Selfish

Selfishness has served its purpose in my life, enduring to this day. It is said by some that selfishness can be healthy. I don't know how to gauge or measure my levels of selfishness. I am finding it hard to know how my selfishness is received by others. As long as my selfishness is serving me I rarely take into consideration how it is effecting others. How can I better listen for evidence or symptoms of unhealthy selfishness? 

I think the only assessment tools that I have to work with right now are my emotions. Right now I can only sit with my guilt, regrets, and confusion. There is a grip (a lot) of meaningful emotions in these. I also bring my hopes into my consciousness. My hopes put strain on my internal critic. My critic has no tolerance for hope, and it sort of creates a lactic acid to keep me from remaining to long in hope. After the fatigue of reality sets in, I am sore with discouragement. I think the economy linked to emotions is revealing how exploitative I am. Emotional economy, a concept in my mind where I broker the supply and demand of spiritual aspects of them for spiritual aspects of me.

In working through selfishness I recognize how reckless being selfish has allowed me to be. I have recently felt responsible for only my emotions, but in this moment I am softening to the idea that I am accountable to how I contribute to other's emotions. I think I am beginning to realize that desire also creeps in looking a lot like hope. I think I can watch for how people I admire value selfishness, and fake it until I make it.

Green Chile

I prefer red chile over my eggs
and potatoes for breakfast.
Red chile ristras decorate my door,
dry on my roof, and hang from eaves.
They lend open-air vegetable stands
historical grandeur, and gently swing
with an air of festive welcome.
I can hear them talking in the wind,
haggard, yellowing, crisp, rasping
tongues of old men, licking the breeze.

But grandmother loves green chile.
When I visit her,
she holds the green chile pepper
in her wrinkled hands.
Ah, voluptuous, masculine,
an air of authority and youth simmers
from its swan-neck stem, tapering to a flowery collar,
fermenting resinous spice.
A well-dressed gentleman at the door
my grandmother takes sensuously in her hand,
rubbing its firm glossed sides,
caressing the oily rubbery serpent,
with mouth -watering fulfillment,
fondling its curves with gentle fingers.
Its bearing magnificent and taut
as flanks of a tiger in mid-leap,
she thrusts her blade into
and cuts it open, with lust
on her hot mouth, sweating over the stove,
bandanna round her forehead,
mysterious passion on her face
as she serves me green chile con carne
between soft warm leaves of corn tortillas,
with beans and rice–her sacrifice
to here little prince.
I slurp form my plate
with last bit of tortilla, my mouth burns
and I hiss and drink a tall glass of cold water.

All over New Mexico, sunburned men and women
drive rickety trucks stuffed with gunny sacks
of green chile, from Belen, Beguita, Wllard, Estancia,
San Antonio y Socorro, from fields
to roadside stands, you see them roasting green chile
in screen-sided homemade barrels, and for a dollar a bag,
we relive this old, beautiful ritual again and again.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Taking Medicine

Can sickness be desired? Is it wrong for me to deny or detour someone on the path of sickness? I am enjoying this concept of illness and wellness. I believe that the well have a formula for being well. I have begun to consider that well is a polarity that needs to be balanced with being ill. Is the formula for being ill just as worthy of praise as the formula for health. Does illness lead to death? A wise man in my circle of faith a long time ago said that a grain of wheat must fall and die for it to produce more seeds. I think I am needing to have more respect for illness that leads to death. Mystically, I think illness has something to say in this world, even potentially teach us. Is the medicine available to me a muzzle on illness' advocate. If I see illness as an intruder then I treat it with disdain, I am aspiring to see it as a messenger who ultimately wants to deliver good news. Even the worst of us wants to be heard.

El buen lenguaje

This won't make much sense to anyone who values correctness. It doesn't mean that I value incorrectness, but I am comfortable enough to understand that correctness is a paradox between appropriate and faulty. There is a monopoly on correct answers and it belongs to the privileged. It is revealed in our languages and validated by tradition, defined by linguists. As I work with my daughters to expand their understanding of themselves and the world, we are stretching our vocabularies. I find that it is a "both and" circumstance. Both and meaning that it takes time to realize the words we know are not enough to express ourselves appropriately and the "and" is how there are words that are unfitting and others that are preferred. It is rarely the under-served that are allowed to set the preference. So our foundational method for communicating and expressing ourselves is discriminant and polluted by preference, privilege, and suitability.

Curanderismo

Over a year ago I created this blog because I felt drawn to healing, but not healing that is know to my American mind. I don't have the confidence, education, or resources to pursue a medical degree. Despite these limitations I still have a passion for wellness. I have chosen to expand my knowledge of people, the body, and my faith, both through education and opportunity. I have a strong intuition that medicine is not as definable as Blue Cross & Blue Shield or United Health would like us to believe. I am wanting to liberate myself from the dogmatic beliefs I have towards medicine.

This summer I participated in a course here at UNM. I touched and bridged a hope I started in 2010 by creating this blog. There is a lot about me that is learning to be genuine, this course motivated me to continue transcending the rest of me.

Triage

In the software industry there is a balance between innovation and maintenance. This healthy balance allows the industry to both sustain and grow. The risk for future health is found in the risk a group is willing to make in spending time in innovative research or the maintenance of health. I find a gap in how we see cultural systems. Unfortunately cultural systems are not evidently profitable like software is. So cultural systems appear to be unworthy of innovation or investment. When a cultural system is broken or buggy, few in society are willing to investigate the source code. Many prefer swapping or outsourcing cultural systems.

So what does this do to the broken cultural system? In software a buggy system can be addressed in a spectrum of ways from by being rewritten all the way to being retired. There is intentionality to fix a system that is influenced by profitability. Our value for human systems is not as dualistic or motivating as our monetary profits. With human systems retirement is shamed, but attempted in the evidence of genocide. In software buggy is identifiable, but in human systems I have come to understand buggy as subjective. Or possibly I am refusing to see in the computing world that there are often systems design for broken processes. In may human systems I see how the system is functional and productive but is expected to function in a broken process. Our indigenous cultures represent these functional and productive systems. The broken processes I see as the consumer mentality, the convenience hoarding, and the power dependence.

As a potential professional in the helping arena I am worried that the incentive that we are pursuing is simply triage.

cultural blister

education can alienate. I often think about why I do the things I do. mostly i do things with narcisistic intentions. I chose to go to school so that could get a good job. I chose my path of study so that I could get good pay. this was the message my parents were fed. this message is true to some extent. what it doesn't explain or help is the cultural stigmas that I wear. it doesn't explain my insecurities. it didn't consider the consequences for becoming educated. and maybe because the consequences are unique to my experiences. the metaphor I have is the blister.
education is an abrasive experience that rubbed raw an unwilling area of my understanding. like a hand on a shovel doing work, strenuous and repetitive work. the area I picture as tender is my communal attachments. I feel like I these communal attachments were worn to a raw friction filled sore. In the process of educating myself I was also distancing myself from my communities that I had functioned in and become comfortable in. I was distancing myself and moving toward connections that are ironically despised by the communal attachments that had embraced me for so long. the distance puts me in a place I call my cultural blister.
is it coincidence that the educational system is dominated by the white culture? are white people better learners? did I have to leave my communal attachments to be productive? in the barrio I am labeled at times a sell out, coconut, or oreo. now in this blistered area I find it difficult in expressing this sadness about choosing my educational route. acculturated people become nervous, defensive, concerned, when I talk about brown, black, and white. I feel obligated to forget the distinctions that reality uses to create advantage. i think it is easier to dismiss the injustice when you are the benefactor. I cannot and will likely never see without prejudice.
I see this sensitivity as the unwilling to touch the sore and raw edges of the cultural blister. in more graphic description this space is filled with puss protecting and obstructing me from confronting the wounded area. I am isolated in this luminal blistered area longing for the simplicity I left in my barrio lifestyle. I feel isolated in my insecurity for participating and contributing to this blistered space. I feel isolated in my hatred for this educational work that divides and has my communal attachments believing that they are lesser. I am suffocated in this pool of puss that compresses my desire to escape the constant pain of knowing I chose this path.
in the metaphor the blister can pop. what will help this callous is either more work or intentionality to break the blister. where I am this morning is fatigue.