The boxes wouldn’t fit. I’d tried over and over. I didn’t fit them. They weren’t what I was really doing. But I needed to learn the boxes, work the boxes, which took time. And I am still learning, but a certain point has been reached.
My box is putting boxes together to make an as yet untitled space. Or perhaps a truly titled space. An Attasalina space.
“You have many books in you,” she said.
I had meant to be a writer in the beginning. In fact it was the beginning. I began writing poems in a little journal when I was only five. I don’t remember. My mother told me. One day she found my little book and she said it read like sage haikus.
She encouraged me to write. She was an avid reader of Anais Nin’s diaries and said that I should keep a diary and I did. But I eventually burned them. I still remember the important bits and rewrote down things I remembered. Some of them are in my songs.
I haven’t a doorway to heaven But a mirror By which I experience the wonder Of possibility The salvation of the self 1990
I wrote stories, poems, essays. I focused on writing in college. Also art and psychology. I had difficulty choosing a professional path. It eventually chose me and I became a photographer. “Photography is the poetry of images,” I said and I channeled my narration into pictures and found expression in forms another kind of diary and much has been documented over the years.
Music was my second form. Soon after I began writing I said I wished to learn piano and my father obliged and at six years began piano lessons which continued for about eight years. That was my one thing. Piano. That was mine. So I identify totally with music, just not the music business.
I loved to sing, but learned I was a singer when I first joined choir in seventh grade. It was a short lived journey, but I was immediately the finalist for opera performance from my school. I always had a good ear. My step mother, a concert pianist, said so and chastised me for being lazy at sight reading. “I’m not playing it for you. You hear it once and just repeat it. You have to learn to read.”
I may have some form of dyslexia. Though I am capable and learn quickly I would also become disoriented which was disturbing to me. I prefered improvisation. Expressing my emotional story through the sounds, moving in the moment. That style didn’t fit with acceptable forms of recorded music according to most. I was told it needed to conform, so eventually I learned how to do songs properly with structure and regular tempo and all that, which is fine, but I think I should return to my improvisation style. I appreciate the skills I’ve gained, but I don’t think people should have been so intent upon critiquing my style, including myself!
So that about brings us up to the point where I became thoroughly disabled and walked away from it all.
At that time, I reclaimed my spiritual life as most contemporary westerners would call it, but to me, it is just my real life.
Systems. Everything is systems. Music, poetry, meditation, ceremony, life, the universe. Systems of reality with inherent properties. Study these systems, live them and learn them, experience them. That’s always been the I in the entire process. I am examining life, I am investigating. I am uncovering what is real.
“I think you are born to it,” she said. My godmother Ruth named me when I was one month old. I was simply nameless for a time. The name was a blessing and tied to a belief that I would become a meditation teacher and inherit her position.
I certainly experienced things differently. I knew things. My mother would say, “she is two going on twenty” when people inquired. I did not speak like a child. When I was born, I immediatly opened my eyes and looked around, I didn’t cry. The doctor said that was unusual.
So, I have been observing my experience for a long time. I have very early memories. I have been asking questions and seeking answers for this condition most of my life.
I was born in Los Angeles, in Venice Beach in 1977 and one of these very early memories is sensing that the city did not belong there and people were missing. I wanted to know why things were the way they were. I felt that they had been different a very short time ago.
It seemed that everyone was lying.
So, miss Salina as I was called throughout my young life, set out to understand what everyone was lying about.
I’ve lived in the city, I’ve lived in the wild. I’ve sat with masters and teachers from all over the world and from here where I am from, this land now called California. But I feel I am from a much older place and my teachers from here are from that older place as well.
We come from a place where medicine is for community. Not everything is business. We must sell for survival now, but that doesn’t mean anything other than we are conquered by commerce which has been turned to a force of destruction while calling itself progress. Our truth lives in secret. Most don’t believe it even exists.
The ancestors spoke when I was young. They told me what was here, what was real and what was needed. They showed me the future and whispered of the past. This land remembers, it has a voice and it wants to be heard. “Truth is in the land,” the voice said. Stories are written and spoken, but I needed to know.
I still don’t know. Not entirely. But I’ve seen too much to have the option of being any other than I am. And I have proven over and over my intuition, or whatever you might call it, is acurate. So, I believe myself now. I have experienced, I have examined and I have tested and so I am satisfied. My life is real. What I know is real. And I will simply, keep going.