mandalay

smoke

right now, i am drinking some wine that my cousin jordan got me for my birthday (a penfolds cabernet shiraz). i'm watching the lightning through my open window, and i'm watching "moonlight and valentino" - the only movie with jeremy sisto that i can stand. tonight turned out to be much like last night. i stayed home, didn't call people i could have, spent a lot of time resting and thinking. today, i drove by a cottage on the east side that i was thinking of renting, i made curried chicken salad with cranberries, i did yoga, and i got coffee with my brother at flightpath.

i remember that there is something that i left out of my update a couple of days ago. within a day or so of deciding not to go to nyu for grad school in april, i went with mary grace and her partner angela to polvo's for happy hour. we had a wonderful time, drank margaritas, and i do believe it stormed a bit. i was asking mary grace if she had any documentary story ideas and we ended up talking about indigenous cultures and the experiences that i had in maine. about why i admired the penobscots so much. she began telling me about a native american woman she knows who was basically considered an elder from birth. mary grace thought that she would be a wonderful subject and as a way of getting to know people in that circle, she invited me to participate in a sweat lodge near san antonio. now i do not consider myself religious, but i do have spiritual moments. these aren't very focused and i wouldn't say that i necessarily have faith in a higher power, but i have faith in people and i think that everything on earth has something to teach us. native spirituality is very in keeping with this - i think if everyone were able to appreciate things the way the penobscots and other indigenous cultures do, the world would be a much more peaceful and benign place.

alright i'm starting to feel like someone should be walking through a rainbow playing a lute so enough of that. the women involved in the sweat lodge were very real, and yet so different than me. they spoke to ghosts and really believed they were there. there are times when i feel that my grandfather is watching me but they interact with their ghosts and see them as almost corporeal. there is a certain confidence that i think many americans don't have, confidence in their place, in their bodies, in their world. i admire the faith that carmina's family has in God. you can go ahead and imagine a disclaimer with this next part as my own opinion, but: i admire the way black women don't seem to ever apologize for their existence, like so many white women i know. i admire how john, one of the penobscots i photographed, was content with his life, despite the fact that he lived in government housing in the place he was born, and had an autistic son that he rarely saw.

i realize that little of this has ended up being about the sweat lodge directly, but i did want to say i had done it, and i'm glad i did. it was like being in a sauna on the beach. it was hard to breathe, i was in a tiny hut with six women so close that our knees would touch, and i wore a "sweat dress" that one of the woman had brought as an extra. it was soft and crocheted. no one wore jewelry. the idea was to be as close to the way you were born as possible. it was a full moon, it was chilly outside, the steam was stifling, many women cried and prayed in spanish and i couldn't see anything except the very dim orange glow of the lava rocks when they were first pulled from the fire. my neck ached from not being able to sit up straight for three hours and i was muddy and damp and it smelled like sweetgrass and cedar smoke.

Labels: native

posted by amanda @ 12:17 AM