Gaia Tripping

Messages from the Cosmos, Sent January 21, 2011

2011-01-21T23:19:00.001+08:00

Belated Merry Christmas and Happy Gregorian New Year, dear Cheesers!
I think I missed Diwali, Ramadan, and Samhain in my last cheeses, we had a Red Moon last month, we just had a Full Moon, and Chinese New Year is coming up, so let's throw all those in too.

Cheesers, as usual this stuff is long, so for those of you who usually only get halfway through, I ask that you skip to the end (marked with asterisks and capital letters) and read only the most important part, poems that two Cheesers sent in response to the Song of Silence, Hunger, and Heroes, in the last Sound Cheese. To those of you who always get through it all and write back with words of love, my gratitude always. To all, know that before I send cheese I go through the list and send heart love to each one, but will think nothing bad of anyone who wants off this crazy ship.

I'm back in Argentina after a couple months in Asia, helping my father move from Singapore to Pune. I was in Singapore helping my parents put things in boxes, in Pune helping them take things out of boxes, and briefly in Kerala to peck my grandparents on the cheek and fly off again. While the transition from Singapore to Pune had all the chaos and nail-biting and box-waiting and too-much-stuff-lamenting that any international move will involve, my dad's new situation in Pune seems most thoroughly excellent, not just for him, but for all living beings.

Near where we stayed while getting the house ready, one particular slum shack always caught my eye; I always felt like something interesting was happening there. The first time I went by I saw a woman pumping up and down on a bamboo pole, powering something I couldn't see, and a man kneeling on the ground, perpendicular to her, reading out loud from a piece of paper, perhaps a letter. As I walked on I saw that the thick flapping sheet that protected one side of their patchwork of tin and tarpaulin said, "Really Windy Apartments". At first I wondered if it was someone's idea of a joke. Later after seeing billboards and hearing about local green energy trends I figured it was an old advertisement for a new luxury apartment complex that uses wind generated electricity. The man and woman I saw might even have been on the construction team, carrying bricks for Really Windy Apartments, a symbol of the new progressive consciousness of the wealthy classes. (Only the woman would have carried bricks. The man would have been involved in more skilled labor). Maybe that's where they went shopping for their new wall. I returned to my original conclusion. The universe does indeed have a strange sense of humor. Just cross your fingers and hope you're on the better end of the slap stick.

Flying from Kerala to Pune through Madras (for those of you with enough Indian geography to shake your heads and roll your eyes at that) I sat in an airport contemplating the strange gigantic mind-boggling maya we've built for ourselves. As I got off the bus that drove us the 100m from the terminal to the plane, I saw on the side of a van, " ality Wins". I interpreted it as "Reality Wins", which I liked, but couldn't figure out what it might be a slogan for in this context. After a few blinks I replaced the missing "Re" with "Qu", which made more sense, within the constraints of aforementioned maya, but I still couldn't help feeling like the cosmos was trying to assure me things would all work out.

Several months ago in Bolson I saw a girl on the back of a motorbike with a backpack that said "I love nice people who make cool things." I loved it, though I wondered where it came from and why it was in english. I was still looking her way when we overtook them and she turned around and shared a conspiratorial grin with me, and I felt happy.

It clicked that that's exactly what Denali and I would say about our friends here. We know a ridiculous number of really nice people who make crazy cool things. That I later saw the same backpack on someone else in the city of Buenos Aires, which means it's just another nugget of the creative spirit gobbled up and coopted by the Maya of Mass Production, doesnt take away from the fact that I love nice people who make cool things, and that's why I'm here. I've found the life of magick and witches and wizards that I read about and daydreamed of as a little girl. I may even become one myself some day.

Meanwhile, the reason I'm here, in Blue Cheese cyber world, is because I've got nice people who make cool things all around the world. Like this.

*** CHEESERS WITH SHORT ATTENTION SPANS START HERE ***

Pam Olson wrote back to Sound Cheese:
"I especially liked the part about wearing sunshine on our hips, and leaving the gold and diamonds for the earth. Perhaps for children to find and collect and exclaim over and discard. Have you read Utopia? In that book, they knew the evils of greed unleashed by gold. They made their chamberpots out of it so that when foreigners came rapaciously looking for it, they just laughed and said, "What's your obsession with shit pots?"

It reminds me of a poem I composed recently but never fully wrote down:

The whole reason
we love emeralds
is because they reminds us
dimly
of sunlight
through trees.

The whole reason
we love diamonds
is because they reminds us
dimly
of a rainbow
in a waterfall.

The whole reason
we love sapphires
is because they remind us
dimly
of the bottomlessliving sea.

The whole reason
we love garnets
is because they remind us
dimly
of the sunset
through a glass of wine."

Harrison Gardner wrote:
"This is what I wrote after reading it.
Not necessarily meant for you but thought you might enjoy reading it.

My Dear one,J
ust as a husband and Wife,
Should know themselves,
Before offering themselves to each other
You should find strength in your roots
before the wave of the world rolls in.
In silence you will find your maker
In hunger you will find yourself
In finding them you will meet the world
What drug could induce a people
to value money more than their own life?
The irony is overwhelming.
What fog fills their sight?
In silence you will find your maker
In hunger you will find yourself
In finding them you will meet the world
We made the machine
that we try to escape
the "we" no longer sing in unison
The "we" are dividing by the Ganga herself
by love of wealth and love of life
One day I hope
to sit in the dark
with he who values
life over light

And we will drink to our success."

*******

Pam, Harry, I've written them both into my little poetry book handmade by Linda, Denali's mom. Excited to share with you over a glass of wine some day (or mango juice).

End of cheese,
Endless love to each of you,
Ammu Malavika Mali Emu

-- *******************************************************************************Bringing down civilization is millions of different actions performedby millions of different people in millions of different places inmillions of different circumstances. It is everything from bearingwitness to beauty to bearing witness to suffering to bearing witnessto joy.Derrick Jensen. Endgame, Volume 1, The Problem of Civilization.(Chapter “Bringing Down Civilization Part 1, p. 252”)

Nov. 8: Sound Cheese

2010-12-12T21:44:00.001+08:00

Cheesers dearest,

There's this thing I've been working on for a few day, and been wanting to work on for even more days. I wanted to have it ready for November 2, which is an important anniversary for the subject of the piece. November 2 came and went. I fasted that day on the bus from Patagonia to Buenos Aires to create the space for The Piece to come through, and planned to have it ready at least for new moon a couple nights ago. Now the moon is filling up again.

So. I'm attaching it. It should come with footnotes, but doesn't have them yet. Eventually it wants to be an audio piece. A well-produced, compelling, complete audio piece. Translated from the english version and performed in Spanish and Hindi as well. Ha!! We'll see.

Meanwhile, I would love feedback, if you time and means and desire.

I meant to give you an update on Rania and her family in Palestine, the subject of the last semi-cheese. Not happening. For those interested, write to pamolson4@yahoo.com> and look up her website and awesome soon-in-bookstores-near-you book Fast Times in Palestine.

Meanwhile, I'm in Buenos Aires doing workshops and performances and will be in Singapore in a week.

Hey. Love you lots.

Ammu Malavika Mali Emu

***

A Song of Silence, Hunger, and Heroes

Folks sit down to eat. For a while at the table there is only the sound of chewing and
plates and mmming. Someone says, “Donde hay silencio hay hambre.” Where there is
silence, there is hunger. A conversation starts up, and a lovely meal is had.

Tonight, from Wallmapu to Manipur, where there is hunger, there is silence.

Followers of Islam take part in a 40 day holy fast, Ramadan, in which they let nothing
pass their lips each day, not food nor water nor even smoke, and break fast at night after
prayers. Those who cannot complete the fast make an offering by arranging for someone
else to have food to break their fast with each day, someone too poor to fast otherwise
because they have no control over when and what they eat.

Justice and spirituality are never far apart.

The power to fast doesn’t come with credit cards, PhDs, or AK-47s. It comes with a deep
knowledge of self and one’s place in the universe, and an undeniable love for life.

From Ireland to India, hunger striking is an ancient form of protest against injustice. For
some it is a tactic. For others it is part of their spiritual path. Sharmila Irom calls it her
bounden duty.

Sharmila Irom has refused food for 10 years. In November 2000, in Malom, Manipur,
the Indian military killed 10 villagers standing at a bus stop. Sharmila stopped eating,
and will not take food or drink into her body till the end of the brutal law of the land,
the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, under which such killings, and even worse, are
commonplace. Within days Sharmila was imprisoned for attempting to commit suicide,
and a tube was stuffed down her nose to force-feed her.

Have you ever felt the clarity that comes with not eating? The wakefulness that comes
when your body is not stuffed to sleep? The light that appears when you joyfully and
easily do your bounden duty?

Earlier this year Mapuche political prisoners in Chile carried out a hunger strike for three
months. They are being held under an anti-terrorist law that was put in place under the
Pinochet regime, the military dictatorship that held Chile prisoner for 16 years. Maria
Tralkal, a representative for the hunger strikers, said in her message of solidarity and

support to Sharmila Irom that she and her community consider force-feeding to be a form
of torture. So did the suffragettes of the United States and Britain almost a century ago.
So does the World Medical Association.

There is another kind of hunger, one that no amount of credit cards, PhDs, or AK-
47s will sate. One that consumes everything including itself. For what will it eat once
it has killed this planet, species by species, ecosystem by ecosystem, community by
community?

Seventy-eight percent of countries reporting child malnutrition export food. A woman
taking action in defense of the life of her people is charged with attempting suicide.
From Chile to Chhattisgarh, those who defend the land that sustains them are called
terrorists.

To know someone, we ask them what they are called. To really know someone, we must
ask them what they call themselves. To ask them anything, we must speak their language.

In the Mapuche language, mapu is earth, dungun is speech or speaking, che is person
or people. In the Argentine side of Patagonia, after cultural and physical genocide, few
Mapuches speak Mapudungun. In its place there is mostly silence, and poor peasant
Spanish. But across the Andes in Chile the force of the tongue still lives strong. Where
young Mapuches grow up speaking the language of the earth, there lives a culture of
resistance and resilience against the destruction of the land.

Up north, the sing-song drawl of the Appalachians marks one as a hillbilly. Larry Gibson
is a hillbilly in West Virginia who never got past third grade but will rattle off facts
and figures quicker than you can catch them, as he tells you story after story about the
mountains that are his home, the blasting that is systematically leveling these mountains,
the thick black water that pours out of the taps, the wealth of the earth that has been
destroyed for the sake of black gold. He says if fighting the coal industry eventually
means living without electric lights, then heck, he’ll live without electric lights.

Have you ever been with someone who sources their energy from life itself?

I’ve never met Sharmila. I imagine she speaks slowly, softly, penetrating politically,
technically, and spiritually to the heart of the matter, without a hint of aggression, even
while speaking of great injustice, like Sergio Catrilaf does. I went to speak with him in
Temuco, Chile, this September. Despite having been let out on bail, he was still fasting
alongside the other Mapuche political prisoners.

The next day was the bicentennial anniversary of Chile’s independence from Spain. We
watched soldiers and schoolchildren in the military parade. The top officials wore capes

and hats that were eerily reminiscent of Nazi Germany. For a brief moment I wasn’t sure
when or where I was.

Centuries ago the Spanish invaders met with tremendous resistance when they reached
Mapuche territory, known as Wallmapu. The conquest failed in the southern tip of the
Americas. The Spanish were unable to colonize the Mapuche people. Chile later as
an “independent” nation swallowed, or assimilated, one side of Wallmapu. Without
a war or a word, the Mapuche people were finally colonized by the simple drawing of
borders and the myth of national unity.

A similar story could be told about India, the nation that some think it is, and the
liberation that others will do their bounden duty to attain.

The story of the Mapuche political prisoners on hunger strike is as unheard as that of
Sharmila’s 10 phenomenal years of non-violent resistance, as silenced as the voices of the
Appalachias.

And everywhere we haven’t looked there are unsung heroes about whom children are
waiting to hear.

I’d like to meet her some day. Part of me wants to meet in her in a free Manipur, but
another part of me wonders, if she begins to eat, will she lose her light?

Sharmila Irom. The Iron Lady, they call her. A Gandhi of today, they say.

Fasting and hunger were old friends for Mohandas K. Gandhi. Silence, too, he knew well,
observing a day without speaking every Monday for years.

So many of us want to change the world. Leave a livable planet for the children to come.
But we don’t know what to do. Perhaps, if we know silence well enough, and if we know
hunger well enough, we will know what to do, what feeds us, when to be silent, and when
to sing.

***

And tonight
we will keep right on singing
for our dead.

And we will give our dead
back to the Earth
and the Earth will embrace them
and breathe them into the seeds of new life.

And we will save these seeds

and exchange them
and plant them everywhere, even –
especially –
in our most crowded cities,
and the flowers will come
cracking out of the concrete,
and when the petals fall
we will clap our hands in wonder
at the fruits
and the plenty before us.

What we have, we will give,
and what we need, we will create.
We will hang dewdrops
from our ears
and sunshine
from our hips and
leave the diamonds
and the gold
for the earth to wear.

When we cut down
the body of a tree
we will first ask its spirit
for its permission,
forgiveness,
and blessing.
When we take
from a body of water
we will remember that every drop is sacred.
We will know what we take
into our own body,
and what we become.

We will measure time
by the skies
and space by our stride.
The planet will be our playground,
the universe, our classroom,
and we will see all the world
in the seed of a grape.

We will build each other houses
and grow each other food
and bathe each other’ s children.

We will breathe the air of equality.
We will be good neighbours

and bad subjects.
We will have a healthy disrespect for authority
and question before we believe
but have faith before we dismiss
and understand before we judge.

We will write and re-write our own laws,
and the greatest punishment for a crime
will be the very knowledge
that we have committed it.

Our minds and hearts
will be weapons of love,
our bodies,
shields.

We will read and write about freedom
in the sunlight,
sing and dance about it
in the moonlight,
and whisper about it in the darkness.

And tonight we will find
deep inside us
the soulforce
truthforce
that resides in the freedom
of Tibet
Palestine
Kashmir
Myanmar
Manipur, Assam, Nagalim
the Cherokee Nation
the Mapuche Nation
the Yirrkala Nation
Leonard Peltier
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Hector Llaitul
Aung San Suu Kyi
Sharmila Irom

And tonight, we will...

June 17th: a kind of sort of not really Cheese

2010-12-12T21:43:00.000+08:00

My dear Cheesers,

Got on a bus yesterday morning to New York. Heard Arabic standing in the line. Wondered if it alarmed people like Denali's big red beard does these days. Thought of New Community Church's Artspace (http://www.artspacedc.org/) where I performed Being Human last week. Annie Houston couldn't stay for the post-performance discussion about what it means to be human, but before she left she told me that for her, it was communication. Mary Waters, who was the main reason for my opening night of Being Human in DC last October said it was laughter.

The language school that rents space from New Community Church teaches, among other tongues, Arabic. Good way to make peace, learn the language. Till you get the humor. Till they make you laugh, and vice versa. It's hard to wish or do harm to someone you laugh with.

Must be getting sensitive to coffee. Had one cup in the morning, got the jitters. Or maybe it was nerves. I don't get stage fright. What gets me fluttery is the logistics of organizing. Not knowing if we've done all we needed to to get the crowd there. Especially when there might be a presentation by some of the survivors of the flotilla massacre tomorrow night too, if the Israel lobby lets them get through with visas. Not sure how the sound system will be. Hoping I'll find a way to sell or give away the Navashwaasam DVDs to the right people.

Tomorrow I'll be performing Being Human again here in New York as a fundraiser for a family in the West Bank, Palestine. (see email below). My good friend Pam's friend Rania had a small child and another one on the way when her husband was arrested a year ago for stealing a car in Israel. He's never been to Israel. This kind of thing is devastatingly common in Palestine. (http://mondoweiss.net/2009/08/an-arrest-on-the-west-bank.html) Pam's been trying to raise money for her. I offered the performance. There'll be a discussion afterwards of course. Not just about Rania and her family, but all the represent. Pam will be able to talk about her book Fast Times in Palestine (fasttimesinpalestine.wordpress.com) which, when published, will rock your world like it did mine.

Meanwhile, the flotilla massacre. Enough said.

Meanwhile, Rania's husband gets out soon, we hear. They'll still have legal and baby and health and all sorts of fees to do deal with, but at least they'll be a family again. If you want to contribute to the fundraiser you can Paypal donations to pamolson02@yahoo.com, or contact Pam (cc'd).

Meanwhile, as with many Palestinian prisoners under the occupation, he's learnt Hebrew.

Communication. Laughter. Maybe the Third Intifada will involve a lot of good jokes.

Salaam aleikum. Shalom alejem.

Love, as always,
Malavika-Ammu-Mali-Emu

fool's cheese (April 1, 2010)

2010-04-01T11:29:00.000+08:00

cheese lovers

today
i abhor punctuation
like nature abhors a vacuum
cleaner running at 7 o clock
on a sunday morning
in a thin skinned apartment block
in brooklyn

every day
i sit in my home
and gape at the mountain
that hangs from the clouds
and at night i sleep
to the song of the river

every day i am grateful
that i have travelled enough
to know that
grandmothers everywhere
just want you to eat

and that
home
like love
is always there
waiting to be seen
for the first time

these days i am filled
with gratitude
that i share a home
with one i love
in which we can offer
tea
a bed
bread we baked this morning
apple sauce we made
from apples we picked
from a friends yard
stories
about quiet heroes around the earth
and laughter
always laughter

these days i realize
i am an indian woman
i like things clean
and in their proper place

today i am not an indian woman
i cant keep up with the cobwebs and grime
and you know what
thats ok

today
it is not difficult
for me
or for you
to be well known
or well loved
for being good
and skillful
and selfless

the task today
is to see the blinding brilliance
in every one
and to love without condition
and to understand that since
there is no self
there can be no selfless

the task today
is to see that writing
in strange lines with no punctuation
is only a poem
like every single act of truth and beauty
is a poem

today i believe

god
goddess
magic
miracle
fate
free will
call it what you will
and i will believe
in it with you

every day
i worship the fractal
the pattern that can only be described by
itself
the constant deterministic incremental
repetition towards infinity

anicca anicca anicca

today i will dance
in epuyen
antu quillen
my home for a month
where i learned to leave my self
five years ago

five years ago today
we first cheesed of sorts

che que significa disfrutar

to those of you with me since then
i thank you
to those of you who joined me later
i thank you

cheese lately has been mild
i have been writing only
of love and learning
and light

today i have read too much
derrick jensen
arundhati roy
chris hedges
to beat around the bush
any more

the tsunami
katrina
earthquakes and hurricanes in
the southasian subcontinent
haiti
chile

are the rumbles of the beast
arriving faster than even
the littlest and most chickeny
chicken little
can imagine

today i dont need to chide myself
for not having the courage
certainty
or knowledge
to run to the disaster zone
like florence nightingale meets flo jo

the disaster
the collapse
will come to me
ready or not
and all i can do is ready myself
as best i can
and i suggest you do the same
beg you to do the same
if you arent already

money in the bank
your resume
your remote control
your portfolio
your president
your website
your wish list
these will soon return to the nothing
they came from
and the only things that will mean something
will be
water
food
shelter
and what you
truly
love

so grow kale
build with mud
make friends with fire
strengthen your bicycle muscles
resist the rape of the earth
laugh at everything
play with everyone
and worship all deities but the ones with power

because the only thing that will save this life is
how much you love it

i dont wish to offend
i only wish to love
learn
and be light

as always i welcome
cherish
your thoughts
even if i dont reply for years

love
ammu
malavika
mali
emu

--
********************************************************
Let the mind beware that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances
of existence are pretty glorious.

- Jack Kerouac

Spoiled Cheese - Blue Cheese of December 3

2009-12-04T03:22:00.000+08:00

Dear Blue Cheesers,

Welcome to new cheesers, Grey Poupon, scruachaux, and énfrüge. Welcome all, new and old, to a very long cheese. Get yourself some caffeine, and read on.

Since last we cheesed (I'm not counting the sliced processed cheese about the performances last month), my parents and grandparents and I kicked the flu, and then my mom lovingly kicked me out of the house. I was committed to not leaving until I was sure that she and my grandparents had the help they needed, but she gently pushed me out of the nest (after years of me flying away), telling me not to be sad or scared or worried about them, to shake my cute little butt and fly away (Masakkali, matakkali...). I am continually in awe of that woman, my mother.

So Denali picked me up at the airport far sooner than we expected to see each other, and drove me straight to Rolling Ridge in West Virginia. On the way, even the minimal contact I had with Amerika with a k (the one that consumes and destroys everything, including itself) consisted of strangers being helpful and jovial with each other.

I love America, and I love being an American.

I spent my 28th birthday in West Virginia. I love getting older.

I was in WV when my 10 year highschool reunion met in Singapore. Part of me wanted to have my old classmates meet my older, cooler self, now on a ladder hammering away at the house Scot and Linda (Denali's parents) are building, slimmer, fitter, more able, in both spirit and body. Part of me didn't care. Part of me, that part that used to assert her American-ness because she thought that was the only way to be respected and loved, ashamed of her Indian-ness because racism, colonialism, and empire building patterns take a long time to dissolve from the human consciousness, that part of me wanted to casually tell a mind-blowing story about travelling the world and finding its deep magickal revolutionary veins in response to something they said about their new house or car or job or phone or toothpaste. Part of me knows there are plenty of stories to come, and plenty of love and respect already with me.

The kind of plenty that defies the illusion of scarcity. That allows a sad lonely little girl to face the darkest depression, the self-destructive despair and bottomless hunger for self-worth that she shares with the farmers in India who can't feed their families, let alone the country. Allows her to face it and say Boo, and become a woman.

I do love my school, though, and some day I'd like to go back, to Singapore or some other UWC, and be another small zap in the process of another young mind unplugging from samsara.

So, yeah, I spent a couple months in West Virginia, building and dancing in the forest, and I discovered an ever-deepening bond with Denali's extended family, both birth and earth family. I also, unfortunately, discovered my allergies are getting worse. Cats and mold got me bad. I had some pretty desperate nights, and went around for several weeks in a sleep-deprived de-oxygenated haze. Despite this nightmare, the days and nights of laughter, games, thoughtfulness, and togetherness still define my memories of this time on the East Coast. Every day I am grateful for the warm embrace of this new family of mine.

In the month at home with my grandparents and my mom I had found an internal fire from which I was dancing and creating every day. It kept burning in West Virginia, under the auspices of the Rolling Ridge land and community. My father visited in early October, for which I stepped up production and had a dance performance ready, with help and sponsorship from some immensely supportive friends. October 7^th was the opening night for “Being Human”, in the middle of a romp of a week with my dad and Denali’s family.

After the performance debuted in DC, I took the show on tour to Northern California.

By the way, in case you haven’t noticed I now use phrases like “tour” and “opening night” and “debut” with ease, and in my OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) papers it says my occupation is “artist”. Could I, sweet cheesers, be forming an identity for myself?

But first I attended the Economics of Peace conference in Sonoma organized by Praxis Peace and RSF Social Finance. I practiced meditation and yoga every morning, got enough sleep, attended almost every session and actually paid attention, and walked back and forth several times to cook meals in my lovely host’s home with two new-found friends instead of buying food in the cute but upscale Sonoma center. I spoke up, articulately and compassionately but frankly, at every opportinity, about the microcosm of institutional injustice represented at the conference. My ego was present, as always, but stayed surprisingly behind the scenes for most of the show.

Who was that lady, where the heck did she come from, and where did she go? I ask myself now, searching inside for that heroine who emerged briefly and disappeared into the shadows again. It’s ok. I know she’s there, and she’ll come back with buns blazing more and more as I grow older.

Back to the tour. At the beginning I was unsure of having even one place to offer the performance even just for dear ones around the Bay Area. I ended up with four beautiful venues to hold a by-donation event, with a performance followed by a discussion circle on gift economy. I organized the whole thing by the seat of my pants at the last minute, from the computers of loving friends who also fed and sheltered me. The whole endeavor was a whopping success, financially, spiritually, and artistically. In fact, the greatest part of the success was that those three categories, financial, spiritual, and artistic, were inseparable.

A big shout-out to the four spaces who welcomed me and my work with open arms, especially the ones that have to run commercial operations and pay rent. And a special shout-out to my home and family in Synergy, for hosting and playing. And hallelujah for things like jars of jam (or apple sauce and tomato sauce) in the donation basket, sometimes home-made, and always given with love.

Every day I feel spoiled and blown away by what the universe has to offer.

My only regret is that I cannot yet share this performance with my mother and grandparents and others in India, especially now that I'm doing accessible entertaining Bollywood numbers that I rejected for so many years, with my elitist highbrow leanings. The kids in the slum in Ahmedabad would have loved Being Human.

I love India, and I love being Indian.

Apparently now so does the rest of the world. Indian things are hot shit. (Pardon the french). I hear it started with a hot Indian guy on a show called Heroes. And then there was Slum Dog Millionairem, of course. I actually think it started when hip-hop started mixing in Indian flavor. Too bad it wasn't this way when I was a confused little brown girl who wanted to be blonde and blue-eyed. Well, I'll take what I can get. Now that I've balanced my identities, take pride in all that I contain, and wear Indian kurtas of my own choosing, now when I don't crave acceptance, random strangers in the street tell me Your dress is beautiful, where did you get it? And I reply that my mother made it. And we all share a touching moment in America.

In conversation with Scot and Linda at some point it came up that they were “spoiled” when it came to watching Indian dance performances. This was one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received. And it got me started thinking. I’m really spoiled too. This month in the Bay Area I got to see friends in performance (Taiko, a cappella….) of high standard. This is happening more and more as time passes. And my sweetheart, for example, compromises nothing and gives of himself completely to make instruments and other works of the highest quality. I find myself surrounded by great artists and thinkers and creators.

What if we all spoiled each other? What if we could only eat lasagna made from home-made pasta, or cookies made from home-made dough because that’s what we’re used to? What if we could only bear to build our own homes, curved and angled to perfection, from local and recycled materials, light on the earth? What if our homes were filled with paintings and flutes and rocking chairs and cradles and quilts and cutting boards and ceramics and canned apple sauce made with love by friends? What if we learned about Mongolia from a slideshow of a friend’s journey rather than a textbook? What if we studied mycology by going mushroom-hunting in woods with a knowledgable friend, and ate the delicious edible ones for dinner? What if we gave each other high quality live music and theatre in intimate venues every week? And side-splitting moments of improv genius every day while chopping broccoli or blending green smoothies with kale from the garden?

And what if the debate were about the meaning of health and health care, and other such fundamentals, instead of only who’s going to pay for it? And what if America set up 20 schools in Afghanistan, for boys and girls, in place of each soldier stationed for a year (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/opinion/29kristof.html?_r=1&emc=eta1)? What if Obama refused to inherit the war in Afghanistan (cover of The Economist, ''Obama's war''), and Latin America (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/11-4), and helped bring to trial the ones it actually belongs to? What if the US-Israel-(India) axis of money and power didn’t silence the United Nations commissioned Goldstone report on Israeli humans rights violations? What if the Third Intifada involved a lot of singing (http://fasttimesinpalestine.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/yoga-concerts-prison/)? What if we stopped blasting the Appalachians for a few chunks of black gold? What if the US Congress knew where the hell the bank bail-out money went, and never ever authorized anything so mind-bogglingly stupid like that again? What if the Federal Reserve were actually federal (http://www.webofdebt.com/)?

And what if all institutional and personal policy came out of gratitude and respect, instead of debt and fear?

But I digress.

I extended the month in the Bay Area for a few days to participate in the sleepover on Alcatraz with We Players (http://www.weplayers.org/) as part of the two year creative process for the performance project on the island. Then, as much as I enjoyed my time in Northern California, I thoroughly enjoyed leaving the urban space and taking a beautiful train ride down to Southern California to meet Denali where he had been building flutes and drums and eating well with his teacher-friend Guillermo for the month. We spent a few days there in the tranquil canyon , including Thanksgiving and Buy Nothing Day.

Almost two years ago I cheesed you from Guillermo’s house about Travelling Light, after which Denali and I picked up our tiny packs and sailed south to Mexico. A couple days ago we lugged several elephant sized bags to fly with jet fuel south through Mexico to Buenos Aires, where I write from now. We’ll be moving into our new place in El Bolson, Patagonia by next week some time.

The address, should you care to use it, is

Malavika Tara Mohanan

lista de correo

El Bolson 8430

Rio Negro

Argentina

And the best news ever, we have a landline! With an answering machine!! Our voices can be heard at +54 2944 498 656.

Last Thanksgiving and Buy Nothing Day I cheesed you from Singapore, in the dark emptiness of new beginnings in the new moon in which I had become a dancer. I’ve been lucky enough to see several of you in person recently. I am thankful for that. To each of you, I am thankful for your presence, and nothing I could ever buy would top that, except for a big house where we could all live together.

I ask you all for blessings as Denali and I begin this new stage of life in Patagonia.

Come visit, and I'll tell you more about Alcatraz and all that the island represents, and our heartwrenching visit to the blasted beauty of the Appalachians, and why, when I criticize the policies of the U.S. President, I wholly appreciate why he brought tears of joy to the country, but I'm uncomfortable with pedestals and saviors, and unwilling to turn a blind eye to so many things, and you'll tell me what's been floating your boat, and we'll drink mate and pick blackberries and generally disfrutamos in the very place where Blue Cheeses were born.

Much love,

Malavika/Ammu/Mali/Emu/Bu

Squeeze Sneeze Cheese (Blue Cheese June 23, 2009)

2009-07-23T00:36:00.000+08:00

Dear ones,

Since last we cheesed many moons have passed. It was new moon then as it was last night. I asked what you thought of darkness and emptiness and spoke of new beginnings and old questions, and you wrote back to me of moons and dreams and identity and faith and Living the Questions Now.

You might find this cheese more conventional than others so far. Maybe its because so much has happened since the last cheese that I find I have to squeeze it all in and squeeze away the stream of consciousness, speeding through because I want to squeeze this out while it’s still a newish moon. Maybe it’s because I’m tired today, from doing my best to support my grandparents and mother as they struggle with flus and bad backs and the process of ageing, which all came crashing down on us these last few days, and now I think I’m coming down with the flu too. Maybe it’s because I’m growing up. (Ha. Fat chance.)

When last we cheesed I wrote of writing. Denali and I lived in Ahmedabad from September to April, during which we were hired for a writing job, and then fired, by a dear friend. I’ve never been fired before. I tend not to make myself available for hire, and the few times I have been, I’ve left before I was even close to being fired, restless native that I am. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have minded being fired. It’s something I believe everyone should do at least once in life, like shaving your head. But not in this way, this heartwrenching way. We spent months working in an office at a computer, becoming more and more miserable by the day, our energy draining away for what we believed was a life-long friendship. By the end, we found we were facing some of the deepest pain we’ve felt in our lives, and with each step we were shocked at how much more painful it could still become. We have yet to learn what lesson we could take from it (in view that every blooming flower to every broken bone can be a teacher). The experience did, however, confirm that I find office life entirely alien, so much so that I was reminded how much I want us all, not just myself, to be free from it.

The conflict was never resolved, but at least it ended, eventually. Just as it was dragging through the last and most grief that seemed to have no relief, we found community. When we first arrived, we had started exploring activity in Manav Sadhna, a Gandhian service organization working mainly with children from the nearby slum, but hadn’t been able to settle on a project that made sense, and as the writing job progressed we made less and less time for the few scattered things that we had started. We had moved away from the MS volunteer house to a tiny ground floor apartment nearby, both for the privacy, and because we felt we weren’t doing enough at MS to justify living at the house. With all the time we spent at the office, and on the bus to and fro (and that’s a rant for another time, the public transport situation that represents how systems in India make people behave inhumanely and unjustly to each other) we found ourselves alarmingly friendless, except the two friends for whom we worked, and one of those relationships was rapidly becoming the source of our misery. When we left, there were few international volunteers, and the house felt empty, though we had tried to make it lived in. In the meantime, new volunteers had joined, some living in the volunteer house, filling the emptiness with love and laughter. After one very agonizing day we came to the house and told them we hadn’t brought anything to contribute to dinner, and were miserable and weren’t even supposed to talk about it, but just needed company. We were hugged and fed and loved and laughed with, and we went to sleep that night so grateful.

Around the same time we also started two projects, a perfect transition from the job. Through Manav Sadhna, we were developing materials for organic food and farming and helping to start weekly organic food in Seva Café, a gift-economy restaurant born from the MS family. We became friends with the main farmer involved in the project, a wonderful soul, and spent time outside of Ahmedabad at his beautiful bird-filled farm. Meanwhile, Denali had also started music workshops for teachers and students in another slum school organization my father had started working with, and we had a lot of fun with that.

Unfortunately we also had problems healthwise. Denali was plagued by headaches coming from his upper back and neck, which he eventually figured out was linked to his flute playing. This was and is still devastating, even after the headaches stopped (when he eased off on playing the flute every day) because learning the bansuri, North Indian classical bamboo flute, was a crucial part of why he was in India and why we came to Ahmedabad. And then in March we both got very very very sick with what the doctor first thought might be typhoid, and then said was a “strange virus”. Humph. Anyway, for a few days after that everything around us seemed dirty and dangerous, before we returned to our any-water-chugging ways (I exaggerate. We’ve actually always been reasonably careful and sensible) so now I sympathize a little more with those crazy NRIs (non-resident Indian) and foreigners who go around rubbing disinfectant gel on their hands all the time.

The virus scare made us think we might not be able to carry out our plan to join Ankur, once he got to India in April, on a walking pilgrimage along the Ganga to the source of the river, but fortune fawned on us and shined blessings on our entire journey. The three of us recuperated fruitfully (seriously. Lots of fruit.) and rejuvenated and meditated with our wise friend Mukeshbhai in Santram Ashram in Nadiad, and then left Ahmedabad on the day after Vishu (the Kerala new year). We passed through three hotspots of revolutionary activity in Rajasthan: Shikshantar, MKSS in Dev Doongri, and Tilonia Barefoot College, on the way to Haridwar. From there we walked to Rishikesh on the car road in a day, decided that that wasn’t where we were wanted, and took a bus with Manav Sadhna folks to Uttar Kashi, which was where we had been advised to start from in the first place. We walked for 8 days on the mountain footpaths, including one rest day at Ganganaani hot springs, from Uttar Kashi to Gangothri, staying in villages and ashrams, being bathed by Gangaji all the way. We eventually made it up to Gomukh, the glacier from which the river is born (where we took a 7 second dip), and even up to Tapovan, a magickal meadow tucked up above the glacier. We came down and decided to keep walking, and made it more than halfway to Yamunotri, crossing paths with an awesome and awe-inspiring pastoral cattle herding tribe, the Van Gujjars, and a very cool American guy who was traveling and living with them for a month. After starting back down again in aim for the famous and fantastic Futanes organic mango farm in Maharashtra, we diverted back up the river to study the Tehri dam and its achingly submerged history. We eventually reached the farm, in all its heat and glory, before returning to Ahmedabad for Denali to leave two hours after his visa expired, and for my dad and me to rush home to my back-thrown mom.

I’m giving you the bare bones of the trip, but the flesh is still waiting to form, one of these days when I can finally sit down and bash it all out on this machine that I’m still so terribly dependent on. When it comes, I hope I’ll be able to give you some small inkling of how significant our time in the Himalayas has been for me, even though I’m sure I myself won’t know the extent of it for years to come.

One immediately visible effect is that I lost some weight. Welcome to what my friend Maya’s mom calls Earth Gym. Take yourself on a walk with some nice big elevations and drops, put yourself in the care of the locals, eat whatever the universe puts in front of your grateful face, dig holes, shovel horse manure, and pound rice whenever you find a chance, and say goodbye to your expensive gym membership and metabolism pills and detox shakes.

But seriously folks. Some of us are dying to get skinny and some of us are dying to be more than skin and bones, literally. Most of us on this list, I think, live in the society made up of the former. And the fastest, easiest, most revolutionary, and most enlightened way out of this disease, in my loudmouthed opinion, is to Do. Manual. Labor. All of us, whatever our education, gender, age, or identity. We have to change our relationship to our bodies and to Work. A few cheeses ago I expounded on Work a little. It’s become even more real and accessible to me since then, and I hope never to let that experiential wisdom go. As always, let me know what you think, eh?

One more thing, in three parts, before I squeeze myself out, as follow-up to the last ferment on identity, on being a dancer and wanting to be Shanti Sainik, so many moons ago. a) Since last we cheesed I completed and sent in the application for training for Non-Violent Peace Force reserves (see www.nvpf.org). (For Shanti Sainiks: Amma, Acchan, Denali, Ankur, Allio, Ava, Maya, Lauren, Neilu, Shahir, Lauren - I’m attaching the application for you to look at and comment). b) In the last few months I’ve gradually been coming back to dance. In the last week since I’ve been back here in Kerala I had been dancing a lot, and working on some pieces which might actually come to fruition. c) I haven’t been doing much dance in the last couple days, because, as I said, my dad and I have been trying to help my grandparents and mom kick this flu, and keep my granddad from falling again like he did a couple nights ago, and get my mom’s back to a place where she can at least travel to where she can get more professional help. I’m grateful to them for this. I’m grateful to them for having provided me with the physical and spiritual nutrition I needed to grow up healthy and happy and wise enough to come back home and give back, and I’m grateful to them for providing me a place where I can come back and feel not only loved because I’m a general affable person, and tend to be reasonably well-liked wherever I am, but also very very needed, in a very physical, practical, concrete way. I usually wander around doubtful about how useful I am. Nowhere else like here, especially in the last week, can I know with full certainty that without me, life would be difficult and unequivocally less happy. I believe we all need this certainty, and secretly hunger for the social situations that can give it to us.

On that note, we’ll all be much happier if I stop being sneezy, kick this flu I’ve stolen from them and can go back to being useful and cheerful, so off I go in that endeavor.

As always, to each of you whom I love and always wish to be more in contact with,
thank you for being with me,
I love you,
Malavika/Ammu/Mali/Emu

Cheese breath

2008-11-26T16:26:00.006+08:00

Blue cheesers,

Last night the moon was a dark and empty circle. What happens in you when I speak of darkness, emptiness?

I feel space, freedom. A place from where new things can be born. New breaths.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, one of my favoritest holidays. We're in Singapore, with access to a real live oven. Denali made a pumpkin pie from his grandmother's recipe. And for the first time in my life on November 5th I was wholeheartedly undividedly genuinely glad to be American. As American as pumpkin pie.

I give thanks for all of you.
For all the messages that came in with suggestions on where to find the spirit of water, a few cheeses ago. She is with me now as I write.
For your sweet love after my cheese about the blues, messages I've kept away to reply to with care.

Some of you have told me I should write more, for more people, maybe a book or something. I'm grateful for that too, but until recently I've been resisting it for various reasons.

I'm still trying to escape from a world consumed by reading and writing. I've grown up with it, I'm grateful to it, but eventually I felt trapped by it, stuck in my head, unable to reach my heart. As many of us are, yes? I tried to wean myself off email, then off computers, and I've been fighting to wean myself off writing altogether. Obviously, by the medium in which you're receiving this, I'm fighting a losing battle on all accounts. So here's a thought, maybe I don't need to fight at all.

Which is what led me to say, before Denali and I left Kerala to move to Ahmedabad a couple months ago, that one of the employment options I was open to, even excited about, was writing. And the universe answered by giving us a job writing for the Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Limited. As many misgivings I have about it, not the least of which is that by working for TCGL we're effectively working for right-wing Hindutva maniac Narendra Modi, it has been (and still is. Deadlines are hovering.) an excellent experience, mediated by our angel friend Nirali. And I'm open to more like it. I'm now enjoying opening up to the writer in me.

But you know what? I'm not a writer. I'm a dancer. I sometimes correct that to say performer, or performing artist, to include theatre, but the spirit of me is conveyed best by dancer, plain and simple.

Yesterday I went back to my first blog entry, almost 5 years ago, when I began recording random thoughts, and it says, "I'd like to be a dancer. No. I mean. Really, a dancer. What say the universe about that?" I had forgotten, but I guess that's when I started articulating this to myself. And you, what say you about it?

It seems to me that now is the time to dance, not to write. Maybe when I'm 70 and slowing down (I used to think I didn't want to live past 30, now I'm quite looking forward to being grey and crinkly), then I'll write. Or maybe one of these days I'll finally ground myself enough to get in the way of the machine good and proper without doing harm to myself or others, and then I'll get put away for a while, and then I'll write. Because I know I'm a dancer, but I also want to know that I'm a shanti sainik, I just don't fully trust it fully yet.

And another reason I didn't want to write a book or something was because there's simply too many products in this world already. If I sat down and just read every decent insightful thing that was out there I wouldn't finish in this lifetime. It feels like we're obsessed with productivity and plagued by information overload, frying both our minds and the planet. I don't feel like adding blindly to that.

I don't feel that way about my live dance, but I do about recorded. Which is why I needed convincing to make the Navashwaasam DVD. And as much as I learned from and appreciate this product that my parents and I created together, the 250 or so copies that are now gathering dust in Singapore, Kerala, and Ahmedabad are weighing on me. I'm troubled that our effort and resources have been wasted. It's getting in the way, or, I've let it get in the way of the darkness and emptiness from which my breaths are born.

While I know that some of the 500 copies printed are gathering dust in homes of family and friends (which is fine, they were given with love, not with expectations), and while I've moved so far beyond the DVD that I've put the project to rest and no longer want it to represent my work, I still believe there are people out there who would want and use Navashwaasam, the recording. I want to get those copies out of the dust and into the hands of these people. If, in the process, they can contribute to the costs of making the DVDs, awesome, but at this point that's secondary. But this is an overwhelmingly complex task for people like my parents and me.

Brother Ankur suggested kindly that his mom in Washington could store the DVDs to send to people who requested it, but I don't want to even ask her without knowing where it's going to need to be sent, and if there is even the need at all.

So now, for the umpty third time, I'm asking for your help. Any ideas? Is this even worth it, or should I resign myself to using the DVDs as coasters and get on with my life?

Today is Buy Nothing Day (or tomorrow, depending on where you are. Check out Adbusters or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day), an effort to resist and balance out our earth-crashing consumerism, represented by day-after-Thanksgiving sales. We're celebrating it, no doubt. So it feels weird to be almost trying to sell something, but I want to believe that the spirit of my effort in fact fits perfectly with the spirit of what we're celebrating today. Again, what say you to that? All of it?

(On a funny sidenote (as if my cheeses don't consist entirely of sidenotes) my dad just walked in, as I was typing the last paragraph, with a bag of groceries. I had told him this morning that today was Buy Nothing Day, but he had forgotten and decided we needed yoghurt, and other stuff came along with it. Denali said food items were allowed. And my dad said that anyway he didn't actually buy anything, because he had forgotten his wallet so he would just pay them tomorrow. He very rarely forgets his wallet, only once in three blue moons, so it's very odd. We decided the gods of Buying Nothing had punished him for trying to buy something, or maybe they were helping him worship them properly. Then he went into the kitchen to put stuff away, and dropped the yoghurt on the floor. It was a big white thick mess. The gods smote him good, it seems. We laughed uproariously, of course.)

Happy Thanksgiving,
Love
Malavika Ammu Mali Emu Tara Mohanan

A Cheese About the Blues

2008-06-28T20:35:00.000+08:00

Blue Cheesers,

For every penny, rupee, shillingi, or real I try to save, for every ounce or pound of guilt I create for myself as the burden of privilege, the universe does something to balance my debt, to lighten my load.

***

Last Thursday morning I was leaving from a friend's house in Kozhikode (the 'zh' sound in Malayalam is pronounced, by the way, as a curled 'r', the way Americans pronounce the 'r' in 'American') where my mother and I had been visiting. When I realized I had forgotten a belt for my pants, I didn't think it would be more than a mild inconvenience. (I'll ruin the fun right here. No, my pants don't fall off in a crowded public area in this story.)

In the bus to Sultan Batheri I sat trying to Reiki and sleep away some sniffles that had been hanging over my head for a good few weeks. I expected to only have to get off at the last stop, so I wasn't too alert when we reached the middle of the town and the driver told me to get out, which I found out later was because the station for this bus was a little ways out of town. Not wanting to delay him further (He was already impatient. They often are.) I grabbed my bags and left without checking the seat as I usually do.

On the next bus I reached into my back pocket for money and didn't find my wallet. My throat and chest tightened up and I simultaneously tried to a) figure out how to get my wallet, wherever it was, b) figure out how to manage if I didn't get it, and c) relax myself out of the familiar heavy guilty sensations and thought processes of being an absolute idiot.

The answer to b) was that I had just enough coins to get myself a ticket to Cheengode, my last stop for today, from where the only problem would be breaking the extra 500 point note I had hidden in my bag for emergencies (aah, not so absolutely an idiot after all), which I could probably do with someone at Kanavu, the place I was visiting for the night, before I left for Mangalore the next morning, after which I would be with my uncle, which was almost like being safe at home. (Home? Where is home? Will I ever figure that out? Sure, for now I say its here with my grandparents and my mother in this burgeoning village but as my grandmother points out, how often am I here? For how long? Where am I watching my plants grow?)

The answer to a) was that, since I had been absolutely alone at the back of the bus (the area reserved for women. Don't worry, it's not always the back, often its the front, it's not a inferiority thing. Though that's not to say there isn't serious sexism around here.) and walked straight to the next bus without allowing anyone near me so I couldn't have been pickpocketed, I was 99% sure that it was my beltless pants that had allowed my wallet to go AWOL. It occurred to me that my last chance at c), recovering myself from idiocy, was to leap out and get myself to the other bus station in case the bus hadn't left with my stowaway wallet yet. I really had to pee, which didn't help my clarity of thought, but that seemed like the best plan. Of course, in the process of leaping out, asking in broken Malayalam (because my throat and chest were tight and I had to pee. My Malayalam is actually passable these days when I'm not stressed.) where the station was, fumbling in my pocket for the ticket to give back to the conductor since I wasn't taking the bus, I succeeding in revealing my idiocy to the entire bus.

I broke my note and found out the station was "2km" away (which means an undefined distance, somewhere between short and long. Our friend Ankur Shah says that it means "I've never been there". Gujurati and Malayalam translate differently, but the overbearing certainty of a false notion is common to humans across South Asia, I think), which I would have walked if I weren't trying to chase my wallet. Funny how chasing time and money necessarily means spending both. I took the recommended 12 point autorickshaw ride, only to find that Sultan Batheri wasn't the last destination of the bus as I had thought (because of the sign in the front of the bus saying Sultan Batheri), and it had left for Mysore a while ago.

I briefly wondered if some kind soul would see the address inserted in the wallet and be channeled by our friend Doug Pulleyblank (who goes out of his way to get lost wallets back to their homes).

Right.

I walked back the "2k" with a lump in my throat. My last cheese to you was also right after my wallet fell out of my pocket (and then was stolen). Would I never learn? Would life never thump some sense into my befuddled careless brain? Travelling light, indeed. What right did I have to philosophize? What right did I have carrying anything of value? What was I wandering around for anyway, when was I going to stop being a child?

I knew there was no sense in crying over spilled wallets, and I was being too hard on myself, and I needed to treat myself gently and kindly, but the questions and doubts and self-flagellations continued and the lump in my throat thickened.

Later that night at Kanavu (an Adivasi, or indigenous, learning community in the hills of north Kerala that I've been visiting for the last few years) I woke up to the sound of people hooting at wild elephants to scare them away from their fields. I lay awake thinking I could have called my mother or uncle and asked them to call the Transport office and see if they could get the bus driver to check for the wallet. Many of them have cell phones these days. And my sniffles made their way from a cold into a sore throat.

I usually sit generally blissed out in buses and trains. But the next morning the series of long bus rides to Mangalore had me mostly ranging from dull to ruffled to teary.

By Sunday, I had sniffled my way to a bad cough and cold, and spiraled my way into a depression.

This monster is familiar to me. I've had it with me at least since I was 7. Some years ago it built up towards a major crisis, and since then, with help, I've been healing, trying to shake this thing off.

It started to build up again last year, for various intangible reasons. It really dug its heels in when Denali and I were crew on a sailboat from San Diego to the south of Mexico for several weeks, a phenomenal magickal experience, much of which I spent fighting back tears and feeling terribly horribly Not Good Enough. (Some time I'll write you about all the good parts too. It was a much awaited, and in many ways, very successful adventure.)

This time the monster has been very different, though. I am slowly realizing that I can no more shake it off than I can my brown skin that I so wanted to not have so many years ago. Slowly coming to see that perhaps it's not a monster at all. Not something to fear, to hate, to get away from, but something to be with, to understand, to be kind to.

Some of you know this about me already, but for some of you, this may come as a bit of a shock. I'm writing this partly so you can help me in my journey towards wholeness, if you want to (and haven't already started). I also know some of you have monsters of your own. In fact, I'll bet most of you have some monster or another under your skin that you are learning to live with. So I'm also writing to ask to be part of your journey too, monsters and angels and all, if you want me to.

That's plenty of cheese to chew on for now, so I'll leave you with a poem by Rumi, along with so many unwritten letters composed in my head to each of you, as I sit on one moving vehicle after another, and my deep deep love.

Ammu Malavika Mali Emu

****

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

(I found this poem, and the quote I have now as my email signature, in a book called The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness, by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. It is helping me tremendously. I seriously recommend it for anyone who is open, whether or not you experience depression.)

--
************************************************************
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races – the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you've ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves across your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you; that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Travelling Light

2008-01-19T03:37:00.000+08:00

Dear Blue Cheesers,

I've been waiting to have something real to say that won't dissolve into human ego as soon as I put it down. The longer I wait, the bluer this cheese gets. It's now sea blue.

I've been reading and writing all my life. For a time I even thought that if I practiced, I might get good at it, and that would be part of my contribution to the development of human consciousness. Recently I've been reading Rumi, Gibran, Taha Muhammad Ali, Alice Walker, especially Alice Walker, the grandmother goddess....They are brave and tender Wise ones and I found myself beginning to write like them. Like when I was reading a lot of Christopher Durang and started writing wacky scenes for plays that I never finished. (Or the way I hope kids are starting to behave with courage and love after reading the final Harry Potter.) You know how that is? We give out that which we take in, and when we surround ourselves by those we admire perhaps we hope that we take on those qualities. Then at some point maybe we realize our works are just weak imitations of an inner light that is not our own. Yet still, maybe in the light we borrow from Them, we eventually find our own.

Denali and I have reduced our packs drastically for our future travel. If all goes well we have a ride on someone's boat from San Diego, California to Mazatlan, Mexico, and from somewhere south we'll keep looking for rides across the Pacific to India or Singapore. That's the plan anyway. And this will all be much easier if we don't have huge things on our backs like we had when we were on tour across the country.

I know longer put quotemarks around the word tour, because that's actually what we did, no joke, no irony, no sarcasm. We travelled and performed, professionally, in most senses of the word. It's a nice feeling to know it's possible to do that in a way that nurtures our souls.

The next adventure will be very different. And we need light packs for it. In more senses than one, of the word Light.

We went to our friend Ian's house in Mendocino for a couple days to hang out and help a little bit with re-building his family's house. It burned down last year, completely down. It's a good thing they had insurance. Real insurance. They couldn't get the fake paper-kind, because the insurance company wouldn't do it for an old wooden house (go figure), but they had the real people-kind. Over the years they had built a nourishing network of family and friends and love that helped them take what could have been a traumatic experience and turn it into one of renewal and gratitude. That's what I call real insurance.

Someone gifted Kathy, Ian's mom, with a book called Traveling Light ("Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Basho, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard and Others" by Philip Harnden) to help her in her journey beyond Stuff. I happened on it gladly just as I was about to move beyond my own Stuff towards a much lighter backpack, and needing some inspiration for it.

I lost my wallet yesterday. Or, it fell out of my pocket, and by the time I went back to look for it, someone had taken it. I was briefly bummed, but the lines I most remember of the book rubbed salve and blew on my wounds. "We delight in things, and we delight in being loosed from things. Between the two we dance our lives."

The book spoke of the many meanings of travelling light. Light materially, but also light spiritually. About taking things lightly. About travelling by our own inner light. The one that the many brave and tender Wise Ones can help us find.

Denali and I went for a class with another wise one, Jean Couch, at the Balance Center in Palo Alto. She gave us a taste of how it feels to let our bones do the work they're meant to do, so that we can feel light and energetic like we're meant to. It's a lifelong work of re-alignment for us. It's fun. I strongly suggest you give it a try if you're anywhere near her, and feel anything less than weightless.

So now we travel with lighter packs. And lighter bodies. And lighter minds. And that means less words. Maybe I don't need to read and write and think and speak all the time. Maybe human consciousness delights not only in creating new works, but in savoring old ones again and again. Bathing in them. Seeing them anew each time. And in silence, it most surely delights in silence.

I tend to build my cheeses around the marking of an occasion. Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. The shutdown of San Francisco after the first day of the bombing of Iraq (the second time around). My re-discovery of the meaning of Work through the peeling of cashews. I started a cheese for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and never got around to finishing it. I started a cheese for the day Denali and I drove out to the ocean (and really cross the country coast to coast) just before leaving Washington after spending six weeks working (lightly) on a farm on the Olympic Peninsula, in which I would have told you about the unspeakable largeness of existence there, and the magick Wand of Wanting that I found (with which you could bless someone to want to be what they are, not want to be what they're not.) and never got around to finishing it. I started a cheese describing the contents of a beautiful calendar that Denali's mom Linda had given us, made by the Syracuse Cultural Workers, that seemed to me to represent perfectly the way I see history and humanity and the balance between resistance and creation, but I didn't get around to copying down the appropriate events from the calendar before I left with my friend Kellea because we're lightening our packs. So many cheeses lost like that, dropped like my wallet, through carelessness, mindlessness. Or. Through lightness?

And now, if all goes well, we set sail on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr Day. All this week I thought I was building a cheese for him. For you all and me to think about him. And I thought perhaps my teacher Alice Walker would visit. But I didn't get around to copying down the passage from her book "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For" before I left it with my friend Neilu because we've lightened our packs.

One of the few books we're taking with us is "In the Absence of the Sacred" written by, I kid you not, Jerry Mander. From the little bits Denali has read, it seems most excellent and lucid and balanced and soulful. It says computers are poopie (like I needed to read a book to know that).

And it's a beautiful day outside. And I don't need to write anymore for you to know I love you, even if I missed seeing you when I passed through your area, or I didn't get around to organizing the performance for you, or I haven't written to congratulate you on your wedding, or your birthday, or the success of your project, or your gift-free family Christmas, or the very fact that you exist.

Lightly, lovingly,

Malavika Ammu Mali Emu

Gandhi Cheese

2008-01-19T03:34:00.000+08:00

Text is in email. This computer won't cut and paste it right. Harumph.

Impeachment, Arrest, and Trial of Bush and Cheney

2007-08-16T05:34:00.000+08:00

Dear Blue Cheesers,

This is not an email about my time in the Bay Area in the spring, about my falling in love in and with San Francisco.

This is not about driving from Southern California to Jackson, Wyoming, where Jacquie Pratt, a fox, and the Big French Titties (known to some as Grand Teton National Park) were waiting lovingly for us.

This is not about Maya picking me up and us driving and Greyhounding across the country to Atlanta, Georgia, with a bottle of water from Guillermo's Modjeska canyon creek water in a bottle to take to the water ceremony at the first United States Social Forum. This is definitely not about the Forum, with its Healing Space, and Children's Social Forum, and volunteer security force (Shanti Sainya anybody?) that were some of the best parts of a stunningly incredible experience. This is not about the fortuitous carride from Atlanta to DC with a car full of kooks with sharing hearts and bounding dreams.

This is not about wearing a sari to Denali's brother Colin's wedding in New Hampshire and dancing the Macarena with all those Hampshireans.

This isn't about a awe-inspiring all-night storm on the beach in Corolla, North Carolina where at first you couldn't even count a second between lightning flashes.

This is not about running through the rain this morning, smelling and enjoying it, but not wanting to stop and savor it because I really had to pee.

This is not about all those things that you're probably thoroughly confused by. My dear blue cheesers, this isn't even a Blue Cheese.

This is an email about impeaching and arresting Bush and Cheney and trying them as war criminals.

Peace, love, and squishes on your noses,
Malavika/Ammu/Mali/Emu

*****

There is a widespread feeling, in the United States and throughout the world, that it's time for the world to stop calling George Walker Bush and Richard Cheney "president" and "vice-president" of the United States of America, and start calling them war criminals. I share this feeling. Impeachment, arrest, and trial are in order.

How do you feel?

If you feel that Bush and Cheney are good men and fine leaders of a righteous nation, or if you feel they might have made a few mistakes, but nothing that warrants impeachment, and certainly not arrest, then I invite you to read, at the very least, "The Impeachment of George W. Bush" by Elizabeth Holtzman and Cynthia L. Cooper (or shorter articles by these and various other authors which are linked at http://www.impeachbushbook.com/) and/or engage with me in a dialogue about this. I invite you to consider the possibility of an institutional inquiry into whether impeachment is in order.

If you feel that the Bush administration has wreaked global havoc and it would be nice to get them out of power, but we might as well wait for January 20th, 2009 (the date that is stated on a T-shirt, found in even mainstream stores near you, as "The End of an Error") when the imperial presidency comes to an end anyway, so that we can save our resources for more constructive efforts, then I invite you to read "The Impeachment of George W. Bush" (or shorter articles at http://www.impeachbushbook.com/) and/or engage with me in a dialogue about this. I invite you to consider the possibility that our other constructive efforts will be exponentially aided by mobilizing on this task first, not only to end this presidency, but to send a clear message to all presidents and leaders for the future.

If you don't really know how you feel or what impeachment even is, or you know but don't really feel like getting involved, then I invite you to read "The Impeachment of George W. Bush" by Elizabeth Holtzman and Cynthia L. Cooper (or shorter articles at http://www.impeachbushbook.com/) and/or contact me to allow me to convince you how vital your participation is to this situation, and how much more whole and vibrant your life will feel when you engage with it.

If you're one of the above, or anything else, and don't have the time or inclination to read the whole book, or any other writing on this issue, allow me to lay it out for you in the section between the asterisks, with my commentary added and blended to the summary for no extra charge. (If you feel sufficiently informed feel free to skip this section, though I welcome comments and additions if you choose to read it, since I would like to be still more informed than I am now.)
***
One of the authors, Elizabeth Holtzman, is "the youngest woman ever elected to the US congress and won national attention for her role on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate." (from the back of the book) The authors use this experience to explain why impeachment is necessary "to preserve the constitution", and how to do it. They describe the Nixon impeachment process. They draw the parallels between the impeachable actions of Nixon and Bush (though Nixon was impeached on the basis of far less than what Bush and Co. have done). They explain how impeachment works (Basically, the House of Representatives investigates through the Judiciary Committee and decides to impeach, sends it up to the Senate, and Senate decide whether to remove the official from office) and outline the 5 things that can be used to impeach Bush:
1. He subverted democracy by lying about, among other things, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, (yes, AQ is now very much in Iraq, but as various agencies and experts advised the Bush administration beforehand, they entered and took hold only afterwards, as a direct result of the invasion and occupation) in order to take the country to war. (Nixon deja-vu?)
2. He authorized illegal domestic wiretapping and surveillance of Americans, and when discovered, supplied false justifications. (Nixon deja-vu?)
3. He authorized torture, flouting international law by stating that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. Furthermore, upon receiving an anti-torture statute, he signed it with a statement that said, as president, he disagreed with the law and thus need not abide by it.
4. He showed "reckless indifference to human life" in the lead-up and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and by sending troops into Iraq lacking basic equipment, with no post-invasion plan (there was, of course, lots of lying and "dissembling" here too, as with everything else).
5. He authorized the leaking of classified information about Iraq's supposed purchase of yellowcake uranium in Niger, rearranged and edited to be misleading (more lying, more distortion), causing the ousting of a CIA agent (as retaliation against her husband, an outspoken Bush critic, who disproved the story of Iraq's supposed uranium purchasing), which was a breach of national security. (Nixon deja-vu?)
The next 5 chapters are for the details and arguments for each of the 5 points.
They devote a chapter to impeachment of Cheney. They are for it, but argue against the idea that Cheney should be impeached/arrested first (which many are pressing for, so that he does not become president after Bush is impeached), because a) Bush needs to be impeached, among other things, in order to show future presidents that they cannot repeat this behavior, and b) that there isn't as much information (though there is plenty!) on Cheney's impeachable offenses. The idea is that the investigation of the Bush Impeachment will yield the information needed to impeach Cheney. (I'm not inclined to argue with the tactics, but my commitment is to impeaching and arresting them both.)
They then tell you "What you can do", and end with a chapter that emphasizes "Why impeachment is necessary", followed by Appendices with excerpts of various relevant Constitutional and legal documents, and a overwhelming list of sources.
***
Back to you, and how you feel.
If you're an engaged and informed radical committed to disrupting and dissolving the system that Bush, Cheney, et al, are merely erupting symptoms of, and the whole impeachment process is just too institutional for you, and even if it works it just brings things back to status quo, I sympathize, but I invite you to engage with me on this and allow me to convince you that for once in our free spirit lives we actually have to devote our fire to making the system work the way it is supposed to. Once we get that wheel turning, we can keep going with our Sharpies and our compost, and you know what, along the way we might even unplug some new brains that will join us. But until we get this situation cleared up, the war will rage on and the US military will establish a long-term presence in Iraq and in our hearts and our everyday journey towards a free and loving world will be that much harder.
If you feel that you're with me in spirit without even reading the book, but you think impeachment is an impossible task, read on and allow me to convince you otherwise, while showing you what you can do to get involved in this snowball of an essential and entirely feasible movement to impeach Bush and Cheney.
(Sidenote 1: As mentioned previously, I'm for both impeaching and arresting them as war criminals, but I'm focusing on the first for the time being, in the hope that the second can afford more time and research even after the regime change in the next elections.
Sidenote 2: If you're receiving this directly from me, there's a high likelihood you don't have a U.S. passport, and maybe you're resigned to watching from the sidelines as American people, the only ones with power, allow this disaster to drive us to extinction. This does not have to be. This is a matter of earth, not nation, and every earthling is connected. Apologies, much of what I'm writing about here seems relevant only for those with a U.S. passport, or at least living in the United States, but if you're interested, let's start a brainstorm on what folks all over the world can do.)
* What you can do *
First of all, note that "a Zogby poll taken in November [2005] --before the wiretap scandal--showed more than 50 percent of those questioned favored impeachment of President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq." (Elizabeth Holtzman, The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060130/holtzman/6).
Next, gear up with information and inspiration by....
... reading the book. It's out in bookstores near you, or by now, perhaps even homes and libraries near you. There's also a lot of information on the website for the book, http://www.impeachbushbook.com/. Holtzman and Cooper aren't hippies, peace-niks, wackos from the fringe. They are informed, engaged, successful professionals, one a former Congresswoman, fully integrated into and representative of the mainstream. If they're saying it, then so are others, in overwhelmingly large numbers, and so can you. If you can't read the whole book, at least read the Holtzman article I mentioned in the paragraph above, and/or any one of the many articles by these and other authors. If you are sick of reading alone like I am, get together with folks and read it out loud, or at least side by side, with discussions like a Book Club. (That's right, shake off that mistaken sense of isolation. You're going to need to get together and work with folks anyway for later steps so you might as well start now.)
... getting ahold of the song "Let's Impeach the President", the 7th track on Neil Young's 2006 album, Living With War. You can hear the song with a video on the Living With War part of his website, http://www.neilyoung.com/, and I'm sure you can download it for free from somewhere or other, or for 99cts on iTunes. Some may say the lyrics are vanilla and the chords are wooden, but you know what, vanilla is scrumptious, and you see how far you can live without wood. The song is out there. Play it, blast it, learn it, teach it, sing it, often, and with as many people as you can (and don't forget the little people, otherwise known as "'children").
Now you're ready to get Political. If you have a U.S. passport and live in the country, you can start by contacting your Representative and Senator of your district by email, phone, letter (hand-written), and even better, in person. If you can't do that because of passport or location, you can encourage others who can. And you know what, you don't even have to stop there. Hit up every single Congress member. Start by sending a message of support to those already active in the impeachment movement (many of whose names appear in the Impeachment book.) Then send messages to those who have already voiced opposition to the Bush administration's policies, to help convince them that impeachment is a worthwhile pursuit. And finally, send another kind of message to the other kind, those complicit or involved in the impeachable offenses. Let them know the world is watching. (Side Note: this is a step I have yet to take. It's just not part of my MO. But I'm in DC, and one of these days I'm gonna find myself dressed decently, sitting across the table meeting with the secretary of every member of Congress I can get an appointment with. And hell will still be hot and pigs will still be landed.)
Meanwhile, add to the extensive signage and bumper stickerage with even more signs and stickers, but this time, with a cohesive simple striking message:
"Arrest Bush"
"Arrest Cheney First"
Maybe you're not usually one for sloganizing, but this situation isn't usual. This calls for mass collective extra-usual behavior. Imagine people, cars, sidewalks, beaches, all saying one thing, together, clearly, loudly, joyfully, telling Congress to do their job, put an end to an imperial presidency, and get the world back on track. Well, heck, don't even imagine it, just take a walk and look around. The party's already happening, and you're invited.
A coalition of artist/activists in New York has put out T-shirts with these messages on the front, and the article for impeachment in the Constitution on the back, in simple dignified black and white. Email Laurie Arbeiter at arrestbush@gmail.com to order T-shirts, or to ask for the artwork to do a printing and distribute on your own. (They ask for a $15 donation to help keep the group going, but the main thing isn't the money, it's the message, and the action.) Wearing a shirt like this means getting the word out there, and more importantly, engaging people on the streets in conversation. Denali and I met Laurie because she was wearing the T-shirt, we gave her a thumbs-up, and she stopped to talk.
But if we were going to just sit on our heels and beg for Congress to do what is glaringly obvious, then yeah, maybe I wouldn't be so convinced this was possible either. But if this all comes out of what is necessary to preserve democracy (Radicals, bear with me, we're addressing a multi-dimensional spectrum of belief systems here), then it must be done democratically, which means that the decisions are taken by those with the information. If you are part of a community that decides it is sufficiently informed to decide that Bush and Cheney are no longer your president and vice-president, then put out a local resolution that says so. That community can be as big as a state (Vermont did it. California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin are trying to do it.) or as small as a neighborhood (I'm currently staying near Takoma Park, MD, which most recently celebrated the passing of a city council resolution.), and even small political groups or non-residential communities. See the list on http://impeachpac.org/resolutions to keep track of local resolutions.
Now that you've informed and have activized yourself, what next? If you feel you have more income than time and energy, you could always shoot off a few donations to the groups and individuals who are eating, breathing, sleeping, pooping the impeachment movement. But maybe you also want to start eating a little of that same food for thought, breathing that same air of Possibility, dreaming the Unrealized, shitting the pre-compost for Transformation...
You've been reading this for a while now. Take a moment to breathe, stretch your neck, back, hands. Shut your eyes. (You might have to finish reading this paragraph first, of course.) Look for the center of what makes you You. Find the boundaries of your comfort zone. Take a finger and press gently on that fuzziness of safety. See how far you can stretch. Take a deep breath in and blow. Let your breath do the stretching, expanding. Stay there for as long as it takes to feel, in your center, slightly imprisoned by your security, enough to feel the urge to do what you need to do, even if that means entering into unfamiliar, uncertain territory, enough to feel the thrill of what might happen in that new land. Open your eyes.
No one's asking you to be a hero. Definitely not a martyr. But the reality is, the reason I'm here writing this to you is because, while I believe our task is possible, I also know how mind-bogglingly difficult it is. I know that what it needs is for overwhelming masses of people, each one strong enough in their core to act as individuals, yet connected enough to act in concert, to disrupt their normal lives even just a little bit. To collectively detach from one gear and hook onto another, to send us hurtling down a different path than the one it seems like we're on right now.
So yes, I'm asking you to get uncomfortable. I'm asking you to evaluate your individual needs, your community, your income, your job security, your freetime, your lifestyle, your passport and/or other documentation, your geographical location, and whatever else you need to take into account before making that decision to put some or all of those slightly at risk.
If you live in DC, that might mean simply appearing at the A.N.S.W.E.R. peace march on September 15th, or the TroopsOutNow peace march on September 29th, or the United For Peace and Justice march on September 24th (I think). It might mean joining the New York based coalition of artists/activists at the Rayburn Building (House of Representatives) for a day/night of mourning on September 11th, followed by a day of outrage on September 12th, where you could read one of many statements to Nancy Pelosi calling for impeachment of Bush and Cheney and whatever else you want to express. It could mean joining the coalition in New York on September 25th to support or participate in a mass citizen's arrest of George W. Bush as he goes in to speak to the United Nations. It might mean finding an action closer to wherever you are. It might mean getting together with the folks you've been reading, discussing, and singing with to organize your own event. Remember, every one of these actions is planned with safety, community, and non-violence in mind, making sure that everyone can participate at their level of comfort (or just beyond).
If you are a teacher or a parent, you could read the Impeachment book and other materials with your students/children to co-learn with them about everything from the Constitution (and other aspects of the legal/political system), to radioactivity (yellowcake/depleted uranium, radioactivity, steel pipes, nuclear energy and weapons) to art (puppets/songs/theatre/graffiti/screen printing as resistance...). Use your classroom to talk about the importance of civic engagement and its relationship to civil disobedience, non-cooperation with a system you don't believe in, and simultaneous cooperation with community-based living that you do believe in. Bring the kids out and have class on the streets as part of the protests.
If you live near a major port and are amenable to the idea of disrupting the machine of war profiteering, take part in the shutdown of the port (as has been done previously in places like Oakland (California), Tacoma and Seattle (Washington)). Support the workers as they strike, and the protesters who practice civil disobedience. BE the workers and the protesters, or be their media, legal support, their nutrition, their energy...
...And the list goes on. But I think you've read enough, and I've certainly typed enough. If you want help with more ideas, write me back with details of your situation. (If you absolutely don't want me to engage you on this in any way shape or form, let me know.) Before I sign off, here's one last possible thing you can do. If you got something out of this email, forward it (or your own version of it), by email or hardmail if needs be, to every single person who would also appreciate it, learn from it, and/or be able and willing to contribute their efforts to the movement.
Peace out and back in again,
Malavika

Cashew Cheese

2007-03-23T17:08:00.000+08:00

Dear Blue Cheesers and Other Loved Ones,

(If you don’t feel like reading mouldy ramble, and you just want an idea of the space-time logistics of the next few months of my life, skip to the end.)

A couple days after I got home from an Ahmedabad/Udaipur/Jaipur/Delhi trip, I went for a scrounge through the yard around the house to see how it had changed in the weeks I was away. Mangos are only just starting (there are just a few — the yield gets smaller each passing year as our soil gets poorer), but cashews had already arrived before I left. So I expected a few cashews around the tree. But I didn’t think I would find a couple of kilos of nuts (unshelled).

I even found a couple of fruits without too many worm holes, so I peeled off the skin and sucked at the juice and chewed at the flesh (closest fruit to chewing gum, if you ask me) instead of twisting the nut off and throwing the fruit away. Most cashew fruits are either fresh enough to be juicy and difficult to tear from the nut (also, cashew juice stains your clothes. Urckh), but have already been well-nibbled by bugs, birds and bacteria, or they have shrivelled and dried, and just a flick dislodges them from the nut, but they’re nothing you’d want to put in your mouth.

I used to just think of the dry ones as easier to deal with. But I recently heard of a fellow who sun-dries cashew fruits, which are apparently very good for you, and now I think of him. He laments at all the fruits that are left to rot after the nuts are removed (I guessed he’d be psyched to go to Brazil and see the cashew juice you get everywhere.) Funny how things change. My granduncle tells me stories of how, as a boy, he would steal the fruits from a cashew grove and the owner would say, ‘Ok, just make sure you leave the seed’. Of course that’s what he could sell, not the fruit. But the boys would laugh at the fool who wanted the useless little things.

I’ve always loved cashew nuts. One of my favorite Indian sweets is kaju burfi (or kaju katli, kaju for cashew), the key ingredients of which are cashews and sugar. During my vegan experiment it became even dearer to me, because it usually doesn’t have milk, unlike most other commercially available Indian sweets (for vegans who ignore rumours of animal bones and whatnot used to process white sugar).

Then last year around this time, a few months after I had moved to my grandparent’s home here in Kerala, I finally encountered real live homegrown cashews (I’d never been around for the season). I collected them with my grandmother and sat with her to slice/bang open the thick hard skin to get to the soft insides. I smushed the first few, but soon learned to take them out whole, because otherwise the small smushed bits get lost when the lot is fried. They have to be fried because of the non-edible oil around them.

As we shell the nuts, this oil burns our fingers and leaves black skin that peels off over a few days. It doesn’t hurt, but feels scratchy and looks funny. (Apparently there’s some report that says the two most toxic/hazardous jobs around these parts are cashew processing and sand mining. But we mustn’t let this vague unsubstantiated half-information stop us from purchasing a kilo of kaju burfi or adding a second floor of conventional industrial architecture to our house.) After taking part in collecting and processing the cashews, they became dearer than dearerson to me. Imagine how many fingers are burned in some factory to give me just one piece of kaju burfi. Imagine instead if, as part of our education, we spent part of our time growing, gathering, processing and understanding the things we love most.

In February I spent a week at home between getting back from Nairobi and leaving for Ahmedabad. A day or two before I left for A’bad I sliced and scooped the small pile of cashews that had collected.
In February, during the week at home between getting back from Nairobi and leaving for Ahmedabad, I sliced and scooped a small pile of cashews. The dark burned skin appeared on my fingers a few days later during the 34-hour train ride to A’bad, and then started to peel. When I reached A’bad I wrote to my grandparents, on a yellow postcard (a flimsy low-budget thing which costs 50 paise and takes away only half of one side for the address so it lets you write a proper letter, far cooler than the other type, the plasticked tourist snapshot thing that costs a bomb and doesn’t let you write much more than, Dear Mom, With Love-), about the skin-peeling progress, and that I liked it because it was a sign of at least some minimal contribution to the household, although, of course, I was the one to eat most of the fruits of the labor, so materially I was contributing to myself, but I reason that my non-material non-measurable contribution is that my grandmother was happy to see the nuts of the house being appreciated by a child (my dad would probably say ‘nut’ should be used here too) of the house.

The reason I found so many nuts last week was because my grandmother hadn’t had time or energy to collect them. There’s only so much an 81-yr-young woman can do while taking care of a house and a 92-yr-young husband. As I stooped and scrounged and squeezed, I thought about the thing called Work.

In Nairobi the friend whose family I was staying with for part of the time was in financial difficulties. This didn’t stop them from showing generosity and hospitality (they took me in as their daughter) and general good cheer, but their financial situation was weighing on their mind. The father had lost his job a few months before and now went out for what they referred to as ‘cashew job’, which I took to mean whatever work he could find each day. They may feel ashamed, but I say it’s a perfectly respectable position to be in, as long as there is honesty in both the work and the life. But, of course, I have a Bachelor’s degree from Stanford, I can say pretty much whatever the heck I want.

In a conversation in A’bad, a soul-brother defined Work as the thing We do that only We can. I’ll add to that that it should also be valued by at least one other person (including non-humans), and should preferably do as little harm to others as possible.
Only I can wake up and spend an hour traipsing through our yard collecting a skirtful of cashew nuts, sucking the fruits along the way, and bring it back to a grandmother who won’t show it, but is secretly pleased. Only I can sit my bored grandfather down to pull drumstick leaves from their stalks (the ones my grandmother and I collected from the garden because she knows that my favorite food is whatever is grown at home and she won’t show it but she is secretly pleased) so that my grandmother can cook them for lunch, and while we pull leaves we listen to Bela Fleck and only I can laugh with and at my grandfather for thinking the music is from a village band outside the gate, waiting to see it pass, because his hearing is bad. Only I can go to Nairobi and Brazil and Madhya Pradesh and bring back the smells and the words and the wonders to my mother who can, at the very least, travel vicariously through me. Only I can play with my body and voice and words and come up with (be a channel for) dance-theatre performance projects called Navashwaasam, Silent Seeds, Shivataandavam, and hopefully now, an Invitation to a life of Yes!, which are, at the least, even according to others, pretty darn interesting and creative. Only I can write this letter cheese, and I’m pretty sure at least some of you dig it. For me, that all counts as Work.

Work is often confused with the Struggle to Survive, the fight to exist in which we forget to simply Be. It is often confused with any activity that brings in Money. It is often confused with the opposite of Play. Some of us (more than are willing to admit) are lucky enough to be miles more than surviving, so we have to invent our own Work, and pretend we’re not Playing.
Wandering, playful, jobless, unmarried, still a child though old enough to have one. Am I wasting my life, my education, my opportunities, my potential? Do I need to find some “Work”?

I’ll let you figure out what my answer is, what’s yours?

If my ticket comes through I’ll be flying, yes, flying again dammit, to Singapore (April 23-ish to May 3-ish) on the way to San Francisco. I’d like to connect with Stanford and kindred spirits in the rest of the Bay Area. I’d like to work my way down south to see a friend’s (Denali, for those of you know him) flute-friend and my soul baby sister (Deeya, for those of you who know her). I’d like to work my way up north to Seattle to visit Yes! magazine, and maybe Lost Mountain Observatory and Becca Hall. I’d like to work my way east to Atlanta, Georgia to volunteer for and attend the first United States Social Forum (yes, call me officially addicted to the phenomenon that is the Social Forum) in late June/early July. I’d like to work my way over to West Virginia to learn how to build by helping Denali build his parent’s house from June to September-ish. Denali and I would like to work our way, through flute, dance, and anything else, through land, sea, or air, back to India. And maybe by the time I die I’ll realize why this whole damn trip Absolutely Must Be.

If you want to connect with me in one of these body-mind-time-space coordinates, or know of a cheap earth-friendly way of getting from one of these coordinates to another, holler at me. And I’ll be traveling with my costume and bells and my brain and body, as always, so holler if you want to see one of the performance projects. Or if you want to involve me in a new one. And as always, if you don’t want these infrequent but ridiculous nonsensical emails, also, holler.

And to those of you who aren’t receiving the annual birthday greetings I promised, Happy Birthday, I still love you, I just suck at internet organizing.

Peace, love, cashews,
Ammu Mali Malavika Tara Mohanan

P.S. Four years ago today we filled the streets because four years ago yesterday the United States armed forces declared war on Iraq. Now today again we’re saying enough is enough, but this time around we ain’t the only ones. It’s Time. Happy 3/20. May the streets of your heart be filled with the dance of revolution.

an alternative to the alternative to the alternative to the...

2007-02-25T19:39:00.000+08:00

***********************************************************

For any line there are two sides. Right and left, up and down, right and wrong, white and black, us and them.

For any point there is an infinite number of sides. An expanding
sphere of possibilities. An infinity of inclusion.

Open Letter: A Reportback from Another World

Dear friends,

This is a report back from the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi, speaking from a sphere of inclusion as "we". Not as volunteers, team leaders, staff, secretariat, international council, press, service providers, and others, but as fellow citizens. Citizens of Another World.

When we gather for the World Social Forum and its cousins and offshoots, we often make the mistake of thinking we have arrived at The Other World, forgetting that the Forums are simply a window with a glimpse into Possibility. A window that, over time, can get dirty, cloudy, cracked. Then a visitor peering through might confuse the window for the world, come away with an impression of the other world as cracked and dirty, and choose not to tumble through to the other side.

And we forget that we each come from our own unique sub-world; that we are not all coming from and going through the same doors, though some of us may join hands to open new ones.

This open letter is meant as spring cleaning. To keep our windows shiny, our door-hinges well oiled, our well-water potable, and boiled for visitors. To turn our solid waste into compost and compost into flowers and vegetables, we speak of past mistakes only in context of what we have learned from them for future projects. And as we said before, we speak as "we", with collective rights and responsibilities over both the past mistakes and the future flowers. We point no fingers and call no names, but any of us is free to speak out and claim personal responsibility for a mistake, and the right to transform it into a flower.

An unforgiving critic might describe the Nairobi 2007 World Social Forum as expensive, disorganized, hypocritical, corrupt, undemocratic, obsessed with profit, and, at the very least, ineffective. For us, however, the solar cookers, the free food at the Red Cross, the Wangare Maathais and Vandana Shivas in one sports center, the five days of conversations about nothing but how to make the world a better place, even the fact that there were protests against this WSF that was itself parented by the protests at Seattle, that there was an alternative forum at Jeevanjee Gardens while the WSF itself started as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, these are all signs of the inherent beauty of this phenomenon called WSF. Nevertheless we will not shy away from the warts and the scars in the mirror.

We have attached a list of (constructive) criticisms gathered from among and within us. We realize many of the following comments have been made before, but we hope that, in repetition and compilation from our own perspective, we bring value to the process. This letter is meant for anyone who feels Other Worldly, and the hope is that all will be able to understand and join the conversation regardless of whether they were physically there.

The comments fall into three rough categories: infrastructure, ideology, and action. Infrastructure, or system, is what we're talking about when we use words like efficient and smooth, or disorganized and haphazard. Ideology refers to the atomic units of our value-system, based on which we would build our infrastructure. We might talk about, for example, transparency, integrity, democracy, solidarity, freedom, non-capitalism, non-violence, etc. In action, we check whether we're walking our talk, practicing what we preach.

Some of the points in our list of criticisms refer to the infrastructure we created, some refer directly to the ideology behind it. Some refer to the actions and attitudes of individuals, some to the infrastructure or ideology of this specific Forum, and some to the World Social Forum in general. Some are to do with the event, a specific Forum, and some are about the ongoing process, the movement.

Based on the criticisms and our dreams of what could be, we suggest for our next gathering that we

1) Continue the process of examining and evolving our common denominator of ideologies as represented by the Charter of Principles. We suspect that if we were to produce and compare written versions of each of our individual ideologies and, more importantly, the specific contexts to which they refer, we would have enough fodder for lifetimes of debate. And yet, we all come to the Forum assuming we agree on the fundamentals. So perhaps some self-exploration, re-examination, and re-formulation is in order.
It is difficult to explain to those who aren't familiar with the Forum phenomenon what the movement is about. Even if we have the Charter of Principles at hand, and the person has time to read the whole thing, it still doesn't explain what the Forum is.
At each event, if we ask ourselves a) who we are, b) why we are here, and c) where we want to go, and frame the answers in terms of what we aspire to, not agree to, we will inch towards a more concrete answer for that person who still asks what actually Happens, what we Do over there at the Forum.

2) Re-create the infrastructure for our event by checking it against our existing Charter of Principles. The feedback loop for the evolution of the Charter will be constant and eternal, but at crucial points we can simply accept and work with the document we have at the time. We hope the fundamentals have emerged clearly enough such that we can act on them, because our infrastructure should be something we look back on without fear of having lost our way.
We assume, for example, that we are committed to Transparency, and would therefore want to re-create our infrastructure to ensure the clearest channels of communication and information transfer. What are the email habits we need to ensure this happens in the process leading up to the event? What are the physical structures of communication that we need to set up at the event itself so that information flows freely?
We also assume commitment to Democracy and Decentralized Decision Making at all levels. Free information transfer would facilitate this, but this is another criterion against which we would need to check our infrastructure. How are we dividing the labor, the information, and the decision-making power amongst ourselves? What labels are we giving ourselves that might give one inordinate power over the other? What incentives are we giving ourselves to work together without ego and greed?
Finally, an infrastructure that supported Transparency, and therefore Decentralized Decision Making, might then create the best environment for Equitable and Sustainable common resource management. We assume commitment to this as well. In other words, if each of us could find out what the other was doing, and trusted each other to make decisions appropriate to our situations, we would be able to share resources across the community as freely and fruitfully as is possible.

If we organize our event by these principles, and others give us a similar evaluation of the event, then we have made an immeasurable step forward.

Imagine, for example, the following description:

"What I saw was that everyone involved saw themselves as a combination of volunteer, participant, and service provider. We were supported not by an "allowance" of x amount of shillings or dollars per day, but by a solidarity economy that allowed people with extra space and blankets and soap to offer it to people who brought concerts and booklets and computer skills.

Yesterday afternoon I met an old Kenyan woman passing out free githere and chapathi outside one of the sessions. She said her daughter had persuaded various stores and markets to donate leftover but healthy ingredients, and then talked the manager of a hotel into contributing the kitchen space for preparing the food and a van for transporting it. Today when I saw the old woman she had left her sister with the food. She was coming out of a session where she befriended a young Frenchman who gave people massages in his time between sessions. He said we would help cook tomorrow.

We all wore the same badge. We all washed our own dishes (after finishing all the food we served ourselves) from a communal tap and passed them on to someone else to eat from."

If even a fraction of this seems possible, then there's light at the end of the tunnel that leads to Another World. We walk the tunnel knowing full well we will never reach the light, because the light is a creation of the movement through the tunnel itself. We can walk towards perfection and never seem to get there because we have created another perfection ahead of us. So when we criticize, or self-criticize, we make sure we do it with the joy of knowing we HAVE something to improve on. And when the next generation comes along and criticizes us with the same fervor we once had, we know we have done something right.

We've included, after the list of criticisms (the nightmare), other dream descriptions like the one above, some of which are taken from what actually happened in previous forums, and some are just dreams.

This letter is just a start. Let's keep adding to the analyses, metaphors, dreams, and nightmares, and see where that takes us.

Meanwhile, we send energy to those still on the ground in Kenya organizing in the aftermath of the WSF for the Accountability Forum, the Action Plan, for the election and constitutional reform, for stopping the demolition of the Milimani (Sihnae, is it Kilimani Seto?) slum, and to those around the world returning to their Social Forums, working to make sure World Cup Footballs aren't made by children, or researching indigenous medicine, and for every other community united in body, mind, and spirit against what shouldn't be, and acting for what should.

Until the next possibility,
Citizens of Another World:
- Malavika Mohanan
- [Add your name below to sign on to this letter once youre ok with it.]

Nightmares:

∑ Many of those of us who came from abroad, particularly overseas, arrived at the airport without knowing where to go, how to get there, and where to stay.

∑ Many of us were put up as much as 4 hours away from Kasarani, the WSF site.

∑ Many of us were robbed at or on the way from the airport.

∑ We did not create a system for sharing resources, thereby reducing cost and waste. (This was especially important, again, for those who were not local, but all could have benefited from such a system.)

∑ At the last minute, we unceremoniously excluded local volunteers who had put aside valuable time and resources to attend the trainings.

∑ We pulled in replacements at the last minute, instead of inviting back the ones who had been excluded. One of the most biting examples of this is that of a volunteer who had been signed up from the beginning but was excluded at the last minute, and then on the first day of the Forum, his roommate was called in to volunteer/work.

∑ There were many of us who volunteered purely for the allowance, seeing the activity as a low-paying job rather than as participation in global consciousness. At the same time, there were many of us who poured our hearts and souls into the work without thinking of the shillings per minute; there were even those who joined onto the work without being official volunteers.

∑ Some of us, as "volunteers" for translation, were shocked at the high pay and resources (including air transport) that we were given, while we watched other volunteers struggle.

∑ The Charter of Principles has good intentions, and it was nice that it was handed out in booklet form. It is the kind of resource that needs to be distributed to everyone along with the program. Yet, when a volunteer asked about what the Charter of Principles (the document we were supposed to have signed onto as volunteers) was, we told them we didn't have time for it, it wasn't important.

∑ Although well-intentioned, the Charter of Principles is too long and wordy; it repeats many of the points, and doesn't cover others. So it needs re-writing.

∑ Whether we had been to trainings or not, we were woefully lacking in information which, even if we somehow got wind of, was sure to change by the time we were passing it on to the next inquirer. (Note: The lack-of-information problem will be a recurring theme in this list. The repetition is merely an indication of the systemic nature of the problem.)

∑ The registration process had far too many different stations. Transfer of information, documents, and people was like the Brownian motion of particles in water.

∑ Many of us mistakenly assumed half our work was over when we registered online, and were dismayed to find we wasted our internet time. Even those of us who went so far as to pay online had to chase after the elusive status of being a Registered Participant.

∑ Many of us were not aware that we had to bring photocopies of
passports for registration, in large enough numbers to indicate that the problem lay with the channels of communication and not with the individuals.

∑ We had no registration forms, and were unable to mobilize funds for photocopies, so we had to come up with the idea of writing them out by hand. For 40,000 participants? Ouch. At one point there was a table for general information with two volunteers and no questions, right next to a table for registration information with one volunteer handwriting forms while simultaneously answering questions from 9 people. When we from the information desk finally checked people at the CelTel booth and at the final registration table, they agreed to let us simply scrap the forms and have each station take the information there and then.

∑ Our maps and schedules were often confusing, difficult to read, missing crucial information, or providing incorrect information. A sub-section of us, however, realizing early enough where things were going, did manage to contract a local (Kenyan) company to produce a document that contained more accurate and accessible information and a map in color.

∑ The first part of registration for this non-capitalist event was payment. At a CelTel booth.

∑ The other option for payment was at one specific branch of a bank that was conveniently either closed, or at the exact opposite side of town from where we were. Some of us, for example, found the bank closed and, not realizing we could only pay at one bank, went to the bank next door. The second bank accepted a payment into an account that did not exist and sent us on our way. We lined up yet again, found we could not register, wandered for hours searching for someone who could help us rectify the situation, ended up paying again, and are probably still waiting for a refund that will never come.

∑ At KICC some of us had set up a very official looking transport table which offered, in exchange for a hefty payment, transport from "the main road" ("Which main road?" "Oh, just walk to any main road, the bus will be there") to Kasarani. There was a large enough number of people who waited for transport that never came to indicate that the problem lay, again, not with the individuals. Those of us who waited for a bus that never came are probably still waiting for a refund that will never come.

∑ We offered no information about requesting refunds. The common opinion was that if even someone needing a refund did find out how to apply for one, they would probably never get it.

∑ We have not yet put up our financial accounts such that each of us can audit the process.

∑ We brought out most of the materials that were supposed to go out to masses of people, such as bags, T-shirts, and most importantly, badges and programs, in small batches at random times. (Most of the bags actually came out on the last day of the forum. There are now small piles of bags lying around in corners of rooms all over the city, while many of us didn't get even one.) Some of us believe there were also supposed to be pens and other small resources, and we are all well aware that rumors spread like Bird Flu, but if there were such materials, they were not to be found.

∑ We have not yet put up our financial accounts such that each of us can audit the process. (Yes, we realize we have made this point before, but repetition is merely an indication of its significance.)

∑ The Youth Camp was expensive and empty. These cannot be unrelated. This comes in sharp contrast to the vibrant and creative spirit of the 2005 Porto Alegre youth camp in the center of the WSF site.

∑ For the International Council meeting on the two days after the Forum the population was mainly white with no youths except the ones that crashed the party as they were waiting for their volunteer allowance. The meal was served at 550 shillings.

∑ We who were part of the organizing, respectively, of the East African Social Forum, the Kenyan Social Forum, and the Nairobi World Social Forum, seem to be distanced from each other, with no continuity of information and organizing.

∑ Some of us, frustrated with what we saw as centralization and monopolization of the Nairobi World Social Forum process, organized a Poor People's Forum at Jeevanjee Gardens as a simultaneous alternative that was free and accessible. In a press conference some of us claimed WSF credit for the Poor People's Forum instead of acknowledging that it was an alternative event in protest of the WSF.

∑ The alternative forum was also a counter to what we saw as a lack of WSF outreach to local individuals and organizations.

∑ We set the cost of registration shockingly higher than any previous WSF, higher than the average socially-conscious participant from any country could afford. There was a protest outside the gates of the WSF in solidarity with the people, particularly Kenyans, who could not afford the high price of registration.

∑ The division of registration prices along strictly geographical lines, without taking into account other factors, was unfair to many participants.

∑ The cost of food at the WSF site was also shockingly high. We gave the expensive stalls official recognition with no outreach to the local vendors who would provide food cheaply. The standardization of the high price was deliberate according to a statement we sent out to vendors. (check on this one, Anne-Claire, you mentioned something about this? we need to know the detailed facts)

∑ There was a similar problem of standardized high cost for accommodation, even home-stays, which could have been arranged through a solidarity economy.

∑ We were also uncomfortable that we arranged the accommodation through a sub-contract of sorts.

∑ In spite of the sub-contract and the high cost, there were many incidents of participants not getting accommodation, or home-stays not getting the guests they had arranged (and invested heavily in materials) for.

∑ There was a protest at the Windsor Hotel stall, representative of the high-priced food.

∑ The protest, which turned into food-grabbing, was reported in the media as carried out by "slumdwellers", though it was led by a group of Maasais and attended by a variety of peoples, from South Africans to....? (Frank, details on this one?)

∑ We gave ourselves 21 themes and 2 hours to discuss our actions on them.

∑ The themes were overlapping and yet not all-encompassing. (Of course we recognize the balance between convergence and diversity is always difficult.)

∑ We gave ourselves far too many sessions in which to talk and not enough actions to demonstrate what we talked about.

∑ Many of the sessions could have collaborated and shared time/energy/space instead of presenting separately.

∑ Some of the previous forums have had a space for spiritual exploration, alternative healing therapies, and spiritual activism. Some of the previous forums have also had a clear space designated for organic coordination of last minute events. Why did we backpedal and lose some of these good ideas?

∑ Many of us seemed preoccupied with what NGO we came from and whether we had a name card.

∑ Many of us claimed to speak for the poor and oppressed. Many of us stayed in expensive hotels and ate expensive food and drank expensive coffee.

∑ Many of us were against privatization of water. We bought shocking amounts of bottled water (some at shocking prices) and left the bottles half-full strewn around the Forum grounds.

∑ A slum was demolished twice by local authorities during the WSF.

∑ The local authorities locked up street children in Nairobi in an effort to clean up the city in the weeks of preparation for the WSF.

∑ Ten mobile vendors were arrested on the Forum grounds.

∑ There was, in general, more of the uniforms of security than the feeling of security.

Dreams:

"Immediately after we decided the 2007 WSF would be in Nairobi, we started holding periodic meetings with Kenyan groups, from large city-based NGOs to rural women's self-help groups, to ease into an infrastructure that was born from and supported our ideology and made the best of local resources. For us, the Forum didn't happen in a blur of 5 days. We were living the Forum day in and day out. It was a process, not an event....

...Every local Forum community around the world began similar meetings. One of the goals was to collect and compile potential workshops for a regional version of the program of events to contribute to the forum. This was supposed to help individuals, in particular, tap into the local resource network, but it ended up being useful even for the organizations that were supposed to have already formed that network. When there were sessions with overlapping content or themes the presenters came together to collaborate, so we were also cutting down on the number of events. As the programs began to take shape we connected each local node with the relevant group or individual in the Kenya forum community. There was, in particular, one Kenyan company that was taking in all the programs for print and distribution at the final event. The company was professional about time and quality, but the employees that were taking on the project wanted to expand their social consciousness, so they were lenient about the cost, and were infecting others in their corporate environment with the same spirit."

"The youth among us (including and especially the most resourceful of the streetkids), under guidance from more experienced organizers, started scouting out for a cheap/accessible venue, the nicest matatu drivers, and the friendliest airport officials. We who did the groundwork from the beginning, including and especially the youth, continued making decisions and providing information on the site during the Forum, rather than being pulled in at the last minute and given strict orders with very little information...

...We began to realize that what we were doing was building a mini-city that sprang up for 5 days and then disappeared. One of us was an urban planning student who had a pen-pal that mentioned that the 2005 Porto Alegre WSF reminded her of Burning Man, a festival that happened in a desert in Nevada at what they called Black Rock City. This reminded another kid among us of an idea called Temporary Autonomous Zone which Hakim Be wrote about in the 60s. When the light bulb finally came on, we realized we could use all this wisdom, Gift Economies, Walking/Biking Culture, Temporary Structures, Building a City that Leaves No Trace, and transform a space in Nairobi into a space-time portal to the revolution."

"We finally decided this time there was no registration fee. There wasn't even a registration table, just a Welcome table that took in people's information, or checked it against the list if people had sent in their info before. The record was purely for historical and community purposes, not financial. The Welcome table also supplied folks with the program, and the full range of the most updated Forum and Nairobi information.

There was another Information table right next to it for folks that were coming back for more later on. This table also accepted information and supplied it to the Welcome table. The other thing it accepted was donations, whether as skills or resources, financial and otherwise. If, for example, people had made bags with the Forum logo on it and wanted them passed out to people, the Information/Welcome folks could take care of that. There was a place for people to put up expenditure information so that others could know who had contributed what so far.

There were various other tables, Waste Transformation, Conflict Transformation, Schedule Coordination, Human Resources, Shelter, etc., all lined up in a row, and all open throughout the forum."

"We didn't expect everyone to sleep on the floor in tin sheds and cook in tin cans on an open fire, but we were pleasantly surprised that even those of us who were used to more materially supported lifestyles came down a few notches, so we filled our tents and houses and even a few of the cheaper hostels and left the expensive hotels and restaurants and bars for the International Conference on Industrial and Technical Management Optimization.

"We were speaking out against the privatization of water. So, instead of buying several small bottles of water a day (at a hiked up price for the foreigners) from the very companies and governments we were protesting, we re-used the plastic bottles to fill boiled and cooled water from tanks that we stationed everywhere at the forum...

...At previous forums there were flyers all over the place, like a giant with dandruff had stumbled though. This time we passed out and accepted a flyer only when we really felt it was important enough to not throw away, and we left the place each night looking just like it did that morning. Actually, a little better even, because some of us planted trees when we had some time to spare."

"Some of us drank Coca-Cola, some of us didn't. Some of us smoked Marlboro cigarettes, some of us didn't. There was no blanket moral decision on any of these consumer choices, though we were conscious of them. Each of us conversed with, respected the explanations of, and did not judge the other."

"The youth camp was exploding!! It was right at the center of the Forum grounds. There were tents everywhere and we had youths from age 7 months to 71 years hanging out around campfires at night before bed. There were jugglers for justice, fire-chess with life size pieces, historical events re-enacted live, Food Not Bombs, you name it, it was there. There was also a space for organic organizing, for folks that wanted to facilitate an event at the last minute and needed help with finding space and people."

"Afterwards we put up a full list of financial accounts on the WSF website such that anyone interested could do an informal audit to satisfy their doubts. Meanwhile, any body (human or organizational) that was responsible for major decisions gave an account of their resources and experiences, the collection of which was useful not only for accounting, but also for passing on the history of the movement. If there were still problems, from financial to organizational to personal, we used discussion and mediation with a focus on finding out and learning from the truth rather than blame and punishment, the same conflict transformation process we had set up during the Forum itself.
With a clear recorded history of organizing, it was easy to pass on the task to a new group for the next WSF, though of course, some of us stayed on the team as links between old and new."

Kids, Dreams, and a Peace Force

2006-12-30T14:39:00.000+08:00

Dear Peter,

I finished reading your book last week, and developed with it a friendship of sorts. Here's an email for your weekly quota of requests for advice that you mention you receive.

I need your help with a dream, if you're willing. I'm cc'ing my parents, my co-dreamers. I'm also cc'ing Skilly (Mr. Skillicorn) a teacher from my old school, the one who lent me the book and gave me your address.

Here's the idea, in two parts, of what we would like to see happen:

Part 1 -

We help create a Space – a child's world – a Home for kids who have no home, and for all the things that come along with kids, like grandparent figures, guava trees, goat droppings, carving tools, and books, lots of books (the only resource we actually have right now). A space for growing, playing, learning, healing, loving, and generally Being. I've pasted a piece below called We Will; it's my picture of the way of life in the Home.

Recently we've had doubts about setting this big thing up all by our little selves, so for now it looks like we're going to start by apprenticing with like-minded existing projects, and maybe the Home of our dreams will birth itself one of these days. Meanwhile...

...Part 2 –

I train to be a Shanti Sainik (see next paragraph). In training I join with other practicing and potential Shanti Sainiks (some of whom might even be kids from the Home).

A Shanti Sainik is a member of a Shanti Sena (or as my mom and I prefer, Shanti Sainya) — a non-violent peace force. It's an idea from Gandhi and Co. Maybe you already know of some of the organizations trying to put it into practice. One of the things they do is organize people to take a Shanti Sainik pledge each year on September 11th. When I first heard about the event last year, on the centenary of Mahatma Gandhi's first 'Satyagraha', I wrote and took my own version of the oath. I've pasted that below too. Ten or so friends joined me in the oath after an email call-out I sent, some of them with their own versions.

One of the reasons I'm emailing you as opposed to the other many folks who do Good Things is that, both in your descriptions and in the way the projects seem to have been carried out, I was reminded of the way military operations are planned and executed. From an "anti-war activist" that may not seem like a good thing, but it absolutely is. What I'm looking for is a military style training for focus, discipline, logistical capacity, strength, fearlessness, awareness, wordless togetherness of soldiers, but without the killing-people and all that. The other reason is that your book is about kids. Strong, able, smart, caring, playful, freedom-loving kids. That combination pretty much sums up the two parts of the dream that are consuming — and not quite knowing how to digest — me.

Floating in my head are the first precipitations of more specific ideas of what I want my own training to be, and what I can extrapolate/generalize from that for how I could help others train themselves, but its still really all too vague for me to put down, and I'm going to Nairobi in a few days to help out with the World Social Forum so I'm all a-fluff, and this email is biting at its tethers, so I thought I'd send you the initial idea and see what you think, if it's something you're interested in.

With a heck of a lot of respect and gratitude, even if I don't hear from you,

Malavika

And we will…

"And tonight we will keep right on singing for our dead.

And we will give our dead back to the Earth

and the Earth will embrace them and breathe them into the seeds of new life.

And we will save these seeds and exchange them and plant them everywhere, even – no, especially – in our most crowded cities,

and the flowers will come cracking out of the concrete, and when the petals fall we will clap our hands in wonder at the fruits and the plenty before us.

What we have, we will give, and what we need, we will create.

We will hang dewdrops from our ears and sunshine from our hips and leave the diamonds and the gold for the earth to wear.

When we cut down the body of a tree we will first ask its spirit for its permission, forgiveness, and blessing.

When we take from a body of water we will remember that every drop is sacred.

We will heal each other with our hands and our hearts.

We will measure time by the skies and space by our stride.

The planet will be our playground, the universe, our classroom, and we will see all the world in the seed of a grape.

We will build each other houses and grow each other food and bathe each other's children.

We will breathe the air of equality.

We will be good neighbours and bad subjects.

We will have a healthy disrespect for authority and question before we believe but have faith before we dismiss and understand before we judge.

We will write and re-write our own laws, and the greatest punishment for a crime will be the very knowledge that we have committed it.

Our minds and hearts will be weapons of love, our bodies, shields.

We will read and write about freedom in the sunlight, sing and dance about it in the moonlight, and whisper about it in the darkness.

And tonight we will find, deep inside us, the soulforce, truthforce, that resides in the freedom of Tibet, Palestine, Kashmir, Myanmar, Manipur, Assam, Nagalim, the Cherokee Nation, the Mapuche Nation, the Yirrkala Nation, Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Aung San Suu Kyi …

And tonight, we will..."

Oath of a shanti sainik

Beginning today, September 11, 2006,

I will seek the good, the wild, and the sacred in all;

see the interconnectedness between every being

and the bliss in every moment;

observe and dissolve my fear and my perception of need;

move towards ahimsa, active non-violence,

in every breath, thought, word, and deed;

aspire to be someone in whose company

it is easy to be peaceful and joyful;

learn to be gentle;commit myself to truthforce, soulforce, satyaagraha;

turn my heart, mind, and body into weapons of love,

and take them with me as I step into the depths of hate.

Tonight, I will be a shanti sainik.

excerpts from The Courage of Children, by Peter Dalglish

I was particularly moved when a homeless person, standing outside the Midtown Tavern in Halifax, handed me half the proceeds from his day of panhandling. "I may be poor," he said, "but those kids in Africa are dirt poor"...Over the years, my work designing community-service projects for children and youth has shown me that even hardened adolescent young offenders have the capacity to care for other human beings, and that we gain strength when we are asked to give something of ourselvs. I have seen young people who have been living in the streets of Canada's largest cities acquire extraordinary self-confidence when given a chance to volunteer. I have visitied recycling projects run by former street youth who, when trusted with the responsibility of managing a business, became productive members of the community. A door had been opened for them to mainstream society. Helping others is life-affirming. The street youth employed by recycling centres tell those who will listen to them that, fo the first time in their lives, someone actually needed them. Volunteering is an effective antidote to cynicism and apathy; we are reminded over and over again that there is a place for us here on earth. While Ethiopia Airlift and all the other organizations that responded to the great African famine did extraordinary things for the people of Africa, the challenge of responding to the famine made better citizens out of everyone who decided to get involved. We learned, once again, that it is better to serve than to be served.
p. 101

In a milieu that puts a premium on getting things done, and when the task at hand often involves feeding kids by the thousands at a single siting, lawyers and university presidents are of limited value. Amidst the chaos of famine in the Ogaden Desert, a meritocracy emerged in which people were ordered not according to the degrees they had earned at fancy universities but rather according to their social utility. Pilots, nurses, doctors, engineers, excavators, agronomists, and veterinarians had all earned the right to be there. John and I were consigned to the role of spectators to human tragedy.
p. 118

Spirit Moves

2006-10-17T13:59:00.000+08:00

Dear Blue Cheesers, Shanti Sainiks, and other spirits,

This is a bit of an update, followed by some questions.

Update

Apparently I'm going to Kenya this January. Or so says my mother and the universe.

The 2007 World Social Forum is taking place in Nairobi from January 20-25. I plan to take (or be taken by?) a performance project in three strands: Navashwaasam (for the Spirit of Air), Silent Seeds (for Earth Spirit), and another for Water Spirit. I have attached the programs for Navashwaasam and Silent Seeds. Some of you have seen one, some the other, none of you have seen Water because neither have I. Yet. And the final Spirit Moves will be a rebraiding of all three.
Sidenote: The programs are formatted such that if you print them out back to back (so page 2 would be on the back of page 1, and so on), and then fold the sheets in half together, it comes out as a booklet. If you don't get it right it can be a leetle confusing.

I plan to be in Kenya early January and return to India in early February.

I plan to be in Bangalore with these performance projects next month, hoping to raise some decent fraction of the expenses that the Kenya trip will throw at me. (My last month-long northward escapade somehow covered itself, but just barely, and only after the trip. This one's a lot larger scale, so funds have to be mobilized pre-voyage.)

If funding manifests, I plan to be in Delhi mid-November to connect with the Indian Social Forum. I plan to volunteer for the Forum activity work, hoping that would lead me on to explore Kenya, and also hoping that the work will still allow me to take these Spirit Moves to at least a few spaces, all of this so as to bring a nibble of Africa back, while taking a dobble of India (+Singapore/Bay Area) to Kenya.

I plan to weave this all into the Dainika Shanti Sainika Nritta that has consumed me.
(Dainika Nritta can mean daily dance, or the dance that is all life. Shanti Sainik is a member of a Shanti Sainya, or non violent peace force. After a talk with a caremuch Nida in Bombay, I realized I hadn't really figured out how my Dance and my Peace come together, but then on a bouncing bus it cleared itself up. When I explained it to my mother, she smushed together nicely these phrases that had been bouncing on my brain, just like she used to smush cream cheese and jam together on sandwiches for me sometimes.)

Questions

Do you resonate to the idea that clear air, clean water, and fertile soil are signs of the Good Life?

Do you know of any texts that convey the Spirit of Water that I might be able to bring to body and life?

Do you know of any folks near me who would be excited to sponsor Spirit Moves to help me mobilize Nairobi funds (This would involve paying for my travel, accommodation if I don't have family nearby, and a little sump'n extra whatever), especially near Ernakulam around November 1, Delhi in early-mid November, Bangalore in late November, Bombay in early December, and Palakkad/Trissur in late December? (And do you know the cheapest way to travel from here to Nairobi?)

Do you know of folks who can't go to the Forum but would like to send a Forum-ish (Other World-ish) message through me to Kenya?

Do you know of folks in Kenya who would be excited to host the bearer of such a message, especially communities to do with movement arts/natural healing/natural farming/natural building/wilderness living/non-violent creative resistance and infinite liberation/a child's world?

Do you feel like dropping everything, mobilizing 30,000 rupees (or whatever it takes to get you to Nairobi from where you are and back, and tide you over your stay), and tripping with me?

*****

None of these questions are rhetorical. None of the update is fictional, and is mostly at least verging on sensical. That's a huge step for me, as Blue Cheesers may realize. Nevertheless, just in case this fermentation was still a little cross-eyed for you, I've pasted an excerpt from a Normal version that I sent out to some Normal people.

Love and gooseberries and spongy coconut egg-babies,
Malavika Mali Ammu Tara Mohanan

Excerpt:

"Project:
The current version is a combination of two previous dance-theatre-poetry performance projects, one called Navashwaasam in the Spirit of Air, another called Silent Seeds in the Spirit of Air, with a new Water project that is yet to be materialized. Silent Seeds was created in celebration of Satyaagraha, for the recent September 11th anniversary. Navashwaasam was created a year ago out of a desire for a new awareness and and a search for more just and peaceful ways of living. I'm currently reading Water Wars by Vandana Shiva for inspiration for the third part. I've attached the programs for first two in case you're interested in them. (They're formatted such that they must be printed back to back and then folded together to make a booklet, I hope that doesn't become confusing)The movement work is based on the classical form of Bharatanatyam, but merged with various other traditions into a new form. The language is mostly English, which is a huge handicap, but I have done Silent Seeds for a Hindi-speaking village audience with translation on the side and, as difficult as that is for all involved, it wasn't a total failure. I'm hoping the Nairobi WSF translation groups will be able to help me out a bit.

Help needed in:
1) Funding: A friend is currently trying to find places in Bangalore for me to bring the performance project in order to mobilize funds for travel and expenses. Do you know by any chance of any other ideas I can follow up on or places in India (or even Kenya) that would sponsor performances?
2) Community: I'm looking for
a) groups in India who want to contribute to the general message I will take from here to Nairobi, so I have a coherent idea of the community I'm representing. I'm also trying to find a way to fund a trip to Delhi to attend the Indian Social Forum so I can help connect the two as fruitfully as possible, but even if I can't do that, I'd like to be in touch with the other people going to Nairobi from India.
b) communities in Nairobi who I could visit and convey this message to, especially those working with movement arts, natural farming/healing/building, non-violent creative resistance and/or children's issues (all as part of a child's world). I am hoping to get to Kenya a few weeks before the forum and leave a couple weeks after.
c) people anywhere who could contribute to the performance project in the form of ideas, texts and resources, constructive criticism, and best of all, by joining me to travel and perform as a tribe." --

************************$$$$$$**************************
"It is stupefying that society does not revolt as a unit against the very sound of the word "War"." -Guy de Maupassant

"The objective of Christiania is to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible over the well-being of the entire community. Our society is to be economically self-sustaining and, as such, our aspiration is to be steadfast in our conviction that psychological and physical destitution can be averted."
mission statement, Freetown Christiania, Copenhagen

Email sent on August 9

2006-08-08T12:34:00.000+08:00

Friends,

Today they bombed Nagasaki.

In June I read an article by Mel Duncan, executive director of Nonviolent Peace Force (www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org), in Yes! magazine (www.yesmagazine.org), about Shanti Sena, a GandhianAndCompany idea of a force for peace and nonviolence, the celebration of September 11 2006 as the hundredth anniversary of the day Mahatma Gandhi first declared Satyagraha in Johannesburg, and the Shanti Sainik (member of Shanti Sena) pledge that will take place that day (www.swarajpeeth.org/events/birthsatyagraha2006/index.php).

Chug chug tinkaloo went my brain.

I had planned to be in Delhi (the only place I know of in India where this is taking place) to take part in the pledge and to contribute to the events a performance project I've been working on (the one that came from the chug chug...) called One Hundred Years of Silent Seeds, the script of which includes
- "Moment of Silence", a poem by Emmanuel Ortiz,
- "O Hidden Life", a prayer written by Annie Besant, and
- "On Getting Along", an informal email Howard Zinn wrote that got circulated widely cuz he's phat like that,
The project is getting ready; I rehearsed/performed it for the first time for a small group yesterday. I hope to bring it to more places and groups over the next weeks of travel to Bangalore, Bhopal, Khandwa, Hyderabad, and Kochi. But for the big day, Delhi is not where the Way seems to be going. All's I know is, wherever I am, I will be taking the oath of a Shanti Sainik.

In Silent Seeds, I'd like to say that people are taking the oath all over the world, instead of just in Delhi, and wherever the heck I'll be. But where else is this happening? Then I started thinking, where else can I ask this to happen? The first answer is, I have no clue yet, I'm waiting on a response from knowledgeable people. The second is, hmm, let's see...

If you're getting this email, its because there's a chance that one or more of the following applies to you:
- You'd like to know about my space-time-body-mind coordinates.
- You contributed to Silent Seeds somehow or other.
- You might be interested in taking the oath.
- You might know people who might want to know about this and might be interested in taking the oath.
- You might be interested, willing, and able to help me figure out how in the doozie to go about this whole Shanti Sainya thing (it's usually Sena, but my mom and I prefer Sainya).
- There are things in this that might make you laugh or smirk or generally feel a little lighter than before.
If you are none of these, feel free to stop reading.

A word to the people interested in taking the oath: I think this is something not to be taken lightly. It is a lifelong commitment, or at least until you become a boddhisatva and therefore have attained the enlightenment to take on the karma and occasionally choose a violent measure when that is the dharma and the Way. So think about it. You have a month. Or however long it takes you to decide this is Your way. If you are taking the oath, I would love it if you let me know, so I can include the whens, wheres, hows, and whos in Silent Seeds.

Some words about the oath:
- The Swarajpeeth pledge is online (www.swarajpeeth.org/program/pledgeofshantisainik.php). I've included my version below.
- The phrases have personal meaning for me. So, for instance, "life form" includes a rock. And the "body [as a] weapon of love" includes taking part in growing my/our food and building my/our house and cleaning up my/our messes. Feel free to make it mean what you want. Feel free to change it and use it how you want. If you make changes, I would love it if you let me know, cuz mebbe I dig em.
- It's an oath that's phrased to convey a process, a movement towards something, not a final product, an achievement of greatness. If something in the oath or the person taking it suggests hypocrisy or self-righteousness or complacency, and you can suggest how to change it, feel free to tell that person.

As A.J. Muste of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and others said in the 1940s (the decade for which I found the least examples of non-violent creative resistance), this is a time for revolutionary non-violence (see Howard Zinn, People's History of the United States, Chapter 16).

TTFN. with love, Malavika
--
************************$$$$$$**************************
"It is stupefying that society does not revolt as a unit against the very sound of the word "War"." -Guy de Maupassant

"The objective of Christiania is to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible over the well-being of the entire community. Our society is to be economically self-sustaining and, as such, our aspiration is to be steadfast in our conviction that psychological and physical destitution can be averted."
-mission statement, Freetown Christiania, Copenhagen

at the risk of overloading peoples inboxes:I forgot to include my personal version of the oath, the one that includes "lifeform" and "body as weapon of love" etc. here it is:

Oath of a shanti sainik
Beginning today, September 11, 2006,
I will
seek the good, the wild, and the sacred in all;
see the interconnectedness between every lifeform
and the bliss in every moment;
observe and dissolve my fear and my perception of need;
move towards ahimsa, active non-violence,
in every breath, thought, word, and deed;
aspire to be someone in whose company
it is easy to be peaceful and joyful;
learn to be gentle;
commit myself to truthforce, soulforce, satyaagraha;
turn my heart, mind, and body into weapons of love,
and take them with me as I step into the depths of hate.

Tonight, I will be a shanti sainik.

a little pungent. and a request.

2006-07-21T15:31:00.000+08:00

Dear Blue Cheesers.

Your reactions to the last cheese have been varied. All sweet, and true, and loving, but my goodness, varied. As you know, the cheese is meant to be infrequent, but this time i feel i owe you an explanation for any misunderstandings of my over-pungent extra-sharp cheese. or, whatever, i feel i want to give you one. If you feel you don't want to read it, skip down to below the asterisks for the favor I'd like to ask you.

Imagine I was approaching a door, slightly ajar, that had a bucket of colder-than-liquid-nitrogen crystal water balanced on it. I became aware of this, but continued towards it anyway, (either deliberately, or inevitably, depending on how you look at it), preparing myself for the drench, knowing that I could recieve it either as a blessing or a curse, a cleansing or a shrivelling, and hoping I would have the strength to choose the right one. As I pushed the door open and the water hung above me for a breath, I spun around my center, and when it fell on my poor tender head and poured down my neuroses of matter-flesh, it flung off onto you, my poor tender dump-takers. I spun both to balance myself, and to share with you, my cosmic companions, this cold cleansing I received. Some of you understood my intent through my confusion and shared in the baptism of the Mundane Divine, but others of you are perhaps far enough from my space-time-body-mind coordinates to not exactly know where i'm headed, and therefore to not understand what spirit you must take my dumps in. You saw only the dirt that flung off me and didn't realize that the dirt was dissolved in liquid crystal that left me cleaner and closer to my Self. And you were concerned and sent me loveliness about not loathing myself.

Humph. As always, I began hoping I would be clear and concise and precise, but look what the cheese pooped once again. If you understood nothing of this, know only this:
I do not loathe what I am or where I come from.

I have very little room left in me for loathing of anything at all, so unrelenting is the love pouring in from the Universe. I do feel, have felt, guilty about being lucky, and I agree, guilt and inadequacy are silly things to keep around, but I assure you, they're on their way out, along with regret and judgement.

The folks working on our house are not hungry, their bodies are well, the work is not slavery, and the earth will survive the materials we are using/usurping. All is well. (Debbie. I most certainly do not feel superior to them. If anything, it's the opposite. Before you tell me not to feel guilty or inadequate about not having to work really hard to get food and housing and give my kids education, read the previous paragraph again.)

*****

Meanwhile, a request. September 11 approaches. A piece called Silent Seeds is coming together in honor of this event. I'm looking for Moments in the last hundred years (since Mahatma Gandhi first declared satyagraha in Johannesburg) of non-violent creative collective resistance. Examples of Temporary and Permanent Autonomous Zones. Anything that you might find in Yes! magazine, but even more global. The Chipko movement, Zapatistas after 1994, Detroit Michigan urban gardens, Paris 1968, Palestinian non-violent direct action, a small neighborhood event you took part in,...
If you dig, maybe you could send me Moments I might not have heard of. You could send me just a snippet, like, "Hey theres this town in Copenhagen that went free and made their own laws, go find out about it the hard way", or you could give me a detailed and accurate historic psychological description. Of course the second option would be awesomest, since it would save me precious time (i'm trying to have this done like yesterday. No. Last week. But at least before July 27)

And if any of you happen to know the email address for Nathan Matthews from Synergy, perhaps you could forward this to him and ask him to write to me from a damn replyable address.

Love. So much love.
Ammu Malavika Mali

self-loathing

2006-06-26T13:03:00.000+08:00

NATHAN FROM SYNERGY (LONG HAIRED TREECLIMBING BEERBREWING PARIS-KNOWING NATHAN?) IF YOU READ THIS, EMAIL ME WITH YOUR ADDRESS CUZ ITS NOT WORKING WHEN I JUST REPLY TO YOUR EMAIL AND I CANT REMEMBER YOUR LAST NAME TO TRACK YOU DOWN.

Dear Blue Cheesers and others,

In case you didn't read the subject line, this one's about self-loathing.

I'm here in my grandparents' house again, this time with my mother too, after a month in Singapore where my parents and I started work on a documentary based on a dance-poetry-theatre project called Navashwaasam which I/we have been working on for 9 months. If this documentary comes together it could be a fantastic resource to learn and teach and dialogue about art, history, science, education,democracy, beauty, truth, and creative resistance.

As that work flows on, the next project looms. September 11th 2006 is the centennial anniversary of Gandhi's declaration of satyaagraha in Johannesburg. It's also 5 years after the WTC and Pentagon bombings. Peace groups are using the occasion to call for a world-wide pledge of non-violence. I'd like to use one of the parts of Navashwaasam, a poem by Emmanuel Ortiz called Moment of Silence, and add a mirror-image echo in a poetic litany of the various triumphs that the Other World has seen (that CNN has not). Preferably with a group. Preferably as a tangible action in a people's movement that honors and protects an earthly resource. Preferably disobedient, though thoroughly civil, and definitely non-violent. If this project comes together it could captivate and activate audiences around the world.

I'm also working on a projectwith/for my dance teacher who, after seeing Navashwaasam, has started treating me like a fellow dance-maker, an adult, a professional, notjust another good student. She wants to explore Chaanakya, an Indian Machiavelli, especially with respect to his views on women, and especially through three women characters Draupadi, Mira Bai, andSavitri, all of whom, she says, maintained a facade of subserviencewhile in fact being subversive, even revolutionary. I'm in charge offiguring out the Savitri part. My mother suggested looking atAurobindo's Savitri. Now I'm hooked. Every time my mother walks through the room looking like she's not doing anything in particular I ask her to read Savitri with me. It's a meditation in itself. We'replaying around with an idea of a costume that can be flipped back and forth to show both Death and Savitri as they converse. If this project comes together it could be spiritually and artistically mind-blowing,a whole other level of Humanness and Being.

That all not sound much like self-loathing to you? Oh, but it is. I would say you don't even know how much it is, but if you're on this email list maybe you do.

I loathe having the privilege of intelligence, talent, lack of any severe physical deformity, and a family who made it their priority toprovide me access to an exceptional institutional education. It doesn't matter that this blessed family support, this home education, now allows me to break free of all manners of prisons, institutional, emotional, physical, and otherwise. My privilege is still thoroughly loathable. And no matter how much I scrub my own clothes or clean the bathroom or dig my own holes or powder the dry ginger on a stone instead of in the grinder, that privilege will never go away. I will still be the elite. I loathe the elite. I loathe that I've never been hungry. Oh sure, there are times likewhen we got lost in Chapada Diamantina and had to do Cobra Watch all night and I came back to the poussada thinking I was ravenous. But when have I truly known Hunger? And now when I'm about to eat the delicious dish my grandma made for breakfast in which the wheat grains are wonderfully chewy and the ginger (grown in our yard) just zings out, and after morning yoga, and my regular meager intake the previous evening, my hunger is the very best spice, just then, the women carrying heavy stones on their heads come in the gate and I lose my appetite. The stones are to lay the foundation for the staircase to the second floor that will be built by them, instead of by me and my mother (and guests), the ones who will actually live there. The stones probably come from blasting a sacred mountain in front of our house, a blasting I was so vehemently railing against just a few months back. My self-loathing at the sight of these women stops me from taking the second helping which I always take though my body never needs it.

I loathe that I'm still pleased when I lose weight even though I'm always speaking out against the media industrial societal complex that causes devastating body inferiority complexes in urbanized boys andgirls, the sons and daughters of the urbanized middle class who sit on their asses all day and then pay to go to a gym instead of just using their body to get what they really need (like by digging holes to grow vegetables instead of buying them and cleaning bathrooms instead of hiring someone else to do the dirty work and doing yoga for health and playing soccer for joy) and then just being happy with the body shape that results. I loathe that the only thing I can do to turn this violence I feel towards myself and all I am into a positive, sustaining, learning experience is to write to you all, because that is all I know to do. I loathe that I'm sitting at a computer, the parts of which someone searching through an e-waste dump will eventually poison themselveson, biding my time until the revolution begins and I will build its house, together with the other inhabitants. I loathe that there is apart of me that knows and needs to know that some of you will read this email and think it impressive, and think me remarkable.

But enough. I'm in India, the land of wisdom and truth and non-violence, right? I'm taking the Self and leaving the loathing inLas Vegas.

Love the Self.
Play with the Self.
Worship the Self.
Be the Self.

Thanks for taking my dump.
May your moons be ripe and smelly,
malavikataramohanan

P.S. This communique occurs when the moon made of cheese is blue. If you think this all smells interesting and wish to be a blue cheeser and are not already, please tell me. If you think this cheese is smelly kaka and want nothing to do with it, please tell me. If you don't understand (and want to know the meaning of) certain words or phrases because they're in portugese or spanish or malayalam or sanskrit or hindi or mali-speak, please tell me. If you can help me inany of the things I mentioned (especially about September 11th), please tell me.

P.P.S. I'm behind on birth celebration communications. I love you all.

Now.

2006-04-21T00:29:00.000+08:00

Ank and Neilu are lying on the bed reading the Code Book by Simon Singh, i think. they are beautiful.

I am backwards on a chair, the cool way to sit, also the easiest way to remind myself to keep my back straight, typing and grooving to Ank's r-Evolutionary Love and Angst CD. It's the first hip hop i've heard since i've been in mangolandia. i'm not sure i'm actually here right now.
maybe thats because of the imaginary bonghits we did this morning when we climbed up Mt. Anangan and sat in the sacred grove. only later did i remember its 4/20. go, you mountain madness, flying us high. remember folks, this is the hill onto which medicinal herbs dropped off of that big ass piece of mountainous business that Hanuman carried across to Lakshman to save his life (he carried the whole thing cuz he was a silly monkey who was big and strong and pretty damn funny and clever but didnt know how to identify this healing plant)

Today i love amerika. K and all. i described to ank and neilu my nostalgia for hippie bougie packaged health food, people walking down the street in whatever they want to wear and not being EvilVibed at, TV shows about a woman president who does things like just the bomb (i dont know anything about it, just what my aunt told me last week when she visited from missisipi).
and the hip hop. how i FREAKING miss the hip to the hop. or as brazil would say, hippy hoppy.

but i'm not in amerika. i'm in The India.

if you want to know what that is, come and visit. but you can only stay for two days, especially if you're male and like dosas. my grandma is 80, and still kicking it strong, so allow her to be overbearing and not always up to the hospitality she so wishes to force upon you. (thats mostly a note to myself, oh variety of readers, yes all of you, oh graham and venumama.)

so dont come yet, maybe, come when we've got the shanti sena up and hiking.

what is shanti sena, you ask? oh ho hoho, my little friends, i shake my head at your sweet ignorance of what every cell in you already Knows. That you are a soldier, and that your artillery lies in your heart chakra, waiting to be fired flowered.

more next time. sleep. Now.

Fear, Joy, and Tree droppings.

2006-03-05T23:29:00.000+08:00

last section first: tree droppings

some trees in the backyard are dropping mangoes. Other trees are dropping cashews. So far only one fruit that hasnt rotted on the ground or been eaten up by fellow creatures. I've never had it before. I was lucky to get that one.

fear

yesterday morning the bus from Bangalore to Palakkad dropped me off outside of town on the bypass at 4am instead of 5:30 like They had said. I woke up with a start when the bus conductor yelled out for who was getting off at Palakkad, and tried to gather my wits and my stuff. Couldn't find the clip for my hair immediately, so I moved onto my shoes on my feet and glasses on my nose, but I wasn't happy about getting off the bus with my hair out. Things were unsafe enough without me being all temptress coiffed.

My children, when will you learn to Never Fear. simply trust your angel.

There was an aunty and uncle walking up just as I was getting off. I had noticed them from the bus, and now as I get chucked off this bus at night (night means dark. this is important) with my ears still plugged from the altitude difference, my eyes still scratchy, my hair blowing around, my voice frogged up, I try and catch them before they walk past, i mean, where else am i going to find a woman on these roads? So yeah, my frog croaks, my eyes scritch scratch, my hair blows, and my ears can just barely make out that they're immediately and wonderfully overprotective, just like all these mangolandians in these parts. Brief conversation in Malayalam, in which I of course come off looking like an idiot, but who cares I, as long as they tell me where I need to go and I get there without being raped at least on this stretch of the ride. Exactly that happens. They put me in an auto, tell the driver to take me to the KSRTC bus stand, and squeeze my hand goodbye.

Yes, folks. Raped. This section is about fear, remember? I started writing it thinking it was going to by mostly about other people's fear, but that was before I remembered that there is no Other.

Halfway there I realize there's no meter, and shit, of course I didn't check with them, or at least decide before we left,

alternate india

2006-02-28T03:15:00.000+08:00

so somehow our heroines have landed in some sort of alternate india (dubbed bangaluroo) where white people line the streets, cyber cafes are cheaper than dosas, and atmospheric coffee cafes are everywhere. its still hot and coconuts (india nuts according to marco polo) are less than 10 points a pop and damn good at that.

again, somehow. somehow we've found ourselves writing press releases for organic distributors and mali was never going to send it to you so i figured thats why i hacked into this particular corridor of the matrix to begin with.

so, look. if you're in bangalore tomorrow night please come to this. it's mainly intended as an eye-opener for mr. george bush, jr., but you're welcome. there's a lot of people here who are anti-american (note the 'c') and we're not two of them.

dolphins and rosebushes,
ank

*

Jaiva
No 55 1st cross Marappa Block, JC Nagar

Press Release
February 27, 2006

Jaiva (which stands for life) welcomes Mr. George Bush Jr. to India through an evening of cultural and artistic events held at 6pm on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at Center for Film and Drama (CFD), 5th floor, Sona Towers, Millers Rd, Bangalore.

We have a cartoon showcase by Rasheed Kappen, a dance-poetry-theatre experience ‘Navashwaasam’ by Malavika Mohanan, a film ‘Battle’s Poison Cloud’ by Ceclie, a music video ‘America America’ by K.P. Sasi, and ‘Songs of Peace and Dignity’ by Ruth, Kamaan, Gail Hart, Sumathi, and others.

Through these events we hope to strengthen the channels of communication among the alternative voices in India, United States, and around the world.

Jaiva understands that the most constructive responses to repression, oppression, and violence are not fear, passivity, and anger, but creativity, solidarity, and love. We put our understanding into practice daily by bringing sustainably-grown organic food from local farmers directly to your shopping basket.

We invite the people of Bangalore to join us in celebration of Life

press us

2006-02-26T16:19:00.000+08:00

[ a description of malavika's opening performance for the trissur film festival ]

The medium is the message. The adjective is oppression. We are what we
are and nothing other. To call a peformer "Indian" or a banana
"Yellow" is to amputate. To amputate the wrong foot. The wrong foot?
The wrong foot.
If you could describe her ancestry correctly -- get the right
cocktail of Amerika, Singapore, and the shadow of a proud mountain
called Anangan -- then you'd get the right foot. But "Indian" doesn't
cut it. To call a banana "Yellow" is to ignore her shades of green
astringency and spots of sweet brownth.
To say nothing of the larger intent, the amputation. The implicit
Only sticks in the throat. Our protagonists -- peformers and bananas
-- are sweet and tender, frequently upside-down and, to a newcover,
not a little strange. One yellow adjective suffices not. Their nature
is to limit: to draw lines around the diversity of our subjects. The
contradiction then is immediate and unavoidable.

How then to say about the opening performance of this year's Film
Festival? Praise helps us neither. I want to tell you how she is
beautiful, how robots are the past, how stability is moving. But to
predicate is to lock an infinite genius (which we all must share) into
a velvet cage.

Malavika Mohanan is. A stage is. A dozen children are. A dozen
uniforms are. Diversity continues.

Naturally, as one would expect from the opening act of the VIBGYOR
"Identity and Diversity" festival, Ms. Mohanan leads the audience to a
realization of the theme. Surprisingly, she does it through the
theme's apparent destruction.

They parade onstage, teacher followed by column of robots.
Automatons. Identical uniforms holding names of Diverse letters in
Identical black: "V I B Y G O R". Drumbeat. She speaks. "Violet". They
echo. "Violet". Drumbeat. She speaks. "Indigo". They echo. "Indigo".
Drumbeat. She speaks. "Blue". They echo. "Blue".

The movement, the tempo, the style place us within a robot colony.
Friends or fellows? Before the dryness cracks, sometime in the second
colorless repetition of words, a stranger interrupts from the audi--
MAGENTA
Drumbreak. She stutters. "Yellow". They stutter. "Yellow". Drumbeat.
She speaks. "Green". They echo. "Green". Drumbe--
BROWN
Drumbreak. She stutters. "Orange". They stutter. "Orange".
The infiltrators swagger onstage like virii, corrupting robots into
dance with sashes of color. They waltz in cheap perfume and carry the
unmistakable odor of freedom.
Diversity is not in quantity. Seven colors are not more diverse than
two -- it is the quality, the inclusiveness, the openness that we
strive for. The colors are infinite. Nothing less will satisfy.
She attempts to pull it together. But the dream is over. Everyone is
dancing. She too succumbs. They whoop with delight.
As totalitarian pretense breaks into childish pandemonium we see spy
the second thread. We are training a generation of robots to feed
hungry vacancies in San Francisco, Dubai, Bangalore. They will walk
identically, speak identically, think identically about society,
diversity, individuality. For a time. Until the infiltrators emerge
from the audience, from us, to liberate them with dancing sashes of
color, to remind them that childhood is life and life is forever.
Such is VIBGYOR, a manifesto of its own self-subversion and
trascendence. These are not the droids you're looking for.

what is the matrix?

2006-02-25T20:54:00.000+08:00

we, ankurbhaiya and me, leave on a bus to bangalore in a few hours. we're not supposed to go to kannavu, a beautiful adivasi school/home/community/experiment in wayanad (in the north of godsowncountry kerala, which is in the south west of mangolandia, which in the matrix translates as india) on the way to bangalore because people (many many members of my very loving but socially very different-from-me) are uncomfortable about us travelling, what with one of us being a girl and the other being a boy, and not being blood related to each other. at some point i shall have to find a way to explain how there is no spoon (you think that's blood that's running through your veins?) and if there were a spoon, my brother (for those of you in the last version of the matrix without gmail formatting, brother is bold and italicized) ankur and i would share it and the world would still Be just as pure.

some brief notes on dealing with a) entering the matrix b) travelling and dealing with the mangolandians, specifically those located in godsowncountry.

a)
* upon entering the stall in the internet "cafe" (so named, though pernod and revolution may not be found) establish your space. take the keyboard down from the totally unergonomic drawer and place it on your lap, with the chair facing the monitor that you have turned towards you. sit on your bottom, not on the bottom of your spine. hold your neck straight, shoulders relaxed, arms loose and out, remember to breath, get up and stretch every 15 minutes, and get the hell out of there after an hour, preferably half.
* leave at least a few days between every time you plug in. don't give in to the illusion that just today checking email is just totally necessary. tomorrow will always be today. the matrix will wait. your freedom will not.

b)
* be aware of the balance between dressing as yourself, and dressing to avoid envy/threat/provocativeness/disrespect. learn to wear your body and clothes with no fear and no shame.
* don't take a dish with your right hand after you've started eating.
* eat with, only with, your right hand.
* these people talk a hell of a lot. don't get trapped. learn that you need not reply to everything everyone says. they say a lot. don't
* learn to never hear "i don't know".
* learn to always be told that you don't know, don't know anything about anything.
* travel at sunrise or sunset every now and then. sit on the appropriate side. remember that the sun that dips or rises is the same sun that dips or rises on everyone and everything you love around the world.

they've cut the hard line. time to go.

go and live out what you have learned on the other side of silence.

Sasimama's music video that i danced for

2006-01-03T00:10:00.000+08:00

http://kerala.free-knowledge.org/data/america.mpg

more coming later...

birth, death, and the breath in between

2005-11-07T09:03:00.000+08:00

dear blue cheesers,

this morning i tried to use wheatgrass as dental floss. it doesn't work, in case you're wondering. so now i'm just chewing it to soggy shreds. i'm not sure what i was thinking when i threw the wheat berries in the soil, i was curious to see what would happen, i guess i just thought that with my green-defying two left thumbs it wouldn't grow. or maybe i expected it to come up with the special fancy wheatgrass juicer attached to it. They should warn you about that. Wheatgrass, Brought to you to by Life, Now available in balcony gardens near you, Juicer not included. anyway, its nice. i like this juice subtely mixing with my saliva, gently detoxifying and invigorating my system, going down with undigestable cellulose and all. and apparently i'm not the only one. ¡viva la comida vivienda!

a few days ago i caught up on emailing out birthday wishes piled up from two months ago. last year i sent out a mass email saying, yo, tell me when you were born so i can remind you how cool that is every solar turn. i made a promise that would be my last mass email, but i would always send personal emails to those who responded with their birthdates (i'm still going yahoo gregorian, i'm finding it damn hard to shift, and i dont even really know what to shift too). obviously i'm not keeping the first part of the promise, but the second seems kind of too important to not keep, even if its kept late. so if you're not getting the news that i'm happy you're born, at least once a year, send in the date already. this offer doesn't expire til i die, and maybe not even then.

ten years ago i did my arangetram, one's first full solo performance, a graduation of sorts, after several years of learning bharatanatyam, a south indian classical dance form. last year on vidyarambam day i went to my dance teacher's house to offer respects to my gurus, to begin/continue/generally celebrate learning. in my mind i dedicated the following year, from that vidyarambam day to the next, to dainika nritta, daily dance, or the dance that is all life. a few weeks ago on vidyarambam day i went to my dance teacher's house to offer respects to my gurus, to begin/continue/generally celebrate learning. two weeks ago i began a nine-day run of Navashwaasam, o nuevas respiraciones, or new breaths, a totally homegrown (including the costume making and the date-deseeding) dance-poetry-theatre project that was perhaps a second graduation of sorts. the first day was on the ten-year anniversary of my arangetram, and the last day was the last day of Ramadan fasting. perhaps i'll say more on this experience in time but for now it simply sits and bubbles as one of the most mind-bending trips to happen to me ever. last week i couldnt breathe properly. it happened a week and a half before too. it was like a stronger version of the allergic reaction i get with cats. something in my lungs closes up and i get this weird puffy itchy sensation on my skin, especially my face. it lasted a couple days, during which i was dog tired. or should i say cat tired. the phlegmity remains but now i am back to breathing normally and life is bright and shiny and new once more. i was miserable at the time, but now i'm thinking, what a fantastic reminder. funny though, that the nine days in my life that i was most aware of my breathing were sandwiched between days of not being able breathe. maybe i have to examine how i do my work.

a few days ago, i found out that rama died. no, not the yellow-bellied snot-nose prince for whom most non-malayali hindus light deeyas for every year. i mean, Tio Rama, of Epuyen.
ank was in town and bore the message. he died in his sleep. i've been thinking how best to celebrate his memory. perhaps by finding ways to do what he tried to do with his life. this old man came from india to drink wine and walk in the bosoms of Pa Pirque and Ma Epuyen and write about Ricardo Guiraldes in Epuyen, a tiny Argentina mountain lake town that has so far been invaded by not one (rama), not two (ank) but three (me) indians. this tiny old man became a bridge between india and south (and central) america, two land masses each with their own powerful forces of people and land that still remain, for the large part, unconnected, but once joined, might lead the world in a revolution of revolutions. now i read of the fires in the south and part of me wishes i were back there, or at least that i had included venezuela in my B-trip (b corta, casi lo mismo, ¿puede ser, no?). the same part that asks why revolutionaries abound in latin america while asia, i'm thinking specifically of south asia, sits squashed and rigid, unembracing of the thought that Another World is Possible. the rest of me knows that's just dumb. knows that this is the time to arc back the other way, be part of the completion of the cycle of connection that Tio Rama lived for, to join the globularity that awakes now and here on this living planet.

que viva la gaia

i've been told my writing is confusing. i've been told that i'm never clear about where i am, geographically.
the first, i simply acknowledge. i pledge allegiance to the State of Confusion. to visit me you need only throw away your visas and your resumes and your dollars and your sense.
the second, i also acknowledge, but perhaps even apologize for. so:
i have been in singapore since august, after months of travel. i leave for india in december on a one-way ticket, after which i hope to avoid using jet fuel.

once again, i'm glad you were born. into this dimension of consciousness anyway.

love, shreaking washing machines and soaking urad beans,
me

Wax on, devil, wax on

2005-10-05T17:28:00.000+08:00

I just waxed my upper lip, underarms, and lower legs. Once again, I tell myself it's the last time. It'll grow back in so light and thin that I won't feel uncomfortable about just leaving it, and then I'll still be able to be some semblance of an example to set for young girls whose utter undesirableness the world is otherwise bent on proving.

No, little woman, I'm telling you, really,
you don't have to remove that hair (though if you must, wax, don't shave),
you don't have to cover those spots on your skin with foundation (which, in most cases, would flush out with real food eaten in decent quantities and with a clear mind),
you don't have to hunch to hide your early breasts,
or hold your stomach muscles so constantly tight you forget how to breathe to hide your paunch, in vain (though a paunch might suggest tight psoas muscles, and firm stomach muscles will protect your back and you need a strong base and second chakra for balance in every part of your life)
you don't have to lie to me about those purple marks on your neck because I know damn well what hickeys are and how you get them,
you don't have to
make a rude joke about that girl to get that boy to like you to prove you're not a pathetic nerd,
wear tight pants to get all the boys to watch you walk to prove you're sexy,
get drunk and kiss a boy to get him to keep liking you to prove you're not disgusting,
have sex with a boy to get him to ask you to dinner to prove you're ...

You don't. Have. To do. Anything.
You're perfect.

Touch yourself
know yourself,
love yourself,
before you even daydream about that perfect first kiss, that moaning collapse onto the sheets, that arm around your waist, that look in his eye, that hand in yours...

I was refused at the blood donation center today because I had sex with someone that I knew for less than six months.

I will not judge. Anyone, least of all myself. I am as I am, but I can change, make myself as I want. I've done it before, I'll keep doing it til I shed my body. And perhaps even after.

Wax off, demons, wax off

2005-09-27T08:59:00.000+08:00

Listening to Blur, Modern Life is Rubbish. Reminded of Chris Harrison.

I can change myself all I want. i'll never forget who i was. the various whos i've been. that's ok, but they don't stop hurting, sickening. and maybe i'll never stop being them, those whos. that i don't want to believe.

I want a lot don't I?

Don't wanna be no
roadside blackberry
very
dusty from the
gas guzzling road stuck travellers
gonna tuck me away
till i'm fat ripe n juicy
smear myself all over
some river rinsed mouths.
sure you can cook me put me in a
jar but you'll never find me in a
traffic jam.

Yesterday there was a bright pink round reflection on the inside of the car door. Much empirical investigation was had by all. Finally, it's reflected off a pink sequins stow-away came-from-where hiding in the door pocket. Magic. All the more so because we figured out why.

Nothing else matters.
One day when I look in the Mirror of Erised I'll see me as I am.

Later: Stuff and nonsense. I'm reading Pam's emails, piled up over months. Now that's worth reading. And therefore, writing. Not this stuff and fluff up here. Well, I'll keep it, because it's here, no point taking it away, and perhaps it'll remind me to find a way to jerk myself out of these whiny inconsequential waves that lap up on my beach resort.

Back Bay, rm 11, Beacon Inn, Brookline, Greater Boston, MA

2005-07-08T09:25:00.000+08:00

As we begin descent to Logan my ears remind me I've been congested for the last few days. This doesn't happen often, and it hasn't happened recently, but when it happened it was bad. I brace myself against the coming pain. It comes. It's bad, for a while I'm swallow-yawning and breathing deep and doing Reiki and trying not to brace so much that the tension makes it worse, but I see the ground soon enough. Now I'm just semi-deaf. Amma is too.

Carol Neidle meets us at the baggage belt. One of the first things I say is that I'm semi-deaf. When we get out to the roof where her car is parked I smell the sea. It's windy and cloudy and even drizzling. This is Boston in the summer? What's up with that? Spring '02 was a little chilly, but sunny as far as I remember. That year Bush's climate specialist officially stated they weren't going to worry about climate change till 2013. Worry, buddy, worry. Unless you wanna go down woolly mammoth style.

Skip skip skip to my loo. Let's say the loo in the Beacon Inn has a skylight and skip to the next morning. Amma stays in to rest up, Acchan and I take the T into MIT. We want to get to Morris Halle's office by 12 because he says Everyone will be there then. We get stuck on the way and have to be redirected to a shuttle bus and traffic is sucking big time, maybe because of the floods that Carol mentioned yesterday, so we get to MIT only by 12:40ish. Too bad for Acchan, Everyone will probably be dispersed again.

At some point en route Acchan talks wistfully about the falafel truck in front of bldg 20, but says there's no way it's still there. As we near the area that bldg 20 used to occupy he sees 4 food trucks, one of them falafel, and Squeals. Eeeeeeee, falafel truck, he says, wiggling his fists happily. I'm trying not to be rolling on the ground with laughter because rolling and walking don't go together. Later (after bumping into Jane Simpson, David Nash, various other linguisty people, chatting with Morris for a while and promising to be back at 3 when he would be back from his swim) we return to the truck and have falafel and baklava and throw bits of the thick dry pita (they just wrapped it around, instead of putting the falafel and stuff in the pocket, poopy) to the pidgeons. Acchan says it's a different truck and people, but the falafel is good anyway.
(Note to aspiring pidgeon feeders: they can deal with oversized pieces of bread, they just tear it up into smaller pieces, a process during which you'll have bread flung at you if you're near enough. But for lettuce, make sure the pieces are tiny enough for them to swallow, because their little beaks can't deal with the cellulose.)

We come back to the inn late because of an extended and delightful conversation with Donka Steriade. We leave again pretty soon, all three of us this time, to meet Morris and Ros at Elephant Walk for dinner, the same place Carol took us to last night. It being close to the inn and us being vegetarian seem to be a formula for this place. No matter. I thoroughly enjoy both the food and the company, so much so that after dinner when I have to go to the bathroom, I don't want to leave the table and miss any bits of the conversation. Later it turns out Amma and Acchan were doing the same thing. We're idiots. But we're cute idiots, no?

Wandering around MIT was damn fun. We hit the student center, the chapel, westgate, among other old haunts. We're heading back tomorrow so Amma can go too. So much more to say about the day, but enough now, my computer patience is nearing it's end. A couple things to note down that Morris mentioned
-Mansfield (?) Act of '70s (which did what?)
-Mission Act? which said defense could only fund projects which were directly related to missions which meant basic research, and fields like linguistics were kaka. He mentioned it in the context of the underground story of MIT linguistics, starting with some book called Loom of Language.

I gotta pee and my wrists hurt i'm askj;woreuitorwej out like sidhfsdk hjlk light see ya laktejlt later alli sdlkfj lfj gator. slkj;dfl jk

free culture

2005-06-15T03:31:00.000+08:00

I remember a time I was a person who could be excited hearing about a freeflow at such and such nightspot.
I don't know who that person is anymore.
I'm looking for a different kind of free, different kind of flow.

(Cholmes, you're a lucky dawg to have glimpsed freedom with that dude.)

Some cyber locations that friends Mish Mosh and Josh led me to, with simple instructional suggestions, should you choose to click and click.

Set 1: An article by Lawrence Lessig
a) gather 8 friends around a worldly wise computer screen (as in, 8 plus you makes 9)
b) click here
c) take turns reading each page out loud to each other, taking time to interrupt the reading process with questions, comments, and pizza, allowing those to lead to discussion, argument, and general raucous engagement.

d) Go outside and breathe. Swing on a tree. Sit on a rock. Wind your arms around a few times. Decide whether you want to go back to the computer or not. If you do, read on. If not, don't.

Set 2: A video clip called EPIC 2014
e) gather x friends, x being a real or imaginary number of your free choosing, which may or may not be the same number and same individuals as in instruction a).
f) click here and then click again where it tells you.
g) watch the clip taking turns to make comments and shush comments.
h) re-engage in general raucousness.

i) wind down with introspective wistfulness of what magic is to come from this particular special group of people with all their skills, disagreements, values, agreements, knowledge, wisdom, love, and above all,
FREEDOM!!!!!!!

shitterless hus, a shitty sing talking poem

2005-06-14T01:50:00.000+08:00

11/17/2004
there once was a hus
on top of a hill
that belonged to the uncle
of one Kellea Mill-
-er, she had kill-
-er good looks,
her friends were fools of a Took,
they thought they could cook
the goose that laid the oily eggs
that was drinking away the world
down to its dreggs
so they packed up their beggs (say this new zealand style)
and put out their feggs (or cloves, if they didnt smoke feggs, or incense
if they didnt smoke cloves, or garbage if they didnt do anything at all
smoke related)
they got on a bus
and headed to a hus...
THAT.
SAT.
on a hill above a
CITY
that wasn't toooooo
SHITTY
but inspite of
THAT.
FACT.
the house didn't haaaave aaaaa
SHITTER.

la, La, LA, LAAAAAAA.....

shitterless hus! shitterless hus!
better lets US,
shit in the BUSH-US,
and if we CAN,
find a CAN,
or even a PAN,
we can take care of OUR shit,
and finally stop this BUSH shit.

see this morning i was sitting on the throne, peeing, not shitting, and i
was washing, (i try not to use paper when i pee now, i wash, it was hard
at first, but all good now. with shitting, i still sometimes use paper,
but sometimes wash. you wanted to know that right?) and i remembered how
we came back from the city and up those stairs at the side of the house
and then skiddled off the trees to take a shit. didnt even dig or
nothing, just sat and shat, and then wiped with a dry leaf and hoped that
all was still well with the world, and prayed that none of y'all saw me.

shitterless HUS! shitterless HUS!
hope you don't mind if i CUSS
about that
shitterless HUS! shitterless HUS!
cuz even though it sounds like i FUSS
really i know
that
shitterless HUS! shitterless HUS!
was the shiznit, the doowickety hang dawg
that liggity let US
rock the streets, drum the beats
in the early morning BUS
on the way to the
Reeeeeee
Vooooooooo
Luuuuuuuuuuuuuu (even thought the house didnt have a loo)
SHUUUUUNNNN!!!!!!!!

now.
somebody write that in Tha-yiii.

synergy navashwasam

2005-06-09T03:11:00.000+08:00

amores, precios.a.o.s,

I dance. I live to dance. I always have, but I guess I know it more and more now.
It's nice to have found this particular Bill to Kill.
Share it with me?

Friday, June 3, 7:30 pm, Synergy House, 550 San Juan, Stanford

It's a short show-in-evolution called
navashwasam
(nuevas respiraciones)
(new breaths)
mostly Bharatanatyam, with a work-in-evolution combining spanish poetry with movements based on Bharatanatyam.

It's a gift long overdue to a house that is one of my once-now-forever homes.

Some of you aren't in foot/wheel access distance to this house, pero quiero que (ya se que) vengas por corazon.

So.
Presence in qualquier form requested, feedback on all fronts welcome.
Much love
Malavika Ammu Mali

Sure as hell

2005-05-24T04:07:00.000+08:00

Coffee cups with plastic lids stride past casually worshipped by dedicated addicted hands. I'm odd here, not homeless and yet crouched in front of a closed cafe off of University Avenue, some of the cups glance me an amused smile, some also take in that I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, reactions vary. That's a good book, one says. Yup, I say. He keeps walking and I keep reading and then get lost in the design on the back of a tiny bug. The design looks indigenous, or traditional, or tribal, or whatever word one uses these days. It has straight lines. See? Who says straight lines are human inventions?

The ideas I've met in my most recent sublifetime(s) merge and revisit with one another. Earlier this sublifetime I ambled the hills of Epuyen picking rosehips and thinking about post-scarcity, the little I grasped from the first section of Murray Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism. I've probably spilled more words about the book than I read. Now Robert M. Pirsig's bike maintaining protagonist and his former being too tell me we are in post-scarcity, though we sure as hell don't know it. Well, Bookchin and Pirsig tell me, but really I tell myself.

Pirsig says Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive. So often I think this, and find it strange that I'm thinking it. But now I'd like to arrive. The problem is, I'm travelling to teach myself that I've already arrived, and apparently I still haven't fully learned that lesson.

That stuff in those boxes stuck in Maasi and Akhil's attic, I put almost all of it in the Columbae free store. Done. Llego. I've arrived. At that place that many steps closer to nothing. I'm still a packrat though, I've already started keeping the plastic cups from pearl milk tea and whatnot. For when I really arrive, bodily, in that place, that home I'm looking for, and can fill my home with systems of goodness and transformation of waste into not.

Yesterday Cherrie Moraga's Medea's lover said they were looking for a home so long that the looking became the home. So I suppose I'm always home, thought it sure as hell doesn't feel that way.

If hell is sure, maybe I'll make that my home.

sorting through cyber sent thoughts after dosa at poomchima's house in los altos hills, and damn are they altos, my bike-bonkered legs hear that

2005-05-19T04:31:00.000+08:00

Nrityagram said no, i found out yesterday. Amma was waiting till i got home to tell me. I guess i kind of knew but i was disappointed and upset. still am a little. i think i was relying on it (my to-be, now not-to-be Nrityagram time) to catalyze me to my destiny which is truly. To Dance. I must. and right now i'm not, because i need a space, a community, music, yahdah yahday thats bullshit i can dance anywhere and i have to make myself do it. And instead here i am online again messing up my brain and eyes and arms and hands and wrists and neck and back and.

It's gorgeous outside.

I read Moment of Silence at the Fast Breaking celebration after ramadan and then wrote to the poet, Emmanuel Ortiz:
Dear Emmanuel,
I read your Moment of Silence poem at an informal poetry gathering we had this evening because what it says is hits home hard, and yet lyrical soft as breeze. I changed three things when I read it. Like, I cut out "white" before "guilt". Targetting the white people in the room just wasn't in my agenda, no disrespect meant to your righteously crafted words, but as a fellow lover of the spoken word, i know that some word artists might not be cool with edits without permission like that. I wanted to get your thoughts on it, if you have the time. Feel free to yell at me, I'll read the real version next time if you like.
Also, again only if you have that precious commodity Time that exists infinite but one can only create out of thin air, your thoughts on the anti-semitism accusation that I'm sure you've got feedback on?
Otherwise, fight on, sing on, brother.
Much health, Malavika

"Fast, Dance, Be" to lauren (and shannon and mandeep)

dearest juego de la vida (game of life)
in this thing i use many words you might not understand. i will explain some of them. but the time i can spend at the computer without wearing out my wrists eyes back neck brain is short, so ask me which specific ones you want me to explain more if you like. also, its long and i havent read it through, so it might have nonsense, apologies.

dearest shannabis and big M
i wrote this to juego de la vida in response to some of her questions on Fasting, Dancing, and both of you asked for general update on my Being, so i thought i'd shoot three friends with one love bullet. apologies that its not personalized, but think of it in the light that the links are all part of one big fat happy chain that speaks the same infinite language.

Fast
see, i was torn twisted tearing inside when i
a) read about iraq, remembered the experience of resistance i entered last year then abandoned, now so disconnected from the people i wanted to be in solidarity with,
b) read Pam Olson's letters from palestine which are so compelling telling feeling knowing, and i remembered how i changed from not knowing a damn thing about the israel-palestine conflict,
-> to thinking that i wish both sides would stop doing wrong, ->to realizing that it was a case of state sponsored and i felt so disconnected from the people i now wanted to be in solidarity with,
and at the same i was remembering our ramadan (my failed ramadan) solidarity last year and wishing thinking knowing i could do it right, or at least, less wrong this time, in the safety and stability of the warm embrace of my mommy and daddy,
so i told my parents i was going to observe ramadan to be In Solidarity with the Occupied Peoples of Iraq and Palestine, to send thhem energy to Peacefully Resist and Oust their Occupiers, and asked for their (my parents') help in any way they could give it. ramadan started on friday. friday and saturday i had dance performances, so i eased in by simply eating a little less quantity, and more consciously. sunday i woke up early and ate before sunrise, waited till sunset to eat again, and continued the next few weeks with only water during the day, having at least that because i was still dancing, performing, and i didnt believe i should collapse, that wasnt the purpose of this. I broke one day, a week into the fast, because my period started that day and i had a very important performance (explanation coming later) that night. the dance went off magically, and i was glad i broke, but hoped i wouldnt have to break again. i didnt. the last week of the fast, my mom joined me, and i stopped drinking water. it was hard, exponentially harder than just food, especially on the day during that week when i had to perform. the hour just before sunset, the last 5 minutes, was excruciating at moments. but just moments. mostly it was ok. no, not ok, great. no, not great, i just dont have a word for what it was.

Dance
it was important because
a) i, with the help of my teacher and mom, choreographed the item i was doing earlier this year, so it was a new phase of dance being
b) i was coming back to a style of body awareness in dance that i had lost at some point, but with the new awareness that i've gained along the way, so it was a new phase of dance being
c) it was the night before Vijayadashami, which is the day you start all things to do with learning. you go to your guru and give gurudakshana. i had decided that from that day for the next year till the next Vijayadashami, i was dedicating myself to Dainika Nritya, which might be translated as the Dance that is All Life, translation itself interpretable in many ways. how i choose to intepret dainika nritya is what i will find out over this next phase of dance being. on saturday my mom and i broke completely for the last day of the fast. we had to break quickly because we had tickets to a Odissi dance performance. Odissi is a classical dance form from Orissa, India. Our (my mom, dad, and mine) lives were changed that evening. The two performers were from Nrityagram, a dance school near Bangalore, India. Nritya means dance, gram means village, dance village. here is the website:www.nrityagram.orgi really want you to look at it when you get the chance. its not just dance. or rather, it is just dance, it is dainika nritya. it is dance, it is life choice, nature, urban spaces (please please please read the architecture section, it wont take long, but it will please you i think), it is food, body, mind, breath, health, peace, determination, joy, i have to stop now or i'll explode, but just one more thing to say. the reason it changed our lives is. :: . Fickleness of mind be gone. Wanting, needing, being dizzy from turning away and away and away, not knowing, thinking too much, be gone. I'm applying to be a student at this school for next year. If they don't accept my application, or turn me down after the audition, I will go and visit at the very least. If they accept me for three months of probation, but turn me down, I will leave ecstatic at having had spent that time. If they take me for the three or six years, then !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ......... *_*_*_/^~^\ jhimmi ta kita toom toom tari kita tam kita taka toom jhimmi jhimmi toom toom

Be
i am. and it is. wonderful. tough, sometimes. i just spent half an hour melting by my sun burning window trying to convince the Kent Vale (our apartment complex) Block A (our block) representative (representing us to the university authorities who rule us) that it would be a good idea to approach the university authorities about allowing us to start a small compost project in a small corner of the estate that i would be in charge of at least until i leave, and if nobody took it over, i would simply take it down, and chalk it off as at least being able to compost my own family's waste the way i have been doing already, except without having to bury it (which, now reading One Straw Revolution, i'm less keen to do, and plus its hard work, blech) and without worrying that someone would come and stop me. thats worst case scenario, and even that is pleasing, which is what i was trying to tell her, but she has been burned by the conflict between her ideals and the difficulty of the Singaporean mindset and bureaucracy bullshit, a fire fueled by the pressure of the workplace in university teaching. i was quite politely tenacious and didnt allow her to make me give up, so perhaps i have a chance. a year ago, no, because i didnt know enough to give the impression of capability, and i wasnt stable enough to finish what i started, like my stupid stinky unhealthy compost heap in UBC and the free store i scattered and abandoned on the lawn, and i wasnt disciplined enough to keep things neat and clean and presentable so that people werent disgusted by them, unlike my messy trashy garage UBC room, but i believe in myself now, because my parents are my checks and balances, and in their shining light i grow and give and love and be.

Om Bhur Bhuvaswa Tat Savitur Varenyam Bhargo Devasya Dhimahi Dhiyo Yo Nah Pracodayat = We contemplate the ultimate reality that permeates the earth, sky, the heavens.

Terribly insufficient translation, but it will have to do. i cant make predictions about the future, even choices that seem to be be in my control. i said i was going to be in brazil, then i said i was going to be in glasgow, then i said bangalore, now i say i'm here till mid-january at least, because i'm doing a play (greek tragedy, with the words, but with movement based on Bharatanatyam, the style of classical indian dance that i'm trained in, very exciting project) that goes up in january, and then at some point, possibly february, possibly march, i'm going to the stanford/bay area to collect and get rid of the stuff that i'm storing in my aunt's attic, and to say goodbye to the people trees ground air that i only said See You Soon to because i thought i was coming back soon, and after that i dont know if i'll ever see again, and to wait for my parents to come there so we do a Be Trip. Be, meaning, existence, but more literally, this show is brought to you by the letter B. Bay Area, British Columbia (Vancouver, friends), Boston (friends, Chomsky my dad's teacher, my birthplace), Barcelona (friends, cooperative revolution), Bergen (my parents' linguistics conference). possibly our last such world travel, since we're now settling down to saving every last drop for the Home we will build after the next few years when my parents "retire", a idea that started off as an orphanage type thing, -> morphed into home for children, -> morphed into home for children with accomodation for elderly who can help out but need community and support also, -> morphed into simply Home. for all Life and Living. it will be in india, we think, south india, we think, it will be natural, because everything that exists is natural, but more natural than other natural things in that humans forget that we are natural, so this will be a reminder. coconut trees, coffee trees, happy children, education without indoctrination, banana trees, mud buildings, intelligent but tolerant debate, grey water systems, will sing from the ground.

Come visit us? Play with the babies? Be babies? Be?

Munching on home baked bread, Sending much love and velorutionary shits and giggles,Malavika Mali little m, your Bu

¿Che, que significa...?

2005-03-27T22:51:00.000+08:00

¿Che, que significa disfrutar?
(Hey, what does disfrutar mean?)

Disfrutar
is a verb which can only be translated in memes and qualia.
Disfrutando
is to be doing that verb,
to be ···

·emerging magically out of an invisible portal path in the bushes with telltale Keats-Purple-stained lips and fingers from picking blackberries up the wazoo, or rather, up the Rio Azul, but still more than enough left to make cobbler back home

·lowering a tongue to gather the very last of that Keats-Purple-staining coldness from the bottom and sides of that gleaming white tigela (bowl) that was once Açai na tigela (açai in a bowl, instead of diluted and poured in a plastic cup, erch, no way, thank you very much)

·glimpsing the specifically right now and never again spentamacular combination of sun cloud and mountain out the window and running out of the house with the door open even though its damn cold to stare at it with awe drip dropping down from open jaws

·trooping out to the huerta (garden) to gather carrots and beans and lemonade lettuce and tomatoes and squash and basil and potatoes and apples and watching it and helping it transform into a glorious feast in which only the oil and the salt didn´t come from this very land right here and right now

·standing in front of a pile of mud bricks that will soon be in the walls of a bakery for a school piled together by precisely the kind of hands and minds that seemed too idealistic to exist in the real world

·finally seeing that thin tall Amazonian palm with those tiny little berries that are concocted into Açai

·watching someone eat sunflower seeds right from the flower and realizing that´s where they come from

·gathering with fellow artists in an utterly non-hierarchical temporary performance tribe to put all professional social mental physical energy into the creation of art that exists specifically right now and never before and never again

·putting on a purple lavender hat that was knitted with love and given as Trueque (a system of barter exchange hereabouts, once complex and organized, bottom-up, during the economic crisis, and now still a common informal concept) in exchange for Bharatanatyam talleres (workshops)

**¬_}·····´`\_¡**··_

Hey you.
A friend told me that when someone says hey you to you that means they like you.
I like you.
I probably even love you.
I might owe you an individual mail.
I might have told you about this time last year that I was done with mass mails.
Some things change.
Hey you.
Some don´t.
I´m in El Bolson, Patagonia. Sunday I go to Epuyen to live in a building where the nearest anything is a good stroll away. Except for the mountains and the lake and the dragon and the rosehips and the artesenal art and all the things that matter.
If you write me I will you write you back, (you back, you specifically and just you) and will try to make it before the next time the earth and sun are in this exact position right here and right now.
If you want to check in on me every now and then, this email was composed on www.giispot.blogspot.com, and it gets updated every twice in a blue cheese.
If you want me to send you these two blue cheeses, let me know and I´ll put you on a list. (Those of you who have already requested this, consider it done.)
Some things get too administrative for their own good.
Too much computer time makes malavika ammu mali malibu emu etc tara mohanan poopy.

Hey you.

SEAS memories Take 2

2005-03-16T07:34:00.000+08:00

Dear SEAS,

Spring 2002, I think it was, that the image first popped into my head and weighed on my heart. That we had been welcomed into your house, you, a righteous mama, once big and strong, who had suddenly taken ill. We had drank the last of your water in the hopes that, our thirst quenched, we would know how to nurse you back to health. But now we sat confused and helpless, meeting after meeting, our childish hands barely propping up your frail body.

I´m far away. I have no clue how you fare now. Whether this letter will go into a book
·on your raft as you sail off to die in dignity
·or on a shelf in your bustling bursting home
·or for you to read and rejuvenate with because you´re still in bedrest but well enough to be restless.

I´m far away. And yet I´m so close to you. I´m in a town called El Bolson in Patagonia, so far away and yet I´m one of 6 $tanford alumni, 2 living here, and 4 of us visiting. I have next to me
·the Honors thesis of one, about revolutionary artistic living in Bolson ("Life and All its Miracles. A revolutionary poetics of social transformation, May 17 2004)
·the voluptuous program for the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, so far away from you and yet I was one of at least 10 Stanford alumni participating in it
·the DisO guide. Version 2002.

I sometimes forget why I brought the DisO with me in these wanderings of the globe. Then I open it and read an article and I remember.
Do you?
Remember?

We first met, you and I, after the rally for Amadou Diallo. We wore red for the blood he shed (DisO ´02 p. 24). I got a flier (which I still don´t know whether to spell with an i or a y) from Tim Ly, went home and subscribed to the list, skimmed your emails, and continued doing my a cappella and theatre and classes and other generally non-specifically-revolutionary things and, and, and.

And in one of my skimmings I stumbled upon Fair Trade coffee (p. 15) and, running after that butterfly, tumbled down off the side of the organizational mountain. I´m sorry. I´m sorry for mixing my metaphors and I´m sorry I didn´t follow your lead first and learn how to tread the paths before running off trying to forge new ones. (Big Mama, you know, you remember, but do your children know how we, StanFair, fizzled out after our original burst of fire, armed with so much information and so little womanpower?)

I finally came to you in the fall after a terrorist group attacked the people of the largest terrorist State in the world. The people under that terrorist State, citizens or not, knowingly or not, were entering a period of unprecedented fascism. War was in the air, on more than one front. And we, we would meet around the Haas Center kitchen table amidst that sound and fury and, and, and.

·And the labor struggle was intensifying (p. 60, also 14, 53).
·the Hoover tower had cast its shadow too long, too strong (p.36).
·prisons were doing a PacMan on schools (p. 18).
·the medical waste campaign needed follow-up (p. 28).
·Philipino airport screeners and other victims of racial profiling needed solidarity (p. 55).
·this group or that event needed money.
·flyers (i?) to be able to give money to this group or that event needed putting up.
And we would meet and say and do things but we still needed a campaign for this year but we couldn´t even agree on what Environmental Justice was (or figure out how to settle it into your name once and for all) and so many righteous folks had just graduated and it felt like none of us knew what we were doing and it was beautiful how we respected each other and put ideals into practice in our round-table straight-talking decision-making but did I mention how we still needed a campaign and, but, and, but, and.

And the DisOs were late but arrived, printed and beautiful. Little red books that opened onto the discontentment that sat like splinters in our minds, that shattered pavements to reveal the dirt tracks that led to the beaches on the islands of the rEvolution.

Lavanya put together summer reading for us, and the reader was red and black too, and when we came back in the fall we knew in our hearts that the Administration that had taken over the land commonly referred to as the United States of America was going to invade the land referred to as Iraq, and the Administration of our $chool was one of 5 contracted with the Department of Energy to research and develop nuclear weapons under the guise of stewardship of existing materials (p. 45), and on the same day that we were told to Act Patriotic or be hunted down by signatures on one document, Boeing signed another billion dollar deal with the Department of Defense to fuel an industry that toxified the water of its fellow citizens during a production process that aimed specifically for shock, awe, and death, and we knew $tanford was invested Boeing and we had to Do Something about it, and, and, and.

And we didn´t Know Everthing but we knew Enough To Act (p. 35) so we Acted, but in haste, forgetting that Acting would involve Being More Informed and Saying It Good to convince other people to act, and we took our divestment proposals and our befuddled well-intentioned selves to the Advisory Panel on Investment Responsibility (p. 71) and they Slapped Us Down.

We went home and licked our wounds and regrouped and recuperated and kept joining our people in White Plaza, the Quad, front of Hoover tower, the streets of Palo Alto, streets of San Francisco and, and, and.

They bombed Iraq.

And they occupied Iraq, and we were occupying too much space in the Haas Center. I came one evening and sat and looked at you, heavy and bloated with information and history and undistributed DisOs and felt like crying because all this time I still didn´t know who you were and what you´d been, and I took my scalpel in my childish hands and sliced into your organs and examined every tissue and steeled myself to discard and rearrange, even though each dead tree I threw away could have delivered an Honors thesis and I wondered where these righteous folks whose names danced out were now, and were they still as righteous, and did they ever feel as helpless? And now that I´d cut you into pieces I wanted to draw you whole again and bring you back to life but da Vinci wasn´t alive to teach me and, and, and.

And when we came back in the fall we still didn´t have a campaign, but suddenly you appeared larger than that. We couldn´t find a campaign for you like any other group anymore than we could attribute properties to Brahma like any other god because you weren´t any other group anymore. And we sketched you as we talked and you filled out and we glimpsed the exquisiteness that you could be and we set out to manifest it and we called it the Convergence.

May I? Might I describe, feeble as my words will be, a sketch of sorts?

Your DisOrganization lives in the heart of campus. Perhaps the Old Union. You offer yourself to every individual and collection of individuals that believes that Another World Is Possible. They themselves don´t know what that means, and they disagree constantly, but that´s just fine. They disagree in the warmth of your embrace and with access to your
·library that tells them that noone has ever exactly what they´re doing but have tried something very similar that they could learn from. The library would have the essence of the history of each group and movement across campus, across the country, across the world, from the beginning of all groups and movements, like a fantasmic cataclysmic explosion across all dimensions of the DisO.
·website, the cyberpresence that allowed them to connect even away from your physical embrace, the nexus not only for the network of learning activators on campus, but even those who had learned and left and were activated in other worlds.
·calendar that allowed them to schedule events in cooperation and concert
·art supplies and whatnot, so that one´s trash would be another´s revolutionary masterpiece.
and they would examine each of their resources in the light of cooperation, not competition, and the cooperative houses would be sisters and brothers to the ethnic theme houses and you wouldn´t be able to tell what the event was about based on the color of the partipants
and the community would converge at the beginning of each quarter to present themselves to the young ´uns, and each big ´un would take a young ´un under their wings and each group would know the other groups so that when a young ´un came to them and expressed desires and ideals and ideas that jived better with another group the big ´un would point ´em right to that other group, and each ´un, lil or big, would learn how to direct every part of their life and learning towards the possibility of that Other World, not just in meetings and rallies and petitions, but in classes, and parties, and finals, and jobs and houses and homes and food and clothes and how food grows and clothes are made and schools or non-schools and shampoo and group decision making and burrito tomatoes and strawberries and bicycles and wines and computer parts and water sources and crop seeds and, and, and.

And when they converge they look like the people sitting at the bottom of the DisO cover holding hands, not boxed in, but safe and secure in the warmth of your embrace that is the frame around us, and they quote K.M. (back cover) knowing that he was wrong in some things and right on in others and so are they.

Spring 2005 it is.
How do you fare?

Love,
Malavika

What I´m working on, to send in to current SEAS folks by March 20. Suggestions please?

2005-03-10T02:45:00.000+08:00

Spring 2002, I think it was, that the image first popped into my head and weighed on my heart.
That we had been welcomed into the house of a righteous mama, once big and strong, who had suddenly taken ill. We had drank the last of her water in the hopes that, our thirst quenched, we would know how to nurse her back to health. But now we sat confused and helpless, meeting after meeting, our childish hands barely propping up her frail body.
I´ll start from the beginning, shall I?

We first met, SEAS and I, after the rally in protest of the acquittal of the officers who gunned down Amadou Diallo. March 10, 2000.
(italics) We wore red for the blood he shed.
Tim Ly (often said in the same breath as Louise Averhahn, who I still think of as SeasLouise) handed me a flyer (which I still don´t know whether to spell with an i or a y) about Students for Environmental Action at Stanford, I think it was still called then. I went home and signed on to the list and did nothing more than skim emails for the next several months. I hadn´t really joined the revolution yet, see.

Late fall or early winter, a note about Fair Trade coffee caught my eye, amidst the notes on toxic medical waste and whatnot. I worked in a café and loved the substance. What could it have to do with environmental issues and injustice? What wasn´t fair about trade? I pulled on the dangling thread and didn´t even realize when what was left of the fabric that veiled my middle class liberal eyes was entirely and utterly unravelled.
(italics) You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Our relationship didn´t really take off, even then. SEAS wasn´t pursuing the coffee thing, her plate was understandably full, so we went our separate ways. I was part of the founding of yet another student activist group to address an issue that we felt deserved more attention. I ran into her every now and then, in those repeating faces and names at events and rallies and petitions. SeasLouise came to our group´s first tabling to offer advice and wisdom and I was glad to finally put a face to the name.
(italics) You´re an activist, huh? Hey, so what´s your cause?

Fall 2001, after immeasurable ages of state sponsored terrorism, the United States government, and the people it presides over finally experienced terrorism on what they called their own land. War was in the air on more than one front; the labor struggle was intensifying. Meanwhile, some of the most revolutionary folks had just graduated, off to continue their work in the bigger and badder realms of the struggle.
(italics) Hasta la victoria siempre.
I returned to school and joined SEAS, not realizing her health was in a precarious stage. Meetings were Monday nights, I vaguely remember. I would head down to the Haas Center with Adrian Guzman, my roommate. Sabrina Fernandes made a deal with him that she would join Vegan Action if he would join SEAS. She (Sabrina) and Cody had been in SEAS the year before. They were starting to get the ins and outs, the whats and the whos. Lavanya Chekuru and Adrianna ?? seemed to bring the most experience to the table, that table in the Haas kitchen, having their fingers in so many of the activist pies (They were SLACers too). Adrian and I were newbies. We stumbled through the haze of recent happenings, the various campaigns and whatnots...
*Medical waste needed follow-up. Anyone? Cody? Consider it done.
* Prison construction needed stopping. Delano II was on its way, or we/they had stopped it already, there had been a victory on one front, a loss on another, I wish I could tell you more, but like I said, hazy happenings, purple from pollution. We´ll return to the problem of this historical strategical haze later.
* Philipino airport screeners were getting screwed over and needed solidarity against the racial profiling at SF airport that was one locust among the cloud that was being flown in and dropped from the latest Boeing Apache helicopters.
* Special fees needed campaigning for, which meant flyers needed printing and sticking up, only to end up fluttering in the winds of deforestation.
* Special fees needed using, which, for this year, meant that requests from other groups and events needed
* Dis-Orientation guides needed printing. Little red books that opened onto the discontentment that sat like splinters in our minds and shattered pavements to reveal the dirt tracks that led to the beaches on the island of revolution.
* And the doozie. This year´s new campaign needed identifying and researching.
So we followed up, stopped (?), were in solidarity, flyered, and printed. But the identifying was another matter. I mean, what the hell WAS our cause? Each

I felt like I was part of a collective diarrohea of activity. The Dis-O was the fiber mass that grounded us. I have the little red book in my bag as I type from a small town in Argentina. I can´t really explain why I carry it with me....
Let me explain my ambivalence.
* Med waste. Was it over? Did we win? Who did what and how?

-med waste. one righteous campagin. it was for a year. consistency. whats our cause? community history. we didnt know what happened.

what is ej?
Summer reading

After summer, more what is ej. Antiwar, slac.
Boeing, committee.
Convergence and Seas history files. Searats.

What campaign do we choose?
What is progressive?

From Curitiba, Parana, Brazil

2005-03-04T09:39:00.000+08:00

Me, on computer 10. Thea, computer 11. Daisy, computer 12. Three blind mice.
We type freely, oh so freely, for Curitiba has government sponsored free internet.
Thea says, what is this, Muzak Beatles. She sings along to the saxophone that croons in the night air of this Twin Peaks town with a world-acclaimed transit system, institutionalized scavenging/recycling, European citizens and cobble stones, and Native women with wool wrapped wiggle worm babes on the sidewalk. Welcome to Chi-chi land.

I can't take this. I'm out. Leaving, on a jet bus, don't know when I'll be back again.
Maybe April, to join the MST march. Can I handle that?
Who knows, all I know is I can't take this world of restaurants and hotels and touristing and not giving to beggars and trying to save money to pretend I'm living in solidarity with the povo, the pueblo, the gente,
Now I need a place to hide away
Oh I believe in yesterday....

Shut up.
Self-righteous pompous self-depracating whining tooting (is all that possible simultaneously?)
Get with the program. Life is, will be, however I live it. Ahhhh, and that is the question. How to live it. And I'm finding out, I truly am.

In
the WSF youth camp bag slung from the shoulder of the stranger on the bus (the bag slung from my shoulder is from last year's WSF. the propaganda spreads among us)
the dry compost toilet (that I was too constipated to contribute too, but appreciate nevertheless) at the fresh beautiful hippy scented permaculture house
the whiffs of a library in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon (Amandouim, the children will breathe in word art, and perhaps then create it, because of you)
the hand-made DIY collection of random individuals that are streaming out of the woodworks like termites that know that If we all work together, we can totally disrupt the system (Risa, how many 10th graders have you corrupted, how many future revolutionaries have you created, so far?)
in all these
I'm finding out.
How To Live.
How To Love.

From
Peter Singer, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Howard Zinn, Murray Bookchin, Vandana Shiva, Aung San Suu Chi, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Gilberto Gil, Alice Walker, Grace Paley,
in all these living souls
I invoke the strength to know
How To Live, How To Love

From you. Reader. Friend. I invoke the peace, the health, the truth, the beauty,
that lives and breathes inside you,
revolves around a deep core that is you.

Ate logo, amigos.

possible mass mail from salvador

2005-02-20T01:46:00.000+08:00

Dear yous,

First ~
ignore the last mass mail that some of you may have received that claimed to be the mass mail to end all mass mails. Apparently, it was indeed like a war to end all wars.

Second ~
if you ever come across a place that has acai, GET IT. The ´c´ should have a little hook below it, but i´m not that clever. actually, i´m just too lazy to figure it out, but i´m on a mission here, people.
->The mission is to relay at least some of the life forms that I observe/create/come into contact with/what-have-you as I globe roam, and one of those forms of life is. ¨_Oof. Shluppum. Yum._¨
Acai. With a hook. Iced. With granola. This Brazilian fruit will bead your mouth Keats purple and leave you thoroughly refreshed and satisfied and buzzing with energy.
~No, I have not been paid by Nestle to advertise this alimentation so that they can then proceed to buy up the market and sell it at bloodthirsty prices.
~No. Nor have I been buying bottled water, a market that is, unlike acai, monopolized by Nestle, at least here in Brazil.
~No, I have not visited the Guarani aquifer, a major water source that borders Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, and is just one of the frontiers of the war between Life and Profit.
~No. It doesn´t help to see everything in terms of war, it only helps to further perpetuate war, but sometimes, hyperbole gets the better of me, especially when riding the wave of aforementioned Acai. I beg forgiveness for my shins, which are currently slightly beat up, especially my right one.

Third, yes, the rest of my emails just might be this ridonkulous, so.
* if you´re peacin out of this cyberspace, know that I send my love and good thoughts about the soul that is you, and if you ever feel like checking in on me, these sporadic spaced out emails will be posted at www.giispot.blogspot.com. The previous posts were of an entirely different nature, so feel free to ignore them.
*if you´re still pieced in to this cyberspace, and feel like asking please sir, can i have some more pieces (dont do it! save yourselves while you still can!!), then send me an itty bitty reply, and I´ll add you to a list, odd as that feels to say, after my passionately pendulumic past relationship with email and lists and other such virtual unrealities.

Fourth, I bid you all well, my wrists and neck and wallet are telling me to finish the job and get the hell out.

Fifth, I just found the c with hook key. It´s brazil. Of COURSE every keyboard has the apostrophe button stuck but also has a functional c with hook key. Here, see?
ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç ç .
And just for good measure.
ç.

I love you all.
Me.

From anks computer, o bigode, Daisymali

2005-02-19T02:43:00.000+08:00

dickson's heavy churches. buildings. whoomph, indestructible, the
others
are like, made out of cardboard, i mean...

{Daisy, taking over the keyboard, interjecting nonsense, childish
babble,
into my profundity, typed this: espeg jzdth dcar ran out the streset
daning with md feet. nd then the man was thinking such stange thoughts
about the beauty of touching another person and oveing them sooo
osoooooo
muc}

...just take the building cornering the church we were looking at when
he
(dickson) shared his heavy church thoughts, its this long candy pink
thing
thatll fall
timbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. damn the man, dont let the
man
get you down.

yeah, so ok, but then here's the doozy, for me at least. dickson is
telling me about this heavy church thing while morphing massing
sections
of human beans are flowing past, a rep from each section hands me a
flyer
(funny, why do i take it, i never take flyers, save the trees and
whatnot)
sharing their path to salvation. mobile transitory carbon based live
churches. elemental. heaviness towers up around, lightness swims past,
licking every corner. god is contained and yet uncontrollably volatile
flowatile

and so i decided to start my lucy (lucy fer?) trip looking up through
the
line of energy of the cross on the church that we have postcard
memories
of.

and then god called on the cellular.

wtf?

my headspace is used to connecting religion with puritanism. carnaval
shows me, tis not so. disconnect myself. reconnect in revolutionary
space.
grow a moustache, in the town of the transvestite priest.

someones on the phone. its my mom and dad. not god. more than in god.
because god and goddess are contained in my mother and father. i go
now,
daisy will take over.

when we were young, so very long ago, we all thought that space was all
there was. the space did not end. and then we learned that there were
borders, edges, containers...boxes, if you will. the space was
sub-divided, cortado, pieced out into little bits and smidgens of
things
and beings and willingnesses to be contained. all that there is, it
fits
into different sorts of beingspaces. spaces for being, but being in
different manners and ways and means and doings. except that some of us
long to cross these borders, traverse these edges, and spill out of
these
containers, running and flowing our many different colors into the
other
potholes of being and comingling into different hues and shades and
tones
that vibrate with multifaceted being and exist in multiple colorspaces.
our heads yearn to rap around into varied brainspaces. and our loves
yearn
to expand into all of the desirespaces of the universe, allowing the
light
of love to give us energy that fills up all of our cellbeings, each and
every kind of differentiated unit. when we were young, we knew
inherently
that this was possible. then we learned about the containers and forgot
the wisdom, and replaced it with knowing. forget what you learned. you
can
be it all. you are the universe. thou art god.

From Salvador

2005-02-12T01:01:00.000+08:00

If you´re strapped for time, scroll down to the paragraph that starts with ´My real point´.

Never say never, they say.
But then, they say it twice, that n-word, so does a double negative make a positive?

My point.
Is that some of you on this list received a ridiculously long mass email from me last year that announced itself as the mass mail to end all mass mails. The email went on further to claim that this was not like the war to end all wars.
Apparently the size of my nose isn´t just to do with genes or running full speed ahead into a glass door, but also has a Pinocchion element.

My point.
Is not what you want from me anyway, because if you´re reading this, you probably know me well enough to know that pointfulness is not my forte, and yet you love me anyway, just as I love you anyway, whatever you do and are (!@!).

My lack of point.
Is currently situated in Salvador, Brazil, in an internet/pizza place. No, I´m not eating Pizza, mainly because it costs a toe and a finger, but also because I´m stuffed and happy. I will explain why I´m stuffed and happy shortly, but first.

My real point.
I´m travelling right now. It´s an intense experience, as any traveller well knows. The environments and communities I´m finding myself in are worth telling about, so I´ll try my best, whenever I can. This probably means once a month but I make no promises given my erratic internet habits (*#*).
If you would like these updates through email, let me know.
If you want to read them online instead, I´ll be putting them up on www.giispot.blogspot.com. The previous writings are of a completely different style and purpose, so please ignore those, but feel free to dip in if you have ridiculous amounts of free time. The links section is badly organized, and missing important pages, but contain some worth, nevertheless.
If you still haven´t sent me your birthday, please do.
If I´ve missed your birthday, and also haven´t replied to your personal emails, I´m really sorry, but I won´t promise more. (see above *#*)
If you want/have to do something else entirely, feel free. (see above !@!)

Right. Onward ho. Why I´m stuffed and happy. I stopped at Restaurante Popular while walking from the Policia Federal, where I spent a measly 2 and a half hours getting my visa extended, to Pellorinho, where I am now. I had seen this restaurante yesterday (on the same walk, after I had gotten to Policia Federal at 4:30, half an hour after closing, after spending a draining, disgruntling

From porto alegre

2005-01-28T21:22:00.000+08:00

the forum is in its third day. am here in santander cultural center, using its convenient and very kind free email. should be at the forum, what the hell am i doing here? but no, a few notes first.

the forum is spread out. its tiring to get from one place to another, and theres sun and beer ice-cream everywhere, which invites people to go into party mode, rather than social exchange and transformation mode. there is much trash. much waste. much hypocrisy. much consumerism. much disregard for the people who pick up the trash. much ridiculous overlap and redudancy. much lechery. all the problems of the world are manifest here.

so why am i here? because all the solutions of the world are also here.

the problems, the solutions, are all human, are all life. only when they confront each other in a space like this, will we learn where the balances lie, where the truths are sleeping, where enlightenment crouches.

i've been repulsed, i've been delighted, bored, inspired. off i go to catch the next pendulum. the problems of bottled water await me.

From Floripa

2005-01-25T09:52:00.000+08:00

Floripa, nickname for Florianapolis. Waves, beach bums, Argentinian tourists, and maricuja sorvete.
But let me jump back a bit first.

Flew into Frankfurt Wednesday morning, spent the whole friggin day there in that terribly-lacking-in-soft-beddish-spaces airport. Eh. It wasn't that bad. I used the time to make Theacup and people-watch. And doze.

That night I flew to Sao Paolo, waited to meet up with Daisy, Thea, and MiklBoon. On the flight, chatted to my neighbor about Swedish and United Statesian politics and dirty toilet humor.

Sao Paolo for a few days. DTM and I getting used to the place, and each other. Cities are cities are cities, but the hieroglyphics on the wall there is different. Glyphitti. The hotel was more expensive than I expected, but given the people, the room, the warm water, and the breakfast (gostozo!!!), it was worth it.

Next, Floripa. Translation above. Think Santa Barbara/Cruz/Monica. We swam, sang and danced with the hippy boys and discussed Israel/Palestine in Portunol last night, and today we went on a scavenger hunt to find the permaculture people. Todo legal.

Much Portugese has NOT been learned by me, and I didn't sleep enough last night, and tomorrow we bus to Porto Alegre, and day after tomorrow the phenomenon that is Forum Sociale Mondiale starts, and my eyes are starting to blur and i htinkd lsdji should go to sldkeep .....

os suenos. boa noite.

From Daisy, December 3

2005-01-17T22:37:00.000+08:00

Ms. Mali-vali bo-mo'-han-on-and-on-to the break o' dawn---

Oh, I've been feeling you strong tonight. Tonight, looking at your
radiance on that online community thingy that was supposed to have
blossomed but is just a little weird and a little glorious, depending
on your intents and purposes - Friendster- and then on to your blog,
because it's been so damn long without word or hide nor hair of you
that I have no idea what to think.

Today marks the beginning of the end of my time here in the nation's
capital. I ended my internship today...the job that brought me here in
the first place. Kicking and screaming, from the sagebrush plains of
Wyoming, to engross myself in power suits, business cards, buildings
and metros and buses and people. And also to discover that deep seated
in this throne of power dwell many, many fine folks with their eyes
toward change. Even when my bitter jadedness reached an all=time low,
I was sucked back up from it by an incredible force of social will,
and brought back into the optimism of a more seasoned veteran.

From here, I took off for northern shores, to reunite with family and
long-lost friends, for a brief week of time, then on to California for
a monthly time, and then on to Sudamerica with Thea and Mikl Miller,
to romp across the jungles, socially-concious gatherings,
samba-shaking fiestas, and sustainable cities of Brasil, on to finally
savor the true flavor of El Bolson with Mr. Denali, and on to visit
old friends and explore old intense flames of passion in Chile. What a
wild adventure it will be!

I miss you like mad, Ms. Mali. It was god to read some of what's going
on in your blog. Though I have to say that I can't really understand
half of the Indian (Hindi?) words you use. ;) I think my next travel
outside of the US will have to be to NOT latin america.

FUnny that you start to speak/think of yourself as maybe not American
anymore. I feel that feeling, as I start to feel less like I belong to
California like I used to. I do not feel that I've found a true home
to compare yet, out here in DC or in WY, but little parts of me are
changed in ways that can't be found back where I'm from. It will be
interesting to return for a time and see how I fit in with what I used
to be.

Despite loving you to smithereens, I must get to bed finally. Too much
fruitless internet surfing, time-wasting tonight. Good thing I wrote
you, b/c otherwise it would all have been in vane. But, for this
email, the whole night was valuable and wholesome, like the food I
love to put in my belly but that I rarely find time to prepare for
myself. Sigh. The days of time-consuming dumpstered food prepping are
long behind in this mile-a-minute rush of a city. Or, maybe that's
just me and my overly social ways making it so. sigh.

Love you like blood,
Miss you like sunsets,
Send you luck like blond breath on Vegas dice,
And strength like triangles.

Daisy

--
**************************************
There was never a night or a fear
that could destroy sunrise or hope.
--Bern Williams
**************************************

Tidal Waves come before a Supernova

2004-12-29T14:11:00.000+08:00

Daisy says my blog is old two weeks. Whoa. She reads my blog. Someone reads my blog.

I don't actually want to be gorgeous, or famous, or a hero, or the best at something, because being a best gorgeous famous hero is a pain in the ass. I know this by the whiffs and tastes of each I get every now and then. I know this. But it's gonna take me a while to get it, really know it.

I don't want anyone to read my blog. Because then I start thinking I haven't blogged in a while, and even though I go around basically blogging in my head 24/7, I don't like blogging because computers hurt my brain and eyes and hands and back and I'm addicted to them and like sugar I'm trying to kick the habit but it's so hard and words mean jack shit but I can't stop them from banging on my skull like Jehovah's witnesses.

I want a Bill to Kill. Just one. Right now I have too many. I keep taking swipes at them and end up falling on my ass because I slip on the banana peel I just dropped.

Let's shut up already with the self-flagulation shall we? And no, let's not go and check if flagulation is what we actually mean. It could be fladucation or flatucation for we care. It's not flatulation, we're pretty sure, but that's there too.

Do we know what the hell we're talking about? No. Enlightenment is in sight but the closer it gets the less it means.

Hey Tony, if you see Her can you tell Her I think I'll be reborn as a supernova this time?

Published on Wednesday December 8, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Despair is a Lie We Tell Ourselves

by Tony Kushner

[ From The Impossible Will Take a Little While, edited by Paul Loeb. Tony Kushner is the author of Angels in America and Homebody/Kabul. This essay is adapted from his talks at Chicago's Columbia College and New York's Cooper Union. ]

Excerpt from the book "The Impossible Will Take a Little While":

A Chicago cab driver recently told me, "If there's a supernova 60 light years away from here, the world will be totally wiped out. We don't stand a chance." He gave me something to think about, namely the fact that life, each individual life and our collective life on the planet, is a teleological game. It is not infinite, like Bush's justice. It has an ending, and so the future you put your faith in is not, in fact,
limitless.

Given the catastrophic failure here and abroad of the Kyoto global warming accords, given our newfound post 9-11 imperialist exuberance, given the sagging of the world's economy and the IMF-directed refusal to see any solutions beyond making poor people suffer even more than they always do in the hopes of reviving a market that only ever revives long enough to make the rich even richer, given the eagerness in Washington to explore new and tinier kinds of nuclear bombs, well, it's sort of optimistic to believe it's a supernova that's going to get us. It's clear that what's much more likely to get us, if we are got, is our present condition of living in a world run by miscreants while the people of the world either have no access to power or have access but have forgotten how to get it and why it is important to have it.

Since I was a little kid I've been told I have choices, the right to make a choice. Though I've never been dumb enough to believe that was literally true, I've also never been dumb enough to be literal. I have always believed I could choose to believe, or not believe, that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

I do not believe the wicked always win. I believe our despair is a lie we are telling ourselves. In many other periods of history, people, ordinary citizens, routinely set aside hours, days, time in their lives for doing the work of politics, some of which is glam and revolutionary and some of which is dull and electoral and tedious and not especially pure-and the world changed because of the work they did. That's what we're starting now. It requires setting aside the time to do it, and then doing it. Not
any single one of us has to or possibly can save the world, but together in some sort of concert, in even not-especially-coordinated concert, with all of us working where we see work to be done, the world will change. And we have to do it by showing up places, our bodies in places, turn off the fucking computers, leave the Web and the Net-and show up, our bodies at meetings and demos and rallies and leafletting corners.

Because this is a moment in history that needs us to begin, each of us every day at her or his own pace, slowly and surely rediscovering how to be politically active, how to organize our disparate energies into effective group action-and I choose to believe we will do what is required. Act. Organize. Assemble. Oppose. Resist. Find a place a cause a group a friend and start, today, now now now, continue continue continue. Being politically active is for the citizens of a democracy maybe the best way of speaking to God and hearing Her answer: You exist. If we are active, if we are activist, She replies to us: You specifically exist. Mazel tov. Now get busy, She replies. Maintain the world by changing the world.

So when the supernova comes to get us we don't want to be disappointed in ourselves. We should hope to be able to say proudly to the supernova, that angel of death, "Hello supernova, we have been expecting you, we know all about you, because in our schools we teach science and not creationism, and so we have been expecting you, everywhere everyone has been expecting you, except Texas. And we would like to say, supernova, in the moment before we are returned by your protean fire to our previous inchoate state, clouds of incandescent atomic vapor, we'd like to declare that we have tried our best and worked hard to make a good and just and free and peaceful world, a world that is better for our having been here, at least we believe it is."

Sent Mail Excerpts, December 10 2004, Part 1

2004-12-10T11:45:00.000+08:00

Debbie Timmins, Oct 3, in response to
"So what do you reckon was your most significant revolutionary activity to date?"
deciding firmly in my mind that i am no longer the citizen of any one nation if being a citizen means i have to abide by that nation's laws and accept that nation's State as my leader/ruler, and that i have to do my best to live in coherence and consistency with that decision, while at the same time developing my own guidelines (not rules!) of living, along
the lines of the principles of a) non-violence, b) health, and c) oneness of all of life.
mmmph. bunch of talk if you ask me, but i suppose i have the rest of my life starting now, at every now, to put it into practice.

Ammayi/Ammama, Ammamma, Amma, Shashi, Oct 3
hi all,
aaaaahyoooh, did tush try and walk his ninja across the tightrope and break a glass vase again?
acchan and acchamma asleep. acchan drew a clothing-debatable monkeyman and a victorian hardhat manual labor woman today. amma's working on class notes so the computer is going click tringwhoosh.
finally a day without rehearsal today, back at it again early tomorrow morning, so i should head off to sleep too.
love ammz

Sitara, Oct 4
aratiS
sheeit. well as usual youre a few steps ahead of me.
last year i started thinking about law school. when i went to india in mid-july it was still a possiblity, and one i had talked to my parents about, so unfortunately they got kind of excited, i wish i had upped them jjust to down them. a couple weeks into being in india, during a three day train journey, which is when so much soul searching finally gels into verbalizable thoughts, i realized that i could compare going to law school to use that education to do the work i wanted to in the world would be like drinking a bottle of coke to stay up at night to write a paper on why the company, Coke, is bad. so yes. i too want something that doesnt make me throw up. and i also firmly decided that i will not pursue higher education, though since i have given up predicting what i will think in the future, of course i might change my mind.
prisons. my main reason for considering law school. forget smash the state. i've already decided that i'm committed to dissolving it, not smashing it. but i thought i could do some prison smashing if i became a lawyer. but then at the same time this decision that i've recently made was formulating, the decision to no longer be a citizen of a nation's state, and abide by any state's laws, and that instead i have to develop my own guidelines, not laws, that allow me to live in health and ahimsa with myself and the community around me. how am i supposed to be a lawyer and use laws if i dont abide by them? i'm not talking about the kind of civil disobedience that we did, deliberately breaking a law to make a point to a government, and thereby in a way validating both the legal system and the government. i'm talking about the henry thoreau kind of civil disobedience. i'm hereby signing off all those societies i never signed on to, henry, you got it. have you read it? if not, you should. if yes, you wont be as confused as you would be if you hadnt read it.
oh my gosh look what you did you went and typed open my stream of babble and now i'll have to build a big fat world bank sponsored dam to stop it.
another way youre a step ahead of me, i STILL havent heard arundhati roy speak even though i have such a big crush on the woman and i was in the same room as her TWICE at the world social forum and she waved at me (i think) and i went and talked to her, cuz i missed her talk on the opening day of the forum. blitzpoop.
yup. i'm still in singapore. i got back from india this week. i'm here till december at least. and then where, who knows not i, no sir, no maam. i dont know how to put this thing into practice, especially because i'm so desperately detached from anything remotely revolutionary and definltey have no peeps to discuss these things with in person and then act on the ideas, so i'm waiting in limbo for the Dissolve the State God to tell me what to do next.
thank you for lending me your eyes and your e-shoulder to babble on, off i go now, my love to you and yours and the rest of my beloved bay area.
re.paz.olucion siempre
mali mali mali

OED, Oct 5
Dear Lee Peng Chuan,
I am a resident at Kent Vale. I am glad that there are provisions for recycling of some of the waste materials we generate, and I went to the office to find out about development of further waste management systems and was given your name.
I would like to inquire about setting up a compost area in one of the corners of the estate where interested residents can bring their organic material. It will not require much work, and will allow the organic matter to turn to useful soil, instead of being stuck between plastic and metal waste. I will be happy to set this up, but I did not want to intrude on the gardeners who work the grounds every day, so I would be grateful for any advice you could give me on this matter.
Sincerely,
Malavika Mohanan
Blk A, #09-08

Miriam (WSF '04), Oct 5
tell me more about cambodia too! nope, i didnt see anything about it at
wsf. oooh, definitely tell me about burma too. a long time after i
realized i was politically aware, i'd taken the red pill and all that, i
thought back and remembered how in middle school i half-joked about going
off to be a freedom fighter in burma, but i was also half serious. funny
how things like that start in your mind before you really know yourself.

Pete, Anne-Lise, questionnaire thingy, Oct 5
39. FAVOURITE TIME OF DAY? any time where i remember to take a breath and then realize that i'd also been forgetting to remember that life is beautiful and it's all good cuz really i could be perfectly happy with oh so little and whats the use of all that tension about nothing at all and oh hell yeah zippedeedoo da.

Bhumika, Oct 5
singapore's really changing so fast, i love being on the MRT and people watching, whizz blur swish eye nose skirt moustache spiked hair newspaper baby plooey.

Becca, Oct 6
during one of my scouts i went to the hills of north kerala and fell in love. with the land that is. you would love it b-dawg. its trees and animals and birds and people and life at its richest. i saw a coffee tree for the first time, after all this while!! coffee is what first got me into activism you see, and it has a special place in my heart, even
though i barely ever drink it, because i know it where it comes from and who picked it and how the land is ruined by it the way its usually grown.

Adrian, Oct 6
i'm so very glad you wept and i know exactly how you feel about seeing all those people and being part of them. there was this time in DC at the IMF/World Bank thing, we started off in front of that big monument that i cant rememb er the name of, and there werent that many folks, but as we were marching up hill i looked back and saw a swell of humans rise out of the ground like in Lord of the Rings, and my heart popped out of my head and stayed there levitating for the rest of the day.

Pam, Oct 7
i got back last week to singapore from two and a half months in india and i'm here at least till deccember, planning and plotting and deliberating needlessly my next step. not having firm plans is liberating and all that jazz, but it would be a lot better if i could discipline my mind to give in to that liberation and not worry too much about it, or just go ahead and make a plan and stick with it, but unfortunately my baby mind tends to dwell on futures that might be and is trying to find out exactly the right future that should be, instead of just lettinng this baby future of mine just be whatever it would like to be. hmmmm. does any of that make sense?
i went to a meeting with my mom yesterday with this group called Food From the Heart. they started off getting bread from bakeries that was thrown away and collecting it for the poor and expanded from there. sound familiar? theyre hardly as revolutionary in their approach as Food Not Bombs, but theyre good people, and theyre doing a good thing. i'll see
where my non-organizational non-permission asking self can fit into their scheme. i'm craving what i call a "crew" of folks to activate with, but i'll do the best i can with what i got, and what i got is actually pretty amazing, cuz right now my crew is my parents, and they really get me. they not only put up with my little box of pre-compost waste next to the sink, and the pile of plastic food boxes that get washed and barely used, and my rants about the state of the labor conditions for (foreign) construction workers (i havent done a damn thing about it yet), and my deliberations over whether i really need to use the car to get to dance rehearsal or not, and my decision not to vote because dennis kucinich is out and i'm not going to take part in the acknowledgement and validation of anyone else as my "leader" or any administration as my government, and my decision not to go to law school or any other form of institutionalized higher education beccause of this that and the other reason, yeah, like i said, they not only put up with all this crap, they also support and love it along with all the rest of me that they love.
wow. that little recap of my life right now makes me sound anal retentive, i'm annoyed by myself even, but i promise i'm not really that bad, i'm actually using time to discover much abandoned delicious joy of being part of this big thing that some call gaia, and when i'm not sleep deprived and cranky and beating myself up about not having re-joined the
revolution yet i'm generally fun to be around.

Mike Kaufman, Oct 7
there's a few reasons why my Awake and Enough dont immediately translate into voting for Kerry to get bush out. to name a couple:
one. i am no longer america and america is no longer me, even if i say it politically correctly, united states. i have attachment to the bay area and a few other parts of that land known as U.S., singapore, and a few parts of india. this takes me all around the world for home. even with these places, i dont prize the lives of those in other countries any more than i do in these, so what form should my nationalism, my patriotism, my identity, take?
two. lets take the point above a little further. i was born in the US and i got a passport saying so, but if being a citizen means i abide by the laws of the state that has claimed this land as its own, and accept the president, any president, texan or otherwise, as my leader, then count me out. i am hereby doing a thoreau. (have you read civil disobedience?) i'm signing off all the societies i never signed on to inn the first place.
i'm not signing off your society though, so drop me a line kid and tell me whats the what jiggity bam.

Lauren Dietrich, Oct 8
dearie,
i'm performing this dance thing ont he 15th and 16th, so i'm not gonna start on the 15th when ramadan starts, but i was thinking of starting a ramadan style fast on the 17th, like last year, but this time with more maturity and discipline hopefully, and with each night break the fast with thought of two places of conflict, iraq and palestine, in mind. join me? or at least, wish me peace and health while i attempt it?
also, whats your address? and whats your mom's address in ashland? and how are they both, i never wrote to them cuz i lost their address.
love
me

Blair, Oct 8
i've been kind of vagrant and wandering for the last one and a half years, eventually thatll wind down and i'll settle for a spell and then be off in the winds again, i suspect.

Andy Simpson, Oct 12
the necessity of revolution is irrelevant. it will happen/is happening whether you believe it is necessary or not, and the only thing to do is jump in, find a seat that will cushion at least some of the bumps, lock yourself in and lift your arms in the air for the ride. try not to puke, kiddo, this one IS being televised, and aired shots of flying puke aint too good for getting dates.

Debbie, Oct 12
never been very patriotic, but there was definitely a time before now that i didnt realize that life could exist without governments/states. rules/laws and their consequences do apply when certain laws and actions by the states that make the laws break the rules of my own moral/ethical system, and my commitment to prevention of what i see as injust will result in the breaking of another of the state's laws, in a manner that will most certainly bring on arrest. think salt and gandhi. think thoreau and taxes. and even if youre not doing that, the state is very much present, though often invisibly so, in every single person's life. i'm not blaming all problems on the existence of governments, but i'm keen on freedom from the idea that the state is necessary for civilized life to go on, freedom into the notion of individual right and responsibility, and a re-evalutaion, a narrowing down, of the scale of community interaction and decision making process.
nah, i thought i wasnt going to vote, but then i looked at the ballot and saw leonard peltier still on there, and changed my mind.
ow. theres a crick in my back which i havent figured out how to uncrick. aaah, bliss will be found with the advent of uncrickability.

Amy Chen, OCt 14
i have a dance performance tomorrow and day after. my grandma is here, and her sister is coming day after tomorrow, so she'll get to see the performance too. i'm reading one straw revolution with my parents and thats very cool. eventually we're going to set up a home for ourselves that will be a home for kids who dont have a home, and old folks who live
alone or dont have a home, and we'll live on land that grows Fukoakan and wild. yum.

Amy Chen, Oct 19
more about the home, itll come, my dear, its still in the pipe dream pipe lines. for now we're pretty sure itll be somewhere in kerala, and i know its going to have grey water system and be naturally built, hopefully no concrete, and therell be a library and a wood stove and solar panels and wind turbines and biomass fuel and coconut trees and coffee trees and vanilla plants and the kids, human and otherwise, will grow up wild and free, and you will come and visit us and play and teach and learn.

Shashi, Oct 19 (resent?)
when you came to panamanna on a whim that day we were going to kottakal, the last two things i said to you while you were leaving were 1) when you said something about being my long lost uncle i said you can stay lost as long as you want, and 2) when you tried to start your bike i jokingly offered to start it for you. neither of these meant, or did (i think) any harm, but as you rode off i had a sudden and stupid flash of how i would feel if you crashed and died and these were the last things i said to you and i wished i had instead said that i really respected the way you cut short and wound up our coca cola argument with the spot-on insight that we both probably essentially agreed anyway, and that i was glad you made a surprise visit because it was nice to see you even briefly. and then you came riding back to get the thing you forgot and i was gladder than glad and i felt like i had been given a second chance. i think from now on when a parting is taking place i'll take more care to say things i really feel about the person (if i like em, if not, i'll just shut the hell up) instead of trying to be funny and quippy and sarcastic.

***Alpha fell in love during these days, and his life was wonderful***

Gillian, Nov 8
so i'm way late with wishes and whatnot. my reason, you will understand, I'm sure. I don't do the whole computer thing so much anymore. but i'm hoping you reached that great milestone, the equivalent of 453 Behogian years, without ever having to meet a Behogian, ensuring your utmost happiness. In other words, I hope youre utmostly happy.
as for me, i have not had the misfortune of meeting a behogian either, and so am bumbling along quite dandy. i'm in singapore, back after 2 and a half months in india, i'm dancing, i'm theatering, i'm sort of composting/mulching, i'm baking, i'm fasting for ramadan in solidarity with the occupied peoples of iraq and palestine, i'm helping my mom and
dad with their work and generally exchanging energy with them, i'm trying to remain as patient as i can with my grandmother and her sister who are staying at home with us right now.

T W Th F Sa Su M

2004-11-08T07:49:00.000+08:00

Tuesday we made granola and ate it. Sunset, I broke my muslim fast in a hindu temple. Rehearsal for some stupid deepavali parade. I turned into a pissy brat. No good.

Wednesday Amma, Acchan, and I broke fast in Ba'alwi mosque with Uncle Belal, Aunty Najma, Imam Hassan, his wife. Not with, really. The women and men were separate. Nuff said. Good to go though.

Thursday Bush will call himself President of USA for another four FUCKING years. I fasted from water. Was fine. Stomach still disastrous from the turned pumpkin soup a few days ago, though. Kris came over for dinner, we went for subText and ran into Lindley and Ian.

Friday another rehearsal for that stupid deepavali parade, so I had water. Broke fast in the car. Started with a bad attitude, pissy brat again, but this time the too-cool-for-y'all, wander-around-tree-gaze-mystically-at-sky kind of pissy brat. Warmed up a little, but still not entirely as positive as I could have been.

Saturday dance class, stayed there straight through getting ready for the stupid parade, but all went fine. Totally positive, was I. Almost only contributing good energy and whatnot. Sweet. Never again, for real, but just once, I could handle the stupid parade. Amma has joined me fasting, but we couldn't break together. Water again today.

Sunday I grabbed my wallet and Dhammapada to go to Elektra rehearsal. A pocket book version that actually fit in my pocket. Sweet. Fasted from water again. Broccoli soup but I ate too much as always. Stomach still churning pumpkin. Cinderella I ain't.

Today Iraq declares a state of emergency. What the fucking Fuck fuck. I laughed out loud a real laugh, not a dry ironic bittersweet snigger. If people weren't dying I wouldn't try to stop laughing, I said.

Day 18
Moon 11ish
Fast 23 (25)
Wine 21
Ambikaaliilaa, longer than i thought.
Getting ready for open house and poetry reading on sunday.

stay with that shakiness

2004-11-01T18:13:00.000+08:00

forwarded by christine hoffman.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul Bastian
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:39:21 -0700
Subject:
To: christine3@gmail.com

"Life is a good teacher and a good friend.
Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it.
Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about.
The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation,
a situation in which we don't get caught up
and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit.
It's a very tender, nonaggressive, open ended state of affairs.

To stay with that shakiness --
to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach,
with the feeling of hoplessness and wanting to get revenge --
that is the path of true awakening.
Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the
midst of chaos,
learning not to panic -- this is the spiritual path.
Getting the knack of catching ourselves,
of gently and compassionately catching ourselves
is the path of the warrior.
We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again,
whether we like it or not, we harden
into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation --
harden in any way,
even into a sense of relief,
a sense of inspiration."

- from some book

Day 11
Moon 4ish
Fast 16 (18)
Wine 14
Ambikaaliilaa, getting there.

My primary reason is to be in solidarity with the occupied peoples of Iraq and Palestine.

2004-10-25T05:14:00.000+08:00

Monday and Tuesday I didn't nap in the afternoon. Wednesday afternoon I crashed, Amma's office makeshift bed. I didn't go to Grant's talk. That evening didn't go to the supposed-to-be-really-good NUS band playing (for free) at UCC. Thursday I napped, but didn't go to the nature poetry night at Little Bali, whatever that is. Friday I performed (publically) Sri Ramacandra for the first time at the Ceylon Rd temple. Broke fast during the day because I was bleeding and going to be dancing. Danced the absolute best I've ever done. Broke my Muslic non-fast-day fast in a Hindu temple with Abu Dhabian dates, Iranian pistachios, and almonds and grapes from I don't know where.

Saturday was Vidyarambham Day. Maami's house all morning. For the next year, till next Vidyarambham, I'm dedicating myself to dainika nrita. Apparently. I say. Haven't the faintest what the shit that means.

Saturday night we saw a phenomenally badly done but well written play, the NUS theater graduation. Sunday morning Amma and I went shopping, veggies, fruits, grains, plants, tools. It was kind of stressful, not as fun as it could have been, but there were good times to be had even so. We got a parking ticket. Dammit.
Viv's mom took a turn for the worse. Amma went to visit her while Acchan and I went to see The story of the Weeping Camel in Mongolian with Shekhar, Vikram, Manjiri. Sunday night I didn't go to the PA performance after all. 60 buckaroos a down the drain, I have to be ok with that. Viv's mom still not better.

Today. Maami's rehearsal. Maybe Viv's mom. Jaikina and Omanatingal. Acchan's curriculum manifesto.

Day 4.
Moon goodness knows.
Fast 9 (11)
Wine 7
Ambikaaliilaa: Written, needs to be distributed. It's deliciously satisfying.

Nothing

2004-10-20T07:38:00.000+08:00

Fukuoka says No, there is nothing special about me, but what I have glimpsed is vastly important.

Reality is Nothing. What I say here is neither futile nor useful because to be either, there must be a goal, and Nothing cannot have a goal. But out of Nothing came something, and somebody, and I am somebody, and you are somebody too, though Dickinson may say a greater truth.

A perfect world may or may not exist in Time, but it can exist across another dimension. Our imagination. If it does not exist there, it will never exist anywhere else.

I woke up at 4:59. The alarm was set for 5. It was set that late because I realized I wasn't actually late the last few days, the sunrise is actually at 6:45 not 5:45. This is what comes of living in a highrise airconditioned curtained apartment. Instead of in the woods in a tent.

I had breakfast with Amma. I made spaghetti with Amma (and Mutashi) yesterday. We ate it and it was stupendously satisfying.

I did not nap yesterday, I really should today.

My left eye is fuzzy. I need new contacts. I wish I had better eyes, but I think, I hope, that I wish more that the people of Iraq and Palestine would peacefully oust their invaders and occupiers and renew their lives and their land.

Day 42ish
Moon 20ish
Ambikaaliilaa, crossing fingers for report to be distributable today.

Freecycle

2004-10-19T10:14:00.000+08:00

Got up at 4:30 but I was still late with breakfast. Its cuz after yoga I did pranayama breathing stuff with Acchan.

So we were talking about what police had a right to arrest you for, like being naked in public, of course i'm like, no, he's like, its complicated, and we ended up making a pact for him to stop drinking tea and me to write a description of what i think the world should be. or something. i should check what exactly he wants. gah. maybe itll be a really good thing, especially if i can work the now-stewing play around it. acchan and i have been having a lot of arguments lately, mostly around power, and centers of power, and how to react to them, and the like.

amma forwarded me a message about the NUS group SAVE doing freecycling, which is the same idea as freestore. they were going off the idea on the website freecycle.com (or org. whatever). awesome. i want a group like that to do things with. maybe not exactly like that, but its a start. group group group alone alone alone, complain complain complain.

i'm looking forward to spaghetti today.

i'm looking forward to some of the emails i'm going to, not have to, write.

i'm looking forward to eating chocolate again.

i'm looking forward to eternal bliss, except when i get there i wont know it because there wont be anything to know.

shweeeeeeeeet. i'm not looking forward to typing more. i think i should find another way to let out and record my ideas, and communication.

bigideedoodah deal, talk talk talk, sit on ass ass ass.

Fuzzy words that thrust their chin forward

2004-10-18T06:12:00.000+08:00

Yesterday I sat with Amma Acchan Acchamma Mutashi as they ate breakfast and lunch, and with Amma Acchan Uncle Balal Aunty Nagma as they had tea and snacks (a gorgeous tempting spread. Amma says the cutlets were excellent, she has to get the recipe.) 2 Delicious Hots with the first two meals, just conversation with the third. When we came back Mutashi made chapatis, dinner was late but great.

Breakfast was even better. Most excellent in fact. Yoghurt with honey, papaya, orange, banana, crackers with pesto dip and mint sauce. Deee-lish.

Rewind. I woke up this morning at 4:41. The alarm was set to ring in 4 minutes. About the same time as yesterday morning, but I slept like a baby the whole night, unlike night before.

Acchan is sick. Kidneys or something. Amma and Acchan are both pretty bad. Food awareness sounds good for all of us. Hopefully Mutashi being here will help us keep Acchamma happy without destroying our own stomachs. Not my own, actually, I've been pretty good even before the fast, except for a few binges, which if I learn to be not guilty about, and also not to extend past that day, shouldnt wreak too much havoc on my body.

So, food awareness. Yeah. But let's talk about Iraq and Palestine. That's my primary attention right? What do I do with this attention? Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I feel like yesterday's conversation with the Balal's and the upcoming possibility of attending mosque with him is a good start.

But that's a social change, and right now on a very individual level. Me understanding and supporting Islam and those under its umbrella doesn't change the very real political force and violence that is ravaging these two areas right now. Of course, as I go, I'm trying to let go of the desire to change things. Or maybe I should say, change things that are not in my control. And not try to gain control in order to change things.

Israel and the United States. If I weren't so anti-hatred I'd have a lot of hatred against them right now, which might even transfer to the people of the country rather than just the states which control them, (although, seriously the people are not often that separate from the State, it's not like they/we are blameless). It would be worse if I'd been affected more concretely, family or friend dying or something. Let's hope I'd still be anti-hatred.

There's a lot of hatred on the ground at these warzones. There's a lot of peaceful intention too, and perhaps I should be there, using myself to counter the hatred, support the peaceful. But I'm here not there and I'm sick of beating myself up about it. Seriously, shut up already. My time will come for the frontlines, the glory, the martyrdom, and hopefully, by that time I will not be doing it for those things, but simply because it is what I must do. For now I am here, I must be and help those around me be food aware and healthy, I must dance, I must read, I must MUST MUST write, I must still my mind, I must breathe full.

'Must' is starting to look funny now, I've written it so many times it's warping into a strange fuzzy chin-thrusting caterpillar thing.

Caterpillars are razing olive farms.
I make salad with extra virgin olive oil.
Some day I will raise an olive farm and
branches of peace will be born from the soil.

Day 40ish
Moon 20ish
Ambikaaliilaa, yeah yeah, this week, I promise.

Ramadan 2004

2004-10-17T07:06:00.000+08:00

Friday was the start of Ramadan. I think it was also World Food Day, or maybe it was yesterday (Saturday). I was performing a couple items for Maami's Navaratri show Friday and Saturday so I put off starting the fast till today. Mutashi flew in yesterday, she and Acchamma saw the show. I went to Serene's friend's May's My-brother-left-for-Nepal dyke party for a tiny tiny spell. slept at 1 something.

I woke up this morning at 4:51. I wasn't sure whether to get up or not, my brain wasn't working, and i wanted more sleep, but i couldnt get real sleep with my mind on getting up to eat before sunrise, and i kept trying to work out a schedule for the morning based on yesterday's newspaper's report of 6:45 sunrise, so that I could know exactly when to get up. Gah. Schedules. Part of me shuns them, and would function just fine without them, if it could get rid of the other part of me that was so conditioned to use them to organize myself and feel more in control.

I did my bathroom stuff and made my bed without the light. it was nice. Went out to the den (we have a living room and what used to be the dining room which i'm now calling the den because i love the sound of a den) to do yoga. Ech. That phrase has such yuppie consumer connotations to it.
"Yes, I do yoga. It's just done wonders for my skin tone."
"Oh, I know, those things are supposed to be just wonderful, I'm thinking of taking up pilates. Or maybe kick-boxing, I can get great deals on both."
Ech.

So, yeah, I did my yoga. Drank two Delicious Hots. Turned on Subhalakshmi Suprabathams. Acchan cut open the coconut from Durga's mom yesterday. I made honey raisin oatmeal, Acchan sat with me and talked about the exercises he was setting while I ate the oatmeal and drank the coconut water. I followed up with cucumber and feta cheese and finished up with chyavanaprasham and milk. It was starting to get light out. I think I may have ended too late. And I shouldn't have asked Acchan to sit with me, I should have continued in the mood I had built up.

The last few days haven't been so hot. I have a feeling I'm being hard on myself about everything. I need to let up. But this stage I'm in is pretty great, in general. Discipline is coming back to me. Knowing my flow is coming back to me. When knowing my flow really comes I won't even need discipline, I think.

And then when I sat down to write this I skimmed through some of my old entries. I dig em. And I don't care if noone else reads them, or theres something private in them and someone else reads them, I'm writing for me, I like writing and I like reading what I write, so tiddly pom pom.

This week I hope to finish and distribute BOSCO report, read Acchan's manifesto, and go through at least two old dances so I know them again. Check it. I'm out. Wash. Myself and clothes.

Day 39ish
Moon 19ish????
Ambikaaliilaa wrap-up, working on BOSCO report, finish line in sight

the sent mail excerpts from 10/03 i thought i shmeleted or shlost.

2004-10-09T01:52:00.000+08:00

Amma, Acchan, titled Bloop
is what maya writes things like in the middle of her mails.
let me turn that sentence right way up.
maya writes things like bloop in the middle of her mails.
verbal inversion. mental invasion.
the home. how about a real home? not an NGO type thing. lets start with where YOU both want to have a home (a home which i will also call home, regardless of where i happen to jet off to from there). so lets figure that out first. where do want to live the rest of your lives? and then we'll build it, and there will be children and other sorts of animals that will need a home and we will give it to them and build more if we need to, funds will come and go, home will always be. so where and how do you want to live?

To Malika Virdiz, first email, titled apprenticeship
To give you an idea of where I'm coming from (thought/belief/action-wise, especially), I went to college in California, and for the last couple years of school I lived in a cooperative house on campus that had a small garden, compost, tried to go organic, alternative living, blah blah, modern day hippie stuff, some call it. Since then I've been continuing my search for alternative living practices, whatever that might mean at the time. I'm prone to supporting organic food and products, but as part of a larger picture of sustainable and balanced living, not the yuppy niche market that the organic label has turned into so often. I like to know where my food comes from, who
gathered it, and I especially like that Who, the Who that gathers my food, to include me. Along the sustainability and balance lines, I'm currently in the process of seeking apprenticeships with various good souls in order to gather lifeskills to help my parents set up a home eventually, in which they will hold open the door, hold up the roof, and hold out a full plate, to whoever might want such things (especially to kids).
I'm also prone to supporting reasoned and cooperative freedom and sovereignty and autonomy. nilanjana mentioned you were involved in such a struggle. i'm not so sure of where you are geographically, but autonomy is autonomy, and the north of india is not neccessarily india, and nation states are arbitrarily defined by the rule of (a military) state and another world is possible.

Alpha, Acchan, Amma, August 14, 2004
illustrating the exploitation of entirely hypernumerated lexicalization

Molly Aeck, Zoe FC
dearest moldawg (and zoybean)
sometimes am so ever frustrated with myself for not being in NYC these past few days (and boston last month). that was so my plan was it not? what happened? how did i end up typing this to you from an internet cafe in trissur (india) listening to a cheezy early 90s song (i'll be two steps behind you, yeah-ee-eah, two steps) instead on the streets with la poder de la gente?
how long are you both there? whats happening? where next? shit dawgs, i hope youre peaceful and rowdy and healthy and happy. tear it up a little extra for me will you?
lovaliciousness
m

David Solnit, Sept 1
d-dawg,
saw the book on akpress site just the day before i got this email, didnt have time to write and felicitate because computers keep blowing up or freezing on me.
i'm in india visiting family and experiencing strange concoctions of belonging and alienation at the same time. i thought i was supposed to be at RNC in NYC right now, but apparently i wasnt supposed to be, after all.
manipur, a state in north east india is on fire. the people want the state to remove the armed forces special powers act, at the very least. at the most extreme they want autonomy, independence, like many of the northern areas of this increasingly powerful country. while the cops beat down on them last week, india's politicians commemorated india's independence day and india's freedom fighters like gandhi etc. i wasnt sure whether to laugh or cry or puke. manipur features nowhere in the world news i think, no?
still, i read about gaiia and am happy that she will survive whether or not we do.
hoping youre healthy and happy and tearing it up. paz.
mali

Adrian Guzman, Sept 5
the day has come, the day is here, happy birthday!!!
what with computers blowing up on me or at the very least, freezing EVERY single TIME i try and use it, and me being sort of travellish on the go right now, i didnt know if i'd get to email in time, and now its not actually your birthday here anymore but if my calculations serve me correctly, which they never do of course, it should be only 4:30 (3:30?) in the afternoon and you should be gearing up to have the wildest party ever with your family, going all out with the ambrosia you've never tasted that we sophistes call "le buuz".
how was RNC?!!!! please be my eyes ears and heart and tell all thank you yes.
spiderman 2 is the only one on your list i've seen, it sucks the biggest fattest mama monkey kaka ever. i went to an int'l film fest in trissur, saw some really good stuff there.
outtie. back in singapore on sept 27, probably talk to you only after that. once again, hoping youre having a good one, mr.
love
mali

Lakshmi Gopal, Sept 5
gaaaar! last time i tried to reply to your message the computer froze. it was very long. now its all gone. such is life. easy come easy go. nothing is forever, infinity is forever, infinity is nothing. see, the thing about table yoga is that there wouldnt even be table yoga. i think i let you run away with that idea too fast and far. its not the table thats important. the concept behind the yoga that involves the table, if it is even a yoga, (what exactly is a yoga?) is realizing that everything, including the table or the coasters, or the cockroach or the...is a) all made of the same essential stuff, energy, ki, chi, whatever (heard of string theory? exciting stuff. the physicists in this area talk ever so metaphysically its wonderful. whether theyre right about strings or not, the concept is much usable), and b)that all of these things, Me, the table the coasters cockroach and... are all part of a larger whole, shall we say, the room, which is part of a larger whole, perhaps the apartment, and so on and so on, until the larger whole is everything, One. when someone takes us away from that table and room and apartment, we are perfectly at peace because we know that being away is in a way an illusion, because we are always present with everything since we are part of that One that is everything. using the table as a starting point becuase it happens to be in front of us, these two ideas are what we devote ourselves to in this unnamed yoga, not the table itself. in the step with the table, we might consider the wood that table is made from, the tree that it used to be, the person who cut it and nailed it, now this is definitely no longer a yoga, its gone too wide. i dont know. but have i remoevd the idea from your head that i'm worshipping a table, or a table god? are you back in india? what are you up to? i'm in panamanna(near ottapalam) leaving back for singapore from madras ont he 26th. see you soon fellow world wanderer. ammu malavika

Shashi, Oct 1, titled Andaz
.is the word i was looking for, that d-word that meant cooking without
a recipe and just putting things together by intuition or whatever, and you and prita were helping/confusing me by throwing out all these d-words, yeah well apparently its not a d-word, although it does have a d in it.
when you came to panamanna on a whim that day we were going to kottakal, the last two things i said to you while you were leaving were 1) when you said something about being my long lost uncle i said you can stay lost as long as you want, and 2) when you tried to start your bike i jokingly offered to start it for you. neither of these meant, or did (i think) any harm, but as you rode off i had a sudden and stupid flash of how i would feel if you crashed and died and these were the last things i said to you and i wished i had instead said that i really respected the way you cut short and wound up our coca cola argument with the spot-on insight that we both probably essentially agreed anyway, and that i was glad you made
a surprise visit because it was nice to see you even briefly. and then
you came riding back to get the thing you forgot and i was gladder than glad and i felt like i had been given a second chance. i think from now on when a parting is taking place i'll take more care to say things i really feel about the person (if i like em, if not, i'll just shut the hell up) instead of trying to be funny and quippy and sarcastic.
i forgot to warn you that a package might be coming from sasi in
bangalore, if it comes/has come, can you tell me what it is, and then
just keep it there, i'll pick it up next time?
hi and love to p-dawg and ben-dawg
love
ammu

Denali, Ank, Oct 2
deenyloonybali (and ank, i'm cc'ing you on this because after i started writing it i realized i would eventually be saying many of the same things to you too)
bah humbug, you took 5 weeks to reply, i took two months. 5 weeks or two months is one molecule on the southern tip of a speck of dust on the horizon of existence.
i'm back in singapore, back from india where i was roasting eggplants and having sex with other (?) americans, the question mark is because i'm no longer "american", but in fact i dont really need a question mark because the sex didnt really happen and the eggplants were usually fried not roasted. truth is, i spent a lot of time with different parts of family. i saw parts of india i havent seen but i didnt do anything revolutionary. thats ok. i'm ok with that. now what next?
when am i coming. to brazil. yes see you know how the plan i tell you one month is likely to be the very opposite of what i'll tell you the next? DNC RNC new york brazil now i just dont know. bangalore is figuring on the horizons. it calls. from there, i might just be called to a farm in the northern rural regions of india, where there are autonomy struggles and organic strawberries. apparently i'm focusing in on india. part of that is to be able to fly to my parents without a humungabungabus cost, both in terms of money and in terms of fuel. i think i've used up more than my fair share of jet fuel for the rest of my lifetime. also, if i get arrested for, say, standing in front of the construction of a highway or a dam, i will not be using the normal recourses of the law, because i no longer abide by the US nor any other state's legal obligations, and there is a chance i'll have my passport taken away, or something like that, (because passports, i think, are the closest thing to an implicit acknowledgement and validation of a state's control over us) and if i get stuck anywhere i want it to be in india so, again, i can get to my parents or i can get to them.
theyre almost definitely settling in india to build this home of ours that i'm in the process of gathering lifeskills and knowledge for (even if i do get around to taking natural building lessons, i'll still be needing folks to come and help and advise, so keep that plan in mind denali. ankh, denali has promised to come help build our home, you in?). i went to a region in the hills of northern kerala to scope it out. its bliss. nirvana. paradise. gods own country, as kerala is advertised in all tourism promotions. blech. anyway, it might not be there, it might be somewhere else, so if i go to bangalore i can explore more options, while at the same time getting the opportunity to expand on the dance work i'm doing now, and do the theatre work i'm so craving.
i havent mentioned all this to my parents yet, i think because i'm now so traumatized by my own electron-like planning skills. (like an electron jumping invisibly from one orbit to another, here one minute, there the next, ah yes you see?) i'm now hesitant to tell them something because itll start getting firmer in my mind and then when, not if, i change my mind i'll feel yet more impossibly foolish. i mean. what if i crumble under my guilt and fury and go to iraq because i have this vague notion i should be raging against the machine there, instead of sitting here and finding peace and bliss and enlightenment?
anyhoo. december comes round soon enough, regardless of whether i'm ready for it or not, and the next leg of my life will begin.
so, hermosos, no se cuando nos recontraramos. is that right? i've lsot my little spanish. i'm hoping to get around to taking that dictionary in one hand, my cien anos de soledad in the other to mash my eyes over both.
out i am, kiddos. the TV is distracting me, i cannot see your faces anymore to be able to converse.
love
mali

Gaaaaaaaahhhhh.

2004-10-04T17:09:00.000+08:00

Yesterday's excerpts page didn't make it. I think I left the page without publishing. Words. All words. I'm needing unshackling from words anyway right?

This blog is jinxed. Every time I open it up my mind goes blank. All those words, those words, words, go flitshit out of my head. Which is why I was storing my sent mail excerpts here. That's not gonna work. There's a privacy issue that's getting conflicted with, both mine and my receivers privacy, and I'm all about resolving conflict. So I'm resolving the sent mail out of this blog. And I'm unjinxing the jinx.

Unjh, mophala obata rr.eun foshnit
Unjh, ka.eumpeuu ta bi-dan-folkae

I think i know i type.

I'm sleepy. That's why I'm grumpy today. And I keep remembering that for a split minute and then it's gone forgotten, and I'm irritated at the world and irritated at myself for being irritated at the world. Hehe. That's kind of funny.

I'm less irritated now. I think I can go and write to real people now.

feliz cumpleanos, ammumalavikamaliemuetcetc

2004-07-26T11:14:00.000+08:00

Liam Helmer, June 21, 2004
...bdays arent a big deal by themselves for me either any more, but i'm trying to use them as a way to keep in touch with people, so at least once a year, i have an excuse to have to check in with all the good folks for whom i have marked a day in my yahoo calendar to celebrate their existence...singapore, is um. good. quite excellent in fact. its a place that kind of epitomizes a lot of the accelerations that are happening globally, for better or worse. ...may chuckles ache your belly

Ank, June 21
ankle toby, i'm watching the third cd of Brain Story. one man can see apples but not faces, another can see faces of the queen of hearts but not the hearts, a woman who cannot see things move, and suddenly i've taken a drug that has no name and whose trip is a singularity of the impossible.
holograms of the dance performance are moving, and since both silicon and carbon based brains find it difficult to process such motion, i will wait till i have a more still representation. except, did you know, still life painting cannot be, for, what is still is not life.
i drank your email. i will respond to whatever i burp up. perhaps i should have sipped and wrote and sipped and wrote but thats no fun. so forgive me if not all your questions are answered yes? i think i will ask no questions but the ones implicit in my answers.
p.s. of course i love dolphins, but when i ask myself why i don't know. i don't love k+d yet but maybe i will when i know them. i graduated! sunday. i got an email that says so, and email is the true purveyor of all Knowledge, so it must be so. yeah, see, i took Spring quarter off to get arrested and dance in the streets, even though i just had 2 classes left. took one of two in the fall at Foothills, most excellently enjoying being a non-stanford student, and for the other class, thought i could just pass the test into spanish 3 but it turns out that after a year of not speaking the tongue my tongue twisted and broke and since i refused to change my plans to come to singapore in december to be with my parents i just decided i could take french because they dont take spanish here at the university which i always declared i would never attend, in a country i always declared i would never live in for a long period of time after i left for college. and here i am. oh, and i'm graduated. after 5 months of fucked up paperwork and chasing after people who have no business holding the power to declare me educated. when i'm empress there will be no such schools and no such administrators, they will all be lined up and fed pizza till they fold over and turn into human calzones. and when i'm empress yoda will be slightlier fuzzier. and when i'm empress i'll dissolve the empire we call the state and my post will be redundant and freedom will reign and freedom will rain. sovereignty, not freedom, i like that word better, or i would if i could spell the damn thing.
dennish bernstein is a reporter inn the bay area, most well known as part of KPFA.
dennis kucinich i? think? is? still? running? for president? i dont know anything anymore, i havent read a newspaper for 3 weeks. the united states is another world, i think in part to protect me from the extreme frustration at my decision to get to the RNC and not knowing why the hell i decided it and what the hell i'm going to do instead.
i can roll joints. just barely. you teach me rotis, i'll practice on the joints and teach you in exchange.
aurobindo was a spirituality a politicality a growth in india around the time of the call for swaraj, and after too. he was more militant and a little less tolerant of utter non-violence than gandhi, at first, but the society he and Mother (his Other) created in Pondicherry, Auroville and the Ashram, non-violence is a guiding principle of evolution of the human. He was one of the first, if not the first, i think, to speak of the Superhuman, recently more technologically oriented manifestation being Neo, the transhumanist ideal, which was brought alive in the movie Trilogy of One, namely, named, The Matrix (1, 2, 3).
my wrists are heating up. so are my thighs, i'm resting Mickey the laptop on my lap. Atop my lap. my shoulders are tightening i retreat now. soon my friend we will build tables out of landfills and dance the cancansamba on them after we've eaten mangoes floating in pineapple liquor on them.
dissolved,malavikawhich means nothing literally but is the name of an ancient princess, an herb, and one of the best bharatanatyam dancers in india today (Malavika Sarukai)

Caroline Picker, June 22
"drink deep so you have what you need to dazzle."thank you. you have no idea what a much needed truth you hit on at exactly the moment i needed to know that truth. or perhaps you do know and that's why you wrote it.

christine hoffmans's Questionaire, June 22
73. Favorite smells? mud. me. chocolate. ground coffee, then brewed. chocolate. justice. peace. peace and cream. peaches and cream. beaches and streams. bitches can scream. chocolate. me.

Becca Hall, June 22
and i have shhort tolerance for emailage these days, so i wont say much this time, but i did want to say a hello and how are you and does the wind strum ballads through your hair?

Pete, June 22
shit. i'm scared for alb now. coming off prozac cold turkey isnt easy and going back to drinking is also not so easy to be in balance with. i know. i faked mmyself that i was in balance, and i'm only now learning that i still wasnt, and mighht never be.
anyway. i'm glad jo's gone. i'm glad she has your support.
glasgow. i had deccided against it cuz i realized i was doinng it foor the wrong reasons, which were 1) thinking that i would come with the magic solution for ALB and she would get all cured how wonderful and 2) to get the fuck away from singapore and my parents cuz theyre driving me crazy even though theyre actually quite good for me and anywhere will eventually drive me crazy and make me want to run away because i'm born crazy. and i didnt have a plan for glasgow, i mean i didnt have a job or nothing. i dont mind not having a job living with my parnets because that IS kind of my job, i get to have the freedom to be withh them and make them happy any way i can, and that is worth it. but if i move away i have to be independent, which means i need a way of providing my food, housing, and a bit of dough to have a pint or a puff every now and then. and all the whhile still being part of the revolution. and perhaps saving up at the same time. and that didnt look too easy to find without even knowing glasgow at all. SO. i've already told ALB i'm not coming. but then when i read your email i was thinking, i want to sing in a band (and have a band sing the songs i've written, because the more songs i write the more heavy a sound they need, i can just hear them being roared out and the guitars and drums going insane), and do you need a singer, and do you have any ideas how i can still come over to glasgow for a few months and make a little dosh and Damn a little Man?

Luna Federici, June 22
yup. i can see you resonating to indonesia.too bad about joanna. i was hoping she was still going to be there. my uncle, aunt, cousin, are moving to KL later this year, and i was like sweet, i'll head up there and see them all (includinng joanna i mean). forgot about hte gardner fellowship, tess had told me about that. you know tess right? we ran into each other in bombay at the world social forum. frickin insane fortuitousness that was. i love our global community, the wanderers of the world. yeah. exactly. there is SO MUCH possiblity so how on earth do we choose? i just got an email saying i'm graduated. i no longer have any official reason to say i'm a student, which i had been saying, even though in my mind i graduated a long time ago. so now i have to find a new label. or not. whatever. ebb flow come go jolly good show we've all put on, ho. i'm feeling oddly british today. perhaps i shall move to london and have tea and crumpets. or a decree of trumpets.sorry. you caught me in crackbaby mode. i should go check on the bread, i smell its wafts.
love mali

Thea, June 22
i'm doing my best to stop trying to look beautiful, its so very hard. being an ugly duckling i was so used to putting on a flashy tacky swan suit that would distract and dazzle at least momentarily. now i must learn to be me just me, me free, see me free, set me free.

Babaloush, June 22
amar asked if i was good. fuzzy. yes, i said, fuzzy, sometimes, sharp others. in general good. it wasnt a lie, not wholly, but i guess i'm not entirely ship shape and shweet. i have a feeling this particular series of days of feeling out of sorts and a little weepy for no real reason is because my period is about to start, but its still a real part of me, a real thing i'm feeling, no matter how irrational, and i dont know who to talk to so i was trying to call you this weekend, well to ask about the exam, but mostly to talk and cry a little bit. i've been fine, gotten over my little bout of down each time, but i found myself in that state again just now so i thought i'd let it out to you on email at least, and also i figured i would tell you anyway that i called to cry to you so that next time you will do the same without feeling bad about it. i deleted the stuff i had written here about my bout of down. i dont need to go through it and you dont need to read it. i'm done. my period will come and go and i'll stop crying and start laughing again and all will seem rosy again.

David Gasca, June 22
i'm dancing. everyday. theres a sanskrit phrase in the natya shastra (the text from which most classical indian dance originates), dainika nritta, which means daily dance. it means that everything, ALL, life, existence, can be seen to move in a dance. i love that. i'm trying to know that and be that.
heard of Gurtu, a musician? listened to a CD called Miles_Gurtu this morning and dance/acted to it. you would love it, the CD i mean. collaboration between miles davis and gurtu dude.

Paul, June 22
cool. i definitely wasnt opposed to the PGP thing, but i was looking at it more like a fun game to figure out. security is no longer an issue, i'm naively believing. its all so fucked up that worrying about shit like that just becomes paranoia for me, and i cant live like that. go ahead motherfuckers put me in jail, make me a martyr, how many Mumias can you handle?
so here's the thing, i was confused when you said violence is the only form of political expression. you very purposefully ended the email withh PEACE, which you seem to believe in. you laid out in the streets, peacefully (some would say that itself was a form of violence, shall we complicate and complexify or let it be?). so i was confused. then i resolved it by thinking maybe you meant it as follows, which i can also resonate to:
the use of power/force is inherently a form of violence.
political involvement (expression) is the use of power/force.
thusly, good friends and countrymen, political involvement/expression is a form of violence.
but methinks that is not what you meant. you say our capacityy for violence has given us everything. as in, violence is necessary and good. what parts of the above did you mean, and what parts of the above are bollocks?here's where i stand. i am doing my utter best to not cause suffering (and because death causes suffering, death also) in every action of my life. violence causes suffering regardless of cause. so. i will do my best to avoid violence. however. i do not rule out the possibility of certain situations requiring a certain amount of force. i'm down with the zapatistas even though they swing their rifles. they've proved that they tread with caution, and who am i to say that they have not tried every other avenue and that a form of violence is not necessary in their struggle. that said, if i were to jet over and join their struggle, i would refuse to pick up a gun.
chewed. responded. sleepy. why did you quit your job? itchy eyes. ya basta. good night.

Christine Hoffman, June 24
apple pie sugar plum there's bread in the bread machine again. methinks i was machining bread the last time i wrote to you too? its nice, the smell, even though i still cant really say i'm BAKING bread, cuz i'm really MACHINING bread. should machining have an e after the n? who the fuck cares. not i, sir, not i. i had missed you, thought about and wondered what you were doing, now no longer, yessirree cuz you will tell me about your burned apartments and your morning thoughts and the very best of meaning of life that you seem to have found in your love for one person who loves you back, the existence of which, along with the existence of the Kyle and Rachel who were here last week for the performance studies conference and i got to hang out with them more gooder than i had when we were together at stanford, yes all the existence of that makes me not so lonely and not so alone. whats billboard liberation front? it sounds familiar, and i could guess what it means, and i could even look it up in my Holy Book aka the internet, but i'd rather wait for your reply and read your description, even though i'm kind of in a hurry, i mean i only have until the end of existence to do all this shit so i better start typing faster and fatser ssnassdjflksjl ,xvolskdjf . i was born in boston to my daddy who was doing his PhD at MIT and my mommy who had joined him from India when they realized he would be there longer than they thought so they saved up to buy her a plane ticket. they sometimes didn't know where the money for my food for the next week would come from. my dad was walking on the ice once and he slipped and i flew out of his hands and landed on my head so i tell everyone i was dropped as a baby like a big joke but its not really that funny cuz my epilepsy (which has never been fully figured out, just like my depression, cuz its not actually depression its bi-polar disorder you fools, and i can tell you more about my brain than you can so get your medical degrees and MRIs and counselling therapy out of my face assholes) could have been a result of that fall, and i often wonder if they feel bad about that, they shouldnt, i hope they dont. theyre the bestest parents i could have asked for even though they drive me crazy, especially my mom. shit. you gave me your life story. you asked for it baby. during the time we were in boston we also sort of lived in austin texas for a little while. we flew over to singapore when i was 3 lived here for 3 years i hated my school bus and i stopped growing as tall cuz the milk is different here and my dad hated the department he was teaching in but we lived here for 3 years becausee it was close to family in india and plus the pay wasnt bad connsidering they were saving up for my college. then my mom went to do a linguistics PhD at stanford while my dad taught in the same department and gave her harsh grades because our culture does that, we're less nice to the ones closest to us, and i played in the quad and made very few friends because i was starting to become a quiet well-behaved child. fucking pansy. i was brown and not very cool but i only had a small inkling that i wasnt that cool. and THEN we moved back to singapore because my parents both got a job in the same department and thats so rare and it was gonna be much easier for us to see our family in india again and i went to an international school and we didnt change countries (still havent) but we moved house a lot because in our last last last life we were a nomadic desert tribe and i dont like to stay in the same place for more than 4 years, i think its a form of running away, i had a lot to run away from by the time i got to high school because there were cool kids and i wasnt but more importantly, EVERYONE, cool or not, was starting to get into relationships with that group that used to have cooties and i wasnt and in order to make myself feel like i was just a little cool and sexy i started getting drunk and partying and hooking up with people and puking every weekend because all my friends were british and they all did that and i took that habit to college along with my by-then-very-severe depressinon that was in fact suicidal because even though i loved life i didnt want to live without life and the way my life was going i thought i would end up alone forever and most of the time i still think that even though i'm ok with that, and i lived a terrible life my freshman year even though i had lots of friends and was often very happy and actually had a lot of guys thinking i was hot even though i didnt always know it and never knew how to handle it and then in the spring i tried to kill myself because i just couldnt make myself think of more things to stop myself from doing what i thought about doing for every day of the last one and a half years and then my parents flew over freaked out flipped out and i was in a psycho ward and they gave me stupid meds and no-one could figure me out and i had a glimpse of what happiness should really be and i came home with them and when i went back to school in the fall i quickly turned into a radical politicized hippy-wanna-be who everybody saw as a burning flame of energy tasting life to its fullest and strong and independent from everyone so noone felt needed even though inside i was a lonely curled up little ball of need. most of the rest of my life you kinda know the general gist, like where i lived and shit, and really thats the important part of this story so i'll stop now because maybe by now your brain is hurting from all the insanity i've revealed or maybe not because maybe youre familiar with insanity, at least if not in yourself, in others you care so deeply about. i've heard more about your mom than your dad. it was nice to read about him and his gardening tree loving computer science rejecting shelf building ways.
my address for now, at least till september-ish and possibly more is 1
03 Clementi Rd, Blk A, #09-08
Singapore 129788
whats yours? i like writing letters, especially from india where i wont feel like goinng to an internet cafe, i'd much rather sit on the mountain in front of my grandparents house and scribble to my world and my peeps.
uf t w
mali

Denali, June 30
you know how i said i cant commit to a plan for myself? its not like the usual oh i dont know what career i'll have and i need a career now, cuz we both know neither of us subscribe to that BS. but its like the problem i always had at stanford, or wherever, wanting to do too many things, because the things i was doing were never enough, and i'm training myself out of that, but even now no matter what project i choose, i feel stifled by it after the glow wears off, and i dont commit to it and do it the best i can. problem committing. the real problem is, i think, i know, that applies to people too. mmm. i wrote more to try and explain but its not coming out right. anyway, my point is, in some ways, be glad for you
desire (i dont mean desire in the sexual fantasy way, but in the walk in the woods way you wrote about), i envy you that because i fear i will never have it, and without loving i cannot be loved truly, or at least i cannot feel that love, and thats a scary thought, and all the more frustrating because its seemingly in my control, but not really.

Pam Olson, July 1
funny (in a not that funny way) that one of the experiences that shook Yeshuda Shaul was the kids eating his trash. i always felt that oddness when we dumpstered in good ole luxurious PA.
how did the PNI interview go?
i'm in singapore with my parents. right now i'm officially jobless and graduated and people are asking me what i'm doing. remember that uncareer fair Think! did? we distributed that comic strip with the girl meeting her friend and being asked what she did? if you remember it, thats what i feel like communicating to them, DOING to them, and cant, dont know how. and if you dont remember it, no matter. just know that i'm trying to learn how to live life and am frustrated by people sitting willingly in cages, pods, getting their lives sucked out of them like batteries, and i want to scream and tell them to unplug already. its not always like that, the way i feel, and i when i describe it like that i'm being very unfair
to the ones around me, but hey, what the hey.
my parents are cool. theyre most excellently supportive. i'm here because of them, to be with them make them happy, and they know that. its hard to live with them at times, but its giving me a stability that i need to build on.
pam. you've known a love that movies and fairytales try to capture,
polaroided, distorted, but yours is real. how fortunate to have happened on that, even in its loss.
off to india next week.
may the olive trees in your area still be thriving, and may the only
Caterpillars you encounter be the cute fuzzy wriggly kind.
mali

The Think! list, July 4, labelled "is anyone else sad that..."
..the only mailage on this list is virus/junk/spam stuff?
i'm sticking on out of some stupid unrealistic hope that some day there will be a something like Think! Int Uninc. Pbl Unlim. (Think!
International Unincorporated Public Unlimited), bringing disorganization, discontent, and somethingconstructive to theatres of revolution near you.
this unneccessary mailage was brought to you by Think! Singapore aka
SingtownThink.
how's it going out there?

Ank, July 4
i had planned to throw this independence day party today. not because i'm patriotic and all that jazz, but i was going to invite everyone to come and celebrate independence from whatever they wanted, whether it be as the white folks who crossed the ocean and gained independence from their queen and her dominion, or the brown folks who are some day going to gain independence from the system run by the white folks who came and took their country, or other brown folks who were born in that country and are slowly starting to gain independence from the identity of being part of the first white folks' legacy, or the orange folks under the leadership of aung san suu kyi gaining independence from the orange military folkks that have taken over the country, yeah so all that, party, invite, didnt
so much happen. i'm good at having ideas, not so good at making them
happen. kellea says i need a secretary or something. blech. i would hate to have a secretary.
whats fukuoaka?
you're not crazy. but you're wrong in thinking none of the goodytwoshoe freemarket inndians want to apply. they ARE applying. in droves. to these programs that are like, look, come back to your country of origin and help them get sliced bread and wheels and wireless networking. ick. the way they run those programs, i do not like, theyre all corporatey and icky, and i'm sure they open their eyes a little, but i dont know. ick.
well i'm off to india this friday to go roast some eggplants and have sex with other americans, except, i'm not american anymore, i'm not indian, and i'm not singaporean so i dont really know what i am.
i had a dream last night that i was stuck on the outskirts of some town and someone was trying to explain that it was america(tm) and tell me more about it but everything was blurry and we were trying to get into the middle of the town somewhere even though at the same time i really jjust wanted to get away from the whole damn area. i dont understand what the dream means. jung? freud? anyone? a little help here?
dreaming life, waking death,
mali

Interlude: Emails to Shouri, Mica, Ayla, Wind, Marc (FNB), that i deleted but thought i should remember that i sent, trying to reconnect with them. no response from any. Also an unanswered reconnect email to Jed a week earlier.

Valarie Kaur, July 9
val.
hmmm. yes. i'm glad you dont associate me with cold and dark. but try replacing those words with cool and shaded, respectively. better picture? just the calm space the peace away from the frenzy the madness the desires the angers that consumed corrupted me while i battled the world.

dark chocolate. yes, that is what it must be, what i think i would like to be. that is what your description of the love you are exploring reminds me of. if you had asked me what kind of chocolate i would want it to be before, i would have said the milkiest creamiest possible but now i discover in fact, no, bittersweet ecstasy can only be dark chocolate.
leaving for india this tuesday for two months, very very very excited.
pet pet pet on cocoa and kajal's heads.
snatch snatch snatch type type type.
your turn.
love love love
mali

Pam Olson, July 21
in bangalore right now, learning all i can about the politics of freedom and identity, and the interflowage of community. off to delhi this evening. then down to kerala (south west state of india) to see the rest of my family for a month and a half or so.
not using toilet paper. being brown skinned and semi-white brained in a brown country. spending my parents money which we three see as family money not separable and yet me still being confused on whats worth spending on.
read on for my dad's email to me in response to my question about publishing.
wondering why the hell i'm at a computer instead of using my last few hours in bangalore walking and talking and blinking and breathing and seeing.
mali

Thea, July 25
thealita
am on journey, as you say. journey has passed from singapore to bangalore to delhi where i am now and where i was walking on grass and felt breeze and thought it was just across that particular point in the fabric of space and then walked forward and realized it was all over the general area of space and it was actually only at that particular point in the fabric of time. i guess i'm more aware of motion through space rather than time and so think more in terms of space than time. mmm. what a deliciously brainless revelation. i've been having a lot of those. there's a lot of time to revelate when you're on the go, visiting folks entering their lives for a week, a little taste and onwards ho.
plants are awesome youre right. theres a bitty biodiversity plant across the road from here, we're going there to chill with the greenery after the afternoon when we've put the sun to sleep. its hot here. smelt like the wicked witch of the east, we will, if we step into the sun now. i tried, with a sheet on my head, this morning (which is when i walked on the grass and confused space with time), cuz my cous and i were being ghosts playing a kid game, but even with the white reflecting the heat it was toasty burning.
my brain got fried. off i fly, with a peck on your nose and hello to olivia, who yes, of course i know and a tap on my bottom for acceleration
till my next cyberial travel that happens across your communique,
malavika

Mansi Maheshwari, July 25
heya from uncle/aunt/cousin/dog's house in gurgaon, mansi. my aunt is a translator. she was talking about the EU and the sudden demand for translation and how now languages are flying all over the place and i thought of babel's tower falling and breaking and now its happening all over again, and then i realized i dont really know the story of babel and the tower, i just connect it to a vague thing about languages and tower falling and maybe i should read up or ask someone.

ok, that's my random thought for the day, hope thinking is just as scraggly and confused and illuminating on that corner of the sphere(wait but spheres dont have corners. heehee.)

malavika

Day 27
Moon 28

feliz cumpleanos, pablo.

2004-07-12T15:13:00.000+08:00

One entry more than the Daily Revolution now. more permanent? nah. nothing is. permanent.

Gaaaaaaah. so ready to leave. frustration. dissatisfaction with All and All.

Today would be Pablo Neruda's 100th bday.
Ank sent this to me a a few weeks ago. Someday I'll find out what it means.

Neruda, Testamento de otono, the closing poem in extravagario

Matilde Urrutia, aqui' te dejo
lo que tuve y lo que no tuve,
lo que soy y lo que no soy.
Mi amor es un nin~o que llora,
no quiere salir de tus brazos,
yo te lo dejo para siempre:
eres para mi' la ma's bella.

Eres para mi' la ma's bella,
la ma's tatuada por el viento,
como un arbolito del sur,
como un avellano en agosto,
eres para mi' suculenta
como una panaderi'a,
es de tierra tu corazo'n
pero tus manos son celestes.

Eres roja y eres picante,
eres blanca y eres salada
como escabeche de cebolla,
eres un piano que ri'e
con todas las notas del alma
y sobre mi' cae la mu'sica
de tus pestan~as y tu pelo,
me ban~o en tu sombra de oro
y me deleitan tus orejas
como si las hubiera visto
en las mareas de coral:
por tus un~as luche' en las olas
contra pescados pavorosos.

Day 9
Moon 10ish

Email from Pam, subject line: Abbel Boy

2004-07-08T10:24:00.000+08:00

Dear all,

It is so strange to be sitting in an office in front
of a computer eating a chicken sandwich and drinking
fresh carrot juice with a multi-lingual Palestinian
woman (fluent in French, Arabic, and English, passable
in Spanish) chatting like in any other office, typing
up a report about, for example, a family that was
gunned down in their home at midnight in a Palestinian
town where friends of mine live by the army of a
country where other friends of mine live. One report
last week said Israeli soldiers in Nablus shot and
killed two sons and shot their father in the head in
front of their mother and sister.

Every day, it's like a normal day at work, and then a
report comes in about another family killed, another
operation or incursion or ambulance attacked or curfew
instated or checkpoint closed or parcel of productive
land destroyed, and your stomach turns to water. Last
week another nine-year-old kid was shot and killed at
a peaceful protest in Gaza, and I doubt the mainstream
news even reported it. Things like this have become
commonplace.

While Muzna and I were typing up reports one day last
week, two guys showed up, a reporter and a
photographer. The photographer walked in like a tall
beam of sunshine, a half-Palestinian half-Catalonian
from Barcelona, effortlessly charming in a friendly,
smiling, confident way, and in possession of a
passionate devotion to human rights, animal rights,
and Spanish soccer. Seemed like the type for whom
women just fell at his feet.

He came in and all the women fell at his feet. Muzna
suggested that if he really wanted to learn Arabic, he
should get himself a Palestinian girlfriend, and I had
to make an effort not to stutter. Later we and some
others went out for drinks at a place called Sangria's
with a gorgeous outdoor patio and garden. Most folks
ordered a very decent Palestinian beer called Taybeh,
and I had some Turkish coffee and a nargila.

Someone asked what a nargila was last time I wrote.
It is a tall ornate hookah, sheesha, water bong,
usually filled with flavored tobacco. My favorite
flavor is warad (rose), but grape and mint and
raspberry and mango are also nice. It's one of my
favorite things about the Middle East, time together
sitting around on a porch talking, usually about
politics, and laughing and enjoying each other's
company with no concept of time whatever, taking turns
blowing smoke rings and making coffee and tea while
people come and go and goats wander up the stairs and
cats come and sit in your lap and someone comes by
with some leftover desserts and the sun sets and
al-Jazeera or CNN comes on, and everyone rolls their
eyes because they are lying as usual, or at best
telling half the truth, and people who come randomly
by sometimes end up becoming great friends... That's
a short definition of nargila.

Anyway, we were hanging out on the patio of Sangria's
when a happy birthday song came on the loudspeakers
and two cakes came out with fireworks spewing fire out
on top. The birthday party had gotten enough cake for
everyone on the patio and the waiters passed it
around. When Muzna said, "La, shukran," (no thanks),
and the waiter asked, "Lehsh?" (why?), I laughed out
loud.

Alex, the Canadian journalist, told Mushir the
Spanishtinian heartthrob to tell his story of crossing
into Israel. Mushir laughed and said, "Ah yes, the
girl at the border control, she ask me, 'What will
your address be in Ramallah?' I said, 'Why, you want
to come visit me?' She turn very red, and she try to
answer me in Spanish, then she try to answer me in
English, then she start cursing in Hebrew." We all
laughed and he said, "But it is not so funny, because
then they give me only two weeks in Israel." Normally
tourists get three months. So he'll have to go back
to Jordan and renew soon. I almost don't blame the
poor girl.

After drinks I followed Alex and Mushir and a law
student named Omar to their apartment to watch the
Portugal/Holland soccer game. Omar is an itriguing
person to me because he is so thoroughly American and
yet has a certain understanding of things because he
has close family in the Middle East. He turned down
an amazingly lucrative summer job in the States for a
$500-a-month stint in Palestine. I am not sure how he
holds so many ideas, some of which seem contradictory
to me, in his head at once. I think I will learn a
lot talking to him.

He works for the economic arm of the Palestinian
Authority and is pretty disappointed with it. The PA,
from most accounts I've heard, is weak and
disorganized and dishonest and generally lacks
solidarity with the Palestinian people. Many
Palestinians are more upset with the PA, which was
installed by and is dependent on Israel, than with
Israel itself. Many feel betrayed and
ill-represented. And yet maybe 1/3 of the West Bank
population is dependent on it for their livelihood,
and Palestinian citizens have little to fall back on
politically except the fundamentalist party Hamas.
Somebody told me about half of Palestinians identify
with neither Hamas nor Fateh (the dominant party in
the PA). I hope al-Mubadara can be a viable Third
Front, and I hope its call for democratic elections
will be honored, but we will see. I have a lot to
learn.

While we were watching the game, Omar jokingly asked
Mushir if he would like anything, "like maybe some
abbel boy?" Mushir laughed, and Omar explained that
they had dinner one time with a girl who had been in
the West Bank a little too long, and she asked a
waiter, "May I have some apple pie?"

The waiter looked at her, confused, and the girl said,
"Sorry, some abbel boy, please?"

The waiter smiled, relieved, and said, "Oh yes, abbel
boy! Right away."

The next night, when I was studying my Egyptian Arabic
textbook, the Palestinian girl I live with said that
all Arabs understand Egyptian standard Arabic, but
almost no one speaks it. "And by the way, all our
books are written in Egypt, published in Lebanon, and
read in Iraq." I laughed but she said, "No, I'm
serious, it's been true for 200 years. All the
thinkers are in Egypt, but they have never had
democracy. So everything gets published in Beirut,
but they are all too busy to read. In Iraq everyone
is so smart, so that's where they read the books." I
wondered how much reading the Iraqis have done lately.

There was another expat party on Thursday night at my
house, and I was talking to an American guy who has
lived in Palestine for more than five years. He lived
in Gaza City for about two years, and he said the US
Agency for International Development spent tons of
time and US taxpayer money to build several wells for
the Gazans--our tax money given to the government's
business partners. Fair enough if it provides the
Gazans with much-needed water.

But then Israel came and destroyed all the wells, with
weapons paid for by US tax dollars to the government's
defense contractor business partners. And then the
first well-building business partners got another fat
tax-funded deal to rebuild the wells.

I was reminded of Milo Minderbinder, the black market
mastermind in Catch-22, bombing his men with their own
planes, making a large profit from it, and calmly
explaining to everyone why it was in their best
interest and done, after all, in the sacred and
inviolable name of Free Enterprise.

The American guy said, "I've seen so much stuff, I
didn't think I could get angry anymore. But the wall
makes me very angry."

Halfway through the party an Israeli Jeep showed up
and cut off our access to the main road, and it stayed
there for hours and hours. My Palestinian housemate
ushered us all into the house like it was a
thunderstorm or something. And, like in a
thunderstorm, we kept hearing explosions every twenty
minutes or so and vainly made guesses as to how far
away they were and what kind of damage they might have
done.

A French diplomat and a German guy were playing bottle
caps, and I talked to an Irish guy who got sick of
being rich in Geneva and is working now for al-Haq, a
human rights NGO. He and the Swedish girl both said
that the UN pays well, but you have to have
connections to get hired.

The next day at work I found out the explosions were
part of an Israeli incursion, with six people arrested
and several doors blown down and at least two people
injured, including one child. Arafat's compound was
surrounded again. I believe two houses were
demolished. Three of those arrested are from Tulkarm
and work for the Palestinian Red Crescent. All six
were taken to unknown places. Details are sketchy,
because a curfew was in place, and to be a witness
would have been dangerous.

Walking around looking at the strong, beautiful stone
houses in my neighborhood the other day, I was
thinking that if someone were even to think about
destroying them, for any reason, I don't know how my
anger could be contained. My Palestinian housemate
later told me she was a victim of the very first home
demolition in Ramallah. She used to live in a very
nice five-story flat, and one night Israelis came and
found a wanted man, killed him (extrajudicial
assassination, illegal by the Geneva Conventions),
threw everyone out of their apartments, including
families with young children, without letting them
bring anything out with them, and dynamited it before
their eyes as an act of collective punishment (also
illegal by international law). My housemate lost her
father when she was 13, and her portrait of her father
was destroyed, as well as her book, clothes, CDs,
furniture, personal effects... she said she could not
count what she lost.

She grew up in Gaza City, and her family is made up of
wealthy Communists. (Wealthy Gaza Communists--triple
oxymoron? I have yet to meet a truth that was not
stranger than fiction.) She was hit with a bullet the
first time when she was six years old. During the
first Intifada in 1987, Israeli soldiers were shooting
at youths who were throwing rocks. She was on her way
home and was caught in the crossfire, and a bullet
grazed her ankle, and then a stone hit her in almost
the same place.

She said Israeli soldiers came into her home all the
time when she was young, and she saw her father being
beaten more than once, and sometimes her father or
brothers were taken away and put in prison. I wonder
why a family of Gaza Communists was so dangerous to
the security of Israel.

I told her Ronan's story from southern Lebanon about
the four prisoners being killed by an Israeli soldier,
including a child. She told me one time she and her
friends were playing in the road when they were about
7 or 8 years old, and some Israeli soldiers were on a
rooftop nearby. The soldiers started pointing at the
kids and laughing, and then one pointed his gun and
shot one of the children in the cheek. Another
soldier shot another kid in the eye. She said each
time they aimed she could not tell whom they were
aiming at. She said with a weak smile, "They were
playing a game, who could shoot a kid in the eye."

She said the worst thing she saw lately was that one
of the American torturers in Abu Ghraib was a pregnant
woman. "How can she do that when she was in that time
of life that is most... I mean could she not think
ahead and think that someone might do that to her
child someday?"

When the Al-Aqsa mosque compound was stormed by Ariel
Sharon in September 2000, the spark that lit the
powder keg of the Second Intifada, my housemate was on
her way to a party in West Jerusalem, but because of
the craziness she decided not to go. A Communist
friend of hers phoned and said he was going to go
check out the protest. He wasn't religious or
anything, he was just angry that the country that had
oppressed his people so long was now spitting in their
eye, and excited to be part of a big passionate group
of people. The next they heard of him was that he had
been shot and killed at the protest.

She said, "I have never lived anywhere else, and I was
six years old during the first Intifada and I was just
learning what the world was about. I thought it was
always about soldiers and beatings and killings and
checkpoints. I don't know what normal is." She's
hoping to study for a masters in finance in France
soon, and I can't imagine what a relief it will be.
Despite it all she still wants to raise kids here in
Palestine. She doesn't want them to see what she has
seen, but at the same time she says her experiences
have made her stronger, and she wants to stay with her
homeland.

She and I went to see Mystic River at the
Cinematheque, and on the way back yet another Israeli
Jeep was blocking our path, and teenaged boys were
running toward it with stones. She turned me around
and said, "Don't go that way, ugh, I hate it when they
do that. Don't they know some of the Israeli soldiers
are not right in the head? They get scared and they
just shoot."

Last night a group of us went to a club called The
Orthodox to watch the Portugal/Greece game. There was
a small but vocal group of Greece supporters, and they
were very happy at the end. The guy sitting beside me
was from Nablus, works in Jericho, will study in
Missouri next year, and said he hates to leave
Palestine and is only going away for a time because of
the situation. He doesn't want to study here now
because it is too hard just getting around, and with
checkpoint and curfews and everything else, serious
study would be very stressful if not impossible. (My
housemate lost a year of study because of some
problems with her Israeli-issued documents.) But he
definitely plans to come back to his homeland to live.
I asked what he thought of Dr. Barghouthi, and he
said, "Like most Palestinians I think he is a very
good man."

An international film festival is coming to town next
week, and I hope to catch some good movies. There's
one about Che Guevara called Motorcycle Diaries that
looks good. My housemate, like me, enjoys long walks
around town, so I am looking forward to exploring the
area with her. We're thinking of walking the 20 km to
Bir Zeit at some point and catching a cab back.

Today I showed Dr. Barghouthi our new web page design,
and he is happy with it. Insha'Allah we can get it up
and running soon.

I hope you all are staying well and look forward to
seeing you again.

Pam
________________
www.pamolson.org

"Few of us can surrender our belief that society
must somehow make sense. The thought that The State
has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent
people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be
internally denied."
~Arthur Miller

Day 5
Moon 6ish

Call now to end genocide in Sudan.

2004-07-01T12:43:00.000+08:00

That was in the subject line of an email yesterday. Hey, excellent, that's all we have to do, we just have to call? Sweet, I'm on it, Sudanese-style peace celebration party at my house afterwards, y'all. Naah, don't worry, I got the phonebill covered, least I could do, yeah you can just put the Nobel down there, by the ceramic vase.

Save the world in someone else's inbox, mofos.

In the process of making presents and gearing up for India.
Out of sorts.
Always wanting to do something else besides what I'm doing. Irritable. Maybe it's blood coming on. Maybe it's the moon. Full tomorrow I think. Maybe it's the fact that I have no freaking structure or discipline in my life and it's driving me nuts.

Possession --by Barbara Kinsolver

The things I wish for are:
A color. A forest.
The devil and ice in my mouth.
Everything
that can't be owned.
A leopard, a life, a kiss.
You
never let me down.
To know that you have wanted me too
is as good as the deed
of trust.

Time for What to do in case of fire.

pain is temporary. pride is forever.

2004-06-28T10:35:00.000+08:00

hungersite click breastcancersite click childhealthsite click rainforestsite click animalrescuesite click.
last email/internet was last monday i think. been busy. doing what?
bread. doctors. dance. doug/amma/acchan time. nina/bhavish time.
yesterday i went climbing again. last saturday when i went, the shoes were too small and i couldnt get my mind off it to climb so really only my left toes hurt the next day. yesterday i ignored the shoes and climed Direct twice, and then attempted the route next to Tails of Power several times. so today every single muscle in my tender body hurts, except for the thigh muscles that are strong and bulging from dance. ow.
i kind of want to go again next week. wonder if i can pay ian and bernie a small fee to use their equipment and expertise.

when you feel like letting go, hooold on,
when you think you've had too much of this life, hang on,
cuz everybody hurts, take comfort in your friends
everybody hurts,
don thoooo yooo haannnnn ooooo naaa
don thooo yoooooooo hannnn
if you like yooo maaaan
no no no you're not alone

crying, my last brownie, sitting in the couch chair in anna and my room in zapata, crying, trying to enjoy the brownie before i did it, listening, crying with this song, this song stopped me.

Day 47
Moon 26ish

CleanedOutSentMail Excerpts

2004-06-20T16:13:00.000+08:00

To Emma James, 5/17/04: it would be nice if i could just
friggin figure it out, but i'm doomed to a daily yo-yo between this that and the other imperative plan of action which never actually materializes.

To Jason Glick, 5/21/04:
dear J-man,
you're the first birth celebration promise i've broken. being online is not my forte right now, so email is scarce and sparing. since i havent checked my online calendar, goddess knows how many others i've missed since yours. please forgive me, and know that on may 9 i wished you across the seas?
sleep calls, email is being shut down without being looked at.
zzzzzzzz
love
me

To Maya, 5/30/04: good! i'm glad youre convincing yourself that things are better, cuz then things ARE better, i mean, if you think there's a spoon, there's a spoon, cuz really there are no such things as spoons and better and worse anyway. hahahahaha!! spoutage of nonsense, oh such fun to be had.
hmmm. i think i'm staying in singapore after i come back from india (will be there all the month of july). probably here in spore till december. then? would like to go to wsf, after stopping by in my friends post-capitalist restaurant in north brazil. hmmmm. would like to go to the moon for a shake and fries. hmmmm. would like to swing on a bamboo stalk attached by a dew drop.

To Travis Helms, 5/30/04: i was doing so much in school, never had any time for anything or anybody, that now is the time when i'm taking things day by day, having time to do things i want to do, and actually enjoy them becuase they're not so crowded that they become a burden instead of a joy. every day is different, stands on its own, not as just another calendar box to be crossed off. i dont have a real schedule. i am doinng
nothing that can be categorized by the usual names that people have for the function of an individual in society, as in, you know, career, job, etc. My main un-job job is being a daughter. My next main job is being a friend. Then i have little side jobs like being a dancer, recently also a dance teacher, astonishing is that is to me, being a secretary-ish thing,
sometimes a healer, etc. I also have an even more unjob job of being a surpriser and think-maker.
i have no idea what the hell i am and what the hell i will be.

To Dev Rana, 5/30/04 (in response to his email, below:
dev of devs,
what is the thousand points of Light re-appropriated from?
is not our future always open?
yup, did fine on that test. thank you for pshawing.
much love
mali
Dev Rana wrote:
You do have a charming way about you Mali. It's nice.
How wonderful to have the future open! Bangalore. Glasgow. Dance.
Yes, those who seek the light must shine a bit on each other, just to keep the courage strong. Thank you.
Dev.
(And pshaw - you'll do fine on that test!)

To Becca Hall, 5/30/04:
beccster.
you in north carolina yet? its almost june you know! goodness. time. space. fabric. soft yet scratchy sometimes. get a little wrapped up and stuck in it sometimes. othertimes its a gorgeous evening gown.
now in a situation to sometimes struggle with car issues. have access to the family car. in a completely car driven culture. have situations that create an excuse to use car with only me in it, like tomorrow, where i have to pick up my dance teacher before and drop her off after my class, and then sinnce i have the car i have to drive to work for organizing this conference thingy. gah. getting a bike soon. thats exciting. thatll be most awesome.
dancing lots. yes. tis good. heard that lauren's gang did a great dance piece back at the Farm, and that Ava's show went swimmingly as always.
do you ever miss the Farm?
sending the delicious shock that is filling my night air these stormy
days.
mali

To David Mishook, 6/3/04
heya david,
eaten any triscuits lately? or how about chickens? heehee!!
hmmm. so a couple days ago i tried to reply to your message, again, like yours, long overdue, and i thought i was appropriately located cuz i was in the office that i go to to help out with organization of the Performance Studies International conference happening here in june, which, what the heck, peggy phelan is coming to because she's the president of PSi. so yeah, i was going to write from there cuz i was just sitting and waiting for my next task, but then the computer (from which i'm writing right now, and who is called Mickey, and is pleased to meet you) went kaput. so message go bye bye.
so now me write another one. writing from my room which has a MUCH slower connection, but whatever dude, at least i have electricity, right? wihtout which i would die. i dont use my airconditioning, but i DO need the fan to sleep. this is singapore after all. i tried valiantly to go super-luddite and not even use a fan, but the heat-induced lack of sleep induced tiredness prevailed.
so ok. there's a slice of my life. it doesnt really describe a lot of it, and i've written a lot of nonsense for very little information, but you know thats how i am, so thatll have to do.
and you, Mr Manager slash director slash whatever other titles you hold heavy on your poor pasta eating shoulders?
mali

To Babaloush, 6/3/04:
hello dearie. tried calling on pinch and punch first day of the month day but SOMEONE was on the phone. but i still got you first so there. hmm. you couldnt sleep with amar there. what could that mean? did you hook up with him?!!!! hahahahahaha!! i knew it was bound to happen eventually. good. really good. if i'm right, what now? if i'm imagining things, ignore this paragraph, but tell me how the weekend was anyway. and tell me those bloody things you couldnt tell me then, because i'm sick of waiting on the edge of my seat!!! and. um. one of the reasons i wanted to call was because, although about two weeks ago i was absolutely sure that it would be a good idea to come to glasgow, i was still flip flopping back and forth, and then finally when i decided it was not a good idea for me to come, decided that i needed to stay here longer (august onwards, after i get back from india in late july) to keep building up my brain and body, especially now that i'm very slowly dragging my parents into my project of facing my bi-polar disorder, which, as much as i'm in control of it right now, could very easily spin out of control given the wrong environment, food, atmosphere, chemicals, weather, whatever. so yeah. i thought i was all set to come and live with you and that would make both you and me and everyone happy, but now i have to tell you to definitely look for another flatmate. i'm sorry, i reallllly realllly wanted to live with you, but that will have to wait for another time, i know itll happen some time soon. grrr, i really want to talk on the phone to you, but i have to go order my stupid transcript for the third time, and then get to sleep so i can take my mom to the doctors in 7 hours. oops. i love you poo poo
-other poo

To Jean Ann after forgetting her and Bruce's birthday, 6/8/04:
happy birthday to you
i wish i had a clue
maybe next time my head will have a better screw
happy birhtday to you

Day 39
Moon 18ish

Today's Tomorrow

2004-06-05T23:36:00.000+08:00

Long fourth dimension no blog. How's it going?

Amma and I drove each other crazy yesterday and today. It's ok, tomorrow will be better. It's too bad, the week had been going so well, we were so harmonious and synergistic. Well geewillikers there I go expecting perfection again.

I grate carrots *like mice bitten*. I'm having trouble lighting matches, too. And my manner, in dance but even in normal interaction too, apparently, has a harshness to it that it didn't used to, that perhaps translates into Maami's calling it "manly" (I guess I'm just lucky she didn't say I have a microscopic brain or that I'm smelly like the flowers). I think they're all tied up together. Somehow I seem to be using too much pressure. I'm trying too hard. Like massage, reiki, how I take a long time to get in the groove because I'm trying to hard to find the right spot. Funny, I always see myself as knowing how to let go more than most, sometimes even too much. The free spirit, in the flow, easy-going and carefree, tripping the light fantastic. Perhaps Simon Baker aka Nick Fallin isn't the only one who needs to do some self-image analysis and consider the possibility of distorted perception. I'm always conscious, overly conscious, of how others perceive me, but apparently not enough, or, no. Not in the right way. It's time to get a Mirror Mirror on the Wall, a real one, not one of those stupid Look at you, you're hot shit, or Oh my god what are those craters in your skin mirrors.

Oh yeah, and hey, I'm manic. Or rather, bi-polar. Or rather, I have bi-polar disorder. Or rather, perhaps, I'm recovering from bi-polar disorder. Or perhaps, I have complex and intense body-mind that is still and might always be settling into equilibrium with its environment.

Or perhaps I am Goddess Manifest come to lead the world into its final stages of being. Shit, I shouldn't have said that last one because I mean it as a joke right now but in some states of mind I really think along those lines and that's just plain stupid. And one of the many things that tells me I'm bi-polar.

But I did immediately say no when Amma asked about a Riding for the Disabled Assocation event next weekend. And I did make the pain-free transition from planning very seriously to go to tonight's free 7hr Kathakali Mahabharata to staying home to catch up on TV, internet, Amma, and sleep, so maybe just maybe I'm learning to prioritize and equilibriate. Ha. Let's see what happens tomorrow. Speaking of TV, I GODDAM LOVE JUDGING AMY ITS THE BEST SHOW IN THE ENTIRE WORLD EXCEPT FOR GUARDIAN.

You know, I'd really like to Subvert The Dominant Paridigm and Dissolve The State but I don't know how. I hope I find out tomorrow.

Dear Diary, Shut the hell up. Goodnight.

day 24ish
moon 3ish
post ambikaaliilaa many. STILL wrapping up. screw it, no more update on this.

the State of the world

2004-06-01T15:51:00.000+08:00

A worldwide survey was conducted by the United Nations. The only question asked was:

'Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?'

The survey was a huge failure.

In Africa they didn't know what 'food' meant.

In Eastern Europe they didn't know what 'honest' meant.

In Western Europe they didn't know what 'shortage' meant.

In China they didn't know what 'opinion' meant.

In the Middle East they didn't know what 'solution' meant.

In South America they didn't know what 'please' meant.

And in the USA they didn't know what 'the rest of the world' meant.

An email I didn't send today

2004-05-24T11:41:00.000+08:00

Dearest fellow StreetTakers in the SFish area,

I'm sure you're all in the know about this early June riseup, but I thought I'd send this to you anyway just to make my disconnected, lost-in-BuyEverything-ProtestNothing-land, meditate-to-pretend-i'm-discovering-inner-freedom, self feel a little better.

My flesh won't be with you in SF in June, or Georgia in June, or Boston in July, or New York in August, or anywhere else in any time soon, but my spirit is always

With you,

Me

------ Original Message ------
Received: 09:22 PM PDT, 05/08/2004
From: "Reilly Zagreus Phanes"
To: scratches_the_cat@hotmail.com, latte123@hotmail.com, b_4_l_l_3_t_4eva@hotmail.com, casse_87@hotmail.com, radharani@optusnet.com.au, ernestlee@post1.com, bithewayiamhappy@yahoo.com.sg, ghimlay@hotmail.com, gonpo1982@yahoo.com, gracelau07@hotmail.com, frog_m2@hotmail.com, j0ntan@hotmail.com, jfbuzz@yahoo.com, netineti01@hotmail.com, l_r_kin@yahoo.co.uk, drkunga@hotmail.com, wanderlisa@yahoo.com, malibu@stanfordalumni.org, mieko780@hotmail.com, netballzfun@hotmail.com, nikkiorei@hotmail.com, singapore-pagan-network@yahoogroups.com, sacredspace@pacific.net.sg, sophun02@yahoo.co.in, amor_vincit_o26@hotmail.com, yvonneli_@hotmail.com
Subject: Reclaim the Commons------Travellers' Tale from Possible (An Otherworld)

Reclaim the Commons

We never thought it would happen here, in San Franciscoa major
mobilization on a global justice issue. We never thought any of the
institutions of corporate globalization would schedule a meeting in this
hotbed of activism. But we werent taking into account the biotech
industry, with its tentacles deeply embedded into neighboring Silicon Valley
to the south of us. They are having their major annual meeting, Bio2004, at
San Franciscos Moscone Center in early June, at the same time the G8 will
be meeting in Georgia. And we are rising to the occasion with a
mobilization we have named Reclaim the Commons, which will extend beyond the
issues of genetic engineering and biowarfare to include the whole arena of
corporate control of our economy and our governments, and link the
environmental, peace, and racial justice movements. We are calling on
everyone who can to come to San Francisco June 4-9, for a convergence that
will include teach-ins, trainings, gardening projects and urban
transformations, a Really, Really Free Market, marches, and direct action
linked to our sister mobilization in Georgia. Come check out our website at
www.reclaimthecommons.net .

For months, weve been organizing, meeting, planning, and making
connections with local and neighborhood groups. We want to do this one
differentlynot just to protest biotech, but to embody our vision of a world
of sustainable abundance and real democracy, where we take back the commons,
all those things that are necessary to sustain life, that are our common
heritage and the common trust for generations to come after us. Our
statement of unity says:

The Commons are the universal heritage of people and all living
things.
They are everything needed to support healthy life on earth: air, water,
food, shelter, health care, energy sources and our genes. They are what is
needed to sustain culture: our multicultural heritages, education,
information and the means to disseminate it, essential human services,
public spaces, and political space. They are equally the land, its forests,
the oceans, and all ecosystems. In sum, the Commons are everything that we
inherit jointly and freely, and hold in trust for future generations.

So weve also been propagating plants and making links with
community gardens, covering greenhouses and seeding long term projects that
can help provide healthy, organic food in the inner city, examples of
sustainable energy and ecological solutions, a memorial grove for youth
killed in street violence, and common gathering places. Weve been starting
plants to give away at the really, really free market and breeding worms for
compost and fertilizing tea. Were planning actions that will be exuberant,
creative, visionary, and inspiring as well as confrontational.

But we need help. We need money, to be blunt about it. All the
usual sources of money for this sort of thing have dried up this year.
Foundations that fund activism are funneling all their money into getting
Bush out of officea goal we support. But we see this mobilization as
attacking the root causes of the lack of democracy that put him in office in
the first place. We need tens of thousands of dollars to rent a convergence
space in high-priced San Francisco, print and distribute our flyers and
outreach materials, feed, house and provide emergency medical care for those
who will come, and to realize our visions.

So were asking directly for help from our community, asking you
to help water the garden. We know that a lot of you dont have a whole lot
of money, and we know that there are lots of appeals for the money you do
have. But no garden can grow without some fertilization, and if we want to
realize our dreams and visions, we need to provide the resources and support
for them. You can donate directly from the webpage, www.reclaimthe
commons.net or through the address
below. Donations can even be tax deductible, letting you buy a few more
plants for us and a few less bullets for Iraq.

Adopt-an-Activist
PO Box 9363
Santa Rosa CA 95405
707.523/4304
adoptanactivist@riseup.net

And as a little thank you in advance for your support, Im
including here the first installment of Travellers Tales from Possibleto
be continued on the Reclaim the Commons website: www.reclaimthecommons.net
and my own, www.starhawk.org
.

Thanks so much,
Starhawk

Travellers Tales from Possible: What Is This, Anyway?

Another World is Possible has long been the slogan of the
global justice movement. But what would that world look like, and how would
it work? Would it be any different, really, from this one? Fortunately, we
can now answer that question with an eyewitness report from Possible, which
exists just on the other side of This Reality. Beware, you, too, might slip
through, and never be the same again. To an awakened imagination, anything
is possible. So if you dont like ours, dream up some possibilities of your
own.

Travellers Tales from Another World
Part One
Welcome to Possible
(as told to Starhawk)

It takes a certain kind of person to maintain a tight knot of anxiety in the
pit of the belly when a chorus of frogs is happily croaking in the morning
fog outside your window, and the scent of honeysuckle drifting in. But as a
lifetime New Yorker, and a science writer for the New York Times, Id had
plenty of practice maintaining tension. The arias of the songbirds, the
lemony scent of herbal tea brought to me by my hostess, the lavender-scented
fresh sheets on my comfortable bed all made me nervous. I missed the slight
chemical taint of the dehydrating, artificially cooled air of the Marriott,
where I should have been staying, the comforting traces of someones stale
cigarettes, the homey conversation of the early morning talk shows on TV,
the bad coffee from the automatic coffeemaker.

My name is Alice Stickly, Im a successful journalist in an extremely
competitive field, and I want to go home!

But let me get hold of myself, and start from the beginning,
with the who, what, where, when and why, as they taught us in the journalism
school at NYU, even if the how has me mystified.

Yesterday, I was on my way to San Francisco to cover the biotechnology
industrys biggest annual get-together, a massive flocking of journalists,
lobbyists, CEOs and management and marketing teams and here and there a few
actual scientists. It was an ontime, nonstop flight from La Guardia. No
boxcutter-wielding terrorists attempted to highjack it; no anthrax was piped
through the ventilation system and nothing whatsoever exploded. I spent the
flight napping and worrying about nothing more than would there be
protestors at the convention, and could you get a decent margarita at the
Marriott? Everything was completely normal, unless you count the fact that
my luggage arrived on time and undamaged. I picked up my bags, and walked
out of the baggage area at exactly midnight, through a big, black gate like
a metal detector. Then things began to get strange.

I remember thinking, How odd, a metal detector as youre leavingit must be
some new antiterrorist device, when everything changed. A mist rolled in,
as if all the fogs of San Francisco coalesced and slipped through the
airports revolving doors. I found myself walking down a long hallway. I
could hardly see beyond my face, but I kept going, as if some mysterious
force was drawing me. A banner loomed out of the mist ahead of me. It
proclaimed, Another World is Possible! It was the slogan from the World
Social Forum, in India this year. I didnt think much of itafter all, this
was liberal San Francisco. But a few yards further on, a second banner read,
An Otherworld is Possible. And beyond that, Welcome to Possible.

I blinked, feeling a sudden nervousness. Where was I? What had happened?
Had I gotten onto the wrong plane? In thirteen years of professional
journalism, hundreds, thousands of trips, I had never before so much as
misplaced a ticket. Was something wrong with me? But even if Id somehow
gotten on the wrong plane, I hadnt been in the air long enough to get to
India. Besides, the conference was in January and this was June. Could I be
losing my mind?

Just then I noticed a booth to my left, glowing through the fog with its own
pearly light. A bright colored sign read, Dazed and Confused Traveller
Orientation Station. Welcome to Possible! A beautiful young woman behind
the desk beamed at me and gave me a big smile.

My name is Glinda. Can I help you?

Whats happened? Is this San Francisco? I asked.

Her deep brown eyes gazed at me kindly. Yes and no, she said. Perhaps
youd better come in and sit down.

Inside the booth was a small, comfortable armchair, and Glinda sat me down
and poured me a cup of what she said was a soothing tea of valerian and St.
Johns Wort. I could have used a whiskey, frankly, but I was in no shape to
complain.

What do you mean, yes and no? I asked.

Have you ever heard of the theory of parallel realities? she asked.

Im a science writer for the New York Times. Ive heard of everything.

Were not sure just how it began. It might have had something to do with
voting patterns, or the time our mayor decided to register gay and lesbian
marriages. Anyway, for a long time many of us had been feeling that San
Francisco represented a somewhat different reality than the rest of the
country. And gradually that Otherworld seemed to become, well, more and
more real. One day we woke up and discovered that reality had divided, like
an amoeba. And every now and then, someone like yourself slips through.

Holy Sweet Jesus, was all I could say, reverting to my mothers favorite
expression. Would I ever see her again? What would this do to her
hypertension?

Dont worry, Glinda reassured me. She was beaming at me with just that
doe-eyed, New Age, treacly smile that made me want to hit her. What about
Jason, my fiance? What about my job? What would they think if I didnt show
up for my assignment? Our helpful Indymedia technicians are working on ways
to bridge the reality gap. In the meantime, youll be a guest of the city.

With worries churning around in my brain, I let her bundle me into an oddly
silent taxi that brought me here, to Mercedes guesthouse. I lay in bed,
shuffling my worries as if they were a definitive hand of cards I was damned
if Id put down. Until with the stress, and the jetlag, and the fact that
it was now close to four AM in New York, in spite of myself I fell sound
asleep.

Off my room is a small balcony, where Mercedes, my hostess, had
set a lovely breakfast of homemade scones, fresh cream and eggs which she
said come from the chickens I could hear clucking nearby. Id trade it all
for a plastic room-service omelet or even the tasteless lasagna on the plane
yesterday.

Mercedes was looking at me sympathetically out of her big, brown, eyes, but
I refused to be soothed. She was so beautiful she annoyed me, with her
glossy black hair and her face that could have come straight off a Mayan
carving, and that damn smile. No one has ever mistaken me for a beautiful
woman, although Im fashionably thin, chicly dressed, and the price of my
every-six-weeks haircut could support a small village in the Third World.

A chorus of songbirds competed with the cackling of hens
objecting in principle to the omelet made of their scrambled potential
offspring. I had a wide view of the garden, which extended over the full
interior of this block of row houses. All the old dividing fences had been
taken down, and the result was truly charming, at least, for anyone capable
of being charmed by a garden. Id lost that capacity years ago. Minoring in
botany at Smith College, Id had a summer job writing catalog copy for White
Flower Farm. Three months of trying to describe every scrawny scabiosa in
mouthwatering prose left me hoping to never see another iris that wasnt
already safely dead and entombed in some expensive and tasteful arrangement.

I thought back to my last breakfast with my fiancé Jason, his eyes darting
anxiously to the clock, the cell phone in his jacket pocket ringing, the
worried frown line between his eyes as he stared at the morning paper.
Actually the same line formed between my eyes whenever I thought of my job.
The conference I was supposed to be covering started tomorrow. I HAD to get
back by then.

But this was an extraordinary garden, I had to admit. Mercedes
handed me a basket, and suggested I might like to pick some berries for
dessert. I wandered out, along a small path edged with alpine strawberries.
Near the kitchen door, a raised spiral mound grew every kind of fresh herb a
cook might need. Tubs of fragrant water lilies spilled over into miniature
waterfalls that flow over rock beds and into a small wetland of reeds and
cattails. Round, raised beds were thick with lettuces, arugula, radicchio
and sorrel, or newly planted with baby squash and young tomatoes. The path
wound between berry bushes and around fruit trees, with apples just
beginning to swell and plums almost ripe. Another fork dove into a small
wilderness of native shrubs and berries. All in all, it was quite
delightful and took my mind off my anxiety.

Deep in the center of the garden was a large pond, surrounded by
rounded stones and full of water lilies, water hyacinths, and paddling
ducks. All the little streams and rivulets and waterfalls seemed to
converge here, and a large frog sculpture spouted a fountain from its mouth
that splashed happily into the pond. Two small children lay on their
stomachs, scooping tadpoles out with a glass jar. They scrambled up to
their little feet when they saw me, beaming and thrusting a dripping jar
into my face. I shuddered. I hate children, as a rule, noisy little
rugrats. But these were extremely polite, introducing themselves as Tad and
Lily, beaming with those obnoxiously bright, healthy faces that looked as if
a bad thought or a whiff of air pollution had never brushed across that
glowing skin.

Look, you can see its legs starting to grow, Lily said to me,
holding up the jar for my inspection, where a hapless tadpole thrashed.
That one will be a red-legged frog. Theyre rare, but I bet we have a
thousand here. She gave me a big smile, flashing perfect teeth that
appeared to have never crunched a Fruit Loop or sucked a Pepsi in their
short life. She had the big dark eyes of those poster children who gaze so
pathetically out of direct mail appeals for aid to the Third World, but hers
were glowing with health and happiness. Tad, in contrast, was as blond and
blue-eyed as a miniature Leonardo di Capria.

Were the Frog Block, Tad explained. Every family on the
block has at least one pond or water barrel where frogs can breed. And we
grow catfish, too, and water chestnuts.

Dont you have terrible mosquitos? I asked.

No, silly, Lily said. Mosquitoes cant breed in moving
water. Thats why we have the fountain.

And fish eat them, Tad added.

The next block over is the Hummingbird Block, Lily said. You
should see their gardenits so beautiful, with so many red flowers.
Pineapple sage and trumpet vine and honeysuckle.

And the block on the other side is the Songbird Block, Tad
said. They have all these really cool bird feeders and nesting boxes, and
they plant things for the birds, like sunflowers, or flowers that attract
the insects birds like to eat.

I wouldnt like to live there, Lily said. Nobody in that
whole block can have a cat.

They can, they just cant let it go outside, Tad corrected
her.

The children proceeded to escort me around the garden. A swathe
of native plants meandered through the area, providing habitat for native
insects, birds, and wildlife. Fruit trees were underplanted with fava
beans, herbs, currants or artichokes, in what the kids called guildskind
of plant support groups, as they explained it, with some fixing nitrogen,
some attracting beneficial insects, others bringing up nutrients from deep
in the soil, and some, presumably, encouraging the others to talk about
their feelings and unashamedly admit their deepest traumas. One bed was
covered with a domed chicken house, woven of willow. The chickens were
happily scratching the dirt and consuming kitchen scraps.

Thats our chicken tractor, Lily said. They eat our kitchen
scraps, dig and fertilize the garden bed, and give us eggs to eat. When the
bed is ready, we move the whole dome to a new bed and plant the old one.
Beyond the chickens, a raised spiral bed was planted with
strawberries, and I spied many ripe, red ones. I remembered my errand.

Can I pick some of those? I asked the children.

Help yourself to anything you want, except from the beds right
by peoples doors, Lily said. Its all common.

But whats to prevent someone from just taking it all? I
asked.

The kids looked shocked. Who would do that? Lilly asked.
Youd feel just terrible, sitting alone in your house eating strawberries
and thinking that nobody else had any.

The most fun part of the garden is sharing, Tad said. And
theres enough strawberries so everyone can have as much as they want,
anyway.

It was clear to me that Id fallen into some Otherworld, some
different social order. I considered informing them that all such
altruistic ideologies had been discredited by harsh experience and the
failures of Soviet Communism, but why spoil their innocence? I just hoped,
for their sakes, that theyd never reverse my little accident and fall into
the real world, where the vultures would eat them alive. I picked
strawberries, and the children showed me a few hidden vines of ripe blackcap
raspberries and red currants.

Be serious, now, I said to Mercedes as we ate berries and cream on the
balcony. This commons business cant really work. It never has.
Someone always overstocks the sheep or whatever, and ruins it all.

She just smiled, basking like a cat in the sun. Youre working
awfully hard at being unhappy.

Working! Thats what I should be doingworking! At the job I
struggled and waited and planned and plotted and worked my posterior off to
get! Do you have any idea how hard it is for a womana woman!to get to be
a science writer for the New York Times! And how important this assignment
isthe assignment Im going to blow because some weird glitch in reality has
me trapped in some hippy gardeners utopia!

Im sorry. I forget how upsetting this must be for you. But
wont your boss understand?

Understand what? You just cant call an editor at the New York
Times and explain that you missed an important assignment because you fell
into another reality. Believe me!

Mercedes sighed. We do have to get you back, somehow. I know
the Indymedia technicians are working on itnot just for you, but for the
others. Theres been a steady trickle of Slippers over the past few years.
Many dont want to go back, but some do.

And how many have gotten back? I asked.

Were working on it.

I couldnt help myself, I began to cry. My mother has high
blood pressure, I sobbed. This will kill her. And Jasonhes expecting me
to have dinner with his law firm next week. Were supposed to announce our
engagement.

Mercedes patted me on the shoulder, looking deeply distressed,
and handed me a fresh handkerchief so I could blow my nose. Im not one of
those women who cries attractively, and I knew my nose was red and my eyes
puffy.

Your poor mother, Mercedes said sympathetically. You must be
terribly worried. Well, theres only one thing to do. To hell with those
slowpokes at Indymedia. Well have to go find the Wizards Collective.

The Wizards Collective? What is that?

Theyre very mysterious. Nobody knows exactly where or how
they meet. But they are widely believed to have synthesized the most
sophisticated virtual reality technology with magic. Some people think
theyre responsible for the reality split that removed us from your world.
And they are rumored to be able to manipulate time.

How do we find them? Follow the Yellow Brick Road? The
thought that my fate hung not just on a bunch of wizards, but a collective
of them was extremely depressing to me. I had briefly been part of a
womens collective my first year in college. Id attended three, long,
grueling meetings where we never could agree on anything, and decided that I
much preferred a clear hierarchy where someone, preferably me, could just
tell everyone what to do.

We'll begin where everything begins in this city, Mercedes
said. At the Garden of the Commons.

To Be Continued

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