The Spoken Sound

#9: Correspondence Con La Pachamama

Election is the order and obsession of the days to come. An election of consequence like no other we have known. And yet it pales in the light of a greater consequence looming on the near horizon, begging a forthright conversation—ahora mismo, now—con la Madre Planetaria…La ubicua Pachamama. Home.

#8: Mid-July, 2020. The United States of America.

A reckoning is upon us. The human presence is being called to task. The planet is demanding that our species begin to tell a different story, to work for the practice of a better real—a telling of change in the human narrative, back to a truer state of human nature characterized by love, wonderment, solidarity, cooperation, humility… None of this is new. Nothing that I say herein is anything a million others have not said, and said again and again and again and again, and continue to say and to exemplify in their lives in ways and at depths I cannot begin to measure up to. But I say it, as best I can with the intention of learning to begin to live up to the courage of my convictions—and to contribute to the writing of that better human story.

#7: Mancave

An Independence Day kind of podcast, in the spirit of the current spirit of shedding light on painful truths too long relegated to the shadows pitched by the walls and guns and egos, and the sickness of the Settler Class across the human spectrum. A short chapter late in a writing in the works, Wake Up…And Go to Sleep. From the tiny story of three siblings dismantling their father’s “mancave”, to their mother’s odyssey into Alzheimer’s, to the bigger story of colonial “conquest” and the human footprint on this earth, to the current rising of a collective human voice saying STOP! CHANGE! LOVE! REMEMBER! RE-IMAGINE!—a general story of the struggle to change the course of a runaway train: diffuse the violence of the single-minded mind,for the restoration of the human-kinded kind…

#6: Far Away So Close

"Mama used to say that music was the essence of the human soul, and the only true religion. Not just the music that comes out of saxophones and trumpets and vocal chords, but MUSIC—the rhythm of being, of knowing and not knowing, of trying and growing and sharing. The rhythm, she would say, of MIND and SPIRIT." Chapter 7 from "The Last Sandoval", a novel I'm peddling to agents, about a shell-shocked twenty-year old LatinX writing in a diary from a shack in a State sanctioned shantytown in a near-distant future (2077) where she has lost her beloved mother, as well as her aunt, uncle and maternal grandparents to the consequences of a too “slow-to-come-to-Jesus” socially unconscious, climate-blind industrial plutocracy... Writing her way to a sense of hope and love and bone-deep feeling where they had each been frozen senseless by the times.

#5: What Do We Do?

Five poems: loss, discovery, reality, interruption and the yearning for a second sight. This is life affected by the peopled spectrum. This is love and loss, trust and security. This is history and context, the layered sheets of balance and placement, of living systems adapting and evolving, engaging and negotiating, and finally asking: "What...do we do...about ourselves?"