The Nature Of Refuge

Reverend Janice Madsen invited me to meet and interview with her in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, a suburb community outside of Denver. Reverend Jan – as she is called by most people – is running a christian maternity home for pregnant women or mothers who have predominately been homeless or have recently been incarcerated. The home is called Shannon’s Hope and has been in operation under different leadership mantles for the past forty years. Initially, Revered Jan agreed to come and help with Shannon’s Hope through leading bible study classes with the women but assumed running the daily operation of the home with its founder, Leslie Pottebaum.

 

When I arrived, I was greeted warmly by Reverend Jan and taken on a tour of the facility. Reverend Jan was focused on me and our upcoming interview but she was also focused on every conversation and flow of women coming in and out of the home. Conversations with every woman we passed with residents and staff, addressing needs, smoothing interactions, bouncing babies, making introductions, and clarifying tasks; all of this Reverend Jan facilitated while talking to me and showing me the space. A multitasker of the highest order.

Reverend Jan was preoccupied at one point with the fact that one of the young residents had left in the middle of the night. Left out of one of the back windows taking the twin bed mattress she had been sleeping on with her. Reverend Jan saw the humor, the pathos, and experienced the practical frustration of losing the mattress. Reverend Jan referred back to this young woman later on when we were in the actual interview process. The woman had called her right after jumping out the back window begging her not to hate her for leaving and stealing the mattress. Reverend Jan’s response was one of compassion and genuine love, explaining that of course she didn’t hate the woman or was angry with her, she just wept that the young woman wasn’t ready to start healing. Reverend Jan explained her mission statement of building faith, life skills,  and self love into the desperate women and their children that she housed, and that she had the deepest compassion for the ones who were not ready to heal and that they would always have a place to come back to when and if they were ready. Reverend Jan then laughed, and bemoaned the loss of the bed, good mattresses for her women were always hard to come by.

Reverend Jan states that her God directed her to come back out of retirement by the shore of Coos Bay, OR where she was content with living in her RV and beach combing, and return to the Denver area. Reverend Jan had spent all her life as a christian crusader for the most desperate, the most in need in her community and she was specifically called back to Shannon’s Hope through her conversations with her God. Reverend Jan’s God is very specific and is her daily sounding board, touchstone, confidant, best friend. Reverend Jan is a self-described, “holy roller, evangelical ordained reverend of the christian faith” and her God is her one true light. Every interaction that Reverend Jan has is in tandem with her God by her side.

Please enjoy Reverend Jan’s full length interview by clicking here: https://vimeo.com/291582894

The thing of it is, I really like Reverend Jan and I like her relationship with her God. Reverend Jan has a kindness and acceptance in her world view at that same time that she has her firm belief in the literal and therefor, rigid adherence to the scriptures and laws of her faith. She is compassionate and intelligent and deeply connected with the mysticism of her experience with the divine. She has devoted her life to be in service of others, to be in service to the weakest, most vulnerable individuals that exists in our society. Reverend Jan has been an adoption advocate, worked for years with the homeless population in Denver, her husband and her worked with the foster care system and also adopted children from that system, and then in these past years, running Shannon’s Hope and being an advocate for at risk women and their children. Reverend Jan is a true crusader for the poor and helpless and she leads with the banner of her God and Jesus Christ.

I am also fascinated with how Reverend Jan straddles true compassion and the rigid code of conduct mandated by her chosen religion, evangelicalism. In speaking to me, Reverend Jan was across the board open, emotionally available, kind, accepting of others in their love for a god or not, nonjudgemental, articulate in her wisdom. There were also hints in our conversation of her conservative belief system; women and men created by her God for exclusive partnership, contending that the bible is fact and inviting anyone to come and disprove its authenticity in debate. I didn’t question Reverend Jan specifically about abortion counseling, but i believe I can safely say that after looking at the Shannon Hope website and knowing a bit about the born again christian faith that she is a minister in, that there is no counsel and information given to the women in the safe house about abortion options when finding oneself poor, alone, desperate, and then suddenly pregnant.

Another aspect of Reverend Jan I find intriguing is her relationship with one of her children, Merhia Wiese who I interviewed for this project as well and who was the facilitator of interviewing her mother. If you read and view Merhia’s interview, you will know immediately how different these two are from each other ideologically. Merhia is a leftist, grown up pink haired punk rocker who works for the corporate artist collective Meow Wolf, and has three kids, one of which identifies as non-binary. Reverend Jan is a evangelical minister that supports Trump and the far right and is a compassionate crusader for the hopeless and helpless people in our society that very few wish to assist.  A fascinating, dynamic duo of mother and daughter that mirror so many aspects of what we are battling out as an American society with such fury right now.

But here’s another thing, these two are not furiously battling it out, they love each other and at the end of the day, they accept each other despite and I’d say, because of their great differences. I think at one point and time there was a lot more divisiveness in their relationship, but at this point, Reverend Jan and Merhia bicker and i don’t think, bite when they disagree. Age is part of the acceptance of their core disagreements, Merhia in her mid forties, Reverend Jan in her mid seventies; mellowness over time. They are mother and daughter, blood being the connector right? Here’s another fascinating fact on these two – Merhia is adopted, she is one of those most abused in our society that Reverend Jan adopted and raised in her home. At one point, Reverend Jan was on a mission to create a family out the most severely traumatized kids in the foster care system she could find, Merhia was one of them and alternately flourished and did not and became the amazing woman she is today under the care of Reverend Jan. These two are mother and daughter, fiercely bonded in ways many mothers and daughters could never imagine. So its not blood that makes a person accept another no matter what, its true, unconditional love, caring and compassion. Just like Reverend Jan said when she was describing sanctuary – and this is why I like Reverend Jan as much as I do, that she gets that about the power of Love.

Mothers and daughters. The way that that intimate duo takes off and puts on masks in rapid succession when they interact. A myriad of psychic reflections that highlight and contradict. The mystery and magic that binds them together, The profound love and powerful hate. Expectations and disappointments. Shadows of ego and externalizing of of self. Self sacrifice and divine devotion. Joy and laughter in the face of so much strange. Mother and daughter are the same, they are not the same. All obvious and all inexplicable. its a bond for always, It lives beyond birth and death. You do not need to give birth to a child to be its forever mother. You do not need to be alive to be always be the first voice in each others head.

There is another thing that fascinates me about Reverend Jan, its a thing that fascinates me about every woman. Its how women so often identify with themselves in connection to another or something external; mother, partner, career. Its rare that a woman connects and identifies with herself primarily and then secondary how she connects with others. This is gender training, female=others first, male=self first. This is shifting in our country and worldwide and with that shift in gender norms, and definition, there is a great groan and resistance as that heavy societal weight is finally moving and becoming fluid. Reverend Jan shared a story of her own reckoning with self that didn’t occur until she was in her forties and fifties, its beautiful and simple; its when Reverend Jan chose her own favorite colors. She shares it here in this clip:

I wrote these words in after my first impression of Reverend Jan: deep faith/bedrock, strong and intimate relationship with her God, traditional, loving, compassionate, fighter, strong, stubborn, funny, full of laughter, thoughtful, aware, caretaker, zealot, crusader dedicated, intelligent, bossy, connector, literal, aware of paradox and mystery.

This is Revered Jan through my eyes and as a result of our experience together.

This is the nature of refuge.

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Merhia Wiese is a beautiful combination of strength and vulnerability. This woman has survived and at this point in her life, is learning about her true vulnerability and how she wants to claim herself in this more open, aware context. Navigating her career, family, herself through this relatively new emotional perspective, is a daily unfolding of joy and challenge. Merhia is committed to acknowledging the reality of her fear and moving forward in the truth of it.

Merhia has been quite open and articulate in her life experiences related to fear. Merhia was born into fear and abuse, she was shuttled through the horror of the foster care system in the 1970’s until her adoptive mother took her out of foster care at the age of five and brought her into her home. Merhia’s mother who I had the pleasure of also interviewing for this project, has been an advocate for desperate people as a profession and a crusade and in the case of Merhia and her fellow foster sisters and brothers, decided to adopted as many children as possible that had been the most abused, the most ravaged by life, and create a home for them. A wonderful idea but in actual practice, Merhia shared how that much concentrated damage in one household was a daily emotional and physical threat as the children played out their abused psyche on one another.

Merhia loves her adoptive parents very much but needed to escape the chaos of that household and ended up moving out as a teenager and entering into a relationship that resulted in her being a young single mother by the age of 18. As Merhia put it, you can’t be a starving punk rock artist when you have a child, so she shelved her own ambitions of being a photographer and worked every job she could get her hands on that would support her and her child. Merhia did not give up on being a part of the artistic community, she channeled her artistic passion into repping other artists that she knew and admired and did this for over twenty years. Juggling three jobs at once and two more children, all in the endeavor to take care of her family while maintaining her passion for the artistic community in Denver.

Please enjoy Merhia’s full length interview by following the link here: https://vimeo.com/286779980

So this is where Merhia began. The content of her life experience and character is so much more, but this is the bedrock. Women are amazing in their tenacity, their relentless push to survive. Often with children, often without a stable partner, women insist each day that they and their children will make it through somehow. Some women most definitely abandon those children, abandon themselves, but we most often survive. And the women who do hold onto the kids and also commit to pursuing their passions somehow – heavy weight champion fighters.

Merhia is now enjoying the benefits of all that amazing hard work. She is the manager of the office of operations for the upcoming opening of Meow Wolf Denver, a highly visible DYI corporate artist collective based in Sante Fe, NM that is opening immersive art instillations in cities across the country. Merhia’s long struggle to raise her family, have enough money to meet everyone’s needs, stay working and connected in Denver’s art community, has now born fruition. Being employed at Meow Wolf affords Merhia to utilize all her skills and talents in the Denver artistic community with artist outreach, fundraising, event organizing, She is overseeing the construction of Meow Wolf Denver from the offices on site, a beautiful space to work where I interviewed Merhia and under her recommendation and connection, I interviewed Zoë Williams as well who is also working for Meow Wolf.

Meow Wolf and what that means to Merhia as far as financial and professional sustainability for herself and her family, is everything as far as affording Merhia a sense of true stability for the first time in her life. Merhia can obviously survive and manage just about any situation, but to come to a place of abundance and learn how to breathe and relax into that, is profound. Merhia knows her privilege in this and is present to the responsibility of having more than enough and how to pay it forward to others whenever she can.

Merhia has been a connector in this interview process while i was in Denver. First with Zoë Williams,  Merhia then also really opened herself up and suggested her mother, Reverend Jan, the next interviewee in this project. Reverend Jan is an ordained minister in the evangelical faith, a Trump supporter, and runs a shelter for recently incarcerated women and their children, Merhia is leftist liberal punk rock artist who manages Meow Wolf Denver and has deep roots in the Denver artistic community.  The connection between Merhia and her mother and interviewing them both for The Nature Of Refuge feels pivotal to me as a storyteller pursuing emotional truth. The connection between mothers and daughters is primal and often strange. It is joy and laughter at all the fear that can pass between the two. It is a powerful connection that I will explore further in  Merhia’s mothers interview story that will be published as a continuation of this one. Thats how daughters and mothers work, we melt into each other whether we want the boundaries there or not.

This project is one about exploring fear at its heart. I am interviewing predominately women who identify as female, but I am also meeting and interviewing non-binary individuals and transgender women to add their clear, strong voices to this chorus. I am invested in the stories of American women through the lens of this project because I have a deep powerful faith in the truth of fear and the response of compassion. I am asking these voices to share their experiences of vulnerability and how they connect with their inner sacred sense of safety. I am asking these voices to tell me how they survive, what tools have they cultivated in the endeavor of not drowning in their own and others suffering. I am doing this because i did drown at one point in my own suffering and I learned that magic and faith and love are the cornerstones of emotional survival that open up the door to actual thriving. Suffering being the catalyst. Fear being propulsion. Compassion being the connector and the stabilizer. My own drowning and resurrection gave birth in me a overwhelming sense of connection to other women’s experiences with fear and what they do with it. How we can take care of one another in states of extreme vulnerability. Because we are all the same stuff after all.

Merhia is many things: she is reaching for the light, vulnerable, tough, a survivor, an artist, a mother, a lover, a professional, detail-oriented, a manager, wounded, soft, fierce, scared, courageous, loving, open-minded, caretaker, aware, intelligent, focused, strong, a connector, resourceful.

This is the nature of refuge.

 

 

This is Zoë Williams and their sweet babe, Iva Defiance. I experience Zoë as an individual who has access to all of themselves and operates with great presence and strength in many endeavors simultaneously. When I asked Zoë what it was that they do in life, this is what they said, “a community organizer, a collective liberator dreamer, a herbalist, ..does what they can to make a better world than the one their children were born into.” Righteous response. In addition, Zoë also is going to law school, a professional social justice advocate, working for the art collective Meow Wolf, in a committed partnership, and raising three children. Zoë is thirty-two years old and in my opinion, kicking some major life ass as a full blown compassionate warrior for justice.

There is another aspect of Zoë’s identity  that is currently on the forefront of American consciousness, Zoë identifies as non-binary, or gender-fluid. Think in concepts of gender duality, the Native American definition of “Two Spirit”; releasing oneself from the rigid social boxes of, “Male” or “Female” and the proscribed societal norms within those gender definitions. Instead of “He” or “She” in the conversation of identifying non-binary, there is “They” and all the choice of self or selves that is implied. Not either/or but many/any. This identification of self  and where a person identifies in the social landscape goes beyond the identification of Bisexual or Gay or Transgender or even the weirdo fluid/outsider catchall, Queer.

This is a new evolution in our human understanding of one another based on gender placement and biological identification and therefor a person’s use and worth in human society. This is in my mind, a staggeringly simple and profound answer to gender inequality. Its takes the argument right off the table whether male or female is superior, inferior,  or even equal. If every individual identifies as both male, female, a little of this and a little of that, or some new hybrid of the two, then we are all one, not two. Not a pair, but a an infinite variety of reflection. Take the gender wars off the table with non-binary leading the way, and then we’ve cleared an enormous space as a species in how we subjugate each other and we can then tackle equality in race and class with all that room made suddenly available.

Its a great step forward toward unification. And this is only the beginning of this conversation and evolution, it is a movement that has emerged in this current generation – imagine in twenty years what the movement will look like. I think this is very exciting and am so glad I met Zoë and listened to their experience with non-binary identification. Zoë and their partner are raising their children as non-binary and Zoë shared how these children are teaching adults around them how to let go of such spiritual and social rigidity, along with proper pronouns, the language of self-identification being very important. There is resistance and fear in response but there is also a great deal of curiosity and learning happening, Zoë and her partner are choosing to trust their children and themselves in letting that possibility of negative response be  part of the learning process.

Please enjoy Zoë Williams full length interview by following this link: https://vimeo.com/286764905

I met Zoë and Iva in the Denver, Colorado offices of the artistic collective Meow Wolf Denver  where Zoë works. Zoë works with this amazing DIY corporate art collective that originated in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2008, created The House Of Eternal Return , and is now opening satellite immersive art experiences first in Denver slated to open in 2020. There further plans to open in other American cities as well. When I rolled into Denver, a great friend who has a fantastic community there initiated introductions that resulted in me meeting and interviewing a powerhouse quartet of individuals while I was there this past July. Not only were Zoë and their child  Iva in the room with me when I arrived at Meow Wolf, but the woman who orchestrated me connecting with Zoë, Merhia Wiese who is the manager of the Meow Wolf Denver offices and whom I also had the great pleasure of interviewing later that same day. As the day progressed, Merhia further offered me the gift of connecting me to her mother and setting up an interview the following Monday. These next three stories are a reflection of that powerful interconnection that I’ve experienced every step along the way of conducting this epic project.

Zoë, Iva, I began our conversation here in this creative hub. Zoë with their clear direct gaze and speech; their child Iva having the same eyes and Iva’s joyful communication that filled the room; both intimately connected and fully individual from each other. Zoë with their clarity and compassion hard won through beginning years of being profoundly uncomfortable with her allotted female identification until they broke free of those confines through the emergence of non-binary identification. And the sweet babe Iva, so wild and sure in their joy and they have never been identified as anything but their own self. Iva will or won’t make the decision as identifying male or female when their time comes along with their siblings in Zoë’s family, the choice is completely up to Iva to define what they are in the world.

Another really cool thing that Zoë is exploring as a parent is their evolution as a social justice warrior that includes their family. Zoë has been a political activist that has put their body on the front line of political protest, describing situations of intense civil disobedience that they have participated in over the years but that now due to health issues and being a parent, has made the  choice to pull back from that front line of aggressive activism. But Zoë isn’t retiring and fading back into domestic life in any way, they are just shifting the parameters. Zoë is currently committed to calling focus and attention to the immigrant parents and children that have been and continue to be separated from one another in ICE detention centers all over the country. Zoë at their own  and their children’s passionate response to this current battle of injustice, is incorporating public protest story time and lemonade stands at the nearby ICE detention centers that are located outside of Denver. Involving children and the family dynamic to political protest is Zoë’s current family and social political objective. To introduce the concept to other parents and families that they can participate in the political landscape in this manner in being hands on in actively advocating for the shape of their children’s societal future. That they can actively create this compassionate world with their children as its being shaped.

And just an FYI: I did just a surface Google search this morning about the status of the 1,475 children that went missing from our government tracking agency the Office of Refugee and Resettlement back in April 2018 and there are still only vague answers about where these children might be. 400 children are still in custody in ICE detention centers and have not been reunited with their families and it is 45 days past the promised deadline that these families would be reunited. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has just welcomed 44 new immigration judges in preparation to try the most immigration cases that this country has ever experienced – this atrocious practice of separating families at the our borders who are seeking asylum or entering our country illegally is nothing new and will obviously be continuing. Its a gut wrenching industry of another branch of privatized incarceration that this country is embracing on a corporate level of creating financial profit off the misery and inhumane treatment of families and children.

Zoë is intelligent, integrated, thoughtful, and passionate. They demand the best from themselves and give it each day. Zoë is motivated, organized, loving, and kind. They are ambitious and strong and galvanized by the pursuit of justice. Being a once outsider has lit a fire under this force of nature that has learned through suffering the meaning of self identification. This individual also understands their place of privilege in this word and uses it with social awareness and teaches their children to do the same in service for  the people who are given no voice in our culture.

This is the nature of refuge.

 

 

I’ve got a great friend who knows a lot of cool women in Denver. This friend tells me I have to meet and interview Alicia Cardenas, an amazing woman who has been running her own business, Sol Tribe Tattoo and Body Piercing for years, and raising a kickass daughter while doing both in her own signature style. I didn’t have anymore information before I reached out to Alicia except that recommendation. But like every woman in this project, I could just get a read off of her, that yes, this is one of the stories I want to hear and add to the conversation I am having with American women in this past year.

There are some days that you wake up and do the thing and meet the teacher you were supposed to have that day in life to make you a more aware human being. Somedays you are the teacher yourself and that is a good thing but its really a great thing to have the opportunity to learn and leave the suddenly worn out parameters of yourself behind and fit into a larger, looser space. Meeting. talking with, and listening to Alicia was one of those student days for me, I invite you to do the same here:

To enjoy the full length interview with Alicia, please follow the link and enjoy –  https://vimeo.com/283352778

When Alicia and I were messaging back and forth about the interview process before we met, she said an interesting thing that sparked me. Alicia stated that she didn’t know if she was a good fit for my project because she didn’t believe in the concept of “safe”, that it didn’t exist and that it was a byproduct of privilege to live in the sensation of that unreal thing. I responded that was exactly why I wanted to interview her and that I didn’t have an agenda of what safety and refuge could mean to each women I talked to, I want to know what these ideas mean to each individual, thats where I think its the most juicy. That Alicia was experiencing these ideas I had been exploring from a vastly different perspective, that made me excited to meet her, I knew I was going to learn something true.

Alicia and I met in the morning at one of her sacred spaces in life, her shop Sol Tribe. Its an warm, sensual, environment. All dark woods and metals and spirals and hoops. Needles and ceramics and alters. It smells good and is an environment of dedicated creativity.

And diversity. There is a Pride rainbow flag hanging from the window of the shop that is directly across from one of the rainbow crosswalks that decorate the queer-friendly Denver neighborhood.

Queer, non-binary, trans, cis, black, brown, white, feminist, weirdo, whatever you are into just check your bigotry at the door and engage in respect – This is Alicia Cardenas’s world and this is Sol Tribe.

We started talking and one of the first topics we explored was what its like to be a single mom and operating her own business. Alicia has been asked in many interviews what its like to be a hispanic, single mom running her own tattoo shop in the US today. her response to me, “Lucky. ” Which was a brilliant answer. Alicia went on to explain that though we are addressing privilege, and white privilege, in current social conversations, what American privilege means is the real conversation.

We in this country have a vast, complicated system of classification that determines who gets the stuff and who doesn’t. Obviously, caucasian straight men are at the top of the pyramid but its not just skin color or identified gender that gives you the go to rise to the top. Its education. Access to education gives you the tools to navigate the ladder of class, gives you choice. Access to that education is systematically made difficult to individuals who are not caucasian, not male, not born into wealth, not born into “enough”. This is where class supersedes skin color, but those class lines are in alignment with your racial background and if you identify with having more than enough or not. It comes down to what you are taught, how your class placement defines you. Education gives an individual a possible loophole to move with more fluidity through our system of class.

Then there is the reality of American privilege thats sets us apart from the rest of the global community, it also isolates us in our American bubble of what is “real”. Suffering to success, we have a very skewed and rigid vision of what those realities look like and the realities in between. Alicia spoke clearly and with great intelligence based on personal experience as a world traveler and educated observation, of how these factors all go into American privilege. Alicia pointed out that we do not as Americans, experience poverty on the same level that most of the rest of the world does, we are a country with extraordinary abundance and we take that for granted and mindlessly consume our resources, willfully ignorant of the finite ending that is looming ahead. There is definitely poverty here in the US, everywhere, right next door to those who have enough. But it is not experienced to the great depth that most of cultures in the rest of the world experience. It comes close on our Native American reservations, in downtown LA on Skid Row, the Appalachian mountain communities, but not to the overwhelming magnitude experienced elsewhere . With this padding of great wealth we take so much for granted and feel entitled to everything. Our collective misunderstanding of our country’s experience with suffering makes us quite juvenile in our national behavior and how we play it out on an international level. We are the bratty kids in the corner refusing to share our toys with each other and the rest of the classroom. We expect as our right, so much more than the rest of the world and kick and scream instead of collective problem solving if we feel denied. We don’t take care of each other very well and we definitely do not share responsibility with the other countries on this planet.

In Alicia speaking with great intelligence on all of this and much more – check out her full interview, its quite a treat – she was reinforcing conversations I’ve been having with people quite a bit, especially in the last couple of years under our current political administration. We are having an exciting dialogue about American privilege, white privilege, class, gender, sexual orientation, our abusive national ancestry, with greater truth than ever before. It’s been so extraordinarily uncomfortable and necessary and we still have so far to go as a nation to integrate  our vast differences and the truth of our heritage. But this is where education is so important. We educate each other on our personal life experiences and how we actually effect one another.

As a white woman born in the US with access and understanding of the benefits of education, I have got it made. I have had my struggles which I will not belittle as they have made me who I am and I like who I am. But my struggles are not as demoralizing on a daily basis as most other people around me. My weight is not as back-breaking, I was given the privilege of seeking and obtaining enough in this world simply because my skin is the right color and I was able to cultivate my mind through a wonderful world education. I don’t experience the same barriers as others not born into my world because simply, they are not there. Lucky indeed.

Another way that I am lucky is that I was born with a personality that loves to be challenged. My whole life I have sought out and thrived on having my assumptions blown wide open.  The national conversations we have been having in the last couple of years have been challenging and exciting as I repeatedly experience coming up against one of my cultural assumption walls, having it be uncomfortable, and then opening up to letting my misinformation go. To learn, everyday what it means to be someone else. To learn about my own level of misinformation and what I have always taken for granted with each eye-opening experience. To be humble about my lack of true knowlege but to embrace the opportunity to learn about what it means to be a compassionate human.

So listening to Alicia, I had one of those learning curve moments. That day Alicia was one of my teachers. While I stood behind my camera and watched and listened, the shiver learning went down my back. I understood that much more how deep my misconceptions lay of what is real in my relationship to my privilege. How much I have to let go of in my entitlement. In how much space I take up just because I was born into the class that I was. Just because my skin is white, just because I am who i am. I got “woke” in that time with Alicia and it will be a continual learning curve my whole life and I thank the teachers who will be patient and take the time to explain to me the obvious.

What surfaced after my conversation with Alicia was a new,  deeper understanding of my assumed privilege. It sunk in after the interview and continues to blossom in my consciousness, its how I need to stop wasting my privilege. To know I have access to a life experience denied to so many means I have  greater responsibility to it, I need to treat this privilege with awareness and respect. I have a tendency to purposefully self-destruct at different times, to burn down my house in a cleansing emotional fire and walk away to start something new. To put myself if desperate situations where I deplete my resources down to zero and then indulge in a panic game to distract myself by feeling unworthy of abundance. Its juvenile and completely unnecessary as an fully adult woman with as much opportunity as I have. We all have our teachers at the right time when we are ready to learn and move forward. I have stepped through a door of awareness recently and another one is just right around the corner. I will not waste the gifts given me any longer, its time to pay it forward consciously.

But enough of my experience and back to Alicia Cardenas. Alicia has a great story; discovered the tattoo world as a teenager and found her place in the world right out of the gate in that culture of outlaws and weirdos. She has not needed to compromise her true voice ever and the life long cultivation of her strength is evident in every gesture she makes. Alicia has chosen to raise her daughter outside the confines of preconceived motherhood and what the privilege of education can look like for her child, she is all in one hundred percent. Alicia moves like a queen, regal and strong and deliberate. Her words are intelligent and have weight, she is precise which I greatly admire. She is a community leader and teacher to many, she creates and holds sacred space. She understands the importance of asking for help as it does indeed take a village and she understands what it means to help others by often just holding space for them. Alicia is paying attention and she has an expectation that others are paying attention as well and there’s no room for bullshit there. I admire this American woman, Alicia’s clarity is a gift and she gives it freely and with grace.

This is the nature of refuge.

 

 

 

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.