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Afaa M. Weaver 尉雅風 57th Distinguished Artist Award The St. Botolph Club Foundation The Plum Flower Trilogy Spirit Boxing  The Giant Cypress Trees of Taiwan, © 2019 Afaa Weaver. All rights reserved. In the distance between here and there, the unknown lives. The unknown lives here, there, everywhere. It lives inside us, and it lives outside of us. The unknown calls to us at different times for different reasons. We can be driven to it by fear, by hunger for new experiences, and often by faith. As we grow and grow older, the hope is that we will find love and sustenance as we explore the unknown, and when we are children, our instinct is that we will be guided through the unknown by the protective love of our parents. This often fails, needless to say, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Xenophobia, nativism, racism, sexism, greed, hatred…these are energies and forces that work against the good. The world’s wealthiest nation can do better than what it is doing now. The U.S. can do better than what it is now doing to children and families at our southern border. The seeds of future heartache and dysfunction are being planted in the souls of children. It need not be this way. Trauma begets trauma, and it takes conscious healing to untangle this transmission. In “Who Is Singing To The Children At The Border,” which aired on WBUR, Ellen Spero visits the issues of the traumatizing of children at our southern border with Mexico, and in doing so she rediscovers the trauma in her own family. During the WWII era, her Jewish mother was separated from her parents. Trauma and tragedy were woven together into an emotional inheritance. Read/hear her article here: https://wbur.fm/2LmHqDp The Way to Paradise Selfie, © 2019 Harold Anderson and Sandy Rogers. Going to visit my friends Harold Anderson and Sandy Rodgers when homemade blueberry pies were available, I would always have to struggle for a slice of pie. Harold handed them out stingily, and always only after he had his portions. He would laugh heartily, from way deep in some place as cavernous as all the possible music held in his upright bass. Harold loved his family and friends, his art, the world of art, life. I learned so much from him. When we talked about art, about music, poetry, visual art, all forms of language, it was as if we were having a sumptuous meal. We performed together several times over the years, beginning with a Valentines Day performance at Simmons College, which is now Simmons University. It was over fifteen years ago. Bill Lowe and Stan Strickland made it a foursome, and we had such a wonderful time. The students loved the performance. We called the show “Old Men in Love.” I performed the wedding ceremony for Harold and Sandy, my only such service. We stood in the backyard of Sandy’s daughter and I was succinct. This morning I was thinking back to that day and wishing I had said much more. It’s a way of bringing a person back to my space once they have made the journey we all must make. When Kristen and I last visited Harold and Sandy at their home in Greenbelt, Maryland, he was sharing his progress on his last composition, a grand piece of music inspired by a painting by Ewin McDougall entitled “The Way to Paradise.” We talked, and he explained what he was doing in the composition, playing sections of it as his computer displayed the music sheet. He talked about his upcoming journey, of what he had do to and how he was feeling. I was there with him, and I was traveling all the times we shared together. Once outside walking along with Kristen to our car, I let the tears roll down my face. Harold and Sandy later traveled to New Zealand, a place he loved and where he made his transition. We come to appreciate the gift of art more deeply when we share it in the intimate spaces we share with the people we love, and art teaches us how to love more widely and more deeply, if we are willing, if we are brave. “The Way to Paradise” and more of Harold’s work with the painting are in this article from the Otago Daily Times in New Zealand. African American Cowboys and Cowgirls Cowgirl Jean Lockette, circa 1936. © 2019 Liz LaRue. Published courtesy of owner.  Black cowboy, Nat Love. Source: Wikipedia When I watch reruns of westerns from my childhood, "Gunsmoke," "Wagon Train," "Big Valley," and the others, I see myself as I am now and when I was ten years old. My child-self is puzzled when I turn to him and ask, “Do you ever wonder what it would be like if some or all of them were like you?”
This is not an exercise I would recommend unless you’re willing to take apart your own personal history. After all, you will need a sense of humor around something that is pretty serious in many ways. My child self looks at me and says, “You’re pretty funny looking. I mean you are really old. Is that what’s going to happen to me? Ah man.” Really. How do we take apart history? What questions can we reasonably ask? I love the fact that historians believe one out of four cowboys in the Old West were actually black, but when I begin to wonder what it was like for them, I almost always insert myself. It’s me riding a big bay Quarter horse along a trail at the edge of a large field, looking for a place to pitch camp for the night, no mind to the probable saddle fatigue, including the back pain from riding all day. I would most likely want to dismount and lead the horse for awhile and give it a break. What would it really have been like? Would I have been safe in this place or that place, depending on who lives there? How would I know? After all, much of my childhood love of horses came from television, and the tube is no oracle of truthfulness. Marshall Dillon always had the nicest, pressed shirts, neat as a pin in a world where slavery had hardly been ended. Still I love seeing the photos of black men and women who made their livelihood when horses were very necessary in day to day being. Black cowboys in the Smithsonian. Read More!
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