Creative Portland

Kaitlin: [00:00:00] Hey there. Do you think of yourself as a creative person? If you found yourself here and you're curious, you are. This is Creative Portland, the podcast made for you by the all volunteer team who organized the Creative Morning Series. speaker series in Portland, Oregon. I'm your host, Kaitlin, and I'm really glad you're here.

Each episode, we are going to share a talk from one of the most generous, inspiring, and creative people in this city. You'll hear from people doing things You probably already think of as creative people who paint, write books, illustrate comics, style photo shoots, make music, even sing opera. There are others who run companies or bake, a few who've broken world records, some who organize festivals, even a rodeo.[00:01:00]

They interrogate sorrow. They create joy. They play. I'm confident you'll take away something different from every person on this show. Each of these talks was originally recorded in front of a live audience, so sometimes they mention things that are on a screen, but those are pretty minor. Today's talk is from Michael Namco, a performing artist, writer, Poet, meditation teacher, and father.

He is also a multiple world champion athlete, and in 2022 was inducted into the Ultimate Hall of Fame. Michael originally gave this talk at Clinton Street Theater in October 2023. And I have to say, if you enjoy listening to it, it's worth seeking out to watch for Michael's physical performance at the end.

You can find more of his work linked in the show notes, and at michaelnamkung. com.[00:02:00]

Michael Namkung: Recently. My father told me that.

When my siblings and I were growing up that he didn't really enjoy being a father and that he was waiting for us to grow up.

That my childhood and his fatherhood was something that he endured, that he just had to get through.

And

it's also the way he approached life, and one of the lessons he taught me was that life itself was something to be endured, to be tolerated, to be gotten through. And because of that, I heard a lot of [00:03:00] messages either directly as a teaching or indirectly through his behaviors, his actions, the way he lived his life.

Keep your head down, don't make a lot of noise, don't complain, be quiet,

certainly not to express. your emotions, because to do that would draw consequences. Maybe the strength of his hand, or the intimidation of his voice, or ridicule. And it makes sense to me now that I look back and I understand him better. He grew up in a Korea that was occupied by Japan under the, [00:04:00] under a 35 year Japanese occupation.

His parents were born under that. And as you can imagine, that meant a constant suppression of Korean culture, Korean language, just being Korean wasn't good enough. And so he did learn to hide, to keep his head down, to stay safe, to survive. One of the consequences of that for me was that I learned to do that myself.

And I always knew that I wanted to be an artist. This is something I just knew as a child in my bones. And there was one day when I was around 10 or 11 years old, when my parents sat me down to have a talk, to let me know that this artist thing really isn't a good idea [00:05:00] and to be an artist, you have to be kind of a genius.

And you have to, you're basically committing yourself to a life of suffering and starvation and you're going to end up living under a bridge, I'd like to say. And sadly, I believed him. And this wasn't the first time I heard this message, this was the sit down to hear the message because I really needed to hear the message.

And uh, and so I went inward, gave up on that part of myself at a young age. and

really turn my energy into sports. Sports was the one place where I could escape from myself, from my feelings of depression and melancholy and [00:06:00] having lost that dream. But I found it in other ways. I found this way of being, of losing my self consciousness, of joining in with the group, working together, being in the moment with my teammates, with my opponents.

and pushing my body to extremes. And for athletes, endurance is a very, it makes a lot of sense. All athletes understand that to grow and to, to make progress, one must endure physical pain. One must push up against the edges of one's physical limits. And so I embraced this practice, I loved to go out and run until my legs were on fire.

I loved to see how far could I run, how fast could I run, how long could I endure that kind of pain and discomfort. And I [00:07:00] found myself as an athlete in my 20s and then as I got into my late 20s and I still hadn't found that creative voice inside of me, it started to speak, it started to sort of make itself known to me in the form of a different kind of pain.

emotional pain. Something's hurting inside of me and I don't know what it is.

And around age 26, I, I couldn't bear that pain any longer. And I decided I was going to do it. I was going to find out what it is to be an artist. I didn't know. And as I began to find that first inkling of my artistic voice, I was just trying to bring all the parts of myself to that conversation. And the first and most natural place that [00:08:00] showed up for that was sports.

Although to be truly honest, I didn't, I hesitated to bring that in. I brought in this way of working with drawing, with working with painting that was very physical. I knew that Physicality was so important to me and pushing my body to these extremes and these limits was very important to me. But I found myself in, uh, in graduate school in my MFA program and I was talking about this and showing these big drawings, these big scale drawings that were very physical and , my mentor said to me, you know, I can.

I can hear how important this is to you, how, how much your physicality and your athleticism matters to your creative process, but I don't really believe you.

And that shook me. And it caused me to go into about a two month [00:09:00] period of not making art, of really looking inside of myself to try to understand what he meant.

And it was a period of darkness and a period of unknown and I was journaling and it was in the middle of winter too so it was literally dark and cold and raining just like what we're about to face here. And coming out of that was nothing more than an enduring, a way of enduring that unknown and a decision to endure that unknown.

And be in that discomfort, be in that, I, I don't know who I am in this conversation anymore. But when I did finally come out of it, it was a way of combining, basically it was a, coming back to the playful decision making of the child. What sounds fun? I'm just going to combine sports and art, [00:10:00] and I'm going to mash them together in as many ways as I can and see what happens.

So, it was a great liberation to find this, this voice inside of me, this way of expressing myself, that seemed to combine these really important elements of my own experience together. It was very freeing, and as I did this for a number of years, I began to feel another kind of pain bubbling up within me.

I was getting pretty good at, it was becoming more comfortable for me to be in physical pain. I understood that in a really clear way, but I didn't understand this new emotional pain that was coming up. And what that was, was a realization that I did not know my own voice. And learning, growing up in my family, I learned that speaking itself was dangerous.

So that [00:11:00] my, the way that I responded to the, those threats, those dangers, the occasional violence that happened. In my family was to suppress that voice and to stuff it inside. And I knew that I had this expressive thing that was happening out in the world, but I didn't know how to talk about it. I didn't know how to talk about what else was in there.

And in 2016, when Trump was elected, I, and many of the people in my community felt a great sense of despair, a great sense of something is broken and a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. Myself and a friend of mine, Mel Day, who's another artist, we decided we wanted to respond somehow artistically.

We wanted to do something to mobilize ourselves, to mobilize [00:12:00] others. And we, together, we created a We created an app and that app was something that we shared with people, everyone that we knew, and we asked them to sing. Now, Leonard Cohen, you might remember, died at that same time, died I think the day before the election.

It was announced a couple days after, and this was another

shot in the gut to lose that voice.

We chose this song, Hallelujah, as a way of giving voice to that pain and that despair, while also giving voice to the hope in the spirit of humanity, the, the desire for something more exalted, the broken and the holy.

And I don't know about you all, but for me to [00:13:00] sing in public, to have other people hear my cracked voice was one of the most scary things I could think of. We asked people to do this and they did that in their in the privacy of their own spaces So they did it by themselves, but we overlaid all the video and the audio together to create this over 100 person chorus and We took this performance to places like Grace Cathedral, San Francisco where we had people sing together in these mass singing events and Most importantly we took it to Washington DC on inauguration day And projected it on the side of a building just outside of Potomac Station.

And blasted the sound of these voices from the rooftops.

Can we endure the complexity of our own contradictory emotions? And can we speak from there? Can we sing from there?[00:14:00]

I'll share with you one, , other little story here. And I'll actually have this play while I do it.

I,

right before that time, , I'd broken my hand, I'd broken a bunch of bones, but I'd just broken my hand in a couple places and had surgery and I was very incapacitated for quite a while. And in enduring the pain or the discomfort and dissatisfaction of not being able to write, to draw, to use this. My dominant hand, I decided I wanted to learn to write with my left hand.

And so I began that process of just slowly, like a child, learning to pick up a pencil for the first time and struggling through forming letters and forming words. And trying writing four words and I really, really got to understand how left [00:15:00] handers experience the world for a little bit, this sort of pushing across the body and the covering up of the words and the smearing and the not, all the ways that it's, it's unnatural to write from left to right for a left hander.

But something amazing happened during this time of not knowing and struggle, which is that in forcing myself to slow down, to be very deliberate. And to pay close attention to what I was doing, I found that my mind slowed down and the words themselves began to pass through my body in this much slower way, in this way that I could kind of marinate in them.

And I began to understand language in a different way. Not in this fast way I had to get everything down and, you know, capture it all or the way that I was conditioned to do with my right hand. But in this way that was more patient. and slow and [00:16:00] meaningful. And it was from this very act of the struggle of forming words for the first time that a new voice inside of me was born.

This is the first time I started writing poetry.

And so I want to offer that any kind of darkness that you find yourself in, any kind of pain and injury, it's not the only thing that's there. There's other, there's other gifts. lying below the surface, if we're open to them, if we can endure that struggle, if we can endure that pain and still move through it anyway.

I want to, um, suggest that the greatest form of endurance is the dedication and the persistence and the [00:17:00] discipline of listening to yourself. of staying in tune with that inner voice, with the inner vision, with your heart. Because there's going to be voices all around you that are always trying to tell you something different.

And so that enduring way that we can stake that, the discipline of staying in endurance with yourself. is the greatest and most difficult and most rewarding and most enjoyable aspect of life. To be in tune with yourself, your own, and it's your own pain, your own joys and your own struggles. The last thing I want to share with you is, um, leave you with a poem, not my own, a poem by Mary Oliver called[00:18:00]

The Journey.

One day you finally knew what you had to do and began. Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice.

Though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. Mend my life, each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do. Though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations. Though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough and a wild night [00:19:00] in the road full of fallen branches.

And stones.

But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world. Determined to do the only thing you could do. Determined to save the only life you could save.

When I instruct people to do these exercises,[00:20:00]

I always say that the idea is to get your body into a place of discomfort, and to push, and to explore that edge of Discomfort, and to watch it slowly turn into pain,

and to sit with that, to not run from it.

In this exercise, I always say, see how far you can go. See if you can get out to that edge when you feel like stopping. And see if you can make one more line, one more line, [00:21:00] one more line,

and you stay with it. This

is the first time I've done this exercise and spoken at the same time,

so I don't really know what I'm going to say.

The poem, the poem's over.

But somehow, I want to dedicate myself to this space. Of being in discomfort, pushing myself and staying with you, letting you know what's going on inside of me. [00:22:00] Like the burning that's beginning to grow in my quadriceps

and the mounting discomfort in my shoulders

and the knowing that As I get out to that edge, it's going to hurt.

Now, when I do these kinds of things, I know that it can be difficult to watch. Sometimes for some of you,

it's hard to bear witness to someone who's struggling,

someone in pain. So[00:23:00]

I also want you to know that I'm safe.

I'm okay.

It's just that it hurts.

It's hurting more now.

I can see that this stage is not large enough.

It's getting, it's getting harder to speak.

Part of [00:24:00] me wants to say, don't try this at home.

Oh, another, another part of me says.

Try this at home.

Can I, can I do more?[00:25:00]

Kaitlin: This podcast is produced by the all volunteer crew who bring you Creative Mornings events in Portland, Oregon. You can reach us at morningsportland at gmail. com and watch the videos of all the talks that are featured on this podcast plus others.

to the Regional Arts and Culture Council, whose 2024 grant funding helped us launch this podcast. Thank you also to our sustaining partner, Wacom, who make each of these original events possible. And to Kova Coffee, who caffeinate everyone who attends. Thank you to Johnny and Simon of Weird Wonderful for their audio production and podcast wizardry.

And to Laura Nickelhoff for managing production. And just a huge hug to each person who's been part of the Creative Mornings Portland volunteer [00:26:00] team over the years. Thank you to Antha. Rogen, Shemisa, Charlie, Chelsea, Christopher, Crystal, Elizabeth, Hannah, Yvonne, Joan, Julia, Kavir, Laura M, Laura N, Leah, Lucy, Sarah, Sumit, Tyler, and Vinny.