Laurita Dianita

Last Fall, I decided to undertake a series of photographic portraits and narratives of women in Alaska. I wrote about the idea in the early life of this blog: http://www.lauritadianita.info/?p=16. I am finally beginning.

I am interested in sharing the stories of the women that make Alaska the unique place that it is. I am interested in showing the different forms that women’s strength can take: from fixing snowmachines and putting up firewood and hunting to bringing your family across the ocean as a refugee and resettling in this strange, cold land to fighting with wisdom and compassion for the well-being of your people who have lived here for many thousands of years.

For those who are not from here, such stories can provide a much-needed humanity to Alaska; they can provide a portrait of our state apart from the we-all-live-in-igloos misconceptions or Sarah Palin’s mama grizzlies.  For those from here, we all, I think, deserve to stop and celebrate the women who are our neighbors, coworkers, family members, forbearers, tribal leaders, legislators, and inspirations. In a state with mostly male legislators and the highest rates of sexual violence in the country, a state where the mayor of the largest city can veto equal rights for LBGT folks, we need to celebrate and promote the places where we are forward-thinking in terms of gender: we have some tough-as-nails women up here doing good things.

I am interested in telling the stories, through photographs and interviews, of what strong and compassionate women do and who they are. Most important to me, however, is the question of how they came to be. How does strength and passion develop? How does someone develop a sense of justice? Where did each woman find her inspirations and role models and which lessons and oppressions did she have to reject? This is important to explore because it gives us clues into how we can raise and educate children to be strong, just and compassionate leaders in the world. And in particular, it guides us in this process for raising our daughters.

Very soon I will have the first installment, featuring Tiffany Zulkosky. You can get a sneak peek of the photo on Flickr.

I <3 the Anchorage arts community because…

• Sheila Wyne’s studio party was the most fun party I’ve been to in Anchorage and it raised money for rad artists Erin Pollock and Steph Kesey.
• Many of my photog friends were there and posted great photos, like Charles Tice’s pix on Flickr (look down for the comments section).
• We go to each other’s shows and promote each other.
• Enzina Marrari, an amazing performance and visual artist, always asks me to provide art for Middle Way Café, so this month I provided not only 3 of my own pieces, but 5 of Oscar Avellaneda’s. Yep, even though he is in Costa Rica doing sea turtle research before biking to Panamá and taking a boat to Colombia and meeting me there in a month (!!!!!!!), he still gets to show his work and maybe sell it. Cuz his fiancé hustles for him.
• Lots and lots of other reasons… Feel free to add your own!

Here are my pieces for the Middle Way show:

The show runs from tomorrow, 8/13/10, the big opening with food until October 6th. Only the nude is for sale, as I already sold the other two.

Oscar’s pix are from his Kids & Bikes collection plus one other. They’re all shot on black and white film and he hand-printed and framed them all.

Kids & Bikes collection: http://www.avephoto.com/kidsnbikes.php

Portraits collection: http://www.avephoto.com/portraiture.php

(photo by Oscar Avellaneda)

In kindergarten, Ms. Clutz asked us to write an “I love my mother because…” paper with a drawing for Mother’s Day. In the big open space on top of that newsprint paper with the lines, I drew a ferris wheel and wrote: “I love my mother because shez gona tak me to the Dixn May Fare,” or some such partially-invented spelling. (Oh how I wish I had the paper with me to scan and post here!) When I found this piece of writing as a wisened 5th grader, I thought, “How shallow I was! I thought love was just about her doing little things for me!”

But tonight, I began a little list in my head of reasons I loved my parents, and they were all small things like that. Of course I love them for big, giant reasons—reasons as big as the lessons and patterns of my life, reasons like the way they’ve helped form my character as a strong woman with integrity or the way they accept me. But I find that little things are powerful in themselves, and powerful as symbols of something larger.

So here goes a very short list of the little reasons that came into my head tonight.

I love my parents because:

• We share fruit and cheese from Costco. One of us goes to Costco and then we split up the food and the receipts. They have the money to buy excess fruit & such, but they don’t like to waste. And they know that I hate to waste food and loathe spending more money than I need to, so they agree to sharing food from Costco runs, as inconvenient as it may be. It’s kind of cute and communitarian of them.
• My dad helped me move furniture on Friday night even with his thumb in a brace. Half-way through, I fed him green curry which he said looked like second-hand food, but smelled good. We ate in silence as he read, with rapt attention, this book I have on foods from the African diaspora. Then we carried more furniture, using my shawl as a sling to make up for the un-opposability of his thumb. My dad, and both my parents, are so tough and adaptable, so curious, and ready all the time with wry, sometimes caustic, sometimes obscene humor.
• My mom and I just went and saw “The Kids are All Right” and then talked about it over beer and dinner. To me, the message of the film was about how marriage is hard and it takes work and you can’t let problems pile up without addressing them consciously and compassionately. It was a message shared poignantly in the film. But I was grateful that it was also a message I grew up hearing, grew up understanding from my parents. I love them for demonstrating that you can’t sweep problems under the rug and that the work of love is worth it.
• I love them for being reticent with their support when I was in the wrong relationships and generous with it now. I love my dad’s enthusiasm for making beer (“Hoppiness is Wedded Bliss Brown Ale,” as he has already named it) and black currant wine for Oscar and my wedding and my mom’s eagerness to help cash in miles to get me to Bogotá to see my amor.

There’s more, there’s always more, and it’s good to stop and note it at times. My kindergarten self, as egocentric as I may have been at five years old, recognized love in the little things, and wrote it down.

(Left, at a District K forum with legislators. My photo.)

(Right, playing Pictionary on Christmas 2009. Photo by Oscar Avellaneda)

Please join me and many wonderful co-hosts…

I’ve been working hard on organizing this fundraiser for my mom and Lupe, getting a bunch of co-hosts who are cyclists, athletes, promoters of bike transportation, etc. This event will be a fundraiser, meaning people come and eat tasty appetizers and drink wine, write a check to support the candidates with their campaigns, visit with their friends and colleagues and have fun. But it will also be a forum to discuss parks issues, transportation and bike planning, etc. Both these candidates are advocates for planning that includes bike transport and public transportation, and both, as parks users, support our municipal, state and federal parks. Please come with questions and comments, concerns, friends…and money, even if it’s just a little bit.

You can also sign up to volunteer or donate online.

The candidates’ websites:

www.barbaranortonforstatehouse.com

www.lupemarroquinforstatehouse.com

I got my first photos published! And in an independent, internationally-distributed feminist parenting magazine called Hip Mama, which is the kind of place I’d want to be published.

How did this come about? My rad fellow Mount Holyoke alumna, Amanda Englund is one of the magazine’s editors. She took a liking to my pictures, asked if she could use them in upcoming editions, and then she & the other editors picked some off of my Flickr account that they thought fit.

But, as Oscar pointed out, it’s not only the photos–it’s also because they see me as part of their tribe. I think he means that a photo has more relevance to a person or, in this case, a group of editors, when the person behind the camera shares some common hopes or values and wants to give their art to the same cause. And though I am not yet a feminist mother and Oscar is not yet a feminist father, we are hatching plans to become them. I guess this, indeed, makes me part of the feminist parenting tribe.

These is one of the pictures they used:

6.9.10

Today I had of those moments of de-centering that comes from travel, maybe you know the type, the type that confronts you with how very non-universal are your views. Third World countries are famous for offering such experiences to First Worlders, and First Worlders are famous for trying to avoid or otherwise ignore the value of such moments.  I can see why; sometimes they’re really hard. But today’s was a gleeful decentering, easier to absorb.

I biked down to the busy intersection by the train tracks to get groceries for the next few days and to take a photo of three pig skins that I had seen hanging in front of a carnicería the day before. I locked up my bike on a pole next to the pig skin store while eyeing the chickens at a butcher shop nearby. The yellow meat laid out in the hot, exhaust-filled air by the intersection and the train tracks, and I could not bring myself to buy it. My fiancé, Oscar, and I have been eating almost entirely vegetarian here in Jalisco, México, in part due to the heat in which the meat hangs all day in the markets. But tonight he wanted to make me roasted chicken with achiote, and so I was on the hunt for chicken breast.

After taking my photo, squeezed up against a truck on the other side of the busy street and trying to make myself small as buses went by, I bought my naranjas and chayote and ejote, and asked the man helping me where I could buy chicken “que no está afuera en el calor todo el día” (“that’s not out in the heat all day”). I was thinking, in my imagination filled with grocery stores that have entire sections so refrigerated you can feel your skin stick up, in my imagination filled with chicken breasts wrapped in plastic packaging that fly from Montana to Alaska, that there may be a little store nearby with some sort of refrigeration. The man turned to the woman who seemed to be in charge and asked, “¿Dónde puede comprar pollo recién matado?” (“Where can she buy recently-killed chicken?”) They pointed me to a place just around the corner, where I found the same bright yellow chicken legs, feet and breasts out in the heat being sliced and sold by a woman with an apron. Right behind, however, was a young, short-haired woman grabbing a white chicken as it squawked, steadily bringing a blade across its throat and bleeding it, with great calm and equanimity, into a large steel drum. The old, peeling metal was lined with the feathered and bloody remnants of the chickens that came before it–the same ones sitting on the table for me to buy, I suppose. A telenovela played quietly behind on an old television set, and the Virgen de Guadalupe watched over the proceedings from the wall with that same accepting calm.

In the U.S., watching a chicken being slaughtered by a young woman who stands, smiling, right behind the sales counter might be considered an offensive business practice. Here, however, this was not only a convenient use of a small space but also a way of signaling to the buyer that the meat is fresh and safe, a way of assuaging worries over salmonella. Refrigeration, the solution I had been pulling on in my mind without fully realizing,  was translated by the imaginations of the fruit and chicken vendors; translated by the brutal functionality required by these hot, loud streets; translated by a place that lacks the infrastructure for keeping meat cold.

It is as though the language, the streets, the infrastructure of our lives shape the little spaces in our brain where our imaginations are continuously born. We are built this way, I think–built to make sense of the world through our experiences, adding bits and pieces to the schemas we create as children, and then creating new schemas when something proves ours inadequate. I suppose we universalize our own thinking and expectations by design; maybe there’s not space enough in our imaginations to fit all of the things we have not seen, the religions and traditions and ways of eating. It seems that the best we can do is to take moments like this for what they offer: humility, the chance to reflect on how big the world is and how little we still know, the inspiration to ask more open-ended questions like, “What measures do people take to have safer food and how can I look for those?” rather than working only from within the schema we bring with us and judging on, say, the storage temperature alone. It is a reminder for me as a researcher of why research must be careful to not just hand out surveys, but first to draw out, in people’s own words and schemas, what they do or what they believe in, so that questions are fit to the contexts of the people, interacting truthfully with their worlds. And of course, it is a reminder that when we step outside of our normal lives, and even as we walk within them, we should always expect to be surprised.

We are in Guadalajara, the sprawling city of 7 million that is the capital of Jalisco, México, staying at our friend Arqui’s house upstairs from his little brother Moises (Arqui’s in Anchorage, where he lives and works now). We are stuck here for Oscar’s 30 day rabies vaccine series. Well, I extended my ticket an extra week anyway, but will eventually have to get back to work and leave him here by himself, el pobrecito. It is hot, the air is filled with dust and pollution and the smell of people burning their trash, and the whole place overwhelms us, the whole experience overwhelms us.

I will back up and tell the story of why we are here.

The Coast

Erika flew home to Anchorage to be with her beaux and I flew to Puerto Vallarta to be with mine. We spent a beautiful anniversary weekend in the isolated village of Yelapa that has not a single car or street, but is built over ocean cliffs with stone and cement paths. I am anxious to see my photos of the people we met there, the parents making sand sculptures of their children’s bodies in the sand, the mother playing games with her children during the water taxi ride. Then we spent a day in PV to deal with the dental visit from hell (note to others who prolong needed dental work in order to wait and do it in a country with cheaper dental care: DON’T wait if you really need it because it gets worse and more expensive), and the next morning took off on our ride over the mountains to Guadalajara (me on Erika’s bike).

The Bike Ride Over the Mountains

[At our first campsite]

The first night we stayed by a beautiful little stream outside of Las Palmas under a giant tree, which, as very romantic as it was, was accompanied by about 70 nasty bug bites on my legs. This was followed by a hot and dehydrated day of climbing about 3,000 feet and feeling more exhausted than I have since running Crow Pass 13 years ago. Then a night of sleeping in the plaza of the pueblito of Estancia after the teenagers that had gathered there to sing and joke and play Norteños on their cell phones and the middle aged men who had gathered to drink Coronas had all gone off to their homes and the dogs began their caucaphony of discussing whatever it is that rural dogs want to discuss all night…needless to say, it was not the best night of sleep. The following day we climbed about 3,000 feet more, but with better food and drink and earlier in the morning and with good conversation and humor. We then descended and rode a long time into the beautiful little colonial town of Mascota with its cobblestone streets and clay tile roofs. In Mascota we met curious young men and women at the carníceria and a kind old woman in the comedor, and I was finally able to take better care of the nasty blisters that had been forming on my butt from the unfamiliar seat. Then a heartbreakingly long and hot and steep ride up to the damn/lake where we were to camp, a delicious sopa de res, and a night of feeling angry and agitated by the pendejo restaurant owners on the lakeshore who decided to get drunk and blare the jukebox late into the night, after it had already been blaring all afternoon and evening. We took a rest day in which we decided in late afternoon to ride down the hill and camp by the river to avoid the late night party scene at the lake. This led to an evening spent playing in the river with and teaching two curious little grade school aged “chayoteros” (farmers/vendors of the vegetable chayote, photos of whom are on the link) about camping gear, and another night of sleep interrupted every hour or so by Norteños playing loudly from someone’s big truck, some borrachos, somewhere.

[Oscar's photo with my little half-broken Canon of the full moon rising over the lake. Peaceful view, not peaceful music blaring.]

Not Just Another Mexican-Hating Gringa, Really

So, there are some themes here, right? Men drinking and (mostly) men playing music–specifically, Norteños–at all hours, often with big trucks involved. See, I love Norteños, love their springy polka rhythms and funny lyrics, and especially corridos, the story songs, but I was getting worried for a while that their constant presence, their being pushed into our every waking (and potentially sleeping) moment would spoil me on them. I also love México and was getting worried that this would spoil me on México. I kept telling Oscar that it’s not like this in the South–he’ll see–, that it’s more sensilla and indigenous and that when I heard music in the streets in Oaxaca it was most often a funeral or wedding parade with lots of brass instruments. And of course, I told him about Gil and Cynthia and Claudia, my dear friends from Oaxaca who questioned gender norms and machismo, anti-indigenist sentiment, materialism, the worship of US Americanism, etc. But I said these things most of all to remind myself, to assure myself that I’m not just another Mexican-hating gringa, another First Worlder afraid of the Third World (or Second? Where does Mexico fit in this scheme?)

I’m not just another gringa, but I find myself critical as always of machismo and more critical of the Mexican government and the ways in which corruption and inefficacy seems to trickle down into even the smallest institutions and businesses than I was when I lived in Southern Mexico 7 years ago–maybe because I’m farther North, maybe because I’m older and understand systems better, maybe also because I never had to deal with the medical system before, having never had rabies exposure…so, on to that story:

Love in the Time of Rabies

On Saturday, Oscar’s mother’s birthday, after a 5:30 am morning and a really hard 4 1/2 hours of riding, mostly climbing, we stopped at a shack covered by a roof of wood and straw where an old woman was making tortillas. She prepared us food over the fire as I cleaned my wounds and then we sat down to eat the most amazing meal of cow heart in a guisado of tomato with beans and freshly-made tortillas. As I think back on it, the Carolyn Forché poem keeps running through my head in which she writes, about revolutionary El Salvador, something like “You can’t eat heart in times like these.” I don’t think it quite fits, but there is something to the gravity of it that I like in this situation.

We had stopped at the shack to eat rather than eating our previous night’s leftovers like usual, because we intended to break for a few hours in the shade to sleep and repack. However, this plan was quickly interrupted by the family’s dog biting Oscar out of nowhere, us realizing that there were potential rabies-related behaviors in the dog and that the family had never vaccinated it, cleaning the wounds, and quickly getting on our bikes to ride the 15 K down the mountain to Anteguilla where we hopped a bus to Guadalajara. Once in the city, we checked into the first hotel we found and adventured out on the buses to 5 hours of walking and calling around from hospital to hospital and chatting with women in pharmacies (where, by the way, the women wear peach-colored dresses with collars and double buttons up the front, which I thought was interesting and old-fashioned) only to be told that the Cruz Verde should have the rabies treatment/vaccine but they don’t…and no one else does. We asked each other, “How is it that everyone points their fingers at an institution responsible for toxicology that acts as though they’d never even considered treating rabies?” and, the next day, upon making dozens more phone calls “How is it that even the medical emergency line doesn’t have a working number for the Secretary of Health that is responsible for rabies?”…and we don’t know the answers. We know only that the giant holes in communication between institutions is something we see reproduced between business people and clients and, we would find on Monday and also in my follow-up dental apt. on Thursday, between patients and medical providers.

Upon returning to our hotel, my earlier suspicion that there were fleas was confirmed by many little bites and Oscar squishing one open, and so we spent the next hour or so re-packing, demanding my money back, and calling Arqui, who got his kind friend Enrique to come pick us and our bikes up in his little sedan to go to Arqui’s house, where I left all of my clothing on the patio outside for fear of fleas. And so, it was while undressed for fear of fleas, on the dark cement porch at 1:30 in the morning, that Oscar knelt down and told me how strong and wonderful I was and asked me to marry him, slipping onto my finger the beautiful ring he had had made for me in Puerto Vallarta while tears slipped out of his eyes and down his cheeks. Of course I said yes. How could I not want to marry this man who proceeds with so much strength and grace after being bitten by a dog, this man who rubbed ointment in little circulitos on my aching bug bites with the intention of calming me down while Norteños blared around us at the lake, who is so strong and competent and curious and kind and smart, who has talked sweetly on the phone about our future for months now despite what I now see are incredibly trying days?

¡Viva Public Health!

So, the sleepy now-fiancés slept on a bed (a bed! a bed with an absolutely perfect mattress!) and woke up to a morning of laundering the fleas out of the clothing and cleaning the dusty house (dust from the streets coats everything in only a day or so). We proceeded on to phone calls all day, and finally a plan to proceed to the Secretaria de Salud in the morning…because, being government, they were closed on the weekend. Just as my dad telling me over the phone that the rates of rabies in Jalisco had dropped almost off the charts since 2000 had calmed us down, so too did walking into the Secretaria de Salud and seeing signs over the doors with the words “epidemiología” and “estadistica.” I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that por fin we were in the hands of people/an institution with a public health perspective. Maybe that’s just grad school heady Laura needing to grasp something in terms she could be comfortable with, but I think it’s also that a public health perspective is so qualitatively different than the “It’s not my problem” perspective we had gotten from the hospitals and the profit motive from businesses and vendors that often means cheating people outright.

[Mi Osquitar in the waiting area of the Secretaria de Salud, waiting for his consultation, nervous.]

After a visit with an oldish doctor who could stand to improve in clarity of communication and some extremely young nurses who forgot tell Oscar the side effects and contraindications of the vaccination, Oscar began his first of five injections of rabies vaccine. (After his fever and weakness started, we went back to ask about side effects.) In the US, this vaccine would have cost thousands of dollars. Here, they’re giving it to him for free. This is, indeed, a public health approach. Despite everything else, ¡Viva México! ¡Viva la salud pública!

Country Bumpkins

We have until Tuesday to make sure Oscar isn’t showing any symptoms of rabies to then fully relax, but we’re confident he’ll be fine and we want to get the hell out of the city this weekend and go to Arqui’s mom’s house. We are such country bumpkins, such Alaskans. I don’t know about Oscar, but I don’t think if I’ve ever missed Alaska as much as I did a few nights ago while suffering from food poisoning and smelling the neighbors burn trash and being hot and dirty because the house didn’t have enough water left in the tank to shower or wash dishes…all I could do was try to imagine the mountains and clean glacial lakes, the snow and the air and the trees, and imagine us there, try to dream about home.

The Upside

But we’re here, not in Alaska, and it’s not all bad. We are eating lots of delicious fruits and vegetables for cheap and trying new ones. Guadalajara seems to be a queer-friendly city; or if it’s not outwardly friendly, at least lesbians, gay men and trans individuals seem to feel safe enough being out because we’ve met and seen a number of them. And there’s certainly more options for women and girls to wear their gender than in the campo, with the roqueras opting for baggy t-shirts and jeans and less makeup. Plus, Oscar and I often get to exchange those looks of joy when we watch multiple generations of family members enjoying their children and when we notice the casualness with which men touch one another, not always avoiding one another so as to not look gay, like American men do. We love the way buses stop wherever people put out their hand and how people pass their money forward to the driver from the back of the bus when it’s crowded. And we loved the simple kindness of the people in the pueblitos and of the women in the corner store in this neighborhood.

Plus, we are learning! Living in this house that didn’t have water for a few days and so learning how to catch water at every opportunity, siphon water from the bit that remained, use gray water to flush the toilet, wash dishes with as little as possible, and begin our nightly ritual of washing one another’s feet in a bucket before bed has made us way more conscious of how to conserve water and how much even we, little environmentalists, waste when we are in the US. Now, we are not going to use gray water like this back home because it stinks, but we will take these lessons with us. In general, scarcity like this makes one aware both of how much government services are important for quality of life (and grateful that we have them) and of privilege and waste, how imperative it is that those of us in the First World don’t continue to consume resources at the same devastatingly quick level. Catching and reusing water, walking or riding a bike or taking the bus, not languishing in the shower, buying produce from local markets that don’t use extensive packaging are all little things that México will remind me of when I return. I am grateful for this.

And most of all, I am grateful to be problem-solving and working and cooking and sleeping next to the love of my life, the very good and beautiful man who I will marry. Who will not have rabies.

[My engagement ring! Mexican silver and turquoise, crafted esp. by a local jeweler in Puerto Vallarta, per Oscar's instructions. Now I have to find him something fitting and beautiful and local as well. No luck yet, but I'm searching. This photo is from the not-so-romantic location of the Secretaria de Salud.]

p.s. Next installment I want to reflect on diet, overweight and obesity here. I am astounded by how like the US it is.

Update 7/10/10: Here are Oscar and my engagement rings together. I found him one a week or so later. He has never been used to wearing jewelry, but now he loves it & wears it & kisses it before bed. It makes me so happy that we both, from afar, have these symbols on our body of our committment:

1.)  Boil the jalapeños:

Yeah, seeds and all.
I mean, I know you’re Colombiano
y no se come picante allí,
but you know that story your mama tells?
The one where your abuela
made the sopa without cilantro
“for Nachito”
and your mama put the cilantro back in
(she flicks her hand as she re-enacts it)
because she knew she’d be eating with him
for the rest of their lives?
Well,
since I’m your future wifey
and you’re the chaparro de mi vida
and I’m your aguacate tree
growing in Alaska
to whose roots—and fruit—
you will come flying back
and we will sit across kitchen tables
from one another
for the rest of our days,
pues, te tendrás que acostumbrar.

2.)  Slice the onion:
And try placing it in the blender
but poniéndome aguila
because before I know it
you’ll kiss me with that onion
on your breath,
whole slices tucked away
into your teeth.
I’ll say “¡Guácala!”
and never understand it,
how you find the sweet
in its so acrid flesh.
But I quietly admire you for it,
this iron mouth of yours,
the way you see through
even the worst.

3.)  Skin and mash the garlic:
And this too I must guard
from your habit of drinking it
with cayenne and
waiting to do so, of course,
until I’m soon to come over.
The smell of it:
“Ay, Oscar, ¿Porqué
lo tenías que comer ahora
before kissing me?”
And I search out the line
between asking you
to be considerate
and control.
Then toss the garlic in the blender
with everything else.

4.)  Enjoy:
Disfrútala, with fish, with sopa,
with cuidado, mi Colombiano.
I learned in the cloud forest,
the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca,
from a small woman who
cooked her beans in a clay pot,
to make salsa verde sin tomate.
Y así, mi amor,
when you eat it,
the sweat beads up,
glints of light over the
redenning skin,
across your brow,
across your nose—
your nose, mi amor,
that perfect bridge of shadow
and light
that bridge of indígena and
Castellano.
None of our ancestors
ate like this,
the people of wheat,
the people of potatoes.
But we are adaptors
and you sweat your way through it
like we work our way through
each other
building bridges across
continents and
spirits and
bodies,
from which we’ll create children
to pass the recipe on,
learning, over time,
to endure.

______________________

I was inspired to write this because a creative little girl who I taught in math was surprised when I told her that her poetry teacher, Ashley Skabar, was also a professional food writer. She asked, “Does Miss Ashley write her recipes as poems?” I replied, “I don’t think so, but that’s a great idea,” and I went home and began working on this recipe-poem. I am bringing the original to Oscar, drawings and cursive and all, for part of an anniversary gift. We will celebrate our anniversary together in Jalisco, México, eating comida picosa, camping, biking, swimming in rivers, reading the stars.

It has been nearly a year now since I graduated from the University of Michigan with my Master of Social Work degree, packed up my apartment, flew home, moved into a new place, started my job, and found Oscar again to promptly fall in love with him.

It seems appropriate, then, to reflect on what this year back home has meant to me, what growth has arisen from my first year as an MSW, my first year of being with my life partner, my first year of really returning to Alaska to stay.

If I were to heed the mantra my dad always repeated from Shakespeare that “brevity is the soul of wit” and tell it in the, uh, wittiest? way possible, it would be simply to say that:

This year, I have grown more compassionate with myself and others.

But now I think I will un-heed his advice and flesh out the story, starting with the two people who have had the most influence over this growth: My best friend, Jessica Laura Russell and the love of my life, Oscar Avellaneda.

Here is Jessica Laura (who I write as JLR). She is hugging me as we say a long goodbye on the day after her wedding:

Oscar took the photo with his Hasselblad, proud and happy that his girlfriend had such a good friend. In this photo, JLR has just given me a book that her wife recommended for me called There’s Nothing Wrong with You. I am holding it in my hand. It’s a fun and easy to read Buddhist guide to getting over self-hate and treating yourself with compassion. Oscar and I read it together on the Caltrain back to the airport and in bed at nights. We took what we liked from the book and incorporated it into our practices with one another and with ourselves.

But still, even with this resource, after Oscar-Laura fights or during moments of acute insecurity, back when Oscar and I were still so unfamiliar with our own and one another’s fears, when we were trying to figure out how to communicate across difference, when we had not yet learned to take time-outs and clearly communicate our needs (not like we always do it right now, but we’re better), I would sometimes call Jessica Laura. She would tell me to treat my vulnerable and fearful Laura (my Laurita) with compassion rather than disdain, to acknowledge the vulnerability in me and feel sorry for it, but not give it so much power. This helped me to meet Oscar more calmly. And she would tell me how she and her wife deal with the others’ fears and needs, how they negotiate and forgive, how they have patience with their own and the others’ growth, but mainly, this idea:

Guilt and anger to try to change you or change someone else doesn’t work well.

Compassion does.

I was many many years struggling with this one, though now it seems so obvious. I think I didn’t know what the alternative to criticism, guilt, and anger was. To offer an easy example, “I shouldn’t eat more; I hate being over my good weight. It shows no discipline!” never worked well. Taking myself seriously in a positive way, seeing progress, feeling good about it and continuing that progress does work to maintain a healthy weight.

And so, it was through compassion and patience that Oscar and I have grown into very healthy problem-solving. It’s through compassion for himself that he now feels comfortable articulating his needs or offense in a constructive way at the moment rather than bottling it up for later. It’s through compassion for myself that I stop from getting angry at whatever inherited tendencies I have and don’t like and just try to manage them instead.

The funny thing is, Oscar thanks me for teaching him compassion, and I feel like I was a new student in it, while it was Oscar who taught me acceptance. I’ve never accepted anyone like I accept Oscar, and maybe I am capable of doing this because he’s just the right man for me and I am ready, but also because he sees me completely, every part of me, and accepts me—while still pushing me to be my best self, as I do him.  This is a picture of us in Girdwood at the state-wide youth conference where our Photovoice kids presented. We are ready to go to sleep, which shows in what Oscar describes as his “sleepy, happy, in love face”:

This was a night in which both of us needed compassion, patience, listening, acceptance, and guidance. We were both vulnerable and frazzled but met each other there and supported each other. What I learned through late nights like that and through the daily practices of acceptance– me accepting Oscar when we sit for hours correcting his punctuation or even when his poor time management drives me crazy, Oscar accepting me as he shows me how to deal with technology or even when my practices of criticism drive him crazy–is this:

Growth = complete acceptance + faith, truth, pushes  & opportunities

I always knew about the truth, pushes and opportunities part, and I guess I always had faith in people that they/we could grow and that’s why I pushed them/myself and sought honesty and truth.  My parents did a wonderful job of raising me and Claire with these principles. But for a long time I thought that acceptance meant complacency and I was afraid to ever be complacent, static, satisfied with where I am or where others are. What I failed to understand was that without the safety, the home base of acceptance, growth can’t take off in the same way. In truth, maybe our need for acceptance is like healthy attachment in babies—the ones with healthy attachment to their caregivers are the ones who can explore the most.  And maybe that’s why patients need non-judgmental health care providers and clients need non-judgmental social workers in order to grow towards greater health and control in their lives. We’re not so different than babies.

This picture, taken by our friend Steve Nigl, is a great illustration of the mutual acceptance and enjoyment I share with Oscar that fuels my ability to do so as a social worker, friend, daughter, sister:

There’s Oscar, being silly. There’s me, probably being overly serious or having some expectations about what this photo should be like. There’s us, just being with and enjoying our sometimes opposing characteristics, and out of it comes a photo neither of us quite expected but both of us love.

Oscar giggles and is amused by my mistakes, offended by some, and able to address them with dignitiy and acceptance so I can grow. This is what love is supposed to be, and I think this is what social work is supposed to be too.

I can’t really separate what is personal-only and what is social work. I practice my professional training in my relationships and vica versa. Over this last year, I strived to do “strengths-based” assessments and change processes both in Mt. View and in my personal life. Just as I struggled to accept Oscar’s sense of time, I had to adjust for and be patient with the senses of time held by many of the community members in focus groups or interviews, or now with the Latina patients for whom I serve as interpreters, or with clients and colleagues in my grant-writing work.

And luckily, when my professional training was not enough to control the rancor I felt at service providers/managers who I felt were unjust, Oscar was there to remind me of meeting people where they’re at and with compassion, and also the need to work around people who are barriers.

(By the way, the other big lesson of the year is that we won’t get anywhere if we continue to surrender leadership to those who are not leaders, those who cannot think and act creatively and humanely, and that we need to stop being complacent about the social services or education or whatever else status quo…but that’s another blog entry entirely.)

So, what are the consequences of these practices of compassion and acceptance as vehicles for growth? What have Jessica Laura, Oscar, the buddhist book, my social work training, and other dear and wise friends like Jay Pearson and Virginia Speciale helped me to do?

• Have fewer headaches
• Make & show more art (hence, two exhibitions, a photo in next month’s Hip Mama feminist parenting magazine, submitting photos for a juried show soon in Anchorage, 5 finished collage and painting pieces for Oscar…it feels good)
• Get farther along the path of outgrowing some of my old communication patterns of defensiveness and “you statements” that inevitably never work
• Have a successful relationship and future husband and co-parent
• Talk myself out of negative thoughts
• Reflect on my teaching, meeting facilitation, grant-writing, project management, etc. without so much guilt and stress and with more forward movement—because with compassion, critique is less damming and more useful
• Oscar and I made the New Years Resolution to take ourselves seriously, which is like a nice way of pushing ourselves to be disciplined, but from a place of faith instead of criticism. So, taking myself seriously, I intend to compete well in mt. bike races and the Xterra trail triathlon this summer, and maybe a bouldering competition or two.
• Use technology with more competence, comfort, and flexibility—from flow charts to Google platforms to photo software to this blog
• Form some new friendships, I think a little smoother than in the past
• Form meaningful relationships with the future in-laws, including with Herbert, Oscar’s Army Ranger brother, who is soooo different than me that it’s sometimes surprising to me that I  love him, but I do. This relationship, and that with Rodrigo, the kind-hearted boyfriend of my (courageous, creative, check out her blog) future-sister-in-law, Erika, opens up a new understanding for me of the military and what it’s like to be in the military and to be a professional warrior.
• Grow patience that I never knew I had. I mean, what choice do I have while Oscar & Erika are riding across the Americas? (www.quehubo.info). It sure helps in teaching.

I have learned and done many other things this year and have grown with friends and family, building community here in Anchorage with wonderful people and loving my friends and family from afar, building a little career while also dabbling back into teaching and gaining insight into education, traveling for conferences & family, and helping with my mom’s campaign for State House (http://www.barbaranortonforstatehouse.com). But this is what really sticks:

I need to and CAN practice compassion and acceptance, that elusive goal that I never understood very well and always saw as antithetical to change, and now find not only reconcilable with change, but necessary for it.

And I have a lot more growing left to do. I look forward to it.

Becoming an Outdoor Woman (BOW) Weekend out in Chickaloon:

I spent the glorious weekend of March 12th-14th with 4 other friends and 200-some other women out in Chickaloon, Alaska at a retreat sponsored by the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game, with support from other corporations and orgs, including the NRA (*chuckle*). As you can see in the picture on the left, I learned to field dress game. My best friend Jessica Laura (picture on top) from Santa Cruz, CA and I learned gun safety, loading, unloading, aiming, etc. She, my roommate and dear friend Tiffany (bottom pic), and I all learned fish filleting skills. Our friends Mel and Kiatcha also did tracking, trapping, snowmachining and other workshops.

It was loads of fun and it was empowering as an Alaskan woman to be equipped with skills that could help me feed my future family. Oscar and I are always talking about the things we want to grow & ways we want to eat as a family once we get a place; this made me think through the logistics of including wild animals into that diet.  It was beautiful to spend a weekend with so many women, many of whom explained that they were learning skills their husbands wouldn’t teach them or that they’d prefer to learn from better teachers. And I soaked in the opportunity to develop and strengthen friendships.

This weekend also exposed me to the politics of hunting in Alaska in a new way. When we first moved to Alaska in 1992, little ten-year-old Californian Laura thought hunting was barbaric. 12 – 15-year-old vegetarian Laura certainly did. But when I started to eat meat again, I figured I should be able to kill it myself, and so I enjoyed fishing and thanking the fish for their lives. I’ve wanted to hunt now for a number of years, a desire especially influenced by knowing more Alaska Native people who tell me about their son learning to duck hunt at age 3 or their experiences growing up and preparing the beaver & moose meat. It has been influenced by reading Velma Wallis’ heartbreakingly honest memoir Raising Ourselves: A Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River, Ernestine Haye’s Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir, the book Eagle Blue by journalist Michael D’Orso about the Fort Yukon Boys basketball team, and the interviews in Growing up Native in Alaska. The relationship that these books describe people having to the earth and to the animals is one of such respect and necessity that it begins to seem less like a choice and more like part of the life cycle. On a more superficial level, my desire to hunt was also influenced by trying dall sheep meat for the first time years ago, when my dad made an Afghani rice pilaf with sheep koftas after a patient of my mom’s sent her home with a chunk of meat. It was delicious.

Yet, being out there for BOW and learning the skills to be a better fisher and hunter, I was struck by the incongruence between the way I had come to think of hunting through Alaska Native narratives, and the culture of it among some of the folks there. There were, indeed, people who saw it as a means to eat well and eat sustainably, and who strove to preserve and use as much of the animal as they could. Fish and Game promoted this attitude, for the most part. But, as Kiatcha bore witness to in her trapping class, there is also a culture of people who want to wear fox fur hats and lynx stolls and ermine coats–not in the way described in Eagle Blue where the kids must wear beaver hats to get through the -50 degree weather in Fort Yukon and they eat the beaver meat anyway–but in what I perceive as a colonialist way. It strikes me as very 18th and 19th century European colonialist, Russians-forcing-Aleuts-to-trap-Otters-for-fur and very un-self-conscious to, in this day and age, trap animals  just for their fur and not eat them.

I also got the feeling–although the rules of the weekend were that we could not talk politics–that there were hunters there who do not believe in rural preference and giving priority to subsistence and to Alaska Natives. In fact, the entire absence of mention of subsistence rights and Alaska Native approaches to hunting made me uncomfortable. Hunting and fishing may be part of a sustainable life in Alaska, as Elaine Frankenstein argues in her film “Eating Alaska” (which we watched and which I enjoyed thoroughly), but it seems to me that how we do that should be influenced not only by the Dept. of Fish and Game, but by AFN and/or other Native organizations who know what the needs are of people in the villages. As a white person and as an immigrant to this land, I don’t feel comfortable making those decisions without that kind of input.

So…it was odd to be there. On the one hand, I felt RIGHT filleting fish after fish and cleaning clams and unzipping the reindeer, skinning him, removing his front quarter, opening his abdominal cavity, holding his heart. I felt like I was born to do this. It felt spiritually important, like this is the part that has been missing from the 16 years that I’ve been cooking, like I’m supposed to provide food in this way. And I adored the instructors of the filleting and field dressing classes. I also really liked using the guns. But I was also weirded out by the enthusiasm of the gun class instructors about youth shotgun leagues and by the woman in Kiatcha and Mel’s classes who was gleeful and almost sadistic about killing animals, and by the snowmachine instructor with her giant wedding ring who taught us how to put on our helmets so that our hair wouldn’t get messed up, and by the whole idea of a sport that uses two stroke engines (although I do admit, it was fun).

The experience certainly helped me understand the cultures within Alaska that I don’t know as well, part of the electorate who my mother is trying to win over (she’s running for State House in East Anchorage: www.barbaranortonforstatehouse.com), and the varied approaches to eating Alaska. And yeah, it made me want to go to the range and learn to shoot, maybe even invest in a .22 someday. But it also left me with a lot of questions, a desire to push that kind of (primarily white) environment to listen to the perspectives of the original inhabitants of this land on how to harvest from it, and a need to learn a lot more about sustainability before I begin hunting.