100 Days: Gratitude and Grace Given
What will save us at the end of the World?
My mental and emotional load fills like water, murky, deep and cold. Deadly not just because the depths alone will drown you as you fall under the weight of cold waters, deep, to touch earths that no humans have before. These waters are dangerous because they are murky, filled with debris, shiprecks of memories and “what could have been’s” and contaminated with petty grudges and great trauma. There is whirlpools laying beneath the seemingly calm and placid waves that touch the shores on each side that will snare and hold you down forever. There is a damn holding it all together and every damn day in the USA erodes it the more.
As days turn to months, prayers answered that I made it here for another commitment. Rooting DC went on without a glitch and the Toward 2040 Fellowship created something really special for the Word, Beats & Life Festival, celebrating Hip Hop past, present and future. I was blown away by the creativity my cohorts wielded. I was also honored to work on a song for this with my brother Romelis, it was such a beautiful moment to share stage with him and see family and old friends once again. Now there are speaking engagements, pride and my retrospective show and other small community projects and engagement to finish up ahead of fall, when we plan to self-deport back home to Uruguay, after 25 years in the USA. After making this difficult decision, and sharing it with my world via a deeply felt interview with a new friend in her podcast, the time feel both the slowest it’s ever felt (and I’ve been locked up! lol) and going way too fast at the same time. I can’t wait to be home, to discover with my children a new and old place. I also wish I had more time, to the see the USA, to be with friends, to say sorry to some and nothing at all to others, to kiss and be kissed.
It’s spring and I have seen some fletchlings and their bird parents nearby as they learn to take flight, I feel like I understand those birds, getting enough wind under their wings to yearn flight, even though learning still takes time. This season I only planted Native flowers in our gardens. I miss committing to a Season and space, the labor of planting seeds and composting the plant after harvest. I take pleasure and pride on creating meals with all that we grow and sharing it with my neighbors. Waiting for flowers is beautiful in itself and I can’t wait to release butterflies through the season and welcoming pollinators in our small city garden, but still, I feel stalled.
I pass my days working every job I can. Some days I am at fancy conferences doing public speaking, teaching and getting paid to do so — My life feels surreal in those moments where I see how far I’ve come. Somedays I am cleaning a house or staffing an event and in between those gigs, and interpreting and consulting contracts I find myself in the middle of a mountain of art stuff, looking through old art work. I took everything out of storage to save cash and moved it into what used to be a living room, now a home studio. I have been framing and clear coating over ten years of art, mostly created during trying times, when we first opened Art Mart, during the rise of Trump, while living in Safe Harbor Shelter for Survivors of Domestic and Sexual Violence. It’s bringing up a lot of feelings and thoughts and my hope in putting this show together is not just to try and sell the art, after all, I cannot take these in my suitcase, but I feel like this is yet another step toward healing for me.
This past week I worked ten hours shifts of physical labor for two days after doing an outdoor event and getting the garden together, the rest of the week I spent on calls and in the middle of a flare up. On days like this my only prayer is “god don’t let today be the day that ice runs through my house and grabs me. First of all it’s a mess here and second, I’ll definitely die in a detention center if I’m captured when sick” this is so far from the American Dream. This is the kind of nightmare you read in memoirs of victims and survivors of fascism. I do not want to live like this here.
A tale of two moms and safety in the USA:
After such a week of fearing for my safety whilst working my disabled ass off I hit another break in the damn as news of a white woman verbally assaulting a Black child and family at a park went viral, not only did this woman get away with a hate crime but also managed in less than a weeks time to raise well past half a million dollars, to “ensure her safety” after being caught verbally assaulting a child with racist epitaphs on 4k. Some of the donations are literally 1488 and other Nazi nonsense, some of the comments within the donations are slurs.
Since November we have managed to raise over $10k in mutual aid funds to get the necessary paperwork, plane tickets and our household home. I really need to raise the rest of the moneys necessary to assist a swift transition home.It’s not just getting tickets, packing and shipping stuff and going: I have to secure housing for me and the kids so you know the usual setting utilities, shopping insurance getting the things we need for the home, I have to do transitional paperwork through the worlds slowest embassy in person with my parents, kids and their dads… entire schedules need to be aligned... It is not just pick up and leave. For example, I have to account for every single item I still have to carefully choose to take back with me, all of it has to be put in a spreadsheet and weighted and packed and sent to Baltimore so it can be shipped to the Montevideo port where they actually go through everything before releasing it.
Transferring my life is expensive and exhausting.
I was venting to a mentor about how someone like that can push hatred in the world and be rewarded greatly, it’s disgusting and unfair that people like me struggle to raise up funds just to leave for our safety. My friend agreed, and also reminded me that hatred loves to show itself like that but so does love. What saves me at the end of the world is my community.
After much thought, I had to agree, because one donation at a time my community is getting me free. I’m sure strangers who sympathized with my need have supported as well, but I know that most all donations are people that I know and love. During Easter weekend my longtime friends from the DIY Scene here in the DMV put together a show to raise more funds toward our goal, it was such a beautiful way to get together, see what the others created, Logan, my 12 year old even joined us as a live painter. It felt really good to reconnect and dream of our futures together. And methany? She’s gone an entire life privileged enough to not even get charged for hate crimes on a child when there’s video evidence of course her white victimhood is going to be prioritized and rewarded, and she still will be mediocre and miserable. I chose to be the opposite no matter what: I’m grateful to be here and I am grateful for anyone that is here with me. The love offering is worth a million times more than money given in bad faith to bad people. Best we can do is pray they’ll come face to face with the hatred they put out into the world and have a come to Christ moment.
Here is a link to the song Romelis and I worked together on, enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT9ZTqimhOE
Leonina Arismendi is an award winning Uruguayan artist, human rights advocate and environmental justice activist in the process of rematriation from living in the USA for 25 years back to their Motherland of Uruguay. Support their safe transition: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-the-arismendi-family-in-their-return-to-uruguay
