general update

Thoughts after LIMBO

/ RCRuiz

We are nearing the close of another season of LIMBO. It’s been a good season and watching LIMBO flourish as more participants come to the workshop meetings has been a source of joy for all of us who are involved.

It’s a privilege to bear witness to how participants discover and grow in their strengths–remembering that they carry all these talents and gifts with them and they have the right to be here and actually, they haven’t yet showed us all that they can be. During yesterday’s session, one of the participants painted a beautiful image of a butterfly breaking out of its cocoon–saying in their own words: “this is me in my former life and this is me in my life now, carrying some of the same colours from before, but I am more me now.”

The conversations in LIMBO are a reminder of why spaces like these are needed.

I worry a little as I think about the precariousness of LIMBO’s future. Will we still get funding for the next season? Will we be able to continue? How can we bring LIMBO’s participants into existing networks? How can we support the community of LGBTQ+ asylumseekers who have come to LIMBO?

I am then reminded that we can only do what we can do, right now. We can’t control the future. We can’t control circumstances or events, but we can do what we can do in this time that’s available to us with the resources that we have right now.

During yesterday’s workshop, Rafik Opti, our wonderful guest facilitator, invited us to visualise through painting, the kind of world we want to see. Maybe visualise through the use of animals, they said. And they used the example of how they like to visualise their self as a friendly dinosaur. It was such a beautiful sunny day and I was happy to be in LIMBO again after missing the last meeting because I was sick. I wanted to capture the brightness of the sun and the light I was feeling. I wanted to just smear colour on the canvas. I discovered that it doesn’t always work as I imagine it should, but I thought I saw a pterodactyl emerging from the mess I made, and flowers blooming amid the morass and then one of the participants said: ‘but I see an eye. I see an eye looking from the canvas and there is a flower blooming from its eye.’

I thought of how beauty can be found even in messiness and how art isn’t about perfection–just as life isn’t about perfection. The true art is in the ability to see what is hopeful and good and beautiful when we think there is none. I think that’s what we do for each other in LIMBO. Everyone goes through difficult days, but we can be there to remind each other that there are also sunny days and flowers can bloom in unexpected places.

I hope that you who read this entry will find flowers in unexpected places. Hope and joy to carry you through days that may sometimes seem grim and dark. I wish you blessings and peace and thank you for dropping by.

*If you have time, visit Rafik’s site. Make sure to watch Black Joy. Rafik is paving the way for others to follow in their footsteps.

Spring is in the air

/ RCRuiz

It’s been quite a busy period as not only is it exam week for the youngest one, it’s also been a week of appointments and events. I visited the municipal hall last week and handed in my application for a new passport along with a new id picture. It’s probably the first time since I’ve had a passport made that my passport picture doesn’t look like I’m running from the law.

A few days before I went to the municipal hall, I had new pictures taken. On my walk to the shop, I found myself ruminating on my previous passport picture and I decided to ask the photographer if it was possible to have one that was somewhat friendlier. As tends to happen, I walked into the shop and blurted out my thoughts to all and sundry including two surprised customers who burst out laughing when I announced that my last passport picture had me looking like I was a fugitive from the law.

It made for a lighthearted moment and I can happily say that for the first time, I have a passport picture that is somewhat friendlier.

At the municipal hall, there was some difficulty registering my fingerprints. I learned that intense treatments like chemotherapy has this effect of where fingerprints become a bit more hazy. It made me wonder if we ever lose our fingerprints.

“It happens with old people too,” the lady behind the counter says to me. “Not that fingerprints are ever erased, it’s just they don’t register anymore. But we also see this in people like you who have undergone chemo.”

And it somehow strikes me that she hasn’t tagged me as an old person but as someone who has undergone intense treatment.

On Saturday, I travel to Rotterdam. I’m headed there to support the project called Project Take Away. Take Away started as a neighbourhood initiative led by friends Marielle and her partner at ook_huis. It’s a lovely initiative which started with refugees and neighbours coming together to share coffee and talk about coffee and different ways of making coffee and as time progressed it evolved into something more. To celebrate their third year, Take Away released a book documenting three years of work. It’s an impressive volume with beautiful images but most importantly it reflects the vibrant life of this group of people who have been working together, caring for this community and for the neighbourhood and growing into this rich and beautiful art collective.

I think of how we forget the power of small movements like these. How practicing care in the community setting is a radical act in a society that’s grown more and more disjointed and disconnected. It’s not the size of the movement that matters, that we are doing a movement with intention is what matters. The intention drives the movement, drives momentum and leads to change.

I think of how these small movements are so vital when it comes to changing perceptions. When it comes to changing how we see each other and when it comes to making space and holding space for one another. I understand the antipathy that exists on one side of society towards asylumseekers, but I also want society to understand that if it were possible to live humanly where they are, people would not be seeking asylum. Living means more than surviving, living means being able to grow and thrive and fulfil your potential as a human being. This is why we can’t turn our backs or close our eyes to the circumstances that cause people to flee the countries of their birth.

It’s callous to say: ‘go back to where you came from’, when we don’t know the full story.

After the meeting at the Take Away space, we traveled to where Marielle was holding a reading/talk around a book she’d collaborated on together with the artist Chen Yun. This book, titled 51 Personae:Tarwewijk was five years in the making. It’s a unique and beautiful work documenting walks around the Rotterdam neighbourhood of Tarwewijk. What I love most about this work is how in the final publication, it contains the text from these walks in Dutch, English and Chinese. Not on separate pages, but these texts exist side by side on the same page or as extensions of each other.

It made me think of how it’s beautifully representative of the multicultural nature of society and how the world is made up of many different people speaking many different languages and there is room for all of us to live side by side.

Copies of this book are available at Available & The Rat.

I feel like I should write a little bit more about Available & The Rat, but I will do so another time. It’s a space that’s definitely worth visiting.

Spring is in the air. Out in the garden, things are growing. Our prunus tree has grown a bit more sturdy and is spreading out its arms. From the small seat by the water, I have a lovely view of back gardens with tulips coming up, a magnolia tree in bloom and a cherry blossom tree.

I have resolved to go and sit out beside the water as much as I can. For now, I’m ending this lengthy post.

Take some time out of your busy schedule to just sit and reflect on how you want to greet this new season. Life brings with it unexpected things, but when you take time to connect to what’s strong in you, you won’t be easily shaken.

Blessings and peace to you who read this and thank you for dropping by.

Hello 2024

/ RCRuiz

I am learning how to do freehand protraits–relying less on a grid and training my eyes and my pencil. I still need to work on proportions, but the results have been surprising. Did you know that turning a picture upside down will actually help you focus more on shapes and lines and will give you a more satisfying rendition than if you are looking directly at a thing? For most of 2023, I had to practice at home by myself as my energy would often run out and I would end up having to skip art classes.

Towards the end of 2023 though, I was able to attend five art classes (what luxury). It became important to me to go to class with a goal. What is it that I’m struggling with, right now? What questions can I ask and how can I put the answers to practice when I am unable to attend class?

There are so many similarities between making art and writing and life and the parallels fascinate me. Because we often start out with a draft–with an idea of where we would like to go–or in my case, I sometimes find myself caught up in an emotion and I let that emotion move my body and take me to what comes out on the canvas. I suppose I am very much a pantser on canvas as I am a pantser with words. Portraiture though is teaching me the discipline of looking and seeing and translating what I see in lines and shadows and angles on the page. We don’t know what we’re making until we see the finished project and even then, it can be tempting to keep tweaking. For the artist, the art is learning when it’s time to stop. There is no such thing as perfection in art, simply the question of: have I managed to convey what I wanted to convey? And does the meaning the viewer attaches to the image make me say: Oh…that interpretation works just as well.

It is satisfying though when you get your meaning across and it’s the same with working with words. Stories work when they mean something to the maker and to the person reading or receiving the story. And in this way, stories become an act of co-creation. The writer creates the world, the characters and the story, but the reader attaches meaning to it and the art becomes the ability to draw the reader in and invite them to create together with the writer.

I’m not a very good fanfiction writer but I find myself in awe of writers of fanfiction who expand the universe and the worlds of stories that have captured their imagination. To have a fanfiction made of your work is, I think, the best possible compliment an artist can hope for. Why? Because it means you’ve made something that has become full of meaning for another person to the extent they wish to co-create with what exists.

Life itself is an act of co-creation. We co-create together with God and with our fellow inhabitants of the earth and together we weave this massive story that is the story of humanity. And it sucks a lot at times. It makes us cry and feel frustrated at times. It makes us angry. It moves us. It makes us want to hit out and hurt someone sometimes. It makes us decide to take action. Co-creating means, we don’t just let life happen. We decide to take part in life becoming.

Reading back, I think this is what 2024 is shaping up to be for me. I spent 2022 trying to stay alive, trying to recover, trying to survive. My 2023, had me learning how to deal with setbacks. It had me on a path of discovering what it was that I really wanted to keep on doing. Here I am in 2024, still alive. I am present. I am doing what I need to do, here and now…bedhead and all.

Agyamanac Unay for stopping by. May peace and love be with you.

Evolution

/ RCRuiz

There’s a Dutch phrase that captures the emotion for what we have gone through–het laat mij niet in de koude kleren zitten. Which means that all we’ve gone through as a family, all I’ve gone through as a person, these things have not left me unchanged or unmoved.

It’s a good thing to be moved and to be changed because it means I am still alive. I am still feeling, I am still living and I am constantly in transition, evolving, changing, not standing still. I think about this as I find myself surprised at how this season, this moment of being in a state of limbo, has feed the creative in me. I write, because I love to write. I make music because I love to make music. I teach because I love seeing how those I teach bloom into their potential. And I make art because a lot of times, when I am making art, I find myself in conversation with my maker.

Before 2022, I never imagined I would be making art as I do today. Or that it would become so important to me or that it would help me talk about what I am going through or that it would be a pathway to growing and knowing myself better. (I used to say that I write because I can’t paint or draw and am basically useless at art.)

When I told my Mom about my diagnosis in 2022, her command was for me to go ask God what his purpose was with me. At that time, I had no words for writing anything. I couldn’t even speak about what I was going through. Imagine being a writer unable to write or say anything about the storm going on inside you?

This was one of the first images I made which expresses what I was going through at the time. It was hope and agony and my soul just crying out. It was: God, if you really see me, then do something.

From that moment, telling the story of that time happened through images. Sometime in 2022, a friend proposed that I should try making use of acrylics. My first approach to painting was to simply splash color on the canvas. To try and put on the canvas or on paper what was in my head or in my heart at the moment.

This stormy canvas was just me saying: here I am in the middle of this storm and the storm is so big, I can’t even begin to describe it.

Making something visual happened because I had no words. But when you are without words for more than a year, and when you are engaging with art making almost everyday for a year, your work changes. One day, early this year, something told me that the way I was working was going to change and so was the art.

I think about the process of art making and how making art led me back to writing and how art that’s on the canvas tells a story just as the words on a page tell a story. We create because we have stories inside us that we want to share and stories will find their way out of the person bearing those stories. If not through words, it will be through other means of telling. (Just consider the plethora of youtube stories, audio stories, film stories..etc., etc.)

The more we engage with telling stories, the better we become at them. The more we engage with a certain medium, the better we become at that medium. Before my diagnosis, I would never have dreamed that I would someday tell stories through painting. After diagnosis, I thought I would never be able to tell stories through words again.

There are a lot of famous saying about life and art, but for the life of me, I can’t remember a proper one at the moment, but I do believe that art and life are intertwined. If anything, being diagnosed has made me more conscious of how important it is to live a life with purpose. To create marks with deliberation and care, to engage fully and be present in the moment, to look–really look, to really see and to also rest and be in the moment and allow moments to flow over me and change me and transform me so I can bring that back to whatever I am working on at the moment whether it is on art, on writing or my relationships.

I keep thinking of that friend who said to me “if only we knew how much time we had”. The truth is, we know. We know our time on this planet is not infinite. We know it, we just don’t want to acknowledge it.

I think about this as I contemplate the story of my life and I find myself wondering about the overall arch and how the completed story will read like or look like if it were in a book or hanging in a gallery. When we are in the process, we only see now. We only see this moment.

This is one of my latest works in progress (yup, I have more than one). I’ve been working on it for almost two months. I do a little work. I put it away. Think about it. Work on it some more. Right now, it’s missing one more element which I am thinking about.

I can honestly say that I don’t know why I am writing this or sharing this at this moment. It just felt good to do so. I don’t know what 2024 holds. I don’t even know what will happen tomorrow or next week or the weeks after that. Today, I am heading to the hospital. I am getting a CT scan. I am doing what I can to keep my body healthy. I am spending time with my kids and with my loved ones. I am writing. I am alive.

Blessings and peace to you who read this. Choose life.

There is strength in uncertainty

/ RCRuiz

Tomorrow marks session number four for LIMBO. For this next group of workshops, I want to think about character creation and the various ways in which we can employ character to occupy and transform the world around us. What do we learn from creating character? How can we make use of these learnings as we engage with the world around us? What insights can we gain from the act of creating characters and interacting with them?

Transformation is an attractive theme in this season of uncertainty. We don’t know what comes next. We don’t know where we are going. We don’t know how things will unfold. Even the world around us is filled with uncertainty. We find ourselves in a world where conflict and wars awaken traumas and make us even more uncertain and fearful.

Perhaps the space we are creating is a temporary escape–an ephemeral space where we can immerse in something else other than what is going on outside. For a while, we are taken away from the worries and the pressures and the stress and we can be here together in space where it is safe to just be as we are. We are in Now.

I think about this as I prepare and I think too about words like miracle, life, living and now. None of the doctors I’ve spoken to wants to speak in certainties. And so, I think of how the true miracle is that I am alive right now. Life is the miracle. Now is the miracle.

It’s from this knowledge that I can gather the strength that I need for the work that I want to do. I want to carry hope with me because the world around us is chaotic and hope is the one thing that will carry us through the uncertainty of the road we are all traveling.

My thoughts, for now, are unfinished. But I hope the sentiment shines through. I hope that you who read this may find for yourself a place of strength and hope for the road ahead.

Blessings and peace to you who read this.

Titles are a challenge

/ RCRuiz

Titles are not my strong point. I am currently working on the second draft of a novel titled The Fifth Woman. Don’t ask me why…it probably just felt cool at that time or maybe I was just like: whatever. Let’s just call it this as a sort of jumpstart. So far, I haven’t found anything in the draft that talks about a fifth woman. It’s a pretty amazing feeling though to have been writing consistently everyday for the past two months as prior to that time, my brain often felt like a jumble of words and there was not enough quiet to properly focus on fiction. To my surprise, I have passed 15k on second draft and it looks like it’s still going.

Before I found The Fifth Woman, I had been writing away at The Cartographer novel which I’ve left stranded at 85k because the world was getting so big and unwieldy I had to step back from its noise for a bit.

Finding The Fifth Woman (first draft from end of 2021 before cancer struck) was like finding a gift because there was enough distance for me to appreciate and see where I’d gone off the rails with it ( characters with names like ‘this person’s dad’ and lazy shorthand place names ‘let’s just call this place wherever’ and I’ll call this form of transport something unpronounceable). Clearly, I was just in a rush to finish first draft. When I read it for the first time after regaining my focus, I thought it was someone else’s work, until I got to some place names and memory hit me…oh right. I wrote this while doing the Munabol online workshop for BIPOC kids. And then…Oh. This thing is long. It’s super-long. What is it? Is it a novel? Is it finished? (Yes. It was indeed a first draft clocked in at a little above 65k.) That was two weeks ago.

My current writing speed is an average of 1000 words a day (sometimes 1500), but at the end of a writing session my brain refuses to focus and I just want to go watch Formula one or something mindless for a while. (I have become quite the Formula One and bike racing addict. Tour de France, the Giro, Vuelta, and then there are the classics. Cobblestones! I can hardly watch but I still do anyway.)

I’ve noticed that there is a lot of messiness in my head the closer I get to the appointments for my bloodtest and immunotherapy. As I said to people closest to me, it’s quite weird because it doesn’t hurt, but I have an increasing aversion to being stuck with needles. It melts away once the bloodtest and immunotherapy week have passed and for most of the time I forget that I am under treatment. My oncologist tells me we are on this road for two more years and then we’ll see. It’s an interesting space to be in because no one really knows and I think that’s okay.

Just a little while ago, I bumped into an acquaintance who I hadn’t seen in a long while. Upon hearing about my diagnosis and about all the treatment things, she went: But you’re too young… (I won’t insert what was implied here because it took me aback). It’s one of those really odd responses that makes me want to laugh out loud. I know it’s well-intentioned and well-meant, but I remind people that I am not dead and I have no intention of dying anytime soon. I am completely in the land of the living and I believe I’ll still be here for as long as I am meant to be here. It’s the thought that comes to me when anxiety strikes: Peace. I remind myself. As my mother said to me at the start: you go ask God what he wants to do with you because until He’s done with you, you’re not done doing.

My mother, a cancer survivor, was diagnosed with metastasised cancer when she was 46. It had spread to her bones and she was given one year to live. Today, she’s 85. She laughs talking about it: ‘Actually,’ she says. ‘I decided I wouldn’t die because I didn’t want your Dad marrying someone else.’

There’s this thing about coming face to face with mortality. You come to understand what it means to be alive. I think about one of the participants to the workshop saying: this is my now.

It’s a pretty radical thing to say and to do. To be present in the now. To rest in this moment. To give as well as to take pleasure, to share in what is funny, what makes you laugh, what makes you cry, what warms your heart, what melts you–to choose to be here in now is such a powerful and radical act because it is the essence of being alive.

It’s easy to get pulled into the rat race. To think: I’ll make time for what matters and what makes me happy when I have more time. Time is an ephemera. It’s an illusion we create for ourselves. Time that matters is now. What am I doing now? How am I being present now? What am I sharing of myself now? What kind of memories and legacies am I putting in place now? It’s in this now moment that we are doing and creating and making and establishing connections and as I said to someone precious to me: humans and relationships are more important than things. Wealth, status and possessions you can replace. Connections, relationships and humans you cannot.

Perhaps it’s why I’ve become so invested in The Fifth Woman. Because it’s a messy novel about messy relationships. It’s about the now space versus the could be space. It’s about family and relationships and all the pressures that are exerted upon that precious space of simply being. It could be fantasy, but it could also be science fiction. I really do not know. I’m just writing it. In the now.

Blessings and Peace and Agyamanac Unay for reading.

A new season

/ RCRuiz

Perhaps the most surprising thing is coming back to life. In the season when cancer was very much at the forefront of our lives, I made the choice to just let go of everything and focus on doing what needed to be done in the moment. Get through surgery, recover from surgery, go through radiotherapy, recover from radiotherapy, go through chemo, survive and recover from chemo. We are in a post-chemo period as my oncologist has determined that chemo is more harmful to me than helpful and so I have been taking immunotherapy once every four weeks for the past two months and will continue to follow this schedule of treatment for the next two years.

I think of how there are reasons for all circumstances that we encounter in life. We won’t always find ourselves in pleasant places. Finding ourselves in the midst of adversity, having to combat things like financial uncertainty, loss, uprootment, illness whether it be of ourselves or someone we love–what we make of that adversity can determine the story of our lives.

I said to my oncologist at the start of this entire trajectory: my life is not cancer and I do not want my life to be about cancer. My life is more than cancer and because I can, I determined in my heart that I would just keep living and being alive. (Also, my surgeon said: actually, except for those tumors, you’re super-healthy.)

Where I am now offers me the chance to reflect on how I want to continue living. I lost words and stories while going through treatment. For a good while, I couldn’t even remember the names of characters or the titles of stories or even the words to describe a thing. I couldn’t piece words together to make a proper story even. But in that season, I learned to make pictures. To draw, to paint, to collage, to work with different mediums–something I’d never thought I could possibly do when I was so focused on writing words. I learned there are no boundaries in art-making and story making and the only thing that keeps us from making is because we think we can’t or we’re afraid we’ll make a mistake (or someone told us we aren’t talented or good enough at it).

This coming season, I will be taking part in LIMBO which is a wonderful life-giving project under the hat of the beautiful Fabian Holle. I can’t think of an adjective that fits them more than that word. Because Fabian is Fabian, it doesn’t surprise me that LIMBO has become this space that is also wonderfully life-giving and inspiring. Working together with my good friend, Lana Jelenjev, we hope to contribute, plant and water seeds, speak life and hope as we facilitate this season with LIMBO.

I’m thinking about all these processes as I prepare for a season with LIMBO. Thinking too about all the different things I’ve learned in the various seasons of my life and thinking of how story isn’t just about words you write on a page. Story is intertwined with life and art and making and sharing and composting and living. It’s crying and laughing and howling with rage and shaping a space in the world for what you have to share.

There are no borders between the different ways of telling or working through or sharing. There is no right or wrong way to go about sharing what has lived and lives and what you hope will continue to live inside and outside of you. There are no limits–not even the space to share is limited because there is enough space for everyone and if we think there isn’t, then we just have to enlarge our circles and make more space. We are limited only as we allow ourselves to be limited.

And yes, we live in a world that’s polarized, where hatred and malice abound. But we can expand the circles filled with light and kindness and love until there’s no more room for hate.

LIMBO occupies a special place in my heart and I invite anyone reading to visit the following links.

Framer Framed Presentation: LIMBO – queer exilic narratives (definitely read Fabian’s beautiful speech as well as the interview with LIMBO co-creators

May lovingkindness always surround you. Agyamanac Unay.

Doing the work

/ RCRuiz

Part one of a four-way process conversation has been published on the PUSH blog. Do go and check out this conversation with writers Paolo Chikiamco, Dean Alfar, Kate Osias and Alessa Hinlo.

I’ll be putting up the second part of this conversation sometime this week and in upcoming updates will be posting about the Eschacon workshop as well as publishing work produced by participating writers to the workshop.

Keep an eye on PUSH and keep supporting our authors.