Hip-hop and training, sustainably

        Tonight is one of the nights where I am cross-posting on blogs. This entry makes sense as a report on hip-hop, a report on health and fitness, and finally a reflection on sustainability. It is a little incomplete because it is coming the night before a triathlon that I signed up on February 1 to compete in. I should put compete in quotation marks, because, really, the only person I am competing with is myself.

     
       As I mull the triathlon, a poem I wrote three years ago comes to mind. It's entitled "B-Girl Warrior" and celebrates the b-girls I met and got to know in Seattle in 2008-10. Here it is:

The b-girl seethes, like a warrior.

She lets nothing show.

Her moves are like the white crane spreading its wings,
stretching past its earthly limits.

But her smile shines down to earth,
upon those the world ignores.

What does she battle?

Frustration?

Injustice?

She won’t let on.

She’s a warrior;

She lets nothing show.

At the cipher edge, she stands, cross-armed, waiting, watching,
hinting that she has a plan.

But until she answers the call
and steps into the ring,

nothing shows.

  I need to be clear that as much as I would like to call myself a b-girl, I do not feel I can lay claim to that title. I do not battle in the way that these warrior women do. But I do draw a great deal of inspiration from them, which fed my training for the triathlon. I am sort of impressed with my competitor self: In the months between February and July, I lost eight pounds, and increasingly began to feel like the lean mean fighting machine that I've aspired for years to become. Giving up a big vice -- drinking wine and other alcoholic beverages --  has made a big difference. So has getting the full eight hours of sleep, and so has being resolute with my training.

       I have been thinking, of late, of how my work with hip-hop and my training are connected, and how that connection nurtures an understanding of community building that is such an underlying component of sustainability. I always worked out, and I always felt that exercise was an important component to living a good healthy life. But I do feel like it took on a new dimension this year, gaining a level of seriousness and commitment that I didn't have with it previously.

       I have been thinking of asking a colleague who I met through the Hip-Hop Education Center at NYU, if he would be willing to serve as a mentor for me in hip-hop. The individual is a few years younger than me but much older than me in his understanding of the community-based wisdom that emerges through hip-hop. I thought that one question that he might ask is what I think I might need a mentor for. I guess there's a few responses that I could give to answer this question.

       The first and perhaps the most obvious is that I would like to have someone to guide me toward gaining a deeper realization of the oppositional consciousness that lies at the core of how one thinks about knowledge (or the fifth element) through hip-hop. I hear and appreciate the importance of academic types being in touch with communities, and at the same time I feel that looking at my own community -- predominantly (but not entirely) white, rural, and traditionally grounded in the trades of farming, trapping, hunting, fishing, and logging -- requires an oppositional consciousness that is not traditionally associated with hip-hop. Now, I could drive the hour to Albany or Schenectady to find hip-hop, but would that be my community or would it be constructing something artificial? I also could move. But the fact of the matter is that I chose to live in the place where I live. Not because I detest cities; on the contrary, I love cities and miss many aspects of the deeply urban environments where I used to live. We chose to live in the country because we wanted to grow food, we wanted to have the space to make art, and, well, truth be told, I think we wanted some peace and quiet. In a society that continues to harshly judge interracial relationships, female-breadearners and stay-at-home males, and desires to do daily life differently, we wanted to be left alone.

  I have a different sort of community via social networks. I have friends all over the world, and colleagues and like-minded allies in many different places. An increasingly large number of these individuals are associated with hip-hop. When we get together on Google Hangout calls, through Facebook, and face-to-face at conferences or hip-hop events, the interaction and exchange is refreshing. I think that community is an important one to build. But I also look at where I'm at, and I think it's important to build in the place where I'm at, too.

      Artists and intellects have always -- let me revise that to often -- sought refuge in nature. B-Girl Naj, one of my first connections to the hip-hop community in Seattle, liked practicing outdoors, even as she professed not to really feel at one with nature. Some of her favorite memories were of getting into a car with her crew members and driving out to a park or beach, and then setting up a stereo and getting down with the moves. She particularly loved it when a crowd would gather to watch the group dance, and once in awhile, they would put out a hat, which always resulted in some extra income for their effort.

  There is peace in coming home to a quiet place, where I hear owls, see deer, and occasionally smell skunk. There is peace in spending a day under the summer's heat pulling weeds, and gathering vegetables from my backyard to make into meals. There is peace in training on roads around my house, where "around-the-block" usually means at least a four-mile loop. It would be nice to have nearby lakes or clean ponds in which to swim right around the block, but they are in fairly good supply, just a few miles.

  The discipline of training is about helping me become a better person. Training keeps me off alcohol, and encourages me to cultivate vegetables, raise hens for eggs, and to support local farmers by purchasing the meat that they raise, usually in kind and sustainable ways. Training also helps me write better, and with more discipline because when I sit down at the computer, I do so with a healthier state of mind as well as a stronger body. Writing can be an exhaustive process, especially if you're not writing with discipline or with an end goal to build.