what you are looking at is also you
Hi. Thank you for reading & the feeling of connection it brings to me. I’m cold all the time and still heavy with grief as we enter day 65 of the genocide we have paid for. A colonized mind looks away and decolonization is a practice so I keep looking. That’s 18,000 people wiped off the planet for crimes they didn’t commit. How many is enough? I understand grief as love that has no where to go. I’d like to give that love somewhere to go. I’d like to insist that we do. I’d also like to insist on the joy that makes life worth living. Currently for me, that has come through conversations with a witty 14 year old, cuddling a kitten named Miss America, and perfecting my latte art via a hand me down espresso machine that lures me into each day. I’ve got a working studio in the basement now, trying to figure out what income I can create while being close to home, where and when I am often needed.
In the before times, I worked a decade+ primarily because of and in support of multidisciplinary artist Marcus Fischer, who has a show currently up at Oregon Contemporary in Portland, Oregon until February 11th. To say that my friendship with Marcus has greatly influenced me is a massive understatement. Not only did he keep my child and I fed, he introduced me to experimental music, social practice art, and to the work of musical/comedic/therapeutic performer and activist Morgan Bassichis who helped me see more of my role as an artist. Upon meeting Morgan, they told me to find my stage. Maybe these letters to the nearly 200 of you reading this is a form of that.
In early 2020, I had a $15 reading by a psychic who told me I wasn’t going to be an artist any more, I was going to be a seer. By that summer, I would go on to discover I had degenerative vision loss. Since I’ve been in Michigan, life has thrown another stage my way via ironically silly opportunities like last week when I taught 3rd, 4th, & 5th graders about looking and seeing. (I am convinced that public school teachers are modern day saints because working for attention is not my favorite game, especially in these post pandemic animal bodies.) I handed out rectangular paper view finders and hung photographs I liked from art magazines I inherited via feral generosity that is HI BOOKS. I asked the kids what they liked and didn’t like, and then I talked about basic components of art that way. The thing about doing this for 30 min increments 10 times in a day is noticing what becomes script, what becomes spontaneous collaboration, and what you’re actually teaching. I thought I would list here what I heard myself say when given the stage of a classroom. An echo my own version of distilled information from Julia Cameron, Corita Kent, and Rick Rubin:
Everyone has a unique mark no one else on this planet can make.
Everyone is an artist. It is our innate birthright and sovereign calling.
Unskilled play precedes all skilled art.
Your attention is your power.
The fact that I have any self worth to even share publicly or presume anyone wants to hear from me is living proof that miracles happen. There have been plenty of times that I have made choices that only added to my suffering because I believed that was all that I deserved, because that is all I knew. It was familiar ground. And thanks to a shit ton of therapy and the generous reflection of friendship, I believe differently now. My best guess is that we somehow trick ourselves into finding the right people and developing the right tools we need to survive this place while also accepting that none of us are making it out of here alive. In reconciling the trauma of abuse and the dysfunction of my own “american family”, I have come to understand the delusional thinking of white body supremacy indoctrinated into us in more of a nuanced way via relational power dynamics. IE the power dynamics we perpetuate in our relationships.
So when someone degrades my sensitivity as weakness, it reveals the societal messaging many of us are emotional prisoners to. While I have come to understand that gender is a divisive myth hurting us, I recognize that in the patriarchal conditioning of this culture I am in, the “masculine” is ideal. To be masculine in this society is to suppress feelings, put ego at the forefront, and to chase power or dominance. At best this postures as “protection” from other masculine expressions. We know the old adage thrown at boys and girls alike that a boy should be careful not to cry, play, sound, look, run, or throw like a girl. I’ve known many who have suffered from mental illness because they have never felt safe enough to express their feelings. A lot of times we compensate for these feelings of inadequacy through misogyny. This can look like forcing physical dominance. This can look like making women emotionally labor for you without openly valuing it. This can look like tearing down women through comparison or confrontation to try to one up. We can never be free when the experiences of our whole-person selves is defined by a system that says that some of our humanness somehow holds less weight.
“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.” James Baldwin
The shame of patriarchy stunts the ability to reach out to friends and family for support, to sit with our own feelings, or form healthy, functional relationships. The way we are quick to dismiss things that are too vulnerable, emotional, soft, intuitive, caring, hopeful, feminine. The way we do not question our internal biases as to why. True wisdom is about accepting all forms of knowledge regardless of the source. To reject knowledge because you don’t like where it is coming from is a form of self destruction, sabotaging personal and spiritual growth and therefore, collective growth. Let us stay open to our own inner questions and resourced to tend to our emotional reactions. Teacher Fariha reminding us that we have to be activated by this news cycle. It is an important hesitation to do this necessary work together.
In my experience, I have been more of a transactional possession than a real person by self identified progressive feminists and conservative christians. Mistreatment first taught me what I thought I deserved until I came to understand my own agency and how often it had been compromised in a state of nervous system dysregulation. The thing is, this society is keeping us dysregulated and traumatized—which Dr. Gabor Mate says is the root of all addiction and who among us doesn’t have some sort of addiction in a world of screens, substances, and social clout?
People believe and do all sort of things that might keep them safe when they are traumatized. I am constantly trying to process the ways in which I have been victimized so I don’t buckle to perpetuating a common mentality of the dysfunction in our country that centers bypassing responsibility, blaming others, and complaining without seeking solutions. By compassionately acknowledging my own hurts, caring for myself like I would for a friend, and taking responsibility, I can create the space to offer it to others. Like my child or my mom or the stranger at the store or in a conversation with a friend or you, here, now. One shadow I am trying to really bring into light is my role as an American citizen and activism as my rent for living on the planet we are killing.
The USA makes up 4% of the world yet produces 74% of serial killers and 73% of mass shootings globally. Women in low income households are 3.5 times more likely to experience more violence. Every 9 seconds a woman in this country is assaulted by a domestic partner. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women. Domestic violence increases by 40% during football season, that is to say some men cannot handle their emotions in such a way that a team loss becomes a wife’s punishment. We have one of the highest suicide rates in a wealthy country. We have a charade of a government proving to be nothing but self interested and hoarding wealth, keeping us divided with imaginary party lines and economic struggle so we are distracted enough not to see the con job of public servants squandering our money and our rights. We send militarized troops to places we shouldn’t to define and enforce the status quo, recruiting local militarized presence that divides and destroys countries so we might hoard their resources. Are we not getting the slow drip version of that here? There are nations marketed to us as “underdeveloped” that in actuality are over exploited by us. I never asked “why 9/11?”, I just went along with the plan with no introspection on what conditions created that kind of resistance.
“We are citizens of the most powerful country in the world, and it’s a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on Earth. I want you to feel what that means.” Audre Lorde
MORE QUESTIONS: Does propaganda come from villagers or governments? Who do police or militarized armed presence protect when their entire job is devoted to profiling, harassing, and intimidating people? Is pitting one against the other equitable or is it a type of dehumanizing supremacy via class domination? So then, how can I condemn a violent resistance movement of freedom fighters against a nuclear powered police state? Why wouldn’t I condemn the nuclear powered police state lording over land with dominance, resources, and war crimes? I can understand actions that I might not approve of, but I also must contend with the fact that I haven’t had to experience the same level of aggressive presence keeping me from self determination. Why has the US repeatedly held out on a ceasefire in the UN vote? Why did the US send an additional $10 billion to Israel who has weapons, resources, and healthcare from the $4 billion we already send them each year—-Why did our tax money go to continue bombing Gaza? Where is the humanitarian aid to Palestinians exiled without food, shelter, healthcare? What about those trapped in the rubble? Where else is this happening? Do we only care because it’s considered the Global North and involves white people? Or our own “democracy”? Who will they kill next? What does watching what they do to Palestine reveal to us about our own individual and collective shadows? How do we heal these wounds still so intentionally perpetuated? Do we have a problem with all we have accepted here? How “free” are we?
The work of integrating my shadow requires a lot of deconstructing of what I thought I knew about where I came from. It acknowledges the prompt to shame spiral that keeps me buffering this experience of discomfort with external pawns via hobbies, interests, and people. We are a bunch of children with severed imaginations that have been hijacked by anxiety. We must parent our bodies. I am haunted by a mirror of my own future in caring for an aging parent navigating the chronic self neglect prescribed to her and lacking access to true health care. I am constantly being confronted through parenting a truth telling intellectual warrior I can hardly keep up with but must answer to. *How do I do what my ancestors have been unable to do? How do I take care of myself as a way to honor where I come from? The work of doing anything is doing it mindfully. That is to say to never leave or abandon my sovereign self. So next steps, how do we continue imagining, planning, organizing, building the world we want to live in?
It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime.
what better place than here, what better time than now?
-rage against the machine
POETRY // I AM YOU by REFAAT ALAREER a poet who was targeted & murdered 4 days ago
Two steps: one, two.
Look in the mirror:
The horror, the horror!
The butt of your M-16 on my cheekbone
The yellow patch it left
The bullet-shaped scar expanding
Like a swastika,
Snaking across my face,
The heartache flowing
Out of my eyes dripping
Out of my nostrils piercing
My ears flooding
The place.
Like it did to you
70 years ago
Or so.
I am just you.
I am your past haunting
Your present and your future.
I strive like you did.
I fight like you did.
I resist like you resisted
And for a moment,
I’d take your tenacity
As a model,
Were you not holding
The barrel of the gun
Between my bleeding
Eyes.
One. Two.
The very same gun
The very same bullet
That had killed your Mom
And killed your Dad
Is being used,
Against me,
By you.
Mark this bullet and mark in your gun.
If you sniff it, it has your and my blood.
It has my present and your past.
It has my present.
It has your future.
That’s why we are twins,
Same life track
Same weapon
Same suffering
Same facial expressions drawn
On the face of the killer,
Same everything
Except that in your case
The victim has evolved, backward,
Into a victimizer.
I tell you.
I am you.
Except that I am not the you of now.
I do not hate you.
I want to help you stop hating
And killing me.
I tell you:
The noise of your machine gun
Renders you deaf
The smell of the powder
Beats that of my blood.
The sparks disfigure
My facial expressions.
Would you stop shooting?
For a moment?
Would you?
All you have to do
Is close your eyes
(Seeing these days
Blinds our hearts.)
Close your eyes, tightly
So that you can see
In your mind’s eye.
Then look into the mirror.
One. Two.
I am you.
I am your past.
And killing me,
You kill you.
SPELLCAST //
reminder from Refaat Alareer:
Don’t forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry … It took them years, over 50 years of thinking, of planning, all the politics, money and everything else…
writing prompt from Fariha Roisin:
Imagine a world where you want to live, write about it in detail. In it, imagine a free Palestine, a liberated world where nobody is hungry and everybody is loved. Feel it. What does that place look like?
ENTHUSIASM AS A WAY FORWARD//
This summer I got to spend some of time with brilliant and beautiful May, who founded Nationale—giving artists a space for the last 15 years+ and representing some of my favorites like Pace Taylor, Francesca Capone, Emily Counts, and so many more. After attending an art show, reading some books from her shop, and studying a Sheila Heti essay with a group of strangers (+ one of my all time art crushes Alison Provax in attendance), I could recognize the richness of what May has been offering to the Portland community. It inspired me towards dreams of nurturing my own unique form of that here. I hope to create spaces to cultivate relationships and conversations to engage critical thought and reveal shared values, to bloom where I am planted in college town, middle America. I plan to turn the unused barn on this property into a community space to be used as an art gallery, studio classroom, and some sort of headquarters for a neighborhood garden.
I think a huge piece of what is beckoning us going forward is MUTUAL AID. Witnessing these atrocities should change us, let it change us. Let us change the way we interact, how we see ourselves, our habits, our engagement. We must organize structures centered around needs being met and everyone having something to share. We must look out for one another. One thing from The Artist’s Way that struck me is how enthusiasm is named as a spiritual commitment. I can go out into my community. I can connect and care for people. I can redistribute information, food, and money. I can create the world I want to live in.
In the spirit of saying what you need to get what you want + SOLIDARITY NOT CHARITY, I also have some basic needs I need to meet. So IF YOU GET ANYTHING OUT OF THIS FREE NEWSLETTER, if you believe in the work I’m doing, if you want to partner with me in this way, if you’re in a position to share and want to sponsor your resident sensitive, I am here asking. If every person who reads this shares $1 one time, I could get the wood stove. If 40 of you could do $5/month or 20 of you could do $10/month, I’d have all of my needs met this year. PLEASE CONSIDER I’m looking for either a direct object or financial contribution for the following:
used wood stove & materials for install for barn
3 gallons of white paint for barn
eyeglasses &/or contacts
a month’s worth of daily multivitamins
a couple of pairs of long johns
warm socks (can be used; i can mend holes)
shoes size 9.5 (walking shoe & bonus: a no-heel clog for back support)
any cotton fabric—handkerchiefs, sheets, pillow cases, button down shirts, denim— you’re looking to part with
a website domain
PLS REACH OUT IF YOU CAN MEET ANY OF THESE.
THANK YOU FOR CARING. $caradenden
FIELD NOTES//
*These two questions posed, as well as this poem shared, in a lecture I attended by Fariha Roisin, who everyone should read and support. Hoping to get my hands on her newest book, SURVIVAL TAKES A WILD IMAGINATION
this amazing article written by a Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, Rabea Eghbariah. After the Harvard Law Review solicited, commissioned, contracted Eghbariah, the article was submitted, edited, fact checked, copy edited, and approved by the relevant editors. They refused to run it. Historically, this would have been the first piece written by a Palestinian scholar for the Law Review and is also the only solicited piece known to have been revoked by the Law Review in this way.
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action by Audre Lorde
Ayana Zaire Cotton’s Fear Can’t Survive A Radical Love Ethic
Watching Abbott Elementary for comedic lessons on the public school system and equity in education. Watched The Morning Show with great lessons on media, power structures, and nuanced relationships.
John Russel talking working class solidarity