Artist Archive

The Making of an Immigrant Life

December 26, 2013

It is almost too much to see the pictures. Almost unbearable to see so clearly the passage of time, the circle of life and the line of death. I see my mother and father in the days when we didn’t know each other. As I keep turning the pages, I reach pictures from a more recent […]

2013 | Uncategorized Comments (0)

The Knife and the Onion

November 3, 2013

The onion: round, layered, strong, complex. The knife: sharp, direct, straight, cutting. How are the two to get along? I cut the onion in half. A cross-section is two-dimensional and incomplete. The knife sees no other way. It is, itself, mostly understood from a two-dimensional perspective.   I slice the half-onion into thin half-moons. Then […]

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Manizhe

October 25, 2013

I sat in the armchair at the back of the room, swallowed in the dark while the light from the living room poured down the hall and faded just out of reach. I saw myself in the space, charged by its structure, its light, its dynamism. I felt called to notice it, revel in it, […]

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Country to City

September 19, 2013

After a week of renewal, rest, recuperation in the vast and open spaces of Maryland suburbs, I return to my home in urban Oakland. The airplane I ride on makes the five-hour flight through a changing landscape of clouds, some thick and seemingly solid, others barely a wisp in the wind. As we fly against […]

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Self-love Self-work

July 31, 2013

Today at the farmer’s market, a man handed me a postcard that reads ” If you’re not working on yourself, you’re not working.” An apt reminder for me. What do we spend most our time working on? Generally that which pays our bills, and perhaps after that, some sort of external, creative project. Something we […]

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Spaces at Dos Rios

July 31, 2013

Breathtaking retreat site on the Eel river, and a dancer’s paradise. I was especially struck by the communal living space so alive with energy, color, and meaning. A pattern language truly embodied.

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What I’m learning about time

July 17, 2013

This isn’t now, and “what will happen next?” What is now, was, and will be Every moment is actually part of a soup of time, different parts tasted in what is perceived as now Watching the movement of my thoughts is the experience of living I exist as I am Freedom, from past and future Peace, in […]

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the whole damn system

July 15, 2013

On Friday night, my friends and I walked out of Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, shaken and moved by the recounting of Oscar Grant’s meaningless death in our town a mere three years ago. We discovered that while we watched “Fruitvale Station,” George Zimmerman had been acquitted of all charges in the killing of Trayvon […]

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dad’s resolution

July 11, 2013

This is from an email sent to me and my family, from my father, on January of 2011. Practical, fearless, and always hopeful.   “My Resolution for 2011 In 2011 we might face new challenges. Although every one of us has friends and relationships but we have only each other to rely on for support. […]

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Scale at Night

June 10, 2013

The mind is a sense organ too, its creations mere symptoms of the thing itself. My eyes create images. My mind creates stories. I reach for my zero state, where I can lose the story. Covalent bonding. The color yellow. Water inside everything.   Hello, I love you. But you are dying, and I am […]

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