Goings on at the bao!

Hallo,

yes it's been a whhililileileiellele since forever, but here we is, still baoing. I have three experiences to share.

1) Iron & Wine played a free mill park show for all of the lovely people of chicago. Yes, all of them - there were so many, the city stopped letting people into the show. So I climbed up a girder and sat on top, behind the park ampitheater thing, to listen to Sam what'shisfaceBeanorsomething croon. Here's some pictures:

2) The garden continues to grow. I can hardly believe it. I find myself very attentive to the weather each day - has it rained recently? Is it going to be way too sunny all day? Sometimes we water twice in a day, sometimes we water twice in a week. that's chicago, anyway. but soon, yes soon, there will even be some veggies to eat. We've been talking about preparing the veggies of our labor and taking them for a picnic to that weird abandoned park building just southeast of the bao, next to the 57th street tunnel under lakeshow.

Anyway, here's some pictures of greenery:

aaaand #3) last night Mark the neighbor came by and juggled balls of fire on the roof. He pulled back his hair so it wouldn't light on fire, and it made him look like a sailor.

till next time!

lelz

and what am i looking for and will i know when i find it?

here's a little gem i encountered today, though who knows if this is what you´re looking for--

"Life is hard" signifies a certain degree of fatalism, it must be admitted. But as an all-purpose saying, "La vida es dura" soaks up a variety of meanings, a range of nuances. The vagueness and abstraction of "life" is set against the concreteness of "hard." Most certainly, such a phrase is the simplest possible strategy for linking the particular to the general, the personal to the social. But is this equation an assertion that things must necessarily be so? Or does it not carry the possibility, the implication, that things might be otherwise? As a coda set to the rhythm of life's frustrations, this maxim can relate the duress of social and economic crisis experienced as personal conditions. It marks, too, the duration of the crisis that renders life so very hard. Its pessimism, its fatalism, can plainly serve as a sort of alibi, and excuse that relieves the individual speaker of the consequences of his own actions...at the same time, this proverb can bring to light the strength and endurance of the people who survive life's hardships. It marks, by turns, the banality of suffering, the intimacy of power, the comfort of resignation, and the resilience of the oppressed. (from p. xvi of "Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua" by Roger Lancaster)

oh and me, i was stranded on an island yesterday and today i'm back in a town that, given the options in this country, feels pretty familiar--
becoming-familiar like sweaty shoulders and bug bites
becoming-immune to bug bites.
i go in and out of being uncomfortable with being on vacation. so many feelings (always feelings!) about white tourists, whether anything in my pockets would serve a too-skinny begging boy well (chapstick receipts bandanna..?)...
it's probably been good to become reacquainted with boredom, to miss, to commit wholeheartedly or at least mostheartedly to sticking around for the flourishing of a little familial culture, to think and think about projects i want to be working on without a pen to write anything down--
what is traveling for, again? and am i heavier or lighter now, and does it become easier or harder to recross a border once-crossed? and how much am i seeing, and how much do i want to see?
anyway, little bubbles of thoughts and loves have been flourishing in this faraway,
little messages that aren't quite drowned out by the market flies
relearning rethinking pride and humility, probably not through seawater
but i did see a BRAINCORAL and a blue fish. (life is hard, and not so hard.)

anyhows, i'm missing the sticky sweaty communtarian raw-haven of the bao, looking forward to seeing some of you tomorrow evening and most all of you in my dreams.

screaming in the tunnel under the metra is a beautiful thing

it is so good to be home.
last night, z shared a thought, something like
relationships are getting comfortable in the routine of someone else's patterns.
(this idea extracted from her actual words, which are alonso's words revoiced: "and perhaps you never know anyone as much as you know the rhythms you fall into when you're around them.")
stambam said, yeah, like comfort.

i love missing things,
leaving in order to return
("the return makes the leaving less nervewracking")

but also, when i would sit by the river and make necklaces or paint gourds or think or cry, i wondered whether i was missing being comfortable (rhythms of synchrony), or people (sparks of connection), or a culture of bäo (in which i am something which elsewhere it becomes hard to sustain)...
i concluded that my feelings of saudade were all and none of these things,
and one night over caipirinhas and candlelight az and i articulated our wonder and pleasure at what the bäohaus has become for us (in part)--
(i speak for myself now, my voice inspired by others,)--
a place where we've allowed and pushed ourselves open,
to transform each other, ourselves, allowed ourselves to be(come) transformed,
and celebrated (and respected--maybe respect is not so far from celebration?) community, togetherness, and the benefits reaped from breaking down walls and norms,
and seeking seeking finding building autonomy from codependence, independence and self-reliance through safe-sane-consensual-communicative relationships,
an alternative (to) education (born in the midst of a sometimes-suffocating academia),
(and of course a refrain of
fostering playfulness,
opposing racism, sexism, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, structures and institutions which keep people so bound up that they can't see their ropes and our teeth become too dull to chew-spit-talk a way out,
making music, art of all kinds, encouraging self-expression,
care)

these things, i think, are awesome.
and we (i, i think we) marveled at how these things have also inspired-empowered-educated us, and perhaps other bäos, to build-create-question-challenge elsewhere (or perhaps this is what brought us together--it's hard to say exactly.)

anyway,
it's good to be back here,
but it's not the place i left, exactly, not just slipping back into rhythms of comfort
(although good hugs are good and knowing how the stove works is a nice perk and having a bed that doesn't get rained on...is different)
i think there's something about returning to this space
that makes me want to rip my skin off,
spit on my best friends,
apply and translate and stay awake late and get up early,
bomb the world and rebuild it (using principles of anarchist permaculture this time)
and learning learning listening listening changing always.
to me, the bäo is not static. not closed. never the same. never dead. somehow still home.

for a long time i defined home as a place to return to,
but it's funny to find my definition shifting--
realizing that i've taken the bäo with me, and that it's spread like seeds
created like a collage, modeled on junkheaps, collectives, birdsnests, and sidewalks.

thanks for a fab potluck last night...i'm thrilled in this moment and looking forward to taking chicago (the world?) by glitterheatdirtstorm, again and again and again.

(and i would love to hear your words-thoughts-images,
in life or internet,
about what this house is, has been, could be for you,
since these walls have been built, lived in, pierced, and patched together by all of you.)

today I looked down at my hands while sifting dried cow manuer to make seedbags, and lo woah ahhh ho ho inhale pffffffoooooooooohhhhhhh did I behold they were covered with

GLITTER.

dive into a cold waterfall and air-drying between growing a strong affection for the various phases of cow shit and for pain: (Seven blisters of different ages on my hands and a concrete piercing through my foot: they never tell you how weak you are in a city)

hard hard work and billions of joints. bananas eaten in every form imaginable.

they mine black gold in this region of brazil. a fool here mining for fool´s gold and if you´re lucky i´ll bring some back, melted down and woven into moments of meditation, thanks, and the color green.