Thirty, sounds dirty, like thirsty, 30 years, 30 hours, more than a day. 30 minutes to myself as sweetpea does her late nap thing. 30 breaths I take in during my massage present 3 days before my 30th day of Birth.
This marks the day I came out of the womb, the doctors told my mama she had to be operated on so I was taken out of the womb and into my parents ready and excited hands. A girl, 2 boys and 1 girl, one blonde head in a family of dark brown and black. One set of arched dark eyebrows, poetic passionate dreams, deep green/blue/gray eyes that turn into half moons when I smile. The same half moons I look upon in my dad and babies eyes.
In 2 days I turn 30, I will have been on this planet, breathing this air, taking in all this information for 30 years. Now I am an adult, I will try on this label without the young attached to it. An adult, the chosen people, what we are striving to be, what we are told we should be to early on, now I am me. What next? What does life hold for me now? Will the adventures with white and gold foxgloves and deep blue Mediterranean sea continue?
I have this new unit of my very own called a family. For a very long time it seems I was solo, just me, the pure fun of deciding to have life completely on my terms. Now my choices involve another and then another. It is so sweet being braided into the inner and outer workings of two of my most favorite humans. Still I long for unbridled aloneness, the unpredictable adventures and twists and turns I get myself into when flying solo. I catch these moments now and hold them in a glass bottle like a tiny ship to examine in times of duress. I get them when I go on artist dates and write my soul out, when I take the time to go outside and listen to the birds of central Texas while my baby sleeps in the other room. I also get them while checking facebook and watching historical fiction movies on netflix while eating mint chocolate squares.
30 witching years, a time to reflect and notice some of my achievements
age 8 3rd grade, I write my first story about candy people who get stuck to their beds at night.
age 9 4th grade, I do a ton of art projects and miss a lot of school
age 10 5th grade, I win grand prize in a play writing contest after writing "The Spider Who Wanted to Find A Home." The Yale Dramat Children's theater acts out the play, my grandmother comes to see it from TX, my dad brings me a dozen roses. I am also editor of the school newsletter this year.
age 12 7th grade, Am hating school, decide to take a year off, feel like English teacher is crushing my love of writing, look into alternatives. Last day of school I take a role of caution tape and walk out the doors of institutional schools for 12 years.
age 14, Start hanging with a group of drop out/ unschoolers, make good friends, start thinking about youth lib, start talking about organizing. Help organize a teen weekend for unschoolers with new friends, really decide to stay out of school.
ages 15 & 16, Rocking the unschooler life, volunteering at the natural history museum, writing letters to all my good friends sprinkled across the North East. Regularly spending weekends in NYC, going to art shows, hanging out in parks and shops. Thinking about future dreams and travel. Start doing photography, learning from a neighbor and taking classes at the local arts center. Organize a teen weekend just for women, one of the funnest and most revolutionary experiences of my life.
age 17 Work as a nanny, my first job, save enough money to go and travel in France by myself for two months. Leave in April for Paris, inspired by Billie Holiday, a romantic from the beginning. Also fall in love. While in France decide to move to the North West, following adventure and where the person I loved lived.
age 18 Move to the North West, have my first big break up, decide to stay, get a job at a bakery, a new sweet little house with roommates. Join in the WTO Protests in Seattle 1999.
age 19 Go on a bus trip with dear friend to New Mexico, hitch hike around, camp, swim, stay in a tepee have the time of our lives. Go back to Seattle start a resource center for self educated and drop out youth.
age 20 Save up money and take friend from New Mexico trip with me to Europe for the third time in my life (first trip when I was 6 & 7 with my family) Go to Greece and work on an organic orange farm, Go to the isle of Lesbos, have a ball, decide to join a group of activist and do a 2 week nonviolent action camp in Israel and Palestine. Take ferry there, do the camp, completely life changing and very intense. Decide I am not ready to risk my personal safety for the cause but am very happy to have the experience. The rest of the trip takes me to Egypt, Italy and a road trip to Belgium. September 11th happens I decide I need to be back in the States. Fly into DC for protests against invading Afghanistan. Meet my mom on the street, tears in our eyes.
life is so raw and real, looking at all that I have managed to do I am happy to see how much I have packed in to my 30 years. I will continue the auto biography highlights in my next post. For now I notice, I am soon 30, what a life.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Ethnic Market Love and Raising a Little Foodie
There are these children's board books all about different kinds of food, they rhyme and tell a story from a kids perspective of eating that food. The pictures our photographs collaged with paper and cloth versions of the food. In short these are my favorite children's books. They inspire curiosity, our simple to understand and incredibly creative in their approach to showing the food. In "Yum Yum Dim Sum," we go to a cafe with a little girl and her father and try different kinds of dim sum, taking away the knowledge that dim sum means "a little bit of heart." These are the perfect books to welcome a healthy curiosity in my daughter about the wonders of eating all different kinds of foods.
A habit and happy adventure for me and daddy is to find the little off the beaten path restaurants and markets to make and eat delicious food. When we walked around our neighborhood in Olympia, I would often wish for a chance to happen upon a small grocer, or little house selling homemade goodies for cheap. Now that we are in Austin this dream has come true. Daddy called me from the road a few Saturdays ago saying he had found the coolest market yet. "I am buying ingredients for bubble tea" he told me delightedly, and " I just saw a mound of Chorizo shaped into a hogs head." I was jealous he had gone without me and also excited for the adventure to come in the not so distant future. I watch Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" and learn about a food cart in Austin that makes farm to market, fresh, in season meals each week and another cart that makes gourmet doughnuts the size of frisbees. Our next foodie adventure is set.
Sweet pea has always liked adventures, like her parents some fresh perspective and cool things to sensually experience has always been a great way to get her attention in the present. Ethnic markets and restaurants feel like travel. We don't have to go far away from home to get a similar sensual hit of being in a new place. The people that run the markets and restaurants are trying out their culture on new soil. Making the foods of a place available to its immigrants is a great way to keep cultural tradition in a new place.
My mother, the Southern born Yankee, would often make us her family recipes for dinner, homemade mac and cheese, oven fried chicken, cornbread and black eyed peas. The South was a part of us even though we grew up around the knee highs and sugar maples of the Northeast.
It seems that Sweet pea will grow up with the mix mash food her parents subject her to, but she will have the original versions of those foods as well as our homemade versions. She will have her Teba's corn bread, her Cece's meatloaf, her parents favorite Indian restaurant and some Seattle, via China, dim sum.
The books that inspire childhood foodies:
"Yum Yum Dim Sum" By Amy Wilson Singer part of the "World Snacks" series, check all the books of this series out.
"Bee-Bim Bop" By Linda Sue Park and Ho Baek Lee, a great rhyming story about a Korean dish with a recipe in the back.
A habit and happy adventure for me and daddy is to find the little off the beaten path restaurants and markets to make and eat delicious food. When we walked around our neighborhood in Olympia, I would often wish for a chance to happen upon a small grocer, or little house selling homemade goodies for cheap. Now that we are in Austin this dream has come true. Daddy called me from the road a few Saturdays ago saying he had found the coolest market yet. "I am buying ingredients for bubble tea" he told me delightedly, and " I just saw a mound of Chorizo shaped into a hogs head." I was jealous he had gone without me and also excited for the adventure to come in the not so distant future. I watch Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" and learn about a food cart in Austin that makes farm to market, fresh, in season meals each week and another cart that makes gourmet doughnuts the size of frisbees. Our next foodie adventure is set.
Sweet pea has always liked adventures, like her parents some fresh perspective and cool things to sensually experience has always been a great way to get her attention in the present. Ethnic markets and restaurants feel like travel. We don't have to go far away from home to get a similar sensual hit of being in a new place. The people that run the markets and restaurants are trying out their culture on new soil. Making the foods of a place available to its immigrants is a great way to keep cultural tradition in a new place.
My mother, the Southern born Yankee, would often make us her family recipes for dinner, homemade mac and cheese, oven fried chicken, cornbread and black eyed peas. The South was a part of us even though we grew up around the knee highs and sugar maples of the Northeast.
It seems that Sweet pea will grow up with the mix mash food her parents subject her to, but she will have the original versions of those foods as well as our homemade versions. She will have her Teba's corn bread, her Cece's meatloaf, her parents favorite Indian restaurant and some Seattle, via China, dim sum.
The books that inspire childhood foodies:
"Yum Yum Dim Sum" By Amy Wilson Singer part of the "World Snacks" series, check all the books of this series out.
"Bee-Bim Bop" By Linda Sue Park and Ho Baek Lee, a great rhyming story about a Korean dish with a recipe in the back.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Stars above roots below, some thoughts on faith Part 1
Places of Worship:
Oh how I have loved ritual all throughout my life. It started with Catholic church, the smell of frankincense, the texture of popping the air bubbles on the laminated covers of my catacism books, wearing the heavy red robes with the big white collars to choir practice, then the sound of sweet bells ringing as a dozen little voices harmonized.
The most vivid ritual of my early childhood I remember was my first holy communion. As a tiny infant I had been cleared of sin via my baptism, now I was to marry Christ along with all my other class mates.I remember doing lots of practicing and memorizing for the big days events. I remember my mom having me wear her wedding veil and an embroidered white dress. I remember holding a rose up to a statue of Mary and bowing before her in reverence.
I remember doing the stations of the cross for the first time, rolling my rosary in my hands and praying over each step Christ took, supposedly for our sins, towards the fateful cross he would be hung from then left to die. It was gruesome and intriguing and raised a lot of questions in my head, like what does this have to do with me? It was clearly important for all the adults that I learn this stuff and apply it to my every day actions, so I did, we all did as little believers trying to be good.
When I go into a church I want it to be beautiful, I want it to set the scene for prayer and contemplation. I want to feel that sense of elation, not from the words the person speaks from the pulpit but from the space its self, feeling God in every corner. When God's presence is clear to me I can then blissfully engage with divinity, see it as a part of me, feel a part of something greater then myself, feel as one.
When I first walked into a Unitarian church I did not feel this. the space was clean, open and empty, nothing fun to look at other then the pretty windows behind the pulpit where the forevergreens of the northwest always sat in quiet contentment. The sermon was quiet alive though, I felt like I could actually listen to the words and have it make sense, perhaps even apply it to my life. this was not something I had experienced in my adult hood in any church. The songs we sang were full of hope and ideas, some even re-written to have liberating lyrics as opposed to the ancient hymns of my youth. I felt lost without the repetition and ritual of Catholic mass but also elated at this new idea of worship.
My partner and I have sense gone to many Unitarian services, some exciting and new, others holding a similar dullness to the eulogies of my youth, except without all the fancy fanfare of the Catholic church. We started going to the church in Austin hoping to have some spiritual community and considering it a possible base for Sweet pea to have in her life. The church its self is going through some major transitions with a new minister coming in so it seems like a good time to add our new energy to the mix.
Last week daddy took sweet pea out of the chapel to take a nap and left me alone in the pew, well relatively considering every aisle was packed with folks. This time I got a chance to just be present with my surroundings, instead of the constant tug of attention that is a mother with her toddler in a new place. I got to breath it all in, notice the little ways the Unitarians have figured out how to make sacred space. My favorite was a wall of candles next to windows overlooking a live oak. Also the choir with its immaculate operatic voices echoing through the space.
There is a pause in the chatter of the minister to have a silent meditation and get up and light a candle if you wish. I got up and lit a little blue one that called out to me, I then walked back to my seat with my hands folded and started fervently praying. I prayed for myself and my family and all the people I know. I then prayed for all the animals, and all the people of our world and for protection from climate change and ideas for how to make it less hard. The prayers poured out of me like a sudden gush, I was feeling it, the divine spirit, the right mix of silence, alone-ness surrounded by people, and that ache of love in my heart.
Daddy eventually came back with the sweet pea strapped to his chest asleep, we held hands for the rest of the service. I had finally found my base in this chosen church.
Oh how I have loved ritual all throughout my life. It started with Catholic church, the smell of frankincense, the texture of popping the air bubbles on the laminated covers of my catacism books, wearing the heavy red robes with the big white collars to choir practice, then the sound of sweet bells ringing as a dozen little voices harmonized.
The most vivid ritual of my early childhood I remember was my first holy communion. As a tiny infant I had been cleared of sin via my baptism, now I was to marry Christ along with all my other class mates.I remember doing lots of practicing and memorizing for the big days events. I remember my mom having me wear her wedding veil and an embroidered white dress. I remember holding a rose up to a statue of Mary and bowing before her in reverence.
I remember doing the stations of the cross for the first time, rolling my rosary in my hands and praying over each step Christ took, supposedly for our sins, towards the fateful cross he would be hung from then left to die. It was gruesome and intriguing and raised a lot of questions in my head, like what does this have to do with me? It was clearly important for all the adults that I learn this stuff and apply it to my every day actions, so I did, we all did as little believers trying to be good.
When I go into a church I want it to be beautiful, I want it to set the scene for prayer and contemplation. I want to feel that sense of elation, not from the words the person speaks from the pulpit but from the space its self, feeling God in every corner. When God's presence is clear to me I can then blissfully engage with divinity, see it as a part of me, feel a part of something greater then myself, feel as one.
When I first walked into a Unitarian church I did not feel this. the space was clean, open and empty, nothing fun to look at other then the pretty windows behind the pulpit where the forevergreens of the northwest always sat in quiet contentment. The sermon was quiet alive though, I felt like I could actually listen to the words and have it make sense, perhaps even apply it to my life. this was not something I had experienced in my adult hood in any church. The songs we sang were full of hope and ideas, some even re-written to have liberating lyrics as opposed to the ancient hymns of my youth. I felt lost without the repetition and ritual of Catholic mass but also elated at this new idea of worship.
My partner and I have sense gone to many Unitarian services, some exciting and new, others holding a similar dullness to the eulogies of my youth, except without all the fancy fanfare of the Catholic church. We started going to the church in Austin hoping to have some spiritual community and considering it a possible base for Sweet pea to have in her life. The church its self is going through some major transitions with a new minister coming in so it seems like a good time to add our new energy to the mix.
Last week daddy took sweet pea out of the chapel to take a nap and left me alone in the pew, well relatively considering every aisle was packed with folks. This time I got a chance to just be present with my surroundings, instead of the constant tug of attention that is a mother with her toddler in a new place. I got to breath it all in, notice the little ways the Unitarians have figured out how to make sacred space. My favorite was a wall of candles next to windows overlooking a live oak. Also the choir with its immaculate operatic voices echoing through the space.
There is a pause in the chatter of the minister to have a silent meditation and get up and light a candle if you wish. I got up and lit a little blue one that called out to me, I then walked back to my seat with my hands folded and started fervently praying. I prayed for myself and my family and all the people I know. I then prayed for all the animals, and all the people of our world and for protection from climate change and ideas for how to make it less hard. The prayers poured out of me like a sudden gush, I was feeling it, the divine spirit, the right mix of silence, alone-ness surrounded by people, and that ache of love in my heart.
Daddy eventually came back with the sweet pea strapped to his chest asleep, we held hands for the rest of the service. I had finally found my base in this chosen church.
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