A Way Out
How a Migration Tour Became a Healing Pilgrimage
Welcome to Wandering Grace. I will be sharing essays exploring the themes of place and (be)longing every other Thursday, and bonus snapshots from the road on alternating Sundays. Read more about the project.
“A creature that hides & withdraws into its shell is preparing a way out.” ~ Gaston Bachelard
December 2021 Idea: Workshops
Towards the end of 2021, a friend forwards me a narrative change fellowship she has come across and suggests we each submit project proposals for an art or cultural intervention that addresses “justice, equity, and the theme ‘we can thrive together’”.1 The fellowship is for six months and $15,000. Could I dream up something of that scale? Sure. For my proposal, I outline a “migratory workshop tour through major cities along the Pacific Flyway to engage communities in zinemaking, nestbuilding, and storytelling.”
The Pacific Flyway route traces:
the seasonal migration of birds along the Pacific coast,
my personal history of economic migration and displacement up the west coast,
and the trails of generations of immigrants and migrants seeking economic opportunity.
In my application, I aspire to host workshops in at least two of the places along my ambitious “seasonal yearlong tour” of the Pacific Northwest, Northern California, Southern California, and The Border. I envision half-day workshops and creating zine trees out of nests and stories — some of which would happen at the site of actual neighbor trees (with their consent and participation) serving as shelter, waystation, altar, and elder for our time together. I conjure a story of using popular education to create spaces for people to connect their personal and family stories of movement with the systems of capitalism and empire that require us to sacrifice roots and community for economic opportunity and survival.
How do we (re)connect to place when so many of us are DIS-placed?
How do we heal the wounds of forced displacement? How do we reckon with the root shock that comes from leaving home(s)?
How do we combat the challenges to building community among people who are always looking for ‘next’?
What can we learn from the seasonal movement of birds about how to call multiple locations home while still retaining flock?
How do we practice solidarity with so many of our brethren who are already and also on the move as refugees?
I don’t get that fellowship, and I’m not surprised. My proposal is unfocused. I can’t decide whether these workshops would engage Asian American second gens or BIPOC overall or multicultural audiences. The project idea doesn’t have the energy of ‘readiness’ that other submissions do, and I don’t have a track record or artist brand strong enough for an organizational grant of this size.
The embarrassing truth is: I had felt a tiny spark of desire when I hugged someone the last time I visited Los Angeles for a wedding, and that sense of aliveness was startling and curious enough for my numbed-out self to follow. So I conjured up the idea for a “Migratory Workshop Tour” as an excuse to return to California.
The unexpected gift of it is: I also really vitally need an excuse to get out of Oregon for a spell, and this application process becomes a way to start dreaming into ways of doing so. Articulating the dream transforms it into a possibility, and those possibilities will eventually become the seeds of unimaginable fruit.
~
Fall 2022 Iteration: DIY Artist Residencies
The idea of revisiting the places I used to live is still bopping around taking up space in my brain. Regardless of grant funding, I’m a zinester and a producer and an aspiring-anarchist, so I figure I can just make a DIY “Migration Tour” happen for myself, fueled by relationships and asks and gift ecology. Every time I think about reaching out to individuals or organizations about workshop logistics, however, I feel my energy and momentum for the endeavor plummet.
In the classic maneuver of someone who has a hard time centering her own needs, I had created a project container where the focus was on teaching and facilitating and hosting because I feel like I have to earn it, that I need an outwardly-focused excuse, to give myself permission to go where I want to go (where I am being pulled toward going, where I intuit I need to go even if I couldn’t explain to you why2). When thinking about reweaving relationship to place, tending to the sweet bitters of uprooted diaspora, and reconciling agency and choice against economic pressures of forced migration…I have to reckon with just how much of my own healing work I need to do before I can offer spaceholding to others via art + writing workshops.
As many many teachers have taught: you can’t give what you don’t have yourself.3
As just one example, over the last few years, I had noticed my bodily contraction every time we crossed into the Bay Area driving south on the 580. I knew this was lingering resentment and hurt from the housing insecurity I had experienced leading up to my move away from CA. In other words, I had some shit to deal with.
I still feel compelled to revisit these cities I had once called home, but maybe I don’t need to organize/plan/teach/host while I’m traveling. Maybe I could just do my own artist residencies…writing and creating for myself along the way as a way to alchemize my own healing.
We had hosted over a dozen artists-in-residence in our guest bedroom at Mt Caz4 in Corvallis between the years of 2018 - 2022, so I figure I could ask the favor in reverse: Would people be able to host me in their guest bedrooms, in-law units, or housesits for 1-3 week DIY artist residencies during a season of travel?
~
November 2022 Evolution: Pilgrimage
As I am creating a pitch deck to send to potential hosts, I want to include a map of my route. I am still enamored with this Pacific Flyway idea, and this question of: What can we learn from migratory birds about calling multiple places home? So I ask myself where a bird who flies the same route year after year might stop for regular visits. How would they name or identify their familiar rest stops?5
What emerges is a map of the waters, and the heights, and the sites of respite that I found myself returning to again and again when I lived in those areas. Touchstones from my past as waymarkers for the future.
My externally-focused “Migration Tour” is slowly, slowly, bit by bit, becoming an internally-focused “Healing Pilgrimage” — before I fully understand what the word pilgrim means, or what pilgrimage might entail.
My questions are evolving too. In that “personal is political” way, they are focusing in on the core question(s) that have always driven my interest in migration and movement, root shock and diaspora…
Why do I move around so much?
Was it the inheritance of being a child of refugees who were themselves the children of refugees? Or was I constantly running away from life in an overactive fight-or-flight response? Or was I running toward hope and toward success as shaped by our cultural understandings the American Dream? Or was all my movement just mammalian, a natural creature instinct that we all followed before borders restricted, criminalized, and pathologized movement?
~
May 2023 Incredulity: Mid-Tour Wonder
I am talking to my therapist about how hard it is to just ask for what we need directly. To even know what it is we want and need in the first place.
She says sometimes we go all the way in a big circle around the need — hopping around via deflection or justification or making up stories or passive aggression — instead of just communicating and asking directly to get our need met.
It’s like all of our extra hopping around is a way we are creating our own container of safety when we intuit that the leap required to go straight to the heart of the matter is too big a risk to take unguarded.
It’s the end of the first week of my three-month tour. I am sitting with a couple friends at their kitchen table in the Mission in San Francisco. I pull up the map of my pilgrimage sites on my phone. I laugh at myself and joke about how dumb it is that I didn’t just book a plane ticket and an Airbnb two years ago. That during all my planning and prepping, it had never even occurred to me that I could have just booked a hotel room and taken myself on a vacation.6 About how silly it is that it has taken this long and this much extra energy and such a robustly-programmed container and such a circuitous narrative story for me to actually leave.
My friend notes in a straightforward way that it was simply what I did to get to here. That it wasn’t silly or dumb at all. It’s just what I had needed to do.
I had needed the safety of the container of a Migration-Tour-cum-Healing-Pilgrimage, and being hosted by friends, and guiding questions, and artist residency intentions, and and and and and…to actually get my body out of Oregon.
It’s an expression of how the safety we sometimes need to create for ourselves in order to take the risks to change our lives can be beautiful in their inefficiency, creative in their unskillfulness, and poetic in their wild hopefulness in the face of all the internal gremlins on top of all of the external headwinds that would have us staying in place when that in-place-ness also meant staying stuck and small and shrunken.
~
April 2023 Precipice: It’s happening…
On the eve of my departure, the refrain that keeps repeating in my head is it’s happening.
It’s happening it’s happening it’s happening it’s happening.
This idea, this dream, this desire, this journey which had been floating around in my head for well over a year, and which had been taking shape slowly over time, and which had been in the logistics-planning stages for the last three-plus months, is finally happening, finally manifesting.
I was manifesting it.
And I would leave tomorrow.
“To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.” ~ Mark Nepo
+ + +
Footnotes
The Opportunity Agenda’s Culture & Narrative Fellowship. Hooray to a friend, Ixchel (who I would eventually meet at bellweather, which is a future stop on this Migration Tour), for being a present-day 2023 fellow!
Much of my route planning was done by intuition. It would be months and months, and it has already taken years and years, to get to the point where I can start to name these things, but my instincts knew (even back then) that: the homogenous whiteness in Oregon was killing some vibrant part of me, and that I was craving being in multicultural cities because that might just reset my nervous system, and that I was feeling drawn to places where Asian American diaspora had some kind of stronghold, legacy, and undeniable presence (in an almost unnoteworthy way because of their just is-ness).
Including, most recently to my ears, Lama Rod Owens
A partial archive of the Mt Caz artist residencies which I co-created and co-stewarded for many years in Oregon.
Migrating birds returning to the same sites over multiple years conjured the gifts of deeper knowing that I have learned from being able to visit and revisit certain trails over and over again across different seasons across multiple years across different phases of my life. Something that I was able to learn while living in Corvallis, a gift that I take with me in my bones about how to be in relationship with place, about what it means to root.
To be fair, my personal stucknesses were also happening during a time of more-robust pandemic lockdowns, quarantines, and social stigma against recreational travel.