Saturday, November 25, 2017

In October, February, and August We Become an African Village, Right Here in Santa Fe!


Dear Kamajou Tadfor, Founder of Afreeka Santa Fe, Fiesta Fela, Remembering Mandela and related Local Celebrations of African Culture.

Some of my favorite gifts in life, include global and African culture, music, people, poetry, cuisine, arts, dance, and community. Warm people, indigenous culture, great food, and glorious landscapes beckoned me to live in Beautiful Santa Fe, after visiting over 20 years ago. As a Santa Fe local of 18 years, it has been a similar set of qualities I've cherished, through attending seven solid years of Afreeka Santa Fe's Annual Fiesta Fela Celebration.

Fiesta Fela, from its inception has gathered the community in revelry, cultural pride, savory flavors, colorful fabrics and head wraps, live beautiful rhythms and dances of Africa. The celebration centers around Fela Kuti, whom I was blessed to know and love, across the world from Africa, and even see and hear live, in Berkeley California, nearly thirty years ago. The experience of that live concert was like no other live music concert or presenter, I had ever experienced. It lives on inside me.

I am grateful to you Kamajou Tadfor, your Family and large community of Friends. One year the festival kept a large community of familiar guests dancing into the night, at El Museo de Cultural. Every year the event grows and changes in ways that always inspire, uplift and yes, surprise the community.

We count on you and our Community to come out and shine, via vendors of authentic African food and drinks, Nigerian Batik Arts, Fine Artists, visiting artists, West African Vendors of clothing, art, drums, jewelry, and more, from the Motherland. There are always some new variety of fine crafts, treasures, specialty drinks, foods, snacks and more. This year friends and I gathered at Chef Ahmed's mobile Jambo Food Truck, for the yummiest African Cuisine and drinks around.  

The event itself, featuring African Dancers, Master Drummers, Activist Poetry, Music of the African Diaspora, North African Belly Dancers, lifts our spirits from morning, through mid day, and all the way to sunset. I don't think I've ever gone straight home after dancing, dining, and shopping my way through all of it. I even one a series of passes to yoga classes at Body, two years in a row.  So many local and visiting friends gather each year for the festival, that a tradition grows, where we keep the celebration going long into the night, as we continue, often in restaurants and bars, a mere walk from the Railyard. 

On more than one Fiesta, I have welcomed new African American guests to the event, and remained friends, after they live in Santa Fe and move on. It's always endearing to see, meet, and greet the people, who just happen by, on the event.

The artist who come and paint paintings, or sculpt live sculpture out of clay, astound guests, as their art grows energized from the music, admirers, and community alike. Dean Howell has sculpted impressive, monumental heads African Heads, three years in a row. This year the human theme was replaced by an endangered rhinoceros!

Some years the Tarnoff Art Center has set up easels, tables, painting and drawing supplies, and even pottery wheels and instruction, all for free. This year the Inspiration Squad hosted by Artist Laura Tarnoff, hosted a booth featuring our art and artists, as Laura masterfully juggled the music, community gathering, and live painting all in one day. I brought and showcased original abstract, yet between meeting new guests, socializing, eating, dancing and photographing the fun, I never touched brush and paint to a canvas. And that was perfectly fine with me. Sponanaity is the essence of the heart of the day. So I let it all show up as it did. And now I'm filled with inspiration to pour into my next painting and projects.

This year's highlights included the most colorful sea of trees backdrop I can recall in years, opening with The Swank's Brothers playing a rousing set, including an supremely funky rendition of Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa. The band from Haiti made me want to bilocate, to be in the food line, and the dance floor simultaneously. The final headliner Zimbabwean band, Prince Kudakwashe Musaruwa and the Main Ingredients of African Soul, stirred all the hearts around, activating souls and the main outdoor dance ground alike.

The event is a true treasure. I always love to donate to the event, yet love inviting guests to attend for free, as free is how it is presented.

Grants, gifting and donations help make the event the true success that it is. One of the most magical moments this year, was when our dear friend Kirsten Wing's name was called as the winner of a most gorgeous, original, hand dyed, batik quilt, by Yoruba Artist Rafiu Mustapha of Raf Remi Art. This had a lot of special meaning, symbolizing new life crossroads opening to this friend, who has newly rooted in her dream community, right here in Santa fe.

It was beautiful singing and dancing along to Nigerian Master Drummer and local Santa Fean of countless years, Akeem Ayanniyi and his local band of African Drummers. We contributed our joy, often, in call and response, as you, Kamajou, Akeem, and others shouted out, every body say "Yeah, Yeah"... "Yeah Yeah!"

We missed the friends and family, who came every year, yet now live outside of Santa Fe.

Joy was generously shared by all. Friends who came for the first time, were surprised, at all the years they'd missed. To attend one Fiesta Fela event, a Remembering Mandela Gathering, or even an impromptu African Rhythms DJ Dance Party, is to want to attend all offerings Afreeka Santa Fe Offers.

What grand expressions of your welcoming, generous, infinite African Heart for the Arts and the People. We may not be Africa officially.  But for one, two, or three days a year, the Santa Fe Railyard, or some inspiring location becomes a glorious, beautiful, friendly African Village, and we all leave with our hearts, souls, eyes, ears, feelings, and bellies smiling, satisfied and full!  We take this out and spill it over, into local community, family, and friendships alike, better for every precious moment of the festivities!

In Grace, Joy, Love and Gratitude.

May what you have created, collaborated, and set into motion, continue for countless years to come. People come and go in Santa Fe. May Fiesta Fela, and the triumphant Spirit of Fela Himself, live on in the people, here and everywhere!



Ever so much thanks. My spirit is forever renewed each time we share in this grand day!

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Love This Book, These Gifts, This Author, and This Guidance!

www.youtube.com/user/lisaaromano1
www.LisaARomano.com


My Five Star Book Review of Lisa A. Romano's Memoir "The Road Back to Me," on Amazon.com.


Thank you yet again, Lisa A. Romano.  You really came through for yourself!  And in doing so, you really came through for me and so many of us, via sharing your gifts, guidance, learning, and journey.

Grateful you are such a generous Spirit, in Form.  I see you as the Beautiful Angel you are, daring this tough mission on the Earth Plane, to come through the hidden challenges with flying colors, sharing such raw open truth.

Now, to my fellow future readers, and allies on the road back to full true selfhood:  Lisa has a lot to share.  Her book "The Road Back To Me," is delightfully easy reading.  In fact it feels like attending a cozy slumber party in your pajamas, with an old friend.

I am Lisa's age peer, and an adopted daughter of 4 lineages +, nature and nurture, of Narcissistic Borderline Personality Disorder, BiPolar Disorder, Depression, Addiction, and I suspect, feel and know: sexually predatory abuse to my Birth Mother, in the home, where I was programmed in the womb, for this life.

While I have written two books in two "Write Your Book in a Weekend," accelerated workshops, in recent years, reading Lisa's book helps me see the pitfalls, I have faced, being raised to have no self, no healthy self, and to see, feel, hear, and perceive other people's needs as somehow more valid than, or winning out over my own.  In fact, ironically, Lisa's book helped me see more clearly the whole all too human pattern, of being covertly required to lose one's self, to accommodate other maladaptive, wounded, shut down, checked out parents, and behaviors.  Lisa's life story helps me shed light on why at 52 years of age, in 2017, I am still learning how to figure out what I need, want, and choose, and how to shift old sick internal patterns to better, step by step, find my "Road Back to Me!"  Her book helps me see, and make sense of why I got so shut down, traumatized, and wounded, facing, avoiding, and detangling from my own Narcissistic Mother wounding.  Her book helps me see why I have not yet published, or even read the 2 books I wrote, under the tutelage, of a Book Whisperer/Author who's birthday season it now is.

Astonishing!

I had already begun to explore, and gain healing and guidance from Lisa A. Romano's prolific outpouring of outstanding YouTube support videos, for Adult survivors of Narcissistic Abuse.  Today after completing her book, I went on-line, and discovered a set of 19 Guided Healing Meditations on YouTube, all with very specifically tailored foci.  That's when Lisa jumped from a human who struggled, transformed, awakened, progressed, and on her way, created countless classes, workshops, books, YouTube Videos, a Facebook Support Group, and more for the millions of us, who face our own flavor of these, all too familiar challenges, to Full Blown Angel Incarnate, in my view!

Her book eloquently draws you, the reader in, to experience her life, as if side by side, as she faces torments, ignorance, bullying, scapegoating, blind eyed "love," and worse, at the hands of her, friends, romantic, and life partners, her own self, and her parents, who, while nice, hard working people, likely, seemed to have missed the parenting 101 courses, most of humanity also missed out on, one way or the other.


Lisa A. Romanowww.LisaARomano.com


Lisa guides readers on an epic, "Alice in Wonderland," like journey, from seeming normalcy, down into the underbelly of the beast, that is the American Dysfunctional Family System.

She does an amazing job of expressing all the layers from, oblivious denial of reality, to her own personal flavors, of the bizarre adaptive behaviors we end up making to survive oddly preoccupied, unaware, conditionally loving, judging, fearing, controlling, shut down, closed off parents.

While my experiences were different, in may cases, I saw myself mirrored very precisely, in so many moments and details of her journey.

Knowing this confident, exuberant, expressive, successful, beautiful adult Wayshower, through her on-line presence, it is shocking to travel through her trials and travails in youth, as she experiences betrayal, emotional, and verbal abuse, as she was molded to, from early on.

She does a beautiful job of reminding you of just how oblivious to their abuse, the abusers can be.

She brings hope to many, as she somehow finds truth, help, support, validation, and guidance, on her way to become a Light Beacon of this and more, for so many of us.

Without giving away too many precious details of the reading experience, I simply recommend this book highly, to anyone who is, or has been human, and or raised by fallible, awkward, shutdown humans themselves!

This powerful gem of a guide book, is both a roadmap, a friend, a gift, a treasure, and a key, helping us find our way through so much madness, back to the light left always shining within.

It will fluff your feathers, warm your heart, and open doors on your journey, if you open your attention and simply allow it in.  This book comes wired with unconditional love, raw experience, profound wisdom, and a familiar sense of humor and triumph.

It's sort of like reading your own youthful raw journal, only it's published, her own, and offers some sort of resolution, and personal revolutions, that can be hard to find in one's own, unedited, unpublished journals.  Many of mine were so raw, I unfortunately judged them, tore them to pieces, and threw them away.  Lisa reminds us that we have access to those chronicles, whether saved, destroyed, ripped to shreds, discarded, or salvaged.  

Lisa is a living guide, who knows her terrain.  Her unquenchable curiosity, empathy, and drive rewards all who are drawn to don some flannel pajamas, and climb into the sleeping bag, by her side.  The party is growing bigger and brighter.  Jump in, and be sure to invite some of your friends! Misfits are welcome!

If you've ever wished, "if only I could change this parent, boyfriend, girlfriend, partner, boss, government official, or spouse!" this book will cheer you onward, to a most empowering disillusionment, that helps you see, how irrelevant, impossible, and irreconcilable those pipe dreams truly are.  Instead you will laugh and cry your way back home, where you are seen, heard, felt, known, possible, probable, and yes, cherished, valued, valid, and lovable!


Map of the Narcissist


All that in a life story!

Get the book.  You won't be able to put it down, or read anything else till you finish!

That was my experience.

Much Thanks and Love on the road home, Lisa.

Looking forward to exploring my transformation through more of your tools, gifts, contributions, books and guidance, on the way to unleashing and opening my own, and of course to sharing you with friends and clients alike!

Grateful!

Namaste Dear One(s)!


Artist & Soul Artist Jen Klarfeld
www.TrailblazingTransformation.com
https://www.youtube.com/user/jenlynart

Truly, 
Jen Klarfeld
Artist and Soul Artist 
&
Lead Trailblazer at Trailblazing Transformation
Santa Fe, New Mexico

P.S. Hugs and praises.  What an awesome slumber party shared!

P.P.S.  Somewhere I read or heard you joking about how you must be an Alien, because you sure felt like it, in your family!  I am trained in Dolores Cannon's Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique.  If you ever prioritize listening to Dolores lecture on YouTube, "The Three Waves of Volunteers and the New Earth, or read her book, by the same title, or any of her 19 published books of hypnotherapy transcripts, you may find you feel a special affinity for our Galactic Heritage, as well as the sheer mastery and courage we Volunteers brought into this kooky, crazy, beautiful, terrible, war filled, karma based, quarantined, experimental, ghetto of a free will based planet!

P.P.P.S.  I am currently taking a giant leap of faith, involving art and soul, in Santa Fe.  I hope to soon carry some of your books side by side with those of my other favored teachers, including Dolores and Julia Cannon, and Vianna Stibal!

Graced and Grateful!  


- Jen