Travels

New Year, New Home, New Everything

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Dear friends,

Happy New Year!* Sorry I wasn’t able to put up a post yesterday, but I have a good excuse: no Internet, because I was moving into a new apartment!

2011 is bringing new beginnings for me on many major levels. After over a year of living and learning with the Faithful Fools in San Francisco, I’m crossing the Bay from the City to the Town, setting up shop in a cozy apartment in North Oakland. The “shop” itself will be the final four semesters of the Masters of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts (through Goddard College) that I started in spring of last year, with the unbelievably generous support of the Buck Foundation scholarship. And my shopmates (fellow housemates) will be Ryan (whom you know) and Mai, a friend I got to know through the Marxist-Feminist study group.

Those are the basic facts; the meanings behind them feel a little complex.

Bittersweetness at leaving the Tenderloin, just as I was beginning to form some strong relationships, build trust, and get a solid feel for the place. Excitement to be living in Oakland, which was my original destination upon arriving in the Bay Area. (The Faithful Fools thing, in the city, kind of popped up as a surprise.)

Enthusiasm and optimism for my first time living with a partner.

And a complicated mixture of gratitude and grief about this amazing opportunity to pursue my dream education, fully funded, while so many other students worldwide suffer under tremendous debt from student loans — a collective yet tremendously isolating form of suffering owing to neoliberal attacks on public, accessible, common-good resources. But that matter deserves a whole post to itself: stay tuned.

As I transition into this new phase step by step, preparing to put lovely kitchen things into these lovely kitchen drawers (above), I just want to thank you, again, for reading, for commenting, for your kind encouragement, for your critiques, for your friendship, for your inspiration, collaboration, solidarity, and love in 2010. It was a year of great growth and change on Kloncke. To know that what I’m offering here continues to be of benefit to some people means more than I can express.

Thanks friends, take care, and be well in the new *Gregorian year!

love,

katie

Best Line Of The Year?

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Hola cariñ@s! Last night we of the Faithful Fools (my work/home community center in SF) returned from the annual 2-week trip to our sister group in Nicaragua. Thus ends the Kloncke 2-year anniversary retrospective series, which I hope wasn’t too boring and redundant!

From the moment we hit the landing runway at 5pm, seems like I haven’t stopped to rest. (Evidenced in part by the fact that I’m still wearing the same clothes I was wearing last night). Doesn’t feel too hectic or neurotic, just a fast-moving stream of strange, luminous moments.

  • Seeing a show at a bar last night, the lead singer of which was my partner’s ex-girlfriend from high school (I think that among the attendees of this little concert, we had something like a hexagon of exes going on…).
  • Practicing Thich Nhat Hanh’s guides for loving conflict resolution via 2am text message.
  • Due to a BART subway delay, running late to a Fools zen sitting for which it was especially important to be punctual (and reflecting on cultural and mental meanings around lateness).
  • Assembling an outfit from my closet for a friend who lives on the streets and got kicked out of a showering facility literally mid-stream. At that very moment she happened to run into another friend of the Fools, who called me and brought over the naked girl, wrapped in a sheet, her wet hair still warm as she sat down in our living room.

I could go on. But it’s getting late, and I’m beyond exhausted. So in a bit of a non sequitur, I’ll leave you with a shard of a poem that blew me away recently, and has stayed with me over the past two weeks. It was the second line, in particular, that made something inside me sit bolt upright. Wonder what you think.

Those with dualistic perception regard suffering as happiness,
Like they who lick the honey from a razor’s edge.

By Nyoshul Khenpo, quoted in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche.

A Day At Green Gulch Zen Farm

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Saturday I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge to spend the day (and overnight) at San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm with my friends Michaela and Sarah.  Michaela, a newly ordained priest, has lived on the farm for the last 5 years, and since ordination in September, will undergo 4 more years of training before becoming … a more official priest!  Or something.  I’m not quite sure how the Zen works.  And Sarah, who has taken her lay vows, is not only the executive director of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, but also a true SFZC baby, raised by Zen teacher parents among its three campuses: Green Gulch, Tassajara, and City Center.

Anyhow, the two of them go way back, and it was a delight to spend a while walking, joking, thinking out loud, and generally hangin out with these amazing, brilliant, passionate dharma sisters.  And the setting, while old-hat to them in some ways, for me was … well.  Green Gulch — a functioning subsistence-plus-sales farm, as well as a practice center, located in one of the wealthiest counties in the US — has its issues, is evolving, is imperfect.  And has its gorgeousness, my, my.



Panther Beach

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This week Kloncke is gonna be pretty foto heavy.  Because I’ve been spending time in pretty places.  Thinking a lot about land, too, and my connection to it (or estrangement from it).

Here, some shots from an amazing afternoon at Panther Beach, on the outskirts of Santa Cruz.  Some of the best of Northern California, in its own way, I think.  One of the things I love most about spots like this is the visible age and marks of motion in the stone.  The oldness of the cliffs, and the patterns of waterwear and erosion.  Makes me feel patient and slow and humbled. Kind of like being among elder redwoods.

Reality Drama

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Sometimes I really have fun subverting the “reality drama” genre, you know? Because the drama of reality isn’t always about sex, vices, arguments, competition, smack-talking, appraising, or unraveling. (In other words: getting what we want, and disparaging what we hate.) The drama of reality can also refer to explorations of the utterly mundane. Making ordinariness an occasion for attention. In this case, that might mean cooing like an idiot over a cat, and giving a sloppy, unnecessary video tour of the house you grew up in.

Arguably, the boring stuff does not qualify as “drama.” (After all, what’s the purpose of the word if it just encompasses everything?) But my point is that drama is not an objective category. It depends less on the particular content and more on the mind we bring to it.

We think of drama as being juicy, compelling, and maybe a little dirty. That’s what we expect, and in a way, that’s what we want. At the heart of drama is conflict. Non-drama is non-conflictual.

But fortunately for us everyday drama queens, there is a fundamental, inescapable basis for conflict underlying every single experience of our lives.

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Ryan Starts 10 Days of Woah

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[6:15pm Edit: Now with photos, continued below the jump]

It’s 5am in Sacramento, and I’m about to drive Ryan down to North Fork, California (about a 3 hour trip) to begin his first formal meditation instruction: a 10-day Goenkaji Vipassana course. Yup, that’s the same one I dove headlong into, totally unprepared, a year and a half ago in Barcelona. The wake-up-at-4-am, sit-10-hours-a-day, work-through-some-of-the-toughest-physical-and-psychological-pain-of-my-life-and-come-out-smiling retreat.

Shortly after that first course of mine, I got some sobering love-life advice from a wise (okay—somewhat creepy, and definitely trying to get in my pants, but nevertheless wise) 40something German meditator dude. Dude said: In a two-person relationship, if one person is progressing spiritually and the other is not, it will cause a painful imbalance that is exceptionally difficult to handle. Naturally, individuals have different strengths and interests in life, but when it comes down to it, a big gap in insight progression will probably spell incompatibility.

This makes sense to me. And also scares me. (And not because I presume that I’d be the one advancing.)

Fortunately, though, in the first partnership I enter after this combination-come-on-and-counsel, the partner not only has an intuitive grasp of a lot of dhammic principles (as I see it), but more importantly has a strong and genuine interest in deeply exploring reality, reducing needless suffering, and being guided by compassion.

I know. Super hot, right?

Wish him luck!

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Birthday Blogging Break

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Faithful Fools officewear

Tomorrow is my birthday, friends, and a historic birthday it will be.

Not only because of sea otters (more on that in a second), but because — and I’m fairly certain on this — it will be the first cold-weather birthday of my entire life.

August in Sacramento, Barcelona, Agra (India), New Orleans, Boston…see a theme here?  HEAT.

I love heat!  Ungodly, crazy heat!  The kind of unmitigated heat that gives everyone an excuse to be sweaty and dirty all day long.  Where is this heat???  What happened to summer?

As evidenced by the above photo, in San Francisco we have no excuse to get all sticky and grimy.  We have sweater weather.  Sweater, scarf, wool sock and hat weather, plus a jacket for going outside.

Luckily, my record birthday low will be tempered somewhat by an overnight flight to Massachusetts.  (To volunteer at/attend the Zen Peacemakers’ symposium on Western Socially Engaged Buddhism — remember that?)  At least I will be traveling toward warmth!

Additionally, it will be an awesome birthday because before my 10pm flight there will be kayaking with sea otters and human friends at the Elkhorn Slough, a coastal wetland reserve near Monterey.

Why does any of this matter to you?  It doesn’t, really, except to say that I will be traveling a lot in August (to hot places, hooray!), and will take a break from blogging.  Those of you who’ve been following for a while know this is not an uncommon occurrence!  I often disappear for months at a time, with no warning.

Anyway, in my opinion, with a mindful blogging praxis it’s good to get out of the internet for a while. Stretch the legs.

I am so grateful to all of y’all for reading, commenting, sharing links, and supporting me (and each other) through this little project over the last couple of years.  It’s been an honor and a lot of fun to build and dialogue with you, and I hope some of the stuff you’ve found here has proven useful in your own life.

Big hugs, everybody, and take care!

A New Hometown

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Wednesday, my day off, I visited Sacramento and did two things I hadn’t done in 10 years.

1) Hung out in historically preserved/decorated/re-imagined Old Sacramento.

2) Went to the California State Fair.

I swear, the more time I spend in this city, the more I feel like a foreigner who just magically happens to know the streets and freeways well.

To slightly fictionalize an experience: a friend (and Buddhist) once told me about a conversation she had with a buddy of hers.  Her buddy said, “I could never spend the majority of my life with one partner.  I’d just get bored.”

To which my friend replied, “When you look very closely, you see that a person is always changing.  So staying with one person is like being with a thousand people — a new one every morning.”

Despite having spent my entire childhood living in the same place, I don’t have one hometown.  I have dozens.

A Few More From Angel Island

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Busy day today: accompanying a new friend, a Guatemalan woman with two kids, 7 and 13, to set up her CalWorks (food stamps, medical, and general assistance for people with children).  Then, my friend Lea is coming through SFO with a 10-hour layover, so we’ll get to hang out in the city a bit.  Won’t make it to Angel Island, so this post ain’t too topical, but I just thought I’d share some more of the photos from a couple weeks back.

Workin on a couple of longer pieces, too, so stay tuned.  Happy Wednesday!

Mission Pie with Ryan

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Yes, uh huh, yep.

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?

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