I am a Puerto Rican Jew, born of Ukrainian Jews fleeing war and repression to become sweatshop organizers in 1910s New York, and landed gentry from Naranjito, turned working class migrants in 1930s Harlem and the Bronx, landing in the same garment shops a generation later. I'm also a lifelong activist historian who embraces complexity and has spent decades building alliances between people who misunderstand each other.

It is true that there are specific challenges in the relations between Latin@s (those who are not Jewish) and Jews (the ones who aren't Latin@.) It's true that these challenges are deeply rooted in the anti-Semitism of the Catholic hierarchy, but the belief system that burned Jews at the stake, accused us of sacrificing Christian babies, and held us responsible for the crucifixion of Christ, long predates the State of Israel. And long before that state was founded out of the ashes of genocide and at the expense of a colonized Arab people, Jews were the shock absorbers of Europe's class societies, "Middle Agents" drafted into being the local representatives of distant and definitely Christian ruling classes who alternately exploited and persecuted them while squeezing the life blood out of Europe's peasants and workers.

People are often confused by anti-Semitism They see many US Jews accumulating wealth, moving up, gaining positions of influence, and they say, "What oppression?"  Anti-Semitism doesn't work the way racism does. Racism tries to create permanently exploitable groups of workers, people kept in line through discrimination and violence, kept poor and dependent on low wage jobs.

The whole point of anti-Semitism has been to create a vulnerable buffer group that can be bribed with some privileges into managing the exploitation of others, and then, when social pressure builds, be blamed and scapegoated, distracting those at the bottom from the crimes of those at the top. Peasants who go on pogrom against their Jewish neighbors won't make it to the nobleman's palace to burn him out and seize the fields. This was the role of Jews in Europe. This has been the role of Jews in the United States, and this is the role of Jews in the Middle East.

The people I come from were small scale farmers and garment workers. Like them, the vast majority of European Jews were in no position to wield any sort of economic power, but in a world where the economic lives of Jews were strictly regulated (my great grandfather had to pay bribes to work at a hardware store in a town where Jews were forbidden) the role of agent to the rulers was one of the few options offered, often under duress.

Just as Jews in Europe collaborated in the collection of outrageous taxes from the peasantry, Jews in the United States have collaborated in the exploitation of urban people of color, trading an illusion of safety for the powerful alliances we could have built, and often becoming one of the local faces of oppression: landlords, pawnbrokers, public school teachers and administrators, doctors, and the social workers of the welfare machine, implementing policies that serve others, and collecting rents for the shareholders of the Bank of America. Jews are by no means the majority in any of these roles, but it's been a widespread defensive strategy, in response to the instability of Jewish life, to seek upward mobility not only for its own sake, but as a safety net against persecution.

This is a direct result of the deep insecurity that cyclical oppression creates: no amount of privilege feels like safety, and historically, it hasn't been. The knowledge of what happened to the wealthy, assimilated Jews of Berlin haunts the Jews of Great Neck, who compromise potential alliances for the sake of guarantees that have never worked before, but keep seeming like they should. It's a form of opportunism, the willingness to take up whatever tools are at hand, including the master's tools.

And Latin@s have done the same thing, been willing to mobilize the centuries old weaponry of Catholic Jew-bashing in the fight for economic and social justice, mobilize traditional slanders about Jewish greed, or conspiracy theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written by Czarist secret police, that worked so well to keep old world peasants throwing stones at Jews instead of bringing down the aristocracy, been willing to buy the idea that the problem with the slumlord is that he's a Jew, and not that he's a slumlord.

This system of interlocking opportunisms has diverted attention from the real power structure of this country, which is solidly white and Protestant, and kept us from forming alliances powerful and broad enough to unite the 99%. It saps energy from the work of ending racism and economic injustice, and eliminating the anti-Semitism that keeps Jews scared enough to keep signing up to be middle agents.

In the last line of his article, Rubén Navarrete says of the Israelis, "given all that they've endured, they should know better." Trauma doesn't make people into better human beings. Most of the time, trauma just makes people terrified and easier to manipulate. It makes starving Irish tenants fleeing a devastating famine willing to own slaves or homestead Native American land or police the ghettos they used to live in. It makes the formerly kidnapped and enslaved willing to set up shop in Liberia and hold their African kin in contempt. It makes the survivors of Hitler's Final Solution be willing to become harsh colonial masters, agents of US oil greed and militarism, to bulldoze the villages of Palestinians to make Jewish settlements, torture and kill those who resist, and still insist they are the victims here. People who have faced destruction don't necessarily know better.

The Jewish right in the United States has a near monopoly on public discourse about Israel, and is amazingly effective at silencing dissent. Anyone, Jew or not, who criticizes Israeli policies toward the Palestinians is accused of wanting to destroy the Jewish people. I myself appear on the Masada 2000 list of Self-Hating, Israel Threatening Jews, (twice, because they don't get it about our double last names.) AIPAC and their ilk are experts at mobilizing intense pressure on funders and sponsors of lectures, films or social justice programs that expose Israel's commitment to crushing Palestinian sovereignty, with all the brutal details that that entails. They believe that the survival of all Jews depends on a heavily militarized, Jewish state in which Palestinians must be deprived of their rights in order to secure the rights of Jews. They insist that to say anything negative about Israel is inherently anti-Semitic, makes the critics retroactive Nazi collaborators. (Yes, I've received emails accusing me of complicity in the deaths of Polish Jewish children who died before I was born!) So when U.S. Latin@s are described as hostile to Israel, this aggressive defensiveness is part of what's in play.

The thing is, that while they're wrong, they're not always completely wrong. Criticism of Israel does take on a special tone of hatred and contempt that draws on the same poisoned well as attacking Jewish slumlords as Jews, or singling out the Jewishness of one group of developers out to build an exclusive luxury resort on Puerto Rico's coast, while never mentioning the religion of the many Christian developers.

Israel is a colonial country with a strong right wing nationalist ideology that does what such regimes do, and it's not any better or worse than other colonial regimes with right wing nationalist ideologies. Yes, it's critical that those who love justice stand up for the human rights and sovereignty of Palestinians and their Jewish Israeli allies, but there is no contradiction between doing so and also standing up for Israeli Jews, jammed into the deadliest middle agent role in our history. Israel needs to be pressured toward integrity, economic and political justice, and respect for human rights, in exactly the same way that the Congo needs to be pressured, that tortured country where millions have died in wars over the precious metal that makes our cell phones work, and the legacy of Belgian colonial rule, known for its extreme brutality, is reenacted every day between Congolese people.

And while it's true that opportunism has been a widespread strategy of both Jews and Latinos, the opportunism that leads us to compromise our integrity by agreeing to the mistreatment of others, both my peoples have long traditions of a very different strategy. Jews have been disproportionately present in movements for social justice wherever we have landed, and significant numbers of U.S. Jews have understood from the start that the

best guarantee of our own safety is to form strong alliances with other oppressed people, to fight together, to get each other's backs.

My great-grandparents were garment trade organizers. My grandfather was a radical lawyer who worked on the Scottsboro case. My father, married to a Puerto Rican activist woman, was a rural organizer in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and a leading figure of the independence movement in the 1960s, until we left the island. And my mother, raised among Jewish immigrants in New York who were her best allies against racism, never tolerated anti-Semitism from anyone.

We can't allow support for Jews to be defined as support for Israeli policies. Support for Jews is support for Jewish integrity, for deeply held values of justice and compassion, support for U.S. and Israeli peace activists, for human rights organizations like the Middle East Children's Alliance, and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Many US Jews are deeply concerned about Israel's violent seizure of Palestinian land, and violent suppression of dissent, but don't speak out because they are afraid, not only of attack from the Jewish right, but also of the reality of anti-Semitism, which always flares in times of economic crisis. To many, it still seems that Israel is the one safe haven when things get bad again. We have to see to it that it isn't true.

As long as right wing Jews are the strongest voice against anti-Semitism, they can continue to define criticism of Israeli colonialism and support for Palestinian rights as Jew-hating, intimidating and confusing potential supporters of a just peace. As long as non-Jewish critics of Israeli colonialism allow anti-Semitism to creep into their critiques, U.S. Jews will hold back from joining them, just as people of color don't rush to join white-led organizations where racism isn't actively challenged.

One of the most effective ways for Latin@s to support the people of both Israel and Palestine is to understand the workings of anti-Semitism and take clear strong stands against it. The central justification for Israeli militarism and the subjugation of Palestinians is the belief that Jews are alone in the world, that no-one will fight for us, that the next time Jews are blamed and attacked, most of the world's people will stand by and watch. The more the Israeli right escalates, the more Palestinians are repressed, the less safe it actually is for Jews. When Latin@s are willing to examine our history of anti-Semitism, to study the ways it's been used to manipulate and divide us, and root it out of our organizations, communities, and families, we help create the conditions for large numbers of U.S. Jews to stand up for the rights of Palestinians and a decolonized, plurinational, democratic Israel, to abandon the middle agent role and get the backs of other peoples, knowing that they also have ours.



Aurora Levins Morales is a Puerto Rican Jewish writer and historian. She is the author of three books, and her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in dozens of anthologies and been translated into seven languages. She can be contacted at aurora@historica.us or on her website at www.auroralevinsmorales.com.

I've been single now for ten years, and recovered from my bad break-up for some time now.  Chronic illness makes it hard to meet anyone by accident, since I don't get out that much, but I've told my friends and the universe and half a dozen dating sites that I'm looking.  I know that I'm a catch.  I'm a highly intelligent, creative, passionate, perceptive, communicative, generous, funny, enthusiastic, emotionally mature and socially committed woman.  I love wholeheartedly and intelligently and I'm a great kisser.  And I'm not getting anywhere online.

The problem is, I don't care about the things that most designers of dating sites expect me to care about, and the things that matter most to me, don't even occur to them. I'm not looking for gentlemen who enjoy fine dining, new age divas wanting to make magic, or any of the host of people who insist on financial stability, athletic standards of fitness, slender bodies and glowing health.  I don't want to be anyone's "special someone."  I don't want an activity partner or a friend with benefits.  I want a comrade. 

Sexual attraction is certainly part of what I want with a life partner, but my chemistry isn't ignited by a predetermined formula of body type, hair color, facial features, or even gender.  What turns me on is aliveness, kindness, creativity, integrity, passion, attentiveness, presence, living in one's body, directness, awareness, and good clear consciousness about privilege and oppression across many categories.  Mind and heart kindle flesh for me. So I don't even look at the sections about what sort of body I want to cohabit with. 

I don't care what ethnic cuisines someone likes, or what they do on a typical Friday night.  These things can be negotiated,  I do pay attention to the list of favorite books, but as a window into values, not taste. (The absence of any major women writers is a red flag.)
  
What I absolutely require is radical politics, revolutionary politics, without jargon or sectarianism or cynicism, deeply feminist and deeply hopeful.  A shared vision of the world, and a passionate commitment to dismantle capitalism before it finishes dismantling us.

But OKCupid's "The Two of US" feature, which tells you what percentage of questions about sex, dating, ethics and religion you agree on, doesn't report on political compatibility.  Sites with multiple choice identities don't go any farther left than liberal. Keyword searches for socialist, communist, anti-imperialist rarely turn anything up.  "Left" is just as likely to bring up "left at the altar" as anything ideological.  Social justice gets a few hits, but encompasses everything from a vague interest in bettering society to working for a liberal non-profit to being a radical union organizer.  It's a labor intensive process to find people for whom politics is not just another preference, along with hiking and art museums.

My parents were lucky.  They met at a social gathering of young communists in 1948, got engaged after a lecture on feminist, held hands at the Peekskill riot, when right wing mobs disrupted a Paul Robeson concert, got blacklisted together, went to Cuba together, took on racism and sexism and anti-Semitism, the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico and the Viet Nam War, organized and agitated and pondered and discussed, laughed, fought, danced and sang rebel songs, and got each other's backs decade after decade for 62 years. Thanks to my great-grandmother, who raised him right, my mother spent the 1950s with a feminist man.  It's been a much harder road for me and most of the people I know. 

So I've decided to do something about it.  My friend Paul Malachi Penchalapadu and I are starting our own web site, RedMatch, specifically for leftists, radicals, progressive people of all stripes to find one another and fall in love.  Like OKCupid, there will be many questions people can choose to answer--about their most cherished values, about class background, ethnicity and culture, migration and nationality, gender and sexuality, relationships and sex.

Instead of the five or six standard options for body type, there will be a whole section on bodies--size and shape and health and the many ways our bodies differ from the ones on the billboards.  Our relationship section lets you talk about what you learned last time around, how you handle conflict, what your deal-breakers are, and not only your best qualities as a partner, but also what's challenging about you.    When we ask about politics, it goes way beyond labels.  We want to know what issues are closest to your heart, whether you like working with small groups or national organizations, whether you prefer to think about the local or the global, and what problem you really wish someone else would take on. 

We're open to suggestions.  What do you really want to know about a potential sweetheart? In fact...

We Need Testers.   I've been staying up nights drafting sections of the future site, in the form of online surveys, and now I need to recruit a large and diverse pool of people to test them for me.  To answer the questions and comment on them.  I want people of all ages, sexual orientations, genders, relationship preferences who identify as radicals, leftists, progressive, feminist, etc.  You don't need to be looking in order to help us out.  We want to hear from the happily hooked-up, too.  If you'd like to participate, go to the contact form and send me your email address.  I'll add you to the mailing list, and pretty soon you'll start getting short surveys to fill out. 

To Former Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, Arizona State Superintendant of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal, and the Tucson Unified School District

I am writing to protest discriminatory actions on your part that amount to defamation of my character and that of my mother, Rosario Morales, as Latina writers: You have not placed a single one of our books on your list of titles to be banned from the public school curriculum! 

It’s true that we are Puerto Rican, not Mexican, but you banned our compatriot Martin Espada.  I am not from any of the First Nations of Arizona, and it’s also true that the Tainos have never lived in Arizona in large numbers, (though you did bring a bunch of us in the 1920s to pick cotton,) but you banned Sherman Alexie who is from the Pacific Northwest.

You banned Ron Takaki, Howard Zinn, Henry David Thoreau, and Mumia Abu Jamal, none of them Mexican or Native American.  I have dedicated my life to the promotion of solidarity, to telling the stories of the oppressed, and cultivating our resistance.  I have written history rooted in the knowledge and perspectives of my Indigenous and African ancestors, which are not based on Greco-Roman knowledge and therefore, according to your definitions, lie outside the bounds of Western Civilization and should not be taught.  

Like Howard Zinn and Ron Takaki, I am a people’s historian.  Like bell hooks, Betita Martinez and Gloria Anzaldúa, I am a feminist/womanist of color.  My Back has been a Bridge.  I have Rethought not only Columbus, but all the conquistadores and crusaders you admire.  I have sung the praises of Tecumseh and Jigonsaseh and Urayoan who were likewise dedicated to building solidarity among their own people and advocated the overthrowing of any government built on genocide, conquest and exploitation.  I don’t, it’s true, bother with instigating mere resentment.  I go straight for rage and its beautiful daughter, esperanza. 

My mother Rosario boldly stated “I will not eat myself up inside anymore. I am going to eat you.”  She said she was what she was.  She wrote a Master’s thesis calling Claude Levi-Strauss a racist, and she made fun of him, too. 

In the spring of 1933, German Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels called for a literary cleansing by fire, to purge the “un-German” spirit from educational institutions, “purify” German language and literature, uphold “traditional German values” and turn the universities into centers of nationalist propaganda.  Like you, he was worried about civilization. Mobs of nationalists pulled books from the shelves of college libraries (including the works of  Ernest Hemmingway, Helen Keller and Jack London,) and threw them on bonfires in the streets.  German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose books were honored in the flames, wrote a poem on behalf of those, like myself, who were not, establishing a precedent for my complaint.

In “The Burning of the Books” he wrote of “a banished writer, one of the best” who scanned the lists of burned books and like me “was shocked to find that his books had been passed over.”  The writer rushed to his desk “on wings of wrath” and wrote to those in power “Burn me! Haven’t my books always reported the truth? And here you are, treating me like a liar!  I command you! Burn me!” 

By failing to ban Getting Home Alive, Medicine Stories, and Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas, you are treating me like a liar instead of a digger for the roots of truth, a scribe for the imperial chronicles of Fox News instead of the many-colored codices of liberation, a sad assimilationist longing to be just like you, instead of the fierce, malanga-eating, mixed-blood madre poeta bruja revolucionaria that I am.  You are insulting the memory and tarnishing the reputation of my mother spitting in the eye of colonial anthropology and the FBI.  You have committed libel by omission. 

Like the banished German writer of Brecht’s poem, I demand for myself, and for my Bronx Boricua mama whose ghost can still eat you: Ban me! I command you! Ban me!

Living with my father, for the first time I am managing my health in full view of a family member.  Until she moved out at eighteen, my daughter lived with my chronic illness and the series of catastrophic crises it routinely generates. She had to navigate the choppy seas of a childhood full of emergencies and the vast doldrums of my exhaustion, inevitably more of a caretaker than she should have had to be. 

In that world of impending shipwrecks, avoiding the tips of icebergs was enough to handle.  The deep, cold, roots of my condition, the massive flanks and fissures, were places I went alone, in the dark, filling notebooks in sleepless nights of poring over self- help books and websites and list-serves organized by shared and overlapping diagnoses, drafting new protocols,(liver cleansing, chelation, alkilinity, rotation diets, EMF shielding) looking for explanations, or at least relief, consulting one narrowly focused healer after another, trying out the pills, potions and practices that resonated, tracking changes (seizures, menstrual cycles, sleep and appetite and pain,mood swings, dreams, the clarity of my mind,) traveling by sonar. 

The people by my bedside saw the cups of bitter tea and bowls of pills, but not the insomniac research behind them.

I am living with my father for the first time since I was sixteen. Not since the full-impact years of single motherhood have I had this much responsibility for another person's well-being, and I'm drowning, unable to balance his needs and my own, both of us in shock at our changed worlds since my mother died and I uprooted myself to come here. I am struggling to exercise self care, which is hard enough without this balancing act, hard enough when no one's watching up close, seeing each choice I make. 

For decades I have studied my body and its responses, learned what helps and what doesn't. I have encyclopedic knowledge of the effects of nutrients, herbs, externally applied substances and internal energy practices, am adept at adding micrograms of this and that to the scales, balancing pain relief with a need for alertness, the adrenal boost and the sleeping potion.  Tonight I introduce him to the plants we both take as bedtime tinctures, show him pictures of longstanding allies, the companions I've turned to in pain-wracked nights and sleepless pre-dawns.  The purple bells of skullcap, periwinkle stars of vervain, maroon and yellow blossom of wild stream orchid.

I tell him that last night I was drenched in sweat.  Do I know why? he asks. I explain that I live at the hub of multiple diagnoses, where symptoms criss-cross and can be claimed by any of a handful of causes.  Night sweats can be Bartonella or Babesia, two of the co-infections of Lyme, or CFIDS, that uncharted sea of devastating neuro-immune dysfunction that some people still insist is hysteria.  Adrenal stress alone can drench the sheets.

We've just watched an episode of The West Wing in which President Bartlett has an MS attack. The First Lady wipes down his damp brow, says gently that he's sweated through his clothes, and the Surgeon General explains to the gathered staff that tiring himself could lead to spasms of his legs.  Suddenly my eyes fill with tears.  The severity of my illness has been dawning on me in a new way, again.  I, too, sweat through my clothes, wake up in damp sheets, and for the last two years, the muscles of my calves and feet have gone into frequent, excruciating spasm.  I don't know much about MS, what the relationship is between demyelination and sweat, but my own MRIs show a multitude of "punctate areas of high signal intensity" in the white matter of my brain.  Maybe it's the scars in the white matter that are making me sweat.

The constellations of lesions in my brain are interpreted differently by each specialist who looks at them. Like astronomers from different cultures, they impose their own meanings, seeing different pictures in the patterns of light and dark, the Dipper or the Great Bear, Lyra or Weaving Girl, a rabbit or an old man in the stains of shadow on the moon. Those splotches revealed by magnetic resonance have been explained to me as degenerative vascular disease, multiple sclerosis, the scars of dozens of seizures, the tracks of Lyme or Bartonella or both, the wreckage left by hundreds of complicated migraine episodes constricting blood flow, or whatever it is that allows CFIDS to damage the brain.  Like the classic fable of the blind men and the elephant, no one can offer me a complete picture.       

But in the highly politicized, profit driven worlds of the medical industry and the labyrinths of publicly funded social services, which of the overlapping diagnoses I pursue, and in what order, and in whose view, may ultimately be a strategic, rather than a medical decision.  The symptoms may be the same, but it's easier to get resources under some identities than others.  After thirty years of advocacy and research, it may be better, at least officially, to have CFIDS than chronic Lyme, a diagnosis that has lost physicians their licenses in some states, and is at the center of a raging war for profit, power and prestige.

So, late into my insomniac night, I revisit CFIDS after a few years of doing my suffering under other names.  What strikes me is the accumulation, in recent years, of solid evidence not only that CFIDS is a physical, measurable illness, but also documenting its severity. After decades of ridicule and dismissal, it's been less exhausting to downplay the intensity of how sick I feel, then to deal with the emotional battering of people's skepticism, the assumption that this is attention seeking melodrama, the endless unsolicited recommendations of everything from chamomile tea to affirmations. But I think the worst of it is my inability to tell the truth of what I experience without feeling like every word must be a gross exaggeration, when in fact it's usually a serious understatement. 

In a 2010 speech, leading CFIDS researcher Dr. Anthony Komaroff cites a major study on the severity of CFIDS, using a research survey called the SF-36, considered one of the best tools for measuring how sick people are.  When compared to subjects with heart failure and depression, CFIDS patients had a physical status similar to heart failure patients, the highest levels of pain and lowest levels of vitality and social functioning of all three groups, and substantially better mental health than the depressed patients.  Another study looked for physiological evidence of the wiped out feeling known as "post-exertional malaise," comparing levels of molecules that detect pain and fatigue in CFIDS patients and healthy controls.  For the healthy subjects, the levels peak eight hours after exercising, at two and half times the pre-exercise level.  For those with CFIDS, the levels continue to climb until they are nine times higher than normal, and they stay that way up to 48 hours after exercising. 

These are only two among many studies cited, and reading them is like suddenly discovering that I've been granted citizenship, and can come out of hiding.  I feel vindicated, like a crime victim whose testimony is finally believed. And then, browsing through the introduction to Peggy Munson's groundbreaking anthology Stricken, I find this: "Dr. Mark Loveless, an infectious disease specialist, proclaimed that a CFIDS patient 'feels every day significantly the same as an AIDS patient feels two months before death.'"

I have a dear friend who is facing a second bout of ovarian cancer, an exquisite being whose honesty and vulnerability, courage and humor, affect me like the most potent of my medicinal tinctures, an essence of integrity.  When she writes, I write back, even when I'm very ill.  This week I wrote to her about the words "terminal" and "interminable" side by side, about life-threatening and life-draining as categories of illness.  When my mother was in her last several years of living with multiple myeloma, she would call me for advice on how to live with such exhaustion, how to cope with such limited energy, such restricted capacity, and I would tell her how I do it.  I held her hand while she passed through the territory I live in, and on out of life.  Now I live in the room she died in, and I'm still exhausted. 

Although people with CFIDS, Environmental Illness and similar conditions have a high rate of suicide, and epileptics are six times more likely to be seriously depressed than healthy people, I am fully committed to being alive.  But there's an intensity of suffering for millions of us, that most people have no idea of, and the crazy-making result of its invisibility is that at the same time that I'm struggling to tender my body and soul the very best loving care I can, silently affirming my capacity to heal, all the while that I'm trying to live as fully and joyously as I can within these states of exhausted pain-- in order to protect myself from complete collapse, in order to get access to even minimal support and ridiculously inadequate care, I have write on form after form, chant loudly and continuously to agencies and authorities, acquaintances, family and friends: I'm sick, I'm sick, I'm sick.

I have another dear friend whose body instantly declares her disability to the world, who must fight to be seen as competent, while I fight to be seen as needing help.  Within the ever-shifting dynamics of capacity and incapacity, illness and health, vulnerability and strength, each of us holds truths that are partly submerged.  I know my survival depends on communicating both my competence and incompetence, my resilience and know-how, and my stark limitations; that I have to hold my own and surrender, accept limits and push against them. 
 
So this is what I'm thinking about these days, days that fall away from the clock, when I sleep from dawn to noon, or, like today, from midnight to 5 am. How to be publicly sick and empowered.  How to bring my whole self into view and still be safe, supported. How to be sick and undiagnosed and unashamed; or over-diagnosed, in a storm of contradictory instructions and stories, and stay calm, accepting uncertainty. How to shed the the million ways I am named by others and just be.  How to wear my own face.

Many years ago I was trained in Model Mugging, a powerful form of self-defense based on the physical advantages of female rather than male bodies.  We practiced the moves over and over until they were ingrained, learned at the level of nerve and muscle.  Our teachers wanted our bodies to go on automatic if the need arose.  And that does seem to be how it works.  We were told a story about a woman who was attacked at a subway station, eight years after she graduated from the training.  She didn't even remember the name of the course, but her body flew into action and carried out its moves without her.  She has no recollection of what she did to her attacker. She had to deduce it from the hospital reports of the damage done.

I can't tell you what my body does when it has a grand mal, tonic-clonic seizure.  My nervous system decides it's had enough and throws a switch and I go down.  There's a lightening storm that I never see.  I wake up in the landscape of its aftermath, in a field of debris, and trace its path by the damage done.  I wake up incoherent, stumbling after words, language shredded and scattered, my tongue bloody, my pants drenched in urine.  Burnt light, is what I say this time.  Over and over, whispering to myself.  Burnt light.

I wake up in the middle of a sentence, half an hour into a conversation, the first part of which is hidden from me.  This time it's my niece telling me "She died."  She died?!  "When," I ask. "Of what?  Was I there?"  Because it seems I was asking for my mother.  I often wake up asking for someone who is missing, so I must be aware, somewhere inside me, of a gap.  Or else I was just with her.  I ask if I still live on California Street, trying to figure out which chapter of my life I'm in right now.  It could be any one of a number of years.

The inside of my head feels scorched, the way our eyes get from staring at the sun.  It's always like this: a light too bright to be tolerated has shone into every cell of my brain and I can't see, have spots of un-thought floating across my mind.  Dragging the words I want to say, one at a time, out of the storage bins of words is exhausting, as if each one weighs a ton. 

Then there are the muscles.  In those few seconds of wildness, they have contracted hard enough to crack stone.  They have clenched beyond anything I could do with my waking will.  Every strand hurts.  My sacrum is jammed, my right hip excruciating, my left knee and ankle pulled awry. My arms, my back, my thighs, my face--it's as if each separate part of me climbed its own mountain range and is aching from the labor of it.   It's as if I was beaten up from the inside. I'm all bruise.

The storm no longer strikes without warning, or rather, I've become a storm reader.  Instead of green skies and tornado sirens, I begin to have trouble retrieving words.  Someone speaks, and there's a long delay before I understand what was said and can begin to reach for an answer.  It means parts of my brain are already flickering on the edge of the hyper-coordinated dance that will sweep in and take over from lovely randomness. 

I recognized the storm warnings on Wednesday, but it had been four years since I had a knock-down, drag-out seizure and I was cocky.  I even had a visitation. A beautiful blue jay perched on a branch outside my window, and I told my helper "That's my mother."  The bird began to peck at a branch and I said "She's telling me to eat," but I didn't do it.  I thought lying down and sipping passionflower tonic would be enough.  So after a while I got up and went to the dining room. The last thing I remember is standing facing the fridge. The next thing I remember is my niece saying "She died."

I learned to recognize my danger zones from a woman named Donna Andrews who not only woke herself from a vegetative state, but learned how to stop her ten seizures a day, some forty years ago, and with neurologist Joel Reiter, developed a protocol for teaching others.  She taught me to listen to my body, to recognize the risk factors unique to my being, to know where the limits of safety lie, for me.  In the last six years I've stopped many seizures, identifying what stressors were dragging me toward that edge and reducing them, one by one, until my brain no longer needed to throw an emergency switch. 

But in the last few months, stressors have piled up one on top of another and my ability to know how I'm doing has been numbed. Donna always told me I could go out on one limb or two but not three.  I was out on about five limbs last Wednesday, without knowing it. 

I cultivate awareness of the subtle states of my bodymind in many ways.  I control my immediate environment as much as I can, so that I notice changes.  I make my room a sanctuary, where subtle shifts will show up against a soothing background.  I retreat to my introvert's cave at the first hint of over-stimulation.  Sleep, food, exertion, temperature, emotion, sensory input, a build-up of stories.  These are the compass points, the factors whose levels I must be aware of.  If I'm not sleeping well, I have to eat extra carefully.  If I'm upset, I need to rest and stretch.  If I am collecting stories, I have to write them, give them away before they pile up in my head and trigger an avalanche. 

But half my belongings are 3500 miles away and I can't find that red velour sweater, or the golden mask of the Epileptic Ancestor that I've been working on.  I packed up a 35 year life and drove across the continent to my father in the hospital, in and out and in again, half a dozen times, had barely unpacked before I was flying home to Puerto Rico for the first time in six years, learned something shocking while I was there that interrupted my sleep for weeks, and also felt more drawn to live there than ever before (excitement is as dangerous as being upset), came back to more medical emergencies and unpacking, all the while moving into my mother's room, moving her belongings out, then drove to Albany, cocky still, I suppose, from my cross country trek, gave a talk and got food poisoning and had to be fetched because I was too sick to drive.  For the last few weeks my father was extremely anxious, his worries confused and repetitive, and I spent my waking hours talking him down from ledges, my adrenaline sky high around the clock.  There wasn't enough help and I was on all the time.  My fine tuned sensors got overwhelmed and after four years and a much greater margin of safety, I thought I was safe.  But I spent it all down in three hectic months.

This is where the model mugging metaphor is more accurate than it seems.  My body was in fact acting in my best defense, protecting me from unbearable levels of stress by blowing a circuit, like those little red buttons in bathrooms.  My beautiful, sensitive brain threw itself on the assailants, did those model mugging moves without my conscious participation, and left me to read the hospital reports. 

These are a few of the images from my cross country drive.  Many more are on my cell, but not yet transferred.  I'll add them here as I retrieve them, and add stories, too. 

Lake Tahoe: first night on the road.

Utah Salt Flats

Wyoming wind farm.

Utah/Wyoming borderlands.

Ancient ocean beds, dry as bone.

Nebraska dawn. 

When my family left Puerto Rico in 1967, this is where we moved to.  Ingleside Avenue, Hyde Park, Chicago.

Upstate New York. 

Upstate New York.

I meant to write about the next phase of my journey, about crossing Utah, and sitting in Rock Springs Wyoming with my brother on the phone, trying to find a place to camp. About leaving the highway and diving into the fragrant, dusky desert, and the high point of my whole journey, a night spent listening to coyotes singing among the canyons of a land carved by water and left dry as bone.  I meant to tell you about Nebraska's unexpected beauty, about the moment plains turned to prairie, about Medicine Bow and grassland, about the red-gold tint of autumn fields of grain and the North Platte River.  I meant to tell you about the little nature preserve where I sat and read under a tree while the sun cooked my lunch, about crossing the Missouri and the Mississippi, and watching the smudge over Chicago grow larger on the horizon. 

I was going to write about being in that city where I spent my teens, seeing it again after so many years, and about the two days I spent with my oldest friends in the U.S.  About meeting the grieving partner of my dead poet friend and finding my way to a synagogue in Cleveland without knowing it was where friends from California were rabbi & educator. I really wanted to tell you of the absurdity of the KOA ("we spell Kamping with a K") Kampground in Sandusky, Ohio and the beautiful lake in upstate New York, where my neighbors set up their outdoor living room, complete with generator, sports channel and, I kid you not, an artificial palm tree and a two foot parrot with a spinning tail and a sign saying "every hour is happy hour."

But sometimes life is faster than the pen, or the keyboard.  I arrived to medical crises and way more that needing doing than I had the ability to do.  Hospital visits and medical decisions, clearing my mother's room and starting to unpack with my wonderful attendant's help, trying to set up support systems and find my way around with a GPS that always tells me to turn down the street I just passed.  Ten days of that and then I was on a plane to Puerto Rico for the first time in six years. So much has happened so quickly that the story of that amazing cross-country journey has fallen behind.  Soon I'll upload my photographs, but new stories are blooming faster than I can tell them.  So this is just to say that when things stop spinning wuite so fast, I'll have alot to say.  

This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar.

                                          1
The morning I leave Oakland I wake at 5 am, and spend four hours finishing loading my truck. I check the mailbox one last time, and there's a package.  A new book by my friend Christian McEwen, called World Enough and Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down. The perfect journey book for someone about to hurtle across a whole continent at 75 miles per hour..
I planned my departure so I could go to Rosh Hashana services at my beloved Kehilla Community. I will spend High Holy Days on the road, thinking, singing, experiencing the geography of the United States as I drive I-80 right across its middle.  I park my loaded truck at the hall we rent for big services and go in, o immerse myself in song, bathe in prayers, dance to Ma Gadlu, receive blessings like a shower of petals from people I've gathered with for years, and sip the Rosh Hashana wine.  Then I climb into my ten foot Budget truck and drive away.
By the time the last errand is done, fog has started to settle over the Bay and the hills, that breathtaking play of light and moisture that defines the Bay Area sky, sun pouring through, glazing the blue fog with gold, then more fog rolling in, a white cottony blanket on the water, and pouring down off the hills, dimming the sun to a shimmer, and smelling of eucalyptus and ocean.  I am wrenched with love for this place I am leaving. 

Once I cross the Carquines Bridge, I'm beyond the range of ordinary errands.  The journey has begun.  Golden hills, like plush upholstered furniture, or buzz-cut heads asleep on folded arms.  Across the wide, flat, pesticide-drenched valley, into the foothills, racing against dusk, I must trust my memory of the directions, because tech troubles have deprived me of the mechanical voice of my GPS.  It’s dark when I turn off I-80 onto Rt 89, toward South Lake Tahoe, and when at last I arrive at Meeks Bay, I can’t find my campsite, and need help to get the unwieldy length of the truck into the only empty site that seems feasible, without crashing into boulders.  I have to borrow a flashlight and am feeling terribly incompetent, but my tent goes up easily and in half an hour I’m sound asleep.  
I wake at dawn and walk toward the new light, and there, only yards away, is Lake Tahoe, pearly blue, like pale glass poured round the bases of blue-grey mountains as flat as paper cutouts. Where water meets mountain is a band of deeper blue, like the dark rim of an old eye.  I dip my cupped hands in the water and wash my face in its clear, clean coolness.

                              2                                      The theme of High Holy Days this year is the famous trio of questions posed centuries ago by Hillel: If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am only for myself, what am I?  If not now, when?  As I set off down the road from Lake Tahoe, through the Donner Pass and onto the high desert, I am singing them to my own tune, thinking about what it means to be "for myself" as a disabled and chronically ill person in a hyper-individualistic society that prizes self-reliance so highly.  How to hold being responsible for myself, standing for myself, but not by myself.  On my left, the Truckee River unwinds through steep, rocky valleys, dark blue water ruffled with whitecaps from the chunks of rock in its bed.  It loops back and forth under the highway as the landscape opens up.  Here is the high country and the longest day of my trip.  I plan to cross Nevada and sleep in Salt Lake City.  I also expect it to be boring.  I remember Nevada as a uniform, endless brown, something to be gotten through.  But Nevada makes me cry out "Oh, beauty!"  The colors are pale yellow, a green the color of oxidized copper, silver grass, bone white earth, bright yellow flowering, sage green dotting the flat ground, and shades of tan and brown.  The ancient ocean has never quite evaporated from these dry Western lands.  There's something of sea bed, or coral reef, to the clumps of sage and tumbleweed, the long brown hills, the silver light.

When the great plates of the earth's crust shift, it seems to happen in a second.  Cups rattle, floors buckle, walls crack, waters move out and then in, alarms go off, the landscape is changed.  But those plates are always in slow, perpetual motion, grinding against, under, over each other, catching, building tension, and then jolting loose.  

It all began when my father drove to Ithaca to see an old friend.  On the way back, in Troy, New York, on the hottest day of the year, his car stalled at an intersection. Friendly people helped him. A woman guided him to the shade of a tree, called AAA, directed traffic around his stalled Volvo, and stayed with him for two hours.  A man brought them iced coffee.  When the tow truck came, he got up from the ground where he'd been sitting, and his legs buckled under him.  He fell against the tree trunk, gashed his head, bruised his ribs and scraped his arms.  A week later he started having sharp pains in the upper right side of his abdomen.  Two days after that he was in the hospital.  A gallstone, possibly knocked out of place by the fall, had blocked a bile duct, and his gallbladder had gone septic.  Hallucinating, confused, in pain, he was unable to follow what the doctors were telling him.  Normally they would have taken his gallbladder out, but he has a heart condition, and they didn't dare risk general anesthesia while he was so sick.  Alternatives were being discussed, and we weren't fully in the loop.  I got on a plane.

For the next two weeks I spent many long days at Mt. Auburn Hospital, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking out from the sixth floor windows over a summer sea of trees, sometimes sunlit, sometimes lashed with rain, listening to the endless beeping and buzzing of hospital machinery, getting to know the nurses and their shifts, their countries of origin, their moods; waiting for the doctors to talk to us, reconciling conflicting stories and theories and interpretations of tests, enduring repetitive questions, making sure nothing was done without our consent, explaining to my father, updating family and friends on several continents, riding the constant changes in his condition.  Once we brought him home, and then another stone blocked another duct and we had to take him back.  They put a tube into his gallbladder to drain bile, another through his nose into his stomach to suck out an air bubble, and a probe with a camera and a little claw down his throat into his gut, to catch and remove the second gallstone and widen the duct.  He was full of bruises from the blood thinner they gave him to prevent lung clots. Short, intense crises and long stretches of boredom and worry.  Between bursts of medical activity my father told me histories of the left, and the politics of genetics, but couldn't keep track of what day it was, what they'd said he could eat.  As I sat by his bed, feeling the texture of his bewilderment, I realized that though the sepsis was making him see things, this earth had been moving for months.

My mother and father were together for 62 years, from the summer of 1949 until she died in March of this year, and besides being his best friend, companion, intellectual and political comrade, and beloved, she was also the strong-minded administrator of their joint lives.  I saw that he was overwhelmed by the new requirements of his self care (testing sugar, taking insulin, varieties and schedules of medications) and the new requirements of the single life (home maintenance my mother kept track of, buying clothing my mother would have ordered for him, noticing emotions my mother would have noticed and probed.)  Slowly it dawned on me that at least for now, he shouldn't be living alone, and then, that I was the only one of his children who was able to move in with him. After thirty-five years in the San Francisco Bay Area, the ground has moved under my feet.

My mother's room, the "master" bedroom, is like a studio apartment, with areas for sleeping and desk work, and a wide loft with shelves for books.  With the help of my chosen sister, Freda, and now my brother Ricardo, I am stripping it of the aura of sickness, the residue of her dying.  When it is cleared and cleansed, it will become my home for the next year.  My job is not to nurse my father or keep house for him.  I'm unable to do those things for myself, let alone someone else.  Other people will help him regain his strength by climbing up and down the stairs.  Others will make his bed, wash his dishes, cook most of his meals.  He has a wonderful new doctor with a holistic eye who makes house calls.  My brother Alejandro handles his finances.  I have a different task.

In 1981 my father had a massive heart attack that almost killed him.  Afterwards my mother wrote a poem describing herself and my father as two trees grown so close over the years that she couldn't tell where he left off and she began, bound together, root, bark and limb.

Like any plant whose boughs have been struck by lightening or wrenched by wind, half its mass torn away, my father is simultaneously fine and in shock.  My job is to help him make the passage from the living half of a stricken ecosystem, struggling for equilibrium, to a balanced, rooted, state of singleness.  The Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. There is no road.  You make it by walking. I don't have a road map for this journey.  Not even a topo map.  But I know how to accompany, how to ask questions, how to face unthinkable change.  I'm still a citizen of the cities by the bay, still anchored to the edge of that great ocean and the eucalyptus scented air, fingers still intertwined with those of beloved friends at the other edge of the North American plate, but for now I'm living with deciduous leaves that will soon begin to fall, exploring the possibilities inherent in a landscape turned upside down.