Happy New Year 2015!
Happy New Year! Welcome to my new blog, The Bridge, a place for me to share my
experience as an ex-pat from California living in Canoa Quebrada, a small town in the Northeast of Brazil. In this day and age of social media it might feel like everything is already being documented and there is a living record of our lives, but mostly what we put out there are flashes and bits, blips and borrowed bites, but not often reflections or stories, which can maybe help us to connect across the globe in a more intimate way if we can take the time. Our stories are being whittled down into selfies. I’m hoping that this can serve as more than a written selfie. I’ve been living here for more than five years, making periodic visits home to California, but I suffer much homesickness and feeling of disconnect from the distance and the differences between the two places. I’m now fluent in Portuguese, but it’s not the same as expressing in my mother tongue, so this can be my English outlet as well.
As distance makes the heart grow fonder, I find myself hungrier to explore the history of my homeland each time I go home to Santa Cruz. I was recently there for the Holidays and the day before I left to come back to Brazil I went on a tour of the Santa Cruz Mission given by the local Parks and Rec department, and dragged my parents along with me, as my father was born in Santa Cruz at the old hospital that now houses Branciforte Plaza, and grew up in an era of Santa Cruz that many current residents can only dream of. I bought a book in the gift shop titled The Anza Trail and the Settling of California by Vladimir Guerrero and read most of it on the airplane on my way back to Brazil. It is very well written and makes it easy to imagine what it must have been like for those early settlers and the native people who were there before them, right there in the land where I grew up and where my family and friends still live. This book would not have been possible without the personal journal of Father Pedro Font. The records that were written by the other priests and soldiers were kept mostly as updates of the missionaries’ developments for the leadership in New Spain and did not get into much personal detail, but having Font’s journal helped immensely in making the story human and interesting as he included his own thoughts and feelings, so that we now, two hundred and thirty years later, can relate to it and imagine this historical adventure and what the native nations and peoples might have experienced as worlds collided on the “frontier.” I’ve been keeping a journal since I was a kid and have always found comfort in taking time to process my thoughts and feelings in writing. With this blog I want to share my personal experience of life here in Brazil as a way to help bridge to my life in California.
The last couple of years since I’ve been living in Brazil, it has come to my attention that the theater piece I directed in 2008 as artist-in-residence at the 418 Project in Santa Cruz, which was titled My American Dream, has mysteriously and repetitively come back to haunt me in many ways, leaving me with the sense that life absolutely imitates art as well as the other way around. My American Dream grew out of my personal yearning for a cultural identity that feeds me and lets me know who I am, my lineage, my place on this earth. American culture is known throughout the world as being mostly identified with materialism, Hollywood, and the almighty dollar, but not much that is real and reinforces one’s true sense of self and belonging. American culture, (or North American culture, more accurately, as living here in Brazil I am still in the Americas, only South America,) is largely identified with the self-made man, a blank slate who takes full credit for who he is and cuts ties with any ancestry he may have left behind in Europe. As I finished my education and began my adult life I became more and more aware of this rift in my existence, that my family didn’t seem to know where our ancestors came from, nor seem too concerned, and even my family religion embraces the notion of being born again, leaving the past behind and starting from zero, all sins forgiven. This can be comforting, but what about all of the valuable information gleaned from generations of surviving and thriving on this earth, so that when we are born there is a period of education in which we are taught where we came from so we can go forward from there and we don’t have to go all the way back to Lucy and reinvent the wheel? My conventional education consisted mostly of learning how to give people what they ask for, memorize and repeat, and though I love my family and am proud of who I am, the greater culture that I was born into taught me that I am to purchase my identity, and if I choose right and have enough money, I can belong.
In My American Dream, I and my collaborators, Julie Oak and RD Bolam, created characters out of our childhood selves as a way to compare and contrast our backgrounds and our different relationships to American culture. My childhood self, frustrated with the imposition of bed time after watching all of the prime time sitcoms that television had to offer, fantasized about staying up all night, singing and dancing until sunrise, and she twirled around and threw her pillow into the air as she imagined what that would be like. In 2009, the year after we did My American Dream, my husband and I moved to Brazil and I soon realized how insightful that moment of childhood memory was. I had discovered Santo Daime, a profoundly Brazilian religion based around the ingestion of Daime or ayauasca, the first time I came to Brazil in 2004, but it wasn’t until 2009 that I decided to become a Daimista and officially “get my star.” During Daime works we sing and dance for hours and hours, saying the closing prayers only after the sun has risen as we’ve passed through the darkness of night together and made it to see the light of day return. I had no idea at the time how prophetic My American Dream would be, and only years later did I remember that moment in the piece and realize how significant it was to my life now. Although Santo Daime is from Brazil and I am now a member of a church here in Canoa Quebrada, I got my star in California and my Madrinha, Luzia, lives there, though she has a house in the Amazon and visits every year. I’ve since then gone to the Amazon with her three times, and hope to return soon, as experiencing these works in the middle of the forest with hundreds of people singing and dancing together dressed all in white and green uniforms is the closest thing to Heaven that I have experienced. I think my childhood self knew a lot more than I often give her credit for.
At the end of My American Dream, in a state of desperation and loneliness, my adult character screams that “I just want to feel something real for a change!” We just celebrated King’s Day here, drinking Daime, singing Mestre Irineu’s hymns and dancing together in circle all night long. When the sun came up and as the full moon was still high in the West, a bliss settled over the room and I could feel every cell in my body, as real as the stars, perfect belief and existence, pure prophesy, the great “I am.” Daime is all over the world now, so I don’t have to be in Brazil for this, but now that I live here I feel how Brazilian it is as a spiritual practice. Religion and state are not so separate here, as well, and especially in the Northeast, the landscape is marked by statues of Mary and Jesus, and even in Rio de Janeiro I remember seeing an altar to Mary in a fire station in the city, not to mention the huge statue of Christ towering over the whole city! Daime can make us conscious of what we are feeling and that we even exist, which is a kind of intelligence that we have largely lost through brain washing that perhaps we “are not,” and that we need to “do” ourselves into being in order to exist, which reminds me of another prophetic part of My American Dream, a dance titled Do, Do, Do. I made a piece of jazzy music singing, “Do …. do, do…. do, do, do do,” and my character danced to it in a rolling office chair as a commentary on this played out image of the successful modern human, always important, always seductively busy, always dominated by the appointment book and by the market.
Although this has been another maddening part of my transition living here, that I often feel disempowered to do all that I want to do when I want to do it, I understand that it is a difference worthy of tolerating. People will often drop in for a visit at any time, or on the contrary, contractors rarely show up when they say they will. People generally enjoy spending hours together sitting and talking, but not really doing much else. An appointment or a work scheduled for 8:00 will likely start after 8:30, but hopefully by 9:00. On the other hand, if one is serious about studying detatchment in their daily lives, and not being driven by ambition just for the sake of making a name for yourself, this is a great place to be. It can be disconcerting to a Californian like myself, that what I find so important might actually not be so important in the grand scheme of things, but I have learned that there is more to life than getting everything done, and have been surprised at how un-ambitious I’m capable of being. Hopefully I’ll stick with this blog, though.
All of that said, after years of feeling like I needed to become Brazilian in order to be happy here, or even Northeastern Brazilian, and drop all of my North American ways, I’m coming around to see how important it is for me to accept my real roots and search for what is good from both of my homes, that I don’t have to choose between them, but can choose to connect them more, and create more opportunities for others to cross over . This is why I’m calling my blog The Bridge. And here again, life imitating art. A sweet little three year old who was at our place recently was playing in the flowers around the kitchen. He pulled a large flat branch out of the ground that had been placed there as protection for the plants, and started checking it out, seeing what else it could do or be. He placed it against the edge of the cement floor and looking up at me with his big brown eyes he told me that it was a bridge! So here we go, 2015, over the river and through the woods, in search of Grandma. The beautiful thing is that Grandma is inside of us, so all we have to do is bridge into that part of ourselves and know that we belong wherever we are because we are here, and through this knowing we can come more fully into the human family that is our heritage. Your feedback is welcome! Please share your own feelings and comments, as this bridge goes both ways.
