A friend guides us for a second time through a sunny afternoon gathering, a weekly Saturday afternoon event we call BODY SQUAD. We sit on blankets or mats in the yard for yoga, bodywork, and guided meditation. R. “scripts” or choreographs the gathering. She guides us through exercises. We sit and stand and stretch with friends and partners. During the guided meditation, we concentrate on our chakras: aspects of a body-model involving centers of energy. It involves a practice of “visualizing” or “imagining in the mind’s eye” a ladder of colors, points of light along an inner totem pole of the body. At each point, one is asked to visualize a flower that blossoms to reveal a jewel of a similar color. One becomes a student again, learning experientially by trying and doing. One explores and develops one’s awareness of one’s body, as Esalen Institute Gestalt psychotherapist George Downing recommended in his contribution to Anne Kent Rush’s Getting Clear: Body Work for Women. “At the deepest level if we are bound to roles,” Downing writes, “it is because our bodies bind us. […]. Any real transformation must ultimately include transformation of the body” (227).
Thursday November 19, 2020
The yard around the house changes, of course, with the change of seasons. Neighboring houses enter sight, though still from a great distance, as trees lose their leaves. ‘Tis the season to build beds, I tell myself, so that when spring arrives, we can plant the beginnings of our vegetable, herb, and flower gardens. Because of deer, we’ll also have to raise a fence. The yard around this fenced-in area will remain open: some parts wild woods of trees, other parts mown. The deer are thus welcome still to visit and graze. Students and I arrive, meanwhile, to the tragic, long-awaited “novum-event” at the mid-point or core of Octavia E. Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower. A drug-consuming cult of “crazies” or “pyros” attack the narrator-protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina’s walled neighborhood and separate her from her family, forcing her to flee north. Lauren travels on foot as part of a “pack” with two of her neighbors. The three characters — Lauren, Harry Balter, and Zahra Moss — must learn to trust one another to survive.
Tuesday November 17, 2020
I recovered a shoe of Frankie’s while out walking this afternoon. It had fallen yesterday along her walk with Aunt Jojo. There it was beside an odd property: a house set back in a patch of woods with an American flag and “private property” signs out front. Further along down the road past several other houses stands a weird Republican-seeming neighborhood of ugly stone-faced McMansions around a private lake. Not one of my preferred places to walk — though I admit enjoying it, particularly when a beautiful heron flew overhead. The bird appeared shortly after my recovery of the shoe. I paused and admired the bird as it flew past, sensing in its appearance a sign of good luck. Greetings, friend! My cosmology permits perception and experience of a many-voiced cosmos. Sarah and Frankie sit beside me, for instance, as I write. They play a game involving a toy sword in a toy stone. Frankie retrieves the sword and Sarah declares her a Queen.
Monday November 16, 2020
Headlines suggest vaccines are approaching readiness. I’m hopeful on that front — though I dread the winter ahead. We wish to travel north to visit family over break. We wish to gather to celebrate Frankie’s birthday and the holidays: Christmas and New Year’s. We also wish to raise and decorate a Christmas tree here in our home in the weeks ahead, like the one we kept in our apartment last winter before and after Frankie’s birth. When time allows, I bundle up in a hoodie and jacket to gather up bundles of sticks, like that figure from the Tarot. I sit at the picnic table in the yard on a cold afternoon, enjoying a calm moment: light Doppler effect coupled with birdsong. Wind rustles leaves, gathers occasionally for light gusts.
Saturday November 14, 2020
A multi-talented translator / Reiki instructor / musician friend of ours guides a group of us through a sequence of physical exercises: stretches, poses, celebrations of embodiment. We stand and sit in a circle in the driveway. (If we do it again, we might consider the grass. Or does it not matter? When we sit, we sit on yoga mats.) The exercises are body meditations aligned with particular limbs, joints, and muscles. At the end we lie on our backs together enjoying a lovely, sunny afternoon. Frankie played and sat among us on her blanket / happy, pleased to be with us in companionship with others. More of that, please! It feels wonderful to be present, nerves stimulated by “Chi” again in our legs and feet and arms and fingers and toes, in our hips, our backs, our butts and pelvises. The group concentrates together, bodies held through lengths of breath through guided exercise. The trees stand in their tallness and majesty beside us, their autumn leaves lit by the sun.
Thursday November 12, 2020
Students and I read Parable of the Sower together. Despite having read the novel several times now, I remain uncertain of my feelings regarding the starward longings of the book’s protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina. Does outer space function for her as did the North Star for Frederick Douglass? Are indigenous people present in this vision? Perhaps those stories are not Lauren’s to tell. A student from Albuquerque recommended a book called The Green Glass Sea during our discussion of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Her grandfather moved the family to New Mexico, she said, for work related to the Manhattan Project. “They did some bad stuff there,” she noted. The “green glass sea” is the name given to the crater blasted into the desert by the first atomic device. The Ellen Klages book recommended by my student describes Los Alamos from the perspective of two female characters — children whose parents were scientists involved in the bomb’s creation. The book is in fact written for children. It’s an award-winning work of children’s literature. Given my student’s family connection to the story, I hope she pairs the book with Silko’s Ceremony for her final paper. Stepping away from my desk, I head downstairs and talk with Sarah. The two of us discover we own a freezer in the basement. We have a laugh about how “brat” is one of my go-to words when I’m angry. If so, it’s presumably a mannerism I “picked up” or “inherited” as a child. “Nasty Matt Calls Others ‘Brat'”: let us change that. Let there be no outbursts of anger. Recall instead childhood’s fonder moments. Enjoy. Relish the smell of homemade tomato sauce as it cooks on the stove.
Tuesday November 10, 2020
Sarah reads Frankie the story of the Gingerbread Man as I mow the lawn. Earlier in the day Frankie and I watched an episode of the Comedy Central series Over the Garden Wall. The episode is called “Tome of the Unknown” and features a guitar-playing vegetable man named “Mr. Crops.”
The series title “Over the Garden Wall” reminds me of the next book I teach, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, as the book’s protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina flees her family’s gated community after the latter comes under attack from a group of “crazies” — people addicted to a drug called Pyro. Lauren quite literally escapes over the garden wall.
Monday November 9, 2020
According to Nick Estes, the phrase “Red Power” was first coined or invented by members of the National Indian Youth Council (particularly figures like Clyde Warrior, he says) in cities like Gallup and Albuquerque in the mid-1960s. The “power” movements arose in close temporal proximity to one another, in quick succession. Stokely Carmichael had invented “Black Power” just a few months prior. I rake leaves onto a tarp and move them to a pile in a wooded area behind the garage, in the back corner of the yard. Crows gather in the trees. Leaves continue to fall as I work.
Sunday November 8, 2020
Evenings are when I write. Sarah DJs, gets us dancing to James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone. Time to set up stereos and drums. Organize the studio, arrange speakers atop the desk. So I tell myself, past self to future self, mind ranging through the rooms of its memory palace assembling a “to-do” list. That’s where my head goes until I make my way out to the porch — where moths cast shadows and streetlights shine in my eyes. A daddy long legs crawls past as pass cars on the road. Crickets sing in the grass. Dogs bark from a distance on occasion. Traffic eases up come night. With the latter come cooler temperatures, however, so before long I’m back indoors, washing dishes and snacking on sesame sticks.
Saturday November 7, 2020
On the table before me is a new board book, an interactive one with a “Slide and Find” feature. Frankie and I slide panels on each page and meet animals: Water Buffalo, Spider Monkey, Bald Eagle, Macaroni Penguin. The book is called Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See? The election votes have been counted, and a result declared: Biden/Harris victory, Trump/Pence defeat. Many celebrate, as there is certainly reason to. Jes Grew-style dance parties erupt in the streets amid a mood of general happiness and relief. Frankie and I listened to the new Terror/Cactus single “Churro vs. Crow” and the accompanying track “Regresso” by Orquestra Pacifico Tropical aloud on our morning walk.
She and I admired the leaves, a colorful array of browns, red, oranges, and yellows, on this beautiful autumn day. Afterwards, a friend pulls up and honks her horn in our driveway. She and Sarah walk Frankie midafternoon while I run to Goodwill and score a stack of LPs from the Nonesuch “Explorer Series.” ‘Tis a good day.
Trance-Scripts 