I offer me.

As I recognize my life’s tank dial, move closer and seemingly faster than ever towards empty, I accept how pain and love complement themselves more than ever.  I love that I feel pain free and simultaneously respect how pain filled life has to be.  My youthful self mildly glamorized a pain filled self perception and romanticized some struggles. I romanticized my story stirring up pain, replaying thoughts of hardship. I think through the years I have learned to value the reflective strategies that help me assess my pain; translate my pain versus indulging. My Catholic faith with its many flaws, provides me with tools that help me understand when and if my pain is phantom or real. Both my romanticized manifested pain and real wounds are impactful. 

The phantom pain lead to the stirring up of anger pangs, and the real pains hurt so bad I am led to anguish reminding me they still needing healing. I also get to taste the pain, regardless of its ontology, and can better determine if the pains are necessary or in vain. The strategy I feel most essential to my encounters with pain is paradox.  My capacity to scan for paradox is a tactic my Catholic faith instilled in me. It is literally a contradictory believe system where holding a concept with competing truths is fundamental. In  the context of pain, it is the movement to find the balance between fear and trust. I have to hold the avoidance of pain with the absolute inevitability of pain, like a person who has to breathe in while going under water, building up a panicked dependency to breathe out.  The paradox isn’t the breathing, the paradox is the desire to be where we don’t belong to taste the forbidden at the risk of drowning; we find a way to have both. There are tiny opposites in every paradox creating small revolutions of meaning and at the same time laying down a stillness. The struggle and or the dance is seek out this idiosyncratic balance is what I call a Chicano style. Finding a personal balance between two competing intrapersonal truths and offering that awareness as a contribution to an interpersonal existence. Most healthy cultures have a similar system. 

I think there is something revealing about the mestizo attitude that encourages gravitation towards pain. My pride in a Nuevomexicano (Mexican-American) heritage gives me the bedrock to let my pain filled experiences flow right into a humility that my elders prepared me for. Hard work is the place where pain goes to be planted, beads of sweat cool the tempers, releasing tears dripped from the grief, hydrating my seeds of passion. Seeds of passion that were fanatic in my childhood and adolescence. Seeds of passion that were economic and political in my early adulthood. Maybe the social justice curiosity is how I have learned to deal with my pain.  Social injustice is the way for my pain to be externalized. How I approach the externalized is how I feel I will heal the internal. If I let the greedy American infuriate me with their disregard for my heritage or perceived dignities then I cannot learn about the defenses of those material imbalances of land, water, money, laws, comforts, rights, or culture. This is where my faith guides me into paradox. The greedy American is in pain, and maybe more pain than me. Their insatiability is the strategy they’ve learned to rely on to ease their pain. I have that same insatiability in me. The paradox is seeing myself as a greedy Chicano, while also defending myself from the toxicity of the greed American. My peace of mind has to be found through the hard fight of treating my inner insatiable and building up a harmonious internal sense of enough. Then bring this feature to existence in the form of a Chicano ofrenda to my immediate world. 

I understand that my romance with pain, gave me the emotional state to write interestingly, at least to me.  And at least it felt more interesting as I revisit it.  Now I just feel the paradox. The fire that pain once lit, is now more of an irritating burn. I have found joy in the mediocre.  I can’t write like I used to. I often feel like my thought process is analogous to a cows digestive system. I chew the same topics, swallow, digest, absorb, regurgitate, and bite a few more blades of tragedy.  It doesn’t feel as poetic and color filled as it once did,

when I was closer to my pain. I think that balance is easier to choose than preference.  My emotions aren’t as contrasting, making it harder to find the momentum to write. With acceptance comes comfort. I haven’t learned to write from comfort.

I wonder if this is a type liminal space that might help with saying goodbye to this world.  Does balance fit with acceptance?  Is acceptance an illusion that is really just expressing the condition of being option-less.  I once relied so much on my grandparents.  I relied so much on mothering from, of course Mom, and fortunately my Aunts.  I felt such hurt from the lost or missed time with an attentive father. And yet I had the attention of loving people,  I found perspectives that highlighted my pain and that I nestled up to. My pain was a fuel for my movement, pain was my rhythm.

I am losing my family and friends. I think this would bring on a sadness that I think I would channel into these perceptions to propagate the same outlets.  I’m not sad in the same ways.  I am a sad that feels as if it skipped straight to acceptance.  I am curious about my comfort with solitude.  What is it about balance that allows for an apparent comfort for being alone.  My life still feels meaningful but equally it is definitely feeling less certain.  I still want to live.

Life is still teaching me.

You can’t assassinate closeminded-ness, only heal it

 As much as I have worked through hate for Donald Trump I have not reached the depths of wanting him to suffer.  An attempt on his life was made.  A young adult, perched himself on a rooftop overlooking the event space for a Trump rally.  While Donald was performing, the young man took aim and fired a long distance rifle shot. The young boy unleashed the next round of spectacle and delivered tragedy and disappointment on us.  He has doused the flames of discontent with more malice.  I look back at the event and see how its chaos is a good reflection point for me.

What happens next will inform us about who we are?  I’d like to spend time on the we in question being the us as a country, but I am stuck on the we as a political mechanism.  I hope there is humanism in the situation.  I hope I am surprised by Donald’s responses.  I hope I am surprised by the sympathy that comes from our civic leadership.  I am ready to work through the opposite and typical bipartisan extremes.  I wonder how we will reflect on the symptom of violence as a preferential response to disagreement.  I am expecting the typical marketing spin, immature exploitation of the circumstances, the propagandizing of it, and the lack of curiosity for how we continue to rely on ending each other.

It seems appropriate to start with myself, for retrospect.  When I first heard that he was shot at, I didn’t believe it. That quickly transitioned to skepticism that it was likely staged. Then as more reliable sources were reporting on it, I felt shame for my own lack of sympathy for the man.  I feel disappointed that I didn’t have a strong sense of concern for his security.  I am asked to love my enemy, and this revealed to me that I have not evolved in this area of my faith.  I am ashamed that I even felt some feelings of redemption for all the asinine things he’s said and done.

I don’t want him as my President. I do want him humbled.  I do wish him justice for the hurts he has caused and I do compassionately feel that he deserves love.  Without letting go the anger and disappointment for who Donald has been, I can hold lightly the humanistic love for him and the suffering he must thrive in to have motivated a young man to hunt him down.  May I grow from my shortcomings and may we all analyze our responses.  My work is to enhance how I we see my enemies.

Immigrating Without Borders

    As a child, approaching adolescence,  I immigrated from Albuquerque’s city life to a quieter Santa Fe.  Santa Fe is 50 some odd miles north of Albuquerque along the Camino Rael; the same byways of the original Spanish colonizers.  Santa Fe is the town of my formative years.  The place where I walked lonesome afternoons on the beaten paths through its arroyos, until I warmed up to the other curious meanderers.  In meandering I found amigos, carnales that passed the time filled childhood afternoons in similars ways as me. Santa Fe became a place where I would rush my homework after school to maximize the day light I had to play pick up basketball, baseball, and football with the barrio kids.  The desert mountain refuge that allowed me to ride my tank of a street bike on seemingly endless dirt trails, winding through chamisa fields and piñon tree mazes.  It was in hind sight a major blessing because it shrunk my bad influences.

    Santa Fe is the mountain town that can move, when necessary, with a city’s pace.  Santa Fe in the 1980’s was a place that gave me an expanded understanding of New Mexico’s lifestyles.  It also opened my eyes to people of different cultures.  Santa Fe gave me more opportunities to see integrated spaces than Albuquerque.  It is also a city that has lived up to its slogan, “the city different”, and is even more different now as I see through middled age eyes.  The streets are nearly the same.  The buildings mostly familiar.  The smells resurrect youthful memories.  The people, the ambiance, the attitude are all impactfully different.  The most accurate way of describing this feeling is to say that I am an outsider in a place I once felt I belonged to. 

    I don’t want to write with a victim mindset, and I want to honor the observations I feel now.  The home I knew is tainted.  And I understand that what I may find tainted, others obviously find evolved.  As I walk through the plaza area, I recognize how it is no longer functional.  It isn’t a downtown as much as it is a historic Disney-like playground for touring Texans.  I have to be more accurate and share that Santa Fe’s tourists are clearly comprised of so many more populations than Texans, but this hurt I feel resonates through that mild prejudice towards Texans.  I think it points to the privileged hypocrisy of legislating against Brown culture in its impoverished form but romanticizing its Southwestern spin.  It might be disgust for the best of both worlds they epitomize where they get to despise most immigrant Mexican people and vacation in New Mexican quaint culture sanitized of anything truely New Mexican other than a traditional meal here or there.  Santa Fe has grown into a tourist destination.  

    Of course it is both and.  Many state government offices are nearby and the national hot spot is a gold mine for tourist dollars.  I am talking about New Mexican functional.  I am talking about the New Mexico Rael not the New Mexico True.  I cannot see New Mexican faces.  Even when I think I am seeing New Mexican faces they are really Mexicano faces.  I am writing about this evolution as a way of understanding that the culture and conditions I have aren’t anything I should think I can persist.  The New Mexico I was raised in is going away.  I am proud of belonging to this fading flavor of humankind.  

    I come to this conclusion after some small experiences as an adult.  I can’t know what Santa Fe was like for adults when I was a child and so maybe New Mexico as I know it isn’t going away, it is possible that I am going away.  Regardless I recall this itchy event that sits in my mind.  

    I walk into a distillery.  This distillery is in a renovated part of the city that used to be an empty Rail area.  It used to be a shortcut into downtown at the furthest part of south downtown Santa Fe.  This place is trendy.  It looks like what I remember Denver being.  It is decorated with modern  everything.  The place is nearly empty and I enjoy a pour of a craft gin.  After around 2.5 hours of work, I don’t need another gin, but I also find it surprising how I have not been asked if I needed anything.  I let this observation simmer as coincidence and chalk up the poor service to bad timing.  I rationalize away my typical feelings of being discriminated.  And some of it is that a part of me appreciated being left alone.

    Then my girlfriend arrives and I note the place has filled with happy hour customers.  The wait staff that I encountered are the same people, but entirely different personalities.  I walk to get some water from a water station and look around noticing the people who have filled the front area.  I stand curiously and scan each face.  I gradually have an awareness and some level of feeling stunned.  I am socially disoriented because every patron is Anglo.  I have a surreal feeling of being a visitor.  Not only a visitor but a nuisance because now I have that long lingering self-doubt that lies to me and says mentally that I don’t fit in here.

    I had just come off the mountain and I was not matching the implied dress code.  I quickly speculate that this must be why I’m ignored and the service sucks.  I was in comfortable bottoms, a non-matching mid layer sweater, hat hair, and tennis shoes.  I made a second round of rationalization, and I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe the wait staff did appreciate how I was so casual.  Then a group of scraggly, un-groomed, tennis shoe and torn jean wearing anglos sat at the table next to me and my partner.  I note that they now get the attention of 2 servers.  

    I could no longer do the injustice to myself and realize that it may not be discrimination but the Santa Fe that embraced me is not on this side of town.  I could write another couple of hours taking some emotional ownership for what happened to me in this brief encounter with the city of my youth.  I save that for another day.  I think more importantly I have to continue to see these American refugees as finding a quieter and nourishing place, just like my mom and I back in the 80’s.

    Santa Fe the landscape is not very different and Santa Fe the people are being inundated by the afflicted and possibly fatigued American Rat Racer.  I understand that being aware of the classism this has and continues to create will likely be something I can only write about because hanging on to a New Mexico that resembles me is my romance ready to be steamed rolled by modernization.  I don’t recognize this Santa Fe, and like its gin I am only a recipe derived from its local ingredients, and susceptible to mixing with a variety of ingredients from all over the globe.  I grieve the Santa Fe that raised me, and I learn to be hopeful despite the perceive expulsion. 

Feliz Dia del Doctor Rey

On my favorite holiday, I’d like to revisit some words from Saint King Jr.  Without getting into the details or context of this prompt, let me answer his simple question.  What is my life’s blueprint?   I have years of contemplation.  I have sat with plenty of emotions to stir the heart and force me to consider my constitution.  So as much as I want to get lost in this question I am going to try and keep it simple.

When building a structure most projects begin with a design.  The analogy implies we start life with a plan.  And I didn’t, that I know of.  The vision of my structure changes frequently.  My blueprint is not a design of what I hope my life can be, but who I have maintained to be.

 

Who I am maintaining is respectful of who I have been and who I still have an opportunity to shape.  The three core principles Dr King Jr mentions are belief in self, excellence through achievement, and being beautiful.  I cannot say that these qualities have always been apart of my design.  At times I have not had any of these.  These times are rare.  A majority of my life has been holding some of these in scope, and when the spirit finds me, I have all three. 

I am worthy of kindness.  I have learned to add self-valuation slowly.  I grew it out of a desperation to be extraordinary, with the paradoxical balance of knowing I can disappear.  I know the unit of measure here is dignity.  When I think about this quality in terms of who I am, I think it is in believing that I am worthy of kindness.  I think understanding that my appearance might default stereotypically as brown and suspicious; more as a young adult.  Now as I grey, I feel it is tapering and I might be seen more as older.  I have a history of vetting perceptions.  I have learned to function out of a self-concept that forces me to minimize comparison and rely on competency.  I don’t necessarily shine, but I am durable.  I am not invincible, but I will often be impactful.

 

I would like to thank Dr King for helping me to appreciate, once again, the need to achieve.  After an early childhood rooted in aspiration and accolades, in middle adulthood I resisted greatness.  I thought this was a vice.  I can now reframe the idea of achievement as a dignified excellence.  I have a grounding in a family filled with athletes who taught me to practice.  I had a grandpa who said, “measure 2 times, and cut once.”  When impatient he would bark with a New Mexican accent, “Do it right, or don’t do it all”.  Practice helped me understand that being good is only a doorway, stepping into the room and finding the next entrance is diligence.  Practice means learning something so that it can be repeated with quality.  I don’t mix in aspirations or trophies with this understanding of achievement . I think I measure my experiences with the unit of measure of dignity.  The accomplishment is what Dr king might describe as the beauty in my soul.  My blueprint helps me have an endearing appearance, or how I have learned to see my soul.  I don’t check my status as a human, and this helps me practice the first quality and have self-belief.

 

My faith has engrained a communal orientation.  My blueprint is for building a person that must contribute to the greater good of all.  This is key piece to my blueprint.  Dr King frames this as being beautiful. Throughout my life I had the Catholic voices of the profound in my minds ear.  This is a call to sow beauty.  Since the unit of measure is dignity, beauty is not aesthetic, it is nutritious.  The façade is unnecessary, in favor of a soul that inspires.  I was raised in a family that treated me as beautiful.  This allows me to understand how I can steward others.  

I am under construction.  I am still a work in progress.  I am remembering that during the project I must take my eye off the prize and look at the blueprints.

I am not as shiny as Saint Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and I am learning to be just as soundly constructed. 

 

Disappointment, shame, and other vitamins and minerals of the soul

 I came across some emotions as I learned about a family member who shared how they payed for a cleaning service.  Disappointment surfaced in me in a way that I realize is not healthy.  And I know the feeling is an essential aspect to my human experience, a real response from the bowels of my limbic system.  A gut feeling.  I am irritated by the idea that people chose not maintain and clean their home and delegating this life chore to a sub class of people.  I judge and cannot unsee this as an irresponsible act of paying another person to clean me as “serviceable”.  I know this is a judgment on my part, and the pain this concept creates in me is a reminder of the idea that my grandmother’s brilliance was distracted and her creative vibrance was derailed by the irresponsibility of a class of people who lured her away from aspiration, to clean their messes.  Not only to clean their messes, but to clear time so they could find luxurious activities, selfishly satiating their lives.  Is this fair of me to surface these darker emotions.

I don’t want to create shame,  I know the effects of shame and I know how it cannot be synthesized by our hearts.  And it is still useful.  In holding on to this paradox of shame and its utility, I find that it might be a vitamin to our soul.  Something essential to our growth but equally something that cannot be absorbed by us, our bodies.  This is a seed for meditation.

Shame does not seem to be a condition that should be transferred, and even the idea of sharing it might need to be avoided, in favor of transcendence.  The root of all soulful vitamins might be to dissolve the compounds and bonds of trauma, pain, and grief to release the healing, their nutritious cathartic energy of grace.

The healing is mine.  The healing is loving through the disappointment.  The cathartic energy is being able to transcend the paradoxical encounter of shame and the moment, so that I love the other in front of me, before I resort to shaming.
 

Pedagogy of the Mestizo

I want to teach my culture to and with those who appreciate the legacy of heritage.  I did not understand, in my own proverbial backyard, there is an organized and professional way to learn to do this. Through my understanding of Chicano Studies I did not consider that I might contribute my own self-labeled Chicano journey to this program.  Me, as a young learner, treated knowledge as preparation for a trade.  University sowed the ideas of discovery into my mind, growing an authority, allowing me to share knowledge beyond a career.  My maturity and hardship inspired me to transcend my learning into a creative service through counseling. I am once again sharpening my learning, hoping to sharpen my contribution to my communities by giving back an organized and vetted perspective on what created me.  I feel very unworthy and know what Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and New Mexico did to me is worth researching and replicating.   

I spent hours with people seeking care for behavioral, lifestyle, and relationship healing.  They were looking for answers to miseries, as if they didn't have the answers intrinsically, at minimum nearby, or even with the possibility that an answer didn't exist yet.  I have a background in counseling, and strong desire to shrink the social gaps mestizo communities are closing.  I have a desire to turn this tour of duty in Albuquerque’s social battle for wellness into an ethnography.  I learned that communal wellness through the vocation of counseling alleviates individual relationships.  Now, I’d like to transcend those individual experiences into a map of patterns for the potential of healing groups, through ideas.  I would like to contribute concepts for healing where in counseling I felt I was providing a smaller step, maybe relief. 

I find counseling, when done well, addresses the ways we are perceiving that we are not lovable.  And it might be important to quickly note that there are mental health diseases and dysfunctions that can't be reasoned away using this understanding. By reducing my mental health training down to working through a few hard knox lessons in self-love, I am not trying to minimize or overlook any forms of medically based modalities. I am trying to address the more humanistic and collective experiences with hardship.  The common pain-filled angsts troubling populations that need support and attention but not necessarily the clinical treatments and prescriptions, are opportune topics for research. 

I would like to present or describe how Love, as a cultural trait, is an essential nutrient for agency.  Cultures that build agency into their pedagogy know how to heal and thrive.  Love orientates us towards harmony. Harmony in a communal form is culture done well.  Culture done well becomes heritage, and defining “well” is what I hope to discover.  I want to explore and map the Love qualities found in my mestizo heritage.

The mental health field is a vocational way of contributing attributes of wellness to a community and it is not my preference for pedagogy.  Through my introspection and discernment on how and what could help me grow into the man the world might need, God might expect, and most importantly who my grandma invested in, I realized the ultimate pedagogy was in the modesty of their lives.  A lifestyle of civic duty, religious loyalty, resourceful sustainability, communal dependence, and within a lower class.  I want to share this pedagogy.  

I want others to know that learning does not necessarily mean having to split atoms.  I want to share that learning to be communal might be just as world changing as putting a rocket into space.  The modesty of the New Mexican is overshadowed by the provocative celebrity of the brilliant jet setter.  The meritocratic modalities should not be the only orientations that we have to offer our learners.  What I hope the Chicano Studies program can challenge me to do is organize my desire to package lessons of modesty, mostly in the form of love, into a curriculum of culture.

I am curious about integrating my analytical skills, mental health training, and passion for the stewardship of my heritage's traditions.  I want to focus this curiosity on finding patterns for cultural wellness. I want to participate in the ethnography of my New Mexican lifestyle by leveraging it as a case study for this exact pattern seeking.  I want to explore this ethnography through the Chicano lens.  The Chicano lens gives me the closest prescribed vision to articulate and set scope for what heritage means for me. I align with the perplexities brought out by the Chicano movement, particularly the identity struggle, civic stewardship, and a intellectual potential for shaping Latin communities.

   

I am talking about treating these identified patterns as medicinal qualities.  I want to re-align learning with culture in a way that brings agency to traditions being overshadowed. I want to align our recent ancestral traditions with contemporary tools not to regress in lifestyle but to enhance the mestizo gaps in cultural authority.  I want to contribute to this legacy in peer reviewed and criticized ways.  I want to orientate some mindsets so we are staring into the heart of healing by suggesting cultural medicines. 

That brings me to this request.  I want a formal platform for describing or shaping these patterns in a way that can mature them into something presentable.  I aspire to validate the patterns of humanistic traits expressed through a unique Latin flavor.  I want to contribute to the legacy of Mestizo minds.  I hope to learn how to teach the human experience through a topic that provides more familiar and intimate pedagogy for peoples of Spanish Mexican origins.  I want to learn to write my ideas so that the qualities  found in my modest family systems can be packaged as reliable.

And with this I put one small step towards an education in Chicanismo.

Morbid Manipulation

 I have been keeping up with the conflicts around the world as reminders for living simply and humbly as a small token towards shrinking my culpability in these global conditions.  As I have been staying aware of the Palestinian struggle, I came across a synchronous intersect between my trauma interests and insight into the Arab injustices being morbidly manipulated to fuel a long lived punishment of Palestinian communities.  I felt it important to clear a little space on my small soapbox to contribute to the algorithm.  I have a Palestinian bias knowing that being against Israeli policies is not being against Jewish peoples.  I also understand that taking sides is not what is needed in this complicated situation. But collaboration is.  I can only grow more aware of what I can do to shrink injustice understanding balance has a formidable opponents.