Com Amor, Dja
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Friday, April 22, 2016
I Was Afraid - Eu Tinha Medo
Sympathetic Character
(Alanis Morissette)
I was afraid you'd hit me if I'd spoken up(Alanis Morissette)
I was afraid of your physical strength
I was afraid you'd hit below the belt
I was afraid of your sucker punch
I was afraid of your reducing me
I was afraid of your alcohol breath
I was afraid of your complete disregard for me
I was afraid of your temper
I was afraid of handle being flown off of, oh
I was afraid of holes being punched into walls
I was afraid of your testosterone
I have as much rage as you have
I have as much pain as you do
I've lived as much hell as you have
And I've kept mine bubbling under for you
You were my best friend
You were my lover
You were my mentor
You were my brother
You were my partner
You were my teacher
You were my very own sympathetic character
I was afraid of verbal daggers
I was afraid of the calm before the storm
I was afraid for my own bones
I was afraid of your seduction
I was afraid of your coercion
I was afraid of your rejection
I was afraid of your intimidation
I was afraid of your punishment
I was afraid of your icy silences
I was afraid of your volume
I was afraid of your manipulation
I was afraid of your explosions
'Cause I have as much rage as you have
I have as much pain as you do
I've lived as much hell as you have
And I've kept mine bubbling under for you *(E eu borbulhava apenas por dentro, para não comprometer você)
You were my best friend
You were my lover
You were my mentor
An' you were my brother
You were my partner
You were my teacher
You were my very own sympathetic character
You were my best friend
You were my lover
You were my mentor
You were my brother
You were my partner
You were my teacher
You were my very own sympathetic character
You were my keeper
You were my anchor
You were my family
You were my savior
And therein lay the issue *(E foi daí que surgiu tanto trauma)
And therein lay the problem *(E é ai que mora os nossos problemas)
And therein lay the issue *(E foi daí que surgiu tanto trauma)
And therein lay the problem *(E é ai que mora os nossos problemas)
Love, Dja
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Monday, March 21, 2016
Highly Sensitive - Profundamente Sensível
I Humbly Offer This Poem To Mother Russia...
Thank You For All You Do For My Family and The World. I Truly Love Thee...
RUSSIA
I was not left for no reason,
It was meant to be
what I wanted to feel like,
it felt like,
to be left,
within...
That was the only way inside this universe.
The place where only who enters,
to be love,
is ultimately betrayed.
Without this unique and powerful ingredient,
no soup can be completely a healthy soup.
No one can exist without it.
I stirred it for twenty years after I left my Papa's land...
Knowing this alchemized feeling,
the one he carries.
Nostalgic, in his eyes, the love for
the peace of his people and family...
I knew to spot it everywhere.
I was never left behind,
I was let to be...
I was
only truthfully,
if I could see it.
Did I want to free you too?
From my own notion of betrayals,
your notion of been taken from
is the same side of
our token.
The other side,
if never spoken to me,
I voiced your silence...
Eternally.
I ask not for forgiveness
but, for an end to both our needs.
The end of all charity.
I may have passed through you
like a violent wave,
but you left me there before that...
Didn't you, 'Putin'?
I went back to look you square in the eyes,
in the face, and really EMBRACE
the American you never were...
Without me.
The land you have never visited,
the people you have forgotten...
As I listen.
All that in two slaps
and all the beatings you
won from me...
That was finally my turn.
You finally gave it to me.
Exactly as you deserved it...
I was not left at last,
and you my love,
are NEVER
without me...
Djanine Queiroz Putin Stalin
(Listening to Zaz - Veux)
Poem Written On May 11th 2022
I'm overwhelmed by this presence... As I learn to stay with my core, your gentle smile enters my eyes, your approach fills my cracks with joy and my breathing has changed since I saw it for the first time... The highly sensitive understands what's not said, feels what's underneath, pulses thick and thin with the wave patterns of every encounter...
Pulling from every direction is this sound, this presence in every little gesture pulling and saying; -I'm there and you're here...
"We’ve been on a roll since
Your breath first graced my skin
This fire unfolds steadily
It keeps me warm within"
On my mind, the still picture of your face isn't so still... It has told me many stories and convinced me to trust your guiding, it has kept me company, every night, just before I fall asleep.
And when I wake up every morning, it invites me to reconsider my old habits and to remember who I am...
-Dja Putin Stalin
Friday, March 18, 2016
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Saint Patrick's Day - Dia De São Patrício
The Real Irish-American Story Not Taught in Schools
by
To support the famine relief effort, British tax policy required landlords to pay the local taxes of their poorest tenant farmers, leading many landlords to forcibly evict struggling farmers and destroy their cottages in order to save money. (Sketch: The Irish Famine: Interior of a Peasants Hut)
“Wear
green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up
the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school.
Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned
only in passing.
Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.
Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:
These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.
First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.
Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato—during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?
Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.
The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.
More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”
Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.
But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.
As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?
These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.
So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.
Love, Dja
Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.
Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:
… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleakBy contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that’s another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.
These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.
First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.
Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato—during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?
Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.
The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.
More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”
Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.
But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.
As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?
These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.
So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.
Love, Dja
Monday, March 14, 2016
Patidos Políticos - Political Parties
-Dja Putin
While we are divided by political parties or otherwise, we will continue deeply divided as beings in this human reality...
-Dja Putin
Thursday, March 10, 2016
You are - Você é
You are not what you do. You are not what you don’t do.
You are not the job title. You are not a labeled societal sub group.You are not your personality;
You are not a happy person, a depressed person or an angry person.
You are not a definition of your own qualities.
Who are you?
You are not who your mother says you are.
You are not who your best friend says you are.
You are not your own descriptions of yourself.
Drop all the labels, titles, designations, descriptions, accomplishments and even failures.
Below the labels, beneath the layers, on the most subtle level…
What do you feel?
What is left?
What is there?
Who are you?
If you are not what you do,
If you are not what others say you are,
If you are not a set of descriptions,
Who are you?
Lets move a little deeper.
You are not defined or confined by the limits of your physical body.
You are not your beating heart, you are not your breath.
You are not your mind, emotions or thoughts.
If you are not all these “things”…
Who are you?
A better question may be not who are you, but what are you?
Take a deep breath into every cell of your being. As you exhale release all the labels, all the descriptors, titles, both other and self created. Bask in this space.
What are you?
Close your eyes and feel your way to it. Don’t define it, don’t put it into words, but feel it completely.
Do you feel a sense of spaciousness, of limitlessness, of infinite potential?
If you are not all or any of these things, if you can not be defined or put into words, but only felt.
What are you?
Remember who, or better yet, what you really are.
Remember your potential, remember your limitless possibility.
Remember that you can not be defined, by self or other.
Remember what you are, where you come from and why you’re here.
Remember your knowingness, your awareness, remember your truth.
What are you?
You are the awareness of all these things.
You are embedded deep within yet extend far beyond.
You are the driving force of all these things.
You are both the wave and the ocean.
You are both the dance and the dancer.
You are both the creator and the container.
You are me as I am you.
Love, Dja
Love, Dja
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