Day four: RAKs with a rabbit hole.

[parasitegirl]

The recently completed vacation is a difficult creature to fix in place.

Returning home is like stepping out of the water. There’s the relief of dry land, warmth, and the familiarity of the everyday. There is tangible evidence of your swim, but those ripples subside and the water evaporates from your skin. After that point it’s hard to fully recall the sensations of moving through water, floating, being immersed. Eventually you fall asleep without the body memories of being buoyant flittering through your muscles.

The longer the journey, the harder it is to write-up. Do you start at the end, the most recent images, and hope the beginning is there when you arrive? Do you hope your recall of the start of the journey doesn’t write over the ending? Do you submit to the fact that memory isn’t linear at all and just expand on what you can grasp at any given sitting, hoping that a whole will be made of your parts?

As I fell asleep last night I remembered an omission in my narrative: After Khalida and I stretched side-by-side at her apartment and before I was pacing, about to teach, in her studio, she’d read my cards.

(and we scurry down the rabbit hole, which is more picturesque than taking the highway back to Germany).

Who among us doesn’t have some sort of reaction to the images on tarot cards?

There used to be a pack floating around my father and step-mother’s place when I was young. I think it was my father’s. He collected (collects?) board games and where you can buy board games (and comics and figurines and…) you’ll often find tarot cards. They fascinated me but not in a way that made me learn more.

Khalida told me that the person who taught her about tarot introduced her to the idea that the deck of tarot deck that speaks to you is the one you should start with. I know this means if I ever take up the deck, it’s not my father’s pack I should get. I’ll have to get the out-of-print Wonderland tarot deck based on illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. I wonder if I know of this deck’s existence from one of the trips I took with my father into geek-stores or if it’s just a branching out of my childhood love of Alice books and illustrations, a love second only to the Oz book illustrations.

Do I “believe” in tarot cards? Well, they do exist. I’m not a believer of magic or even vaguer ideas of spiritual energy but I do think that picking random, open, concepts and seeing how you can, or can’t, measure them against your ideas of your self and life can open paths in your mind worth exploring. Dada!

It was a relaxing activity, comfortable, and sometimes mirth making. I don’t mean we laughed at it, but we chuckled and nodded when informed of what we thought we already knew about me. Did ya know? In my first card I learned that I wield words and my intellect carefully, like a weapon at times, and am aware of it?

As much as I observe the past emotions of painful times, and goodness knows my blog is testament to that, I need to turn around an take stock of the emotionally rich and rewarding events that surround me…or, in the case of tarot imagery, are in the unspilled cups standing just behind me.

Bonus card: VACATION!

I wasn’t the only one to have her cards read before RAKs. Elisa had a telling reading before she left America, the results of which she thought of and mentioned more than once in classes.

(through the tiny door, which seems to have grown, back to RAKS)

18:00- 19:30: The workshops were over for the day but we had an optional Movie Night to eat before.

My car-pool team and Zoe, a student of Artemisia who I recognized from her Bhuz and FB posts, went to a café for food. Zoe and I pitched in for Fifi’s parking fees accumulated over the day.

We got crap service. Usually crap service abroad can also be chalked up to the fact Japan has given me unreasonable expectations of service levels…but this woman, thinking we were ALL Americans, not just me, did mumble a lot about disliking serving us and shit in a language understood by at least one of us at the table.

19:30-22:00 Movie Night.

I am conflicted about if, in retrospect, I wish I’d skipped this.

Why I wish I’d skipped it:
The location was stuffy and hot, the seating (or absence thereof…we had judo training mats…people in the know with apartments/homes nearby brought big pillows) was physically uncomfortable, and it felt about 30 minutes longer than what my body could take. I might have been ok with the length if I felt comfortable. My jetlag was kicking in hard and I wanted to be in my hotel room. Resting would have done me good.

Why I am glad I went:

I’m really glad I saw the documentary “They Work at Night.” I don’t think the documentary was really well edited but it did provide a view into lives/a scene I wouldn’t otherwise have. It was difficult at first to fully understand at first and I can’t imagine what it would have been like without some context of the scene it depicted (modern Shaabi dancing and one family whose life revolves around it). It was depressing and enlightening.

Other aspects of movie night that were not about movie night:

What follows may be emotionally triggering. It addresses emotional pain, and some of the rough times my fellow bloggers have been through in the last few years

Fifi and I talked more. Fifi is an alarmingly open woman. Before the film, we tried to find comfortable ways to lie on the mats. This was made harder by the fact that Fifi has had a lot of work done on her chest due to breast cancer. I don’t think this is too personal a detail to mention here, as she’s very open about it. When she dances, you can sometimes see the tattoos that cover scars. She mentioned some of the physical issues around her recovery at the first breakfast we ate, which wasthe first time we talked.

She mentioned it again while trying to find a position of comfort. Then, she went on to tell me, in detail, some of the many traumatic medical complications she’s endured. Her voice rose in pitch and volume on some points as she illustrated the sort of episodes that pink ribbon campaigns never get into…and she spoke of the loss of friendships that resulted in her struggles.

This is when I grabbed her hand.

I don’t know how I would have reacted two or more years ago. I would have been uncomfortable in the face of such raw emotion, which isn’t something that has changed. But, I think I wouldn’t have fought the desire to recoil, to shut my mind down, to wonder why the hell someone was telling me this.

I didn’t pull away, or stop the conversation, or empathize with the friends who had left her due to similar reactions. I thank the years of reading blogs you of honest, kind, people who have been through hell. I know too many of you who have endured the unthinkable, the cancers, the deaths of those you care about, abuse, rape, the emotional and physical traumas of life. I’ve witnessed, from an intimate afar, how the recoil of those around you, and the voices of “why don’t you just get on with your lives”, has wounded you more. You’ve shown me your pain. I grasp better how trauma doesn’t leave, it changes you and is a factor of who you are…and that sometimes it just has to come out at times other people aren’t “prepared” for it. I think you have made me slightly better by your honesty.

Also, as the RAKS experience progressed, I was getting a feel for how often, albeit offhandedly, I mentioned the earthquake when people wanted to talk about their image of Japan, or my life in Japan, or were just getting to know me. RAKS was the first time I’ve been in a group of people who doesn’t have the shared experience of the earthquake or who doesn’t know me well enough to know what last year was like and to have worried about me at the worst.

I did the only thing I could do, which was to grab her hand, and I quietly cried for all of her pain. I thanked her for sharing herself with me. If I didn’t hug her then, we hugged later.

I couldn’t tell you if anyone else noticed.

Day 1 of RAKs drew to an end.

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