BLOG 94— (present reflections tied to March, 2001 journal entries, Buenos Aires, and Super Bowl Halftime)—Today, I remembered it as if it were yesterday. I was in my father’s apartment in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I sat on the bed in one room, in massive pain from the night before when I had pulled my arm backwards to pick something off the floor I had pushed off the night table by accident. My father was in the other room, listening to his news o
n the television, absorbed in his own world. And I was sitting there, not only in pain from having pulled a muscle, but from having flown this far south from my New Mexico home to be with my father, whose emotional absence in the other room only made me feel more alone.
Those days, almost five years ago, in my father’s world in Buenos Aires, were excruciating. And today, as I felt the same pain in my neck and left shoulder, and realized it will soon be three years since my father’s death (on February 23 to be exact),the memories of my attempts at love and connection with my father came back to me. The pain I carried in Buenos Aires had been a buildup of not having felt seen or loved by my father—or at least him not showing me this—and of feeling this ache show up too often in my relationships with men.
That month in Buenos Aires had been my commitment to change, to building a relationship with my father I had never had. And while those first weeks together were painful, the dam of silence, that wall of communication so thick it hurt, my journey south with my father provided much-needed healing. The little girl in me, who had so longed to feel, hear, and receive love from her father, finally did. The few years that remained before his passing became crucial for our relationship to heal, for him to leave this world having given more of himself to his daughter and to those who had waited for him to show love.
Today, as I go further back in time, beyond Buenos Aires, to earlier years, when I was healing from a hip injury (and much greater heart ache), I came across journal entries that spoke so much of this need in me to be loved by my father. It made me reflect on what happens to so many of us, and specifically young girls, when we feel our father’s absence. The messages of what it means to 
be a girl, and later, what it means to be a woman, become extremely confusing.
Recently, I read a blog that reflected on the Super Bowl halftime show (by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir in the Feminism and Religion Blog) and how so many people reacted strongly to two Latinas who danced for a nation with all their sexuality and womanhood on display. Her blog caused me to think more deeply about this piece of being a woman and how we represent ourselves in the world. And it dovetailed into my own experience as a young girl seeking approval and love from my father, and my journal writings about it in 2001.
That great ache and longing to be loved that I felt as a child—and in Buenos Aires and shared in my journal writings 20 years ago—plays such an important role in whom I would be later in my life. “There is such a desire I carry to make a man happy,” I wrote in my journal of 2001. “There’s this begging to be loved and to be allowed to be loved, this feeling of needing to act a certain way or be a certain way to receive love.”
When that little girl longing so much to be loved by her father becomes a woman, what happens to her in relationships? And in this society, where there’s such pressure for women to look good, or be attractive or sexy enough for men (as Trelawney Grenfell-Muir in her Feminism and Religion Blog wrote about) how do women, and especially young women, know how to be themselves and empowered as woman (and especially when not having healed that daughter-father wound)? And how does our sexuality come into play in all this?
It can be a confusing mess, I think, and that became very evident in the uproar and ongoing debate about the two Latinas—Shakira and J Lo—dancing and singing at 
Superbowl half-time. On one hand, these two women owned their sexuality and weren’t afraid to show this. I remember as young woman how I had worked hard to “own” my own sexuality as a way of owning my own power (not waiting for someone to bring it out in me or to see and love me first). It was a way of owning my own body, or not being afraid to be a woman (and not to be in the shadow of my own insecurities). So, when these two women danced, I saw it as them owning their own sexuality, sensuality and aliveness. At the same time, did the fact that these two women danced in a sexual way take away from others seeing them in their talent and their greater soul essence?
It may be a stretch comparing these two Latinas to my own journey as a woman coming into my own as I healed a lost love with my father. Yet, I feel there’s a piece that still aches in so many of us as women…in our DNA and our lineage…and that is of having grown up in a society and world where what we do, how we do it, and how feminine we are when we do it, is judged every day…where being loved and liked for who we are matters…where the ultimate decision-maker is our father or our patriarchal system.
I think about that little girl who became a woman of twenty ago, and then the one of 5 years ago, still crying in the other room in my father’s apartment, waiting for his love and approval. How many of us have lived that? How many of us women have sought to define who we are, not just as individuals, but as women in a society that for so long defined us, that told us who we needed to be to receive approval, love, and power?
When we make peace with that part of ourselves… when we come home to the love we are and the beauty we are as ourselves…no matter what the world thinks…then we’ve come to fill the gap in our hearts we’ve spent so long aching to fill. Maybe we will look at a half time show of two Latinas and be able celebrate who they have chosen to be and honor their gift. We will be able to look in the mirror at ourselves and other women around us and love the heck out of what we’ve become. We will also have an immense amount of compassion for this long and arduous journey we’ve taken to get here and simply love ourselves without a need to wait for anyone to do this for us.
My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is a story of returning home to the earth inside and all around us. It’s now available in Spanish as Niña Duende: Un Viaje del Espiritu, that’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page or at www.michelleadam.net. It was soon be published by the Spanish publisher Corona Borealis and the Portuguese publisher, Edições Mahatma. It can be ordered at a local bookstore or directly from me (for those outside of the U.S.) as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video
e house were open fields, high wheat grasses on one end, and a large lawn and soon-to-be-tilled garden on the other.
The weeks to follow were the beginning of magic, though, of discovering what’s possible when we show up with clear prayer and intention, and leave the rest up to God. Jean, who died several years later, would become one of numerous angels offering me retreat from the chains of pain I had carried for far too long.
About a month ago from today, after arriving back to New Mexico from Buenos Aires and our family’s honoring of my recently-deceased father’s life, I met another angel of sorts in man’s clothing. I met an Argentinean man who appeared to me without cigarette in hand :), but with an embracing heart, passion, and laughter. Together we exchanged mystical love poems; shared—with my father’s spirit, it seemed—Argentinean songs he and I both loved; held communion on a moon-filled mesa that whispered of the infinite until early morning; and danced and laughed inside the light-filled rhythm of our newly-discovered bubble.
poor health, I battled this reality of receiving divine grace within the limitations of this earth journey. And while I tried to contemplate, analyze, feel, reflect, and be with the tension that built knots inside my heart and that of this relationship (quite a different energy from the heart-opening magic of weeks prior), it seemed to only create more tension, more struggle.
Lorca more than 80 years ago. 
feels and no philosopher has explained” that is “in sum, the spirit of the earth.”… the spirit of the earth, which, in moving through every limb of our being, unencumbered and raw, produces an almost religious enthusiasm. It’s that spirit that an artist embodies when singing so profoundly and truthfully, with clear channel, that we are left with goose bumps, and sighs. Unlike the muse and angel, this spirit must come from within, and must be “awakened in the remotest mansions of the blood,” and ONLY once having done so, then, “announces the constant baptism of newly created things.”
grieving of the old…a rebirth:
father’s apartment, to let the memories of our times together seep through the walls, and along the streets of this port city. It’s springtime here again—that time of the year I used to spend with my father in Argentina, his childhood home. It was two springtime’s ago I was there, and, I think, two years before that—as the days lengthened here in the north, but inside the shadow of spring, prepared for winter in the southern hemisphere.
had been with him for many weeks, until the end, in my parent’s home in New Jersey, but I hadn’t slowed down enough to let the grief catch up with me. Maybe I’ve been holding the grief in my lungs, which have been congested for weeks now, and am finally feeling the reality of my father’s loss.
se you here with me. In several weeks, though, I imagine I’ll feel your presence even more. That’s when my mother, sisters, and I will be traveling to Buenos Aires, Argentina, staying inside your apartment tucked away inside the old quarters of your city. It once lay above the empanada shop that smelled of oven-baked dough wafting up toward your place, and then the hairdresser’s where I replaced, with decent hair color, that horrific henna hair color that made the top of my head look like a carrot—and which you kept touching to make fun of.
talking to the drivers and everyone else we met. “Isn’t this city the best city in the world,” you’d tell the taxi driver. You’d sit there in the back with your little black bag you carried everywhere, beaming with joy for your childhood homeland you had returned to.
es became the gift that opened you to love. I adored how you talked to everyone you met; how you let things go that weren’t important; how you didn’t care about things being perfect anymore. What had become perfect was your giving heart, memorable dinners with precious friends of your childhood, and your unbridled passion for small things (like that ice cream you loved at Adan Restaurant—the one topped with champagne and lemon!).
my passion for living this moment, this breath, this spirit of life that is only given to us for this brief moment. I hope you can come, that you can see me, that you can see and feel all of us honoring you where your heart had learned to open so big in your last years of your life, at home, in your Beloved Querido Buenos Aires.
ouse in New Jersey. It was time for me to learn about the medicine of spirit that would become my life’s path.
Inside the hustle and bustle of New York City, Oscar Miro-Quesada shared a message that I have since learned well. Spirit moves through love, he had said, and love is light that reflects off everything it touches. Start with what draws you toward its beauty, he added, and then build gardens from there.
leave behind. I sensed then that even the furniture and walls would miss him.
many moons ago, on Father’s Day, as I lived in my parent’s house in New Jersey, healing from physical and emotional pain. 
The following year, my father insisted we return to Buenos Aires together. I shared songs and poems with him and friends, letting my father know how precious this time was. He reflected back to me how I had finally come into my own after years of searching. That summer was when he also told me he had chronic leukemia (in addition to his Parkinsons and crippling pain)—a disease that would require undergoing months of chemotherapy in the U.S., followed by more treatments and surgery for melanoma, which he later had. Our visit together was one of his last to Argentina before his death.
Michelle Adam 