14, 15

My friend Katie visited Ox-Bow yesterday. Ting, Olivia, Katie, and I spent a lovely time in downtown Saugatuck. Katie also brought me a green scarf to keep me warm. It's getting a bit chilly here.

I have been feeling quite liberated - in merely exploring the colors and being obsessed with 8 colors of 색동. They were used to celebrate... but also to cast out a bad luck. I feel as though I could swim in these stripes of colors.

My studio -

Currently reading -
A Rap on Race
 - In 1970, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead met for an extraordinary seven-and-a-half-hour discussion about race and society. Mead brought her knowledge of racism as practiced in remote societies around the world. Baldwin brought his personal experience with the legacy of black American history. They talked with candor, passion, rage, and brilliance, and their discussion became this unique volume. Here is Baldwin's creativity and fire. Here is Mead's scholarship and reason. And here, for all to see, are their prejudices, their pain, and finally theire shared desire to find the thread that binds us all.

"... And I have to do it that way because, for the moment, I know one thing. I am forty-six, okay? Whatever has happened to me has happened to me and that's all right; it doesn't make any difference now. But I have a great-nephew who is two years old, and he is not going to live the life I have had to live. If it demands blowing up the Empire State Building, or whatever it demands, I will not be a party to it twice.

In a sense that's my real frame of reference... I don't believe that the band of mediocrities which appear to rule this country now have any right whatever to tell him where to sit and where to stand and who he is and what he is going to become. And I won't let them do it. Really, it is as simple as that." - pg.92-3, Baldwin.

Yes, it is a discussion from 70s... a bit outdated. Yet I feel drawn to learn about what took place here with people of color and non, and what took place in their hearts and stories. It seems as important as my own story, it seems as relevant to me as my parents' experience of post-Korean War. They talk with passion, knowledge, and understanding of each other. And I want to be in that place, too...

I woke up late this morning, and haven't gone to my studio yet. Today is... a thinking day.