the moon, re-phased

sidewalks

and you too...

Remember in Kindergarten when we used to make valentines for everyone in the class? How did we grow out of that to giving our candy-chalk hearts away to one and only one truly?

Everywhere people are walking around with strings attached to their significant other and their significant children-- often the only people whose needs to which they’re able to attend. And we “single,” unpaired folk are entangled within layers and layers of other couple’s tyings. We are left feeling like the only way to survive is to find someone to whom to tie ourselves-- to join the coordinated points of society connecting a dot to a dot. The tighter the connection to just one, the more knots are made. The coupled are stuck in their weaving, and strangling the ones without a string.

For years I have been cutting all the strings around me trying to stay alive in a world not made for me.  I nourish and maintain lots and lots of emotionally intimate relationships with fellow musicians, artistic collaborators, 5 awesome roommates, my sister, my family, my piano students and their parents. Having a community gives me the strength to swim against the current of the mainstream.

Even still, some of my close friends have become close to me only after breaking up with their partner. and sometimes I will lose friends’ attention when they fall in love and suddenly have different priorities.

So, to survive I have lots of friends: best friends, almost-best friends, good friends, new friends...because, for some reason friends won’t always commit to eachother in the way romantic partners will. This is my deepest sadness in life. I am not sad because I’m pining for a romantic partner, but I get depressed that the world is set up in a way where most people want to prioritize their romantic ideal over their friends. So I just get used to different friends coming in and out of my life. Usually it’s the time that they are un-partnered that they suddenly become available.  I find myself running around from just-singled to other just-singled friends to assuage my need for emotional intimacy.

This is maddening and depressing.

Why can’t friends commit to eachother?

Why can’t a community get married?

A good friend recently told me that I can’t expect her to act like she’s my life partner, that my expectations are too high.

I came away from that conversation with a stinging feeling of being too needy, too much of a burden on my friends, demanding too much.

If I had a romantic partner then I wouldn’t need so much from my friends. 

But I don’t want to have to have a romantic partner in order to be prioritized.

I want to create a different world.

I am tired of my friends having a kid and then losing touch with everyone else.

Why have we learned to live inside such an insular and exclusive love?

Why can’t love open us to expanding our attention to the world around?

I want to knock down the fences between each nuclear family until everyone’s yards become one giant communal yard. We’ll turn it into a farm where we’ll all work and live together, honoring the reality of our interconnected lives.

What would a community in love look like?

What if we kept expanding our community so that even if we created our “own” children we could still feel a connection to the Palestinian children whose lives are lost to Israeli terrorism.

What if we made space to mourn the loss of the trans women that were murdered this year.

The choices we make everyday affect the people facing different forms of oppression.

What each of us pay attention to affects everyone not just our own life.

I would like to notice more, to prioritize a community, a movement--

a new world we can create together where every life is a significant other...

where Black lives matter--

where we fight for the lives of trans women of color.

hey new world,

let’s get married!

The wedding will be huge and spread over the earth. 
Everyone will fall to their knees and say to another:

you too

and you too

and you too

and you too….

until we have sworn our love

into every face in the world.

what am I?

call me anything
but by my name.

What am I?

I am walls narrowing in.

a fog smothering your vision
so you can't see anything

but gray gray gray.

nothing has come before me,
nothing will come after.

I blind your vision.

I am a bully that tells you that you are alone.

that there is no one for you to trust.
that you are a failure
and will never be good enough
never be love-able enough...

I am a mirror
that only reflects lies.

I surround you with stories
until you don't even realize
that you're not seeing
anything but me.

I am everything you know...
everything you hear.

What am I?

I am a weight crushing you.

I draw your eyelids closed,
so sleep is the only thing
that isn't so much effort.


every step is a steep climb.


you are out of breath
from simply trying...

to breathe.



What am I?



I am a string that weaves itself
around and around your neck.


I am a voice that won't stop shouting.


What am I?


I am nothing.
I am emptiness.
but I take everything from you.

I kidnap your mind.
I weigh down your body with bricks.

What am I?

Call me anything
but by my name.

for once you name me
I start to lose my hold on you.

I will return
again and again

to knock you over
and smother your life.

and you will remember
again and again

to call me by my name:

depression.

and you will reclaim your mind
and learn who you really are

the more you know me
as  not you,

the smaller I become.



and you will stand watching.

guarding your life.


For I am always just around the corner

waiting for you to forget
my name.

I will not
bow down to you.


you, that roars through valleys.


you, of which I am filled.



I would rather trust something solid and full.

a mountain...

rocks.


wood.


but the Strongest of Rocks
erodes by flowing water still.

that which changes
takes us all.

Listen to the sound of rain...
the rhythm unsteady
each drop a new pattern
its own unique sound.

Listen to the ocean
whose waves curl in and out
in no certain shape
and unmetered rate.

Watch it appear
and then hide...

here I am,
I am gone

here I am,
I am gone

happy new year

holiday time: feasting, & fighting

"just left my bubble and found out there are people out there not looking at everything through the lens of racism/white supremacy right now. Oh."
-Beka Mari

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the holidays.

a time for
feasting


and fighting.


Over the holidays I got into a screaming battle with someone over the front page of the NYtimes. I noticed that again, the deaths of the cops were featured, which is terrible and tragic, but I pointed out that their lives do not matter more than Michael Brown, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Eric Garner, Tata Sanchez, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Renisha McBride and the other people of color that were killed by police officers or self-appointed vigilantes who weren't on the front page when they were killed.

    He said to me: "Mariel, you read biased blogs, articles without any credibility. Your view is way too extreme and uninformed. You need to read more to see the larger picture." As he yells this I'm staring down at the front cover of the NYtimes and noticing that all the writers are male in name and I wonder
what exactly he means by biased
and what he means by balanced.

   I am 33 years old and for my entire education through high-school the curriculum included reading predominately white cis men. In college my music classes taught me that music WAS western culture. That music WAS Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Schubert...etc... and in my Jazz classes I listened to recording of men playing. A lot not white at least, but again only men. only men. This persisted through grad school and some years after. That is 28 years of my life where I absorbed the language, beliefs, art, and philosophy of cis MEN as my education.

  I wonder if we can examine the word balanced again. Is there anything balanced about our education system/curriculum and media? How many women write for the NYtimes--one of the most read papers in the country? How many people of color?

  So, when I began to notice that even while I had a liberal, mostly feminist disposition in my early 20s, if everyone I was listening to and reading were men...how would that lend its way to gender equality? Really, if you do the math, if I were to inform myself in a balanced way I would need to read mostly only women for the next 28 years.


  As a musician/artist I am interested in the underground art scene. House concerts. Living room art gatherings. Musicians who have not yet become popularized. Art that is nestled in the moment of creativity before it is washed away by the masses...diluted...changed...its very essence of innovation lost.
The subtle, soft sounds underneath the everyday screams. The secret wonderings of a lone and hidden poet.

  When I'm with a group of people in a simple social situation, I would like to hear from the person who doesn't jump forward with their ideas...not the loudest one--but the one who is buried by all the talkers. The one people even forget is there.

   In this same respect I want to hear the voices of people who are continually silenced by society--who are taught that they don't even have anything valuable to say. These are the people that need to be heard if any innovation will be made in this world. If there's any chance of breaking out of the pattern and history of patriarchal white supremacy we need to listen to the voices of the oppressed.

    I have run a house concert series for 4 years. In the beginning I was fascinated by experimental music and booked musicians that were creating sounds I had never heard before. Undefinable noises and textures that transcended style, form, history. I found it to be a special pocket of creative energy. We in the community were changing the shape of sound and art---in defiance of the way the masses expected. Then I realized that mostly everyone playing were white men.

What is creative about perpetuating patriarchy?

 Turns out I was still locked inside a lens of white supremacy, looking again to white cis men for the most innovative ideas and expression. that makes it 30 years. 30 years. I decided at that point that I needed to exclusively listen to and read the voices of women, trans and POC (people of color).

    These are the people whose thoughts and ideas are constantly being drowned out by louder and oppressive forces. And you know what happens if we only listen to the loudest voice for century upon century? The content does not change. Look closely. The more you examine, the more you will begin to unveil layers and layers of content that by excluding POC, women, trans, and queer folk, becomes a circular rant with its sole purpose being that of maintaining and upholding white supremacy. We have created a curriculum that teaches everyone that white people are superior, that men are superior. Well-educated liberal people will come out of these schools very knowledgeable, informed to some extent, maybe even end up writing for the NY Times. They might call themselves a feminist. They might say they're not a racist but do not question how their very privilege and class influences how they interpret the world around them--how a certain kind of education can actually make one more blind to the world, unable to see the nuances and inner workings of systematic oppression.

    Unraveling white privilege means you start seeing the world as layers and layers of oppression on which it's built and start to change what you listen to, what you read.  I subscribed to news sources that are written by women, POC, women and trans people of color or trans/queer folk like:
Black Girl Dangerous, For Harriet, Colorlines, The Feminist Wire, The Root, Crunk Feminist Collective, Showing up for Racial Justice, Bitch Media, Huffington Post Black Voices, Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, Anti-Racism Media. I followed lots and lots of women and trans POC on facebook. I unfollowed lots and lots of people. My facebook feed now is pretty much just posts from Palestinian people struggling to have their story heard. Women grieving about their sons or daughters murdered by policemen. Trans people subjugated to abhorrent violations. Michelle Alexander posting articles and commentary on the Prison Industrial Complex.

   Now for my house concerts I mainly book women, trans and/or POC. The content of the performances isn't "experimental" per se, but we are hearing what we never have heard before. People are singing, speaking, and dancing who normally get smothered by layers and layers of thick white paint covering the colors and rich history of our nation--our world.

What would one room look like if we started creating space for the unheard?
What would the world start to sound like if we listened to the voices who have been muted for centuries?

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine a world where white men said:
"We would like to create a more balanced perspective. People of color, Women, Trans people, we've had a long rant.

Would you like to take a turn?

Here in the U.S. we've been talking for 238 years, going on 239.

You can have the next 239 years."


now
  that is balance.