just like America”. The thing I'm trying to get is poking holes in the delusion that United States is the “wealthiest, more stable place in the world, it's people the best taken care of...” Because I don't think that is true at all. Along with the 'privileges' that being the biggest consumer of material crap in the world bring... is the oppression of being little obedient consumers, always ready to buy the next bullshit that corporations can come up with in order to make a profit. The oppression of being fat and sick because corporations are spending millions of dollars figuring out how to make junk food as addictive as opiate drugs and getting us hooked on them... The privilege of school systems that teach us to be obedient consumers (not empowered community members)

The thing I'm trying to get at feels really resonated by a poem in the book, “The State of North America”, written by a white woman about the betrayal she felt from her own government and culture in it's oppression of indigenous people... the betrayal she felt as a white kids growing up in poverty in the midwest... because the side affect of our “white privilege” seems to be an amputation of our right to belong to the land... amputation of our relationship with nature... we are made to be dependent upon grocery stores and shopping malls. We don't know what plant in our environment are edible or not, and we don't even know how to grow the plants we would buy in the grocery store, because they are grown with huge machines and chemicals and shipped huge distances to be displayed in perfect packaging for someone to buy off the shelf without ever having to think about how it is produced.

And this is a self-replicating system, this de-skilling of the United Stated populace. Because the less knowledge people have about their natural environment, the more dependent they become on buying things in stores.

So what I see in Colombia is a bunch of people who might be judged, by United States standards, as “living in poverty” because their GDP is considerably lower, because their houses are not as big, because they don't have as much disposable cash to buy bullshit. Because the level of gang violence in the country is so much higher, fueled by the US demand for illegal drugs and the US government's efforts to control and suppress those drugs...

But the basic fundamental details of life... I don't find all that much different. Most specifically, I don't think Americans are particularly healthier than Colombians. I do think that eating shitty diets of processed, chemical food is the way that people, all people of every economic status, have been trained to oppress themselves. The option of choosing to spend more money on “healthy” food, on vegetables, is definitely a privilege of wealth. But done right, by focusing on locally grown food, strong community networks, fairly traded international foods, eating well and healthy is also a protest against occupation and oppression. It's standing up and asserting your sovereignty, and your right to have a relationship with the land and with your community. And it doesn't have to be a privildege of wealth... ideally that's the whole point – figuring out how to make locally grown food more economically viable, because the reality is that it is more efficient!

Ok, so this blog post got away from descriptions of my trip, and into a bit of diatribe about my opinions on American culture... but that is also sort of the point of my trip, eh? Gaining perspective on my home with the fresh viewpoint of experiencing another place.

La Guanita de Guatavita

2013.03.22

La Juanita de Guatevita

 

La Juantina is a small private farm outside of the small country town of Guatavita. It is both a Wwoofing farm and eco-tourism guest house – all owned and run by one relatively young dude, Felipe Spath.

I arrived here about a week and half ago, after spending 10 days floundering around in Bogota, feeling lost and overwhelmed. Traveling by myself, with no particular plans, and not speaking the local language, apparently it's kind of easy to lose focus on what the goals are.

Ok so... trip goals:

1. do art – ideally every day
2. explore healing sanctuaries
3. learn to speak Spanish
4. meet local people and get to know communities – ideally by doing some useful volunteer work
5. gain perspective about the world

During my week in Bogota, I largely forgot about all of those things. I mostly just wandered, walking around town taking pictures of graffiti art and learning how to use the transit system. I wanted to take Spanish classes during that week, but losing my credit card in Cartagena made it pretty difficult to actually do stuff like that, since most of my time and energy were focused on getting myself re-sorted out.

But then I headed out to La Juanita, in the rural town of Guatavita, bringing a lot of expectations and notions along with me. I came here as a Wwoofer (work-exchange on organic farms for cheap traveling). The arrangement is that the travelers do some volunteer farm-work in exchange for free room and board. At least, that's usually the basic arrangement. In Colombia, it's expensive to feed people so most farms ask volunteers to help pay for their food, but food is pretty cheap, so depending on the farm, it could be $3-$12 a day. Wwoofing is an organization that exists all over the world, is at least 20 years old, and is probably the cheapest way to travel anywhere, short of picking up paid work as you go. It can also be a fantastic way to get to know people and communities.

And Wwoofing at La Janita is an excellent way to get to know this community, because Felipe is a hub of community organizing and networking. He started a Tedx group for his town, Tedx Guatavita. In fact, just before I came here, Felipe was in California, at the big Tedx conference in San Franciso, on a scholarship. Which is pretty hot shit. I feel like there is so much awesome stuff going on in this community, that I want to stay and learn about. One of the great things about wwoofing at La Juanita, s that Felipe takes his volunteers along to lots of community workshops and events. In two weeks of staying with him, I got to help build an herb spiral at the little mountaintop farm to two women, visit La Lagoona la Guatavita, the famous lake of the Eldorado Legend, go to a rural cinema showing of movies about food security, and attend a community worm composting workshop at a farm outside of a really little town. Two weeks of volunteering here feels full and exciting and relaxing at the same time.

Felipe speaks fluent English, and there are also two more American volunteers here, Emilio (Milo at home) and Lindsey. They are traveling together and they've been friends for a really long time, and I get along great with them. They both studied environmental biology/ecology at UC Santa Cruse, in California.

Lindsey and I quickly discovered that we're kindred spirits (according to her it's because we're both scorpios – deeply emotional, slightly melodramatic). She is currently trying to decide whether she wants to keep pursuing biology and science as a career, or shift her focus to yoga and dance. During our time at the farm, Lindsey and I were often the only women in a very male environment, and we take turns giving each other emotional support as we each try to figure out what the hell we're trying to accomplish by traveling

Milo is a career farmer and he's got the whole Wwoofing routine down pat. At home, he runs his own landscaping business. He is so enthusiastic about farming and ecology, that sometimes when he talks about it, his whole being just vibrates with excitement and love.

Milo and Lindsey both speak Spanish, and are nice enough to give me daily crash courses, but I'm just not picking up anything useful when I'm able to speak English all day long. In fact, I have this odd, awkward sort of feeling of being on a family vacation where our host is a distant relative and the whole visit is a family work party. I'm happy to have come to La Juanity and met Felipe and Milo and Lindsey, but I know that if I want to learn Spanish and follow my own path, I need to leave their company, and leave the comforting safety net of the English language.

What I really want to be doing right now, is ART. THE ART! I've found a couple of really outstanding volunteer options to teach/do art with kids, and I'm jumping at those options. From here out, the whole tone of my trip is DOING ARTWORK. I'm a slow learner, and often the universe sends me these messages and I'm like, “yeah, yeah, I'll get to that...” except I never do... I think the focus of my personal work for this whole trip is learning how to make my identity as an artist 1st before everything else. Learning to let go of fear of the unkown, letting go of self-consciousness and self-limitations about doing what I need to do. Getting my butt and my art supplies out into a public plaza and busking that shit.

There is something immensely freeing about being on a trip like this, and having all sorts of shit go wrong right at the beginning. It's like, ok, well I did that. Not I know how that works. It's not nearly so scary. This morning at breakfast, Lindsey gave me a pep talk about living in the “now”. Not stressing out about whether I'm in the right place, or where I'm going to next... just being and appreciating the journey I'm on. It was sort of a pep talk to me and to herself at the same time. And she's right. I'm carrying all of this anxiety all of the time about finding the “perfect” experience... obsessing over where I'm going to go, and what I will be doing, instead of the being.

So here is the end of this blog post. Staying at La Juanita has done for me exactly what I needed from it, which was to get a chance to breath, and find my center, and make some plans for the rest of my trip.

Ecuador is still pulling at me... But I've just started getting my shit figured out in Colombia, and there's so much here... I'm navigating this traveler's discomfort... wanting to stay in one place long enough to have a real understanding of it and to make some real relationships... and the conflicting desire to GO TO ALL THE PLACES AND DO ALL THE THINGS. Suddenly, three months feels like not nearly enough time to properly get to know one country, let alone two.

But right now, I'm on the bus back to Bogota, going to meat up with some cool kids from couchsurfing.com and we're gonna go backpacking in the Sierra Nevada mountains this weekend.

I met a Monster Truck driver from Las Vegas at my hostel.  

He is "stuck" in Bogota because he came to Bogota with his team for a race, but some large, valuable equipment was stolen, and he had to stay behind with one other crew member to try to reclaim it (mostly through legal strategies, it seems).  

I overheard him talking to Jesse Ventura on the telephone.  

He share his joints with me.  It tasted like anxiety and diesel smoke. 

I disapproved of all of the TV shows he wanted to watch on the TV in the hostel common room.  We compromised on Iron Man dubbed in Spanish. 

Eavesdropping on his telophone conversations is highly entertaining.  He plans to set the truck "long jump" record in Las Vegas this New Year's Eve.  

BOGOTA!

March 8, 2013

Tonight is my last night in Bogota, at least for this part of the trip. Tomorrow I will head up to La Guatavita, the farm that I found through couchsurfing.com.

Some reflections of my past week exploring Bogota...

To start with, Bogota is a fully 100% modern city, comparable to any city in the world. With all of the same issues as any city. There are definitely more 'dangerous' places here than in Seattle and other cities I've been to. Security is a Big Deal here. There are even a staff of three security guards at the community coop art gallery.

Not speaking Spanish is a huge barrier for me in getting to know anyone who lives here. I keep finding people who I'd really like to be friends with, but that's hard when I can't talk to them. I mean, there's lots of people who speak English, but my intention for this trip is to get to know this place, on it's own terms, and that definitely requires speaking the language. So for starters, I'm downloading mp3s of Spanish lessons tonight, so I can put them on my phone and listen to them while I paint, walk, do other work.

A few days ago, still staying at my first hostel, Alegria, I met a dude named Hunter and his friend Ankesh, traveling together on spring break from college in Raleigh North Carolina. Hunter is from Ashville, and he tells me the story of how at 18 or something, he started a non-profit company with his best friend (whose name I did not catch), to send shoes to Dominican Republic. He told me about how in doing this work, he quickly realized that people in the Dominican Republic don't need shoes. In fact, they don't need most of the charity bullshit that people send them... Hunter said in one visit, one old dude told him, “you know we just want you to hang out with us and work on actually trying to understand us. If we wanted shoes we would get shoes.” Whoa. Big realization for a privileged white kid. So now, mostly what Hunter and his friend to with their non-profit is to give presentations to school kids in the US and talk about cooperative problem solving... they go to DR to hang out with peeps and learn, then they go home and tell US schoolkids their story about how kids in the DR didn't need their shoes. Which seems like a pretty good turnaround in the flow of “international aid” to me.

I have gotten to meet some people who live in Bogota, very near my hostel in La Candelaria neighborhood. They are Anres and Carolina. Andres is the brother of Felipe, the dude who's farm I'm going to. Before I even got to Bogota, Felipe sent me their phone numbers and told me to call them when I got to Bogota. After getting out of the hospital, I managed to muster up the inertia to actually call Andres, and he was very happy to meet up and chat. He invited me to their house, a gorgeous old Spanish style home, with linking open courtyards (as most of the houses here are).

Andres is an artist, and Carolina is an anthropologist. Carolina spends nearly a total of six months working with tribes in the Columbian Amazon, and Andres often goes with her. I got to have lots of interesting conversation with them about the state of aboriginal rights in Colombia. Carolina says that aboriginal people of the Colombia regions have perhaps the most rights of any peoples in South America. They often own their land, and have nationally recognized sovereignty(!).

I mention my interest in maybe spending time with some tribes, if possible. They gently give me a whole speech, which seems a mix of practiced “reality check” for privileged city kids, and a general vent about negative experiences with idealistic volunteers. Basically, aboriginal people really don't need jack shit from anyone in the “developed world”. In fact the whole concept of “developed vs undeveloped” is inherently racist and ego-centric on the part of the “developed world”. In fact, the reality is more the difference between the colonial/oppressive/corporate world vs the tribes living in harmony with their cultural history and ecology. Anyone trying to “go in and help” is generally full of bullshit and racism (not bad intentions... just bad programming). And the tribes must first spend a massive amount of energy re-programming the jerk and teaching them how to live. Teaching them how to be a human being within their society. Then, maybe... the person can be useful. And anyways, the tribes don't need any things... everything they need is provided by the forest. What the do need is people to help them communicate with the government. Colombian layers and activists to help them assert their sovereignty rights and their land rights.

So in conversation with Caroline and Anres, I re-state my interest with more accuracy to my intentions... “I am interested in spending time with Amazon tribes in order to learn from them... ways to help heal the oppressive colonial world, which is doing so much hurt and destruction.”

“Ah”, the say, “now you might get somewhere.”

So overall, what have I really accomplished the past 10 days in Bogota... ?

Well, I got a diagnosis for a neurological issue that was fucking with my eyesight and giving me vertigo. That was gonna have to happen anyways. I can't blame my trip, Colombia, or Bogota for that one. In fact, I am proud of myself for not allowing that melodrama to derail my trip. One week out of a three month trip to deal with a medical emergency is ok.

I have wandered around the city A Lot, especially back and forth from my hostel to the hospital, which are on completely opposite ends of the city. And Bogota is HUGE. I haven't done any research, but I think it's waaay bigger than Seattle. Bigger than LA. Maybe... I've begun to understand and navigate an incredibly convoluted and chaotic transit system, which I feel super proud of myself for. It is like learning to decipher a new form of hieroglyphics. I have seen tons of amazing graffiti and street art (see photographic evidence!).

I have not done art in public or sold it to any passerbyers, and I have not gone salsa dancing (not sure if the vertigo is healed well enough yet for dancing...). But you know what, I am a huge homebody... and I'm just as much of a homebody while traveling as I am at home... So I don't really want to fill up all of every day with a zillion little goals and tourist activities. I just want to chill out and cook meals for myself and write blog posts and do some artwork. Unfortunately, when I do that in hostels, it costs $12 a day, which isn't incredibly expensive, but definitely isn't in my budget for the whole trip. Also, hostels are this strange bubble-world of privileged international travelers. Granted, I've met some awesome people staying in hostels this past week, but I've barely met anyone who actually lives in Bogota, aside from Adnres and Carolina.

Now, Andres and Carolina I met, vaguely, through couchsurfing. And I think that's definitely what I'll focus the rest of my trip on for staying in cities. I was excessively picky when looking for CS hosts before my trip, trying really hard to find people to stay with who were as close to me (or some idealized version of who I think I'd like to be...) as possible. Which is kind of bullshit. Reviewing the list of nearly 15 thousand possible couchsurfing hosts in Bogota alone, I found lots and lots of people who I'd love to stay with and get to know. I really think coming back to Bogota and staying with people who live here will drastically improve my experience of this city. Now again, I'm being judgemental of hostels maybe... there's lots and lots of people in hostels who are great! I met a bunch of them! But meeting first world-kids on holiday isn't my intention for this trip, and it's definitely not something I want to blow my trip budget on.

In the first couple of days of this trip, it feels like I got this huge blow that knocked me off center and totally fucked with my sense of self and purpose for being here. I had a couple of dark and stormy days, under the bright and shining Colombian sun. I feel like I'm beginning to get my center back now. I've got a great start getting to know Bogota. I move slowly anyways, and I know this about myself. I should've expect myself to blow into a city in a week, DO ALL THE THINGS, find all of the little out of the way hard to find secret bits of culture that I hope to find. What I did do was figure out how to find all of the things I do want to do, start to get comfortable and familiar with a big huge foreign city, and also deal with a medical crisis. And that's pretty damn ok (I remind myself).

NEXT UPDATE: FARMALICIOUS