A Flood Of ME

 A Flood of ME

all in hats 

or coats 

or nothing at all

inhabiting the nothing all around

as creatures, monsters looks and thoughts

the backs of mirrors and tootsie boots

Bipedal axolotl comes to break the ice

dark rainbows emanating from an invisible force

an old fiend old foe brought forth to friend

those purple eyes, those almonds glow

against the black so labeled wrong

we comfort, we

won't hide in the head

worms that slice

and spider chats

ephemeral whispers of un-dark silhouettes

no limit no horizon, no one melody

tons, all, so many of me

with new voice and new voice and new reverie

come new song new ballads

new screaming metal rods

and all is beautiful

all is need

all 

is 

enough

and hereby settles "I";

all are tension gone, to clouds of color and soft light

all dancing, sleeping, settling into mist

all together form a life 

and this is where I live

Happy World Circus Day!

I know it's been forever since I've posted anything here, so ...Surprise!
I thought this might be a fun way to sneak back into recording and sharing thoughts and memories here :

In celebration of World Circus Day, I thought I would share a little clip from my first (I think) ever circus performance...30 years ago. In 1990. Wasn't prepared for that to sneak up on me...

Anyway, I hope that everyone is staying healthy and sane here in the midst of the covid19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown. I have things to say about much of it but, for now, let's stick with the more lighthearted Circus nostalgia.

Peace and love, all!

You Don't Need Magic To Make A Difference

It's been a while, so how about some goofy videos??

Happy Birthday, Dad!!

Today is my Dad's 60th birthday, so this is for him:

From your birthday in 1988

Happy Birthday, Dad!!
I wanted to celebrate by writing a post for you that could encompass as much of your life as I could capture; but when I sat down to write it, I realized that yours has been and still is a deeply detailed, intricate, and adventurous one, and I don't stand a chance of summing it all up in a single post. And of course, whatever I put down would be from my own perspective only...but then, so much of you and your life has become much of me and mine.

In case you were wondering where I get it from...

Stories you've told me about your childhood have painted vivid images in my mind - I told my own kids the story you shared about your dad grabbing the Cheerios to explain why you should relax during a shot.  Hearing stories of Grandma carrying you still mostly sleeping to your Aunt Shirl's, playing with Bill and Marybeth...The story about the time you were told you couldn't go out to play because the only available clothes were girls' clothes...so you went outside to play in a dress.  For some reason that story always reminds me of the time you played Lady MacBeth in the Laundry piece. It still bothers me when someone leaves a kitchen cabinet open because it bothered you-old habit that stuck, because your dad couldn't see them.  The loss of your dad while you were still a kid, and how you always seem to have an aggression against hornets and wasps that I never see towards any other animals because of their role in that.

Vivid images of what it must have been like to watch your high school burn down, and the gym class that ended up being about how to butcher a pig...working on your uncle's farm, stomping hay down mostly unable to breathe thanks to hay fever.  And the time when you tore the porch off of the house with a tractor...

Not this one though, of course.

All of your adventures in College, friends, theater, shenanigans...meeting mom in Rome, getting into CalArts but turning it down to stay with her, Nursing school - and the found poem you and mom shared from the class list there.  The collapsing loft bed...Hiding the fact that you were living together from her mom. Meeting Pamela in Jamaica. Rescuing Coriander. Finding Jezzy. Stealing Ashley away to a better home.

My earliest memory is of sitting on mom's lap while you were outside the picture window on a ladder, painting the house.  I talked to mom about it - she was pretty sure that was when you were fixing up the Minneapolis house to sell...

This is one of those tasks that I am almost afraid to start because I already know that I can't possibly include even a noticeable fraction of what I would want to put down...Obviously all of the times we shared over the years, classic stuff, but also things like how you rescued my 8th grade class when a field trip gone wrong left us on the wrong mountain, and having come prepared, you were able to lead us back to the correct one, even carrying one girl who fell.  Or how you took me to see your production of Antigone, and when I asked why they were treating her like that, you explained patriarchy and specifically men's fear and mistrust of the fact that women menstruate, which was an angle I had entirely not considered but sparked a through line of looking at both history and contemporary culture that has this awareness.

I don't know why it's such a poignant thing to me, but I remember that after one of your students (Rick, if I recall, who I believe had played foxy loxy in the production of Henny Penny my elementary school class had come to see) was struck by lightning on the beach and killed, you spoke at his memorial service and ended your eulogy by diving into the water -Lake? Pond?- behind you, and lost your glasses.

Spending late nights at the New Moon, loading in and loading our all the sound equipment, painting the box you made for it all. Getting to see you in concert (and almost always requesting Onion Skin even though I knew it was not something you really wanted to do).  When we got Jomo and found out he was the only cat in the world that you were violently allergic to...and how we would be reminded of that every time you went to Carol Allen's house after she took him in.

I remember being in the car with you when we passed one of your students on the street, clearly high on something -you guessed heroin- about to walk into traffic on 125, so you stopped the car and talked him down, making sure he was safe before we went on our way.

I have always appreciated the fact that - even when I was a tiny kid, you never treated me like an inferior.  I feel lucky to have come from a family that values honesty, and didn't shield me from reality.  I felt prepared going off on my own, in ways that I didn't even know someone could lack (until I lived with a bunch of freshmen college students who could barely care for themselves).
I have always loved and am increasingly grateful for the full, diverse cultural experience I had as a kid thanks both to conscious efforts and simply the way you and mom lived your lives.

I see so much Kelly in you in this one...

You have now had 60 years of amazing adventures - boating through the grand canyon, skydiving, going to Russia (and getting sick on bad cream), being a nurse, being an actor, being a director, being a writer, being a dancer, being an outdoorsman, an intellectual, a martial artist, a researcher and deep thinker, a hero, a villain, a musician, singer, songwriter, an administrator, a rebel, a teacher.  You are a trickster, warrior, caregiver; and your self deprecating style only aids in making you a strong leader, and I have no doubt that you have many decades of adventure still ahead.

I love you, Dad.
Happy Birthday!
Kate

the kids and grief

I just stumbled across this in my unfinished drafts folder, and couldn't NOT share it.  I suddenly remember all of these things as I sit here, and the tears I find on my cheeks here feel weirdly comforting.  I find myself saying, out loud "I love you Mommy!"

**********

And of course, there is grief for the children, too.  I would occasionally find the work "Nana" spelled out in random places, and Cadence found a piece of art created by a family friend for mom in her last days, and solemnly and wordlessly presented it to me and then gave it a place of honor in the bedroom where she could see it.  It took her several months to be able to verbally admit that she missed her and was sad, and she confessed that seeing her things was painful.  Hazel's approach has been to talk about it all quite matter-of-factly.  "Nana liked to play this game with me, but now she can't play anymore because she's dead, right?" And Calliope...well, perhaps her young age puts her more in touch with the spiritual realm, because she continued to have conversations with someone who wasn't there and refer to Nana and point to an empty space for weeks. Around mother's day I heard her say "bye Nana!" and I haven't heard her having any such conversations since.  I am actually willing to believe she was there, even though I know it sounds totally nuts...There were times where I could feel her presence, and twice we awoke to find a bedroom curtain had been opened and tied up while we slept, and once I couldn't sleep because I was having an allergy-induced asthma attack and all of a sudden my air purifier turned on and turned itself up to "turbo" mode seemingly of its own accord.  (It has no automatic settings.)    

Royals And Dragons

In this humble little courtyard, I am surrounded by tiny royals, Sultan, Amir, Amira - Ruler, Prince, Princess.

I have watched their people fight and struggle, evil looming large and slinking in through deliberately forgotten alleyways, drenched in shadow, where everyone chooses to look away.

But these bright souls shine on, borne away by their parents, their sisters, brothers, neighbors, friends; set off on a frightful journey, destination unknown, path riddled with terrors they couldn't think to imagine before their homes ceased to mean home.

Here, their castles don't stand proudly high, their garments don't shine purple. They tread through mud, learn to speak around fires insufficient against the cold.

And yet they are protected, not by knives or guns, but by the fierce enduring love of the royals loyal guards.

The tenacity of the dragons, fending off the fiercest foes, fighting hard to protect the future leaders not yet grown, to teach them how to live and love and laugh.

The light of this northern star burns bright and true, even in the very heart of darkness. And here in its brilliant persistence will these tiny royals grow into their own, learning to hear with a gentle hand, their tenderness not forgetting the blade woven between those fingers as they cut their teeth on the bigness that surrounds them.

O these tiny royals will grow, and take their rightful places guiding a scarred land, ready to rule with compassion over this broken world. They are our hope, our future, humanity's next step; and they will have learned of both love and horror to extremes.

May this bring them the balance and the wisdom they need to build a better world than the pestilence we have left them.

The Good We Can Do - a heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who made this possible!!

I've been so excited to share this update with you all for so long; it is especially exciting to be able to give it to you as a high note to end this crazy year on!

The trip to Serbia my dear friend Amy and I went on in October was unlike our usual trips.  It was an exploratory mission to find out what the situation was like for refugees and those helping them there, and much of it was spent making connections and scouting out need.  We did have baby carriers, of course, but they were held up in customs for the majority of the time we spent there. Carry The Future provided us $800 to spend on 'additional aid' as needed, so, after scouting out the various encampments and aid centers and polling folks for what the greatest needs were, we hit up our favorite big box store for a massive aid run.

This is a chain that we have used in Greece - both as a landmark to find our hotel (haha!) and to purchase aid items at reasonably cheap prices, so it was quite exciting to find one in Serbia, too!

Let me tell ya: remember all those shows where they'd give people shopping carts to fill with as much stuff as they possibly could?  That's essentially what we got to do - granted, there was considerably more math involved - but it was every bit as fun as I imagined it would be...and the fact that it was all meeting specific needs to boot?? My amazing travel sister Amy and I were positively giddy...which might be obvious from the pictures.

Probably the only situation in which I would be this happy buying an entire cartload of sanitary napkins.

Amy modeling the confusing hats...they were the same size, shape, and material as the full face balaclavas they had on the next rack, but they had no face holes...

we filled two whole carts with aid!

Two whole carts!!!

 Next, it was off to a Serbian version of Costco:

we got soap...

a LOT of soap...

by the time we checked out, we had overfilled yet another cart with much needed supplies.

There was just SO MUCH STUFF!

We were a little excited about how far our aid money was going.

...Ok, a lotta bit excited...

We loaded it all up into our trusty little car...

luckily there was still a little room for us!

Back at the hotel, I loaded Panther Pack up with as much as I could, and then some...

once inside, we spent the majority of our evening prepping little care packages - making sure that everyone who received soap had a way to store and reuse it as well.

We had a limited number of towels, which we included in a batch to be given to mothers with babies.

The next day, we dropped everything off at the various aid stations that had requested them...here is a stack of diapers successfully delivered to Miksaliste's aid  distribution storehouse.

And I have to include this one because all of that on the fly math - calculating how much of each thing would give us the biggest bang for our buck, taking the exchange rates into account...it totally paid off.  When we did our final calculation to see how close to our budget we were, we were Amazingly On Point!!

Boom.

Not too bad for budgeting through exchange rates.

...But now we had a problem. We had all used up all of our aid money, and had prepped and distributed it all, but it was only a couple days into our trip, and our carriers were still stuck in customs.  Not wanting to waste our time there when there was such obvious and urgent need, we decided to strike out on our own and see if we could raise a little bit more to spend while we were there on the ground.  Amy created a paypal link where people could donate whatever funds they so chose, and we both shared that link on our own personal facebook pages - and that was it.  Overnight, our amazing support networks shared those posts and donated a whopping $900, giving us even more than we had from CTF the first time around.  Within 24 hours, that number had risen to over $1,400.  We were floored, and so, so SO grateful to our friends and family for rallying to make such an immediate difference.  We got right to work!

After a lot more math...

Exchange rates + ATMS + haggling prices in multiple languages = I'm amazed my brain could process it all!

Armed once again with cash:

Serbian Dinar notes

We headed off on an adventure to find the Chinese market; which we had been tipped off about by various aid workers there...evidently they have the best prices in Belgrade for the types of items we needed to get, and the sellers were open to haggling.  Edin gave us a lesson (seriously, wrote out diagrams on a whiteboard and everything) on the best way to haggle down the prices, and off we went.  Our GPS - which we named Charles, and spoke with a British accent once finally finding an English language setting - was utterly useless in finding this place, so it took us the better part of a day to find it, but we finally did - using old fashioned maps and landmarks and guesswork - and were not disappointed!

a tiny fraction of the Chinese market...we didn't take a lot of pictures because we were busy searching out and haggling over the best options for our aid purchases.

It went well, overall..I made Amy nervous at first because I kept walking away from potential deals, but after we got a deal on the same hats for literally half the price, she went into power mode and brokered several more awesome deals!

The most amusing part of the whole ordeal was the language barrier.  Many of the vendors only spoke Chinese or the local Serbian dialect, and not many (if any) of them spoke English.  This provided for a lot of non-verbal communications and speaking via a calculator...and at least one hilarious instance of me recognizing that the vendor was speaking Mandarin, and so I dusted off a bit of Mandarin from the corner of my memory and conducted an entire deal haggling in Chinese, in Serbia, to benefit people from places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, while trying to convert the numbers in my head to US currency.  It went quite well, overall...except that I totally blanked on the word for "one hundred", so I ended up asking for "ninety-nine and one" hats...

After a quite successful day at the Chinese market, it was time to head over to the Hungarian border.

But first it was back to city center to pick up some sugar.

A LOT of sugar.

Is this an appropriate face for someone about to purchase over 100 kilos of sugar?

 A note about all of this Sugar:

While on the surface this may seem like an irresponsibly frivolous purchase, it's actually a really important one. Tea is a super big deal to most refugees; tea in many middle eastern cultures brings people together, and can be a comfort in a dehumanizing situation...and to get that 'comfort of home' feeling, it needs to be SWEET. (Like, way too sweet for most Americans) - but obviously sugar is hard to come by when you are living in abandoned buildings or tents...So I consider it a contribution towards aiding the mental well-being of these people who have lived through things no one should ever have to witness.  

When we had visited Edin at the Daily Center, in addition to our haggling lesson, we got to meet many of the regulars in his establishment, many of whom were giving him a good natured hard time about needing to ration the sugar - a thing that he clearly wished he could address.

By this time, Edin himself had spent an unprecedented amount of time and money to help us get our carriers out of customs, and we found out during our shopping spree that he had successfully obtained our carriers and they were waiting for us at the center.

Overjoyed, we wanted to show give him a small gesture of thanks.

So we bought as much sugar as we could fit in our trunk

(along with some hats and other things that had been requested)

And drove over to The Daily Center, where we built a little castle of sugar for him to find on the coffee table.

(we also gave them plenty of other aid from our plunders as well, but they weren't as photogenic as this magnificent tower...plus I love all the pictures on the wall in the background!)

Reunited at long last!

Armed now with our carriers and remaining aid, we took the trek out to the Hungarian border.  There, we found another 'flea market' that reputedly had even better prices than the Chinese market in Belgrade...We got as much stuff as we possibly could, and filled our car to bursting.

It was one of those "don't open the door we may never get it shut again" situations.

who needs to see out the back windows anyway?

We would have gotten more, but we simply couldn't fit anything else in our car!! 

At North Star, we were able to distribute massive amounts of stuff.  Syd was especially happy to get the mylar emergency blankets that I brought from home (and yes, he already knew that they had to be used under people's clothes in order to be effective.)

Also stashed in my panther pack, I had two bags full of handmade hats from a friend here in DC; Laura had broken her ankle and utilized her immobile healing time to make as many hats as she possibly could...so I had the great honor of handing those out as well.  The kids loved them.  They were the first thing we handed out, and it was so fun to see little heads running about with familiar bright pops of color throughout the rest of our stay!

One of Laura's hats spotted warming a small head from afar!

Amy hanging out with our tiny friend Sultan, and his new red hat from Laura!

Back in Beograd, we spent our last full day distributing the last of our aid stores. By giving up our free day, we were even able to distribute all of our baby carriers, despite the hold up! We held several training sessions with core volunteers from each of the groups we had worked with (and left them with small supplies of carriers), so that we could rest assured that they would be able to properly fit not only our carriers, but any they receive in the future, too!

Amy demonstrating that the wearer should be able to kiss the top of baby's head in a proper fit to a volunteer at Miksaliste

Box of carriers delivered to Miksaliste!

Amy, Baby-wearing Guru, leading a training session at Refugee Aid (Serbia)

At the close of that final day, we were faced with a bit of a conundrum.  We still had a decent chunk of aid money left, but no time, and frankly not a whole lot of obivously unmet needs that were within our means to address in that moment.  After much discussion and deliberation, we found a fabulous way to spend it all in a meaningful way while still on the ground in Serbia, therefore doing some serious good while fulfilling the terms we'd laid forth when we approached our friends for help.

For many of the refugees, having access to a computer is the only way to communicate with their families.  A few aid centers offer wifi, but only the asylum center had publicly available computers - and that is the place that is like a sardine can...getting a chance to use a computer there is not guaranteed. Knowing that having a way to contact family members is crucial to the wellbeing of these displaced people - and knowing that Edin had laptop computers on his wishlist for the center, and also taking into account how much of himself he poured into this place, what a difference it made to the people he served, and how far above and beyond he had gone to assist us in addition to all that, we decided to put our remaining aid money towards getting him a laptop for the center.

Amy had to leave early the next morning, but I had a later flight and was able to put my morning to good use.  After consulting with the AMAZING woman who worked at the hotel and helped us out -enthusiastically - many times, I found a place where I could get not just one, but TWO brand-spankin' new (which means that they came with a several year warranty, and should anything happen to them, he can take them in to get fixed) computers!!

(OK fine, we were short $50 just on the tax...which was simply too close not to go for, especially because we'd be left with a surplus otherwise...so I got two anyway.  Amy and I each agreed to pay an extra $25 to cover it.  WORTH IT.)

The AMAZING woman at the hotel helped to make it a nice surprise; she put them in the hotel safe and we sent a message to Edin to find her.  We left this note along with it:

(we threw in the sugar packets we had been collecting the whole week.)

Of course there were many, MANY simply wonderful people that we met along the way, and so many fabulous organizations committed to doing whatever it takes to help refugees on their journeys, but I genuinely cannot overstate the amount of work Edin put into helping us during that week.  He expended so much energy, time, and money on assisting us, we wouldn't have been surprised if he decided it was too much work to be associated with us anymore; so we felt a strong desire to show him how much we appreciated his work, and that we are willing to help his org as much as he helped ours...

But he didn't distance himself from us, instead he continues to work closely with us as a liaison within the Serbian refugee community, and was instrumental in us getting a count - and subsequent request to aid - the number of families in the camps in need of carriers. In January, our teams will be bringing 500 baby carriers to families in need in Serbia!

So, to sum up, I am proud to share with you the official numbers from this single trip; Amy and I - with the help of all of our wonderful friends and families - were able to provide:

Purchased with CTF funding:  $800 USD
⦁ 5 reams paper
⦁ 5 jumbo colored pencil boxes
⦁ 480 bars soap
⦁ 420 ziploc bags
⦁ 48 small towels
⦁ 24 bags diapers (size 4/5)
⦁ 1,272 sanitary pads
⦁ 120 tissue packs
⦁ 21 baby wipes
⦁ 21 mommy wipes
⦁ 60 hats

Purchased with independently raised funds:  $1,423USD
⦁ 100 pairs gloves
⦁ 105 Kilos Sugar
⦁ 200 double layer thermal hats
⦁ 100 pairs thermal leggings
⦁ 72 pairs men's thermal socks
⦁ 60 pairs women/child socks
⦁ 112 razors
⦁ 54 boxes black tea
⦁ 2 lenovo ideapad laptop computers

Also distributed: 
⦁ Laura's hand knit hats (20)
⦁ 50 mylar emergency blankets
⦁ 50 baby carriers.