The road to a new way of living.

I’ve started another blog to document my experiences working the soil and building a more just and sustainable world.

Please visit Ground Theory, a chronicle of how I keep myself close to the Earth and its people.

“I am large. I contain multitudes.” – Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’

Please visit my new blog Earth and Air, where I try to capture the parts of myself and life that escapes words.

When you live your dreams, you’re answering your soul’s request to be heard.
- Greeting card at the Tree of Life Bookstore,
Center for Spiritual Enlightenment, San Jose, CA

I have been waiting for months to write these words. Maybe years. I am at the advent of some major changes in my life. In the last several months I’ve been consumed by work and I don’t mean my job. I’ve been thinking about the next thing for me. I’ve decided to leave my comfortable job in non-profit property management to pursue what poet Aya de Leon calls “the created life.”

I voluntarily went part-time in September so it should be no surprise to my co-workers that I will be leaving in January. In my spare time I’ve been writing and reading a lot more, all the while marinating over what my next step is.

In a moment it occurred to me that I was already moving in a clear direction like a speeding train. I wouldn’t have gone part time if I didn’t know what for. I spent my free time reading more and writing more because that’s what I needed to do.

I am choosing the life of a creative. I am going to write and make things. I hesitate to call myself a writer or an artist because what I am deciding is not a career choice to me. This is about how I live my life. This is a decision for me to commit to my truth as a creative being and to commit to my vision of the world.

I’ve thought for a long time about how I will leave my entry-level job to do what matters to me. For the longest time I pushed myself to really figure out how to make this work–how could I make some money as an artist or writer? I bought in to the myth of creativity as a difficult life. Only recently I realized I was approaching the situation backwards. I needed to come to terms with my own fear of insecurity. I needed to make doing what I love a priority. I have had financial stability and it hasn’t been enough.

The time is right for me to do this now. I recently checked in with my boss about what I’m planning to do next. She told me “If there’s any time to follow your passion it’s now, while you’re young.” I have some money saved up and I need a break from this wage-slavery. I am ready to make the stupid mistakes I need to do to live the life I imagine. Those mistakes and that life is my birthright.

Some years ago I learned that Allen Ginsberg once told his therapist that he wanted to just quit his day job and write poetry. His therapist told him “Why not?” And he did it. Where would we be without that “Why not?” I have been waiting for my “Why not?” moment to come and it has finally arrived. Only in my case it is now a “You must!” moment. The energy has built up in me as I have weighed every option and found there is only one way to go. I have made the choices. I have expected more for myself and I am ready to give it now.

I am taking a huge leap of faith. There is a lot of pressure–for example, from my parents–for me to find gainful employment. It may not make sense to some people that I am leaving my secure job in the middle of a recession. But I am not making a rational choice. I am making an emotional one. There is something that John Keats called “negative capability,” a way of being in which one “is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” It is taking all my effort but I am arriving into a state of negative capability. I am becoming open to the Right way.

This is one of the most important choices of my life. I know because it has taken me over two years to finally be at the point where I am comfortable with this. I am choosing to create my life on my terms. I am going to do the work that sustains me and meet life head on, come what may.

I have been building up to this. I have only arrived at this point because I have listened. I have thought long and hard, and then I quieted my thoughts and found myself returning to the only way. How am I going to live the creative life? Only one way is clear. Any way is the only way.

PAWA/Maganda Reading and Conversation (UC Berkeley)

When: Monday, November 8, 2010 @ 6:30 pm
Where: 106 Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley (campus map)
Who: David Maduli, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Maiana Minahal, and Adrien Salazar!

Today is National Coming Out Day and today I come out for the young people who fight valiantly just to be themselves.

Not all of us make it here. It has been a hard month. Since the beginning of September, six young people have committed suicide across the country due to anti-gay bullying. Just this week  19-ear-old Zach Harrington, from Norman, Oklahoma committed suicide after a city council debate over recognizing October as LGBT History Month in Norman that included some vicious comments from local citizens. Zach was taunted in high school due to his sexual orientation.

The above video is produced by the New York City-based Youth Pride Chorus in contribution to the It Gets Better Project begun by partners Dan Savage and Terry Miller in response to the tragedies of the last few weeks. The Make It Better Project was also started to give young people tools to make a difference in their communities now.

Only nine states in the country have laws to protect LGBT youth against anti-gay bullying. To learn more about how you can take action to protect young people, visit makeitbetterproject.org.

Kearny Street Workshop‘s LitCrawl 2010 event, at which I will be reading, is titled Younger Than Gautama, which supposes that I am younger than Siddhartha Gautama when he achieved enlightenment. I am flattered to be considered within the same sentence as the Illustrious Buddha. I am even more flattered to be reading with the other amazing writers at this event. Come hear us and you might achieve nirvana.

Younger than Gautama: KSW at Lit Crawl

Saturday, October 9
8 – 9 pm
Cafe La Boheme
3318 24th St., SF
FREE Admission

Siddhartha Gautama (AKA Buddha) achieved enlightenment at the age of 35. These young Asian American writers are not quite there yet. But as we know, it’s not the end result but the journey that matters. Come and hear their stories.

Writer Bios

Noelle de la Paz sneezes loudly, laughs daily, plays with her DSLR, and spends much of her time thinking about things to write.

mai doan uses poetry to disrupt and expand understandings of what it means to be queer, mixed, woman.

Cathlin Goulding has been involved with Kearny Street Workshop since 2003. She lives in New York City, where she studies at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Vanessa Huang practices poetry to feed resilience and movement building from the margins. Her manuscript was a finalist for Poets & Writers’ 2010 California Writers Exchange.

Adrien Salazar is an artist, warrior of light, and lover. Do not be fooled his appearances. He is actually a lion.

Jonathan Yang writes novels for young adults, mainly about celebrities and shopping. And um, hopefully deeper stuff too. He lives online here: www.jonyang.org.

This is my final artist interview for AAWAA‘s A Place of Her Own exhibit currently at the Driftwood Salon in San Francisco — which just means that you will have to check the show out before it closes on October 3 for more insights directly from the artists’ work.

Irene Wibawa’s work, Experiment D0910 A-Z,  dangles on wood boards floating from the ceiling, a collection of dozens of glass jars each containing fantastical scenes in miniature. I try not to bump into the floating worlds as we talk.

AS: Have you worked in miniatures before or is this new for you?

IW: It’s fairly new. I actually work for USDA and I work with insects and plants. I look at the microscopes almost on a daily basis. That’s sort of why I got interested in this, I just saw that under the microscope it’s a whole new world. So I played with scale and also with found objects. Just things that are inexpensive. This I just started doing them last year for a class, for a 3D class at Berkeley City College.

AS: I saw some of the cork was sculpted, did you sculpt all the cork pieces also?

IW: Like the houses? Yeah. You know they’re accessible and you can sculpt it and it’s really inexpensive or free in a lot of cases.

AS: How did you interpret A Place of Her Own with the work you have here?

IW: Well I think there are many places of my own. And I feel like a place could be interpreted as a physical place, a mental space, an emotional space. There’s a lot of different kinds of places. So I also feel like one space for me — it doesn’t do justice. I need a lot of spaces you know. For some of these I am just going through things that I am going through. I’m dealing with it emotionally. Then I put it in a jar and I can just let it sit there.

AS: So each of these is like a self-contained space.

IW: Yeah. I think that we are all human beings with many different kinds of moods and different kinds of head-space. So I guess I feel like sometimes my place is like this and sometimes it’s like that, and it’s not necessarily one space that for me can tell the whole story.

AS: Are any of them like your favorite or ones that you really like?

IW: I do have ones that are my favorite and ones that are personal. Like this one is one of my favorites [she points to a jar filled with water in which a couple sits on a park bench] only because it’s the first time that I discovered that I could use something really non traditional like tea leaves.

AS: Oh those are tea leaves in there?

IW: Yeah. And I’m also a fan of kinetic art you know things that move. But I don’t know yet how to like make the cogs turn mechanically, I’m not that inclined, and I like snow globes. And it was the first time I used water too so it was a way for me to make the art more dynamic.

AS: So you could shake this?

IW: Exactly. Ideally it’s interactive. The same with that [she points to another jar filled with water], there’s sand. So it’s like a snow globe for the poor.

AS: It’s very democratic. And you could make these yourself too …

IW: Exactly I did want to make it accessible so I wanna say you know you don’t have to have a lot of money. You can get a jar and a few things. You can do it too. You don’t need fancy materials. Nothing that’s expensive. You can just use every day household things. You can just experiment with that.

AS: Were you into making models or dioramas when you were younger?

IW: Yes I love Legos. I think I have Legos to blame for all of this.

AS: That’s the root of all this!

IW: Yeah and when I go back to this state, when I’m doing this I feel like I’m a kid again too. It feels really free and I feel like ‘Oh I can deal with these serious issues in a not so serious way so it’s not so heavy.’

AS: So there’s an element of play involved also.

IW: Oh yeah absolutely.

A Place of Her Own shows at Driftwood Salon, 39 Isis Street San Francisco, now through October 3. Closing reception on October 2, 5pm at the gallery.

“The most powerful weapon is truth. Go out and tell truth everywhere.” – Yuri Kochiyama

I’ve got to shout out for this historic event coming up at the revolutionary Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland. Activists Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama will come together for a screening of the new film Mountains That Take Wing, which features thirteen years of conversations between the two women on topics ranging from the role of women in social movements, to the prison industrial complex, to war and the arts.

I have heard both these women speak separately and each one carries the weight of change in her body. Their words serve as a wellspring of inspiration that spurs me to speak truth and work hard for justice.

Mountains That Take Wing:
Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama-
A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation
Friday, September 24, 2010 7pm Free
EastSide Cultural Center
2277 International Blvd Oakland

Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama will both be present for the screening.
Limited seating, so come early!