“Fuck it! It was only a hobby!”
13 August 2014
That Was Zen, This Is Now
“Fuck it! It was only a hobby!”
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Labels: Anne Lamott, Carolyn See, childhood, forgiveness, grace, introversion, judging, miracles, peace
25 July 2014
Godfamilies are good families
We godfamilies are always a place where members our tribe can land. We will always have room for the others. How fortunate we are for these tribes, for loving and being loved by them.
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Labels: California, Colorado, family, family history, friends, godfamilies, tribe
23 July 2014
Scenes from this year's Indian Nepalese Heritage Camp
On Thursday evening, the first night of Camp, most families arrive at Snow Mountain Ranch YMCA near Tabernash, Colorado in time for the barbecue dinner (grilled hot dogs, burgers, and veggie burgers), held indoors or in the park, depending on the weather ("If you don't like the weather in Colorado, wait five minutes and it will change," we like to say). This year the dinner was inside, in the Kiva, a cavernous building area that houses a rollerskating/games/climbing wall at one end and at the other end we have tables and chairs, a stage and a sound system, tables for a registration/administration area, and a village of little painted plywood buildings for the littler kids. The Kiva is the all-purpose room for several of the gatherings and groupings of our 100 families, plus counselors, and community members. A variety of additional camp activities are distributed elsewhere around the YMCA campus over the next two-and-a-half days.
I was in the Kiva filling my plate with veggie burger, watermelon, and dessert. At the condiments table, a teenager I knew asked for help.
"I don't know you, but could you please help me get some baked beans?"
"Of course," I said. As I shook some ketchup onto his plate and scooped a spoonful of baked beans out of the giant can, I added, "You might not remember me, but you know me. I saw you when you were still at IMH." He thanked me politely, perhaps looking at me a little more curiously because of my comment, and then went to dine with his family and friends.
I feel like we already know each other on some level because he had been at the orphanage when we had come to adopt our daughter. There, everyone we met said he was the little prince of the orphanage, that he was always at the center of things. At the orphanage, I saw the massis (caretakers) and sisters (nurses) chuck his little chin and cheeks, saying affectionately that he knew everyone's comings and goings and he had a say in everything that went on there. At the time, I felt the complicated mix of pleasure and remorse about our being there to adopt a little five-month-old baby girl, when here were one-, two-, and three-year-old children who still needed families, some of whom had disabilities, special needs, or all of the above. It had been a long time since I thought of that.
That Thursday night as we pumped ketchup and mustard out of large plastic jugs onto our picnic plates, I wondered what it was like for him to be plopped down at age two-and-a-half or three into a family in the United States with several other kids after being master of a universe in an orphanage in India. What does he remember about his toddlerhood? I remember him and some of the other children so well; I see the ones who come to Camp grow up into themselves a little more every year, while they still look out from the same eyes and faces they had when they were babies and small children. I saw one girl whom I'd met when she was a toddler with close-cropped hair. Now those same glittering eyes crinkled as she laughed with her friends and tossed her dark ringlets, which reached halfway down her back. I wonder when I see my daughter and her orphanage mates every summer whether any of them still remember when other parents and people came to take the little babies away. Did any of their little best friends get adopted before they did?
***
On the second day of camp, I looked for people who needed help but no one did, so I went into the Kiva to see what was happening. One of the community members was setting up a clay lantern-making craft and four women were seated in front of slabs of cool, soft terra cotta. People in India make little lanterns like these to celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights, and this year's camp theme was the festivals of India and Nepal. A little cool clay appealed to me greatly, so I sat down to my own slab of clay and started mashing it around to see what it wanted to be.
"Some people paint them after they have dried. Someone made a bird on theirs," the instructor said.
I started forming an elephant's head and legs. Another person made a paisley shape and paved it beautifully with shiny gemlike stones. Another person made an elephant head. A fellow joined us and made a clay hand, modeled on his own. I made my elephant's body into a dish and attached four stubby, squat legs that wouldn't come off. I made a head separately, thinking I would attach it later. I squished clay into ears, trying to make them look India-shaped (because Indian elephants have ears that are shaped like India), and pinched and poked clay to make a trunk. I found a way to hang the head on the body, which was the dish for the candles to rest in. A few times people remarked on how soothing it felt to work the clay. One of the directors saw us crafting quietly and called us the "rehab group," which cracked her up, and us too.
Later I said to her, "That was one of the most fun activities I've done at Camp in years!" I felt a little bad for saying that when we've done huge projects with grand conclusions like building houses and making movies in our recent past, but sometimes it's those quiet, contemplative shared moments that unfold into peace of mind and heart.
***
One hour later, my husband and daughter and I had all eaten our fill of savory foods and the trays of rich, honeyed baklava glistened on the table, no one yet hungry enough to take the first piece. I had changed out of my camp t-shirt, which I wear most of the weekend, and put on a casual salwar kameez (loose pants and tunic dress) of light cotton. I felt a little dowdy. My daughter teased me about already having spilled on my outfit. We chatted and joked with my daughter's crib-sister and her family. We were joined by one of the directors and her daughter. We bantered and chatted and laughed about the day's events, in-jokes, and whatever else caught our fancies. I thought: I'm so glad I do this. I do this so my daughters can feel comfortable in this place, in this way, with all these people.
My friend Fran, the mother of my daughter's crib-sister, so a kind of family member to me over the past decade-plus, asked what my favorite thing about Camp is. I looked around the room and said to her, "It's really about this right here: the rainbow of people who come here together to do this every year."
***
At one point during the "Dumb questions" discussion in the adult workshop, I raised my hand to share an observation. "Looking at this as an adoptive parent," I said, "it seems like our adopted kids have a double burden in terms of self-advocacy. I mean, first everyone has to learn to advocate for themselves, which isn't easy in and of itself. But these kids have to do this extra layer of self-advocacy. It makes me see how important it is for us to support them, as their parents and community."
"Yes, this may be," said the presenter, "but we don't ever put ideas in the kids' mouths about this. We try to ask them open-ended questions and let them come up with the answers. We never put words in their mouths." Ah, yes, I thought, nodding. I can just be there for them, because it can be exhausting over time to field all those "where are you from?"s and those double-takes people do when they see our family (the ones that always prompt me to say, "Mental math! They're doing their mental math, trying to figure us out."). But I see how there's no need to give anyone a chip on their shoulder. We just need to help our kids get the information they need to be informed about their history and culture and food and current events, and some emotional-intelligence tools for fielding the dumb questions and stereotypes, so they can keep moving beyond those and toward what they truly want and need to do in the world. The kids feel pride in what they know of their cultures and often have the attitude that with a little more information, everyone could be more comfortable in their skin, including them. This is truly what INHC is all about.
Namita Khanna Nariani, one of the facilitators of the teens' workshop, who also happens to be the head of the Mudra Dance Studio, described a situation with a student from India she had learned about who had moved to a new community and was at a new school. He had special needs, and brown skin, and was persistently getting bullied by his classmates. He was fearful and small, in danger of fading away. He didn't want to live.
One of the student's teachers called Namita for help. Namita came to teach the students in his class about Indian dance. She did a performance with her dance troupe, and then led the students in learning a couple of styles of Indian dance -- Punjabi, Bhangra, etc. As she taught them dances and explained some of the history, Namita was delighted when one of the Latino students in the class noticed, "This is a lot like our salsa dance." By the end of the dance instruction, the class had completely opened the boy and his culture up to his classmates, and their relationship changed completely. The boy felt proud of his culture, and felt cool for coming from the place where these fun dances had originated, and his cultural pride spilled over into pride in himself. The students learned more about him, and the bullying stopped. After the session, I talked with Namita, and teared up as I thanked her for all she does.
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Labels: camp, identity, India, Indian Nepalese Heritage Camp, INHC
22 July 2014
A dozen years at Indian Nepalese Heritage Camp
Our summer began with a trip to Los Angeles, where we gathered with family to celebrate my sister's recent wedding. It seemed so fitting that we found a restaurant for the event -- our grandfather might not have liked the place, but would have approved of the gathering. I was thrilled that all but one of my family members joined us (one was ill). Even the ones who live over on the Westside came -- by bicycle! (It took them a few hours each way, and they had to leave a bit early because they forgot a bike light.) After we returned home, our birthday march commenced, peppered with Father's Day, our anniversary, and the 4th of July holiday.
But the culminating event of the summer was Camp.
"Camp?" you ask. "What camp?"
Every year except one since our daughter was a year old, we have gone up to the mountains, two hours from home, for Indian Nepalese Heritage Camp, which celebrates our children's Indian and Nepalese heritage and cultures. It happens every summer at a YMCA facility in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, 15 minutes from the ski town of Winter Park. When we started attending, it was still called East Indian Heritage Camp, because originally it was started to give the founder Pam Sweetser's child and all the kids coming to the Denver area (via our adoption agency, Friends of Children of Various Nations) a way to connect with their fellow adoptees from Kolkata (Calcutta) and explore aspects of their shared culture every year. Next year, I was thrilled to learn, a couple of young women who attended the first camp as children, came back year after year as campers, then counselors, then coordinators, are going to be co-directors of the camp.
One amazing thing is ours isn't the only camp. There are camps every weekend all summer long -- for Chinese, Cambodian, Eastern European, and other adoptees. But I love our camp. As a group, we pull off some ambitious and amazing projects, and there's a dance party at the end that's all about inclusion in the best ways (except for the part where the loud volume drives many people out of the room). Every year at Camp, there are great things, overwhelming aspects, tricky bits, interesting people, and big personalities. Above all, though, there's a willingness to put all our children and young people at the center of everything for a long weekend and let them get to know each other and themselves just a little better.
For me personally, it's marvelous to be a part of this community rising up to support these people. I love knowing the community members better and better, and the other parents, and enlarging the circle to include new families of all shapes and sizes and constituents. My recent revelation about making coffee -- there are so many ways to make an excellent cup of coffee, not just one -- holds for making families, too. There are so many ways for people to join together as families, and INHC's wonderful array of families and community members proves this is true. One of the greatest things about Camp is how it acknowledges how the kids' adoptions and living in mixed-race families affects and creates their own unique culture.
Until I started volunteering at Camp, I often felt overwhelmed by the activities and the emotions they stirred up. I didn't know as many families, and I often felt like an outsider. Looking back, it is clear we adopted our daughter at a peak in Indian adoptions -- hardly anyone is adopted from India these days (more kids are coming from Nepal now). What this has meant for us is our daughter grew up with a bunch of kids from her orphanage she now sees every summer at Camp. Now, having attended 12 years of these camps, we don't feel like outsiders in any sense. We weren't outsiders when we'd only attended once, but I couldn't help feeling like we were back then. For our daughter, it has not felt like she left India and never went back -- it's felt like she left India and a whole bunch of the kids came with her! (And then we went back, but that's another story, or several.) And she's never been "the only one" -- since we became her parents, we have had a community of families with kids adopted from India and other places around us, and camp has reinforced and extended our connections to these families.
For the last few camps, I have had larger volunteer roles, which definitely helped me feel more a part of everything. This year I volunteered to help with the audio/visual equipment, in part because of the loudness of some of the events. But every time I went to offer help, though, I was assured other folks had it under control. So I just offered support where I saw a need, which worked out well. This year I got to go to some of the adult sessions and enjoy conversations with other new and long-attending families. I reconnected with a former coworker who since adopted a child from China and a younger one from Nepal, and I participated in the adult dance performance, which I always love.
The hardest thing about writing about Camp is knowing how much to explain, and again I find myself not knowing where to begin. For what it is -- just over two days of workshops for kids and adults on dance, cooking, culture, and adoption/mixed race issues -- it has such a huge impact on our lives. Any questions? Please ask!
26 June 2014
Playing and being played
It's a new sensation in that my judgments and skepticism have been falling away. I wonder lately whether each of us has a field of energy interacting with everyone else's energy field, or auras that mix and match or clash or that glow bright or dim according to circumstances or health or interactions with others. It's like starting with three colors of paint and combining them to make more colors: each time you mix two colors, you get something different. If there's one thing I've learned from my mother's health issues, it's that we are all so different, each exposed to a different set of hazards, blessed with a different set of genetic strengths and environmental advantages while having a unique achilles heel in each of our reactions to toxins, pollution, allergies, or other insults to our health.
This sensation of turning my ... fate, for lack of a better word, over to something as vague as “the divine,” as Tosha Silver says, is also an old, familiar one in that I've always thrown the I Ching when I have not known what I wanted or where I was going. Sometimes I turn to the the ritual of shaking three pennies six times and recording the hexagram so I can look it up in the I Ching for advice, but it's more that I want some landmarks as I continue on my way, some signposts indicating what I should remain mindful of as I walk down the next section of the path. I trust that my contact with the coins will lead me to something I need to know at this moment. My edition of the I Ching has two different books that each list interpretations of each hexagram, so I look up the hexagram in each book to make sure I don't miss some detail I should to pay attention to, just the way I look up two different recipes for the same new dish so I understand how the recipe is supposed to work in theory, not just in one instance.
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21 June 2014
Strategies for Sports and Life
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09 June 2014
Songs of Gratitude: On Being Seen
21 May 2014
Oh What A Time It Was...
The next day, Sunday, May 18, was the Olompali Heritage Day celebration. We got there just after 10 and drove up the road, a newer road a little south of the one that used to go straight out to 101, just outside the city of Novato, which had only been a town when we lived at Olompali in 1969.
I wasn't sure what to expect from this day. I had sent my Olompali story to the folks making the documentary Olompali: A California Story. I met Greg Gibbs, the partner of the film's producer, Maura McCoy, who was one of the founders of this chapter of Olompali's history as one of three children of her dad, Don McCoy was the man who had leased the ranch (all 690 acres of it!) from the State of California starting in 1966. The Grateful Dead had been the land's renters for a few months, earlier in that halcyon year of hippiedom, which also happened to be the year we arrived in San Francisco.
We entered the park, me marveling all the while at the visitor center apparatus (paved parking lot and fences) and finding things not quite as I had remembered. The visitor center is in the Yellow House but the lower floor has been gutted and remodeled, so was entirely unfamiliar, and I didn't ask to go upstairs, where things have been less altered since I lived there.
I then met Gregg and Maura in person. Maura would have been about 10 or 11 when my sister died and Novato shut the place down. Perhaps Maura and I didn't click back in the day, and didn't remember each other fondly. Testing my recall, I asked a couple of people if they remembered anyone named "Ivy" at Olompali, but now I wonder whether it is Maura I've renamed in my memory banks.
After showing the film trailer, an early Q & A with Gregg, Maura, and Noelle followed to let the overheating projector recover before we could all watch the film clip. During the Q & A I stood up with all the people in the room who had lived there then. Some people didn't know who I was, and I didn't recognize most of the other 15 people or so who were standing with me in the room.
After seeing the 10-minute film excerpt, everyone in attendance was quite impressed. Many of the Olompali folks had been through the experience of working with an archaeologist who sorted out the things found in the fire that gutted the Burdell Mansion early in 1969 so they were used to a certain kind of examination of their past. But this snappy, hopeful, and well produced tale showed how the place is woven into the fabric of California history and validated some key elements of this chapter of Rancho Olompali's storied history. It focused on how the commune didn't start out as a grand experiment in utopian living. It was more that the kids in three families all liked each other and the adults said, "Hey, we have money -- let's get out of the concrete jungle and try living in the country all together." And they did.
Sister Mary, who had been the commune's schoolteacher at what came to be called the Not School, stood up and read a poem she'd written to commemorate the occasion. Everyone cheered and accepted the copies she handed around.
After the film clip, everyone walked around and chatted. I introduced myself to Buz, who was the ranch manager at the time. I would have been just one of the little kids to him, I think. Then I introduced myself to a fellow in a straw hat and wearing a bead necklace. "You're Flower?" he beamed, brightening. "I'm Hari. I knew you and your family well. You were my favorite kid!" We were both crying now. I'm crying again as I write this.
Hari said he remembered me well, and my family too. I was so happy to hear this! We had been friends. "You were so imaginative and free," Hari said. "I remember your mother, too. I think I had a crush on her. I was 'between families' then, and she represented everything that my first wife had not been. And she was so beautiful. And you, you were my favorite kid. And your father." Here he sighed and struggled with what to say. "I don't think he was a junkie," he said carefully, "but he was using." I was glad to have another of my memories corroborated by another witness, because I had confronted my father on this point and he'd disclaimed any memories of the events. I said my father is living in Mexico now and we are out of touch. Hari nodded.
Hari's story had been that he was headed down a narrowing path when he decided to go to India on a spiritual quest. His wife and children wanted no part of his strange journey, and turned against him. He came back from India changed and still seeking, but still without family. When he landed at Olompali around when we did, he too saw the possibility of a place where children were encouraged to play and sing and dance and explore and be curious and interact with the people around them not just in an institution. But he also went to the Haight and saw what was happening, how harder drugs were sweeping away that peaceful, loving vibe and turning the Haight-Ashbury into a place more often than not hijacked by the gritty, greasy stew of junkies, drunks, dealers, pimps, and bikers displacing the flood of hamsterish and earnest stoned people and acid-dropping intellects. Hari later had a second family, two sons who love and cherish him and he them.
___
As one example of the examined life the former Olompalians have lived since that particular experiment aborted, it had become apparent that the archaeologist's assumption was incorrect: the concrete pad outside the yellow house was not for a family gazebo that had since been dismantled or destroyed in a gale. Rather, it had been built for the giant bread oven that was gifted to the commune by a baker who took a detour on his existential trail when he came to live at Olompali. Bread was baked by nudists in the large commercial oven (An oven, or a sweat lodge? You be the judge!) not only for the communards but also as part of the Diggers' self-appointed mission to hand out for free on Sundays in San Francisco. Someone asked about the recipe for the bread and the answer came, "It had a lot of molasses. It was more virtuous than delicious." But I remember that fresh hot whole-wheat bread with meals being filling and chewy. Some days it tasted better than others. Remember: these were the days when people were experimenting with everything -- you can just imagine what happened when a bunch of communally minded people converged on the kitchen!
I have to curb my storytelling for now but will pick it up soon. I am so grateful for the opportunity to take this trip right now, and to myself for taking it. It has been a revelation and a delight. For now, a couple more thoughts:
We were all just borrowing this place. But oh, the things we learned! That with care and intention and energy it is possible to create an environment conducive to joy and music and discovery and movement and mixing things up. That a lot of dark stuff got mixed up in it the way PCP or the poorly named "angel dust" hit the streets of the Haight like a toxic tide that brought with it a thousand more ills and imbalances. Yet, before all of that, there had been a big idea that still animates all the hearts of the true hippies I know: that this kind of joy and openness is possible not just for small groups of individuals but in society at large. Which is but one of the reasons my heart swells about the maker movement and I have long dreamed of opening a place called The Craft Palace. I have always turned to making something when I am feeling sad or alienated from others. We had a friend stay with us a few days and teach me how to improvise on the piano, and anytime I had a keyboard at hand and needed to hear my own music, I had that to cheer myself up or remind myself of my basic creative and generative self. Doesn't every child deserve the access to that I had? That experience gave me the tools to get the education I wanted from the environment around me, not only take what was handed to me by my teachers.
For awhile, I struggled with PTSD. I got distracted by all those demons, that "evil life that's got you in its sway," as the Rolling Stones song goes. And all that came in a middle section of the story, so we'll put that idea aside for another essay or several, not letting that hijack this joyful tale, and return to May 18.
As I have said, the big surprise to me was that we all left Olompali around when our family turned tail and headed to Colorado. Noelle said "about 12 of us moved back home to my mother's house in Mill Valley." I believe the McCoy family went to a place just outside San Rafael in Terra Linda when the commune ended (but I'm still fuzzy on some of the details).
I learned that while my family arrived on the crest of the dark tide that arose about six months before Olompali was shut down, when singalongs started to turn sour and the drunk guys stole the spotlight again, it wasn't me anyone was objecting to. I was where I was supposed to be, the whole time we were there. When I was flipping through the records in the mansion, and picking one to put on and listen to by myself, I was supposed to be doing just that. This environment had been designed for me, and spread out for me to discover at my own pace, which I did every time I put on an album or tapped a tambourine to keep time with a song.
I had so long carried the feeling of being exiled from that place, where heaven went along without us while we had been dashed back down to earth to suffer and shuffle along among the other mortals, an experience that set us apart from angels and humans equally. So what a revelation it is to feel that we belonged there. What a relief no longer to take it personally when someone like Noelle says, "We didn't want just anybody coming here." We belonged there despite the existence of cliques of drunk men or mean kids (who pop up in every crowd, right?). We belonged there because we were ready and willing and able to be genuine and free and true to ourselves, and once you've seen that, no one can take it away from you: It's yours. It's yours to keep in your pocket, to wear the way a superhero dons a cape, or to stick on a pole and fly freak-flag high, or to twirl like the streamer of a rhythmic gymnast. I feel I have given this great gift of belonging to myself, a direct result of taking this trip.
As I met people around the reunion, I saw that we are all still here, and still carry some of that joy with us. It's not always easy to remember amidst the chaos and demands of now, and the pain of losing so many of our fellows along the way. But we all shared and cared how it came out. My sister's death didn't just affect our family; it affected our whole community. It's too bad my family for whatever reasons could not stay and grieve with the others around us, who would have helped us process what happened and grow to accept it over time. We had to navigate that on our own in a way I wouldn't wish on anyone. But we made it through and for that I am grateful. There are so many times we could have not made it for one reason or another, but we did, and we're not victims of our past but survivors, one and all. It's a miracle each one of us is here. So I figure let's make the most of it and celebrate being in it all together. Oh, what a time it is.
OK go!
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Labels: California history, family, family history, Greg Gibbs, Heritage, hippies, Maura McCoy, Olompali, San Francisco
30 April 2014
The End of Olompali
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Labels: childhood, commune life, grief, memoir, Olompali
29 April 2014
Post-Dramatic Stress
The other day I heard an NPR story about the Sherpa community after many Sherpa died in a recent ice slide on Everest. One Sherpa said, "Normally, when we climbing, we just pray: 'Om mani padme hum.' That mantra is very powerful mantra, and that protects you [with] safety and long life. But ... if there's a wrong time, even the mantra cannot protect them."
25 April 2014
Communication saves
I would not be who I am today without the strength of my desire to keep information and love, energy, compassion, and curiosity flowing better and more freely everywhere I turn. I am grateful for feeling connected, not isolated, and for my many open channels of communication. They have truly saved me from many fates far worse than this.
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Labels: grief, information, library, personal history, silence