velocidad
I am living right in the arms of Chaos, who’s barreling forward like a motorcycle rider on a mission, and all I can do is cling desperately to its back and hang on for the ride. I know that life keeps morphing even when I’m not particularly paying attention, but do you ever hit that point where the bend in the road is clear as the water on Fraser Island? That’s where I’m at.
Yesterday I was hit by the desperate need to have the work of e.e. cummings at my fingertips. (I thank You God for this most amazing / day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything / which is natural which is infinite with is yes) Perhaps his ecstatic, effusive poetry fits the current state of my mental-no, not mental-my current state, for whatever it is. Because I have this tendency to trailblaze along heart-first, with my out-of-shape logic and reason panting along behind it.
It suits the way the last few weeks have been going, though. Two Fridays ago, I sat down and talked with the founder, president/acting executive director, and Israeli coordinator for Creativity for Peace. The name aroused my curiosity-I found their website at work one day while Google-searching for Santa Fe nonprofits. A simple phone call provided an opportunity: the organization was holding a informational gathering in just a few days. I went.
They explained the goal of the organization: they bring teenage girls from Israel and Palestine to a camp in Santa Fe each year. Over a span of three weeks, the girls-who are assigned rooms based on cultural diversity-cohabit, and begin to learn the story of a side they have come to view as “the enemy.” They have dialogs, in which the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians can express themselves and their viewpoints to all the other girls. They live together. They eat together. They do art projects, dance, go shopping, and learn, above everything else, what they have in common: they are human.
It sounds good on paper. But it was the DVD that broke something in me, slammed against my heart, transcending physicality and rattling every dimension in which I exist. It was as natural as motherhood, as love, as rain. Something very female inside me woke up, started weeping, wanting to gather these girls in her Earth Mother arms and let the tears soak into her soil.
How to put into words what you feel when a girl barely into high school asks, “Why, why are we in this situation? Do we know what’s peace at all? What is peace? I never lived in peace.”
There are more than 200 nonprofits in Santa Fe. I don’t know why this particular one reached out to me, but I told Dottie, the executive director, “I have to be involved with this.” So I’m writing about it, here, and for the magazine. I’ve been invited to come out to the camp to spend time with the girls when they come. And I’m chaperoning their bowling excursion.
Who knows why certain things come into our lives. I’m just rolling with it. I’ll have to report on this one next month.
Yesterday I was hit by the desperate need to have the work of e.e. cummings at my fingertips. (I thank You God for this most amazing / day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything / which is natural which is infinite with is yes) Perhaps his ecstatic, effusive poetry fits the current state of my mental-no, not mental-my current state, for whatever it is. Because I have this tendency to trailblaze along heart-first, with my out-of-shape logic and reason panting along behind it.
It suits the way the last few weeks have been going, though. Two Fridays ago, I sat down and talked with the founder, president/acting executive director, and Israeli coordinator for Creativity for Peace. The name aroused my curiosity-I found their website at work one day while Google-searching for Santa Fe nonprofits. A simple phone call provided an opportunity: the organization was holding a informational gathering in just a few days. I went.
They explained the goal of the organization: they bring teenage girls from Israel and Palestine to a camp in Santa Fe each year. Over a span of three weeks, the girls-who are assigned rooms based on cultural diversity-cohabit, and begin to learn the story of a side they have come to view as “the enemy.” They have dialogs, in which the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians can express themselves and their viewpoints to all the other girls. They live together. They eat together. They do art projects, dance, go shopping, and learn, above everything else, what they have in common: they are human.
It sounds good on paper. But it was the DVD that broke something in me, slammed against my heart, transcending physicality and rattling every dimension in which I exist. It was as natural as motherhood, as love, as rain. Something very female inside me woke up, started weeping, wanting to gather these girls in her Earth Mother arms and let the tears soak into her soil.
How to put into words what you feel when a girl barely into high school asks, “Why, why are we in this situation? Do we know what’s peace at all? What is peace? I never lived in peace.”
There are more than 200 nonprofits in Santa Fe. I don’t know why this particular one reached out to me, but I told Dottie, the executive director, “I have to be involved with this.” So I’m writing about it, here, and for the magazine. I’ve been invited to come out to the camp to spend time with the girls when they come. And I’m chaperoning their bowling excursion.
Who knows why certain things come into our lives. I’m just rolling with it. I’ll have to report on this one next month.