It’s an honor to have Carrie Mixon at Green Olive Arts helping us to see and feel

In this very personal entry, re-posted from her blog, Carrie seeks an anchor in the wind of sensory overload during her first week in Tetouan, Morocco.

Here

by Carrie Mixon

So many small things strike with force: Here. Here. And here. Winds from the mountains and the sea meet at the street corner cafés, rushing through the skinny streets with no regard for robe or bag or paper, late for their meeting. But what is late, when you must stop to pay special attention to the cords hanging opposite my window, to pull on them playfully and watch them swing. Here and here is time. Nothing is later than it is.

First I must learn who these people are, but only by looking and not looking like I’m looking. The Arab, the Berber, the woman from the mountains. Per usual, my insides churn with questions that have no particular words for them. First my eyes must see the fruit sellers, the script on every sign, the walls and windows, the green shutters on every window in every wall. First my eyes feel, then my fingers feel. Itchy, cold fingers that long to wrap themselves in the striped blanket around the radish lady’s waist, free from cold and free from curiosity. When I sit down and write poetry (what else can I do when I am overcome inside?) nothing but questions seem to be able to stand on their feet. My periods roll off the page and get lost in the cracks between the tiles. My exclamation marks rocket out the window. Only the question marks hook themselves in and withstand the wind of Morocco.

The same question comes, a confession of a young artist: What the heck am I doing? Certain friends, professors, and parents, will laugh at that. They heard me say it months ago, yet here I am. They told me what I was doing. They made me tell them what I was doing. I finally asked God what I was doing, and he said, “Living.” A new place to live and a new way to live, because you cannot go to a new place and live, and not change at all. Historically, that has not been sustainable or good. Colonial pasts and presents can show us that. Now I am in Tetouan, learning to be an artist. There are so many new things for me to learn, appreciate, and love. The sound of the fruit sellers outside my studio window calling to their customers in Moroccan Arabic reminds me of all I don’t know yet, nor will ever learn in a month and a half. How can I ever survive being a baby again?

This fear – of ignorance, of mistakes, of offending – makes me an infant, bawling because I cannot see my mother’s eyes behind her hand. So I say to live is to change, but I cannot grow dangling in midair, knowing nothing. Rather, I must be planted in the good dirt of what I do know. What I know is old. The promises I live in and by and for are older than the rocks on the mountains that rise, framed in every side street. Only by rooting deeper still, I think, will I be flexible enough to bend and be reshaped by this new wind. It laughs through my window at me and blows the dust off my work table.