She lives and works in Berlin. The world is strange and heavy right now. Sometimes I go to Kirtan, which gets wild in the best way. And it takes me back twenty years ago to Chicago, when there were hootenannies with my good friends, Alex Branch and Luba Winship. They played guitar, and we all sang. I have the sheet music for it still, which I have placed lovingly on a shelf above my desk.
She lives in Los Angeles. There is something about living in the place where your family has lived for thousands of years. I feel like there is a misbelief that because I am from these lands that I should know how to navigate them with ease. The precursor to that misbelief is the navigation of land, the way around it, the way through it, the way you maneuver within it, the breaking of the land to the organizational structures of the human mind.
In fact, the ancestral homelands of my community and people remains largely a mystery to me. There is an unconscious mapping that happens within the mind, one that aims to look for the familiar within the landscape, to position oneself in relation to other things. This happens perhaps for convenience. Perhaps mapping happens because one wants to conquer the land, to break it. After all, the first step to breaking a wild horse is the roping.
What is a map if not a lasso? So in thinking through the things that influence me, I kept returning to the land. The various adventures in and the way I mapped the places not with conquest in mind but with language and image in mind.
We map things but it is up to us to map things for the right reasons. The landscape is mapped best when it is mapped with memory and story. Scrolling through my iPhone camera roll today, I heard the stories and memories. I rolled out a map.
