My Mirror, My Tree

“A daughter will always be the closest person in the world for her mother because only she saw the heart of her mother from the inside.”

— Unknown

I used to run to her when she'd pick me up from school. Five-year-old perpetual Student of the Month and proud to show her the artwork made from my clumsy hands, I'd run fast enough to fly once I'd reach her open arms. Her voice on the phone after long days working away from me, and her scent that cloaked me at night before bedtime were all the comfort I could ever need. But as the innocence faded and my porcelain skin became pocked with prepubescence, her love seemed to shift and dangle before me - unreachable and unattained. She started to judge those same clumsy hands that aimed to please her and couldn't seem to honor, understand (or take responsibility for) the fragility hidden inside of every swallowed tear.  

I tend to shy away from publicly delving into the intricacies of my relationship with my mamá. I would rather respond to every loaded "Como está tu mami?" with "Bien, gracias" than to unravel the knot tightly wound up in my neck. Partly because my culture has taught me to unquestionably honor my mother, and partly because to look too deeply hurts too much.  So many aspects of this relationship, I prefer to leave in the dusty corners of my messy mind. An undeniable element of coping with the formidable complexities of committing to loving this woman unconditionally involves suppression. It's such a delicate dance to work through some of the resentments and unfulfilled longings entangled in this relationship. At times it's been so daunting that I'd wondered if I would've allocated the time I spend with her exclusively to holidays and funerals had I not given birth to her favorite human and had she not gotten sick - but I did...and she did....so now this relationship is mandatory. And somehow I am grateful. Because today I love her even more completely.

My mom flew in from LA last night to spend Mother's Day with me and to attend my commencement ceremony next week. We've spent the better part of this day talking herbs and cooking up deliciousness. We've been sharing our latest research on health and healing with one other and shopping for organic veggies to make a big batch of juice to freeze in small portions once I'm done sharing this blog post with you. We've skipped over difficult conversations with ease, mostly because talking about health is so much more satisfying to us both. All of these interactions are profoundly medicinal to me - and to her.

We both acquired autoimmune diseases in our adulthood, and this has forced us to see our relationship as a sharp and unrelenting reflection of one another. This healing journey shows me that we are more alike than we are different. My mom has participated in the 40 Day Healing Journey twice before, and doing so has taught her the tools she has needed to take charge of her process. And access to those tools came through me - the daughter she's never fully figured out. So much of what we chat about today was completely foreign to her just a couple of years ago. We have conversations we never would've been able to explore together had she not understood the basics of what I teach and what I believe everyone should know.

I share this with you today, on Mother's Day, to encourage you to take this day to honor your mother in spite of your differences - no matter how complicated or discouraging your connection to her may be. The parent-child relationship is and should be the primary relationship we work towards finding peace with. Ideally even finding peace within it. Being able to speak about your mother without a pang in your stomach or a lump in your throat is one of the keys to lasting liberation. You and I would not be here had it not been for Her. And that alone is enough to merit our unconditional love.

Happy Mother's Day to all the beautiful mamas out there living and loving powerfully in spite of all the reasons not to! YOU MATTER MORE THAN YOU COULD EVER KNOW....

The Gentrification of Corn

“It was from within the places called Paxil and Cayala that the yellow ears of ripe maize and the white ears of ripe maize came. These were the names of the animals that obtained their food –fox and coyote, parakeet and raven. Four, then, were the animals that revealed to them the yellow ears of maize and the white ears of maize. They came from Paxil and pointed out the path to get there.” – The Popol-Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya

In the beginning, it is proclaimed that my ancestors were actually formed from maize by Quetzalcoatl, the great fire serpent deity who created humans and taught them how to cultivate corn.  Much like Jesus Christ, he advocated for humility and took on a human form to understand his creations more fully. One day, his brother Tezcatlipoca tricked him into drinking pulque, a fermented corn drink that left him drunk, aimless and immoral.  He woke up the next day and left His people out of shame. A calendric prophecy proclaimed he would come back from a seafaring journey mounted on a white beast. This prophecy coincided with the arrival of the first Spaniards, and the Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortes, was confused for Quetzalcoatl in 1519 when his ships landed in Mexico’s Caribbean coast and he and his men descended from them mounted on white horses.  Legend has it that this was the reason why the Spaniards were welcomed and briefly revered as gods when they first arrived, successfully colonizing Mesoamerica and establishing New Spain.

Before the arrival of Europeans, the Maya people of Mesoamerica were a highly advanced civilization thriving for over a thousand years. In Book IV of the Popol Vuh, an ancient K’iche’- Maya text containing our creation story, it is said that after several attempts to create human beings utilizing different materials, it wasn’t until maize was used that the most perfect creatures emerged. “At first, the gods make four men who:

...were good people, handsome, with looks of the male kind. Thoughts came into existence and they gazed; their vision came all at once. Perfectly they saw, perfectly they knew everything under the sky, around in the sky, on the earth, everything was seen without any obstruction...As they looked, their knowledge became intense. Their sight passed through trees, through rocks, through lakes, through seas, through mountains, through plains.” And the gods were pleased.

It was the cultivation of maize that allowed the first Maya people to go from hunter-gatherers to an agricultural, highly innovative civilization. This led to a further development of maize deity veneration and Chac, the rain god, was worshipped through elaborate ceremonies to ensure the maize corn would grow abundantly and prosper. Corn had many uses including medicine, both sacred and quotidian food, the fermented pulque - which was referred to as “the drink of the gods,” and even the husks were used to weave baskets. The cosmology of pre-Colombian cultures (including the Maya and the Aztecs) was intricately tied to maize cultivation and these ancient peoples believed that just like a kernel falls from the ear of the corn unto the ground to become a seed, so too do we continuously die into the earth to be reborn. And through this cyclical re-emergence, we bring forth the knowledge of our ancestors into our current reality. The human experience reflects the agricultural cycles of corn. But today, this basic blueprint that guided our ancestors into the deepest forms of worship and connection to the earth and all of its creatures has been interrupted by biotechnology and the colonization of the very essence of our foodways. This form of culinary colonialism takes multiple forms.

Just one hundred years ago, there were 307 varieties of yellow corn available.  Today there are only 12. Heirloom corn comes in many colors and although minimally cultivated, more varieties remain. Currently, Mexican environmental activism groups are fighting Monsanto, who successfully convinced a Mexican judge to overturn a ban on GMOs in August 2015 in favor of “progress” and “more opportunities for the farmers to prosper.” These Orwellian terms are the cornerstone of gentrification. In this case, the gentrification of corn and where it typically grows. If this appeal is upheld, Mexico stands to risk 59 indigenous varieties that will be crowded out and potentially forced into extinction by a monolithic maze of genetically modified maize.  GMOs are artificial organisms created by essentially injecting the incompatible genes of one species into an entirely unrelated species to create a commercially appealing effect - leaving the new specimen with no true DNA.  DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) is a molecule that is essentially the blueprint for every single living thing.  DNA contains the genetic information necessary for all living things to function, grow, reproduce, and transmit that information forward to new generations coming into being in the right place at the right time. This is why monarch butterflies migrate in the fall and bears hibernate in the winter.  No outer stimulus is needed to instruct them. Their highly complex and evolved DNA drives their expression. This is the unequivocal brilliance of Nature.

Before the unwelcome introduction of GMOs (genetically modified organisms), many of us who come from diverse heritages enjoyed and partook in the traditional foods of our ancestors without any need to question their authenticity.  There was a profound sense of connection to our past through this inherited cuisine.  So many cultures, including my own, honor their dead with these sacred foods and even honor gods with special, native delicacies that are now largely made with genetically modified corn since Mexico imports yellow corn from the United States. So now, the U.S. actually - ironically or not - dominates the yellow corn market in Mexico.   If my ancestors believed that we of Mesoamerican origin are made of corn and our creation stories speak of humankind being molded from maize, then Monsanto, and other biotech companies such as Syngenta, have robbed our new generation living in this country of this vital ancestral information meant to be absorbed through our nourishment.  This means that the hereditary information intended for the youth of my particular culture being transmitted via corn is virtually lost.  Thousands of years of genetic wisdom lost and destroyed. Misinformation comes in the form of Coca-Cola, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, and the milieu of other food-like substances containing high fructose corn syrup. And even in the form of Maseca™, the industrialized corn flour used for tortilla making that has essentially replaced traditional tortilla making processes that utilize native, local corn by monopolizing the Mexican market and selling the concept of convenience and “progress” to the Mexican people. And the genetically modified corn that makes up over 90% of the corn on the market today actually contains a whole new allergen not found in natural varieties.  Meaning that the people who were meant to be nourished mind, body and soul through corn as a staple, are now allergic to it. 

Globalization and the glorification of Western ideals of progress has significantly chipped away at the fragile framework of traditional foodways. Convenience is marketed as social advancement and the maintenance and propagation of traditional recipes and time intensive food preparation is typically relegated to rural communities. Urbanites who wish to make “homemade” tortillas will likely use Maseca™ over corn flour made from heirloom strains of maize.

Gentrification is insidious in its proliferation and is not limited to housing and jobs, but it extends in more surreptitious ways into culture and food.  Gentrification in an agricultural setting moves a particular homogenous species into a richly biodiverse terrain filled with native life forms who have been thriving there for a very long time under the guise of “development” or “renewal.” This particular homogenous species touted as somehow superior – in the context of this paper it is genetically modified corn – replaces endemic biodiversity with a monocultural form of agronomy that does not try to maintain or even harmoniously coexist with what is already existing there, but instead appropriates the space and uproots what is there while forcing its way in with chemical inputs, depleting the soil over time. So what was native is displaced and eventually so far removed from its original context that it literally changes its composition. This happens in neighborhoods and it happens in arable land.

“It is critical to reiterate that ethnic foodways are not merely ornamental; rather, the reproduction of ethnic identity is, in part, dependent upon their maintenance. Here, as in other contexts, one creates one’s own identity and those of one’s children, through foodways.” Cathryn Bailey states this poignant explanation of the relevance of preserving traditional foodways in relation to preserving culture itself in her article “We Are What We Eat Vegetarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity.” Surgically extracting the DNA of a food staple as ancestral as is maize, reducing it to a commodifiable product, stripping it of its primary information, and essentially replacing the original food with an imposter marketed as the “real thing” is a microcosm of what colonialist appropriation has always been and will continue to be.  Couple this with dominant culture taking traditional, “exotic” dishes and putting a twist on them, claiming them as their own invention and charging exorbitant prices for them, and we can safely assume that the entire scope of culinary gentrification has been covered.

Indeed traditional foodways are not ornamental. These culinary gentrifiers who hoard land and hoard culture, are a product of the dominant race and the colonial mentality they are acculturated into. They are described best by Diana Negra in Bailey’s aforementioned article. Negra labels them “‘new ethnics,’ those who come to redefine themselves as having an identity beyond whiteness.” They will take a poor man’s traditionally lowly dish like carne asada tacos and add kimchi and sriracha sauce, thereby decontextualizing their significance and history.  They then transform these customary and humble foods into something exotically appealing, typically marketed to the White liberal. This Mexican “fusion cuisine” furthers Bell Hooks’ argument in “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” where she explores how culture becomes fetishized and appropriation becomes a form of cultural capital. In this way, maize corn is reduced to a genetically perverted imitation of what once was the very foundation of our cells and thus, our identity. It was the staple of life itself.

Corn – in its genetically modified form - is so far removed from its primordial role of serving as our most basic form of nourishment, that it actually has been transformed into the antagonist in the unfolding narrative of what it means to be Mexican within a context of agricultural rape, ecological gentrification and cultural captivity.  These most sacrilegious of acts are performed by the white-gloved hands of neoliberalism and the liberal White hipster culture it produces.

To plant the seeds of our true maize is to plant the perpetuation of our culture. And when we do, we must utter the ancient prayer of our ancestors: “Now I place you in the ground. You will grow tall. Then they shall eat, my children and my friends who come from afar.” For Mexican nationals and those of Mexican descent to reclaim heirloom varieties and shun the products and practices of industrialized corn is not only an act of environmental sustainability, but one of cultural sustainability as well. To reclaim our corn is to reclaim our very identity.

Sources:

Bailey, Cathryn. “We Are What We Eat Vegetarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity.” Indiana University Press. 2007.

Christenson, Allen. Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Maya. University of Oklahoma Press. Translated 2003.

Fussell, Betty Harper. The Story of Corn. University of New Mexico Press. 1992.

Hooks, Bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Pilcher, Jeffrey M. “Taco Bell, Maseca, and Slow Food: A Postmodern Apocalypse for Mexico’s Peasant Cuisine?” Food and Culture: Third Edition. Originally published in 2006.

https://www.inside-mexico.com/the-legend-of-quetzalcoatl-by-chela-orozco/

Inside Mexico. September 30, 2013.

http://passel.unl.edu/pages/informationmodule.php?idinformationmodule=1075412493&topicorder=3&maxto=12

Plant and Soil Sciences E-Library.

http://www.ecowatch.com/59-indigenous-corn-varieties-at-risk-as-monsanto-eyes-mexico-1882152115.html

EcoWatch. January 15, 2016.

Earth Medicine: A Gift from my Ancestors

Life is such a wild ride.  One moment I make a miraculous breakthrough in my health using natural medicine and the next, I am in an emergency room with a cervical fibroid the size of a baby’s head.  One moment I am told I am on the verge of a stroke, the next, I am breastfeeding a newborn child at age 37.  And through it all, my faith in herbal medicine is unwavering. 

My grandmother, who all twenty something of her grandchildren affectionately refer to as “Gramis,” is my first teacher and greatest inspiration.  For whatever may ail us, she has an herb or root or “menjurje”[1] to cure it. And she certainly always did.  Once, I had swollen lymph glands under my jawline and before you knew it, she grilled tomatoes on an open flame and placed them on my lymph nodes, wrapped me in an ace bandage like a burn victim and sent me on my way.  I woke up completely healed. And all of us have experienced the comfort of her “gordolobo” (mullein flowers) tea on a sore throat.  Herbs and concoctions unfamiliar to many were and continue to be commonplace in our family. 

My Gramis has been an uncertified herbalist with a certifiably impressive track list of healing my entire life.  And I am completely invested in learning about and utilizing herbs thanks to her.  Our phone conversations are three parts talking shop, one part talking chisme. 

This love for herbs and earth medicine runs through my DNA and is a natural preference over allopathic medicine for me.  My grandmother talks about her own mother, Francisca, who was an incredibly skilled and resourceful culinary goddess that would even make and fire her own clay pots for cooking.  She knew the medicinal properties of different tree barks and regional herbs and used them to heal her children. Her husband – my great grandfather – planted and cultivated everything they ate.  Francisca would coil slivered, freshly harvested squash around a clothesline to be dried by the sun to be preserved or candied. They collected shrimp and fished for their dinner at the river near the village they lived in just outside of Culiacan, Sinaloa. They truly “lived off the land” and are only three generations removed from the industrialized food system I have become hyper aware of and try to limit my participation in.  She was a Libra like me, and sometimes I feel so connected to her when I create culinary deliciousness or when I create a functional piece of art.

I typically paint faces for Day of the Dead.  Here I am at work a couple of years ago.

Today is Dia de los Muertos, a day to reflect upon the stories of ancestors that swirl around me and through my veins in the form of preferences and proclivities, whether or not I ever knew them in the flesh.  Besides this beautiful great grandmother I never had the pleasure of knowing, I have two loved ones I did know very well whom I honor today.  Interestingly, both lived in my childhood home for brief seasons, both were gay doctors, and both were the source of some of the most painfully hilarious belly laughs of my youth.  They are my uncles Victor and Arturo and I remember their smell, their voice, their humor. 

This is my Tio Arturo who you would never know from this serious face was a bonafide comedian. He was always laughing and making the world around him laugh along.  He was a physician and died of AIDS in 1991.  I think of him often, and especially today.  I can still hear his voice in my head.

I remember the traditional medicine they infused into their clinical practice in and out of the office.  As a teenager, my uncle Victor told me that if I ever got any type of vaginal itch or infection, I was to soak oatmeal in warm water, put it in cheesecloth, and gently pat the moistened cheesecloth on my vagina and it would clear.  It was a random, unsolicited tip, but I’ve passed that wisdom along to friends and will eventually share it with my little girl.  It is this wisdom of the earth conveyed through ancestors that I am lighting candles for on this special day of remembrance.  May I never forget the magic in simple herbs and so called 'weeds'.  May I never sacrifice tradition for convenience.  And may I never forget that love in any concoction is always the active ingredient. 

[1] Menjurje: the correct word is “menjunje,” but we hear our elders pronounce it as “menjurje.” Menjurjes are combinations of natural substances to ne drank or eaten for healing purposes.  It is a Spanish word for a medicinal “concoction.”

Break Habits, Create Rituals

Breaking habits is one of the most challenging undertakings a human being can ever confront.  We are creatures of habit and familiarity is how we keep ourselves safe, no matter how toxic that safety net may be.  Habits are repetitive modes of behavior where the participant is not fully engaged in the act he or she is participating in.  It is mindless and mundane.  Ritual, on the other hand, is a mindful undertaking where the participant immerses herself in the experience and infuses that experience with meaning and devotion.

Habits disconnect us from the present and offer opportunities for escapism, whilst rituals weave our souls into a continuum of creation - extending our reach into the palms of our ancestors in ways escapism never can.  Rituals are spiritual reminders of who we are, where we are going, and why we must go there.  Rituals connect us to our culture (whether inherited or consciously created) and are our portals to healing.

So how do you transform a hard to break habit into a ritual?  Let's use coffee drinking as an example.  A ritual would be that every morning, you wake up and do a few minutes of yoga, stretching or meditation.  You then brew the most deliciously fragrant grounds and breathe deeply in gratitude as the aroma permeates your entire environment.  You sweeten it perfectly.  It has just the right amount of milk.  Or, if you prefer, it is perfectly, robustly black.  However you most enjoy it, you find that one place available to you where you can sit and fully experience the bitter bliss that drips down your throat.  The warmth of your favorite cup in your hands, the heavenly scent wafting up into your nostrils causing you to sigh with delight, the breeze, the sight of your dog wondering why he can't have a sip.  Every sense is entertained.  Your presence in the present is what turns an ordinary, thoughtless moment into a ritual.

Now the habit of drinking coffee looks much different:  You wake up groggy and aimless.  There is no thought or intention on what disposition you would like to try on for the day.  Your only intention is to make your eyes grow a little bigger and shake off the sleep entangled in your lashes.  You turn the coffee pot on, briefly take in the familiar smell before you rush off to get the rest of yourself together.  You drink your first cup while you iron your pants and text your girlfriend.  You pour a second cup into a to-go mug so that you can "enjoy" it on your drive to work since you totally missed experiencing the first cup.  And chances are, you will have another once you get to work just because that's how you settle in; that's how you do it every day.  You don't know any other way.  You don't even consider any other way because you don't believe you have the capacity to change how you experience your life.  There is no thought, no true reverence for the earth from whence those coffee beans came.  Or for the people who grew them.  Or for the pleasure a simple cup can bring if only we show up undistracted and aware.  All of that mindless ingesting of coffee becomes a poison to the body.  Habits kill us.  Rituals save us.  It is not about giving up the "bad habit" of coffee, but instead about enjoying your perfect cup down to the last drop with fully embodied mindfulness.  Then and only then can you experience the medicinal properties of coffee.  Then and only then will you  be able to dismantle addictions and see that what addictions really are are mindless and repetitive habits.  Mindfulness is what will free you.  Mindfulness is what will turn a bad habit into a sacred ritual if only you allow yourself to show up for your own life and experience it with all of your senses.  The magic, the healing, the freedom is in imbuing habits with meaning, thereby creating rituals.  Try this with one habit you find difficult to break and let me know how it goes...

The Willingness to Forgive

When the valley becomes darker and the peak seems so far away. When the sadness of betrayal sets in and all that you’ve worked so hard to “become” is challenged.  When you just don’t want to forgive because you are too angry or too trespassed or too humiliated, this is your moment to breathe more deeply.  This is the moment to let ancestral tears run their course through your veins.  This is the moment to not berate yourself for not being who you think you should be.

The brighter your Light, the darker the energy you magnetize.  That is the nature of balance.  Your power lies in your ability to observe and not react.  Your power is in the breath you take so deep it burns and causes tears to spill innocence out of your jaded eyes.  Your power is in your willingness to feel it all and become still so that when you do move, it is a movement full of grace.

When the teachings disguised as torrents swirl through your peaceful life – because they will – don’t rush to remain serene or to forgive if it isn’t a natural response.  It is inauthentic to your process as a human being. Feel it all.  And remember that you are not defined by your thoughts or your emotions.  Your actions are what determine the quality of your character.  Allow yourself to grieve and repeat these affirmations to carry you through to who you really are:

I am willing to forgive

I am willing to heal

I am willing to see this situation through the eyes of the Divine

Your willingness will set you free…..   

Courage and Fear: A Beautiful Dance

This world can undoubtedly be a very scary place.  With all of its polarities, it’s darkness, it’s wounds, it can make “courage” seem like an unattainable goal. How can one feel safe when nothing is for certain? Where do prayers land while they remain unanswered?  Dizzying questions inundate our minds, yet still we strive to be at peace.  Still we reach for courage to save us from self-pity and stagnation.

But what exactly is courage?  Is it fearlessness?  Is it a discipline?  Is it learned or innate behavior? It is innate within our species to seek harmony in spite of the lack of guaranteed safety.  To be courageous is a primordial human ambition.

Osho says that: “In the beginning there is not much difference between the coward and the courageous person.  The only difference is, the coward listens to his fears and follows them, and the courageous person puts them aside and goes ahead.  The courageous person goes into the unknown in spite of all the fears.”

Courage does not preclude fear.   In fact, it can only exist where fear exists.  Courage is the medicine that turns fear into a spiritual elixir; into an alchemizing force meant to liberate you.  Courage is what it takes to ground you deep into the earth and make you an intrinsic part of its evolution.

So to be courageous, one must be willing to stay awake.  One must be willing to witness fear even as it takes over one’s senses.  And once the heart muscles expand and the exhale is slow and steady, then one has passed through the fear and is ready for creation…what will YOU create?