Black lines on white background with words 'Rimay Raiz'

A collage of a woman in summer clothes beside one in winter clothes; three authoritative-looking women; a girl against a night sky; a woman with her eyes closed; a colorful pattern of sacred geometry; a Chinese water color of birds; a sleeping woman; a woman wearing a poncho; a woman holding a gun.

A collage of a woman sitting cross-legged with her hands on her knees, alongside an image of her lying facedown on a yoga mat with her hands upturned and stretched towards the camera.

An autumn landscape with vibrant trees with leaves in oranges, yellows, and reds

Campfire beside a boulder at night in front of a starry sky

Three men standing side-by-side near trees with a bridge in the foggy distance

About a dozen uncooked dumplings sitting upon a white plate dusted with flower

Film poster for 90s Disney Film "Honey I Blew Up the Kid". Depicts actor Rick Moranis standing in the middle of a white background with a giant red and white toddler's sneaker ominously hanging over him about to stomp on him. Poor man!

A man wearing a golden headless, holding a staff, sitting on a rock; a sword is stuck into his chest and he is bleeding, yet looks proud

Collage of a man wearing glasses and a collared shirt beside a wiphala, opposite a psychedically colored image of a mustached man

Memoir

A new resource for discovering alternative voices is here.

Welcome to the AltSalt sneak peek!

Letter to Art #3 - Young People, Unmoored Asian Americans, and Doing Good

A joint statement from contributors to the Andean and Asian American collections, speaking on what Alternative Worlds means to us.

Envisioning the Future

A piece about the conflicting experience of being disconnected from cultures that have faced so much adversity and colonization. It is about feeling intrinsically connected to these cultures and yet being so displaced from them.

i am a temple forged from sun
an army of iron shimmers from its
golden rays off a white cross
lodged into the beating heart of an empire

i am a dying kingdom
the bleeding sun’s old toy
its bloated bodies born from rotten pride
cast shadows on its land of pawns
like a mushroom cloud travelling by plane

i am of oceans apart
a dead culture, a dying language
a history clinging to its threads
starved of its power, forever writhing

i am empty water bottles
squeezed of worth and tossed aside
white plastic creases
curled over and aching

i am dust in rays of the sun
forever going and gone
yearning a time of no questions
kissing the relics of childhood

i am a temple forged from sun
an army of iron shimmers from its
golden rays off a white cross
lodged into the beating heart of an empire

displacement.

Jessica Kahn is a musician and educator of Jewish, Scottish, and Andean descent, and contributor to the Alternative Worlds Andean collection.

On "Different Folks" and Andean musical fusion

We might take someone’s outward appearance for granted, just beneath the surface though everything is always flowing. It takes listening to one another’s stories to feel just how malleable life is...

(Dear Charles #2) Cultivating Cultural Change

Here follows an interview with Alejandro Fernandez, an Aymara descendant and contributor to the Alternative Worlds Andean collection. Alejandro creates improvised and progressive psychedelic folk music and is a second generation refugee of the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship.

What inspired you to become a musician? What inspired you to become a part of AltSalt and submit?

I think partly my musical inspiration I know now, came from my father, who when a university student went on a tour playing guitar across the north of chile in a little bus in the 60s — and he just dabbled in guitar and could play a bit like Victor Jara, or Peña de los Parra — guitar based singer songwriting, mostly recuperating traditional tunes. I think it was this experience which made our house musical, and made my parents jump at the opportunity to have myself and my older brother join a children's Chilean exile music group, when we lived as exiles in 1970s Glasgow within a tiny Chilean minority. We played on the radio, for Amnesty International, at the city council halls, and were a regular act at Chilean solidarity events. My parents always encouraged that creative side, spending a lot of extra money on piano, guitar, musical theory lessons until I graduated from high school and studies took over.

When I saw the call to submit to AltSalt I felt right at home and had no idea what to submit but I really am grateful for you wanting to dedicate a blog to my musical work!

How does your relationship to the Andes figure into your work?

I always knew I was Aymara, that we were not just Chilean but had another thing, that was our grandma's — and that one side of the family had come down from the Chilean precordillera, from towns and villages at 3 or 4 thousand metres high, and before maybe we had come from the mines near Oruro.

I always treasured that aspect but thought it something almost lost, and only recently looked again for that Aymara identity as others rediscovered it, surprised by seeing so many Mapuche and Aymara flags at the chilean Estallido protests, and even more worldwide when after George Floyd's death there was such an awakening of decolonial thought, and I started seeing young people doing Zoom talks, or with social network presences telling about how they had gone back to their villages, and got their grandmas to teach them their language and culture again, in some cases then resulting in whole families regaining their lost language, which people like my Dad still wish he and his generation had never abandoned due to bullying and racism from "Chilenisation".

But it was only recently that I heard a recording of my other granddad, from the more Spanish, Catholic side of the family that is based around Santiago. That side of my family had been broken by various feuds between uncles and cousins, and I wanted to share something with the cousins I was still in touch with, and so I asked my parents for recordings of him. In the cassette recording from the early 90s he mentions the Camanchaca, the fog that crosses the north, and talks of having always been from La Serena.

I asked my parents about it, and my dad sent back a family tree done by a distant relative on myheritage.org which traces that line all the way back to the conquistador Francisco de Aguirre, exterminator of the Diaguita tribe. Not only did he wage war on people both sides of the Andes, but he also fathered huge amounts of children by raping indigenous women, for which he was taken to trial by the spanish virreinato. He even took part in the siege and looting of Rome and the vatican before taking off down south. My dream is to go back to Chile and travel north from Santiago to uncover more of those secrets that for many are no secret: https://www.amren.com/news/2019/11/conquistadors-tumble-as-indigenous-chileans-tear-down-statues/

We've read your belief about music wanting to be free, and are struck by the range of expression in your music — from classical quartet music to more experimental electronic, glitchy music with poetry on top. Can you tell us more about your creative process?

About musical freedom, I feel my journey has been similar to the decolonial one. I started out playing in rock bands led by a teacher or band leader, or where a composer wrote all the parts, sometimes in a positive way because there was a lot to learn, but also I felt that musical creation had to be colletively based, and loved the concept of art collectives and of creating work without some boss or replicating these top down structures where even the piece of paper is the winner. This led to musical improvisation, experimental improv and psychedelic music as a way to say no to all that, and explore instead the beauty of spontaneous creation, and of musical events where there is no centre or stage, where everyone can be both listener and creator.

I've always struggled to access good recording kit and avoided closed source proprietary software for making music, so I used Audacity, featurephone midi tracker apps, old tape based 4 track mixers, minidiscs, and nowadays bandlab - which is like an all in one version of all those other things, with a microphone and link audio mini bought from bandlab itself that plugs into my tablet and gives good enough recording quality to multitrack. Bandlab really helped me through quarantine as I couldn't meet and play with other people but now I'm hoping to start a band or group of some kind and play together again with others.

Also I wanted to add that although "music wants to be free" is a quote from a futurist — maybe Luigi Russolo about industrial noise and experimental music vs written/composed — that Andean music, when played in the Andes, usually is very strictly matched to the season and time of day, similarly to how Indian classical ragas also are written for specific seasons or settings, but in the Andes they also reflect shared work.

So although it should be free from prescribed order or a single master, it can be also be something done collectively by all and as an offering or part of shared work, an exchange or reciprocity with the season and the communal work required for that time. So maybe on my journey I broke free from music composed by a "leader" to be executed in some kind of hierarchy, to complete freedom of improvised experimental sound, then got more into the rules of traditional forms of melodic improvisation — like Indian or Scottish folk music but now I feel it would be so good for it to be an offering to accompany communal work as we did and some still do in the times of Ayni and Minga, maybe the kind of work we have to do in renewing and regenerating the earth after these times of colonisation and the dominance of extractive systems.

Why do you think it's important for everyone to realize they are musicians or artists and to create?

I think social networks, and some music apps and software always present this image of perfection, and are kind of too efficient at the wrong things, creating this idea that you have to be somehow different from or above the rest in order to make music. I think music can be used in many ways, to show grandiosity and how to stick to rules, but also like an expression of madness, of strangeness, like when everyone "dances as if no-one is looking", just expressing their own selves. I think it's therapeutic to let yourself go sometimes and express these things, and I would love to help people reach that inner decolonised person they have inside, that doesn't stick always to rules, but is a little bit wild and free.

You can find more of Alejandro's work on at his Chorus collection on Archive.org or his Bandlab.

Here follows an interview with Alejandro Fernandez, an Aymara descendant and creator of improvised and progressive psychedelic folk music.

Heritage, music, and creative freedom

Letter to Art #4 - Ukraine, Trans Rights, and Doomscrolling (March 2022)

Rima(y) Raíz is a community collective created by and for the Andean/Andinx1 diaspora community of the United States. Launched in 2018 in New York City and New Jersey, our collective now has members in California and Illinois. We are: <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/jamie_sa">Jamie San Andres</a>, <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/claudia.urd">Claudia Urdanivia</a>, <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/sandycha">Sandy Enriquez</a>, Ben Kruse-Calla, <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/layqakuna">Layqa Nuna Yawar</a>, and <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/sbarretolastra">Stephanie Barreto-Lastra</a>, among others that come and go.

Rimay Raiz was created given the erasure and racist portrayals of Andean and Andean-descendant communities among both Latinx and white communities in the United States. Thus, our collective seeks to confront this discrimination and sense of dual exclusion by uplifting and sharing the stories and experiencies of our communities on our own terms, as a way of exposing and resisting the insidious ways that colonialism and imperialism continue to impose their binary and Western epistemologies on our bodies, minds, spirits, and communities, across time and across borders. This resistance is also represented in our name, which connects two sides of our cultural heritage by using the Quechua/Kichwa word ‘rimay’ (to speak) and the Spanish word ‘raíz’ (roots). We are speaking from our roots. Quechua/Kichwa is an ancestral Indigenous language of the Andes and remains one of the most widely spoken Native American languages in the Americas today.

Our goal is to (1) interview three generations across the US-Andean diaspora, from youth, adults, and elders, and include community leaders that have been carving spaces for our community for decades, be that cultural or political (2) archive the oral histories in a public website, (3) share and discuss our stories through multimedia, via a podcast, zine, public space installations, and Raymikuna or virtual parties in this pandemic era, and (4) organize gatherings to celebrate and unite Andean cultural advocacy efforts. Through these initiatives, we aim to reclaim a sense of identity, alter dominant narratives about our communities, preserve experiences and knowledge of our elders, and create a sense of solidarity across borders within the Andean diaspora.

Porque las historias nos llaman, las historias nos limpian y sanan, como el agua y neblina bendita de la montaña.

The last three years we have recorded 14 oral histories and published two zines, some of which are featured here.

 

Issue #1: Choclo y Chicha, self titled

<img src="https://altsalt.s3.amazonaws.com/catalog/listing/10/cover-10/Screen_Shot_2021-01-07_at_5.25.08_PM-original-489444.png"/>

In March 2020, Rimay Raiz launched <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/listing/choclo-y-chicha-vol-1/10">Choclo y Chicha</a>, a zine that shares the contributions of the Andinx diaspora through poetry, art, and storytelling. Both choclo and chicha are Quechua words for our ancestral foods of fresh corn and maize drinks, we chose them to reflect our cultural connections and create a space for a uniquely Andean zine. Chicha is also a type of music, Peruvian cumbia, that musicologists and sociologists claim emerged in the Amazon of Peru out of a sentiment of exclusion and otherness by dominant white, criollo elites.

We chose to include zines as part of our core mission because they would allow us to showcase creative, multimedia works from our communities on our own terms, without the need to compromise our vision through mainstream publishing. We also want to acknowledge the diverse ways that our communities express their thoughts, feelings, and experiences, some orally, while others visually or through text. We hope to distribute the zines widely and inspire others in our community to value and share their own stories and experiences through this, and other mediums.

Our first zine featured profound stories such as “Camino hacia la Boca del Lobo-Simiatug” by Jimena Vega, powerful poems such as “Mama Negra, Mama Tierra” by Mónica Carrillo Zegarra, and art by colectivo member Layqa Nuna Yawar, Lenny Correa.

Initially, our zine launch was scheduled to be an intimate event with members of the collective and fellow contributors for the zine, with music, food, and dance. Once the pandemic swept the globe, we made the decision to transition to a virtual event that could replicate this celebration while holding space for our community during this immensely difficult time. You can watch our first two Raymikuna, virtual parties on the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RimayRaiz" target="_blank">RR page</a> on Facebook.

 

Issue #2: Family Portraits

<img src="https://altsalt.s3.amazonaws.com/catalog/listing/9/cover-9/Screen_Shot_2021-01-07_at_4.33.36_PM-original-483649.png"/>

Our <a href="https://frontend.altsalt.com/listing/choclo-y-chicha-vol-2/9">second zine</a> focuses on the intersection of stories and memory through family photos. In this section we feature excerpts from the incredible oral history of Analisa Freitas and the beautiful poem by Marisol Silva, “when I make chicha morada and play your huaynos full blast, and I carry a backpack on the 7 train from Queens to Brooklyn brimming with jars of aji panca, aji amarillos, rocotos, I hold onto Ayni when I can’t remember words in any language, I hold onto Ayni, when I remember that who we are as a people is much too strong to ever be forgotten,” she writes.
 
Additionally, inspired by our colectivo member Jamie San Andres’ call to action, we are excited to also introduce a new section to our zine entitled Andean Political Reflections, that speaks to the issues and uprisings the Andean region has experienced in the last two years. It is impossible to do cultural work without addressing the political.

We invite you to join our Choclo y Chicha Zine Vol. 2 Raymikuna, virtual zine parties, this Sunday, January 10th from 4-6pm, to hear from contributors of the Family Portraits section, and Sunday February, 28th from 4-6pm, to hear from contributors of the Andean Political Reflection section.

 

Conclusion

To learn more about our work and stay in touch, please follow us @RimayRaiz on <a href="https://instagram.com/rimayraiz/" target="_blank">Instagram</a> and <a href="https://facebook.com/rimayraiz">Facebook</a>. We will also be launching our website in Summer 2021 which will feature our oral history archive, zines, and other projects. If you would like to get in touch about potential collaborations or have questions, reach out to us at <a href="mailto:rimayraiz@gmail.com">rimayraiz@gmail.com</a>. We would love to hear from you.

Until then, tupananchiskama!

 

<hr/>

 

1&nbsp;The Andean diasporic community includes people with South American heritage from Andean countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Hence, Rimay Raiz utilizes the term Andean to refer to this region of South America, as opposed to folks that are strictly from the highlands. 
We remain inclusive of the many nationalities in the Andean region, and recognize that people that may identify with diverse backgrounds, such as that of the coast and the Amazon, Black Indigenous, and mestizo. We welcome all people who identify with our mission and background, whether they are recent immigrants, second generation, or have not connected to their ancestral countries for generations.

Rima(y) Raíz is a community collective created by and for the Andean/Andinx diaspora community of the United States.

Choclo y Chicha: a zine for (and from) the Andean Diaspora

Ana Somnia is a meditation on what it’s like to dream. It’s also a piece that uses a single interactive element to draw us into an animated world, a clever decision that is minimalism at its best.

Turn out the lights and explore a dream world in Ana Somnia

This is a special kind of comment section that allows everyone to share appreciation with the creators of a publication.

New feature now available: Resonating

Echoes of our ancestors,
Heard across time and space,
We find the key to our future
As we look into the past.

Calling all Andean and Asian American folks! AltSalt is creating two multidisciplinary collections of work — and we want you to be a part of it.

Who: Zinesters, writers, artists, designers, game developers, videographers, musicians, and more who identify as Andean or Asian American.

What: Team up or work solo to submit a publication based on the following prompt: “Envision a future in which your culture, history, and values have guided the world to an alternative reality — and harnessing that energy, create a piece to resonate with our times.”

When: Work can begin as soon as you read this message. We’ll hold a workshop weekend July 17-18th (schedule available here) to spend time together and share progress (the workshop weekend is over!), with a final submission deadline of Sunday, August 15th. The date will come fast — let’s get started!

If you’d like to get involved, please…

Join our Discord server (optional, highly encouraged).

We also welcome folks doing cross-community collaborations. Want to team up and combine Andean and Asian cultural influences? Do it! We’ll have special sections for cross-community projects in both collections.

Brainstorm ideas, form teams if applicable, begin work



Saturday, July 17th — Sunday, July 18th

Workshop weekend to connect and share progress (full schedule available here)

 

Sunday, July 18th — Sunday, August 15th

Continue working on and submit final projects



Our Broader Vision — Our purpose is to envision and create an alternative world through our collective creativity. To grow in community, we must become curious on how we can not only grow as one, but with the multitudes we intersect with. We hope that this can be the first of many initiatives to create solidarity across communities and share knowledge. Let’s transcend artificial boundaries; let’s connect.

Why these two communities? They’re the ones us, the organizers, are most familiar with and the ones that we belong to. We hope to offer a similar space for other communities on AltSalt in the future!

Open To All Creatives — No matter where you are in the creative process, whether your work is free or commercial, you can get involved:

Have you already created work and want to list it in the collections?



Have you started working on creative projects but haven’t had the capacity to finish them?



New to zine-making or creative publications? 

You are welcome to participate! Just fill out the participation form, then join our community of creatives on Discord for inspiration, collaborators, or guidance, and get involved with our upcoming events.

The Andean collection aims to highlight creative and artistic works in diverse mediums/publication styles from self-identified Andean creators. We utilize the term ‘Andean’ to embrace and honor our shared history before colonization, although we recognize that today many of us are accustomed to identifying by nationality (such as Peruvian or Peruvian-American). We appreciate the rich complexity of identities represented in our community and welcome anyone who has ancestral or social ties to the Andes (whether Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, etc), and its diasporas, to participate. Andean identity is also intersectional and extends beyond an Indigenous, Spanish, mestizaje, or Latinx/Latine dichotomy; therefore, we wish to be inclusive of diverse diasporas such as Peruvian Nikkei and Afro-descendiente communities.

This collection is by and for us, our ancestors, and our future generations. Our goal is that it feel both intimately familiar and, at the same time, entirely new because it encompasses diverse perspectives within our shared cultural repertoire, which is so rarely represented in the dominant narrative.

This is an experimental place to explore your individual identity, your creativity, and be a part of our community. We invite you to visit, contribute, and collaborate with us in whatever ways are most inspiring to you.

A S I A N   A M E R I C A N   C O L L E C T I O N

The Asian American collection seeks to explore the many facets of Asian American’s experiences and varied cultural heritages through creative mediums and publications. This collection is for and by Asian Americans, including those whose backgrounds encompass East, Southeast, and South Asian, Pacific Islander, multi-ethnic and diasporic Asian identities.

In defining a collection, the distinctions of who is included in ‘we’ and ‘us’ remains slippery. Within our communities, there are often inequalities of power between groups. Differences within ‘Asian American’ across class, color, gender, sexuality, religion, immigration status, history, and national origin produce asymmetrical and uneven histories, and encounters with state violence. Additionally, calls for community might strategically offer unity yet conflate the differentiated effects of racialization and colonization under one umbrella term. Rather than demand inclusion, our collection offers a space for sharing narratives that speak to different intersections of histories and experiences, within those who identify as Asian American.

This collection seeks to provide a space for identity exploration, community building and a creative well, to come to nourish ourselves, refill our cup and continue to explore without boundaries, to stretch the limits of our imaginations — using our creative practice to puzzle through the times we’re in together towards a future of collective liberation.

To envision an alternative world.
Because representation matters.
Sharing knowledge and consciousness,
Let’s create the future.




From left by row: Artwork by Jessica Tin, Jamie San Andres of Rimay Raiz, Layqa Nuna Yawar, Lia Coleman, Felix Kar-wah Fok courtesy of Shirley Man-Kin Leung, Sandy Enriquez, Adina Farinango, and Angela DelosReyes. Background pattern by Artemio Morales with gratitude  to the teachings of Zadir Milla Euribe. Music by Jonathan Morales. 

Alternative Worlds: The Andes and Asian America

¡Se hace un llamado a toda nuestra gente andina y asioamericana! AltSalt está creando dos colecciones multidisciplinarias de trabajo. Queremos que seas parte de este proyecto.

Mundos Alternatives: Los Andes y América Asiatica

This is the first in a series of posts to highlight members of the AltSalt community. First up we have Shirley Man-Kin Leung, a community organizer and yoga teacher based on traditional homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute nations (Northern Colorado), as well as organizer behind the Asian American collection for Alternative Worlds.

In this series, we hope to showcase and celebrate the diverse perspectives and creative work of our communities, to learn, find inspiration, and share resonance with one another.

Tell us about yourself! How did you get involved with AltSalt?

I am a sister, a daughter, an auntie, an immigrant, a lover, a gardener, an artist and lover of life.

I got involved with AltSalt through my friendship with Artemio, although we haven’t (yet!) met IRL, we participated in this amazing 6-month long virtual course called Global Reciprocity at the Ayni Institute a few years ago, and have stayed connected ever since then. In that course, one of the things we did was work together to map our entire lineage and legacy of life as humans, to understand where we are, who we are, from 5 billion years ago to today… it transformed my life and that is where the seeds of a lot of my work today was born, and where AltSalt also was born!

What does Alternative Worlds mean to you, and why did you decide to organize an Asian American collection?

Alternative Worlds is about giving us the opportunity for "otra forma de ver" — other ways of seeing. We’re in this liminal space, between the ways things had been and an unknown future. I think it's our role, as artists, to be stewards of this in-between space, to be able to hold and see multiple worldviews and swirl them together and breathe into a reality another way of being. The only way to be with all of the contradictions and transitions we’re in right now, is through art and activism. I think that this is how we will be guided through a transformation process towards a collective awakening, moving us towards global reciprocity.

I wanted to organize the Asian American collection because, as a mixed race, Chinese, Filipino immigrant, who was adopted and raised by white American parents, my own healing journey has been about finding community to heal my own wounds and connect with my ancestors lessons for these times we find ourselves in.

Having a collection is about building community for artists, where we can look to each other in our different but common struggles for liberation, and say I see you, I know myself through your struggle, we are done appealing to the dominant white culture, instead we are prioritizing each other, first and foremost.

The silos we find ourselves in are designed by the empire, and it's exhausting constantly appealing to dominant culture or resisting the world coming at us hard, seemingly alone in our struggle, finding ourselves asking for crumbs... the alternative is, you create a community where you can look around and see our power and creativity and strength is immense, we can learn from each other, we can create a vision together, we can show up and show our strength in ways that are impossible to do alone, it's immensely hopeful!

The racist, colonial regimes are very clear about the world they want, they want the status quo. We’re less ready (in part by design I think) to declare the world we want, our imaginations are atrophied in part because of always being in a reactive / traumatic state of resistance. We must collectively put forth the world we want, that we deserve, that is our inheritance from these freedom fighters, our ancestors, we have everything we need to not only articulate that world but to build it, the constant affirmation that we are enough, we have what we need to be in relationship with one another in deep and meaningful ways to build that world.

What’s your own creative practice like?

My creative practice is hard to define because it takes so many different forms. Poetry has definitely been a guide for me though, and there is this quote by Nayira Wahid speaking to my own feelings and intentions around my creative practice right now:

“You do not have to be a fire for every mountain blocking you, you can be a water and soft river your way to freedom too”

I exercise my creative muscle as a daily practice, as a way of taking time to slow down and be intentional with where I’m putting my energy. I also consider my creative practices to be part of a larger whole of resilience practices, which our ancestors and communities have been cultivating to survive and thrive. I really do believe that we need to be just as rigorous in our play, pleasure and our joy, as other forms of work. When we are in a reactive state, we aren’t able to respond creatively, and that's by design.

Lastly, my creative practice is both playful and oftentimes silly, but it also serves a larger purpose and has been critical for me in my own healing journey. For example, I recently shared a piece of poetry I wrote about my mother’s mental illness and what it’s taught me about honoring joy and healing intergenerational trauma. Speaking about things directly is such a big shift from how I articulate through poetry, and it’s powerful to see different gifts each form has.

What do you think the role of art is in our culture?

I spend a lot of my energy and time thinking about cultural change. Changing our hearts, minds, body and spirits. Policy and social change can move really slow. What can make change happen is the people, and there are many instances of this happening in history (take the Mexican Revolution for one example). I believe that art plays a critical role in this aspect. I also think art has a role in spreading and sharing wisdom and knowledge. Sharing knowledge is about building power, not increasing paranoia. We need to understand what is the system we are up against, but the same way we want to study what we don’t want, we need to study, imagine, and create what we do want to see!

Artists are the stewards of our collective imagination. We need both imagination and memories. Artists can remember, reclaim and reframe; to find things that were lost and hidden on purpose and own and reclaim them through our creative practices.

When it comes to re-building, creating alternative worlds, I think the role of artists is to take the time to slow down to dream and be intentional around the world we want to see. How do we start to put those dreams and strategies into play and then practice? It’s not enough to just think about if we aren’t doing them, practicing! And remember that creating and sharing art is collective! The role of artists is about bringing people along with you, we can't do it alone, where are your homies at?

What do you hope participants get out of being a part of this?

A sense of community, some budding friendships, fresh ideas, support for your own creative practices, and just to have fun and be challenged in some new and exciting ways!

You can find out about Shirley's yoga practice here, and find the Call for Submissions for the Asian American and Andean Collections here. We also invite you to join us for our workshop weekend from July 17-18 th, 2021!

This is the first in a series of posts to highlight members of the AltSalt community. First up we have Shirley Man-Kin Leung, organizer behind the Asian American collection for Alternative Worlds.

"To Dream and Be Intentional" — Interview with Shirley Man-Kin Leung

The workshop weekend schedule for Alternative Worlds: The Andes and Asian America.

Alternative Worlds Workshop Weekend Schedule

When it comes to electric literature, though, what happens a computer algorithm is thrown into the creative process? Does the computer get copyright? And, most importantly, does it get royalties?

4 Digital Poems That Will Make You Rethink What Poetry Is

So I’ve been playing around with creating my own tocapu, or pattern based on Andean sacred geometry. I’ve been inspired by the Andean Futurist Manifesto, and also this idea of fractality, shapes and ideas repeating, reflecting, and refracting on themselves, ad infinitum.

Something I learned from Zadir Milla Euribe, an educator from Peru from who I first began learning about Andean design and cosmovision, is how to begin reading the patterns of the earth and sky.

Tocapus like this one, designed with inspiration from Andean sacred geometry, are intrinsically connected with Andean cosmovision and dialogue with the planet

In the way one can see patterns repeated in nature, from the similarity of the branches of a tree to the bronchi of the lungs, to the spirals in a seashell and the spiral arms of a galaxy, in the tocapus one can see the patterns in small segments repeated in the larger segments.

This is because life itself is dynamic, a spiral — and you can see this play out even in history. Everything is always changing yet circling back on itself, evolving with similarities but transformed — what has happened will come again, and everything is similar yet nothing is the same.

When you walk up to the peak of a mountain, or stand beside a lake, if you look closely and choose to see it, you may see the patterns of clouds represented also in the treeline, and repeated again in the shape of a stone on the ground, and repeated against the horizon — everything always speaking, always dialoguing — this is how the world, how the universe speaks.

The ancestors of the Andes understood this, which is why their architecture takes on natural forms that, in the same way they saw the world speaking to them, attempts to speak with the world. That’s the reason the Nazca lines take on the massive shapes of animals. That’s the reason tocapus have that same characteristic of circling, repeating, the whole contained within the parts.

I’ve come to understand that perhaps this is beyond reason, and when you look at the clouds and see the shapes of animals and objects, perhaps it is all in our imaginations, or perhaps it is also the world thinking, dreaming, and imagining, and trying to speak to us.

In the practice of working with the tocapus, it’s another way of seeing, that’s for sure. It’s not a vision that sees the natural world as a resource to be analyzed, broken down, exploited. And yet maybe it’s this very way of seeing that will allow us to imagine another reality, to speak and create — in contrast to what we know — in reciprocity with the earth.

This is because life itself is dynamic, a spiral — and you can see this play out even in history. Everything is always changing yet circling back on itself, evolving with similarities but transformed.

Andean Sacred Geometry

Offering resonance is an intentional practice used to cultivate deep listening and connection.

Typically done in person, participants take turns sharing and listening to one another's stories, practicing both telling stories earnestly and listening deeply (or in our case, reading).

After the speaker has finished, listeners share the specific moments in which they felt emotionally connected to the story, for example saying, "I resonated with you when you said [insert moment]." Storytellers can then in turn express their gratitude by saying, "Thank you for listening."

Every story we receive is a gift. Offering resonance is a way to reciprocate with the receiving of that gift, to let each other know that we've been heard.

We believe that receiving and offering resonance is a human right. Our aim is to cultivate more sharing, more resonance, more connection, both here and beyond.

Example prompts when resonating:
- I resonated with you when...
- I was right there with you when...
- I really felt when...
- I really appreciated...

Resonating is not:
- Telling your own story
- Offering advice
- Reviewing a piece's quality

If you'd like, we'd love for you to try cultivating this reciprocity muscle and offer resonance to storytellers as a way of practicing deep listening. And in turn, we hope you'll consider sharing your story as well!

You can find more information about resonance in this PDF. 

Our deepest gratitude to the Marshall Ganz of Harvard University; Mark Fairfield, Cedar Landsman, and Lucien Demaris via the Relational Center; and Relational Uprising for devising this framework, and to the Ayni Institute  for sharing it with us, which we have adapted.

in this PDF.

Relational Center

Relational Uprising

Ayni Institute

Offering resonance is an intentional practice used to cultivate deep listening and connection; we've adapted it for AltSalt.

What is Resonance?

Every year since my friend Bill committed suicide, his mother and I had exchanged Christmas cards. And I am one of those people who do holiday letters. As I have drifted apart from college friends, those annual missives are the only updates I get or give to them and some others in my life, including Bill’s mother. In the holiday letter of 1997, I had announced to the world that after years of hiding the truth even from myself, I had finally come to terms with being gay.&nbsp;I had just moved to the Normal Heights section San Diego from where I had been living in northern San Diego County, in Carlsbad. The house that I was now renting was on the hill above the Qualcomm Stadium where the 1998 Super Bowl would be held, close enough to hear the blimp engines and we’d be able to walk out to my front porch to see the Blue Angels flyover and watch the fireworks show. I decided to throw a Super Bowl/house warming/coming out party.&nbsp;When I packed for the move from Carlsbad to San Diego, I had vowed I would really weed things out. If I was never going to read that book or wear that shirt again, I’d donate it. Bags of clothes went to Goodwill and boxes of books went to the Carlsbad Library.&nbsp;The Friday before Super Bowl Sunday I still had lots of unpacking to do to and I had promised myself that every single box would be emptied so I’d have Saturday free for party prep. I had about 15 boxes to go and was slicing into them, quickly dispatching whatever I found to the appropriate shelf, closet, or cabinet. Then it happened. I slit open a box that I moved to Carlsbad and from Carlsbad without having ever opened. It had stayed for years out of sight up above my car on the joists of the garage. I knew I was never going to wear the clothes that were in it or read the books or look at the photos hidden in it. In it were all of the things that reminded me of Bill. Photos of the trips we had taken together, music cassettes, books, clothes, and gifts he had given me over the years of our friendship. Shortly after Bill’s death, unable to deal with my guilt and sadness, I had sealed all remembrances of him away and I had no intention of opening that box either before or after the move.&nbsp;Suicide is different. I have lost close friends to cancer and felt terrible, but I never felt guilty. I can’t cure cancer. I couldn’t have done anything to prevent the car accidents that claimed other friends’ lives. But suicide, rightly or wrongly, feels preventable. If I had listened better, if I had been a better friend, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Bill’s suicide haunted me so badly that I couldn’t bear to think about him without it causing days of depression.&nbsp;I opened that box and on top was a bicycling jersey Bill had given me. It made my heart sink. I hadn’t planned to deal with this box now or ever, but in my haste to finish unpacking, I had attacked the box without reading the magic marker warning on the top. Shit. I didn’t have time to deal with this. But the jersey wouldn’t release my stare. I had way too much to do and couldn’t spend time fixating on a stupid shirt. I should just re-seal the box and get back to work. Then I remembered my self-imposed dictum to get rid of anything I would never wear again. But I couldn’t throw it out. It was one of my last tangible reminders of Bill. A reminder I couldn’t bring myself to even look at, let alone wear, so I should just donate it to Goodwill. But I couldn’t give it away. I should just seal the box and deal with another time. But I had to deal with it sometime. I should just throw it out. And so it went, my wheels spinning in the same circle as I faced what I had avoided for years. I also thought of the absurdity of keeping a cycling jersey—my knees were too shot to ride more than a mile or two anyway. My days of riding centuries were over; that was something else Bill and I had in common, our knees had curtailed our serious cycling.I got tired of standing over the box, but still couldn’t let go of the dilemma. I carried the shirt to the living room and held it as I sat and stared at it and replayed the options in my head. Donate it. I can’t. Wear it. I can’t. Only to dismiss them all and start over again. After at least an hour, maybe two, I grew tired of my stupid indecision. I needed to go pick up my mail from my P.O. box before they closed and I hadn’t put a shirt on yet that day, so I just decided, screw it. It’s just a shirt. Put it on and go get the mail.<img src="https://altsalt.s3.amazonaws.com/catalog/article/7/image-7/Ring Crop-152315.jpg" alt="A golden ring on a finger" style="height: auto;width: auto"/>Bill's ringIn that day’s mail was a package slip. I stood in line and gave it to the clerk who retrieved a padded envelope just slightly too large to fit in the box. On it was Bill’s mother’s return address. A month earlier, I had already received my once-a-year communication from her—a card with the usual short note, something to the effect of, “I hope you’re doing well” so I hadn’t expected anything.&nbsp;With great curiosity, I opened the envelope. In it was a gold ring. I recognized it immediately as Bill’s. He treasured that ring and had worn it for years. It had been made for him by his great-uncle, a dentist in England who used scraps of dental gold in wax molds to make jewelry of his own designs. After Bill’s great-uncle’s death, the ring meant even more to him as a daily reminder of the man who had been his surrogate grandfather. Bill and I had that in common, also—we each had a special great-uncle who took the place of the grandfathers we both lacked.&nbsp;After one trip to England to visit his mother’s family, Bill came back heartbroken. He said he had been helping his mother’s brother work in the garden and in the course of the digging and planting apparently the ring had slipped off his wet and slimy finger. He didn’t notice it was gone until they were done and he was washing his hands. They went back the garden and raked and dug and searched. They even borrowed a metal detector, but to no avail. Bill had lost the last piece of his great-uncle and there was no way to replace it.&nbsp;In the package with Bill’s ring was a handwritten note from his mother. She said her brother had been working in his garden and found the ring. He thought she should have it. She received the ring the same day she got my coming out letter and she knew I had to have the ring. She said she was giving it to me by proxy for Bill and that she was happy that I had finally found the self-acceptance that Bill never had. Suddenly everything fell into place. The real reason Bill had killed himself.&nbsp;I sat in the car and cried until I calmed down enough to drive home. It also seemed beyond coincidence that for the first time since Bill had died, I was wearing a shirt he had given me while I was holding his ring.&nbsp;Bill’s death had always been a scab for me. Not an open wound, but a barely-healed scab over a wound I was afraid to go anywhere near for fear of causing damage too deep to handle. I had a hard time ever remembering the good times with Bill since the ending was so horrible and my guilt so overwhelming that I shut out thinking about him at all. With the ring, I felt like he had forgiven me (if there was ever anything to forgive) and I knew I could finally start to think of him without immediately going to the bad places.&nbsp;When I got home, I called a friend of Bill’s in L.A. and asked how soon I could see him. Monday, the day after the Super Bowl, I drove to L.A. to have dinner with him. He and Bill had gone to high school together and lived together in Belgium for almost a year when they were trying to break into the ranks of professional track cyclists. I figured if anyone knew if Bill was secretly gay, he would. He said that even in high school, Bill’s friends had assured him that it was okay to come out. He’d still be their friend, and it would be okay. But Bill always vehemently denied being gay.<img src="https://altsalt.s3.amazonaws.com/catalog/article/7/image-7/IYWH cover small-091429.jpg" alt="A book cover containing the title " style="height: auto;width: auto"/>The memoir containing this and other storiesI asked why he thought Bill was gay and he ran through a list of stereotypical gay interests including liking Morrissey, Lucy, and Marilyn Monroe. The way he dressed and held his cigarette. I had noticed some of those things, but attributed the mannerism to being half English and spending so much time in Europe. (There is the old joke: Is he gay? No, just European.) The friend also said he wondered about my friendship with Bill and how quickly Bill and I became friends when we started working together and Bill at times saying things about me that crossed the line from friendship to crush.&nbsp;The talk helped me understand so much. In my mind I replayed many of the moments I’d had with Bill and they made so much more sense now.&nbsp;Once I sorted out the flood of emotions, I wrote to his mother and told her that far more than his ring, she given me back Bill. I know Bill is still with me. He is a part of me and I can enjoy the good memories without having to dwell on the bad. I cried for days when he died, but had been afraid to since; afraid to start again for fear I’d never stop. I finally let out what I had kept inside. It put one more piece of my old unhappy life behind me, to be even happier out of the closet.&nbsp;I was able to unpack the rest of the box of Bill’s stuff. Wear those shirts again. Look at photos of him, have on display some of the other gifts he had given me.&nbsp;I sent Bill’s mother her annual Christmas card about three years ago and a few days later got an email from a real estate agent in Pasadena. He said he was sorry to inform me that Bill’s mother had died. He said in addition to selling the house for the family in England, he had been asked to check mail and follow up on things that required it. His mother never got over the death of her only son so at least now she was at peace.&nbsp;My eyes are moist and I am wearing his ring as I type this, and although still weirded out by the coincidence of the timing, but there has to be a message here: if I ever needed a final endorsement that I was doing the right thing by choosing to be happy for the first time in my life, Bill’s ring was certainly it.I have had so many people ask about the ring over the years. Sometimes just holding out my credit card to pay in a store, the clerk has grabbed my hand and wanted to look at the ring. Some seemed to sense there is some magic to it and asked if it had a story. Once at a drug store, I started telling the story to the clerk and then I realized a line was forming at the register and I apologized and stepped aside and everyone in the line said, “No, this is good. Go on. Finish the story. Please continue.”&nbsp;◇ ◇ ◇The story of The Coming Out Ring is abridged and adapted from <a href="http://www.waltergmeyer.com/product/werent-not-happening/" target="_blank">If You Weren’t Here, This Would Not Be Happening: plogs from my life</a>.&nbsp;Walter G. Meyer is the co- or ghost-writer of six nonfiction books and his the author of critically-acclaimed, award-winning, and Amazon-bestselling gay-themed novel Rounding Third. He has been on radio and television programs including NPR and he has spoken at colleges, libraries and community centers across the country.&nbsp;Mr. Meyer told his own coming out story in The Los Angeles Times, he has written for all of the major gay publications including Out and Advocate and he has written on LGBT topics for the mainstream press including The San Diego Union-Tribune and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His articles have appeared in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Orange County Register, Westways, Baja Explorer, and dozens of other magazines and newspapers. He is the co-author of a widely-produced stage play GAM3RS.&nbsp;Originally from Pittsburgh, Mr. Meyer has a degree from the School of Communications at Penn State and currently resides in San Diego.

Every year since my friend Bill committed suicide, his mother and I had exchanged Christmas cards. And I am one of those people who do holiday letters...

The Coming Out Ring

I do know that when I saw Bruno, my world froze as I saw his Irish Setter chocolate eyes, wiry frame, and red-orange fur. I knelt down to pet him, he jumped on me in excitement and my mind and body...

Reverberating with the past

As you know, I just turned 31 this past week, and I’m considering more and more what I value, what we as a culture value, how I find myself within that and how to live a good life.

(Dear Charles) The Shape of Our Future

A short story about legacy, revolution, and obliquely, terraforming Mars. Also contains a dumpling recipe.

The morning of the ritual, my fathers assured me there was no need to be nervous. One reminded me I would have all the time I needed. The other said nothing, only tugged gently on my earlobe, to remind me of where I bit my grandmother the first time I met her and that we still laughed about it at family gatherings.

In truth, my nai nai, my grandmother, was a jovial woman who alleviated her rare bad moods with marathon cooking sessions that earned her a legendary status within the neighborhood. She promised me a simple conversation, but I knew it was more, this beginning of my journey into adulthood, the first time I would be listening to a story as its caretaker rather than its recipient.

The whole way to her home, I imagined what it would be like: solemn, I thought, precise, for certain. By the time I arrived on the third floor of a building set into the wall of the lava tube, I thought anyone might be able tell that I was not fit to begin. I hovered outside the curtain in the open doorway until a voice called out from within.

“Suying, no need to loiter. Come in, haizi.” I smiled, both charmed and worried that she would see me as a child no matter how old I grew.

I took a deep breath to brace myself, straightened out of the slouch the aunties in my building always hollered about and ducked through the curtain. I thought there might be incense, perhaps offerings to the ancestors and worried about the appropriateness of my simple smock. I even brought a notebook, real paper and a pen to help the words lodge within my mind. So I was startled to see my grandmother in the kitchen with an array of ingredients on the stone top island counter.

I paused in the doorframe, but my grandma smiled at me, corners of her eyes wrinkling up. She gestured for me to come to the counter and took the notebook from my hand. “Take notes another time. This time, you need only to listen.”

“I thought I was learning a story,” I said, hesitant, surveying the ingredients. A bowl of flour, already shifted, small dishes of spices, apportioned out, and a bundle of green onions, picked fresh from the hydroponic garden shared by the building. The large head of napa cabbage and a package of ground bean-based meat substitute made it clear that my grandmother was preparing to make our traditional family dumplings.

“I am going to tell you a story and I will teach you a skill,” my grandmother said as she directed me to the sink. She said nothing else until I cleaned my hands, dried them upon a dish towel she embroidered with a dancing fish, and rolled my sleeves above my elbows. When we stood over the ingredients, my fear of having to learn multiple things obvious by the way my eyebrows pulled together, she said, “This story will be yours to keep and preserve. One day, you will choose how to pass it on. Today, we do things this way.”

First, we mixed the dough, one part water to four parts flour. I put my hands into a heavy stone bowl and pressed the clumps of flour into each other, rolling and kneading to pick up the dusting of powder that remained. As I worked, beads of sweat building on my temple and an honest ache building up in strange parts of my arm, unused muscles stretching and pulling from the strain, my grandmother began to tell her story.

You already know that your three times great grandparent Zhou Daitan participated in the revolutionary struggles. I will not speak about that today. Instead, I will tell you of their life before the revolution, what made them the sort of person willing to stand arm in arm with their neighbors, the world that shaped them and that they shaped in turn. And though I did not know your three times great grandparent, this story comes to me from their daughter, to her daughter, and down to me. Through them, I bestow it upon you.

Once I punched the dough into a smooth ball, my grandmother declared the task done and we set it aside to rest. Then, I added soy sauce, salt, white pepper, as well as an egg to the meat substitute. With rhythmic, circular motions, I folded these ingredients together.

Daitan grew up on earth, on a patch of sparse and harsh land set aside for refugees. They were a rambunctious child, creative in inventing games and new ways to attract trouble. Though they received the mandatory years of education, provided by the international government for all refugee children, they were not an attentive student. Still, they read widely and thought freely, a difficult thing to do. And someone must have seen potential in that for they received a scholarship to university, sponsored by companies eager to showcase their generosity. They studied as widely as they read and meandered out of university two years too late with a degree in food science. Without sufficient social capital to obtain a posting in a lab, they returned to and worked in the packaging factory next to the camp where they grew tall and strong.

Under my grandmother’s watchful eye, I minced a handful of wood ear mushrooms, the slivers sticking to my hands, as well as a few shitake mushrooms, their unami infused scent filling my nostrils. These I deposited into the marinating meat substitute along with a dollop of sesame oil. Again, I accepted the wooden chopsticks my grandmother passed to me and mixed to integrate the dark pieces of seasoning.

Daitan’s time in university turned them quiet and contemplative. But working in the factory alongside childhood friends and strangers turned into family by proximity and shared struggle, they found their voice again. That voice spoke against exploitation and it wasn’t long before they drew the ire of those who hoped a heavy hand could crush dissent before it bloomed in full.

Then I went back to the bamboo chopping board, passed down through the generations, lovingly cared for by each. I recalled running my hands across the surface as a toddler, feeling the marks left it in by use, some sanded down or covered by newer marks over the years, and wondering when I’d get a chance to use it. Now that I was older, I didn’t have quite the same fascination with chopping vegetables. Still, I found the crunch and thunk of the knife through the green onions and the napa cabbage satisfying. I thought I’d have trouble listening and avoiding injury, but the rhythmic motion proved no distraction.

And so it was that Daitan found themselves cast out, blacklisted, unable to obtain even the meanest of jobs. Their fellow refugees knew what it was to be forced to the margins of society and offered them sustenance. For a time, Daitan was able to do good work within the camp, using what they learned in the factory to rebuild the hastily raised residences, repair the solar still that produced water. These odd jobs also allowed them to distribute the revolutionary literature published by friends within the factory. And when the operation was discovered, Daitan volunteered to take the fall.

The green onions went on top of the mixture and the cabbage went in a separate dish with salt to pull out water. While both rested, my grandmother upended the ball of dough onto a dusting of flour and put me to work pushing it across the counter until it tightened. With one smooth motion, she twisted the dough in half and began to roll her half out, until it resembled a snake.

As there were few places to exile someone who was already a refugee, Daitan found themselves on a one-way trip to the stars. They were still terraforming the planet then and Daitan, like many who grew up in the camps, found it difficult to breathe on the red planet. Even so, they tended to the legume fields for though they did not choose to come to Mars, they were forced to work off the cost of the fuel.

Slowly, so I could copy each step, my grandmother lifted the length of dough and pinched the top of it between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. With her left, she twisted off pieces of dough. Mine were nowhere near as uniform, some small, some large, most torn off with great force rather than the deft and precise motions I failed to copy. When I grimaced at my collection of however, my grandmother only reached out to wipe a bit of flour from my chin and continued.

Daitan was hardly the only one who came to the planet unwillingly. Except for the youngest, taken in by a flashy recruitment poster and the promises of an unscrupulous earth-side recruitment center whose manager sated himself on kickbacks, all of their bunkmates fell afoul of one planetary power or another. And all of them dreamed of something different.

In synchronized motions, we crushed each knob of dough flat and tossed them in the flour so they would not stick together. Then I tipped the cabbage into the rest of the filling and mixed one last time, trying to ignore the ache in my arm and flinging a bit of filling onto the table in the process. Without

skipping a beat, my grandmother swiped the filling into a pan and set it atop the induction stove. Almost immediately, it began to sizzle and pop. She snatched it up with a pair of chopsticks, blew on it, and offered it to me. I closed my eyes as I considered the flavor and layered textures, to see if it needed anything else. When I decided it needed a bit more salt, I picked up the shaker, an old porcelain vinegar bottle repurposed and passed down.

During the day cycles, they rode lifts to the surface, where the vast legume fields blanketed the red dirt of the blossoming planet and fantasized about escaping over the horizon. At the end of their shifts, they urged the bovine herds that consumed the legumes into the shelter of the lava tubes and contemplated letting the animals loose. During their night cycle, they lay in their rickety three-layer bunks, six workers to a room, and traded stories or comfort.

My grandmother handed me a rolling pin, not much wider than my finger. She took one of the knobs of dough and brought the edge of it underneath the pin. In practiced motions, the pressed the dough from the outside in, turning the disc after each stroke. I ended up with an oblong shape of uneven thickness that made me wince when I compared it with her thin circle of dough. She took the wrapper from me without comment and began to fix it, gesturing for me to start another.

Life went on thus and though it seemed as if nothing changed as they repeated the same work against their ever-mounting debt, Daitan came to understood that they were building community. People who might have been enemies on earth taught each other their languages. No mode of living seemed all that strange from two meters away. Games and song and dance from different cultures passed back and forth, used to speed the trickle of time. And in these ways, large and small, sedition spread.

We continued rolling and pressing until we piled the wrappers high, dusted flour between each layer. I used chopsticks to position a dollop of filling in the middle of a wrapper. I set the chopsticks down and gathered the wrapper into my palm, watching my grandmother draw the edges together in folds that held the weight of her experience. Perhaps that’s what kept her dumplings closed because mine invariably peeked open at the edges, bits of filling threatening to burst out or the wrapper simply gaping wide.

At the factory, Daitan learned to play a game of make believe and magic. It was fantastical and fanciful and so no one took notice when they began to teach it to their friends. For diversion and escape, yes, but also to pass messages best left unsaid in rooms owned and operated by people who held debt over them like blades. And some things were better conveyed through simulation and practice than through explanation anyway.

My grandmother said that skill would come with time and practice. And I thought that this too, was a lesson she meant to impart. So I kept at it, crimping and folding and often failing, yet in the end, producing a precious few dumplings I would be proud to present to my fathers. Finally, we dropped them into the boiling water atop the stove, easing them into the roiling water one by one so that the hot water did not splash.

So it was that when the revolution began, Daitan knew what to do. They were part of a community once more, indebted to it, embedded within it, reliant upon it. Because what makes a person is not just who they are but what they do, the people who raise them, the society that shapes them, the atmosphere they breathe, the horizons they see. So it was with your three times great grandparent. So it will be with you. That is why we tell these stories, why we ask you to remember them, why we hope that you hold them to your hearts as we did, so you will make different mistakes, and so you will know what was freely given and what was taken to make a better world.

Within the Fold

Dear Art,

I'm happy to be writing to you in this new format, in these times. I think it feels like taking a coat of fresh paint to refresh my perspective on things and what better way to do it than in a new platform like Zonelets? [Note: This is now on AltSalt, which is a fine platform as well, ha]

This platform invokes a lot of technology, but as I approach my 31st birthday this Friday, I'm feeling many layers of emotions that are hard to parse through (Charlie Brown style).

Here's a list of things that have got me down on my birthday:

It definitely feels hard to be celebrating anything during these times! But ultimately even when I think of all these things I still try to find hope, and I would like to articulate some of those things that I look to that give me that hope.

Somehow, I think a lot of things really come down to the things that I'm learning as I'm being around my family. I've been back with them for the past several months to recover after grad school, but ultimately they bring forth a lot of deep memories and feelings within me. Pains, for all the mistakes they've made, but also hope at the same time, since ultimately many people are just like them, all trying their best to make the best lives for their families and children, but getting mixed up in the world.

Despite what platforms like social media might have us believe, I truly believe that only a very small percentage of the population does not have any empathy for other people. We, as any New Yorker knows, tend to go into our own worlds and walk as if we don't even see each other, but as soon as we see someone fall down in the street, you'll see people flock over to help, as if we're broken from our spell. And then, we all just move on. People are like that on a macro level too I think. Most of us would never truly wish harm on other people especially if we see that affect right in front of us, it's only when we are confused or angry or frustrated or misled that we end up losing empathy for others... Ultimately, the majority of people wish each other peace and goodwill, and it's only when our lines of communication break that we feel we can become cruel to each other...

That's my hope anyway!

I've talked a little about technology with you, so I won't dwell on that too much, and socioeconomic upheaval is way too big a conversation for me to talk about. But something that I think connects these things has been something I haven't brought up, neither in our past conversations nor in this writing so far, and it's that I've been taking an interest in the principles of child development, parenting, and psychology. Maybe the easiest entry point I can think of for all this is the idea that children need to live as children first. This might sound funny, but have you seen "Honey I Blew up the Kid?"

"Honey I Blew Up the Kid" if you don't know, is a sequel to the hit 80s live action Disney film "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids." In "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" a goofy scientist father Wayne Szalinski, played by Rick Moranis, accidentally leaves his experimental shrink ray on and his children end up getting shrunk to ant size and must find their way home from their backyard. It's a technical marvel and became the basis for a Disney theme parks attraction. "Honey I Blew Up the Kid" is the sequel to this movie with a reversal, where a toddler is blown up to 50 feet high and begins to walk towards downtown Las Vegas, filled with product placement for the Hard Rock Cafe amongst other things. I actually consider it the better movie, but that's besides the point.

My point that I want to get to is that I love how this movie uses this sci-fi analogy for what happens when a child grows up too fast. The baby is still psychologically a toddler, so he thinks a truck is a toy truck, and he thinks a giant guitar sign at the Hard Rock Cafe is a guitar. But ultimately, he's still a child, so when he gets inevitably gets injured, he cries, and the audience feels sorry for him, because even though he's really big, he's not capable of being responsible. At that point, they realize the solution to stopping the baby is to send in mama, because that's the only thing the baby will respond to.

My point is a little on the nose here, but I think that lots of things in society are in this constant balancing act to rush children to become mature and responsible adults who can fend for themselves. This dysfunction is not only present in something like a sci fi contraption like a shrink ray, but also in how we push kids to think about college or careers from a young age, or how we punish them for being creative because we want them to have a stable career, or how we punish boys for being sensitive because men don't show their emotions ("man up" and all that).

I think this kind of problem in society has been a tricky balancing act in different eras, the problem of wanting our children to have a childhood, but also want them to be ready for adulthood. I do think with our current era, however, technology takes things to a whole new dimension, where parents are unable to keep up with the young crowd, with rapid change within a single generation. If a younger cousin or a niece or nephew were having struggles with something like cyberbullying or social media, I don't think most parents would even know how to begin to approach dealing with those things, whether from an emotional perspective or a technological perspective, and I think a lot of young people have to look to half a generation above them. I sense that now with many Gen Z friends looking to their Millennial friends for advice.

Anyway, the hope that I get is that young people are able to learn quicker and more capably than their predecessors with faster technology, dialogs, and better toolsets to converse. It's really remarkable, like you said last week in our chat about the students nowadays. It's also a bit terrifying as a slightly older person! But I think we, as any older generation, can only hope to shepherd the younger generation as best we can and have faith they'll make the right decisions. We can guide them, but ultimately our responsibility is to leave the future in the hands of young people (whose hands it was always in the whole time). We just have to be ready to show up like their mama or papa when the babies are in danger of getting themselves hurt.

I also think that this kind of balancing problem of allowing things to mature before they become adults is also prevalent in how we approach creating technology, and I think there's a thesis to be made that a lot of our problems in technology are as fundamental as the issues that a child faces psychologically... but I think that's a whole point to discuss for another piece entirely. I wanted to keep this first piece of writing short.

I also sense your perspective on going back to basics and getting away from the bloat of modern living, beyond just technology, is also going to be insightful in our conversations. I've already sensed that in our talks about growing gardens and such.

Anyway, like I said, I don't want to keep too long, so I'll eagerly await your response.

In his first letter to Art, Charles writes on human nature, technology, and the 90s Disney film "Honey I Blew Up the Baby"

First Letter to Art - Human Nature, Technology, and Blown Up Babies

Created for the Asian American collection of Alternative Worlds.  

Called forth from the dreamers, healers,
witches, womxn of our bloodline
we are the beginning of a new story,
no longer forced to migrate
between truths too small,
stuck in someone else's stomach.
We are not only her aching body
we are dawn
we are light breaking free.
Our ancestors are at our back,
in the rustling of trees and leaves.
They've always been alive.
And when we pray,
we pray whole body into the earth.
We become our own prayer

Called forth from the dreamers, healers, witches, womxn of our bloodline, we are the beginning of a new story,..

Envisioning an alternative world

Letter to Miguel, from “These Are the Things”

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