Coconuts, Again!

Marzo 23

Coconuts, Again!

I’ve been buying whole coconuts in order to drain them of their preciosa agua, elixir of the goddess, tesora according to Yasna , a treasure. At the risk of repeating myself, agua de coco was used to replace plasma in WWII when they ran out ; its compositional properties are similar to mother’s milk

Coconut oil is about 50% lauric acid, and the only other abundant source found in nature is in human breast milk. The value of lauric acid has been widely studied and has shown multiple health benefits. The medium-chain fats in coconut oil are similar to fats in mother's milk and have similar nutriceutical effects. http://www.cocotherapy.com/faq_cocotherapy.htm

and if you’re reading this you might know it’s also saved me many a time with its almost instantaneous healing effect when I’m most in need.

 In the 90’s I  lived on Molokai, the smallest Hawaiian island, trying to recover from what is now called “systemic exertion intolerance disease,” http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-gets-a-new-name/?_r=0. When I ran out of funds that were keeping me in a low rent condo with an ugly green shag carpet, I moved into the home of a native Hawaiian couple  from Oahu in exchange for driving them around when they visited Molokai (I had enough to keep my rental car .) The primitive house – no electricity, gas lanterns at nite, on demand shared shower outside- was next to a heiau and an orchard of banana and coconut palms. In my extremely weakened state I would swing a broom back and forth to knock   a coconut out of the tree and  inexpertly wield my machete to get it open. I drank  from these voraciously  several times a day whenever I could manage the whole operation and was able to  keep myself from being bed-ridden most of the time.

I think I’m mostly free now of this newly renamed disease  but  now I’m drinking 2-3 coconut’s worth a day to keep my blood pressure symptoms away. Yesterday I bought six from Gil’s tienda across the street. Sometimes I buy the aqua from a corner stand or del Mercado which I prefer because I don’t eat the meat from the coconut and end up throwing them away which seems in addition to wasteful sacriligeous.  However ,  sometimes  the stands are closed or out of cocos and when I need it I really need it. What to do with the coconuts !  Yasna told me how to make coconut milk and coconut flour  which I spent one whole Saturday doing. Very labor intensive!  First, I hacked at the hard shell with my dull cleaver  and then spent too long trying to extract the meat with a small also not very sharp knife lacerating a few fingers in the process.  Finally put all the cleavered pieces of coconut meat in the blender with a little water. Squeeze out every drop you can wring from the meat and Voila: Coconut milk just like you buy in a can. (I have since learned  a few tricks to make the process go easier if I ever do it again). Now that I have milk, I put the residue coconut meat out in the sun to dry for a few days and  then put that in the blender to make coconut flour. Well, kind of- my blender only has three settings, not really fine enough but I attempt coconut flour crepes anyway with coconut milk, coconut oil and eggs-my friend Dave happens to drop by just in time for some spread with mango sauce- his verdict: “ they taste like a coconut omelet.”

The next day I propose to Gil at the tienda, that I return the empty shells so he can chop up the meat and sell it. Maybe he’ll give me a discount next time. At least they’re not going to waste.

One of the photographer interviews that strikes me on the lensculture site is Nan Goldin's discourse:
https://lensculture.com/articles/nan-goldin-video-nan-goldin-on-photographing-children

I love some of the things she says about children like how they don't need to be assigned  a gender while they're still young. She says she's always wondered where children come from and has heard several stories from friends . . . I've heard these stories too most recently from my new friend J who impresses me most with the fact that she drove here from Reno alone, doing ten hour days and doesn't speak Spanish. She's 77. She told me one of her grandchildren reached out to her immediately after being born as if he already knew her.

Another link from a fellow playwright: an interview with Sarah Ruhl who is one of the few female playwright to have a play produced on Broadway. I've sent it to a few male playwrights-I wonder if they'll  read it . . .she has some interesting insights  especially re mothers and fathers, and of course theater- like people will watch ten hours of Dowton Abby but balk at 2 hours in a theater. Her latest play is about an American who marries a Tibetan; they give birth to a  re incarnated llama.

http://the-interval.com/ints/sr/

Celebrating International Women's Day — 21 Great Female Photographers

Dear Friend Photographer Lucy Hilmer chosen as one of 21 women photographers honored by LensCulture
 https://lensculture.com/articles/lensculture-editors-celebrating-international-women-s-day-21-great-female-photographers

Crepes, Enrique, Coconuts and Crystal Beds

Crepes, Enrique, Coconuts  y ‘Crystal Beds’

10 de Marzo

Yesterday mis amigas chillenas,   Lorena y Mayita surprised me with a visit and ingredients for crepes con papaya y mango. Que rico!

We were having a common conversation: where should we live?  We both see San Miguel as kind of temporary. Lor is currently leaning towards Cuzco. We are both enchanted with Mexico  but the government . . . Lor: Asqueroso! Mayita: Wacala! I have not heard these words before - to describe anything! Apropos,  they come up with un petit masquerade.

Later  in the day I'm feeling  dizzy so I lie down for awhile and when that doesn’t work, I take  a walk , stopping at the  coconut/corn lady on the corner of Insurgentes y Hidalgo for an agua de coco pick-me-up. I walk  on to visit Van  at the bookstore on Hidalgo. By then the dizziness is accompanied by severe headache. I have a pretty good idea what's going on. Van suggests a blood pressure check next door-it is as I guess, really high. I walk home and by the time I get there all symptoms are gone! I look up agua de coco online and find the following:

 “Coconut water is rich in potassium, magnesium and vitamin C. All of these nutrients are linked to lowering high blood pressure.”

I wake up in the middle of the night with the same severe symptoms, remember there's  a coconut in the fridge, and manage to get up and  hack it open. I know I’m not out of the woods   I reluctantly make an appointment with a heart specialist - a friend who also has a heart murmur told me about  him weeks ago and now I’m off to Mega to buy as many coconuts as I can carry. (except now there’s wonderful thunder lightening and rain storm raging)

What brought it on? I’ve been in a little bit denial for years. Meds always make me feel worse. I usually think I'm as young and healthy as ever  though this dear body doesn’t always comply.

Also on the corner of Insurgentes and Hidalgo is a little Guatemalan tienda and in the back room there are about ten or so black beds with digitized headboards. Allegedly, lying on them regularly for 40 minutes at a stretch cures everything from hernias to cancer and arthritis, there are testimonials on the wall to ‘prove’ it. My friend Katharine and I decide to try them. You lie down, and Hester(!) the proprietor covers you with a black blanket, turns a switch on the digital headboard and says she’ll be back in 20 minutes to turn you over. The bed is supposedly made with magic stones (not plastic which it  looks and feels like but she runs a lighter flame along them to prove it.) Spaced vertically along the bed are large red star shapes (chakra alignment?).  Katharine doesn’t feel anything but I immediately feel a surge of strong energy that iss very intense and not especially comfortable. We are sure she  has left us there longer than the proscribed 40 minutes. I feel  drained and derailed when  it's over but later in the day I feel a certain high (this is the Friday night of the concheros) not unlike a drug with the accompanying come down.

 I won’t be going back. If you’re curious, here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o4zPLofU3w

Nudes and Concheros

Nudes and Concheros

March 6, San Miguel de Allende

Back for a month, my third year  (not counting the 70’s) and there is still so much that ‘s new !

Every year I see the conchero dancers in the jardin and  think I don’t need to see them again  and then I do. One night  I walk up from  the  photo shows at the Bellas Artes (art openings in San Miguel happen as often as the clock strikes the hour-and represent a wide wide range of genre and quality).   Writing or  reading all day in my atelier (so named by someone else as it overlooks the streets of Paris), I walk to the jardin in the evening for  a break where there’s ALWAYS something happening.   Bellas Artes, one of my favorite places in San Miguel

“constructed in 1755-65 as the cloister area of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception (Las Monjas) . It's been called the most ambitiously landscaped cloister in all Mexico, lush as a jungle with 20-foot high bamboo plants and towering poinsettias covered with so many red blooms in season you think they'll topple over . . ”

 where a man offers me  a seat and our conversation leads to the fact one of the photo shows opening tonite is his: about 60 nudes, mostly older expat residents of  San Miguel, balding men with white chest hair and a variety of peni (peni?) and women of a like age with bikini cuts. The models are also all there in the flesh jammed into the narrow passages between the full sized nudes.

In the jardin, the concheros are  out en mass beating on their big steel congas filling the jardin with that universal bass beat- it could  be in Golden Gate Park except for the concheros. I’d seen it all before and wasn’t  going to take  a photo but then  I  walked by the perfect frame –the dancers under the tower of the Parroquia, San Miguel beautiful baroque confection of  a church. Some young Mexicans from DF  ask me to be in their group photo- huh? My favorite photo is one of my Mexican contemporaries in full Azteca dress  dancing her heart out, a perfect symbol for International Women’s Day.

Afghan Theater Goes to Sweden

AFGHAN VOICES FEATURING THE WALL AND MASKS UNDER BURQUA IN STOCKHOLM AUGUST 18, 2012 at Women Playwrights International Multi-media theatre in three parts including Masks Under Burqa -three sisters return to Afghanistan after immigrating abroad to find their parents dead - from Simorgh Film Association of Culture and Art; The Wall – giving birth to her first child, a young woman rediscovers her forbidden love of singing - from Papyrus Co of Kabul http://vimeo.com/31654498

Afghan Voices, Eugene

A small but very engaged audience with four actor friends who read the works of my Afghan students. These are the stories that will never be heard on the news: How many Americans even know there's a very depressed minority (Hazara) in Afghanistan.

Tamina's monologue of the Protester at the Shia Law demonstration on Darulaman Rd near the Iranian mosque, March, 2009, already two years ago. But the law is still in place, the story (of legal rape) relevant as ever.

Hasan's monologue of the old woman who has just lost her whole family in a Nato AIRSTRIKE! What's new.

Nematullah's monologue of the Pashtun man talking about the history of Afghanistan, singing the famous couplet attributed to Malalai inthe 1880's war with the British; also his monologue of the young Hazara.

These monologue were the result of using as a text, Anna Deveare Smith's FIRES IN THE MIRROR, about the battle between Hasids and blacks in Brooklyn

One of the pleasures of sharing my experience is the comments from the audience who see things in the photos I never have as in this painting by a young orphan in Kabul- it is the tent of a Kuchi family, the nomads of Afghanistan (was the child who painted it a Kuchi?) The person in the audience marveled at how integral the animals are to this family . . .and how beautifully rendered

One audience member sent an email suggesting this be a staged production which has been my thought all along . .

I drove the 60 miles home with only one headlite under the fall of giant snowflakes (April28!) happy to arrive at my cozy home in the Oregon forest plenty wood to keep me warm.