in case your curious...

(12 de sept 2014)

and you did not get this on social media....consider this an english language update of my life. si no te gusta o no puedes con el ingles podemos hablar en castellano luego si quieres.  i´ve been thinking of my friends and family north of the caribbean, north of the isthmus... i miss you all, i miss soo many things about being and living in the Imperial USA, but i am happier, better balanced down here... it has the challenges that come with it, things about everyday life that i much more prefer up there, i have to look over my shoulder more down here, but in the big picture, i am digging the transformation... i´m looking for balance in my relation to the north... and as a water creature, we are strong but also vulnerable and sensitive to what is around them, i have had a hard time finding that balance... which is a life walks, a constant task... you know, there are so many things i love about up there, but there are other things that are at best a deep discomfort. i reflect a lot of cultural norms there and here, which of these i have slowly lost and which of these are more of a struggle to loose. the task of being present to these cultural norms and not internalizing and reproducing them is a difficult yet rewarding one.

as i watch our global struggles unfold from my corner of the world… my internet accustomed, multi-cultural-globalized-urban gaze sees gaza, ferguson , tar sands, the usa/mexico frontera, so many other places and i feels kinda out, disconnected. us, gente, pueblo, peoples, we are everywhere, in all those place and in Huila, but from the upper guacacayo valley where we are facing off resource extraction companies, the impacts of the free trade agreements on farmers, illegal military recruitment of youth, the destruction of ancestral and sacred areas and for speaking up being in the aim of a constant surveillance, gossip and threats (kinda like everywhere else... right??),..... shit gets mad lonely sometimes. those tear gas canisters they use in palestine, syria and ferguson , they use the down here too, was hit by one last year.

i miss being nomadic, and still am in some ways but also much more rooted, so i feel the pull to come back to the village constantly, even when i am having an awesome time in other places... i could not begin to explain all that we are doing down here on a local, regional, national, continental and global level, it amazes me and i am constantly humbled to be able to do the weird array of arts, communications, territory/nature-loving promoting and consciousness raising popular education in my region and in many other places and have it so valued and appreciated by folks. why? all of this in dreams and visperas of putting my grain of effort to inspire folks to desire autonomous-horizontal self -organized communities for themselves. preferably with some wilderness nearby with all sorts of non domesticated plant and animal friends.

if it were up to most ppl here, i´d stay in huila forever, but the people in huila is not cauca, it´s not chiapas, or oaxaca, or wallmapu, or coast salish territory or kanehsatake, it may have been 480 years ago but it´s not today, it is not any of that and it is filled with deeply conservative and catholic people who are adherents to gossip and are in denial of who they are and where they are from, this is the population dominated by hypocritical morally corrupt regional elites who dream of colonial era social structures and that use their privileged role in capitalism with the tools of state bureaucracy and violence to participate in the extractivist feeding frenzy of dams-oil extraction-fracking-mining-gmo monocrops that is poorly disguising it as progress and development as it destroys the territory of Huila and displaces the peoples. there are not many good local examples of how to self-organize and hierarchical leftist dinosaurs abound. we use a lot of films and documentaries- popular education and theater/performance work and just now starting to get heavy into the audio-visual production.

it has been nearly four years that i stay with other people on sofas, mats on floors, hammocks and have yet to have my own space, except these four months we are in the project geochoreographies we have a house rented. not having my own space is definitely tiring and exhausting and still hope to have a home soon, at least a plot of land to have a shack while I gather forces to build the structures the process and i needs. living with other folks has also been beautiful, enriching and humbling. while there are many things i do not like about where my family is from, i feel the strong need for coherency, to be grounded, to be consecuente, with the ideas and beliefs i have. to resist and build from where my grandparents and ancestors did it. i do not know if i want to live here forever and organizing, weaving and resisting from here or if at some point i will yearn for a different place to call home. it is hard… to think of a male bodied person who is trying to form a family with another male bodied person to try to find a rural setting where that family will be accepted. hard anywhere on earth i would imagine. i still day dream of being part of the founding of a community in an area with more wilderness than farmland, where our type of relations are not a big deal. we will see, in the meanwhile, life is good with its challenges, i have hopes of securing a good living situation next year and be able to receive visitors, hint, hint, and folks who want to collaborate and create ties and build with the processes in Huila and elsewhere.