Who I am

My name comes from Hebrew: John was the Precursor to the Messiah, a voice crying "aloud in the wilderness;" my birthday is for St. Lawrence.

— Johnny Mendoza Govea (@JohnnyInJapan) November 21, 2013

St. Lawrence was burned as a martyr in the Catholic telling of the story for holding onto his beliefs: thus, I am of the water and the fire.

— Johnny Mendoza Govea (@JohnnyInJapan) November 21, 2013

Now I live in the ancient Land of the Rising Sun, teaching, as John the Baptist did, though not persecuted in the way St. Lawrence was.

— Johnny Mendoza Govea (@JohnnyInJapan) November 21, 2013

The symbol of my birth, hidden but fully realized

So it comes to pass as it always invariably does, that I must redefine who I am and who I am becoming. In the light of day, I strive to polish my skills as a teacher of Junior High students, those adolescents involed in precarious, formative years. At night, I synchopate the silence with dashes of imaginative curiosity and instantaneous inspiration via this blog, my Facebook profile and/or Youtube.com viewings/uploads. I aim for growth and release of the vision of my mind's eye, but I usually find that those tuggings at my heart are only fully expressed in my dreams.

I know where I came from, to near perfection I know it. And I realize the status of my family here in Japan in impermanent yet sublimely in focus right now. This begs the question of where I'll lead them, to what future space in physical locale and in fulfillment of the spirit of our ancestors. What do you get when you mix Mexican, Apache, Spanish, American, Japanese...Catholic, Native, Buddhist (of two kinds), Shinto and the Nagual? We are in the process of answering that very question each and every day we further intertwine our familial bonds. The "relative pronoun" is just that, relative, a binder of what we know and what we want the future to be. It is a way of focus, a shot of peripheral capture of details that our minds instantaneously filter out and designate in priority of our attention.