A week in Amethyst
So much amazing work is happening in our bandspaces! Each week, collaborators send home a message from the building to their families. They spend a lot of time curating photos and stories to illustrate what their students’ experiences are during the week, to give families that insight into the Brightworks life. To help the rest of the community get a peek at this work, we will periodically update the blog with a message from a band. This week, we highlight Sam and the Amethyst Band (11 year olds).
On Friday, our guest poet, Josiah Luis Alderete of the Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore and Gallery, performed a poem called "The Ballad of Don Miguel," honoring one of the line cooks who worked in the Mexican restaurant his mother opened in San Rafael in the 1970s (and is still operating today!) In the piece, he describes an unassuming septua-or-possibly-octogenarian who, despite working in the kitchen for years, has gone unnoticed and unheard by many of his neighbors in Marin County (and certainly not been fairly paid for his lifetime of labor.)
My favorite chunk of the poem is when Alderete points to all the rich wisdom that Don Miguel carries behind his eyes:
Don Miguel's got tiny cuervo eyeballs
that got miles and miles in them
A slick-black-jet-black hairstyle
and a smooth profile taken right off of a TJ bullfighter velvet painting
A brown forehead full of sayings
that'll take me years to figure out because they're that simple
A week of Brightworks is at its best when experiences rub together in unexpected ways and cause big ideas to echo and ricochet. The reason Alderete writes poetry, which he calls "the people's art," is to "speak truth, preserve history, mark a place in the world, and (simply) remember."
On Monday, we were joined by natural historian Joel Pomerantz, who began his "thinkwalk" of the Presidio with a giant map of San Francisco's historic waterways, which showed the various creeks and marshlands that might be buried near our campus.
He reminded us that you can uncover "miles and miles" of history in even the shortest walk if you look carefully enough and ask the right questions. We walked barely a quarter mile with him and every dozen feet, he would find something interesting to share with us about the the stone ledge outside our building, the different types of redwood trees, the one upmanship between base commanders and how that influenced housing development, and the ice plants dotting the landscape (which he mentioned were sometimes shipped in packages to protect breakables, a practice that surely exacerbated their invasive spread). He told us that he started his map-making and tour-guiding projects after being a cyclist and pedestrian in San Francisco and noticing all the street-level details and wondering how they came to be. That simple, everyday experience has fueled decades of creative work.
Encouraged by Joel, Amethyst Band has really tried to exercise our "noticing" muscles this week, too. We've been starting most days in the lovely redwood grove, where we eat our snacks, work out, and practice mindfulness techniques, like naming our feelings, belly breathing, body scans, and guided imagery to take the quickest, most affordable mental vacation.
We've also started to conjure the comfortable sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of home by drafting "Where I'm From" poems based on the iconic George Ella Lyon original.
Even though we're in the beginning stages of the writing process, I've already been transported to so many special locations in Amethyst Band's lives:
to Iona's grandparents house where spinach pasta boils on the stove,
to Dash's Magic room (formerly known as the Lego Room and before that, the Dragon Room,)
...and to Juniper's cousins' backyard, where, when she's lucky, she's greeted by chickens, geese, and frogs jumping at her feet.
These snippets of writing have been punctuated by objects from home we've lovingly shared with each other. This week, we learned that Addie's family has a special connection to the invention of the Klondike bar, and that Atticus's German roots (and bread recipe) pair perfectly with the grapes, jellies, and jams that Beckett makes with his family.
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Stay tuned for more missives from the bandspaces!