Today I went to the dentist.

As she dug for gold in the back of my mouth, I tried to remember that this is a blessing. It is. This whole experience of a bleeding mouth and watery eyes. Some parts of the world never receive this service. That was my mantra.

“Not a hint of a cavity, Lisa! Just keep up on that flossing.”

On my way out, muttering a thanks to the secretary, I passed a sign that read:
AS ADVERTISED IN PEOPLE MAGAZINE. Do you eat too fast? Do you eat too much? Buy this small artificial mouth filler that will decrease the size of your mouth cavity, forcing you to take smaller bites and eat less food, and giving your brain enough time to signal that you are full!

Looooooorrrrrrrrrrd. I just got back from a starving nation, where bellies are hardened with parasites. Here at home, we’re stuffing plastic in our mouths to control proportions. I couldn’t help but think one thought, Americans are out of control…in every possible way. I tasted blood in the back of my mouth and reminded myself several times that access to dentistry is a blessing.

It’s difficult to describe things that matter, what carries heroic-sized significance. It is difficult to explain what most do not experience or even care to know. After all, it’s a description, an explanation. Nothing more.

To describe an experience like Nicaragua, not just as a country, but an experience is large scaled agreement to gently disgrace oneself and one’s excessive lifestyle. There is no way to return home and describe poverty, joy, simplicity in terms that most citizens in the States would understand. We have difficulty with the most basic interferences of difference, how much more to describe a culture that survives on faith and hand-me-downs? Analyzing the Nicaraguan culture, lifestyle, and demographics means painful gazes at the core of global distribution, hierarchal ranking of human worth, and most of all, self-behavior.

This was my third trip to Central America. People ask, “How was it?” In my mind I respond, “I don’t have the right vocabulary to express and you don’t have the vocabulary to understand. We don’t have the right vocabulary.”

And we don’t. Not just for expressing what is different, but also for defining what beauty and rightness can be found in other countries outside developed or “first world” countries.

It is more than just denouncing the ritualistic consumerism that squeezes North Americans at their throats. It is so much more than that, more than any person wants to realize. How does one explain the difference between needs and created needs? You need shoes. You do not need 15 pairs of shoes. Why do we insist on communicating in only one language? What is behind that arrogance? What is behind our narcissistic confidence that reveals more shallow ends than oceans?

One afternoon, I sat for an hour and watched the silver rain fall from the milk sky in silence. I had to fight the question if I was “doing something” productive and meaningful. If not, I should get up and do it. “It” is never clarified itself. The semi-urgent voice to constantly move, endlessly keep going is strong. Three hundred fifty million ants crawling over themselves, never stopping is an American trademark. We sell. Merchandise. Trade and teach and counsel and market and theorize and build and find and wish and crave and govern and decide that we need to get up in the morning and do it all over again. Somewhere in those 52 weeks of living, we take 2 to do something else and call it vacation.

Is that living? Are you living?

For ten days I helped build homes, dig latrines, filled dirt holes with sand, cement, and soil. I passed out used glasses and bifocals. I assisted a pharmacist in a traveling medical clinic give out medication to isolated villages living in such poverty that I rarely spoke aloud. I was in such deep thought. Mentally disabled children bound to poles with flies crawling into their mouths bled into my heart. I stroked the hair of a young girl who lay on the ground and stared at something I could not see, moaning softly when I sang to her.

A peanut butter and jelly sandwich greeted my mouth everyday at noon with warm water chasing it down my dry throat. A plastic bed that captured the heat of my body and reflected it back to my skin held my overheated body each night, the metal bars of the bed frame sticking in my back. I had a fan an inch from my face until my throat grew sore from breathing in its wind each night.

Rats and mice tore through clothes and hidden granola bars. Lizards ran over my bedroom walls. Earth’s soil and dirt stained my face and washcloths until their colors ran grey and black. Near naked children stroked my hair and asked my name and grabbed me in giddiness. I took their pictures for three days before my camera was stolen in the village I was working.

Under the relentless sun that crisped my body, I searched for my camera, my vice and artistic companion. The moment my hands searched frantically in my bag, I knew it was gone for good. This camera was my second replacement. I had a similar one stolen one year ago at a party. Wondering if I was cursed, I walked the village, eyeing the horses, pigs, cattle and people. A depressed sadness began to rise in me.

I talked to G*d in my head and asked for strength; to demonstrate strength in releasing my grip, not in keeping my hands clenched. To not hold plastic so dear to my heart and understand that, should there have been another toss of dice, I would likely be a quick thief, liar, or opening my body for price. I sent warmth to the person who stole what was so clearly mine and hoped that it went to feed a starving family, a sick person’s medication, or provide a need that otherwise would go unattended.

The world we live in is so ridiculously unfair and narrowly trained that we cannot find adequate solutions to distribute the Earth’s natural bounty. So many lives are destroyed through pure greed and we lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel better. We do. We lie and say that taking more than what we need is alright. We lie and convince ourselves that we really cannot help the systematic injustices of the world and its corruptness is too large, too significant and we, in turn, are insignificant. But not too insignificant to spend our lives pursuing money and power in our own communities and circles of life.

Anger is the color of blood and it has long been running in my veins. I’ve heard that anger is the realization that something is going against what you know to be Truth. For me, now, anger is a state of life. A realization that we all are guilty of narrow lives; of keeping ourselves sick with ignorance and then pretending we have the answers with religion, political plans, and charity. We fail our own glory by not experiencing the world, its people, and difference. How many people do you encounter that are truly different from you? Blast through proverbial “difference” like neighborhoods, states, schooling, and class and think harder. Think of someone who you may not even understand linguistically or culturally and ask what you may offer one another to live more vibrant, more alive lives. If you can do that and find someone who will have this conversation, you will find your glory.

Hola mis amigos,
Para su informacion:

Adonis and I will be chaperoning a mission trip to Chinandega, Nicaragua for ten days. I, understandably, will not have computer/internet access and will lapse in my blogging until I return. Somehow, someway, you will have to go about your days without me. I can only offer my promise to return with more enthusiastic sarcasm, senseless humor, and rhetorical questions as solace for your grief.

Adonis and I will be chaperoning 10 highschool senior males. This shall be interesting.

Fe! Lucha! Justicia!
Hasta pronto, con amor siempre.

My Adonis.

He reads everywhere we go, absorbing all the knowledge he can into his brain. He then shares with me, so I figure I am twice as smart as anyone else.

I just spent 6 days at home, without Adonis. I haven’t been home that long, with or without Adonis, probably since college summers.

It’s like magic; the remembering, the familiarity enveloping and comforting. The worn corners…the old blended colors of the carpet…the scratched thresholds…the same light switch that is blocked by a wooden bookcase that somehow your hand remembers to navigate around. It’s like magic.

But home is also where the worst demons can show themselves: the same short tempers, routine friction of too small a space accommodating now adults instead of teenagers. The bedsheets are outdated the crooked pictures taken with flawed film instead of the clarity of digital. Everything representing what was, not what is.

my chest aches
then stops
then pierces with
lightning bolts of seering, hot pain
my chest aches again

I pull my shoulders back
Up, roll back, then down-
Keep them there, stiff
Lift through the stomach
Chin raised, eyes up
Posture, posture
Good, lisa, good posture

Decades of hunch over caught up
Top of my shoulders point
northwest or northeast, depending
on where I stand
They don’t just go straight up, like
most bones
They went up and over
Trying to hide
and disguise, averting notice

I have scars, see
Long, ragged pale scars
On my arms, thighs,
Stomach, bum, and breasts

They’re marks showing my body
carries more than I should
My frame upholding unreasonable
requests of weight
They stretch the corners of my body
to where my skin cried, No More
and screamed as they ripped anyway
across my sea, across my body

There is one
starting near my collar bone
Dragging its pale boots across my coffee field
not stopping until nearly my elbow
When extended, its warpath shows
The evidence of battle ensued

The trails over my body flow like small streams
But there is no one bank it rides to or brims from
Each line, each crooked
whispers a why this body could not contain it all
This abbreviated body is too SMALL
Too SHORT, too BROWN, too QUIET, too SILENCED,
Too NICE, too INSANE

My body is speaking-
You cannot silence me, see
I’ll find a way to talk and should that be by
Crowning your thighs with springing wires
or encasing our arms with thin lasting ropes
and marking the tops of your breasts with
dragging ghost fingers
So be it.

I will speak.

I am not apple shaped like your mother said
I did not open my legs for your teacher’s gaze
I did not sit too close to ruin your vision
I cannot carry Mickey’s abuse
And all your friends who were raped and cried agony into my ears
And all the desire to be someone else
The clenched resolve to stay virgin
The vows and promises
Brokenness and shame
Bankruptcy and pity
Hostility and failure
I cannot take your search for Christ who faded into a cross and left you on your red knees,
Novena after novena
Praying for help
For words
For a wagon to carry some of this for you

I will speak.

Put your arms out like you’re crucified
and turn them slowly like a roast
So the peering eyes can fully see-
That you are human and bear
An unfair load, an unjust proportion
An unbalanced share of caring

Stop hunching over and open your shoulders wide
so the skin sags sadly and frowning folds turn with you
Exposing you, liberating you

Let their eyes graze you like an animal
Let their eyes feast on your imperfections
Allow their drifting stare to target your
Slippery vulnerability
Stop fearing those sleeveless days
and pinching your dribbly, marked skin

I told you I’d speak.

I broke your skin from all the brokenness you let in. And fear. And worry.

You locked it so tight into your bones, the healing marrow could not breathe.

Let your marrow breath.
And come home.

If there is one thing I know to be true about my life, I hate commuting to work. Along with the FOR SALE: PET GOAT signs I see, traffic is slow. It is slow because there are trucks that usually slow me down. These trucks are moving large, or fragile, or as these pictures illustrate, unbelievable objects.

There are few things in the world I can’t stand for: systematic injustice, poverty, people who chew with their mouths open, and mobile waste containers. Porter-potties. It nearly ruined my day.

that whenever I see a bookstore, am about to head into a store that screams SALE SALE SALE, of think about the winter holidays, I have to go to the bathroom.

I have learned:

When a person gets excited, the body reacts by producing adrenaline and hormones that start the peristaltic movement of the bowels. In turn, the waste in one’s body is pushed down, thus signaling the need to defecate.

I’ve spent most of my life excited, if that tells you anything.

I love photography. I always have – there is something so direct, addicting, and challenging to photography.

It’s something about looking through a tunnel and choosing what you see as truth. You see truth, you press a button, and it’s preserved forever.

All the pictures on this blog are my own. Why would I post someone else’s perspective on my own blog? You will see My truth, what I see as important to the world, what I see as fundamentals of myself.

Let the Fun Out. Live without Dead Time.
I took this pictures in New York City where I frequently visit family and friends.

Can you actually do those two things? I believe I can. Each day, I wake up and not before long, my Adonis will contort his face into an unfathomable shape and squeal or whisper or yell, “Good morning, my love!” Today, we went to get milkshakes to escape the thick summer humidity and sang Roxette songs together, complete with acting out lyrics (“She’s got the look/What on earth can make a brown eyed girl turn blue/when everything I do I do for you/and she goes na na na na/She’s got the look”) while we’re stuck on traffic on 71N. Let the Fun Out. We then go to Applebees and make slight fun of the host who says, “Our drink specials today are, err, Sobe. You know, Sobe? [we nod like puppets] Uh, yeah…it’s Sobe… and we put alcohol in it.” Sweet, guy. Thanks for that. Very informative.

Is it rollercoaster, bungee jumping, boldly fun? No. Would I want to be anywhere else or doing anything else than singing off-note to my Adonis? No. Fun is doing, being in the place you want most in life and suddenly realizing you don’t want to move an inch.

Live Without Dead Time.

What in the hell does that mean? I suppose that it is suggesting to get off one’s ass and utter the proverbial Carpe Diem yelp of life.

There is, for me, no such thing as Dead Time. The world – life- is far too funny and mysterious to spend in Dead Time. With a camera, I get to preserve glimpses of it, too.

When I write, I have to change the font on the computer. I have to be sure it looks different than a typical book or magazine font. For some reason, it helps me believe that what I am writing is different than what’s been said before. For an even odder reason, it helps me believe in myself and in my words.

I am 27 years old and in many ways, I am successful. I am myself to the world and in my relationships, believe and am committed to a higher being that guides me through despair and joy, and attempt to my best efforts to channel love, knowledge, and forgiveness in my life and body.

The never ending question I harbor, “Is there more?”

I don’t like “more.” It carries that pejorative of greed, insatiable and the “more” is not action oriented. Society has yet to convince me that more action, increased production equals greater satisfaction. When I say or ask for more, I mean deeper. Grammatically, however, I just cannot ask “Is there deeper?”

Oh, to hell with it.
Is there deeper?

I have found that just by asking myself the question, I am convinced there clearly is. There must be. There must be. “Not should be, or could be, or hope so, or has to be…” (-Fr. Himes) There must be more.

I am distinctly, unusually aware. I become even more attuned when I am alone, doing a thoughtless, mundane task of life. At twilight, if I am walking or driving, and the world is just beginning to dim and I hear a thousand lamps turn on in homes and calls for the end of the day, I breathe deeply and sometimes, just sometimes, I feel a dull, circular falling sensation near my lungs. Out of nowhere, a soft, rising throbbing will ascend and then descend in my body. At times, a piercing but not painful emptiness is felt, and I draw in a short breath through my mouth. The only comparison is that second, that millisecond before you unexpectedly cry without any warning. A welling of unforeseen emotion, a slightly uncontrollable force that uses your physicality, in this case, the tear ducts that lubricate the eyes, to convey its power. A non-linguist peace goes through me, and then a jumble of reason-pleaing words to identify what is happening. It makes sense only when it is happening and the pale translating words that come are: OPEN, COLOR, VOID, CONCAVE, TRUST.

At times, it is so powerful that I want to cry, but not from discomfort or even sadness. It’s a shifting emotion that feels like I must immediately, urgently genuflect because of all the beauty and sorrow in the world. I cannot contain it. I am moved with awe, joy, and despair all at once. And just like that, it’s gone. What is it? What is that feeling? There is no word.

Oh, to hell with it.
Let’s call it Bumag.

[BOOM-`AHG]
Noun. Def: Emotional sensation of falling. An unwarranted disposition of a moving wave felt in the physical body for no anatomical reason. E.g.Without warning, a sudden feeling of bumag filled his being as he walked to his desk. From the Filipino/Tagalog root: BUMAGSAK//: to fall.

There. Now I have to a word to describe it.

The funny and awesome thing about language is that I could move Webster out of business and create a phonics into existence and, still, it would not capture the restless question of, What else is there?

Granted, there are many different forms of reflection. There are milestone reflections that come with rites of passage, sacraments, anniversaries, birthdays, award recognition, birth, death, and retreats. Most people would say that the feeling, Bumag, and the inevitable question of Deepening is spurred by occupational dissatisfaction or relationship trouble or quarter-life or mid-life crisis. But this is not reflection. This is the antecedent of any formed thought. It is an unnamed reminder that, indeed, there is more, but there are no arrows pointing to any direction to find it. It simply appears, making its existence known, and exits.

After it passes, I become as panicked that it happened as I hope it will return; humbled by its passing as I feel cursed that I have no tools to analyze what has no name; convinced that something divine is lingering in me as much as I fret that no one will have experienced it or understand what I mean. Before long, I smile small and realize I have forgotten what I was originally doing. Not good when this happens behind the wheel.