about

Welcome to my website.  I am Randy Rodriguez and I hope you’ll get to know me and how I imagine myself and the imaginative/intellectual spaces we inhabit by perusing this site.  I intend to create and sustain a blog that addresses multiple topics including my responses to current political, cultural, and ideological issues both for popular and scholarly readers.

But this site will also be a work in progress.  It is defined largely by much of my evolutionary thinking over the past few years, beginning when I was a full-time caregiver for my sister, Peggy, whose kidneys failed her in spring of 2002.

As a full-time caregiver of her a few years ago, I became frustrated, resentful, and depressed over my inability to imagine and create physical and intellectual spaces of freedom and engagement for myself and with others.  I finally decided I’d had enough of feeling helpless and always complaining to friends and family about my situation.  The book “The Four Agreements,” introduced me to ways of thinking about suffering, I studied Buddhism and began to practice meditation, worked to practice Yoga which I’d actually learned a limited version from a learn-in-a-weekend yoga manual, and began to pay attention to little clues and hints that I could develop into personal mantras to help me focus more positively, with less suffering, in my daily meditative practices.

One of those mantras, one of my inspirations for my meditative and creative and intellectual practice, I learned when I happened upon a televised biography of Bruce Lee a few years ago.  I don’t remember the year, the month, or day of this specific “enlightenment.”  But I remember how Lee’s life was represented as a gradual dissatisfaction and ultimate rejection of the traditional approaches to teaching and practicing the martial arts.  In particular I was impressed with his rejection of their limited and limiting ways of engaging in self-defense.

Of course, his dissatisfaction and rejection came after his own traditional training and mastery of the martial arts, so when he developed his fundamental critique of the traditional approaches his was a thoroughly informed and thoughtful response.  His rejection is highlighted in his words that embodied both a learned and highly developed intuitive and creative method: “Using no way as way.  Having no limitation as limitation.”

I am no Bruce Lee, indeed, but I find in his words a description of some aspects of what I have attempted to do in my life without always understanding it and more so, what I would like to imagine myself capable of practicing now and in the future.

I will not go into the details or evidence of my efforts here.  Nor do I wish to represent my efforts as always successful. I will simply leave it for you to judge for yourself as you accompany me on a journey, a path where we begin with what we think we know–the traditions and practices we inherit for good and ill–and move to meditations where I/you don’t know what to expect, but learn to accept and foster their challenges and epiphanies.

Randy Rodriguez