intellectual properties

long walks, ecstatic dances, and soulbaring

this past weekend was good and full of special events.

friday night we were really tired and stayed in.

saturday we went to J&J’s house for their baby’s 100th day party, which is a tradition in korea, historically important in that it would celebrate that an infant had lived 100 days back in times of higher mortality, but now just a nice family tradition. jiwon’s family was here from korea for the occasion, and everyone was in good spirits. we were there most of the afternoon and stuffed ourselves full of super yummy korean food.

afterward we went swimming at the YMCA in downtown oakland, which we have just joined, and that was fun and a great workout.

saturday night we got an unexpected invitation to go walk around outside in downtown oakland with some friends who came over the bridge from SF, and it was a gorgeous night with a full moon and so we went and walked around lake merritt and climbed trees and played on swings and enjoyed the relative quietness of an urban center after midnight, and showed some of our SF friends how beautiful oakland really is.

then, though groggy and a bit tired, sunday morning i went for the first time to ecstatic dance in downtown oakland, where my friend alxndr was the DJ for the week. the rules of ecstatic dance are: no talking on the dancefloor, and dance however you want. i was pretty excited about going to a dance event that was taking place 1. during the daytime 2. without the intention of it being a social scene 3. with presumably sober people who just love to dance. i spent a lot of time at bars and clubs and warehouses in the wee hours of the morning with intoxicated socialites, and while i enjoy that to some extent, sometimes i JUST WANT TO DANCE and i don’t ever really get a good space for that. i got there around 11:00 AM and immediately threw myself into it. there were a few familiar faces, but knowing that i wasn’t expected to talk or make chitchat made it so that i felt like i could just ignore them if i wanted to, and mostly, i did.

after about half an hour there was a short “invocation”, during which some intentions were laid and a man read a passage from a book about embracing chaos that was really moving, then we all went back to dancing. i noted that the man who read the passage had laid the book for others to peruse near the altar that was set up, and so i went to take a look. during the invocation, he had read the passage as if it were a poem, with a lyrical tone and rhythm and dramatic pauses between phrases, but when i looked at the marked page in the book, i found that it was in fact just a paragraph in a chapter. the book was Sweat Your Prayers by Gabrielle Roth, who founded 5rhythms, a tranformational/transcendent movement meditation practice. it sounds fruity and new-agey but it’s really just about mind-body connections and accepting and releasing energy, which i can dig, but reading the text that had been so poetically spoken in black in white on the page i barely recognized it as the same passage. the book was written in a style/tone that i generally have difficulty accepting or digesting (spiritual/new-agey), and seeing the passage in its context, it was suddenly laden with all this philosophy when at the time it had sounded so magnificently visceral and poetic. i was quite honestly a bit confused as to how the reader had influxed so much meaning, so much rhythm and so much warmth into a passage that seemed rather dry on the page and i would have skimmed over if i’d been reading it myself. this was definitely a lesson of the day. i’m not sure what the lesson was, but i learned something.

i danced until it ended, in various different ways, using my whole body. i was on the floor. i jumped. i pointed my toes. i spun around. i did the splits. i shimmied. i did backbends. i hooped. i squatted. i rolled. i sweated a ton.

for the hour or so afterward, i felt wonderful. while the soles of my feet were sore, my soul felt light, lifted, energized. however, shortly after that, i felt like shit. i hadn’t had a full night’s sleep, i’d only eaten a light dinner the night before, and no breakfast, and as soon as the adrenaline left my body an hour or so after i left the ballroom, i was physically exhausted in a way i haven’t been in quite a while. my muscles cramped and my back was tweaked. i hurt. i ached. my blood sugar was low. i was NOT in a good mood. another lesson learned: don’t exercise for 2 straight hours on an empty stomach.

we ran some errands but i basically just needed to crawl back into bed to recover i was hurting so bad. (48 hours later and my body still hurts, which is both a positive sign that i danced my ass off but also a negative sign that i am SO OUT OF SHAPE.) i ate a bit and took a 90 minute nap and felt a little better, but then had to get up to deliver our old mattress to our friend bex who just moved to berkeley, and then go to see our friend josie’s production of the 1st ever Men’s Story Project.

this Project is similar to the Vagina Monologues but focuses on the stories of men. it’s an interesting thing for a self-proclaimed feminist and a woman like my friend josie to do, but she’s been working as an community outreach counselor for almost 20 years, and she saw a need for this, and made it happen. she saw how in order for feminism to move forward, men needed to be heard and considered and recognized as victims just as much as women. the cultural center was packed, and the performance pieces ranged from men telling their coming out stories and how it changed their lives to pieces on fatherhood, brotherhood, being an abuser and being abused, what it means to love another man, what it means to be a man, or what they thought it meant to be a man, or what the world wants you to think it means to be a man, and how men are often just as oppressed by the patriarchal system as women are, only they’re not allowed to talk about it. boys don’t cry. men don’t hug. violence solves problems. suck it up and be a man.

some of them were intentionally comedic and funny, and more than a couple of them were incredibly heartbreaking, like the brave young man who talked about losing everything in his life when he found out he had HIV, this public display being the first time he’d ever spoken about it all to, well, pretty much anyone, or the man who’d spent 21 years in prison and now tries to help other inmates ‘see the light’, and how he’d never felt so much love as was in that room that night. he sat there in a chair on the stage, with no prepared performance piece, just sort of taking the time and space to say things maybe he’s never said before about his life as a black man in prison. he spoke slowly and his tone was serious and contemplative and he took several seconds between thoughts; it felt like the room was holding it’s breath until the most unplanned moment of the evening, when he said “i used to hate squares; now i am one” and someone in the audience yelled “SQUARE POWER!” and he just broke into a fit of raw laughter, and everyone else did too.

the event was beautiful and moving, and it was obvious that many of these men had never been given the space or the chance to talk about issues like love and sadness and fear and anger and rape and rage in an honest way without judgment or fear of not looking ‘manly’ enough. the only flaw being that when it ended, they opened it up for 15 minutes of audience Q&A, during which, true to Berkeley tradition, people used the public moment to stand up on a pulpit and preach about their personal issues and bitch about what had NOT been said instead of ask the performers questions. it was actually quite a bit of a buzzkill, and the warmth in the room quickly devolved into irritation with these people who didn’t seem to have any respect for what those performers had just bared on that stage.

josie wants the Men’s Story Project to be replicated and proliferated in cities around the world; if you or someone you know is up to it, i bet you won’t have any trouble finding men to share their sides of the story.

after all that, i went to sleep last night exhausted and aching, but inspired – the best way to end a weekend.

Filed in autobiographical, bay area gems, friends, things you can do | Comments (4)