ATTENTION: Thanks for your interest in RedMatch. At the moment the project is on hold for two reasons, my poor health and the lack of a co-conspirator with the technical expertise to set up a web site that will do the things I want it to do. Finding a co-conspirator would be a significant step, but my health still requires me to put my part of the work on hold for at least a few months, so I won’t be able to send out the test version until late spring or early summer. I will keep your information and add you to the mailing list when I’m able. 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.
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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. 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. 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 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. 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. Waiting to be seen by a doctor. 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. On the last weekend of August I attended the Grief and Growing weekend put on annually by the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center. It was amazing, profound, and yes, healing. Here's the poem I wrote in my head on the drive home from Santa Rosa. On the island of sad people a wave breaks forever on the soft stone of our hearts there is a grove of arms for each of us that sways gently in the wind of our sighs. We cry out and the crows continue their work of being crows. We cry out and the deep rooted forest stays rooted deep. In the crowns of the trees, ten thousand green-tipped twigs still reach quietly for the sun. We cry out and our cries become a flock of small wings circling the place where we stand weeping. N.Y. Volunteers 17th Regiment in Puerto Rico, July 1898. This is an important week in Caribbean history. One hundred and thirteen years ago yesterday, the United States invaded Puerto Rico as part of the military transfer of colonial possessions from the dying empire of Spain to the expanding empire of the United States. On July 25, 1898, U.S. troops landed in the bay of Guánica, on the south coast of Puerto Rico. They were led by General Nelson Miles, who headed the first U.S. military government of my country. (Miles played a leading role in almost every U.S. campaign against the Native peoples of western North America, including the Lakota, Nez Percé, Kiowa, Comanche and Apache.) On August 13, 1898, Spain signed a treaty handing over the last of its American possession to the United States. |
About Aurora
Aurora Levins Morales is a disabled and chronically ill, community supported writer, historian, artist and activist. It takes a village to keep her blogs coming. To become part of the village it takes, donate here. Never miss a post!
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