Robin Cordaro did not want me to take her photograph. It was a big deal, she said that she was allowing me to video our interview. Once the camera was rolling she put on her sunglasses and projected from there. Robin was totally comfortable with me photographing everything else about her life at her campsite, but not her eyes.
Robin and I met at in the bathroom at Lake Trinidad campgrounds in southern Colorado. A stereotypical place for women to meet and connect as there ever was one. All those stories that merge in and out of reality of where and how women speak and connect with each other, themselves, and men and masculine energy. Thats what struck me the most in Robin and I’s interview and conversation – the stereotypes of what it means to be a woman or feminine in this country. The traditional trappings of the ideas and expectations of gender, how they are handed down from generation to generation, what is continued and what is thrown away, and what is birthed and changes everything,
The feminine identity is in great flux at this point in time – it probably always has actually, as feminine is the closest we have to daily, tangible, divinity. The creation of life and the care-taking of fragility. The landscape of emotion and shadow. The joy and pain of creating life and the task of maintaining it to ensure our survival as a species. Feminine is the task of the warrior, to fight to maintain balance, to be aggressive and strong and know when to go into battle for justice. It is also manipulation, spider mind games, and psychological warfare. Feminine is sex and allure, the power of seduction. Feminine is problem solving and invention and art and engineering.
Big stuff.
Robin Cordaro has had many identities as a woman. As she describes herself, Robin has been a mother to three children, and she lost one of her daughters to death – “Mother To All”, she calls it being a result of that loss.
Robin has been a wife a few times, a ‘Stepford Wife”, and also a widow. She has been the Boss/director in her own architect and engineering career and firm, Robin was a student to achieve that career later in life and after her first divorce. Robin is now a reiki practitioner and reflexologist and is fully immersed in the energy work movement, she defines herself as a healer. She has recently taken up creating jewelry as she has been on the road traveling for the past three months in her camper with her beautiful orange cat, Nunzio, the two of them have the same colored eyes. Robin describes how she has been all these identities and now as she enters into her sixtieth year and through traveling and setting off into the unknown, she is finally exploring who she “really is”, who is Robin? That’s her current quest.
To watch Robin’s full interview, please follow the link and enjoy: http://vimeo.com/280420775
Robin strongly identifies with the social gender politics of what has more traditionally defined what is a “woman” and what is a “man”. Its the time period in when she grew up and I imagine, reinforced in the Italian -American culture that she married into in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She made it very clear that she is and was a feminine “Girl” that made her way up in a “Man’s World” through her career as a contractor and builder. She tells in this video clip how she is most comfortable in a dress and once she proved herself after thirteen years navigating a male-dominated industry, she stopped wearing pants to work and only wore dresses as a statement of self-proclamation.
Robin is a wild mix of life-experience and ideologies. She is bold, independent, adventurous, and curious. Robin is determined, practical and a problem-solver through her completion of architect degrees and her former career. Robin identifies with the traditional trappings of what it means to present yourself as feminine in our world and is the most comfortable with herself in a dress. Robin is intuitive and a believer in the magic between the natural world and humans as a reiki practitioner and energy healer. Robin also carries a gun, has a permit for it and has obviously been a gun advocate throughout her life. When we first met in the campground bathroom, Robin shared with me her belief that the creation of Sanctuary Cities for incoming immigrants to the US in response of the recently enforced practice of deportation, arrest, and child separation that our current administration has employed with such overwhelming force, is a really bad idea in her opinion. Robin feels that Sanctuary City status in the US will only make those cities more violent as the people immigrating will bring their violence with them. Further, Robin believes if she got in a situation where she had to defend herself from such an immigrant with her gun, she would be the one punished and not the person of illegal status as the laws would affect them differently.
Robin experiences compassion and fear in a flux of light and shadow, we all do in response to what life has taught us thus far. I have been learning so much about fear and what we do with it culturally. On the road in this journey of this project, I explore daily how we each grow from fear and how it stunts everyone of us.
Being a woman and identifying with female in our current American culture, its a dizzying spectacle of opportunity. We are so lucky here that though our autonomy is under constant attack by the patriarchy, we still have so much room and means and support and solidarity in exploring what that might look like to each one of us, what kind of feminine do we want to be each day. In comparison to so much of the world and its cultures and its fear of the divine female, we are truly in a position of privilege.
My hope and belief is that because of our privilege, that we can listen to each other and witness one another and hopefully hold one another in spirit when we are going through the darkest corners of our fear. That in doing that, the fear won’t rule the day, we will come through the emotional storm and return to the clarity of positive human connection.
This is the nature of refuge.
