Karinaland River

Here are Jamie's  Reflections on becoming Friends, Activism, Healing, and Art (Written after his visit with me on Wednesday February 23) Revisiting Karina’s blog, Karina’s films, Karinaland and Karina herself, I’m reminded that people can be medicine. I’m lifted by Karina’s presence, by all the ways she takes in and pours out. As a person born and raised in the U.S. who identifies as a cis-straight white guy, I’ve long felt that some vital part of me has been cut away. The missing piece aches and sears with phantom pain. The wound only throbs harder when I try to pretend that everything is fine and ignore the violence and harm flowing through me. At times death has felt like the best escape. That’s the ejection trigger my uncle pulled. I feel for him. Watching these cycles of violence and trauma tear through my family, through our community and world, through me, sometimes it feels like, what’s the point? Karina and her community show that healing is possible...

Once a Post War Child.... When a war starts anywhere, we can read, see and hear it in the news, and each time my heart sinks to the bottom , something old and seemingly bottomless gets activated, something residing in the depth of my collective memory pool.   I can only explain it as the visceral remnants of my ancestors being stirred – two major world wars in one century, vast devastation, millions of dead, decades of violence, loss, trauma, and injury to hearts. Human made. The sounds and reverberations of missiles, shelling, bombs, explosions are shattering inside my body. News of wars in Africa, Asia or Middle East does the same thing to me, a sickening deep in the guts suppresses my appetite, draws life out of veins, and makes the garden in my heart shrivel. Of course, getting older I have learned to make an effort to counter these manifestations or symptoms since it does not help anything. But I let it be a red light – a bell rings. Yesterday afternoon, I get take-out Chicken...

  Well, here is the sister of yesterday’s Yucatan Tiger, she is a Jaguar with bird. Sculpted, like her brother, by a young Mayan artist in Coba, Yucatan,   who says he would take me into the jungle tomorrow night to see the jaguars. D espite my broken Spanish w e communicate for a while. To this day, I am sad that I have to decline, and miss out on my private jaguar tour. We are on our honeymoon, however Bob has injured his back, and we need to depart early next day. But all night, I am visited by visceral dreams with jaguars – guided by spirits into the jungle, nevertheless.  This was 30 years ago. We are the only visitors at this archeological pyramid site, nestled in dense vegetation, with a tiny village of indigenous people. The only guesthouse is much to my liking, modest and rustic, with five rooms. We are all alone, Bob is resting. Wandering the dusty dirt road with a yellow moon rising at dusk, I hear chanting coming from one of the small huts. Song and words in ...

Year of the Tiger     In the T’ai Chi Form that I was being trained in, and that I have been practicing and teaching for the past 40 years, the  Tiger  appears three times. Like in a fairytale, three is the magic number. (The Form by Cheng Man-Ch’ing has 37 movements).    First, appears  Embrace the Tiger, and   Return to the Mountain .    Then further into the Form comes  Step back and Ride the Tiger , and close to the end,  Bend the Bow and Shoot the Tiger . Other animals appear as well: Sparrow, White Crane, Monkey, and Golden Pheasant. I am not a scholar on these ancient names of the Form. But each movement clearly embodies and teaches us certain applications and qualities. What better teachers than nature, animals, trees….    The  Tiger ’s qualities and movements teach us readiness and courage. If we can turn and face the  Tiger  – or whatever is stalking us – eye to eye, we have a better chance of...

Three Books on Racism by Bob Blauner Racial Oppression in America  (Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972)   Still the Big News: Racial Oppression in America  (Temple University Press 2001)   Black Lives, White Lives  (University of California Press, first edition 1989, reissue 2022)     Still the Big News:  Racial Oppression in America   By Bob Blauner   (Temple University Press, 2001)     Bob Blauner's Racial Oppression in America was a landmark text, a beacon of radical enlightenment, for those of us in the 1970s and 1980s desperately seeking an intellectual framework for critiquing mainstream American sociology's mystifications on race. This revised and expanded edition, containing many new essays, and informed throughout by authorial hindsight and second thoughts, should win a new audience for a postwar classic of critical race theory. — Charles W. Mills , Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago, and author ...

  How can we not feel deeply ashamed when atrocities like the one in Ahmaud Arbery’s case – a modern day lynching – and many other incidents keep happening?  The Memorial Mural’s garage doors are filled with similar cases like this. How can we shrug it off – just because it causes us to feel uncomfortable? This unwillingness to feel uncomfortable, or even outraged, and the stubborn refusal to have our hearts be broken – what is it about? Does that perhaps make us silent bystanders – Mitläufer? This is a human weakness, and not just found with Germans in post-war Germany. Shame and guilt are necessary feelings, and useful, they will most often move us to deep sorrow and further on to great concern about protecting everyone’s humanity.    Make us allergic to being brainwashed and silenced. My parents raised us with it from a young age, and all of us three siblings turned it into action in our lives, wherever we were or are.    For Americans, these feelings of...

Sneaker Waves and Leopard Shark Last week I sneaked away to Limantour Beach again, away from chores. Sneaker waves were announced along the coast. A sunny day, calm and balmy – I become all ears. The empty beach, rhythm of my feet and crashing waves interweave into a soundscape. Low rumbling, booming, rushing, whooshing, hissing, slow sizzling, again and again, never the same, once in a while seagull’s cry. Spontaneously I start singing and sounding, merging my voice with today’s ocean symphony.      On my way back, still singing, I am stopped in my tracks – something writhing on the wet sand just above the tide line. A snake?    A second later, bent down, I exclaim out loud: “A baby shark!” I don’t have much knowledge of fish. How do I know? About 22-inches long with striking dark spots on its back, on the silvery underside the mouth of a shark, not smiling but agonizing, gasping to breathe water… Without thinking I run to fetch a smooth piece of drift wood, an...

Thomaskirche in Leipzig For almost 3 years  I have not been able to see family and friends in Germany , and it is a big question mark if it can happen this year… In my story from yesterday there is not much nostalgia but rather the excitement to meet a fervent Johann Sebastian Bach expert and musician from Japan. Many years ago, I met a Japanese woman who studied all about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Weimar, the famous town of Goethe, Schiller und Bauhaus. These encounters always tickle and excite me. The “foreigner” offers new understanding to the traditions of another culture or country. They bring their curiosity and their own old traditions to marry it all into new life and meaning.  These days I sense the fateful weight of me emigrating 40 years ago. I am now a foreigner both here and there. This suspension keeps me alert to things that others take for granted. It suits my curiosity and artistic bent. When I go back, I make sure to hear concerts in old churches. It’s li...

Bachfest in Leipzig In 2019, I get to attend for a few days the Bachfest in Leipzig , which takes place all over the city, indoors in the old churches, outdoors on the plazas – an unforgettable experience.  My last event is an evening  with Andras Schiff playing Bach’s Complete Partitas for Keyboard, and it happens to be an extremely hot  day in June.  At 8 pm it is still 96 degrees Fahrenheit outside – the sun has not quite set. Imagine a huge low ceilinged concert hall with no air conditioning, indoors the temperature is approximately 99 degrees.  The disciplined audience is for the most part waiting in their seats, the music is delayed, all doors are kept open to create an elusive draft. Is the concert going to happen? I turn around, observing people, ruminating about me being a foreigner in my own birth country. Every year world famous musicians and audiences from all over the world come together here. These classical music fans speak many languages, Fr...

Let me introduce you to the Wild Violets in my garden, white and unassuming – delicately fragrant – and easy to overlook. Showing their bowed heads early in January, after some good rains. I kneel and bow down close to the ground to greet them, inhale their presence, and ask for permission to harvest them. Their leaves and flowers are my medicine allies for making tinctures, for infusing honey and oils, as well as in my miso soup. Despite the continued devastating drought, many abundant patches have been showing up this year – pure delight... The white violets are with me on the living room table, or on the kitchen window sill. Their sweet uplifting fragrance and their heart shaped leaves invite innermost connection...   I dry the small blossoms and leaves... ...and make a cup of tea The glass cup holds intimate magic – a potion to strengthen heart & spirit. When much death and loss visited me a few years ago, and the wild violets showed their beautiful faces with a ...

Interwoven     On Tuesday, I brought a gift to my weekly cello lesson. My teacher Bob Ng unwrapped his copy of  Black Lives, White Lives , and exclaimed: “Beautiful! And it fits right in with your Memorial Mural and Blog – content-wise and esthetically.”    I had noted this just vaguely, not giving it much attention, but Bob as always has a superb eye (and ear). His black and white art photography of the mural is what started this blog.   (Selfies of Book with Mural by Nicky Gervacio) And when I told Nicky this story, she said: “Yeah, that’s how you and [your husband] Bob were invisibly but strongly intertwined in your work, each in different fields.” True, Bob and I lived very independent lives, and yet what bound us together for the 25 years we had, was profound and deep like an underground river, steady and powerful. And once in a while this river would surface, become visible – as now.   Black on White, and a little bit of Red... It makes a differe...

  The new foreword to  Black Lives, White Lives  by Gerald Early is beautifully conceived and written , with so much intellect, heart, wisdom, and great cultural knowledge, Bob would have felt very honored – I will venture to say, he does feel happy and honored. I want to share short fragments from the very beginning, middle, and very end of Mr. Early’s essay to give you a tiny taste.          Sociologist Bob Blauner’s  Black Lives, White Lives  reads very much as if were a documentary film put on paper with ever-shifting talking heads, ever changing perspectives about race relations in the United States at these distinct moments, 1968, 1978-1979, and 1986.    It is both immediate and epic.    …One never wants to stop reading, as if mesmerized by a film that is presenting a profoundly poetic revelation while it shows a monstrous train wreck.    Perhaps that is what the relationship between White and Black in...

 Today February 1, 2022, is the actual re-issue release date of  Black Lives, White Lives .  And I will indulge in sharing a very personal story.  Thirty years ago, when Bob was wooing and courting me, he gave me early on  (August 10, 1991)  a hard copy of  Black Lives, White Lives.    A year later – shortly before we got married on July 12, 1992 – he inscribed it for me with the following words :   Dear Karina: When I first gave you this book, I had known you only for three weeks. I knew I wanted to know you  much   much  better. But I could have never dreamed how much we would learn about each other. And more importantly how I would come to love and appreciate everything about you, every new dimension of your person, spirit, and character that continually unfold before me. Of course I gave you the book originally so that you would know  me , but my secret motive was that you would admire it and me, and hopefully fal...

  BLACK LIVES, WHITE LIVES: Three Decades of Race Relations in America by BOB BLAUNER with a Foreword by Gerald Early University of California Press New edition on sale today This remarkable collection of oral histories traces three decades of turbulent race relations and social change in the United States. ''A rich and valuable reminder of how limited our progress has been since the late 1960’s."     -- The New York Times Book Review     "A significant if often discomfiting contribution to our understanding . . . . If this book's interviewees had talked about race less candidly and naturally, if they had qualified their generalizations with the sophisticated caveats now required by polite society, we would be deprived of important insights. . . . In this book, free expression is a virtue, even when the viewpoint is lamentable.”  -- The Washington Post " Black Lives, White Lives  is a sociological study with a vivid face and a warm heart. Blauner ...