B.L.O.G.

For years I have been telling my husband that he is an accidental American, and I am the Real American because I am the American by choice.  He was born in the United States, and had no say in the matter.  I had decided to become a citizen, and when I did, I pleged allegience to the Flag willingly and freely. After I married Barnett,  once a year from 1971 to 1975, the U.S. Government would send him a letter asking when his wife was going to become a citizen.  Barnett would ask me and my response would be the same, "When I am good and ready, not before."  The truth was I did really know if I wanted to be an American. Although I was born French, there was not much "French" about me.  Born and raised in South East Asia mostly by my Lao grandmother, went to school in Vietnam, grew up in both places Vietnam and Laos.  Though I was always remind by my Vietnamese mother that I am French (how strange is that), deep in my heart I knew I was Lao.  I am...

Not exactly the Bamboo Forest of my childhood, but this will do! As a child I lived in a convent with many other children; and no way to escape the crowd, the noise, the praying, and the unexciting and insipid moments of the life of a child in a convent.  I found a secret place and every day at sunset I visited the nearby forest of bamboo where I would lie down and listen to the steady rhythmic heartbeat of the earth, or perhaps it was my own heartbeat.  For eleven years I performed this daily ritual; even in the rain I could feel this pulse as though I were connected by a root like umbilicus to the dark core of the earth. The forest in a child’s mind, in my mind is in the middle of a mystic setting, a majestic realm, a kind of a  kiva , a womblike vessel.  This enclosure had all the power of an ancient temple; it was a place of dying and becoming.  I was the sole priestess to decide my own fate.  I learned a way of being in the world and in trans...