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Now
Even before our hands were forced and we collectively began to turn inward over this past month, I had started looking through writing I’ve done over the years. It’s everywhere: journals, school assignments, calendars, unsent letters, letters sent and saved by family members that were returned to me, marginalia and scraps of paper tucked in books. When my kids were little, we had a three-ring notebook called Poetry in which we stored pieces written by others that moved us along with our own.
It dawned on me that I could start writing again, here. It will be what it will be.
Bird Blind, Blakely Harbor, 2020
Pensar | To Ponder
Cherimoya
Marraqueta (crisp baguette)
Tiny jar of homemade whole milk yogurt
Fig + kiwi homemade jam
Hard cheese
Coffee, and more coffee
Soft boiled egg
Butter
Italian & German & French spoken with some awkward Spanish at the Hostal Río Amazonas — I’m high on the forward momentum and very little sleep, and everything is so good.
Easy shared ride to airport, lots of wait time but good watching of all kinds. Now on plane to Calama, full of what I’m guessing is 97 percent men, all of whom seem to know each other. I’m not unobvious in this setting. Are they miners? A partially educated best guess as we are heading to the copper and lithium rich desert of northern Chile. I scan the ground for evidence of the decapitated mountains and draining salt flats that are laid waste in these processes, but there’s little to see yet.
Found the article on dark constellations that I had feared was lost on yesterday’s flight so I’m working on being calm and letting go of attachments in the wake of relief. Everything in the world seems very far away.
Last night I got spontaneous and bought a ticket for a dance performance entitled Háptico (directed by Ana Carvajal) at the Centro Gabriela Mistral in my neighborhood, formerly Pinochet’s headquarters and now a stunning and vibrant democratic civic space for galleries, music, dance, classes, shops, kiosks of antiques and a children’s book festival on this particular weekend. The program I picked up aptly calls it a “centro de las artes, la culture y las personas.” Completely surprised and thoroughly thought-provoked by the performance. The work began with dancers lying on the floor covered by what appeared to be big, thick custom-shaped wool blanket costume and a tape-marked floor (dotted lines of different lengths, straight lines that formed shapes, curved lines, different colors). One dancer stared the movement by rolling up in the blanket and sticking hands out of the top, moving to touch and activate the others. This chain reaction was a central theme of the choreography: feet following the tape, each dancer taking a pose or shape, the next dancer feeling their way to recreate the form that the one before them had struck, all closed eyes all the time. My favorite sequence was the encounter/exchange where one dancer touched another, and the second dancer responded to the touch with a particular and unique gesture depending on the part of the body touched: a face touched = a cheek soft slapped, a hand touched = jumping and holding hands to make a seesaw movement, a torso grazed = a massive full body shudder, etc. I like this translation — it’s another language that I feel both connected to and distant from. This bears exploring.
Kept myself from falling asleep, sort of, and it appeared everyone knew either there too. Even one of the exquisite male stems tango dancers from Lastarria shoed up. I only imagine that it’s not unlie, my world — with the subgroup of dancers and their families and friends making a small community.
Now over mountains heading North. It looks like life below — small valley populations seem everywhere. And green and squares and rows of green. Show on the South facing slopes. So close to the Ocean. Little water.
Mountains have changed throughout the trip: tall + jagged/snowcapped to drier and redder, now different still, almost like burl wood, curly and softer, broad stretch out to ocean. Green has shocks of aqua.
Angularity of road thru what looks like a dry river bed. Now open pit mines. Heading more to east. And what looks like a slaty lake, dried at the edges and white deep aqua colored only at one concentrated point.
Observing self and what’s happening with letting go — writing down the miles, self-narrating.
Comenzar | To Start
Santiago de Chile, first impressions:
Tiny cat and dog scrapping and playing together in square
Grates and wire mesh fences
Every surface painted
Pallets
Tile mosaic in surprise place
Sleeping on grass
merkén + orégano
Tu + yo
Shacks en route from airport made of pallets with horse tied outside
Running up overpass pushing vendor cart in one hand and bike in the other
Rio Mapocho choked in spots with shopping carts, tires
Car parts refabricated into mercado
Serpentine small streets jammed with traffic from marathon
Stream of impossibly bright pink running shirts
Corrugated metal roofs
Wild jade plants pushing up between sidewalk and building
Dancing everywhere: couples in the park, teen girls practicing a routine on the street with boom box, small groups using window reflections as mirrors to check their moves, two men locked in devastatingly erotic freestyle flamenco in Lastarria, juggler in the intersection outside Pablo Neruda’s house
Man with flying bird puppets attached to a long bent pole, swinging back and forth to activate them, spinning and flying
Street vendors in Lastarria: plastic animals spread on blankets, glassware, lapis and copper jewelry, antiques, clothing, pot cakes and “braunis”
Museo Violetta Parra: dedicated to the memory of musician, teacher, compulsive stitcher, papier mâche creator, garden lover, straw (bird) weaver — garden was inspired by her embrace of everything she did, no holding back (Was she just superconfident, was she good at everything, or did any of that matter? She did it. All.)
La rebelión de las brujas! Si deicides abortar confía en tu decision! Viva lxs que guerran al sistema!
Rio Mapocho, Santiago de Chile
Museo Nacional Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile
Hugo Marín, Pachamama, 1930, Museo Nacional Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile
Lastarria, Santiago de Chile
Museo Violetta Parra
Violetta Parra and one of her woven birds
Installation outside of the GAM, Santiago de Chile
Feminazi + amigxs, Lastarria, Santiago de Chile
Retroceder | To Step Backward
(October 13, 2019: Nearly a year after my residency with La Wayaka Current in the Atacama Desert in Chile, I’m posting journal entries and photographs from this life-changing trip. Entries will be filed retroactively to correspond with the actual date on which things happened.)
Arrived in Los Angeles to fire, but what I saw over the Hollywood sign wasn’t the worst of it: Malibu truly evacuated as Mom had suggested. Now taking off to North in thick smoke, emerging above to sun and reflecting. The last day was spent with Carol and Maggie in Carol’s beautiful stucco architect-designed house in Beverly Hills. Square built to lot line with courtyard inside, and a ripe persimmon tree with orange-red dropping fruit. Customized tiles and bricks, interior and exterior. Craft & art everywhere, integrated into the house, adorning and functioning — the prints on the walls, the hand stitched throw on the daybed where I slept, the ceramic plates we ate off, the blown glasses we drank from. Beautiful dinner of roasted cauliflower, squash, mushrooms and carrots, peeled asparagus and Parmesan and soft boiled egg on top. Coffee and croissants for breakfast. Carol graciously drove me to the airport after Maggie played and sang the song she had composed for her wedding to Carol’s son, in front of the fireplace, with a fire.
Carol was a ceramicist first, and this love drove us to LACMA to see the show of Mimbres pottery there. These pots are recognizable by their coloration (terracotta with white and black glaze) and their form (open bowls) and patterning (geometric, linear, spiral, radial symmetry), and though I had seen them to a point of generic recognition, I had never looked deeply until now. The curators told a story of the connection between the imagery on the pots and the datura plant, which was native to the region. The bowls map both the growth patterns of the flower (which blooms and withers within a day) and the effects of consuming the seeds of the plant, which were used as a hallucinogenic pathway to spirit understanding. The spirals, the white tunnel at the center bottom of the bowl concavity. Photos of the flowers were displayed above the bowls to heighten the visual connection and for reference, a great teaching tool about the ways abstraction actually happens.
This entry is so nonlinear, maybe a good way to begin this trip. Fraught night of sleeplessness and general discomfort on the plane rewarded on the morning descent into Santiago de Chile by conversation with my seat mate, who spoke of the silence of the desert where I’m headed.
Approaching Los Angeles, November 8, 2018
Mimbres pottery with datura photograph for context
Furling/unfurling datura, two ways at LACMA
Saltar | To Leap
Los Angeles is the start of a long chain that will take me to Chile for a month. My eyes are happily opening to both big looking and deep seeing here, already affirming the leap I’m taking. Here’s to getting out of the house.
Persimmon season, Los Angeles, 2018
Daydreaming (installation detail) by Uzumaki Cepeda at the LA Craft & Folk Art Museum.
Traction
The coincidence of new car tires, trail running shoes and a plane ticket to Santiago has me understanding something profound about the combination of movement, speed and friction that creates traction. I wish I could say this was an entirely solo venture, but it has honestly been a massive collaboration over many years. I’m grateful for the support and encouragement of so many people who have helped launch me on this adventure.
Wall mosaic, Lastarria, Santiago de Chile, 2018
Place
We borrow our time here, connecting with each other and the land. I’m looking hard at the grid overlaid partway down the lake and wondering about the enduring human urge to control nature. These lines don’t account for the scarcity of berries low on the hills this year, the smoke blowing up the valley, or the river’s shifting meander.
Map of Swan Lake, MT.
Beginner
This post has been languishing unfinished since February, but it’s uncanny how relevant it still feels today.
I’m drawn to the image below, the tender explosion of a flower created by my son when we was very young. It’s a good reminder of the power of beginner’s mind, loosely defined as an approach to life full of openness and curiosity. This week I got so deep inside my head, second guessing my intuition and projecting expectations, that I temporarily lost connection to this resource. Taking steps to slow down, simplify.
plant diagnostics, 2004
Coppice
Pruning to encourage growth.
Cat fur felt balls with quilting pins, 2017