Raha Behnam

The Power of Suction

May 05, 2012

This post is an act of procrastination: writing about something I ought to be doing.

You mustn’t deprive your soul of that which feeds it for too long. We grow and it is the hope that we learn to feed ourselves when we are hungry. Or thirsty for drink or tired for sleep. We ought also learn what it is that feeds our souls.

It has been several months now that a yearning hunger has overcome my insides. I can viscerally feel a gap, an empty, gnawing space at the center of my chest that needs filling.

Feed me with song and sound, with movement and community, love for work that tires the body. Take me somewhere my soul can feast. Somewhere sound vibrates my insides.

I am on the train, sitting, standing, overcome by the desire to move. Imagine not having eaten for four months, and becoming suddenly reminded of your hunger. Imagine your famished self and  then your gratitude for just an apple or a piece of bread. Even the soiled, fluorescent cars of the train are transformed into the most enticing space for dancing when it has been months since your hunger for movement has been fed.

Dancing is the ultimate in honesty. Every moment spent doing something else represents varying degrees of lying. Spending too much time lying and not enough telling the truth is dangerous; robs the days of value and meaning.

Things are happening now that force me to let go of all superfluousness. Some suction power is pulling me away from the place I live, the city, the state, the continent. And my life is becoming a speck within a vast landscape of time and space. The view from here is breathtaking. So little truly matters. From here, I know the one meaningful thing I can do while I am alive is to be a consciously dancing, embodied being.

As I fly further and further from that which is not vital, I am filled more and more with the intense certainty that I must have a dancing life. Everything else is literally     falling away. My family is being scattered. My friends remain distanced. Every day is filled with uncertainty. The power to define my  fate seems to slip through my fingers but then I look down at the hands that remain. These hands, this body, has been with me through greater upheavals. It remains around me still.

Tell me body, what would make you the happiest doing,  if you could do it right now?

The answer, so plain and simple,

I want to dance, I want to move, I want to hear music.      I want to explore. Discover. I want to share this joy with others. I want to sweat and fall. I want to create through moving form. I want to feel pain, tension and triumph.     I want to struggle against gravity. I want to find myself in space and push it around. I want to dive in and work.                    I want to be immersed in process.

This past week, my co-workers and I have been graced by the presence of a group of Tibetan monks who created a museum exhibit displaying both Buddhist and scientific perspectives on the five senses. They warn us of the dangers of getting lost in one’s senses. They tell us that the body is a subjective lens and our experiences through the body are not always dependable or consistent. True, but as they reach for consciousness and awareness through daily chanting and meditation, I used to walk into a studio – deep breaths, coming to self, getting to the heart of things, dropping out of the madness just through this subjective, undependable body. This flawed, ever-changing mass of flesh and bone. My purpose, my meaning. My anti-drug.

Desperate times call for a little prayer

April 23, 2012

Great Things About Today

1. 3:00 am conversations about fats, life and love with beautiful friends to live with. Deep connections of heart and mind that create a home where there was none.
2. Waking up lazy, and honest. Fresh air sliding in through open window.
3. Dancing in the living room. Being upside down, being horizontal, being a ball. The spine and all the muscles around it. My oxygen and blood-filled organs. And the music that it all happened to. That this thing called dance is still there, no matter how many million other distractions I occupy my time with.
4. The cleaning of one’s bedroom, and the clean bedroom itself.
5. Writing colorful letters to second cousins and parents.
6. Making CD’s for dear friends. Listening to the music being prepared and filling up with an ocean of passion.
7. Walking friend’s lovely, sometimes anxious hound.
8. Finally finding a very very important CD with a great deal of my work on it!! That I thought. Would never. Be found.

Not So Great Thing About Today

1. Trying to be a helpful soul and offering my phone to two girls, no older than 20, in their car so they could “find their friends.” Suddenly watching them drive away with my phone as I am left utterly shocked and hurt. Heart pounding, hands on head, a naive little girl who assumes that everyone’s intentions are always pure. Too simple to recognize that unfair, unhappy circumstances are perpetuated as people are left with emptiness they don’t know how to fill.

But to make up for it all
1. A sweet, kind, warm soul named Steven who happens to be walking up Milvia just as I attempt to take the steps toward home and process what has just happened. Shaken, confused, pained, I take a few steps forward then look back, then walk back. Then walk forward. Steven lets me suddenly weep and feel everything. He walks me home. He puts his hand on my shoulder and lets me use his phone.
2. My father who always expects me to be as strong as a mountain. Never allowing me to wallow in anything. Never satisfying my desire to be the victim. My father, who tells me that this petty, meaningless event is not a reflection of humanity’s goodness. My father who tells me that yes, all people are good, who has no need to forgive the “criminals” because he never accuses them of being as such. My father, who never ceases to surprise me in his utter wisdom and power over all of life’s difficulties. My father whose memories of political catastrophes much much direly unfair than petty theft has left him as thick and tough as leather.

May those two silly girls be safe and at peace. May my heart grow ever stronger, may my skin be as tough as my father’s. May I always recognize the love and support surrounding me. May the delinquencies of humanity never leave me jaded or questioning of their goodness and of their deserving of all of life’s blessings.

Point Reyes

April 14, 2012

More and more, I become resentful of the way the city stifles natural life. It does not allow us to be most fully human, in the animal sense. The city does not offer physical challenges. It homogenizes, streamlines and flattens.
Our bodies desire a physical topography to climb and struggle against gravity within. The city’s paved roads, and sidewalks are too flat and uninteresting for our feet. There is no exciting shifts of weight and challenges to our balance available. Similarly, our eyes are bored by the grey squares of asphalt. What a far cry from the stony path of nature, wherein the eyes extend along the horizon and inform the body about what to expect, as the body maneuvers itself around puddles of mud, over boulders and anthills, making every step rich with action and meaning.
Each tiny victory of avoiding a puddle empowers the body and mind, makes us more ourselves – beings who necessarily experience their aliveness through the interaction between their physical selves and the less-than-perfect conditions nature provides.

But a couple of weeks ago, I felt the glorious retreat to my hardy human self at Point Reyes; the western-most edge of the north bay. Voluptuous rollings hills of green along the horizon, sometimes hidden by moist mist and fog. In the morning, a clearing sky invited us to hike the five mile path from the hostel to the shore and back. Bodies heaved themselves up hills and a dynamically rocky topography flanked us on both sides. Sometimes it was thickly wooded and other times it was vast brush and grass.
Reaching the water’s edge, silence falls among us both because of the awesome sight to behold and for the loud overwhelming crashing and roaring of an unfathomably majestic ocean.
Sand, pristine, fine-grained, beige. Sun streaming, commanding yellow. Ocean breeze flitting about, blowing against our skin with enviable self-assuredness. I cry for the realization of what I daily miss. I cry for the feeling of coming home as I stand on that unfamiliar shore.

The city does not invite one to stand erect and proud, watching the ocean write, feeling the wind blow away one’s worries from the brow.
The city makes a woman unreceptive at best, or maybe clam up; from the smog, the disharmonious grunts of engines and motors, the shadowy corners cast by the hubris of skyscrapers.

Once upon a time, I loved the city for its hustle and bustle, its human-filled spaces. Times have changed me to wonder how our cities may one day allow us to actually be human the way nature encourages, while not requiring us to exist within the complete solitude of a faraway campsite.
I wonder: can we strive for the best of both worlds? A physically dynamic, expansive, nature-filled landscape where men and women live, work, play?
Can’t our work buildings be less monotonous than skycrapers?
Can’t our streets be more nurturing than paved city roads?
Can’t we be fully human in the space we spend most of our time, rather than only on the weekend retreats and getaways, afforded by only so few…

Potpourri

April 09, 2012

Life is really just sadness, sadness. Tragedy exudes from my memories. Songs I hear echo the sadness I feel, see, remember.

Jon was one of my teacher’s at York University. He lead our seminar for my professional writing class. If I wasn’t so worn out by the daily trudges in knee-deep ice and snow colored black by time, maybe I would have stuck around.

In Vancouver, where I spent years eight through sixteen, I remember a Marine Drive lined with grocery stores, thrift shops and attempts at more upscale shopping needs. Oh, the sound of cars constantly swiping along roads wet with perpetual rain is cemented into my memory – kkssshhhhh…

Over and over again, as my fourteen-year-old self walks home from dance class, with her walkman in hand playing Alicia Keys’ “Songs in A Minor.” Probably wearing a light zip-up sweater, jeans over her pink dance tights, a black messenger bag over her shoulder with her ballet shoes in it.

I search for meaning, real love. Even my family cannot ford the river of identity that separates me from them. Life is sadness of ultimate aloneness, despite the many clever attempts to convince ourselves that it is not so.

I visit Austin to see family and call on an old friend, an old lover (truly I don’t know which). Searching for meaning, real love.

Why did we meet in the first place?

Why do you linger in my thoughts?

What am I to do about it?

Heat and blazing sun can make everything seem honey sweet. But they cannot ford the river of identity between me and him. Though it was a pleasant time, sadness ensues because my search has again lead me to a dead end. I wish for him to say the things that would give me closure.

“There is a profound reason why we met in the first place.”

“There is some kind of magic at work.”

“The things that happened were mistakes.”

But these words are not said in any iteration. I realize in his simple responses to my questions, my complexity forever separates me from him. There is nothing true between us. He is a plain row boat that cannot ford the raging river of identity. And I am a weeping willow planted in my resolve, only willing to reach my limp branches so far.

These days, I look at society and see only tragedy.

These days, the busy city terrifies me. My obligation to be there everyday for work is a heavy, heavy weight of questioning. iPhone manufacturing plants in Asia contain hundreds of underpaid, starving men and women. They are reduced to suicide. We live on the backs of their misery. Blissfully ignorant.

I feel sick to my stomach at the thought.

Can I even remember a time when my hand wasn’t poised over my phone constantly? How has this all happened so fast? How did all of this become so suddenly commonplace?

Right now, I seek refuge in a patch of grass and some larger-than-life trees. But we all know that time charges forward like a mad bull under our feet and before we even have the time to wonder what we are doing, we are caught in webs of necessity.

I was born in Iran. I have always had thick hair and eyebrows. We had a tiny turtle in our backyard. It would burrow into the garden and never be found. My mom’s singing rang through the house. My sister started speaking very late. My dad spoke gently, and put paints and paintbrushes in front of us.

I was terribly frightened of being left out and forgotten. Kids yelled and laughed outside while I was put to bed.

I went to Austin. My father’s sister whom I hadn’t seen for sixteen years said I hadn’t changed a bit.

A living room does not a bedroom make

Sometimes I lay around this foreign house, feeling imprisoned in a completely plain and unthreatening world. The walls, floors, doors, windows of someone’s home – her nest, her escape from the frustrations of the world – for me are transformed into a terrifying black hole that sucks me in without warning. One moment I am fine in this home; doing my best, going through the motions, waking up, watching tv, dressing, going to sleep. The next, I am suddenly caught in a whirlwind of emotions and disclarity where the home becomes my one sworn enemy. Like the worst kind of leader, it has put on a face of familiarity, friendship, gained my trust, only to shatter it.

I lie on a black leather sofa that doubles as my bed in a 16th floor living room. Sometimes, this couch is a comforting place to curl up alone. But then sometimes it suddenly become the only, and completely unsuitable, place for me to weep quietly to myself under the covers while others come and go, talk about trivial troubles like taxes and refinancing. Without a true nest to call my own, the public domain of living room, albeit one that belongs to someone else’s home, becomes my only place of recluse. And the contrast between what this living room is meant for – light-hearted, sociable interactions between the host and her guests – and what I am obliged to use it for – a space for retreat and seek some desperate modicum of private thought and feeling – is simply too great to bear.

It is a troubling feeling when you attempt to retreat from the world and deal with the internal turmoil you may be experiencing in an environment that is not meant to support this kind of life moment! A living room does not a bedroom make. Without the correct environment to deal with emotions that one yearns to experience in solitude, in quiet, the experience is completely unsatisfying. Everyone knows a good cry is sometimes the best medicine. But a good cry is hard to come by when you cannot revel in it; when you are interrupted by comparatively meaningless topics of conversation by people who simply cannot fathom the depth of complexity and conflict you are feeling in every free moment.

In my mother’s mouth

Those of us born on soil foreign to that we now live upon
may understand how the exotic, unknowable beauties of home
become
somehow dry, modern

uninteresting
with their roots removed

Raha
In my mother’s mouth, my name rolls over the tongue like an ocean wave, crashes on the shores of her palette and then keeps whispering against rocks and sand as it sinks back into her throat.

Ra
unabashed, with the strength of a Persian king begins my name
in my mother’s mouth
cuts through thick moments as if to wake the whole town
Ra
Not raw, like my adolescent self, still uncooked, unready to accept the whole of me
but Ra, wide and weird

Ha
In my mother’s mouth it is a Ha of sudden, arrived wisdom. The sound climbs ever higher and crests at its peak, as if to look down upon the world from glorious heights and laugh just a little at all the commotion.

But the name is more than just a necklace made of its syllabic beads

in my mother’s mouth
my name can be a verb
not just a call to my person, to come for dinner or to do the dishes

but a request for freedom
to set free
and be set free

in my mother’s mouth
Raha
emancipates the air from the drudgery of mere communication
and elevates it to poetry
in my mother’s mouth, my name is a sacred wish
to set free
and be set free

Raha shodam
in my mother’s mouth

I came to be