Walking
and Meditating Together With Sidney Mintz
For
Creating a Different World of Dignity, Dialogue and Beauty
Dear
and respected Friends,
My
best of regards and warm greetings to you. I hope this finds you well.
Sid
is a creative and inspiring seeker, co-traveler and friend of the world who has
inspired and continues to inspire many of us to continue to live a life of love,
labor and co-learning and contribute to our ongoing task of self and world
transformations. Sid’s immortal life dances alive with us and our fragile
world and challenges us to link our ongoing engagement with knowledge, self and
society to transformation of manifold sufferings in our world and creation of a
different world of beauty, dignity and dialogues. Anthropology and
history, life-history and fieldwork come together here as part of a new
trigonometry of creativity where fieldwork as footwork walks not only in the
sugar canes of Puerto Rico but also in corridors of sweetness and power in
London and Washington, Dc., Delhi, Beijing and Brussels. In this new
trigonometry of creativity, footwork dances creatively and critically with the
historical and the philosophical in border-crossing and Creole ways surprising
Sid and many other fellow seekers for a creative creolization of the human
condition.
It
has been a great learning and inspiration for me to have walked a few steps
together with Sid who has always encouraged me as well as challenged me for
continued further transformations in life and quest for knowledge. I remember
warmly Sid’s keynote address at the American Oral History Association in
Baltimore in 1988 where Sid spoke on the theme of “History Within History:
Enactment and Memory.” Though much less attracted to the idea of engaging with
the historical as a way of transforming the contemporary than Sid, this lecture
as well as his larger oeuvre, life and work has continued to inspire me
to bring memory work, work and meditation with self and the world, and cultural
work together. I dedicate the following poem of mine to the immortal
life, thought and works of Sid:
Roots
and Routes: Memory Work, Meditation and Planetary Realizations
1
Roots and Routes
Routes within Roots
Roots with Routes
Multiple Roots and Multiple
Routes
Crisscrossing With Love
Care, Chung
and Karuna
Crisscrossing and
Cross-firing
2
Root work and Route Work
Footwork and Memory Work
Weaving threads
Amidst threats
Dancing in front of terror
Dancing with terrorists
Meditating with threat
Meditating with threads
Meditating with Roots and
Routes
Root Meditation
Route Meditation
Memory Work as Meditating
with Earth
Dancing with Soul, Cultures
and Cosmos
[First
written at UNPAR Guest House, Bandung Feb. 13 2015 9 AM; updated in Guwhati on
July 8, 2015 for the International Conference on “Asian Values and Human
Futures, Assam Don Bosco University, Guwahati, July 7-9, 2015]
