My Snow Globe Has Chemtrails

I have found a newer sense of love.  My role as a father is shrinking, shifting, and at the same time I know it will never go away or the concern lessen.  And even on the other spectrum of love I find romance also feels more fluid.  I find myself having to spend less and less time with the loves that seem to linger.  It is more like cherishing what remains of those experiences,despite knowing I can't touch them today.  Hopefully, I'm cherishing these apparent memories, tattooed, and hopefully not scarred.  I am appreciative of this reminiscence because it reinforces that when you fully understand loves nature, love tells us that it isn't lost or gone.  Lost lovers are actually gone, friends can leave, people can die, but the love they shared with me is still embedded in my psychology.  Relationships die, perplexingly leaving me without a cadaver to mourn.  We as a culture tend to focus on what is lost mistaking those things for love itself.  What a disservice to think love can die.  Love is! Love is not the plane dusting a blank blue sky.  Love is the chemical reaction waiting, preparing, combusting, cooling, dissipating, and redistributing all the molecules in way that they can love again.  My little snow globe has chemtrails and they very well can be vapor too.

Self Isolating in solitude

Hello World!

As a programmer this used be the beginning of a new lesson in a language I was introduced to.  It may be equally valid today.  I am learning a language called social distancing.  We are in a pandemic.  There is a virus that is highly transmittable, fatal for the vulnerable, and incurable at the time I'm writing this.  And because of the uncertainty of how this can incapacitate a medical system, the world, my city, and my community are practicing social distancing. 

I love it.  I have noticed how the simplicity that isolation, self quarantine, or what I might reframe as gifted solitude, liberates me from the obligations that modern living teases me with.  My introvert is nurtured.  I am respectful of the anxiety of being alone can create.  I am around plenty of loved ones to feel fulfilled.  I get plenty of fresh air to feel replenished.  I have plenty of funds and resources to feel sustained.  I rarely leaned into luxuries and not even my coffee skills help me feel like I haven't even lost my gourmet caffeine addiction.  I feel blessed amid this tragedy.  

I walked into my daughter's rooms and straddled the thresholds to their entrances and asked them to recall the book we read together at bedtime about Anne Frank.  I invited them to put into perspective the  juxtaposition with what we are living and what she might have had to.  I asked them to consider how much more extreme her conditions where.  I asked them because I recognize how far worse the plague of human ignorance can be.  I respect the cosmic existence of this virus.  I take time to visit the through segments reported on the realities of this virus' bite.

I try and sympathize with the sadness that COVID-19 brings to families.  I work really hard to transcend the politics around health care, the economy, and partisanship.  I am glad I feel encouraged to write in these times.  I want the World to know that quarantine can be a gift of solitude, and paradoxically I respect how antagonizing being forced to turn off your human connections can be.  I am grateful to my ex-wife for loving so deep at one point in my life, it forced me to suffer the loneliness that I feel gives me to fortitude to appreciate the isolation I am asked to practice now.  I am reminded of my grandmother, reminiscing on how she would tell me that she was happiest in her home.

My grandma, I am beginning to understand how home is joy, and isolation is not so much a restriction but a gift of solitude.

Traditions that Misbehave - Part 2

As a forming adolescent, I built up my identity through a process, taking my cultural loyalty, bathing it in popular trends, and measuring it against the Anglo experience.  Unaware, of how often I was comparing myself, I took my class, my deficits, and especially my talents, measured them to peers.  I began to realize how my behavior shaped my actions.  This shaped my identities and attitudes.  I compared without accounting for the limited exposure I had to social advancements.  I'm arriving at the understanding that measuring doesn't need to happen.  I somberly feel the grief from prejudice and limits created by gaps revealed through measuring.  Comparing is futile. My little splash in the world cannot compare to the evolution of the accomplished colonial and metropolitan cultures.  My local New Mexico grown modest upbringing has to be its own experience, not a juxtaposition rather synthesis with progression.  Policy has to nourish this orientation, and policy appears to be driving it further into competition.

I feel more complemented by Anglo encounters than I do dejected.  The dejection is the result of the comparison.  I am not naively ignoring moments of prejudice, ethnic slants, or bigotry.  I think the realization that I don't have to be acceptable, qualified, or valid to some idealistic American identity, allows me to be more accepting, appreciative, and honored to have the modesty and simplicity of my barrio life.  A life that was often defenseless to the symptoms of poverty.  These symptoms usually are assigned as misbehaviors.  Some are disparaging, like burglary, drug dealing, violence, and delinquency.  Others are overlooked.  These are the most painful. These include the embedded self-doubt, academic aversion, and perceptions of cultural inferiority.  With these I can be an agency for change, then there are those that I cannot.

Between these less malicious byproducts of ethnic integration are the more aggressive misbehaviors.  I think my fear and pain balloon and accentuate the hurt from the more prominent consequences of Anglo migration.  The partiality of rules and laws that hide prejudice and bigotry are the most itchy.  The artful usage of political policy in ways that create enough ambiguity to conceal the ethnic convenience that favor the historic oppression that came with European colonialism.  Some policies that have a vague but in my opinion certain quality of prejudice are voting districts, law enforcement, welfare as promoted as handouts and hypocritically welfare disguised as subsidies, the commodification of education and health care, and taxation.  Each of these policies are expressed with a language that allows for interpretation that the privileged culture can evade a definite label or quality of discrimination.  These malicious strategies confuse the synthesis of cultures, because aspiration seems often too one directional, and that direction is intended to keep a power dynamic teetering towards the Anglo way.

I no longer aspire to be as functional as the Anglo culture can be perceived or might expect.  I see today that this direction and process lures me to see my traditions as misbehaving.  My traditions need to evolve and be refactored, so they become effective again.  My traditions no longer seem to shape and energize my culture.  Chicano traditions are not meant to be religious and repetitive experiences that symbolize an idea, but an exercise that cause me to experience the idea.  Traditional misbehavior is when I lose the responsibility for the idea and allow myself to focus on the ceremony of a tradition, knowing better, knowing the ceremony is ephemeral.  I see what a disservice it is to rely on traditions as way to deal with the grief of not being valued.  This traditional misbehavior results in too many spectators and the atrophy of investors.  The performance of the ceremony then replaces the effect of the tradition.

My lifestyle's culture is part tradition, morality, inferiority, tragedy, principle, faith, and love.  In society, community, nations, or other formal groups of people we have moralities that differ, and competing is a trend I hope to break in favor of collaboration.

Traditions that Misbehave - Part 1

By working through the emotions caused by the current divisions in this country and the disdain for our president, I am given the blessing of addressing my judgment, anger, and distress over the president's policies.  All peoples, cultures, all heritages misbehave.  I see an opportunity to  recognize how our heritages flourish.  The aspect of my life that I have not spent much time writing about is the collaboration of cultures.  The joy I get from learning and integrating my traditions with other's.  Nationalism and tribalism distract me from celebrating the enrichment that I get to see daily.
Nationalists seem to thrive on comparison, championing, and disenfranchisement.  The whole psychology of the American policy appears to be using some idealized Christian morality to disguise a contradictory attitude towards other nation's resources and their peoples.  The interesting aspect of morality is the convenience that American corporations have designed into rules, governing, and terms by which they are asked to behave.  The idealistic or romantic idea of America is the hard working, early bird, enduring hardship through their faithful work ethic, getting beat down by bureaucracies, and coming out on top.  They tend to leave out the more typical foot in the door, good ole boy, scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, pay to play, big fish eat little fish, resulting in near monopolistic and oligarchical markets.  The later is never considered a misbehavior.  Its often labeled good business, the nature of the beast.  This is what privilege might look like.  And America might be some blend of the ideal and the real.
Where it gets complicated for me is the introduction of policies that seem to accentuate the ethnocentric beliefs.  What seems unfair on my part is the categorization of America's founders and their descendants into an Anglo category.  At some point in history Europeans were griping and slicing the abuse of comforts and preferences of a privileged class.  The early European-American migrant tribes were not homogeneous but segregated by traditions, even divided by their preferred understanding of Jesus Christ.  What united them was not their morality but their cooperation and communal harmony.  This same social interdependence served to protect their foreign lifestyle.  They were foreign, vulnerably leaning into indigenous and other foreigners, migrating to be liberated, before their descendants grew to be possessive and colonial.
I now understand how this scenario is playing out in my life. I am the hypocritical, possibly better labeled perplexing, American, the colonized colonizer, and more proximal the assimilating.
The statements that come from this man, inspire me to accept how other people who share his mindset likely see me, despite not being illegal, Mexican, or from a foreign country.  I am New Mexican and I inherit aspects of a few different mindsets, traditions, and culture.  I look brown, rarely Anglo, and surely at times suspect.  Yet I am from a culture that he likely categorizes as Mexican or at least doesn't have the interest in exploring the nuances, compounded by the prejudicial rhetoric.  This feels like an injustice.  I can finally resolve that it hurts to the point of sadness.

I am not a foreigner in my region, the people who resemble me are often seen as misbehaving, and a large enough portion of Anglo Americans aren't interested in who or how we are unique.  I'm visiting these perceptions of me and mi barrios.  I wonder how often enough Anglo take the time to understand the subtle differences between their own heritages, foreign qualities, and misbehavior.  I am curious about how much the American perplexity for being nationally secure is a way to protect their privilege and ability to live by their own value systems, faith, and mindsets.  How much of the desire for security is actually hiding prejudice?  How this man speaks about people who are not from his traditions helps me to practice the patience that my traditions require of me.

I remember how passionate and reactive I used to be around racial discussions.  I no longer recognize these topics as racial but as prejudicial, preferential, or tribal.  I see my Anglo brethren as evolving through their legacies and human experiences.  I still believe that many people still respond and function with the concept of race being differentiating and hierarchical.  I celebrate that I no longer feel motivated by this foolish facade.  So as I start to see other traditions begin or continue to misbehave, I am called to galvanize and calibrate my own wisdom about how to be well behaved in my traditions.

July Joy

I'm writing after a small layoff.  Over a year has past since I lost a close a friend, my loyal buddy Duke, and most hurtfully my grandmother.  I write in a political climate that is roaring with white privilege, saturated with bigotry, and the gradual wear and tear of prejudice.  This all seems like dilemmas I would have passionately bit into.  I no longer feel this social angst.  Not to say I am pain free, and to surely declare that I am filling with joy.  I'm writing with a full heart.

I am writing rejuvenated.  As life appears to be entering its second half for me, I recognize that pain is not an absolute enemy.  I am painful in this moment and still joyful, as if mastering some form of emotional active recovery, still emoting intensely yet at a pace, a tempo that allows for deep inhales of joy.  I look forward to the new ways life will invite me to grown through pain.  I also know paradoxically I need to learn to celebrate with the momentum of joy.

Where life seemed to be like an uphill climb, I'm now learning to keep my self from spilling over too, as the joyful bursts of painlessness bring an exciting pace that pulls me downhill, times feeling out of control.  Since pain is constant, yet its intensity variable, I describe myself as pain-ing, and suffer-ing.  This is a choice that seemed like the only option for an impressionable man navigating a divorce, single parenting, broken hearts, and emotional immaturity.  With that choice is another choice and those are not the only options because I feel capable of joy-ing, celebrate-ing, and navigating foreign plans.  I miss you "my grandma".  Duke, you'd likely snap at our new little guy Mikko.  He listens like you.

Did wanting to leave mean you wanted to be forgotten

Tomorrow marks a year that a close friend left his human experience and is now onto his next one.  He left too soon...for me.  He was dark and twisted, wrapped up in an understanding that was joyful.  He was the most loving angry friend I've ever experienced.  He drank too much, and on purpose.  He drank to forget, he might have drank to be able to remember, and he surely drank to die.  I tried to be there for him at every turn.  I failed him as his cries for help, in the form of cynicism and helplessness, repulsed me in a way that kept me from sharing in his pain. 

I worked so hard to learn to heal, especially with empathy, compassion and interest.  In this loving friendship I failed.  I couldn't heal him.  I couldn't endure the pain that tortured him.  I hear his voice in my thoughts.  I hope to never understand the pain that kept him from fulfilling his role as a dad, a husband, and a friend.  I am writing selfish and raw because I miss him.

It would have been interesting to see him grow old.  And maybe he did, spiritually.  Learning to say goodbye is the horizon, but using hello is still happening too.  This is why we have to live with the idea that "Life is Hard"  Viviendo es duro! Loving is too.

La Margie

When it's over, I want to say all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world

Mary Oliver
When Death Comes

Oh Margie!  Oh my grandma.  You said hello so lovingly, it makes saying goodbye impossible.  I don't know how to capture you perfectly, especially in words. It's also impossible.  I speak as if you're still listening.  I hope you are.  I trust you are.  I have faith you are.  I want to say how much you meant to us, but words can't capture that.  There is nothing I can say that can bring to life the way you'd inspire me to do the right thing. 

I can talk about how you put so much effort into each meal, each corrido, or each story you told. I can't speak enough about how you never let much go to waste, the last spoonful of beans, a corner piece of tortilla, a left handed glove who lost its right hand partner, "gett-a-hots" commodity rice, and the list could extend for hours.  It seems surface to share how principled you'd be like returning every missed call,, creasing your sheets just right, ironing handkerchiefs,  and every household chore perfected.  I can say you spoiled me!  Especially with care and convenience, but it doesn't do your ability to care justice because if we look deep enough you were a Nobel prize winning abuelita, if they had a category for Mothering, you be running away with it.  If they had a Pulitzer for Care, it would be yours.  I feel like you spoiled me, and when I look at how you loved the recipe is that you spoiled all of us. 

You taught me about life without a single lecture, and never asked for anything but for me to be safe...and you did always ask me to clean my room.

I want to describe how you made such a difference in my life, but there isn't a way to paint how your presence could be so comforting. I can only share how you created a home where we all could fall asleep anywhere.  You shared your life in way that was profound with goodwill.  You gave us all a chance to feel loved, cherished, and teased us all into believing we were each your favorite.  You were our biggest fan. 

I praise the life you lived, and I know the only way to genuinely do that is to practice being your best parts, every day. 

You said good bye so slowly.  It still hurts today.  As strong as I feel I can be, remembering you, causes me to fold into tears, like I did when I couldn't sleep over.  Tonight I'm yearning to be in my makeshift bed, at foot of your's, watching grandpa take a knee to pray.  He misses you!  And I do too!

Que Lastima

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