Shooting stars, camping out, mosquito-bite constellations, redwood cathedrals, waterfalls, 85 degrees, epic vistas, winding roads, meditation. Partnership.
And independence from the tyrannical rule of gadget addictions. ;)
(Tech) Independence Day
Friends
On Not Writing For A Minute
Friends! The lucky spell continues. I was fortunate enough to go take a hike on Wednesday with Ryan. A recurring joke from me along the trail: Can I borrow your internet phone to check Feministe comments?
But really, as much as I love spending upwards of 8 hours a day engrossed in writing and reading, it’s especially important at those times to be able to unplug, step away, and reconnect with life around me. (Thanks for that reminder, Wisdom 2.0.)
What a beautiful land I’m living in, and how grateful I am to be able to witness it.
Concert Colors
Didn’t get too much use out of my camera at the Erykah Badu / Janelle Monáe show last Friday, and I don’t do too well with low light, neither. But with a little color editing, it works out — now we all match Erykah’s bright, bright stage.
To be perfectly, perfectly honest, I felt a little disappointed by the show. Something about the ricocheting between extremes of inscrutable coolness and raw vulnerability that didn’t do it for me. But! The audience was simply beautiful — all kind of folks, all ages, everyone warm and friendly and smiling. I hadn’t been to a concert in a long time, and this one was a great opportunity to just walk around and take in the splendor of regular people.
In other news, my first post is up at Feministe! I’m pretty excited. Come check it out!
Badu In T Minus Seven Hours; Feministe In T Minus A Few More
Guess what? This lucky bug is heading to an Erykah Badu show tonight in Oakland! With Ryan, Cat, and a friend of Cat’s (and I’m guessing we’ll run into a whole bunch of folks at the Paramount). And Janelle Monáe is opening. Looking forward to some amazing artistry and musicianship, and also to some marvelous audience engagement skills. (Video description and lyrics below the fold.)
(Random Sidenote: In order to stay up past my bedtime, I may need to treat myself to a rare favorite beverage: fresh-brewed soy chai with a shot of espresso. When I was in high school, my crew’s nighttime haunt, True Love Coffeehouse, used to call this concoction a “Jostled Gandhi.”)
And guess what else? Starting Monday, I’ll be guest-blogging for two whole weeks over at Feministe, a feminist news-media-and pop-culture group blog that I’ve been following for years now. Even wrote part of my college thesis about them. Exciting stuff!
Since I’ll be devoting a lot of time to composing posts for Feministe, there probably won’t be too much regular Kloncking happening here. But I’ll cross-post everything I write, so please feel welcome — and warmly invited — to comment either here or there.
Have a wonderful weekend! Take care, everyone.
Ryan’s Spicy Carrot Ginger Soup
Honestly, I’m not sure I’d ever even tried carrot soup before Ryan cooked up this batch on Saturday. If I have, its memory was totally and completely overshadowed by his gingery, sweet, spicy phenomenon-in-a-bowl.
How can a simple mixture of onions, olive oil, broth, carrots, ginger, cayenne, and cilantro wind up tasting like all the good things of the world combined? (Then again, that might just be an effect that all super-delicious foods have on me. I said the same thing about my friend Cat’s organic honey one time — that it tasted like chocolate and the sea and all earthly deliciousness.)
All I can say is: Yum, people. Yum.
Happy Monday!
Vintage Reading
To celebrate submitting my application to Goddard last fall, I went to a batting cage.
To celebrate completing my first semester at Goddard last week, I…read some fiction.
But not just any fiction! This gorgeous copy of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, a 1946 edition: older than my own mother.
Isn’t she handsome? And I love the candor of the text on the back cover:
Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917, Carson McCullers has been writing since she was sixteen. For several years before that her main interest had been in music and her ambition to be a concert pianist. When she was seventeen she went to New York with the intention of studying at Columbia and Julliard. However, on the second day she lost her tuition money on the subway. Thereafter she was hired and fired from a variety of jobs, and went to school at night. “But the city and the snow (I had never seen snow before) so overwhelmed me that I did no studying at all.” The year after that Story bought two of her short stories and she settled down to writing in earnest. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940 and Reflections in a Golden Eye in 1941. The critics were amazed that works of such maturity should have been written by a twenty-two-year-old girl. Concerning the first book, Richard Wright remarked on “the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro character [sic] with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” Of the second book Louis Untermeyer said: “no literary ancestors, although there will be those who see in the powerful situations something of D. H. Lawrence and something of Dostoievsky.”
I’m only five chapters in or so, partly because McCullers’ prose is so marvelously simple and vivid and penetrating that it makes me want to close the book and go meditate.
Speaking of which, time to sit and go to sleep! Night y’all, see you next week.
Last Of The Stat Dragons
[This is part of a collaborative series on mindful technology use. Background and previous dragons here, here, and here.]
As you may have inferred from the above, Dana Heffern’s work as an artist is bad-ass and complex. She’s another of my cohorts in the Goddard Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program — a true blessing to have as a peer. One of those bold workers who gets to you at a head and gut level: often through something like a parody or twist that makes the familiar strange, thus helping us to confront our assumptions.
Mission Pie with Ryan
Mission Pie is the best kind of pie shop. A bright, airy café at 25th and Mission, filled with sweets and savories, operating on all kinds of good-for-the-community-and-environment bases. Ryan and I met there yesterday to do some work: I was editing a video blog, and 18 hours later it’s still not finished but we got a sweet little photo story out of the deal. I didn’t notice until uploading the pictures that they’re all in primary colors. A fine, bright afternoon. And who can resist that smile, huh?
Faithful Fools Street Retreat, Gender Identity Disorder, and Disability As Class
I heard this radio piece on Tuesday morning because Sharon* wanted to listen to the voice of her late husband. She was a bit of a nervous wreck (understandably) because later that day she and Carmen would be appearing before a judge who would decide whether or not Sharon qualifies for disability benefits. With all the tumult of the past year — losing her husband, quitting a rehab program prematurely, entering a better program only to have her housing number come up in the lottery, which meant choosing between completing rehabilitation and having a place to stay when she got out (I know, right?) — this decision felt particularly momentous. She’d been trying for over a year to secure this income in addition to government assistance, since she can’t hold a job because of her psychological disabilities.
Witnessing our welfare system firsthand through accompanying folks in the Tenderloin is a tremendous eye-opener for me, for sure. I knew the system was fucked in a thousand ways, including bureaucracy and stigma, but it’s another thing entirely to stand beside someone as they endure the process. In justifying her need for support by proving her incapacity to work, Sharon had to prove that she was off drugs (because people with disabilities and addictions don’t deserve support?) and recount all the traumas she has suffered in her life, from being born to a mother addicted to heroin, to being molested by her foster family, to being raped while working as a prostitute. Rather than a celebration of her incredible resilience and survival, the testimony had to be crafted to emphasize inability, incapacity, pathology.
“Break a leg” I said as I dropped her and Carmen off at a downtown Starbucks, where they would meet with her lawyer to review before the hearing. “Yeah,” she cracked, “maybe that would help my case.”
Liberation, Social and Spiritual — East Bay Meditation Center
Hey friends! Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth so suddenly! I went into another Vipassana meditation retreat (my third so far under S. N. Goenka), and by the time I realized I’d forgotten to update the blog about it, it was too late: no phone, internet, reading, writing, or speaking for ten long days. Thanks to everyone who’s visited and written to me in the meantime — a number of delightful messages and comments when I arrived home to San Francisco. Mmmm.
For the first day or two since returning from the retreat, I’d been experiencing something of a blockage. A mild panic or depression that left me feeling that all the activities and avenues I had been struggling to juggle up until the meditation course — work at the Faithful Fools; grad school and blogging; political study; and day-to-day dharma practice — were far too hazy, murky, massive, or complicated for me to ever significantly impact or contribute to any of them. It’s been a long time since I felt such strong pessimism and self-doubt, and the timing — directly after a Vipassana retreat, which usually leaves me feeling giddy and abundant — added to the confusion.
Fortunately, I had just spent almost two weeks focusing at a deep level on the reality of change. So I did the best that I could do: watched and waited. Tried not to spin out or magnify things unnecessarily. Felt and explored the negativity, stayed curious about it, rather than trying to push it away.
And wouldn’t you know — it worked! Today my feet started coming back under me, thanks to some conversations with Ryan as well as three key pieces of media: one video, one book, and one radio segment.
I’ll share the book and the radio spot in the next few days. The video, below, is an independent documentary made for this year’s East Bay Meditation Center annual fundraiser. Seeing it today for the first time since early February, when it debuted at the event with Alice Walker and Jack Kornfield, reminded me just how much this organization inspires me, and how fortunate I am to be able to take part in it. (Even participating in the documentary making was great! Met some wonderful fellow members, and the filmmaker was tremendous, too.)
No more introduction necessary, really. Enjoy! And if you feel so moved, join in.
———
love,
katie
Kloncke 