I sit, on this 2022 Thanksgiving day, with my 94 year old mom in her bedroom and me in the kitchen. I go into her bedroom thinking, “ok, enough is enough.” It’s nearly 2pm and she’s having a very unusual flow to her day - she is still laying in bed! This flow is a continuation from yesterday evening when waking from a nap, she felt sure that we had a performance that we had been preparing for and that it was time to go, NOW! I assured her that we had no such performance and that she had just been dreaming. “No,” she proclaimed. After a couple of minutes of arguing back and forth, her mood changed and she began to look a little confused, “Weren’t we just practicing?” “Is the performance today or tomorrow?” Caught between worlds . That’s what it is often with mom these days. And, that is what this Thanksgiving has felt like. This is a holiday that represents the brutalities of colonization, the lies of “Let us break bread together” AND, it is the holiday with the truest memori
THE PROBLEM IS (Mostly written on the train, traveling as invited to the Fetzer Institue – Oct., 2008) The problem is, you see me as so different. Not you at all, thus incomprehensible . Never clear, the mind searches corridors introduced during your original tour—designed as the ultimate distraction for tourists trying to see the natives by staying out of the village life. You were told that you are not a villager and surely, not a native. Not native to anything? Anywhere? Anyone? You’ve forgotten the taste of blood/the smell of urine unfertilized/the slick feel of skin never yet washed or the care in washing it for the last time. The not-you-ness swells dangerously large filling every orafix. Thus, you can’t pull in or secret. No conscious exhale or pause in response to the caw alert – right above your head. Someone else must supply your colorful language, your out-of-control fucking. Cause its just not you to go there….and,