Two Days
I chose October 1st to launch my Patreon because it made sense. Given the timing and my deadlines by incorporating on 9.9, this gave me enough time to put my resources together and launch. In these three weeks, I have applied for one business grant, two art grants, two art features, updated my website, updated my website images, and then updated them again, updated my personal video, learned new editing techniques, learned new photoshop techniques, learned how to use Adobe Spark, posted on social media too many times, fine tuned my pink bomb graphic and uploaded it to Redbubble, networked with the Adoptee Influencers, consolidated a workshop for Roanoke College, made some new friends, reached out to The Universal Asian and planted some more seeds that I am sure I have forgotten to mention. Some seeds have already sprouted, and some may never breathe, but I also will not know for a while. So, I plant them and forget them. Later I may be happily surprised when something good happens. This has just been the business.
After finishing the most recent Adoptee Healing Project portrait I am taking time to work on my golden interpretation of Boo. This has gone slowly. I need to be in a focused, undistracted mindset to really draw and so the flurry of the business has taken my energies. The passing of Ruth Bader Ginsberg has been no small ripple in the fabric of this time and so as I approach my goal, I feel my steam fading. I cannot avoid it. If you are to be with me on this journey, then you must know that my work is contemporary and always a response to a reality that is often untenable. But here we are two days till launch, and I have one video to create and one business account to open and then I will be ready. “The readiness is all”, spoke Hamlet, though I am certainly not preparing for a “Red Wedding.”
The October 1st launch coincides with two holidays, Sukkot and Chuseok, both celebrating the Autumn Harvest and other things. I mention Sukkot because I grew up loving Sukkot. In my parents’ apocryphal version of conservative Judaism, Kabbalism and Messianic Apocalypse we celebrated Sukkot. Well, the whole traditional Jewish calendar anyway. As a child the ritual cycle was my life. September is the triple threat. Rosh ha Shana: the new year begins with the shofar gathering the tribe calling to the future, the “when.” Then Yom Kippur follows quickly landing hard with reproach and discipline, repenting, and fasting, asking for the great forgiveness of all wrong actions taken over the year. The aching belly of one day of abstinence, the quiet and empty day. It would seem that the reason, the “When,” had not come was surely because we had not been worthy, had not made it so. And then the closing service, the prayers, the Hebrew with the melodic Sephardic music this would take me. The Kaddish; prayer for the dead always makes me tear up and though I no longer practice or believe, this is the song they will sing for me when I go. These songs are so unlike the harsh Ashkenazi incantations I would hear later in life, where for me the joy seems to be missing. The last of the three holidays, the gift of Sukkot arrives with a turning back to the land, the changing colors of autumn, the coolness of the air, the tangy citrus smell of the orange and gold Citroen egg and the shiver of the reeds shaken to the four corners of the world all beneath a night sky of stars and branches. I see the tent made from my mother’s tablecloths stapled to two by fours, joined by braces and hammered by my father. These were yearly raised like so many of the platforms and tree houses of my childhood. This was the gift, looking through the lace of the oak branches and leaves at the patterns of stars. These are the rituals that made me.
I mention Chuseok, because as I have recently connected with lots of fellow Korean Adoptees, I have been exposed to more Korean Culture than I am used to. I told my husband last night that Chuseok was coming up and he asked me what it was. I told him, “I have no idea,” which makes sense. I had to look it up. Being raised as a trans-racial adoptee by Lutherans who converted to a Jewish messianic cult gives the nature of my American culture a little twist. One can say I have Korean Ancestors but being raised with the bloodline persecution complex of a once converted Jew and an annual education in the Holocaust since the age of 9, I do not like the use of bloodlines. In addition, since the Koreans and their allies felt it was in their best cultural interests to exclude children of questionable lineage, I do not take kindly to such distinctions. In my experience these bloodlines seemed to be a convenient tool for persecution, membership, and other superficial projections of reality. Nevertheless, Chuseok is a Korean Autumn Harvest holiday and a time to celebrate one’s ancestors. So as Koreans celebrate everywhere and look to their Ancestors I also will raise a glass to my genetic ancestors and hope they too wish me well in this new venture and if there is rice to be harvested I will keep my door open. One never knows, Elijah may stop by or you. Just remember to wear your mask.
Much love,
Herzel
Two days
