The Shadow of Cultura

Am I ready to take a step towards accepting my daughters's independence?  If so, then my writing is now directed at me.  I think my opportunities to feed their ideas and mold them will be expressed differently, more passively.  Their lives are now more in their hands than in mine.  And I transition effort into accepting their choices, support their growth, and encourage an adventurous attitude.  In a more significant way, I feel I am freeing them from my biases and any obligation to my value system.

They will never experience the same culture I did.  They will need contemporary tools that will help them learn to be productive people in their culture.  They will reflect and fall back on the wisdom every generation seems to.  But not because of culture, more because of the human and innate ability to seek healing.  I like to say seeking God, the Divine, the Complete, the everlasting fountain.  Maybe even going as far to say as common as all organisms.  Mi jitas, they will face their own social, ethnic, and interpersonal dilemmas.  They may not need to call themselves Chicanas.

I don't value culture in the same ways I used to.  It means something different.  It isn't worth the same to me either.  It is just as important as ever.  It holds a different meaning for me.  It is beautiful and invasive, a paradox.  Culture is a facade established possibly, in a poetical way, to give the soul a face, and the ego fists.  It makes me sad and endeared.  I am curious what is in store for the New Mexican culture.  What will my young ladies call themselves?

What do I call myself?

I am a Latino, with a Chicano lifestyle, from the northern region of New Mexico.  After a history of identity crises, I stand poetically looking down into a menacing canyon, with the sun in my eyes, preparing to shed all the conveniences that have come with belonging to a group of people, land, religion, foods, culture.  I am practicing being real with myself, more fully human.  For much of my life I have felt obligated "to be", maybe more, "to be...long".  I am a collection of labels.

I am changing, always, yet in some aspect solidifying. With the changes in perspective I am also writing differently.  I feel ready to write about the limits, embarrassment, shame, and contradictions that come with applied culture.  It feels complicated having to grow up "brown".  I'll share what I feel has become generationaly irresponsible.  I want to capture in idea the hardship of having clung to a community built on oppressing, and eventually having to cry out oppressed.  I want to tell me, my Chicano story.

The term Chicano has so many meanings.  It doesn't have a quantitative nature.  It is an identity, a philosophy, a movement, a religion, and what ever the person needs it to be.  It has its traditions, conservatives, haters, and abusers.  Chicano in my writing will be the culture I know as the following:

Being labeled a radical American citizen having a consquistador's heritage, while believing I am seen as lower, asked to be accountable, yet perceived with less privilege, a revolutionary without country.

I was born human, nurtured like a villager, raised to be Christian, and taught to be American as translated by a bunch of New Mexicans, a bunch of Chicanos.  With this I can write my story.

Letting Love

I've shared my thoughts through writing, as a way of organizing discoveries I want to share with my daughters.  I have been conflicted by the results of my writing. My writing at times, seems more like an orderless rant. I re-read old entries and see a passive aggressive expression.  Other times, it seems like therapy.  I was hoping for some legacy.  I've watched my writing evolve with the mutation of my thought patterns and emotional synthesis.  

My writinghas had a life cycle.  The mutation feels a lot like the fine tuning of wisdom.  This forum started out sad and grew into resentful.  As I learned more about love and my vulnerability, my acceptance expanded.  Relationships inspired me.  The mistakes made in love, despite feeling genuine, helped me develop a stomach for self correction.   That became the emotional synthesis

The synthesis of emotions feels a lot like self acceptance.  I finally see myself as intelligent, but without a need to teach.  I have reached a point to where my learning isn't as competitive.  My learning is growing passionately.  I don't have a message for my daughters like I used to.  God has blessed me with the luxury of being an example more than a parent.  This stage of my writing will be an effort to write, not to my daughters, but to me.

I am capable of loving and accepting the opportunities to be loved.  I don't always receive love.  But Love doesn't ask to be received because love cannot be rejected.  The ego, the surviving pieces of me, and the judging part of me thought I could control who I allowed to love me.  I see now how love waits.  Love does not creep, solicit, or pester.  Love might invite.  Love might peek.  Love doesn't always have perfect timing, but love doesn't get tired.  So I see how love from me and for me, doesn't die.

How much love is there?

Love leads me to passionate topics.  Love has inspired me to be naked of unnecessary identities. Examples of this include how my views on race, they are being overshadowed by the emphasis on heritage.  My fear of not belonging is being cradled by solitude.  My guilt and shame are trusted allies, treasonously providing intelligence for what my shadow hides from me.  I may not be worthy to write about love, but I am worthy of writing about the love in me.

Disease in Homeostasis Clothing

I take words that agitate me and let them burn my thoughts, grind against my morals, weigh on my principles.  It is that beautiful agitation.  The agitation that feels like God just woke me at 5:15 a.m., nearing a winter dawn and asks me to go for a run. It is cold, mind you, its January.  The kind of beautiful that inspires just enough anger to be grumpy, but enough love to be meaningful.  The word Homeostasis does that for me.

Homeostasis has entered my mind through conversations about what is normal, and in particular what is acceptable behavior.  Normal and stable are often used as calibration tools.   Normal carries a stigma for being what is accepted.  

I have grown to embrace the unique.  Even further the radical.  Naturally radical is even more seductive for me.  Technologically radical would be an opposite extreme and un-favored for its mutative tendency.  Technology has shown me a divisive quality in the colonial world.  I see it as becoming luxury.  Luxury in my opinion is not natural.  So homeostasis in nature carries over for me in behavior. 

When I think of homeostasis, I think of it as an orientation towards or away from a state.  I can also see it as a condition.  It can also be dangerous when it becomes a perspective.  It is surely not a position.  It is the state when my wits, effects, or faculties are moving into or near active recovery.  Active recovery being borrowed from the fitness nomenclature, as the bodies search for readiness.  I think of it as if life is telling me, things will be alright.  It is a feeling where I am not exhausted.  I am not indolent.  I am not bored.  I might not be primed for exhilaration.  It's the brief existence when I am least fearful.  It may be a time when my aspiration could be pictured as relaxing.  

I am symbiotic and alive when nearing homeostasis.  Being a New Mexican, Chicano, a brown man inspires me to think about the homeostasis of a culture.  If it is, than my Latin derived culture's homeostasis is illusive.  Homeostasis when it comes to behavior seems to be heavily subjective, but bounded by the construct of equilibrium. It gives me the image as if my existence hears the wild call from symbiosis.  But being a brown man, doesn't make homeostasis convenient for racial, economic, and social factors.  

Identifying as a Chicano makes explaining homeostasis interesting.  Bluntly, and possibly unwarranted, I observe my culture is diseased, or maybe infected. Surely my culture is not completely unhealthy.  I'll explain this perspective in depth soon, but for now I just need to begin with the fact that I see its dysfunction. It makes me understand the need to surround myself with symbiotic systems in order to facilitate personal homeostasis, while I watch my culture moving away from cultural homeostasis.

I see outsiders looking in trying to understand us, describing the New Mexican lifestyle's dysfunctional aspects as potentially being a unique form of homeostasis.  It made me cringe to think how people might consider that our version of the Latin culture is acceptable.  This comes to mind in the realm of machismo, violence, education, apathy, and cynicism.  I am beginning to believe that my New Mexican lifestyle isn't it's healthiest and in denial, being allowed to call itself stable.
  

So as I look from the outside, as drift further away from the lifestyle of a typical New Mexican Chicano, I evaluate my communities with a cultured lens.  I hesitantly but assertively recognize my communities appear naive to conscious progress, a portion seem unaware of the utility for intellect, and enough display attitudes that are uninspired.

I picture my culture with sadness because we appear to admire and cling to our dysfunctions.  Maybe it is the only thing we can own.  It is the only thing that we can contribute to without being doubted or marginalized.  It might be the only thing that keeps us from being white washed.  Clinging to our cultural toxicity seems to keep us from being seen as powerless.  I cling to my cultural toxicity because I don't know where I belong when I let it go.

...

Next post will describe what I see as Toxic Culture.  And yes I will approach homeostasis by also describing the healthy aspects of the New Mexican Chicano, because critical thought requires symbiotic perspectives and homeostasis is my orientation.  

Albuquerque Street Artist Unknown

Happy New Year from a man  who accepts that "new" isn't necessarily any different than the old.  I hope all my loved ones roll into new perspectives.  So I am wishing those who surround me a Happy New Perspective.  This seems to be when life becomes really interesting.   I am thankful for so much this year, but there a day in November for that.  I feel full of love, but there is a day in February for that.  I am grateful for all the gifts in my life, and there was a day for that, it just passed.  So I feel upside down.  I have nothing to write about.  No worries that motivate the creative words.  My Family is well, my friends are well, my lifestyle is well, and my habits are well.  There is no good byes left unsaid.  This New Year isn't leading to much newness just a continuation of fullness.  Love is a powerful perspective.  It makes good byes understandable.  When applied to self it makes the future as valuable as the past.  So there is not necessarily an old year, but I can wish you a blessed New Year.  Bessos and Be Good!

Reflexion Dos: I am a human, disguised as Latino

Dear Elena and Veronica,

I left you for three weeks this summer to be curious.  I came to Mexico because when I was your age I called myself Mexican.  I called myself Mexican because it helped me be accepted into groups that seemed more accepting, similar, and understanding of me.  As an adult I am challenging myself to uncover the realities undiscovered from carelessly calling myself Mexican.  Being a counselor has helped me grow and trust my curiosity.  Today as a mental health professional I felt compelled to see what healing means in the Mexican identity.  I found Curanderismo.  I have spent a lot of time discerning what it means for me to have called myself Mexican and with it I have encountered a humanistic style of healing that Latinos call Curanderismo.

The curiosity for Mexico is tied to my desire to replenish the decreased connection we have to our traditions, especially the healing qualities.  I hope to be a productive member of our community, ethnicity, and humanity.  The pull to Mexico is around the imbalance teetering ethnic peoples towards poverty, particularly discrimination for Mexicans.  The motivation for this trip is the shrinking visibility for our ties to Mexican traditions that our grandparents relied on.  This investigation is a way for me to learn how to address the distinction between being New Mexican and Mexican while also enhancing my perspectives on wellness.  There is also a hope to decrease the disparity between those that have access to healing and others left to endure without medicines or wellness.  This trip is serving my need to become a better counselor and enhance my identity.

Over the years my declared Mexican heritage meshed into my identity and served me, but now I am beginning to see how it limits me.  It is a piece of an identity I have worn.  My identity has been a way to distinguish myself from some, align with others, and declare to many who I think I am.  I am excited to share with you that the curiosity for and exposure to other cultures is giving me understanding of how identities can be binding, adaptable and living.

I came to Mexico to learn more about an ancient and traditional form of healing called Curanderismo.  There are numerous types of curanderos.  Along with the many types, are the unique styles that each curandero can have, like a fingerprint.  Curanderismo is a way of healing that requires the use of four elements, fire, water, plants, and air.  It is a form of medicine that incorporates knowledge, trust, and instinct.  It is a form of medicine that connects divine uncertainty with intricate insight into observable cures.  It is a magical demonstration of how nature provides the elements and energies to ensure our bodies function appropriately.  Curanderismo is more about being connected to wellness and symbiosis than it is to being Mexican.

I came to Mexico to witness aspects of how Curanderismo is used.  I came with hopes of learning more about a community of health care professionals that functioned off the grid.  The grid being for profit, providing an alternative motivation I like to think of as, for passion.  This trip has allowed me to indulge in the spectrum of my own illnesses.  I feel like I am walking away with acceptance that Curanderismo is not a panacea.  What I witnessed cannot be encapsulated by words, because what happened during my trip was cosmic.  How do you put cosmic into words?

I feel like I can only hint at what Curanderismo is.  Curanderismo is the attention to harmony.  Curanderismo is the practices and aspires for an ultimate respect for others.  If Jesus Christ were to come back I believe he would smile at the lifestyle of the Curandero.  If Buddha were to stumble across a Curandera he would likely smile.  There seems to be a grace from what I see as divinity that shines on the practices of Curanderismo.  The experiences I had from the cleansings called Limpias, messages called Sobrados, and sweat session in a Temezcal, helps me see the nature of healing. It helps me connect with what seems to be the universal and primal desire to live.  There also are aspects that can be pragmatic and even scientific.

The practical components to Curanderismo that make up this attention to harmony are the pedagogy, techniques, and its social ability.  Curanderismo has not found its way into the colonial form of teaching.  There is not a formal curriculum like in contemporary healing practices.  It is taught generationally from an elder to a youth.  Usually, a curandero will see the gift of healing in a person and an invitation will be presented to them.  The process is not a vocation.  Curanderismo is a gift and choice to pursue the learning necessary to share the individual’s gift with the world.

The learning is by immersion.  The student is a mentee. The lessons are a legacy of plant knowledge combined with techniques to bring together the Devine, the patient, an altar, and elements.  The gathering of plants is an art in itself.  Special attention to the dignity of the plant is taught to ensure a dignified respect for the plants life and contribution to its destined healing.  The healing process is encapsulated by a special technique geared uniquely to address an ailment.  The Curandero and their mentees recite a pattern, a choreographed ritual, stirring energy, in trust that healing will happen.

The ritual is the technique and so are the Curanderos prescriptions.  The unification of the sickened with the prescribed elements is orchestrated by the curandero in an ancient set of intentional steps.  There is intense intimacy with a call for gratitude.  This is a prayer, an intention, or request for concentration.  The ingredients for healing are unified.  The air is made visible with incents.  The plants are made permeable.  The fluids are intoxicating and diffused by the curandero to be applied completely, covering all areas.  The body becomes grounded into the floor and body alignment is necessary so that energy flows without obstacles or impediment.  The process is the doctor, the healer, the medicine, and the science.

The social science is in the generational observations that help communities learn and teach the effects that surrounding plants have on wellness.  The tradition transcends culture and becomes the formula.  The idea of Curanderismo seen as a gift is the harmony and respect that creates ecosystems.  The intimacy and connection between participants shows that there is social science in the application.  The patient and the Curandero are crossing the belief in individualism to share energy.  The experience seems to conduct a transfer of medicine in the form of minerals, chemicals, fluids, inhalants, poetry of words leading to thoughts being converted to neuro transmissions, and lastly the discharge of barriers to relief.

That is a summary of what I can describe.  There is so much to share.  The plant knowledge can be lifetime of learning.  The rituals require commitment for learning.  The Practice is a powerful responsibility that should be performed under careful observation and supervision.  The final piece of the process, I can describe.

I am altered.  I gained insight into areas of my identity that can heal, need healing, be shared, and clarity for what I can pursue to nurture a better me.  I am validating ideas around healing and illness that feel foreign.  Professionally they seem marginalized.  Despite the lack of knowledge and familiarity, I recognize I have a talent for sensing these ideas.

The ideas I have seem like artifacts and waypoints left by ancestors, tucked away in passages, that they expected me to cross.  I once felt a strong anger that these ideas were perceived to lack value in the modern world.  I had bitterness that the world and technologies were depreciating them.  I encountered a heavy discouragement, but most importantly, I found hope for these lessons during my time in Oaxaca.

Before finding my path into the mental health world I was constantly being told who I should be. I felt like I was being corralled into how I should participate in the world.  Most things I was taught I believed to be concrete.  I had emptiness because people that looked like me rarely had answers to my question.  How come the world is unfair in too many places?  How come health is a luxury?  What is my worth?  With the encounters I am having with Curanderismo, my questions are coming to life, becoming visible, and at a pace that is letting me absorb.

The ideas I am describing are still formulating in my thoughts.  This paper gives me a great opportunity to organize them.  The curanderos have taught me that healing comes through my senses.  I take my medicine through the senses.  Some raw ideas can be that what I hear feeds my thoughts.  What I see heightens my understanding of reality.  What I touch connects me.  What I taste I consume and becomes me.  The aromas around me inform me of where I am and what surrounds me.  My thoughts and ideas are valuable and need to be shared.  

Because of this visit, its experiences, and training I am expanding my definition of illness and even considering defining my own.  My medicine is in my curiosity.  What I need to heal is revealed in my fears.  I don't have to take classes for pedagogy of lessons that are as rampant as the rain or as accessible as the seasons.  I don't have to earn my spot, apply, and hope I can participate.  I am capable of healing.  I can be responsible with power.  I will be respectful of fears.  I will guide you and teach what you want to learn.  This is an invitation.  There is no obligation to be healed or to learn to heal.  It will always be here, waiting like a flower to be smelled, touched, admired, possibly tasted, and listened to.  I wish for you to investigate your contribution and consumptions.  I ask that you learn balance and trust.

You are loved!  

Be good

Veteran's Day Hangover

I got a Veteran's Day Hangover.  I waited all day to share my thoughts so that our soldiers could have a day of reverence.  But it left me to think about how much do we actually appreciate our veteran's? 
I find it helpful to celebrate and critically reflect.  I celebrated privately yesterday and acknowledged the ways that demonstrate gratitude for our soldiers, but today I look at the shadow side of Veteran's day.


It gets pretty dangerous or unpopular to criticize the military or veterans, especially on veteran's day.  So I didn't.  What I will do is share in the truest form of appreciation I know of, participation.  For what have and do veteran's sacrifice for?  We each have our understanding for what this is.  For me it is a responsibility to become an intelligent citizen and participate with equal passion to sustain a symbiosis between prosperity and service. 

I think the greatest gift the military complex has provided me is the opportunity to be a citizen with a collection of rights that when used with compassion and passion will likely be influential.  What I see us as a community forget to do, maybe lack interest in, or don't know how to do, is look beyond the superficial gratitude. I don't think we delve into the principled responsibility we owe our soldiers to live in a way that is adaptive or symbiotic to keeping other wars or operations from being needed.  If we have unconscious appreciation for our military I think we have dogmatic patriotism.  Patriotism is dangerous when we have no idea what the policy our country is projecting.  So trying not to be a dogmatic patriot, I think the first step for me is to continue to hold myself accountable to how I balance my own passionate service.  Am I being responsible with my life, choices, and freedom.

I am soul-dier, who has always felt a passion for making decisions and performing with dignity.  Complexly, dignity is a perspective and perception.  I am not a soldier and cannot speak about war.  I can only respect what soldiers have done to provide me a lifestyle to participate in community with minimal fear and restriction.  Until we have a political system with competent and passionate participants that put the guy next to them before themselves or their fortunes we will rely on dogmatic patriotism to show gratitude for our military.  Most veterans I know don't need a thank you, they need me to carry out my end of the bargain, and fulfill my duty to be a competent and reverent American.

A Letter of Confirmation

I've never really considered how profound it is to be asked to confirm, the responsibility to reinforce someone in a choice.  I have asked and been asked to participate in a confirmation ritual.  I don't put that on my resume.  I can't submit that as a write off on my tax return.  I don't share it on a first date.  But I can recall it when I am discouraged, stressed, and doubtful.  

I am not much of an apologetic, evangelist, or preacher.  I appreciate the way of Francis of Assisi.  I trust my life, imperfect and radical, to be my explanation of my faith.  I breach the walls of sensibility and dance in the clutches of paradox's vortexes.  I put faith in forgiveness.  I am learning to trust being gentle.  I am accepting that power is not strength, and being strong does not help me carry, lift, or move heavy topics.  I am not valuable, I am expendable, and yet I am still significant.

My daughter made her confirmation last summer.  I wrote the following letter for her.  I came across it while cleaning out some other writing off my iPad.  I was pleased with how far I have come as a father, a friend, and confirming believer in Christ.  It gets easier and easier to be faithful as my journey leads me further into maturity.  I was inspired by it and hope you are challenged by it too.

Daughters,
Life gets really difficult and beautifully challenging.  You may want to take short cuts, find pleasures, and take the easier routes.  I don't blame you.  This is the beauty of choice.  You have chosen to be a believer in Jesus Christ,  A person and God, who asks you to find the divine route, find joy, and take the peaceful route.  I hope you value what your contribution to the world can be.
There will be a time when you will need to see your life as serving a purpose for ideas, concepts, and situations greater than yourself.  As you grow you will become aware of how significant every emotion, moment, and incident can be.  You are my motivation for loving others.  I learned to love myself because it was watching you grow where I realized I am living so you can have a good understanding of love.  I have learned to love so that I might show you through my love for you what love looks like.  As you know, I fail, I am irritating, I am silly, I am embarrassing, and I am awkward.  I hope you know it is what trying to love looks like.
I would like you to know that my goal as a dad is to learn to love you despite anything you could possibly do to deserve it. That is a fancy way of saying that I am learning how to love you no matter what. I am really thoughtful about how to challenge you because there are going to be situations in life that will push you to the limits of being able to love. When you come to the point of not being able to love I want you to know that you are touching your humanity, it isn't failure. I also want you to know that God's love doesn't have limits and neither does Her grace.
If you never reach points that test your ability to love, then figure out how to take a couple more risks.  I am very proud of your choice to commit and confirm your Faith in God. I hope you understand that God is unknowable and yet just a prayer away.
I hope that you are courageous enough to find God beyond the Catholic catechism and open yourself to understanding how the people of the world have seen God.  I hope you continue to recognize the power, the beauty, and the soul nutrition that comes with the Eucharist.  I'd like you to discover that the church is not so much a building, can exist without an organization, and is more a way of living.
I'd like you to know that paradox is an important concept that will help you understand what it means to believe in Jesus Christ.  I want you to understand that pain is part of life, suffering doesn't have to be, and there is a difference between the two.  I hope you believe that you are just as valuable as your neighbor and never believe that you are worth more then anyone else. I do hope you understand that I think of you as a priority and precious.
You are worth as much as anyone else but you are uniquely valuable to me.  
Hope you find this message helpful someday.