Happy Valentines Day!

The Flame

I know fire for its high temperature. 

I know it takes fuel, oxygen, and heat... a trinity. 

The thing about fire that eludes us all is knowing how to create it and then how to sustain it. 

What can be put into a fire is fuel. 

What can motivate fire is oxygen.

What ignites fire is heat.

Fire is not a human entitlement, nor is it inherited.

It is liberated and forces us to learn its rules and cooperate, while at times engulfing us without warning.

It can be manipulated.

It can be harnessed.

It can be tamed.

It has an important role in everything.

It can kill and nurture in the same event.

It can be put out, only to spark again where interested.

It teaches me about love.

When it falls in my lap I jump.

When it heats my cold soul I get close.

When it dances, I sweat.

When it is antagonized it rages.

When it is nurtured it is symbiotic.

When it burns I flinch.

When it scorches it scars.

You are fuel, oxygen, and heat.

Like an ember, ready to flame, hold yourself hot, that you may combust, and light the world.

Banned Books

I don't have a lot of info, but to believe that in this day in age we can still ban books is surprising.  I heard today that Arizona, as part of program shrinkage, has placed "Bless Me Ultima" by Rudolpho Anaya on a banned("confiscated") books list, among others.  Stupidity at its best.  Is this just?  Is this productive?  Who are these censors?  Where are they from and what roots do they have in this southwest region? How can Anglo Americans or Americans in general, still question, how ethnic peoples can feel discriminated?

This book changed my life.  I wrote about this in a previous blog, Bless Me Anaya, a few years earlier.  I feel angry about this but in a grateful way.  I feel we are making major progress as a political voice, a cultural influence, and gaining regional leverage.  I feel we are establishing some ground in the American psychology.  I think the influx of Latino peoples is creating worry in the Anglo culture.  It almost feels like we as a people are re-establishing ourselves in a land squatted, squandered, and surrendered over the last few centuries.

Why would Arizona and Texas struggle to create rules to their game that stifle brown progress.  In Texas they are diluting political leverage in Latino communities by redrawing voting districts, where nonsensical boundaries carve out neighborhoods conveniently breaking apart power in numbers.  In Arizona they are limiting the cultural awareness that leads to an increased dignity and identity critical to self-confidence and passion.  We as a Latino people are making progress.  This progress is being validated by the fear and resistance of American people who I feel rarely have to share.  Adivinen quién viene a cenar.

This land is not Latino land, but in many ways we are a legacy of adaptation, culturally designed and evolved to exist here in the desert.  If we do not establish ourselves in this region legally, we will sustain ecologically.  We know how to live without, within, and among this amazing land.  Hopefully our connection to it will grant us hospitality despite the continued migration of desperate human exploitative cultures.  Banning ideas is a strategy for oppression, it deceives and distorts understanding. 

The banned books will only slow the inevitable quest for dignity and your Anglo fear will only delay the inevitable integration and meshing of cultures.

Confiscated Books:
Critical Race Theory, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures, edited by Elizabeth Martinez
Message to Aztlán, by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales
Chicano! The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement, by F Arturo Rosales
Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by Rodolfo Acuña
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire
Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, by Bill Bigelow

A Letter to my daughters

Elena and Veronica,
I am writing this because the Catholic elite are barking out moralities that I find distracting to their role in civics.  Birth Control has become a leverage point in social concerns.  The catholic dogma has evolved to believe that medicines that manipulate your female hormones and reproductive functioning are sinful, yet their refusal to demonstrate a healthy sexuality remains in my eyes absent. 

The burdens and responsibilities for becoming a parent are life changing.  And in recent history a majority  of them have fallen on the mother.  And the role the Catholic institution plays in raising children is minimal, often ending after the sacraments.  So be prepared for the Catholic institution to preach to you more than pragmatically support you.  Keep in mind also that the institution is made up of celibate members, who most don't fully experience being a parent. 

The convenience and availability of sex is tempting.  The choice for you is to know when and how to enter into it.  Ideally, virginity until marriage is the pristine path.  Practically, life is so unique that I couldn't expect that ideal for you.  I think the only thing I ask is that you make love a consensual priority before sex, otherwise it becomes clear that it is carnal.  The purpose of sex is subjective but its gift is life, and life is hard.

I am asking you to be a faithful believer in the Trinity.  Be weary of anyone who declares exclusive rights to the trinity or defends their understanding of God.  God does not need defending, She/He is beyond our petty moral victories.  You will find that wounding and desperation often lead people to religious institutions, leaving the "churches" you find in the phone book to be organized and structured with their wounding at the heart.  I use phone book because I hope you come to understand that the church is not confined to a catechism, building, or sacraments.  I hope you come to understand a Catholic faith that goes beyond a culture saturated with funny dressed and effeminate men. 


I hope that the time we spend together in our human experiences gives you enough wisdom to choose how you practice your faith.  My wish for you is to never be intimidated, manipulated, deceived, or guilted into loving God.  I hope you know that God understands the complexities that He/She put in front of you, not so much as a standardized test but an example of the brilliance chaos and order create.  I hope you learn to suffer as I have found that happiness tastes so much better in concert with pain.  Both feelings are a necessary curriculum for fully sharing in the human experience.


You are sexual beings and there is nothing more connecting than the sexual experience.  Another hope I have for you is that you are attracted to people who embrace and respect the responsibilities that come in choosing to be sexual.  You have my respect for how you choose to experience this life giving gift that our creator has built into our bodies.  I think it is human to desire the pleasures that comes with our sexuality.  The more I have denied these emotions the more toxicity they have had in my life.  It is yours to determine how to experience this pleasure, connect, and value your body.  I do not value the Catholic institution's reaction to birth control, but I do understand that birth control is not a license for sexual liberty, but a guard against human irresponsibility.

I Love You.

I am Newt...a cake eater

The only way I can understand the rational for my contempt for characters like Newt Gingrich, is to accept that I can relate to his stupidity. I can relate to his stupidity not in the stigmatized form of the word "stupid", but the real and mature form of the word.  When I move from generalizations and I become emotionally invested I tend to think with more stupidity.  I tend to forget to be critical and thorough.  So many individualists, who often support a conservative ideology, have experienced success as a consequence of perceived individual intentions, actions, and accomplishments.  This cannot be completely true in a society so dependent on community systems, community resources, and community productions.

So in my brief experiences with this world I have found that I can think with a mentality that results in wounded ideas like, "I have found a way, shouldn't everyone else".  I have look down on others with pity and remembered my own refusal to be kept down.  I can smell the frustration with being seen as a burden.  So as I recognize Newt's ignorance I also recognize underneath it his source of motivation.  I recognize his ambitious desire to never ever again be seen as worthless and insignificant.

And unfortunately every stereotype holds a morsel of truth, like a high fructose sugar is not too useless.  Newt your insensitivity to the reality that America associates welfare with people of color, blacks, browns, unmotivated, uneducated, and lazy is our inability to hear it.  Welfare is a sophisticated system that is not incorruptible, but like your entitlement systems that I see as being a polar opposite, your entitlement system is also corruptible.  So in my ignorance, it is wrong for me to believe your life has been peaches and cream because you have wealth, class, and sophistication.  We all are at times burdened, lazy, and stupid.  So I am like you Newt...in a lot of ways.

My heart is opening to the struggles and perceptions of the capitalist mind.  Where there is a need for profit there lives a deep and painful need to be valued.  To all proverbial Newts I see you, I recognize me in you, I identify with you, and now hope to gain understanding for you, that it may lead to learning to live for you.  In that cosmic way that my grandparents have taught me to love, I send a e-hug to men I have despised, and those I have stereotyped because they look like Newt.  In a way that my mentor asks me to do, work towards being able to love my enemies.

The lesson for is me is a forgiveness synthesis that flows as follows:
Critical sight, recognition, reflection, indentification, integration, and then understanding leading to love.

The art of making your cake and eating it too.

Yesterday's news from the round house, our legislative coliseum, brought with it a perfect example of making your cake and eating it too. The environmental improvement board (EIB) of New Mexico, worked hard to establish regulations that would manage green house and environmental damage by our energy mining. Our governor worked equally as hard to undo and nip it in the bud, by removing all balanced membership to the environmental agency and replacing its members with mining, gas, and ranching advocates. So Dianna Martinez created her cake and is now eating it.

Another example of caking it is the EIB's explanation for stifling the regulations. I herd one advocate for revocation explain it as so. Emissions caps should be a federal issue. This is ironic being that conservatives are heavy supporters of state led initiatives. It is only a states duty when it is convenient and profitable. When it is burdensome and disciplined it should be a federal duty. Like children, I recognized this attitude. My daughters complain and say, "I should be able to bayth and clean whenever I feel like it", but when they get cavities or wear out belongings mommy and daddy should pay. This is how I see the art of having your cake and eating it too.

Hearing this I know that 85% of New Mexico could give a shit nor really care to understand. Believing this, I feel like a gnat on the ass of hog, but I ask the Lord to help me accept the difference in opinion with sophistication and understanding. It is what it is...and another example for me of how education is not a substitute for intelligence.




Remember Elizabeth Ryan...well I do. Texas Interest!

A satire on prejudice...Cake filling!

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Second Layer Cake

The best way for me to describe prejudice is from a personal perspective. In the cake metaphor I have never really felt like I've contributed a cake. How does welfare have such a stigma? I recently came to confirm, that in my youth welfare was a system that helped my mom and I. She had denied this for so long and I had wondered how I could remember our poverty. Was I imagining and turning them into memories. It also say a lot about the shame that comes with our communities cultures perceptions around needing help. Recently hear my mom embarrassingly confirm my childhood memories validated a mysterious part of my identity. It also reopened other hurtful experiences that I can now question and consider their validity, after suppressing and dismissing them.

I am a contributor to the cake despite having had to mooch from the cake because of irresponsible circumstances that my family created. This makes me grounded, and feeling comfortable wanting to grab Newt and telling him fuck your ignorance, fuck your entitlements, and fuck his lack of genuine desire to see people. I have forgotten and was never taught the ingredients to make my families traditional cakes. This makes it hard having to adopt an entitled cultures recipes, but welfare gave me a place to stand.

Now, I mostly think of myself as in the middle of the road socially, class-wise, and intelligently. But this has dismissed the small and few moments that have devastated me and likely others. These moments are moments of prejudice. Prejudice is for me the message of disconnection, the message of difference, the message of pity, and the message of ignorance. I have prejudice and only until now have I been able to see it so clearly. I know it is because of my ignorance and resentment, but knowing this does not help with the intense discontent, or hope for vengeance. It sucks, because I cannot describe how easy it is to move between compassion and contempt. It isn't so much a racial concern, but unfortunately that is where the dividing lines are most discrete. to be continued.....with the forgiveness of a concept where no single person can be forgiven.

Cake...a metaphor for discrepancy

I can't have my cake an eat it too? But what if I make my own cake? Who established this metaphor, because I see too many people eating other people's cakes. Wow, I actually sound like a misinformed conservative. It seems to be that society is made of either cake eaters or cake makers, but likely most of us are both. In the dualistic world I think many people see the poor minorities as the cake eaters.

If they are what kinda cake are they being fed? A cake that has no nutritional value. A cake that leads to the highest incarceration rates (3), highest drop out rates (1), and highest violent death rates (2). Or maybe us minorities just don't know how to eat cake. There is always the belief that people of color are just not motivated enough.  The assumed productive cake makers are being taught to have pride in their cake. Politically they are being taught to believe that minorities, also believed to be poor, lazy, and ignorant, are sitting around with elaborate ways of mooching off their cake.  This is foolish to believe and complex enough to not be able to disprove.

Why can't we have a metaphor that describes our process as baking a cake with enough ingredients from diverse sources to share it?

...to be continued

1 - http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16
2 - http://www.publicagenda.com/charts/violence-related-firearm-death-rates-race
3 - http://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/raceinc.html

Intelligent and connected

Grief is a powerful experience. I sometimes think that we as a society don't value grief as much as we can. I think grief is a compliment to bliss. Take a look at this video of a gorilla named Koko and learn from the reality that grief is not exclusive to the human experience. This reminds me of how I have found ways to avoid it.

I am Havanna dream

I am not much for verbal prayers, but I want to share my dreams. I believe that the prayer concept is so fundamental to the human experience that it is like water for all living things. Prayer is the glue, the transport, the building block, and the cohesive element that manifests our human intentions, sometimes disguised as wishes, shame, hopes, or sins. If we need water to construct all our living parts then I need prayer to construct all my living ideas. I am intending to study in Cuba, and I am thinking it and spawning the initial interest so that it happens.