Chicanonautica: Carlos Castaneda’s Very Weird Shit

by Ernest Hogan 

 

I can’t ignore Carlos Castaneda. Not only was he a bestselling author from the Latinoid Continuum, a big influence on pop culture (the Force in Star Wars is based on power), and a lot of scifiistas. He also encroaches on my territory. So when I heard about Ru Marshall’s American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda, I knew I had to read and review it.

It’s a thick one and it took me a while, mostly because it kept giving me a lot to think about. I’d read a little, and have to stop and let my brain chew on the chunks of weird shit.

And what weird shit . . .

Telling women his semen would instantly give them shamanistic power. Having another man impregnate his wife so he could have a blond son (he was el Negro of his family). His “I am in Peru or Mexico" gag. Immortality. Travel to other dimensions . . .

I had always thought Hunter S. Thompson summed him up in a letter to Oscar Zeta Acosta: “Very weird. The old man really fucked the kid around, eh?” Only now it looks like don Juan didn’t exist. Just who was doing the fucking around here? I have to reconsider my thinking.

It’s that kind of book.

It triggers memories of the world since the Sixties. As the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, I have a unique perspective. Yeah, he wasn’t quite a Chicano in the sense of a Mexican choosing a non-Anglo identity. He was from Peru, but told people he was Brazilian–how do you think people saw him in SoCal? He was cut off (though largely by his own choice) from his family/tribal/ancestral roots, living between cultures, creating his own identity–that’s Chicano.

Also immigrants who can’t fully assimilate tend to become Chicanos.

I read his first two books back in the Seventies largely because they were unavoidable. They were entertaining. I didn’t consider them fiction. 

Since I find the idea of a know-it-all telling everyone what to do a turn-off, I went no further. Besides gurus were–and still are–crawling out of the woodwork.

I don’t believe in gurus.

Thank Tezcatlipoca for my built-in bullshit detector!

Also every Yaqui I’ve met who’s heard of him thought he was full of shit.

Sometimes his name comes up when people try to describe my work, though I’m probably closer to Oscar Acosta, but that’s still misleading.

Sometimes it’s easier to let people have their misconceptions of me than to explain my Chicano-is-a-sci-fi-state-of-being reality. It’s not really lying. What do you do when they don’t seem to be capable of seeing the truth?

Maybe I am un poco like him.

Unlike him, I am not a pathological liar. Apparently, he lied constantly. Ru Marshall did an amazing twenty-year job of sorting through this man’s work and utterances, cross referencing it with interviews with people who knew and encountered him and coming up with an epic biography that is, in my humble opinion, more interesting and fantastic than Castaneda's books. 

He lived writing fiction in his head all the time. So do I. I am painfully aware of where my real life ends and the sci-fi begins. I have no interest in making others live in my fantasies.

It is impressive that he got anthropologists at UCLA to give him a doctorate for a novel, though the fact that he was a rich, bestselling author probably breached the experiment. It’s not surprising that Simon & Schuster didn’t care any more than his readers did. Fiction? Nonfiction? They only care if the books sell. I’ve heard that there are people who read all his books then start over. They fill a need that I don't have.

I think.

This is all amusing, up until you get to the mysterious deaths and disappearances following his death, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see successful media adaptations. The chapter about the fucking around with Fellini alone would make a wild and crazy movie. In all, it’s a bizarre soap opera dealing with the Great American/Latinoid Spiritual Crisis.

The peoples of the United States of America have a strong lust for spirituality. It’s a product they keep trying to buy. It makes them prey to the manipulations of narcissistic sociopaths. We need to learn to recognize and resist them.

And stop electing them.

Be careful out there.

Ernest Hogan’s New, Improved Ancient Chicano Sci-Fi Wisdom is not a cult. When he finds himself sounding like a guru, he laughs. Or is that the laughter of Tezcatlipoca?

Kumpangi, Lost & Found.

In the Time of Spirits: Thrice Found Wedding Ring
Michael Sedano

I have been depressed in recent years over losing my wedding ring. I retrace my steps a thousand times, visualizing the last time I had it seven years ago. Where is it now?  

I dream my wedding ring of silver and gold lies under tons of landfill, that ten thousand years from now, an archaelogical dig finds it, reads the hallmark, "Sterling Brooks 18K". 

Before the Ring.

She didn't want an engagement ring--whirlwind courtship--but a wedding band was de rigueur. We shopped rings, two lovebirds. With Barbara's J.W. Robinson employee discount, we wanted to fall in love with a commercial ring, but like the ticky-tacky song they all looked just the same. We'd have to compromise and settle for what the trays held.

Michael Sedano 1968 at International Peace Shrine above Gaviota.
Foto: Barbara Sedano.

Barbara learned of a new jeweler who'd just set up shop in Montecito. He made rings. 

George Brooks' shop occupied a spot in a millionaire's neighborhood. That boded ill for economy-minded lovebirds, ni modo. We would look inside having driven so far. The stuff in Brooks' windows wasn't jewelry but sculpture in precious metals and jewels. My expectations sank as I walked into the barren shop.

I drew what I considered a female and male version of a serpentine design. Brooks looked at the gold dots on mine and told me they'll fall off. They did. Sergio Flores fixed them when he resized the ring.

My ring, I paid $60. Barbara's, $40. I think George Brooks charged us for materials only. 

Kumpangi

Hwaak-ni, Republic of Korea, sprang up as an organized settlement when the U.S. Army installed the world's highest HAWK missile site on a near-by mountain peak. Down in the valley, the valley's so low, the Army installed the Admin Area, a base camp housing 75 soldiers. The Admin Area had jobs that attracted people to the rugged remoteness. Encontre muy buen trabajo, y tambien con el GI, the slickie boys would sing if they'd been Chicanos.

Mae Bong mountain upper left, partial view of Admin Area B 7/5

Houseboys came to this place at the end of the road to work and to steal anything not locked up. Five dollars a month from five GIs, earns $300 a year. They wash, iron, and polish, keep the barrack swept, and hate GIs. A damned good job in a country with a $90 per capita income. 

"Me House Man, no House Boy!" When I lost my ring, I figured good will and human kindness would have nothing to do with finding my wedding band before it left the Ville.

I looked up that per capita income before I left the States for Korea. That's why I figured a $25 reward would be compelling. My only hope of finding the ring 6000 miles from George Brooks' studio, lay in offering half a year's salary. 

Miss Park, the Mess Hall lady, spoke enough English to understand. She wrote the placard, scandalized that I knew there was no chance of recovery, except at a price. What a price, taksan too muchie. She discouraged offering anything, people are nice. She wrote the words in Korean for me and refused a fee. $25.00 reward. Lost Kumpangi.


Familia Legend of Great-Grampa's Gold Ring

I came in from digging the soil to shower and realized my left hand was bare. I'd left the ring out there. I couldn't find it. 

For a week, I sit cross-legged on the earth, planting suspended, hand-sifting every square foot of the seedbed, over and over. Grab two handsful of dirt. Open the hand and let the soil sift through anxious fingers, sensing stones and pebbles immediately recognizing them as not the ring. Like winnowing chaff, toss handsful of earth into the air where it turns to dust and choking powder and no ring. Fashion a wire mesh screen and rack, sift the entire plot, one shovelful at a time. No ring.

Abandoning hope, my vision fashions a history of repeated tellings of the story of great-grampa's ring, out there in the back. The garden passes through generations of Sedano descendants, the story of the silver and gold ring handed down from generation to generation until years later, a little girl is digging the earth and uncovers the ring. She pulls it from the earth, holds it triumphantly, the instant compressing all those generations of stories retold into this circle of sky. She knows how the story of grampa's lost ring ends.

Landfill Miracle of the Spirits in Plague-time.

The depression hits at unpredictable times. My left thumb reaches over to the fourth finger, rubs the bare skin below the knuckle frustrated it remembers what the ring used to feel like on the empty skin.

Where did the ring go? Did I drop it inside a paper cup of birthday party candies, worthless crap someone automatically tossed? Did the ring lie at the bottom of the trash bin until the truck took its contents to the landfill? Now, do tons of landfill cover my ring? 

I convince myself, my wedding ring now lies buried deep in the guts of urban trash, a fleck of golden detritus calling with despair matching my own. Never, never, never, never, never.

There's medical literature that argues no one dies and returns, they have "near death experience." Bunkum. I was on the Other Side and returned with ancestors' directive to Burn Sage. I do. I hear those ancestor voices, I know my familia occupies this space with me.

It is not my NDE that brings Spirits into my room, most Raza I know have a clear sense of spirit matters, la llorona, el cucui, angelito negro/blanco, family leyenda. We don't have to die and come back to know they're involved.

This time, my mother found my ring for me. 

I should have seen it coming. My Mom found me in deep despair over our national failure, but always lurking at the pits of emotion, the lost wedding ring. 

A wedding ring contains potent values, but not what the Monsignor pronounced about the endlessness of a cycle. That ring, sterling, Brooks, 18K, holds in its circumference joyous memory that I lived, that a vital Barbara lived, she who laughed and made jokes and didn't have any money to buy my ring so I paid George Brooks and he gave us a pair of small manila envelopes. 

We slid the rings onto our palms, shiny and ready for August 31. Brooks 18K hers read. Sterling Brooks 18K mine read. We looked forward to filling the ring with this lifetime of memories. And we did, we have, we are. That I alone remember now is how it is. So it goes.

Mom alerted me to good things happening a few weeks ago. She guided my hand underneath a chest into a remote corner at the furthest reach of my ringless fingers. I found a silver ring with a stone my mom fashioned in lapidary night school. I took that as a sign I would never have my ring, my mother offering, here is a replacement mi'jo. I heard her say that.

Mom's jasper cabochon snuggles comfortably in the crook of the little finger when the ring works its way around to rest there. Thank you, Mom. I will live wearing this silver band now. This is how it is.

Sunday afternoon, I feel my mother behind and next to me while I rummage through storage containers in the attic. Some of this is her stuff. I find the stylus from a blood glucose test kit, an emergency spare set aside has found its way into this grocery bag. 

I extract a dusty, blue vinyl zippered case. Inside I see four strands of beads and art deco hook earrings. I remember the day Mom's great-granddaughter visited, rejected the beads as not what the girl coveted. She wanted Mom's something exquisite made from silver and gold and pearls, not these Lapis, Amethyst, Red Garnet, and Green Jade strung beads. That day hurt my Mother profoundly, such bitter disappointment, seeing that child grown.

I zip closed the purse and take a handful of textile, some kind of purse. Empty. I pull it out and look into the worn grocery bag. 

My heart does not skip a beat. I am surprised but accept what I see. I am not exultantly shouting hosanna! and I realize my restraint. In the dim dusty recess, between nondescript bundles of stuff my Mom left behind, sits my silver and gold ring. My ring has come from the landfill to sit quietly triumphant, glowing out a satisfied quehubole in 18K gold and sterling silver made by George Brooks in 1968, lost in 1969, lost again in 2005, lost a third time around 2015.

My Mom never made a big deal about stuff, she took everything with equanimity, and I'm following her lead, she doesn't have to remind me.  Matter-of-factly, I slip on the ring and from now on, that's how it is.

Thanks for the ring. Mom.

My left thumb reaches for the fourth finger, finds the hard edge of the ring under the knuckle, back where it belongs. Lost. Found. Trust in the Spirits.

On August 31 Barbara and I observe the 52d anniversary of her putting that ring on my finger. It was supposed to be for the rest of my life. Thanks, Mom, that's the way it's going to be again.

Burn Sage.

The Silver & Gold Ring in 2020.

GOTV. Wear a mask. Social isolate like it means your life.

==
La Bloga welcomes Guest Columnists. If you have a book or arts event review, local or national, La Bloga welcomes your fotos and words. When your community throws a pachanga or holds its annual jamaica, share, gente. Several of La Bloga's regular columnists started as Guest Writers, maybe that's for you?
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Review: Rudolfo Anaya. The Old Man's Love Story. News from SE to NW.

Rudolfo Anaya. The Old Man's Love Story. Norman: U Oklahoma Press, 2013.
ISBN: 0806146486

Michael Sedano

Everyone dies. My grandmother died. My mother died. I died. In Rudolfo Anaya’s The Old Man’s Love Story, the old man’s wife has died. How do you go on after death? What of your own? Where do dead souls go?

The widower struggles with grief, memory, and life after death. This is Anaya’s own story--he pulls no punches--but elects to tell this deeply personal story from the safe distance enabled by a third person narrator.

The third person voice allows the mourning man to step outside himself to address an audience, organize the events and relate what happened to a character called “the old man” as he goes about resolving the consequences of life and death.

In this voice, Anaya crafts a barely-controlled narrative of his own roiling emotions, enriches the text with literary flourishes, allusions, motifs, and keen detail, ultimately presenting a meaningful look at death, grief, and living. Beyond its profundity, The Old Man’s Love Story is a scream of pain you need to hear.

It’s not a fun read. Some readers won’t be ready for The Old Man’s Love Story, especially younger people who see themselves invincible. Nor will those with a low tolerance for cultura “get” it. The book deals with issues those people haven’t dealt with, they have no skin in the game. So it goes.

Near death experience patients like me, readers in serious infirmity, and generally, gente aware of cucui and other spirits are ready for The Old Man’s Love Story. It won’t haunt you but starts a conversation that’s probably overdue. Carpe diem. The old man is not afraid of dying but frustrated at everything he’s going to miss.

The old man has spirits in his life and many moments of communion. New Mexico cultura informs the old man’s spiritual and metaphoric view with cloud formations, water, land, soul, various people’s gods. He views his own memory as thrusts from a hellenistic muse whom the old man names Memoria.

The old man's wife speaks to him, offers comfort, and urges him to go on living. He cannot summon her but with a sense of normalcy accepts her presence whenever she appears. “Magic realism” outsiders might term such moments in the narrative. For the old man, and Anaya, conversations with the wife are the most normal things a grieving man does.

Grief comes with memory. Random events and artifacts trigger memories of courtship, travels, life together, her personality, having sex. Each memory fills the old man with pain at her absence magnified by his understanding of the finality of this emptiness. Because grief and memory intertwine but are not the same, the widower finds himself unable to unravel the tangle. He cannot control memory and his grief is inconsolable.

As the old man’s suffering persists unabated, a reader begins to sense thoughts of suicide in the old man’s struggle, notes of surrender that would leave writer and reader deadened with depression. No one wants to read that. Yet, a fleeting thought, a word here, a conclusion there, Anaya sets the reader on edge, the outcome for the old man in no way assured.

As the book begins, with the old man’s bereavement finding its first expression, it comes with a sense of excitement for the dead wife’s next self:

Her journey into the world of spirits was a new adventure, but damn! He knew nothing of that world! He could only imagine it! Like imagining heaven. He worried. Was she okay? What if she lost the way? But she loved adventure. It was part of her nature. Now she had entered a country of spirits, from which no one returned.
Her spirit had lingered a while. Shortly after she died he had seen her walking down the hollyhock path. Dressed in a flowing Mexican skirt, the bright colors she loved, and a white blouse, stepping as lightly as an angel. She had turned and looked at him. 43

But the old man struggles with being separated. His wife’s disappearance from his garden, the hollyhock path, their time, has made his life chaotic, him irrational. At one manic point he surrounds himself with photographs, lies on the floor a shaman willing her back from death, Mictlán, the other side, wherever, just come back. Therapy doesn’t help.

He seeks refuge in reasoning and science. The old man learns about brain chemistry and the brain’s engrams, the loci of memory. He is not consoled that surgery or time will erase memories. Once the memories are gone, she is gone. The old man desperately needs the life memory sparks in him, memories don’t hurt all the time. He persists until he can answer ill-understood questions.

He questioned his own concept of the spirit world.
“It’s not out there,” he whispered. “It’s in me. The world of spirits is my memory—I am the world of spirits!”
Why was he surprised? He had searched for the meaning of life and death, the knowledge that was the bedrock of so many cultures, the truths written in esoteric gospels, a faith held in the human heart since the beginning of time.
He had known this all along. One of his characters, an old woman on her deathbed, had told a child, “I will live as long as you remember me. I live in your memory.” 130

Anaya arrives at this consolation for the old man via a stream-of-consciousness narrative that spills freely out of the writer. The loose style that flows from idea to idea looking for a logical connection can pose a challenge to inattentive readers. This is the way the man’s mind works, how a writer thinks. It’s best to pay attention.

The constrained rambling style of The Old Man’s Love Story stands in tribute to Anaya’s late wife, who was the writer’s editor. The writer is allowed free rein on this manuscript. Anaya seems to be telling his readers, this style is appropriate to this occasion so she’s letting me slide on some of my excesses and more abstract ruminations.

Students of Chicana Chicano Literature will find The Old Man’s Love Story illuminating for its insights into elements of the writer’s life and career. Readers curious about Sonny Baca’s heightened spirituality across the four novels of that series see its origins in the author’s lifelong relationship with spirits and spiritual practice. Anaya accepts that La Llorona frightened him as a boy, perhaps in the guise of grasping ramas in the bosque, but that was La Llorona pulling his hair in the darkness.

Writers will note Anaya’s sense that his characters spring sui generis from their own dimension. Just as spirits are, characters are.

And it’s true, that was his background but the more he wrote the more he felt the pull of the spirit world. The voice of the story was not completely his. He was moved to write the tragedies and comedies of those characters who came to visit him. 54

It’s that sense of spirits and literary characters that lets the grief-stricken mind lose itself in beauties of a garden path before a moment later seeing his dead wife pulling weeds. He’s comforted by their conversations, her advice about getting a girlfriend, helping him close doors and open others in efforts to define the old man’s loneliness and depression, and find a way onward.

Which he does. That is not a spoiler but a final reason to read The Old Man’s Love Story. The last handful of pages, when the issues have reached what resolution exists for one man, sparkle with vision. The old man finds his respite not in a particular spirit but the spirit of life itself, and with that final rainbow along the hollyhock path the old man understands.

His ancestors had come and stayed to raise crops in the land of the pueblos. We worked hard, the old ones said. Our backs broke and our hands were stained with blood. But one afternoon lived beneath this sky provides enough beauty to fill our souls for another day’s toil. The earth provided, the sky rewarded. 168

Order The Old Man’s Love Story from your independent bookseller or via the publisher's website.

NDE Addendum. Anaya's speculation about whether, and what the other side is like are right on. The other side is there. I saw it last July during emergency surgery. I returned with the ancestor's message on my lips, struggling to share it. "Sage" they said without speaking. "Burn sage" I finally said when I found voice. The old man's conversations with his wife don't surprise me but I envy them. Souls cross back and forth for important reasons. In early January I was certain an upcoming surgery--a consequence of July's--would kill me again, this time for sure. In December I was saying good-bye to people, cooking last meals, doing uncharacteristic things, walking on eggshells. One morning I smelled my dad's smell in bed next to me, felt him holding my hand--my dad never held my hand tenderly or otherwise--and in the instant felt assured I would live because he told me, again without speaking. A few days later I went through the operation easily and near painlessly.


Mailbag: Caribbean via Tucson
Greater Antilles Island Focus of Talk

La Bloga friend Tom Miller joins a panel--tomorrow in Tucson--addressing growing interest in Cuba, given prospects for increased communication with the island nation.

Mailbag: Pacific Northwest
Seattle Teatro Announces New Web Presence

Rose Cano,  eSe Teatro - Artistic Director announces her website, http://www.eseteatro.org now features easy-to-click links and a cycling banner featuring the company's programs. Let's get on with the show, ese.

Luzclara Camus Living in Times of Plenitude

tatiana de la tierra

In Chile, Luzclara lives in a round wooden temple that overlooks the Maipo River and faces the Andes mountains. Buddhist flags, statues of goddesses, and an organic garden planted in the shape of a spiral lead the way to Luz del Maipo, the temple that she calls home. This is where she meditates, does yoga, prepares for ceremony, and rides on horseback into the mountains to a special retreat. But shamanic leader Luzclara Camus is a globetrotter who hasn’t been home much lately. She’s been in Poland, Spain, Portugal, and France recently, facilitating ceremonies of the sacred feminine. Her next stop is California, with weekend workshops planned in the Los Angeles area (June 17-19) and in Mount Shasta (June 24-26).

A Priestess of the Goddess, Luzclara is on a mission to bring women together in old-fashioned ways. Imagine a circle of women chanting and drumming around a fire under the full moon. “It’s time for women to come together again,” she says. “This is a moment of a great awakening to the feminine, and we are responding en masse. We’ve been living in a patriarchal system for thousands of years, where we had to develop our masculine side in order to survive. We had to learn to compete, for instance, and we had to forget our feminine essence.”

I met Luzclara in a medicine journey in Chile a few years ago. That same night, after I’d met her, she came to me in a dream as a condor. Over the next few days, I participated in fire circles, sweat lodge, sound healing, and a labyrinth ceremony that she led. I learned of her ways of viewing sexuality, menstruation, manifestation, healing, Pachamama, plant medicine, menopause, and magic. I also found out that the grand Condor is her totem, and that, before going to sleep, she gives her light body permission to travel. Luzclara has unforgettable presence and I’m looking forward to her landing at Los Angeles International Airport in a few days.

Responding to an email interview while taking a break in Saint-Tropez in the French Riviera, Luzclara explains that ancient ones said that the way energy enters the planet changes every two thousand years. Masculine energy entered Earth from the Himalayas, and now feminine energy is entering from the Andes mountain range. “Feminine energy is not just for women,” she says. “It’s for everyone, and it’s time for the feminine qualities to develop once again.”

A native of Chile, Luzclara was mentored by an indigenous Mapuche Machi (shaman), Antonia Lincolaf, after the Machi came to her in a dream in 1981. Machi Antonia taught her how to hold ceremonies and how to heal with herbs, flutes, and sound. She initiated Luzclara with the kultrún, a feminine ceremonial drum in the shape of a bowl with symbols that represent the universe that holds medicine in its womb. Luzclara has initiated hundreds of women kultrún carriers since. “Sound heals by harmonizing our bodies, as the musical vibration penetrates deeply into each organ, into each cell,” she says. She does an adaptation of the Machitún, a healing ceremony done by the Machis, where people receive healing within a circle of drums, rattles, dancing, and intentional chanting.

She is also schooled in Chinese and Tibetan spiritual practices and has learned and shared ceremonies with indigenous groups from North America, Peru, and the Amazon. “My relations and contacts with native tribes in North and South America gave me the memory of how to be one with the Earth, how to feel the spirit in the elements, and how to see Her as a living being and respect Her as my Mother,” she says.

“Right now, European and American multinational corporations are pillaging our lands in Chile,” says Luzclara. Monsanto has claimed ownership of the country’s native seeds, and AES Gener has bought the rights to waters of the Maipo River, with a hydroelectric project that is sure to damage the environment, diminish water supply in Santiago, and enrich the company. Additionally, corporations are vying to build reservoirs in Patagonia. As a Guardian of the Earth, Luzclara has participated in her community’s protests against these assaults on the land.


“I am committed to caring for Pachamama and to teaching others how to connect with Her,” she says. Luzclara is a co-founder of the Guardians of the Earth Women’s Shamanic School in Chile, which began this year. (The school has two sessions every year; one in English, and another in Spanish.) She also takes on apprentices for one-on-one training in Luz del Maipo. “My most important work is empowering women, assisting them in the discovery of their sacred feminine and their roots with the Earth.” Her teaching methods include working in sacred circles and doing ceremony with the moon, solstices, and equinoxes.

“My relationship with Mother Earth has been a love affair. I have so much love and gratitude for her,” she writes. A central part of her message of embracing the feminine is in embracing Mother Earth herself. “To align with the Earth, we need to align with ourselves first and see Her as the living being that she is. We need to walk upon Her with love and respect, and to care for Her waters and Her nature. We need to quit exploiting Her for profit. We need to curb our consumption. And we need to be grateful and conscious of Her generosity.”

In Luzclara’s world, all women are goddesses and all people can become one with Pachamama. She views the female experience as a visionary by turning “menopause” on its head by naming it “plenitude.” The idea of useless shriveled up hags gets replaced with plenitude, “a grand initiation for women, a time for a woman to birth herself and claim her power. It is a time of plenitude and the beginning of a marvelous phase of life.” She explains that during plenitude, blood rises to the upper chakras. The third eye chakra, which corresponds to vision, and the crown chakra, which is the connection to the divine, are engaged. This, in a nutshell, is what it means to be a “wise woman”--a woman who actively “sees” and who is consciously connected to her internal goddess. From everything I know about her, I’d say Luzclara, who’s going to be celebrating her 70th birthday in August, is a wise woman embodied.

Following is information about upcoming events by Luzclara Camus. Individual appointments are also available.

LOS ANGELES AREA EVENTS, June 17-19, to be held at 3732 Sapphire Drive, Encino, CA. See http://innerflowerchild.com/. RSVP 818-905-7789 or susan.bernardo@gmail.com
Friday, June 17, 5:00-11:00 PM. Sound healing ceremony and potluck. All are welcome. $25; kids attend for free.
Saturday June 18, 2:00-8:00 PM, Opening to the True Power of Your Feminine Nature: Learn to deepen your connection to your own healing power and the healing of Earth. Includes rites of initiation, Machitún transformational healing, cleansing with feathers and smoke. $115
Sunday June 19, 11:00-6:00 PM, Woman’s Wisdom, Power and Mysteries, Riding the Serpent Through the Years of Plenitude: Learn to harness the transformational fire energy of menopause to seed your wisdom years with wonder and power. Includes lunch with foods that support all phases of this potentially powerful and transformative time in our lives. $145


MOUNT SHASTA RETREAT: June 24-26. In Spanish. Songs, dances, healing rites, sound healing, fire ceremony, and sweat lodge. Participants should bring sleeping bags and camping equipment. Facilitated by Leticia Elicea at Portal de Luz.$175 for weekend, including meals. Contact Leticia Elicea 408.261.3272, instituto@isehn.org

Peregrinación a Machu Picchu. Un peregrinaje de mujeres por el Valle Sagrado visitando Machu-Picchu y otros lugares de poder. Inscripción: soco@cascada.net o luzclara777@yahoo.com

Contact Luzclara directly for information about the Guardians of the Earth Shamanic School for Women or private apprenticeships. luzclara777@yahoo.com

Gratitude, Martín Espada and Acentos


1. Give what you want to receive. The flow of Abundance is already all around you. To step into this flow is easy. Give to someone else the very thing you would like to receive. And give it freely without expectations of receiving, as if you already had more than enough. If you want more kindness in your life, be kind to someone, if you want more happiness in your life, make someone else happy, if you want more money in your life, share a little of what you have. Give it away easily, like you already had all that you need and there is plenty more from where that came from. 


2. Trust and know. The next step is to trust and know you have just stepped into the flow of abundance and are now aligned with what you want. Know there is more than enough to go around. 
 


3. Take Action. Participation is an important part of Abundance. While you are knowing you are now aligned with the flow of the abundance you want, it is also important to participate and help make things happen. Follow your inner knowing and your intuition and do your part to help create the abundance you would like to have. Continue to participate until you are receiving what you want.
 


4. Be Grateful. Gratitude is a vital step in the flow of abundance. It is a powerful magnet which keeps us in the flow and aligned with receiving all the wonderful things we desire. Fill yourself with gratitude all the time, even about the small and seemingly simple things in your life. There is always something to be grateful about. When you notice a little of what you want flowing to you, take a moment and be grateful for what you have received, regardless of how big or small it may be. Be grateful and say thank you. 



5. Pass it on. When you receive a little abundance take a moment and pass some of it on and assist someone else in feeling a little more abundant. When you pass on some of what you receive, do it easily as if you already have more than you need, expecting nothing in return. When you pass it on in this way you are now starting the process all over again and have once again taken the first step to "give what you want to receive." In this way the flow of abundance continues and becomes more and more each time.

Martín Espada 

From Our Friends at Acentos:

Acentos Writers Workshop welcomes Martín Espada 

Eugenio María de Hostos Community College 

Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 7pm.

Acentos Writers Workshop welcomes Martín Espada to Eugenio María de Hostos Community College on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 7pm sharp. FREE!

We are extremely excited to announce that Martín Espada will facilitate a workshop for Acentos. Called “the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published sixteen books in all as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including two collections of poems last year: Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas (Smokestack, 2008), released in England, and La Tumba de Buenaventura Roig (Terranova, 2008), a bilingual edition published in Puerto Rico.

The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Other books of poetry include Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the Premio Fronterizo, two NEA Fellowships, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

His poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation and The Best American Poetry. He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). His work has been translated into ten languages. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.

Espada will facilitate a 2 hour poetry workshop for free. Yes, I said free. We are welcoming the community at large. Yet, there will not be massive chaos. There will be a registration process. If you have not e-mailed Fish@louderarts.com to register, you will not be able to take the workshop. Notice, this workshop is on a Friday evening at 7pm. Bring your pens, bring your paper, bring your hearts. Palante papi, Siempre palante.

Eugenio María de Hostos Community College Savoy Building, 120 East 149th Street, corner of Walton Ave, Multipurpose Room, Second Floor New York 10451 • Phone 917-209-4211 7pm sharp! Directions to Hostos Community College

Hostos Community College is located at a safe and busy intersection just steps from the subway station and bus stop. By subway: take the 2,4,5 IRT trains to 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard) and the Grand Concourse.By bus: take the Bx1 or cross-town Bx19 to 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard) and the Grand Concourse. By car:From Manhattan, take the FDR Drive north to the Willis Avenue Bridge to the Major Deegan Expressway (87N). Proceed north to Exit 3. Take the right fork in the exit ramp to the Grand Concourse and proceed north to East 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard) From Queens, take the Triborough Bridge to the Major Deegan Expressway. Continue north to Exit 3. Take the right fork in the exit ramp to the Grand Concourse and proceed north to East 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard).From Westchester, take the Major Deegan Expressway south (87S) to Exit 3.

Turn left at the light. Turn left again at Grand Concourse and proceed north to East 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard) .From New Jersey, take the George Washington Bridge to the Major Deegan Expressway south to Exit 3. Turn left at the light. Turn left again at Grand Concourse and proceed north to East 149th Street (Eugenio María de Hostos Boulevard)


Fish Vargas 917-209-4211

Lisa Alvarado

Juan Felipe Hererra on raulsalinas

photo of raulsalinas by Bruce Dye

From Lisa, La Blogista: We hope this stirs and ignites you. Please leave a comment and more importantly take raulsalinas' example to heart....Gracias to Juan Felipe Herrera

hail raúlrsalinas :: 1934 – 2008 :: hail liberationlove raúlr was in red. he came in lower-case, strutting down thru the brown cadre in red, a red bandanna across his forehead & taut around his black tresses down to his shoulders, smilin, boppin’ slow & glowin’ hard, in blue tramos planchados & curled to show the calcos spit-shined black solid, bluish tattoos, turquoise rings & gold medallions, a slung-fine chain swingin’ down the black spaghetti-thin belt, under the amber light in the center of the waiting audience, this is where the street-royal carnal found his calling, throttled the mic & peered into the brown cadre huddled on the floors, some of us squeezed against the shadowy aisles, the rest of us in crescent shaped circles, in strange awe, smeared hot against each other’s shoulder bones, the dark jeweled man in red stood under that first-time sparkle-light, his veined muscled arms swayed at his sides, then, he spoke, his bold baritone sounds found a silky-river way into our head, then coursed through our blood as if we were one blood, what was he all about? what was happening to us? where were we headed, now that we had been set off in motion? raulr was riffin’, blowin’, boppin’, snappin’ spittin’, talkin’-singin’ for the new freedom-body, without the locks, fetters & guards of officialized history, policies, and summations of our multi-dimensional self. november 13th, 1973, raulr appeared in the morning, at the floricanto first national chicano literature conference at USC, thirty-eight years old, one year after he had finished doing his time at leavenworth penitentiary, i sat in the center row, dressed in a tzotzil tunic i had brought back from chiapas in ‘70, miguel mendez, tomás rivera, teresa palomo acosta, zeta acosta by the doorway, then raulr popped the mic again & flowed into “un trip thru the mind jail y otras excursions,” he was speakin’ black, caló, tex-mex, chicano & some kind of san francisco beat mantra chakra choppin’ language meant to pierce your awareness: who are you? who did you think you were? what is oppression? how is it constructed? how many of your rooms does it occupy? who else resides in these chambers? is there a way out? then, the baritone voice slid back into the crimson body under the lights – raúlrsalinas ambled away, into the fresh trembling borderless nation. raúlr’s nation was borderless, he had crossed it, on foot as on the page & the stage, speaking, riffin’ & teaching human verses & unity actions – from working class “barbed-wired existence” barrios, from the land of high school force-outs, from grave stones of bullet-riddled camaradas, from “narcotic driven nerviosidad,” from suicided “colonias” & familias, to “ex-convictos activistas doing good in cities of chavalos gone bad,” to “trenzas indigenas,” dedicated to a revitalized indi@ collectivity, to “cantor de cantinas, pasándole poems a perennial pachukos prendidos, hoping to ease their pain,” “cantando colores de flores in arco iris danza,” ”learning en la lucha,” honoring the oak tree at the margins of a desolate collective capitol, honoring “indias, comadres wearing ski-boots so essential para caminar.” raúlr too was a walker, a walker-writer of the chican@ inferno & finder-seer of "rainbow people spirit." raulrsalinas was a true liberator: a kind fire-word man of soul-jazzed languages, a writer within & without prison walls, a socio-political mind-jail wall-breaker-scribe-singer, a collector, reader & translator of stolen cultura-tablets, a speaker of & for tender homage & eulogy to the invisibilized, a fearless warrior seeking the paths to our indigenous selves, lands & pueblos, relentless in responding to the “animales transnacionales” & militarized hydra machines, a shaman in demin, re-conjuring herstories of unwritten pachuka murders & oppressions across the southwest & pacific northwest, undoing the anthropological & sociological tyrannies of el pachuko, that is, all of us, in lower-case motion – raulr sings in a mid-fifties bebop alto & baritone gold-gilded sax voice, from pine ridge to chiapas, from el barrio de la loma to the diné rez, from shoshone & arapaho tierras to la selva lacandona, healing-gathering, healing-working – “respeto, paz y dignidad,” raúlr offers his life-quest harvests to all of us. what else, raúlr? you were speaking of lower-case love – everything we all are, have been & will ever be. in liberation --juan felipe Herrera, 2/25/08

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And from poet Oscar Bermeo:

Just wanted to pass along that last week, there was a tribute to raulsalinas


Among the readers sharing their thoughts and presenting the work of Raul

Alejandro Murguía
Tomás Riley Francisco
J. Dominguez
Marc Pinate
Naomi Quiñones
Leticia Hernández-Linares
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Nina Serrano
Jack Hirschman
Darren de Leon

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More teatro news, Denver-style

The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare Thursday – Saturday, February 28 – March 1 Thursday – Saturday, March 6 – 8 7:30pm King Center Rawls Courtyard Theatre Auraria Campus, Denver Tickets: $12 General Admission $5 UC Denver students Sponsored by: Theatre, Film and Video Production Department.

José Mercado, new Assistant Professor of the Theatre, Film & Video Production Department, directs a contemporary telling of a classic comedy driven by mix-ups, coincidence and slapstick humor, with the events confined within the action of a single day. The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare’s earliest, shortest and most farcical play. It tells the story of two sets of identical twins and the wild mishaps that occur through mistaken identity. Before joining the faculty at UC Denver, Mercado was head of the theatre department at North High School where he directed "The Zoot Suit Riots", the first high school production to play at Denver Performing Arts Center’s Buell Theatre. Prior to teaching, he worked as an actor in Los Angeles after earning his Master of Fine Arts degree in Theatre from UCLA. He is a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild and Actor’s Equity Association. He is also a member of the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs.

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Women and Creativity Conference/Lisa Alvarado Shameless Self-Promotion Department

Gente: I've been blessed enough to have been asked to perform The Housekeeper's Diary at the conference -- Friday, March 7, at 8 PM at the National Hispanic Cultural Center's Roy E. Disney Center for the Performing Arts, as well as a reading for high school students at the Center's Wells Fargo Auditorium, Monday, March 10th at 10 AM.

Conference Info: Women and Creativity 2008 is organized and presented by the National Hispanic Cultural Center in partnership with more than 25 local arts organizations, artists, writers and independently owned-business. This year, we have an inspiring offering of more than 50 exhibitions, performances, workshops, classes, and engaging discussions in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

Women and Creativity partners invite you to dedicate an afternoon, evening or entire weekend in March to attend events and workshops that awaken and nourish your own creativity and support the creativity of our communities. Although we shine a special light on women’s creativity during this festival, we invite and encourage the participation of men at all events.

The National Hispanic Cultural Center, along with our partners in Women and Creativity 2008, believe that creativity, art and self-expression are central to sustaining healthy individuals, organizations, business and communities – so, join in and celebrate the creative women in your community and the creativity inside yourself.

There will also be a fabulous PEÑA FEMENINA Sunday, March 9th at NHCC's LA FONDA DEL BOSQUE;

Other Artists:
Alma Jarocha,
Leticia Cuevas, Anabel Marín, Otilio Ruiz, Victor Padilla

Jessica López

Bailaora Xicana, Flamenco
marisol encinias, vicente griego, ricardo anglada

Lenore Armijo

Angélica
Cuevas

National Hispanic Cultural Center 1701 4th St, SW Albuquerque, New Mexico

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Teatro Luna Fabulousness!

Teatro Luna has a BRAND NEW SHOW opening on March 6th, but you can catch it now! This Saturday and Sunday see a sneak preview of Teatro Luna's most intimate show yet... SOLO TU, a collection of four interwoven solos all about different women's experiences with PREGNANCY.

One woman thinks she's finally built the perfect family - Mom, Dad, Cute Kid- until an invasion of mice makes her wonder what's really going on. Another woman finds herself caught up in the worst kind of Baby-Daddy-Single-Mama Drama. Meanwhile, a woman in her third year of trying to get pregnant decides her pregnant friends make her want to vomit, and her close friend wrestles with pro-life activists, hospital robes, and how she feels about having an abortion in her 30's.

Saturday @ 7:30 pm and Sunday @ 6pm

SHOW RUN: March 6-April 6 2008
Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays @ 7:30 pm
Sundays @ 6pm
Chicago Dramatists 1105 W. Chicago Ave, at Milwaukee
Tickets $15, Student and Senior Discount on Thursdays and Sundays only, $10
$12 Group Sale price, parties of 8 or more
For tickets, visit www.teatroluna.org

Lisa Alvarado

Creativity - The Magic Synthesis

The synthesis referred to in the title is the ability of a person to combine both the primary and secondary processes of the brain. The primary process is concerned with the subconscious workings of the brain: dreams, imagery, associations. The secondary process is concerned with logical thinking or how we express our primary thinking to the outside. The "magic synthesis" is the result of an individual merging these two, and then creating metaphors, symbols, abstractions and a new way of seeing or thinking about the world.

According to author Silvano Arieti, creative persons and schizophrenics have a greater connection to the primary process, but, unlike the schizophrenic, the creative person is able to then process this thinking into a rational or logical form and create something new. I'm not surprised to read once again about the closeness between madness and creativity.

Aside from the physiological similarities, I believe there is a driven quality, that's shared by both states. I've felt compelling urges when creating something new and in states of intense emotional duress. When I try to make art, I take that energy and hopefully, articulate it, infuse it with metaphor, rhythm, and a certain beauty. (Unlike when I've experienced deep emotional crisis, where the experience is more like a spiraling panic that I need to release.)

As I started work that combined movement and poetry, I found myself more and more concerned with the way the spiritual is linked to the physical, the way the word is made flesh, both literally and figuratively. How something ineffable as connection to Spirit manifests is incredibly important to me. In Creativity: The Magic Synthesis, Arieti discusses the neurological and biological aspects of creativity. The fact that “the human cortex has fifteen billion neurons” seems to account for our ability to be more creative than the other animals on earth.

A path or an “engram” is formed in some neurons when we perform a task or have an experience. It is through the engram that we are able to later recall the experience or perform the task again. “The unfolding of the human psyche may ultimately be considered as a formation and transformation of engrams (and groupings of engrams) throughout life,” says Arieti, though this is where he and I part company.

The ineffable quality of being can't be reduced to this explanation, no matter how compelling or seductive it seems to be. I say seductive, because there is a certain egotism in assuming everything can be known, dissected, reduced to quantifiable elements. And yet, I'm attracted to this kind of research, much in the same way I enjoy my own cleverness, by own ability to be witty, to craft a piece of work, to edit and shape something.

But I'd be foolish to think that I'm the ultimate source for the ideas, the inspiration. Arieti also points out that social factors play a part in a person's level of creativity. He postulates that a society which promotes creative thinking through its educational systems and then controls it via rewards in the work force, will ensure the engrams that get traced will be more likely to facilitate innovative thinking on a collective level. I do feel a certain level of agreement here, but it's a telling comment on the isolation of the scientific ivory tower. Arieti can write this treatise with no reference whatsoever to the way social forces shape how people learn, and what, in fact, is taught to whom .

Those critical flaws aside, Creativity offers a detailed overview and some cogent theorizing on some of current research on creativity, and takes into account unpredictability when dealing with the human mind. I can hardly wait to see the results of the engrams that were etched into my neurons as a result of this reading.

ISBN-10: 0465014437 ISBN-13: 978-0465014439

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NEWS FROM FLORICANTO PRESS!!!!!!!


http://www.floricantopress.com/NEW%20TITLES.htm

Lisa Alvarado