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 past – arriving in Canada, a family of four with two, school-aged daughters. I see how the awkwardness of our particular ages coupled with the profanity of westernized life and the financial impossibility of immigration cast an ugly grey color over everything.
Their smiles have lost that unmistakable brightness of hope, the hope of being newly wed with two fun and funny toddlers in a familiar world around everyone they love. I see instead winces of pain and frustration at the corners of those aging adult mouths, and the wrinkling of foreheads, and the sullenness of eyes. The only hope now resting in the little children – that they grow up healthy and capable in a world hopefully less foreign to them than their parents.
After a rather heartbreaking talk with my mother during which I evoke my strongest most resilient self so that she can be weak and vulnerable, I am left with the utter pain and reality of our immigrant life and the way it affects everything I am and will ever be.
Vancouver, 1998
Comments (0) | More: Uncategorized
The Knife and the Onion
November 03, 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 I chop down perpendicular to those cuts. Cutting away, I am
dissatisfied by the knife’s inability to acknowledge the roundness
of this allium. The diced pieces are not square as the knife would
like them to be. They cannot be, because the onion is essentially
round. If the onion was a square form, and its layers neatly
stacked… my knife and its chopping would yield symmetrical, even
cubes.
But the onion is round, layered, strong and complex. These
qualities cannot ever be denied, only ignored when we take the
knife to the onion and attempt a grid-like chopping pattern.
The sharp, phallic tool and the round layered fruit. How are they to
exist in mutual harmony? Should the knife be, perhaps, reformed so that its cuts reflect the natural inclinations of the onion? Should the
onion be cut forever in a way that ignores its essential round complexity?
I don’t know. But what is certain is that no matter how they meet, a knife with an onion can lead to an endless variety of delicious soups and
stews.
Comments (0) | More: Uncategorized
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, make it my art.
Not to write songs, make films, or paint pictures am I called. But to notice the beauty, the darkness and the art of consciousness filling a space. To make possible the locating of life within a fragment of time and space. And to live. Living as just that; sudden awareness of the self within the world, no matter how immediate, no matter how expansive.
To meditate as a state of being. We cannot separate where we are from the moment we exist there. Time is a dimension of physical space. The sun cannot be said to be setting unless you find yourself just at the place where it disappears from your horizon. So it is with every phase or era of our lives. The years, the moments inseparable from the landscape, the people, the air that consumes us.
She died in April and the last time I saw her, we sat under a tree, sipping coffee and nibbling on cake. Every corner of this place is still filled with her. She is as much gone as she ever was here. She was always a figment of my imagination.
People die but they never go away. They are forever present in the very places we knew them. We can always hold in our hearts the particular gifts of another because they fill the space inside of us as much as they ever filled the space outside. As long as I am alive, so is everyone I have ever known.
Everything is the way my eye sees it. All I need to have love is myself with just the right orientation to the world. How can we love someone who is gone so purely, so easily, so simply, but have such problems loving those around us who are still living? We ask nothing of the dead, or so I hope. Can we love the living with as much abandon and surrender as we would afford them if they were, suddenly, no longer living?
Comments (0) | More: Uncategorized
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 the rotation of the earth, the daylight lingers, and the horizon changes from hazy blues and grays to crimson, fuchsia and orange.
I think to myself, flying on an airplane has got to be some completely unparalleled sort of experience when it comes to becoming suddenly aware of what time, space, and consciousness are. In the suspended space 30,000 feet above earth, it seems as though time is also held in suspension. I have always found great peace and solace on flights, receiving literal and metaphorical perspective on my life. About three-quarters of the way through the flight, I notice a tiny, black jet in the distance, floating across the sky in the opposite direction from me. There it is, nothing holding it up but air, truly flying. And that’s where I am too. Flying in the sky. Unattached to any place, unattached both to my place of departure and to my eventual point of arrival. Floating just with my thoughts and wishes for a life that seems so far away.
This trip surprised me in the amount of comfort, affirmation and support it gave me. Through seeing old friends, colleagues, professors, to waking up for days in a warm and cozy home surrounded by green space and the still-bright sun of an east coast Autumn. But it also gave me a new understanding of space, place and who I am within them. A perpetual anxiety right at the center of my chest which has been present for the past year completely disappeared when I got myself out of urbanity and spent a week sleeping and waking in a real home. Time seemed to go by with so much more leisure and ease in that country environment. As it is necessary to drive most places and nowhere of interest is really very close by, every drive is a journey of sorts, a road trip. I felt slower, softer.
As much as I enjoyed the return home, I remembered once again why in the world I had decided to pick myself up and move across the country away from all the comforts of a familiar place and old friends, to a much more urban, much more economically challenging and unpredictable city environment. As difficult as the last year has been, I needed to challenge my slowness and my softness . I wanted and needed to be in the thick of everything, lost in people of all sorts. And that same anxiety in my chest which greeted me almost immediately upon arriving at San Francisco International Airport tonight, is the same feeling that has so toughened my skin, made me speak louder and more confidently, and sharpened my gaze. It is an alchemical phenomenon – anxiety transformed into a hardened, quick, capable layer. The very way I hold myself, the integrity of my spine, has changed in tangible ways.
So to a new year, to new friends in this shifting, sometimes shady, city with whom I share my current life. I am ready for the city now, ready to take it on again.
Comments (0) | More: Uncategorized
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 affect, manipulate outside of ourselves. To accept that working on ourselves is worthwhile is to accept that transforming our individual experience is possible without changing anything outside of ourselves.
I often wish the job that I get paid to do could be more closely tied to the internal work of self-transformation that I am engaged with. I wish that we could speak more openly, systematically about the process of working on ourselves, and not only at the watercooler, but as part of the bulk of our work. We should question our patterns and wonder about the way we do things. We should consider our past, reflect on our assumptions and judgements, destabilize what we think is our unchangeable way of being, brush our teeth with the opposite hand. We ought to know ourselves intimately, and possess ourselves fully.
Recently, my pops recommended I read “The Art of Loving” by Erich Fromm. It is a very short, completely digestible volume that I recommend to absolutely everyone. I am moved also to write about self-love, and yet so aware of the hippie, mushy, cliche of that statement. But, actually, it is revealing of our culture’s limitations that speaking of self-love has been stigmatized. Any kind of love begins first with love of self. One’s relationship with oneself is a reflection, a microcosm of one’s relationship with everyone, everything else outside.
What can it mean to truly know and love oneself? And how does that kind of love affect the way we exist in the world? And how can our existence in the world as self-loving individuals, affect our communities, societies, countries, world?
Here is a trimmed version of the introduction to the book I just mentioned. I hope you will read the book, and I hope it will encourage you to make the work of the self a greater priority in all that you do in your life.
“Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one ‘falls into’ if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.
Not that today people think love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love – yet hardly anyone thinks there is anything that needs to be learned about love…
Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable… Many of the ways to make oneself lovable are the same as those used to make oneself successful… As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love – or to be loved by – is difficult… Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man’s happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy… He (or she) looks at people in a similar way… Two people thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values… In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.
The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of ‘falling’ in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of ‘standing’ in love. If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break sown, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being “crazy” about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.
This attitude – that nothing is easier than to love – has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. If this were the case with any other activity, people would be eager to know the reasons for the failure, and to learn how one could do better – or they would give up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of love, there seems to be only one adequate way to overcome the failure of love – to examine the reasons for this failure, and to proceed to study the meaning of love.
The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering…
If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one – my intuition…
the mastery of the art must be of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art… And maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art; in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power… Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which ‘only’ profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on?”
Comments (0) | More: Uncategorized
Spaces at Dos Rios
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.
Comments (0) | More: Posts
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 every moment in my own skin
Fully possessed self
I am me
Comments (0) | More: Uncategorized
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 Martin.
The killing of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and many, many other innocent youth at the hands of police, pseudo-police, or vigilantes is itself inflaming. The senseless killing of young people, of a people whose oppression remains embedded in the very fabric of our American society, is sickening and atrocious. But what is fueling protests in Oakland and around the country is that our legal system does not seem to serve any sense of justice in cases such as these. What is right, what is wrong, and how come the system that is supposed to have the answers seems to be betraying us all?
The Florida law which was the basis for Zimmerman’s acquittal required the defense to show that Zimmerman was acting in self-defense. And if they could prove this, then the murder of a defenseless 17-year-old could no longer be the responsibility of the man who wielded the gun with the bullet that went through Trayvon Martin’s head.
And so by the very fact that Zimmerman’s lawyers had the task of fittin the truth into this law – that they had to maneuver the entire situation that resulted in Martin’s death into a law that would make Zimmerman innocent – meant that our legal system would not be analyzing the rightness or wrongness of Zimmerman’s actions, or whether or not he was responsible for Martin’s death. Rather our legal system is concerned only with the written laws that exist on paper, and if anyone can figure out a way to fit what actually happened into the constructs of the law, then the legal system is on their side.
What happens when the law is not about justice but about words written on paper describing supposed situations? And the job of the judge or juror is not serving justice, but determining, much like the most primitive computer program, whether the story constructed by the lawyers can or cannot fit into those words written on paper?
What happens is mass confusion, utter inability to see the clarity of the situation. Two simple facts: that Zimmerman a) was threatened by Martin’s presence for no reason at all (unless, of course, he felt certain that all young, black men are criminals), and b) had no right or responsibility to leave his car with this gun at this side and act without any authority on his suspicions.
Zimmerman’s actions caused Martin’s death. It is so simple and so obvious.
Racism is very seldomly a red flag worn by some and not others. Rather, racism is as pervasive and all-consuming as the air we breathe. But our systems – whether they be legal, medical, or scientific – are not equipped to deal with whole, surrounding phenomena.
Our system can’t by its very nature defend against racism, because as soon as it tries to do so, it cuts up reality into little pieces. It picks through the truth to find facts that fit the desired story, and it loses sight of the giant, perfect, unmistakable truth that is glaring all of the rest of us in the face. The concept of right vs. wrong, of responsibility for one’s actions, become convoluted and confusing because of our legal system. It is a heartless corpse that denies the internal compass of every human being with enough living consciousness to be able to tell what is true and what is false. What our systems do really well is obscure truth, not reveal it.
The case is many-sided, complex, especially as race is involved. But the facts of the case make it crystal clear that had Zimmerman not attempted to take the law into his own hands, Trayvon Martin would not have been shot with his gun. The reality is that he did cause Trayvon Martin’s death by his actions and ignorance. That our justice system cannot account for this obvious factor is truly the tragedy. This article is particularly nuanced; do read. This one is good too.
Protests in Oakland
Comments (0) | More: Uncategorized
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. To be supportive to each other, lets minimize conflicts and emphasize on sympathy and respect.
In 2011 time is becoming more sensitive and therefore we need wiser planning for our immediate future. Please lets organize and share our thoughts. We need closer communication and open discussions. We are of two complementry generations and if become consious we can get to the, heart of the truth and accept the reality to understand better solutions to our problems.
In 2011 we may face more restrictions but we can change these restrictions to our benefit. Train ourself to become a brave and smart observer. A real conscious human of the age. Lets for the first time be a manager of our minds and have control over the inner personal world and outer universe. Our mind is the door between the two worlds. Most fears come from unconscious emotions. Consciousness takes fears away and create love and sympathy. Unconscious emotions create loneliness , emptiness and fear.
In 2011 lets hope to the best.
Be Cool,
Darab”
Comments (0) | More: Uncategorized
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 dying, and one of us could die faster than the other, much faster, maybe immediately. I may never see you again. You may always be a shade of a memory to me. Still I love you with the deepest passion I can muster. I love you with the force of a typhoon. I love you until I am dissolved in my love for you. I love you for me, not for you. I love you for the delicious closeness to death and life I find in my loving of you. I love you as a person dead to her own life. I love you without considering who you are. I love you with unconditional forgetfulness. I love you while lying half asleep, half awake, in a bed I inherited.
The crinkled corner of a white pillowcase.
One deep breath.
I am in a half-sleep trance . The world outside my window is as silent and still as it will ever get. Everyone in the neighborhood is sedated by the dark, their frontal minds receding to expose all their deepest secrets as a dim glow at the center of their heads. Every thought excites and terrifies me.
Nobody has ever been here before.
How many living beings on earth?
A blue ink stain on the tip of a finger.
Sitting in a waiting room, on a green leather chair.
Your grandmother’s, grandmother’s, grandmother’s mother.
Mincing a single clove of garlic.
Yourself, ages eight to ten.
A dream home, with bay windows overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
The stories you will create when you are three times your current age.
Half asleep, I am mostly free, and entirely vulnerable. I can feel that life is an unknown amalgamation of things that are happening all at once while I bear witness. I can see the stories I am living don’t belong to me. The light of day is eons away. Tonight could be the night when the sun doesn’t rise as I expect it to. I turn my head, and witness woven fibers of cotton, one over, one under, many times. I shift my arm and remember a dream once had of being unconditionally embraced in a lake or swimming pool.
The outer edges of feet.
The hollow tube of throat.
The Grand Canyon, though you’ve never been.
Every book you’ve ever read.
Deep-fried funnel cakes sprinkled with powdered sugar.
Mumbled words in his sleep.
A pang of anxiety, of desire, of need hits, because I feel that the future is like an abacus, and all the beads are being pulled to one side, and all that I desire depends on there being more beads. I need to make something happen. I have to do something fast so that I can satisfy the need now before the beads are all pulled aside, and it is too late for me to have what I want. Like only getting to go to Disneyland when you’re thirty, and though going is better than never going, you can’t possibly enjoy it the way you would have when you were eight.
His familiar face and unsettled stance.
The distance from floor to ceiling.
A stranger’s touch, unexpectedly soft gaze.
How many places have you lived?
Finding her sitting on the toilet seat, weeping.
The smell of forest air.
Endless varieties of toothbrushes lining shelves in an aisle.
The inescapable result of that which is happening.
Freedom in a fish bowl.
The undulating line of mountains in the distance, in a haze of blue, grey, white.
Meeting a friend’s mother and feeling surprised.
Chemistry.
Physics lab in Toronto, underground, beneath stubborn snow.
Freedom in a fish bowl.
Months whittled into moments.
The slight uplift of chin and eyebrows a moment before he begins to speak.
The tangible weight of all words unsaid.
Forgetting yourself, the animal, in the heady consciousness of mid-day sun.
The way a minute passes while laying awake at 3:00am next to a digital clock.
My mind is writing stories that may or may not be original creations.
Once upon a time we were all aquatic lizards.
Your shape, as determined by the one belief that makes you who you are.