An Essay on Love in 5 Parts

Dulce Convivencia.

His face peeked out at me, startlingly familiar and just a little painful.
Smooth brown skin, round cheeks, and dark eyes—the way they curved just slightly.
The similarity was striking.
I hadn’t realized how I loved him until he was staring out at me from a TV screen, breathing and blinking and gesturing with his hands. I felt like I had lost him.
Losing comes only with loving, I realized.

----

It’s funny, really, how everyone looks like someone else.

In Chile I learned to make ghosts of my classmates. Everyone there was someone from home. I spent several weeks unconsciously re-assigning identities, establishing a security blanket of familiar faces to surround me.

Then I came back home to Hawaii and I had the same problem. Everyone I saw was suddenly from Chile. I couldn’t avoid them. I went to the grocery store and saw Tío Olvaldo wandering the liquor aisle, or my friend Francisca leafing through magazines by the register—strange and aching remembrances.

I still do this. I am constantly turning my head to see people who aren’t really there. Shocked with an electric second of familiarity—the trace of I face I know well hidden within the face of a stranger.

I find the most surprising people in the most surprising places.

----

This time it’s in a short documentary about panela production in a Mixtecan village in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Panela is a type of raw brown sugar.
In this particular village much of their community life centers around the cultivation, harvest and processing of the sugarcane crop into panela.

It is a nice, quiet little film. Sparse dialogue scattered between long shots of farm workers sitting in the tall grass of a wind-whipped hillside, wiping sweat from their brows, and the calm constant creek of the wooden sugarcane press as it churns out a sweet, pulpy juice. Simple messages about good food and where it comes from. It’s refreshing to hear the same wisdom here, from this community, that every hip young social activist and his younger brother seem to be writing books and making documentaries about these days; know where your food comes from, know what’s in it and how it is prepared.

But this still isn’t the main impression I take away when the film is finished. There is something else which presses more heavily on my mind...

Near the end, the filmmaker—a young man returning to his home village after several years away—makes a short cameo to thank the audience for watching.
And when his face blinks onto the screen, my heart gives a quick painful start and my insides ache just a little.

He looks exactly like Daniel Soto. From my 12th grade class in Chile.

So much so that it shakes me up. I’m not prepared for it—surprised that after 2 ½ years, his image still causes such a raw and visceral reaction. It leaves me breathless and wondering: what power does this boy have over me?

Well, I’m not sure, but I think it’s love.

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. About what it is and whether or not I have experienced it.

I had a friend once who told me she fell in love every day, sometimes even multiple times a day.
I didn’t know what she meant by that. I thought it was a little bit ridiculous. I also thought she must be very loose in her definition of love.

Lately, though, I am starting to understand her meaning. My perspective is shifting and I am starting wonder if maybe that's not impossible. Maybe a person can fall in love every day, or multiple times a day. And maybe I could benefit from being a little looser with my own definition of love—allow myself to love more people, more freely. And to call it that.

I did love Daniel. I didn’t realize it. But then I found his face in a movie and my insides ached, and I can’t think of any other explanation.

I loved him with his colorful beanie and his old guitar. The way I would look for him every day at school and listen to him sing songs of revolution: Inti-Illimani and Victor Jara. I loved our long and clumsy conversations about politics, spanish-english dictionary in hand, flipping to entries like “neo-marxism.” He made me read the Communist Manifesto. I made him read Animal Farm. I liked his glasses and the way he smiled. I liked his muddled anger, joy and frustration the day we all found out that Augusto Pinochet died, and the time he took to sit down in the desk next to mine and explain to me all that this meant. I loved how he took me home on the micro my last night in Arica and gave me a pin with a Chilean flag on it, looked me in the eyes and gave a passionate discourse about “his people” and mine and the windows we had opened with our friendship, all while gripping my shoulders.

This is love.
And maybe it isn’t always as complicated or as involved as I once thought. Maybe, sometimes, love can be simple.
I am still very young, and I realize that. So maybe, for now, simple is fine.
If I think of it that way, then I have loved more times than I can count.

I loved the fire-juggling man from my Oregon summer camp. With his wild beard and kind eyes. I think he had a wife, or maybe she was a lover—a folksy dreadlocked woman who wore a long quilt-patterned skirt. He would smile at her when he performed and in between acts he would go and stand with her.
There was a child too, a little boy that he hoisted on his shoulders and swayed with to the music of the African drum group that was also performing that night. When I watched him there with his family, I loved him. I loved that he existed, I was fascinated by him. I watched him all night.
(I also might have imagined an alternate universe where I was the dreadlocked woman, traveling across the country with him and the other fire jugglers in a beat-up Volkswagen bus. Kicking up dust, racing buffalo herds, letting my growing brood of children run barefoot and free in the plains...)

I loved Martín with his tongue ring and his cigarettes. He lived in the apartment above mine in Chile and asked my host father for permission to take me out on a date. This was my first date. He walked me to the boardwalk on the beach by my house, bought me a diet coke and asked me not to tell his mother that he smoked.

I loved AJ, the Rwandan refugee I met on the bus in Orem. I loved how he dropped everything to come with me and find the nearest Starbucks and told me stories about leaving home at 16 to search for his deadbeat father, his inheritance in Rwanda and his experience with a band of gypsies in Europe.

I loved Joe from the airplane, and those 9 hours we shared easy conversation--talking and laughing. The music he shared with me, the love stories and the loneliness. The panic and urgency with which he spoke when he realized the plane was landing, and although our worlds had been intertwined for a brief moment as we flew suspended between continents, soon we would stand up, walk to baggage claim and part ways to lead two very separate lives.

I have loved perfect strangers: Jorge from the Laundromat. Hyun at the grocery store. Olga from my music class. Cello Joe from the Shake Your Peace concert. The Romanian woman and her little sandy-haired son with his dinosaur toy who I see on the bus occasionally.

I think of them all and I smile.
----

Dulce Convivencia.

The English title for this film is “Sweet Gathering”—but I prefer a more literal, if less graceful translation “sweet coexistence.”
To me, that is love: the simple sweetness that comes from knowing only that someone is alive. That somewhere in this crazy universe they, too, exist: breathing and blinking. And for that to be enough.

Tune Up

Hydrate.

Hello loves. These days I am muddle-minded and scarcely quenched.
My days are long and spent in offices.
Sometimes I forget to drink.

and then I get monster headaches that I can't shake all night long.

But it’s not all bad.
I do research on potential show topics and find wonderful things like the edible schoolyard and the wastach community gardens.
Now I am contemplating attending workshops on solar cooking and urban chicken keeping.

I am working on getting someone from the gardens to come on our show. I think it would be great to do an episode on the benefits of gardening with children and starting gardening programs in schools, or tips on how to start your own community garden.

At my other job I have ample time for movie-watching and intensive music-listening and blog-perusing—all while my hands are busy scanning articles in books for library patrons.

Here are a few things I am excited about that I have been watching/listening to/reading:

Glass: A portrait of Philip in 12 Parts. I started watching this today. I only made it to Part 8 by the end of my shift, but I enjoyed the first 2/3 very much and plan on finishing it later tonight.

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?

Philip Glass.

Joseph Childress--I heard a song by him called Chariots on an online radio station and I fell in love with it. Sadly, it is nowhere to be found online, not even on his myspace. He also doesn’t even have a record out yet. But he is worth giving a tentative listen to anyway. I expect great things from him in the future.

My discovery of Childress led me to my discovery of this blog on the Naturalismo/Freak Folk genre. Genre names and petty categorizations have always confused me. But if this genre includes Joseph Childress, Animal Collective, Joanna Newsom AND Devendra Banhart, it just might be a new favorite.

Movie trailers that I am excited about (mostly old news but...)
The Princess and the Frog
Away We Go
500 Days of Summer
and, of course:
Where the Wild Things Are

Lastly, I am very excited about this year's Twilight Concert Series. Particularly Bon Iver/Jenny Lewis, M Ward/Land of Talk and Iron and Wine/Okkervil River. Those are some pretty great lineups, and you can’t beat free!

Sorry about the media-saturated post. I'll try to post something more substantial soon.

My sister

This is my sister, Jade. She is an amazing girl and we have a lot of fun together.
I was reflecting the other day on all the things we have done so far. The list can go on and on but it includes:
Writing stories (our first one was called Mermaid Rock, about two sisters who are adopted by a family of mermaids and start a rock band underwater), singing songs from The Little Mermaid at the top of our lungs on the beach, building a doll house, inventing dances (we made up the lazy dance together--a dance where you flail about your arms and legs without ever getting out of bed), reading books and interpreting poetry with shadow puppets.
She makes me laugh. I love her and I know she is going to do great things.

Happy Adoption Day Jade.

Dandelion Bats

At their old house my Grandpa had little storage drawers in the garage labeled “crap,” “more crap,” and “assorted crap.”
That is sort of like this entry.

The other night I was dozing off in the living room and in the bizarre stage between waking and sleep I slipped into a semi-lucid dream that involved cartoon bats flapping all over the place with these huge soft pink ears.
I was so thrilled with my muddled hallucination, I purposefully woke myself up to tell the others in the room about it.

I bought a hideous, yet oddly wonderful wall-hanging at DI yesterday. I found it hiding out in the “yard” section of the store, utterly out of place. From the second I laid eyes on it I knew I needed it more completely than I have ever needed something so utterly needless. It is hard to describe.
It is this sort of three-dimensional tree made of yarn and wire and frayed string pieces.
Jessica thought it looked like a bunch of colorful hair ripped out of a clown doll’s head and glued to tree branches.
Becca and I thought it looked awesome.
It reminds me of Danielson and the 9-fruit tree.


Sometimes I think that animal collective captures the very essence of romance in their lyrics:
fruity nuts and good grains
solid souls
peculiar ways
I want to walk around with you (just you)

Sometimes I think of love as the chance to start my own empire.
Sometimes I fear that true love will always be accompanied with small doses of apathy. Like “who cares if the world still sucks as long as I can make my world, with you, beautiful.”
Or, you know, maybe love is just wanting to walk around with someone. I wouldn’t know.

The lifecycle of a dandelion is tragically short. I feel like it was only a few weeks ago that they sprouted up in just about every field and yard in Provo and now I can already see their fluffy white heads ready to blow away…

the joy of ear and eye

I love spring even though it is incredibly fickle: snow one day, sunshine the next.
I love how, with the warmth, everyone seems to emerge from sleepy hibernation and the lawns and walkways buzz with sudden activity. Out come the bicyclers and the football players and the picnickers and the sunbathers and the ice cream vendors.
Tonight I saw a couple of girls studying on a blanket-spread, stubbornly using every last second of daylight--until the streetlamps blinked on and they squinted at their books in the orangish glow.

Today I also saw a man crouched by the side of the road, peering into the grass like a child making some grand discovery. Many people passed him by, but as I approached I looked down to see what he was studying. It looked at first like a small pile of dirt, but on closer examination I saw a massive writhing swarm of ants--all concentrated in one small patch of grass.
I crouched down with him, and without diverting his gaze marveled with him for a moment.

Spring is still a miracle to me. I took the long way home yesterday and stopped to look at every bush, every tree in blossom. I felt the tiny buds with my fingers. I collected specimens of colorful flowers and cupped them in my hands.


It made me want to sing all of the springtime hymns:

For the beauty of the earth,
For the glory of the skies;
For the love which from our birth,
Over and around us lies;
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This, our hymn of grateful praise.

For the wonder of each hour,
Of the day and of the night;
Hill and vale and tree and flow'r,
Sun and moon, and stars of light;
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This, our hymn of grateful praise.

For the joy of ear and eye,
For the heart and mind's delight;
For the mystic harmony,
Linking sense to sound and sight;
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This, our hymn of grateful praise.

I've never read or sung that third verse before. It is not included in our hymn book, but I believe it is by the original author. I think it is now my favorite of them all.

Summer Plans

1. Read so much my brain explodes.
2. Work.
3. Plant. Water. Weed. Harvest. Eat.
4. Ride my bicycle.
5. Create things.