three minutes

yesterday, i listened to 14 people speak on behalf of 30 acres of wilderness in utah's wasatch backcountry. the man in charge -- a gray-haired city councilman -- had the ironic surname of "wilde". his stance on whether or not 30 acres of pristine mountain range should be sold to a canadian developer was unclear, but his disdain for the 100+ uninvited guests in his chambers was apparent. he huffed, he puffed, but he didn't blow the public commentary down.

the rally was rife with rag-a-muffins, ski bums on crutches, hippie chicks in knitted caps, reporters, bearded sages,
mt.dew-slurping punks, patagucci sporters, meteorologists, mothers and public utilities reps (namely, watershed officials). the auditorium was packed. one sign stood out among the others: "skilink is a snowjob" and "how many kickbacks does it take to build skilink?" featuring the iconic tootsie pop owl.

mr. wilde explained to the crowd that no decisions would be made that day, and advised us to return at a nondescript but "reasonably near future date". he noted, however begrudgingly, that if we insisted on speaking then our rights allowed us as much. no one budged.

the first speaker was a rep for 'save our canyons'. toward the end of his address to a half-moon panel of puffy-eyed politicians, his voice quivered. wilde cut him off -- "your three minutes are up". a voice from the plebes blurted "he can have mine".

laughter erupted, wilde denied the offer and called the rabble to order. group reps would be granted 5 minutes, individuals 3 minutes.

each speaker was required to state his or her name, address, and affiliation.

one speaker in a lime green jacket and brown trucker hat ran down to the podium. he stated his name, his address, and explained that he was speaking 'on behalf of the unborn'.

he recited a 1916 quote by theodore roosevelt from his iphone:

"Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the 'the game belongs to the people.' So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The 'greatest good for the greatest number' applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method."


two reps from an affected private corporation also addressed the panel -- somewhere, the question of whether public and protected land should be sold in a back-door deal to a canadian developer became a question of whether or not existing resorts may continue to offer summer activities. the legislation changes required to allow further mountain development were cleverly translated into a legal definition crisis for "ski resort" and all that it entails. the two reps underscored the harmless -- even beneficial -- aspects of developing land they don't own, for private profit that will never trickle down to the people who live here. the word pillage came to mind.


the panel discussed the urgency of redefining the legislation (FCOZ) not in order to expedite development plans in public land, but to allow these existing resorts to maintain their summer activities. suddenly, oktoberfest in a parking lot became the central focus and concern of the panel and the highlighted topic of the resort reps who addressed them. nevermind the 30 acres of wilderness on the chopping block, or the threat to a critical watershed for over one million desert dwellers.

the word 'obfuscation' came to mind. the rhetorical red-herring nature of politics played out on a micro scale. nevermind clean water. nevermind the precedent of auctioning public land in private with broad terms permitting untold development. let's talk about humble ski resorts trying to carry on business as usual, provide utahns with jobs (described by one speaker as "slinging hash at snowbird"), and help the plebes out with transportation issues (to the tune of $96/ride that will flow directly to canada).

we don't need jobs. we need to wake up. we need water. we need natural havens. we need to protect what can never be regained once it is sold and scarred for profit.


one speaker noted: what "they" have is the advantage of gold, lawyers, paid advocates and special interests that trump the will of the people or the integrity of our watershed and the dwindling refuge of people-free wilderness. free access to pristine public land is the inextricable wealth of the masses. it made me think about the recession -- i thought, maybe this is mother nature's plan to protect herself. as the divide between haves and have-nots widens, the haves devise new ways to monetize nature, while the have-nots are increasingly recognizing wild earth as a refuge. it would seem that as team have-nots grows in number, mother nature's chances for survival would increase. but this cold war between greed and survival won't be lost because proponents for survival are outnumbered. it is a david and goliath show-down dominated by government's golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules. moreover, manipulation and obfuscation are formidable weapons that have been expertly forged by team goliath. but as soon as that paradigm is sufficiently deconstructed, i think team david will find its lucky stone.

i thought about these mountains, out there in the snow, carrying on, oblivious....how we could sit in a cramped auditorium and debate the future and integrity of such sinister beauty with which we share a sacred symbiosis. i thought about the absurd asymmetry of what was at stake compared to what we had to defend it: three minutes.

doubt vs. passion

Doubt vs. Passion

in battling Doubt, my arsenal includes memories of times that inspired raw possibility or blissful ignorance: baking my bones in the desert sun, steeping in my emerald lake, being flanked by haughty skyscrapers -- little time pearls plucked from when i believed myself immune to tragedy, or heartbreak.

most decidedly, a teaspoon of delusion is necessary to succeed in a delusional world. so many ideas or thoughts or solutions or whimsical fancies are washed down the mental drain because they seem stupid, hackneyed, done, or unprofitable. then i look around and see people making lives out of thin air, and think, how could they have believed that such a plan would work from the outset? had the same thought occured to me to do xyz stupid thing, i would have been certain that if i'd even pursued the idea, i'd brand myself an idiot for life and get filed away as such -- without hope for parole.

but it seems, the more delusional and self-aggrandizing one is capable of being, the greater the chances of success. it requires a dynamic sleigh ride pulled by the hallowed horses Self-Doubt and Passion.

Passion is the most potent silencer of Doubt. Passion doesn't try to muzzle Doubt. instead, it listens and says without any strain at all, yes, but i can't help it. i will do it anyway, if it kills me, nothing else really matters.

maybe Doubt is Passion's secret frenemy. the more hostile and reasonable Doubt sounds, the more flexible and stalwart the irrationality of Passion becomes. i don't think Passion can be articulated. it is wholly irrational and it has to be, in order to contend with the shrill voice of Doubt.

Doubt is a preservative. it keeps the status quo intact -- something that can be managed and mastered with practice, leaving little room for nasty surprises or curve balls. it keeps risk at bay. it reminds us how limited we are, and how disastrous ridicule can be for a delicate ego or a fledgling dream. transcending doubt is extremely seductive and repellent at the same time. Doubt is that shiny red apple on the tree of eden, and Passion is the snake.

Passion can morph into Doubt, in order to outsmart it. suddenly, Passion asks, you can't do that? i doubt it. you can't leave this garden? i doubt it. you can't spin straw into gold? prove it. then doubt starts to look like a dirty little liar.

Doubt! all this time, you led me to believe that i couldn't. i never questioned you. passion has a point: you cannot be trusted.

then which one points to greater delusion? they are both liars. but since the choice to listen to one or the other can be as simple as tuning a radio dial, maybe Passion has a more pleasant playlist than Doubt. maybe Passion offers a less crippling delusion than Doubt. maybe Doubt and Passion play chess on the weekends and make out on mondays. maybe they need eachother in order to convince us to look beyond the garden gate and go bite the apple.

build it

the kevin costner movie "field of dreams" came out when i was five. i remember watching it, thinking the idea was interesting, and wondering what it would be like to do something outwardly foolish because a loud voice in a corn field promised a return (albeit, a rather ominous one...who will come?).

in the movie, kevin costner is an ordinary american -- hard-working, married, poor, and for the box office's sake, conveniently attractive. his wife, in the film, looks like she could sing karaoke in a roadside saloon in any number of southern states, or nevada.

when costner decides to bulldoze the cornfield and replace it with a yankees-grade baseball diamond--because a voice told him that "he will come" if he builds it--she throws a fit and considers her options.

but he does it anyway. eventually, ray liotta comes sauntering out of the corn field to check out kevin's handiwork. he's impressed.

i think about field of dreams when i write. it's a cheesy reference to an 80's housewife excuse to ogle costner in tight faded jeans and a dirty white tee shirt. but it resonates nonetheless.

doing what you want to do takes a shit load of courage. doing what other people tell you to do is the path of least resistance. humans are mostly made of water, we like to take that path as often as possible. but sometimes, building the arc in a landlocked desert feels less insane than wearing a tie and stamping papers or taking orders. we are used to shelving what our toucan nose would prefer to eat for breakfast so we settle for shredded wheat. but we want fruit loops.

i wonder what the world would be like if more people gave themselves permission to build their arc or raze their cornfields for a baseball diamond, all for the sake of following animal instinct. because something told us to do it.

building your arc is easier when everyone seems to be fumbling for answers. there is a cyclical emphasis on results, science, clarity, logic and data to support hypothesis. but when hard science runs reason into a wall, there is an open invitation to waltz through the debris, pick up the pieces and do something extraordinary with them. that is the only way that order has ever been restored. chaos, anarchy, atheism, revolt begets enlightenment, renaissance, democracy, invention.

in his predictable, iowa-stricken life, humble order and tradition (in the form of corn-husking salt-of-the- earth "conservatives") form a zealot army of backward thought, fear-driven attitudes and mob mentality in rows of folding chairs at a PTA meeting (agenda: book banning). as far as the locals were concerned, swapping corn for a baseball field was, at best, an unpopular choice.

offscreen, certain eras have been more conducive to arc building and corn dozing than others, though certain arc builders have met with less enviable fates.

i saw a "performance art" exhibit at the museum of modern art in manhattan two years ago. it was a collection of wild acts and disturbing dares conceived by one marina abramović. the title of her work: the artist is present. this was a pivotal experience for me, and many others. there is now a blog titled "marina abramovic made me cry". an epidemic of weepers inspired a piece in the new york times about marina's collection as well. i was no exception.

in hindsight, i see this as a prophetic expression of where we are now. it was when the horse came unhooked from the cart to wander aimlessly, while the driver (us) still cracks the ghostly outline of the horse's footprints in the dust.

it was life, a sweater, turned inside out and feeling alarmingly more normal than it did, right-side out. what would "normally" seem absurd, ridiculous, laughable, violent or obscene, tickled a revealing nerve: what we took for granted as normal, was actually insane. and what we'd like to label "crazy" or whimsical, was beginning to seem increasingly more logical by comparison. the affect was unsettling and refreshing: it was the stripping down of normal, deletion of clothing and other facades that exposed normal as a fraud. what could we count on then? why did crazy suddenly feel like home?

marina's arc floated by, and i wished i was on it.

i wrote about it that night:

april 24, 2010


we saw videos of marina screaming herself hoarse, dancing herself to exhaustion, and running naked into a man, also naked. live humans, totally nude, facing eachother, guarded the narrow entrance to a wing of the exhibit, stared at eachother straight in the eyes -- unwavering. brushing past to get to the wing, few people faced the man as they sidestepped through -- most faced the woman. toward the end, there was a naked woman mounted high on a white wall, straddling a bicycle seat with arms raised, pits overgrown.

then, a video of marina trying not to spill water from a pot, standing alone in a dismal, chipping, empty kitchen. that's when i started crying. something about the power of interaction? on a human, face to face level, the literal stepping through or stepping aside of norms that suddenly seemed stranger than the bizarre exhibits we were looking at...something too about women. the baring of women, the absurdity of sex, the grotesqueness of our physical world (reduced to a large heap of bloody cattle bones, in a room by itself) carnage, endurance, amid ridiculous worries not to spill the water. disturbance at watching a woman scream until she can't, dance until she collapses, or silently being scrutinized in public. was it her choice? it must have been. but why?

everything we shared as normal suddenly twisted into shock, wonder, there was something distinctly lost and alienated yet familiar in it all.

pubic hair, no attempt at changing nature but rather, amplifying it in a reversal of what is normal/acceptable/disturbing/pleasant or real about women and who we really are. it made me cry.




like the proverbial field of dreams, an arc is a monument to the true self. it is every human's magnum opus. it is permission from the mind to the heart to the hand, in order to realize the soul's mission and design. only secondarily is it a service to humanity -- though that is usually what everyone else remembers, or values most. it is courage combined with what looks like madness, that levels corn fields, builds a boat in the desert, and makes new yorkers cry.

build it.

arabesque

origami

this town, from certain angles, looks like a punch bowl full of soviet russia. midwinter, the streets fade into an oppressive palette of grays, washed out taupe, and secondhand camel browns. nothing shines -- no hints of red confetti, yellow hibiscus, party sparkles, or swaying palms to halt the insistent rainbow of drab. all surfaces are in need of a spit shine, crumbling walls and disintegrating curbs beg for a dignified burial.

row after row of sensible brick buildings -- jurassic monuments from an era of visual anaesthetics.

i long for a zoning violation in hunter orange, a yarn shop in shocking indigo, or a corrugated, conical structure to disrupt the breadline of tragic stations, warehouses and abandoned popcorn factories. bring on the ghastly neon eyesores -- antidotes to the blah architecture and monochromatic, windowless mordors squatting on neglected sidewalks with accidental foliage.

add winter haze and overcast skies to the background -- silty air, black dots peppering my kleenex, ashy knuckles and the bleakest town in north korea looks like a carnival cruise.

getting out is key. but when i'm inundated with the raggedy quilt of winter qualms week after week, escape seems out of the question. not because it's impossible, but because survival instincts trick me into thinking that i must stay and let the dirge play on -- leaving now would be rude. this is but one pale pocket of the universe. rumors/blind faith suggest that sunnier pastures surely exist, but leaving is always harder than being gone.

a ticket to fiji was not in my cards this december. so finding and forging color on a local, less exotic level became my mission.

reaching back to my high school days, when my half-japanese boyfriend made me a menagerie of origami tulips on a strand of bright, white christmas lights, i decided to try my hand at paper folding. i bought a stack of dazzling origami paper from a craft store and discovered another pasttime that sucks hours into the same black hole that contains lost sock mates, expensive earrings, and passports. indeed, folding paper into three-dimensional tulip bulbs joined the ranks of repetitive motion activity (OCD-fodder) along with knitting pool covers, beating my own personal best at tetris, and playing electronic travel scrabble. i folded incessantly, and filled a victoria's secret gift box with my faux flora for an then-unknown purpose. initially, i planned on placing them on a new string of lights and draping them across my sensible brick mantle (also brown).

a flood in my bedroom forced a "clean cup, move down" affair in my apartment in mid november. room purposes shifted counter-clockwise, and i cleared out my office to make room for my bed, placed my desk in my living room, and shut the door of my beiruted bedroom for a series of russian handymen to inspect and repair at their leisure over the course of a month.

now that i've returned my bed to its rightful place, the office is still empty. having my desk in the middle of the living room created a temporary, anachronistic effect that i found more inspiring than the office. it also created the starving artist illusion of being tight on space -- something that i do not wrestle with in my current abode-- and evokes an urban dwelling with a coveted, seaside zip code.

so the tulips were born. they lived in a hot pink box on my desk, next to my money tree -- the effect was that of a rectangular green glass oasis, adrift in a sea of stain-resistant carpet in need of a dirt devil (artists can't afford vacuums). lacking a string of lights, and the stamina to face the big box stores that sell them, i took a handful of tulips to my parents' house to test their luminosity and lanternability on my mom's christmas tree. her tree lights resembled rose-molded butterballs. they were supposed to be bullet-sized snowballs, but the butter association could not be eradicated.

it was a tight fit, but i managed to shove the tulips over three butterballs and enjoy the flowers of my labor.

upon discovering my homage to the fine art of paper folding, my mother commissioned me to multiply and divide my origami obsession x10 to create tulips for each butterball on her crooked but naturally imperfect evergreen. i accepted. my internal obsessive hobbies bureau (ohb) was ecstatic -- now i could manipulate blossom-dappled paper for hours with a purpose and a deadline.


the origami christmas tree went over quite well with visitors, siblings and such. one aunt coerced me into teaching a fifth grade class how to create tulips, lotuses, and fortune tellers for art class/"decorate the library" day. a string of melancholy blue lights became the host strand for a linear evolution of crumpled attempts, torn edges, and eventually, perfect tulips fashioned by a herd of 9-year-olds.

one boy buried his head in the crook of his elbow in utter despair: "i'll never get the edges to line up" he said. "not in my life. not with my luck". on some level, he was right. these tulips and origami in general, are partial to precision, crisp lines, symmetry, and strong fingernails to iron each fold. sloppy origami is an oxymoron -- in fact, if it is sloppy, it is not origami. i couldn't tell this kid that he had made a mockery of an ancient japanese tradition. instead, i poked a hole in his wrinkled ball of green paper and stuck it on the string of lights with the rest of them. yes, i was an accessory to corner cutting. the kid seemed supremely disappointed in himself, but managed to get his head out his elbow long enough to appreciate the light peering through his mutant tulip.

post-christmas, my sisters and i exorcised all things holiday in my parents' house. we stashed neighbor gifts (popcorn tins, tea pots, cookies in tupperwares, the dancing santa that terrifies the cat) in preparation for a new year. we pulled each tulip off the butterballs and placed them in a tall box. my sister lifted the tree off the square stand while i stood on one corner of it, and laughed. the cat glared -- quietly bidding farewell to his short and inexplicable love affair with an indoor tree.

we dragged it through the front door head first, catching its wide caboose in the door frame and sending a spray of pine needles scattering in remote places. in protest, citing all it had done for us and its stoic tolerance of feline abuse, it clung to the door frame. but what comes in must go out. with a final shove, it was exiled to the curb. the cat wept and waved a starched hanky from the window -- oh, my love.

we decided to give the tulips a final act for new year's eve. popping the tulips on the butterballs once more, we draped the strands over the china hutch and across the white mantle to illuminate our framed baby faces.

back to my empty office space. i envision a moroccan smoking lounge...magenta floor cushions, drum-shaped tables with olives, and a jade tiled fountain in the center of the room, to hold rose petals and live koi -- just a simple upgrade.

i plan to create an entirely new collection of tulips to light the place up -- newspaper clippings, soap or chocolate wrappers, anything that will hold a crease. i've thought to place a wish, a prayer, a curse or a spell in each one -- each guest can pick one to keep -- along with the fortune inside.

while the season insists on conservative tones, and until charm is restored to the streets, i shall adorn butterballs with handcrafted echoes of spring. or perhaps i shall simply go to india.