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For the past 10 years I've kept a personal record of my life in New York and Mexico City, and an account of my travels around the world. This journal represents an intimate journey from my 20's and into my 30's, and its only purpose is to put a line on the sand - keep track of time - as it helps me understand where I am.
The second day of the year Victor and I sat in silence at the porch overlooking the lake. We listened to French folk songs, ate carne asada with frijoles rancheros, and drank a bottle of champagne while observing cranes bath by the lake shore with our binoculars.
The last day of 2010 started as a cold morning. My Mother watered her plants and listened to the radio out loud while I tried to write a few meaningful lines. “How do you imagine yourself in ten years from now?” she asked me but I couldn’t answer. Ten years ago I was in San Francisco with Pico. We bought red wigs and painted our nails silver to receive the New Year in style; I remember he was wearing a shirt with cow prints. After more then a year of leaving art and creativity behind, 2001 was a meaningful year of creative and self-rebirth, and Pico was a catalyst. That was the year I decided to move to New York, my last full year in Guadalajara. Today it’s been two weeks since I arrived home and I already feel a little nostalgic about leaving to New York on Monday. For some of us who live between two places, saying goodbye is the unforgiving routine that makes us question why we left, knowing that our innate need to satisfy the curiosity to explore a greater world and life, wouldn't have allowed us to stay. "You should consider getting married before your time is gone," an uncle said to me during Christmas, "you can't keep traveling for ever." What if I want to have both; is it possible? Life is too short, regardless if you decide to settle or not; regardless on how you spend it. Now, as 2011 starts, I try to guess where we’ll be in ten years, wondering if ten years ago we pictured ourselves as we are now.
Everything will be fine. I have a strong faith for even numbers.
"The day I met Brenda I was wearing my white boots and my hair was dyed; that is why she wanted to be my friend," Pico would say proudly to others. I choose him as a life mentor, and we were very close friends for over ten years. To him I was Princess Brenda, for me he was Pico Cometa. His studio in Alabama Street, at the Mission District of San Francisco, became one of my favorite places on earth; a place I always go back in my dreams. "He painted a blue shape on the courtyard's floor to resemble a swimming pool", I told my mother today. He will play his LP collection in the evenings and leave his door open for everyone to come along. I use to sit at his studio while he cooked pork-chile tacos and shared all his stories as an art student in Mexico City, his years in Wisconsin, his yearly travels to Quintana Roo and how he decided to become an artist. From him I understood the importance of being authentic and coherent. "Pico, whenever I have children, I want them to spend their summer vacations with you, I want them to learn from you there is another way of framing life, of living." The last time I saw him, me, my friend Helena and my colleague Javier went to his studio during a work trip to San Francisco and he played his collection of french and salsa records for us. The last time I talked to him was in May, he called one evening. "I found your phone number while cleaning my drawers and decided to call you Princess," he said, "you should come to San Francisco soon; there are many new stories I want to share with you." Pico knew how much I loved him and how important it was for me to have him as a friend. He showed me to see life in multiple colors, and for that I'll be forever grateful.
Betsy, Pamela, Michelle, Connie and Marcela have asked me how I've managed to balance my life with so much travel. Colombia, Japan, Alabama, Washington DC in one month, with new possibilities for travel emerging each time I open my inbox . "You need to be somehow flexible to adapt to all these different contexts in such a short period of time". I do. A week ago I was flying back from an incredible and intense trip to Japan and now I'm in Alabama working and sharing life experiences with women from very different backgrounds than mine. As a "collector" of stories, I seldom get bored. Visiting a mall with Connie, drinking ginger tea in the porch with Pamela, or going to a spinning class with Betsy bring on their own, new perspectives to my life. "Didn't you get bored at the mall with Connie?" her husband, John, asked me over dinner. "I actually enjoyed it", I replied to his surprise. The only thing I didn't mention is that I felt homesick as I walked past the kitchenware section. Neither I mention that I had to call my mom to ask her if she thinks I will ever have a real home, a family, and a kitchen to buy dinnerware for.
"Look! That is the most beautiful color of tiles I've seen!" I exclaimed to Capuchi as we were exiting a subway station in Kyoto. "Why can't we have this color in the New York Subway?" Our guess was that in New York functionality rules over aesthetics, or even beauty. After spending some days visiting Japanese Buddhist temples I reaffirmed the idea that beauty and good design is not, neither has to be, superficial. Form is meaning coming to surface and the environment shapes your state of mind and being. "For a strange reason, we usually don't have good design in America", Capuchi concluded after taking my picture by the lilac-tile wall.
"Did you ever imagine we were going to be drinking a beer in Japan?" Capuchi asked me as we had dinner in Nagoya with partners from the Pacific Island States.
There is a giant water-bug in my bedroom but I'm too tired to even try to kill it. I started packing for Japan and still need to read a few scripts before going to bed and certainly before a meeting with the Alabama team tomorrow morning. I told my psychologist that life sometimes feels like a roller-coaster where new events keep happening one after the other without time to digest, reflect and fully absorb them. Victor came to visit last week; we went to a Roger Waters' concert, a half-marathon in Staten Island, a few dinners, brunch and spend some time staring to the ceiling in silence. Quality time. I also got promoted last week, opening the opportunity for growth and brining new challenges at the professional level. Doin' Time from Sublime is playing on Pandora, and as the with experience of watching Pink Floyd's The Wall live last week, it reminds me of where I came from, why I took certain life decisions, and how much I have grown in the past 10 years. Things, and we, do change.
I'm laying on bed recalling the ad-hoc party we organized at the grocery store in Anolaima, Colombia last week. We were back from an activity where the production team and actors of the radio drama collaborated with local authorities to clean a nearby community. The production team is very diverse, farmers, youth, local politicians, community leaders and children. We were all tired but nevertheless found a pretext to have a beer, dance to salsa and vallenato, celebrate the success of our cleaning efforts and the progress of the radio drama production. I had the chance to dance with Felipe, an eleven-year old boy from a nearby community who is by far my favorite child in the whole world. He is astonishingly smart, positive, and has the common sense of an octogenarian that has gone through it all. If I could make a bet on someone, he will be the one.
Daniel and I are watching the US Open men's final match between Nadal and Djokovic as we wait for Belen to arrive; her flight should be landing around 10:30 pm. I've been couch surfing for the past four days, and will continue to do so until I leave to Colombia on Friday. I feel bad for Belen as she'll be forced to couch surf with me even when she'll be getting the true New York-chaotic experience. "There is an age when couch surfing is no longer fun," Jorge told me during our production meeting today. My house is a mess, so I rather swallow the shame to ask my friends to host me for a few days. Holes in the walls and ceilings, and fine dust covers every surface. Last night as I was riding the subway to Capuchi's house carrying my bags wet from the rain and covered in white dust, I smiled to a man carrying a fishing pole and a bucket full with fresh fish he had just caught in Long Island City. New York is the kind of place where you can never go wrong; there will always be someone odder than you getting all the attention.
We are so many things, we are so many people. I once heard that there was no such thing as an original idea, and I think what we call original ideas are the abstractions to the accumulation of collective knowledge. So again, we are the accumulation of our experiences, of the people with whom we shared. We all shape one another. Arvind always says that relationships have longevity, and they do, not only we keep growing with the people around us, but we carry the knowledge and teachings of others within ourselves. Someone left a comment to my previous post with a mention to the concept of chocomilkconhuevo (which literally – and oddly - translates to milk chocolate with an egg). Chocomilkconhuevo was a good-humored code my friends and I used to refer to our way of thinking, which was considered strange for the conservative standards of Guadalajara. I’m not sure who left the comment, but it reminded me of some of the stories that lead me to where I am now. A few months ago Agatha, who lives in Cyprus after being my roommate for 3 years, sent me an article on friendship published by the New York Times. The author stated the importance of relationships where the question of worth does not even arise. The willingness to be there, without any expectation of an exchange for pleasure; true friendships are not investments; they don’t exist for what they will bring in the future. To be a friend is to step into the stream of another’s life.
It is past midnight and Troy, Marcelo, Oscar and I are in the living room drinking wine around a candlelight as we wait for the electrician to come and fix our electricity. Troy and Marcelo are making our Thanksgiving plans and describing deep-fried turkey and green-bean casserole. Do you like okra? What about collards? "How do I write collard greens?", I asked Troy. "If you are quoting me, you can say I said 'collards', that's what we call them." In the meantime, the electrician has come with the bad news that it is not a fuse problem but a failure in the whole wiring system, which means we won't have electricity tonight, or not even tomorrow. We could all sleep in the living room. Camping in.
I've been always fascinated by how life and beauty blooms even in the most harsh circumstances. It is in a way a certain kind of resilience, a genuine manifestation of adaptation and survival. In Mexico City, even as polluted and populated as it is, you'll always find yellow flowers blooming in between the concrete blocks on the sidewalks. In the same way, you'll always meet people that have managed to find joy in what appears to be hostile routines. "I love cinema, artistic films and reading science fiction," a taxi driver told me as he drove me from Condesa to Polanco in Mexico City, "I read during traffic lights, and take advantage of the long hours I spend stuck in traffic". Ten years ago my mother, grandmother and me made a road trip in search of our roots in Jalisco. We drove to Platanar, a small village two hours away from Guadalajara that came into oblivion when a highway was built destroying its plantations and making it impossible for drivers to drive through it; or even know of its existence. Manuel, my grandmother's cousin, still lived there and took care of his parents, who must have been almost a hundred years old. They lived in a house in ruins, most of the ceilings where long gone, and the interior patio of a once colonial house was covered with fallen walls, bricks, oxidized pieces of metal and long-stem wild grass. I was surprised to find out that Manuel appeared content with his life, and even more so to discover that he could easily talk about black holes, fractals or bio-technology. Everything he had done all his life was to read every single publication that made its way to Platanar; this included years of volumes of Selection of Reader's Digest. Nobel Prize writer Wole Soyinka spent 27 months in jail before fleeing his native Nigeria to the United States. He was denied access to books, paper and ink so he tried to remember every possible mathematic equation to keep his mind alive. These stories remind me of one of my favorite movie scenes from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: I survived because I held to my own humanity. That's all I could do because that is all I had. Like you. Cling to your own humanity and you'll survive. Like yellow flowers blooming from concrete blocks.
I've been thinking to create a group to invite everyone that had suffered a panic attack at least once in their life. Even when I've had them in the past, I always forget how terrifying they can be. Last week, after a delightful brunch with Lily at Cornelia Street Cafe, I wondered around the West Village by myself. It seemed perfect at first, nice weather and all the time of the world for myself to roam around. Suddenly, and without any anticipation, everything felt wrong, somehow off. The weather was not as nice as I thought, it was actually extremely hot and humid, and the time for myself felt like an endless and empty agenda. Rapid heart-beats and sudden panic followed by sweaty hands and trembling feet. It was not the first, but the third time in my life it happened, so I reacted promptly haling a cab and getting home - to a safe space - as soon as possible. The next day I signed in for therapy. Somewhere I read that panic attacks are one of the most terrifying experiences; with no doubt it is for me. My therapist says it is a good sign that my body is reacting and calling for attention. "This in New York City, and it is stressful to be in this city. If you add your travels, your long-distance relationship and your perceived lack of stability, it is natural for your body to react in such a way." I've been talking and sharing about it with friends, and I've been happily surprised by their response. Maaike has sent a podcast of her favorite meditation teacher. Daniel and Capuchi have spent their Sundays with me. Victor has called every morning with special eagerness. Others have shared their own anxiety experiences. "If anyone has an intestine infection they'll run to the hospital and get treatment, but must people wouldn't ask for help if they feel anxious," Daniel says, "mental health is terribly stimagatized." As my therapist recommended, I've been spending time with myself every morning to establish a routine I can carry with me with every travel. For the past days I've been drinking chai tea with extra cardamom while reading the newspaper by the window. Being good to oneself sounds like an easy task, but for some of us it takes all of our mindfulness to do so.
I love myself in this picture as it reminds me of my inner strength. Looking straightforwardly at the camera, so secure of myself, my elbows resting on the car and with the expression of someone that has lots of ideas to share and is confident on who she is; feeling beautiful with being messy.
“We all can relate to a redemption story”, Troy said at brunch a few weeks ago. His comment sank in as I was just reading a piece on the use of archetypes and ambiguity in storytelling as a way to appeal to a greater audience. Stories of redemption are indeed part of our collective memory, even when the redeemer, the need for redemption and its process are contextual. I read in a book review in the Financial Times that there are universally shared truths that are arrived at differently in many systems of thought. If our choice of our own truth is at all meaningful, we must experience other truths as truthful.
In my search for a new and expanded set of meanings, I went to an event that brought together a Buddhist and a Rabbi to discuss The Tibetan Book of the Dead. “The Book of the Dead describes two central archetypes, one representing the positive and the other representing the negative. It is us with our accumulation of experiences that we interpret what the archetypes stand for. Everything we say about God comes from our perception”, the Buddhist said, “Jesus represents the universal story of redemption.” For the Buddhist, there are five aggregates of self: form, sensation, perception, interpretation and consciousness. “I don’t even know what self, or for that matter soul, means”, the Rabbi joked, “for me it is about being alive or dead; you are your body so when the spark of life in it dies, everything you are goes with it.” If I die, what will remain? How many people are still living in our memory? What is survival? “For me soul is an ensemble of my hopes, fears, loves. It dies with me,” he added. “What is your take on Judaism?” the Rabbi was asked by someone in the audience. “The prevalence of ambiguity,” he replied to a room filled in laughter.
I bought three white roses on my way home and I placed them on a white vase by my bed. Lately I’ve been a little obsessed with white in all its shades and tonalities because the beauty of its emptiness, or I rather say its reflection and inclusion, brings me peace. I like to think that we all appreciate beauty, and to an extent try to bring it to our lives in any form or representation that is meaningful for us. I wish I had the painter’s sensibility to translate abstract emotions and complex concepts into strokes and colors. I’m not a writer either but in the process to find my voice I try to reflect the voice of others. I patiently keep writing, keeping in mind the fundamental principle of growth and learning, and hoping for an ever-evolving maturity. It took several years after Georgia O’Keeffe’s death for New York art critics to consider her as an abstract artist beyond her flowers and the image of an overt sexual woman. What is interesting for me is that she started working with abstraction, creating her own vocabulary of colors and forms, and returned to it a few years before she died. For a long period, as she fought the association to her sexuality, she mastered the use of color by painting figurative art that left no room for interpretations. She had the capacity to keep learning and growing, while she adapted to the circumstances as her life unfolded. Her paintings tell the story of a life-long process that is greater than herself, as it provides the opportunity for the others to get closer.
