Meditations on Love and Isolation

apology

2011-10-13T12:51:00.002-04:00

There are moments (and they come closer together these days) when the world is unintelligible to me. When, despite so much evidence to the contrary, I feel like a child.

And in these moments I think I just want to escape responsibility and be the child I imagine myself as. I think that being an adult is hard. Owning your actions is hard. How easy it would be to not learn how to be a better human being, how hard it would be to be the person my parents raised... And I am stuck in the middle, trying to figure out how to live. How do I love? How could I ever be anything else?

Who am I? Am I the kind of person I want to be? What is my fault? How do I make it better?

They don't want me to ask these questions, because if I get better, they have to. If I am able to not be cruel, their cruelty is called into question. If I apologize, they are accused.

So: I'm sorry. Sorry for the ways I have let myself be defined by things I didn't want, sorry for not speaking up, sorry for not doing more. And I forgive myself for not controlling the world. I realize that mistakes have been made but I will do better.

The New Nature is here, and it causes Diabetes

2011-09-24T11:43:00.001-04:00

The relatively slow pace of evolution versus genetic modification offers an advantage: At every stage, there is trial. If an animal becomes faster, its prey may become stronger. If an animal becomes scarce, its predators may get smaller. Evolution is a constant dance where every infinitely small change is felt by every other part. If [certain] humans (because let's not kid ourselves- this is not something that would be democratically decided) changed the genetic make up of, for example, rice, we might expect to see several results. If we made a species of rice that grows faster and hardier and that has more vitamin A, we might find this kind of rice replacing the old rice and helping people by providing a steady source of food. We might also see this kind of rice replacing plants that were native to an area, and limiting the food available to other species. We might find that this rice doesn't keep time with the dance of its new home, that the nutrients it is taking deplete the soil and that the nutrients it gives to humans increases human population while not dealing with our still unaddressed issue of overpopulation. This rice could be dependent on agro-chemical inputs, putting the low wage farmers who would be growing the vitamin rich crop into debt. The producers of this crop might leverage that debt in the minds of the public with the image of blind children, weak from lack of vitamin A. We may find this rice to be a new allergen, to cause a pest problem, to be dangerous to mice. We won’t know any of that, of course, until it is too late. We might find that there is a substantial chance that this rice will not fix vitamin A deficiency, and that the whole thing was only ever intended to make money for the company through 70 patents on the rice and plans to sell it to big farms.
We might find this rice lauded as a humanistic endeavor. We may find Science coming to its rescue, saying that it’s probably safe and that anyone opposed to it is an environmental extremist. But when such large consequences are on the line, we might ask Easterbrook what, exactly, makes us fit to play g-d? We are creatures of this planet, and the rules should be evident: compete, do not wage war. Do not deny your competitors access to food. Every other species manages to live within these laws.
Easterbrook might think that Native Americans lived “shivering in the cold, starving when crops failed, watching [their] children die of malnutrition” (Easterbrook 56) but in reality they lived in a sacred world. They lived in the hands of the gods, and when the gods saw fit to let their people see morning, the people celebrated. In this day, we die of diseases we made over the course of years of torturing in animals in factory farms.
In this day, Native Americans die of diabetes because the government took their land and gave them lard and white bread. Natives die of suicide and alcoholism because there is nothing sacred in a world where we cannot trust the gods to take care of us. Easterbrook might rather live in a tech-topia, but in reality: this is it. The new nature is here, and it causes diabetes.
Mander calls us to an awareness of a “fundamental truth”, a “reverence for the earth”. (Mander 65) I agree with Mander, but I want to take that further: It isn’t just the reverence with which modern Christians take communion that we must relate with the earth: It is the trust a child has for a loving mother. Trust the planet to know what’s best, trust that evolution will win, every time. Trust that in the Absence of the Sacred, the New Nature will be the death of us yet.

http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/kabernd/seminar/2004/GMevents/AC/Criticism.html
http://ngin.tripod.com/goldrics.htm
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/failures-of-golden-rice/
http://monthlyreview.org/2004/02/01/rice-imperialism-the-agribusiness-threat-to-third-world-rice-production
http://www.diabetes.org/in-my-community/programs/native-american-programs/

Momentum

2011-08-28T12:32:00.001-04:00

In some moments, you are sure that there is nothing outside the room you are in. It isn't that you are truly thinking about the universe stopping at the door- that your mother and siblings don't exist, that you don't have homework to do, or that your phone will never ring. It's the opposite, really- you are truly NOT thinking about those things. Any acknowledgement of a time or place or feeling other than this one is abandoned. Any hope for the future or regret for the past is left somewhere near the quadratic formula. In these moments, whatever darkness holds you seems like your ancestors and descendants. I had one of these moments Friday. I had a moment where nothing existed other than the customer I was dealing with, the too loud music of the amateur band, and the blister that was forming in my shoes. And then, suddenly, the opposite. I remembered this class and the outside world and my password for my email account and all of the things I have done and not done.
Contemplative education is about making connections, so let's draw some lines. If I were climbing a mountain and struggling for answers or if I were working for minimum wage at a coffee shop maybe some times it would feel pointless. But maybe a tree would give me some wisdom, maybe I would find the door to the bathroom and hide from the moment long enough to breath deeply and feel my heartbeat and not do my job for just a moment. And then maybe I would hear a bell or just turn on the sink. I would, maybe, be more aware. I would, maybe, remember to be.

The Road Ahead

2011-08-20T09:23:00.002-04:00

In a moment of indigestion, I reached a decision about the future: I will be a part of it. And it's funny, but I can't say I ever imagined being 30 before that moment. Before I realized that my ankles are sore and my skin itches, I could not commit to getting through these discomforts gracefully.

Here I am, on the other side. Here I am, having seen the darkness and come out the other side baptized and clean. I am okay. I am healed.

What would it mean to know how far I can go? I know that my feet will be tired but I have already strengthened them for the task ahead. I know that there will be new blisters, but I know how to make new skin. I know there will be moments when I am tired, but I know how to rest.

Is this what growing up is? Finally being able to go forward, knowing that you can take care of yourself? FInally knowing that you will be okay.

It is a long walk to where I am going, what I want to do. It is many failed attempts away from being knowable, many wrong turns, many injuries. I will make this world better, though. I will get there.

To treat the wounds of isolation we have only the balm of love.

A Line in the Sand on Your Beach, a rant about false choices.

2011-07-05T11:51:00.001-04:00

In a world of false choices, I think we forget how radically free we are. I am going to tag a few people for this, but feel free to read, respond, repost, or to take the next few minutes to pet your cat. I have something to say, but you don't have to listen.

False choices: Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace. And that kind of false choice is less appropriate before a wedding than after a rape. I don't know why we all assume that a rape victim who doesn't report before s/he has a chance to think about it is lying, but I call bullshit.

We've got plenty of choices: after we allow CocaCola to become massively rich, invasively present in our daily lives, and over represented in our food pyramids, we can still say we've had enough. We can still call it quits, start drinking water again, start demanding clean water for the communities Coke does business in again, start SPEAKING. Maybe it's too late to bring back the species that are gone, but it's not too late for those of us who are still here.

I'm tired of straw men. Stop telling me what I think long enough to listen and you might be able to change my mind. What I think: Only you know what your choices are, so figure it out. Make the call or don't, donate to the cause or don't, or do it later, or do it tomorrow. Don't let them convince you that there's only one way to do this. I don't know what to do either.

There is a moment when you know you are right, but don't confuse it for knowing what's right for me. You are not a prophet, and I am not your disciple. I have priorities and maybe today they will not line up with yours, and that's okay. Don't think I don't care about you just because we disagree- I am not your god. I am your friend.

Go vegetarian or eat from a factory farm: or figure out what works for your body and let me figure out what works for mine. Consume what you want to take from the earth, give what you want to give. We are all given life, and we all give it back. In the end, I just want to give you more choices.

I want you to know that it's not too late to apologize for wrongs done in past lives, it's not too late to take responsibility for your actions, it's not too late to turn the water off, even if you're half way through brushing your teeth already. Maybe it's a drop in the bucket, but maybe starting somewhere is better than never starting. Maybe you have an entirely different idea of what this movement's supposed to be, and maybe we are both wrong. Maybe if we listen and understand ourselves to be fallible we will take what we hold most dear and allow it to coexist with the world.

I want to let you feel the way the insides of my organs feel, but the best I can do is allow you to feel yours. For every strength I have, I am crippled. In every place I come short, I stand tall. We balance each other and there is value in choices I would not make, in words I do not know. Before you ask me to clarify, I will be more precise: there is nothing clean in baptism, and holding on to our personal truths blinds us to all of our options.

I don't mean to imply that there's no absolutes, only that I don't know them. I don't know where we're going or how we'll get there, but I'm doing my best.

So don't ask me to draw a line in the sand for you- it's your beach.

cyclical

2011-05-03T19:06:00.002-04:00

this is only the beginning, I want to tell you. This story that will be told so many times- it is because this is the start. I am so young, too young for endings. In the world that I can create, this is the beginning.

And you'll smile at me and maybe think I'm sweet. Maybe you'll allow yourself to believe for a moment that it's real. Maybe you'll forget that you thought you'd change the world, too. You'll remember what it was like to be full of hope and forget what it's like to be told no so many times. You'll forget that you've been hurt. That you don't believe in this kind of thing any more. You'll let my voice lull you into excitement.'

You might forget that I've been hurt. That's why I'm here, that's why I have to say this: You are not the only one who's burned out, and you're not wrong. I love and respect the efforts you've given up, what you tried and failed at, the visions that never left the insides of your eyelids. I have those too.

I am too young for you to remember that I have been hurt and grown too. That I have failed. That I have learned from you and the world I live in is older than the world you lived in. I have more experience to draw from if you'll lend me your memory.

I am telling you that this is the beginning because there is no going back and starting from yesterday. Today must be the beginning and I must be the one to begin, but I will not be the first. I will be starting with the memories that you have left me, with the energy of youth and the knowledge of some one who has already failed enough to know that failing is just part of learning.

coffee stained

2011-04-13T17:05:00.002-04:00

It has been too long and we both know it. We can breath in the same space, maybe, but we cannot breathe the same air. We hardly know anymore what it was like to understand each other. You have left me to twist into something more real, and I have left you unblemished by my foray into the world of wage work and too little sleep and...

And then... And then we find ourselves in synch one more time, given one more chance... I have hoped for so long the best for you, for your family. You are always in my prayers, and it is only because of you that i can bring my self to my knees and pray. It is finally holy again, in this world. I am finally allowed to speak with my gods. I have missed you. Sometimes in the morning I have woken up and found an empty space, like a missing limb, deep inside my soul, my unpainted fingernails, my morning coffee. You are my decaf. You are my extra ten minutes of sleep. You are the moment I read Patricia Williams for the first time and I cried like a child. You are my in text citations.

I am splitting like drift wood. You are stained wood made to sustain even the biggest waves against the legs of your mighty pier. You stretch into the ocean, theorizing about fish and salt water and the sun, knowing all from your one little place and your long time. You will never need to be replaced because you are stronger than the whole world and it will just move around you.

I left the safety of the academic bay for the tragi-comic world and open sea. I fell in love with a mathematician. I learned how to do the same thing so many times in a row that I can convince myself it's meditative. I forgot what problematic feels like when it's said in the midst of a women's studies classroom and everyone knows what it means and nobody questions whether its problematic to use a word that non-academics don't use.

I have kept a space for you though. And when we find a few minutes we can always sit in the sun and let ourselves fall back in synch. When we can both forget formalities and be honest. Neither of us knows what's right. Neither of us can say whether the movement'll do any good and whether I've burned out or moved on. And neither of us has to try any more to label what the revolution will be. Because the revolution isn't love. We are something and maybe neither of us wants to label it but I know enough to ask you if you're okay. We are testing the waters again. I am trying to hold a pen in hands more used to swimming for the horizons than writing. You are dancing with hands more used to turning pages. We will find a middle ground, maybe. We will find a way to be in communion again.

songs about self

2011-02-28T09:50:00.003-05:00

I touch the edges of what it means, these days. I sit high above the world pulled into my own head and liver. I sit in my anger.

I have no words for where I come from, who I am. I am reading these things that talk about me and I do not recognize myself. I know that outside the space of my skin on hers, there is little of me to understand at all.

Wanting to tell you what I know is one thing, but finding the words is another:

I am a lady, the way my grandmother taught me. I will not throw away the things my family has given me just because it is no longer popular to have respect for the persons around me. It is now considered laughable to give respect to the land, or to the man who is looming over the counter, waiting for his latte that he demanded should be at the cost of a black coffee.

Personhood will exist outside of me, but at least I'll remember how to sing. I keep reading these academic texts and I don't understand where I fit in anymore. I can't find myself in the words.

Context is everything, and my context is shifting. In a relationship that crosses generational and cultural borders, where am I? How do I handle my next generation views of holding hands for queers with the fears of some one raised in a military dictatorship 40 years ago? And this isn't an academic question, although I'm sure there are academic answers.

I suspect I've been using academic answers for too long, allowing them to sit n my skin but never absorbing them fully. I suspect that I am in the things I read, I am just blind to how to find myself.

Who am I? I used to be a student, but I spend more time each week cleaning than in class. I spend more time at my part time job that will barely allow me to buy a car than reading academic texts. I used to be a woman, but these days I cannot see that word and feel myself in it. I am in exile from my ideas of who I am allowed to be. Suddenly, nothing makes sense but the way my hands fit together in my lap, my lips quietly closed. I can't talk about myself any more, and I cannot see the world fairly without that context.

Joy

2010-11-07T22:45:00.002-05:00

I caught myself almost vibrating with happiness today. In the woods, next to this creek. I was laying the dirt and weeds next to a friend, both of us looking up at the canopy above us. In the coolness of the afternoon, I was burrowed in a hat and sweater. I think I touched on joy today- allowing it full access to my felt and my heart and my head.

I do not think I knew what that felt like. It is difficult to sit in one place long enough, to put other thoughts away, to be some where long enough to be joyful there. For me, it is difficult some days to find even twenty minutes to calm down... But I think I will make room for this again.

I think this is important for us, as people who tend to run too fast for too long. I think remembering that sitting with pain can sometimes be the only way I can sit with joy is important.

I am looking at the world and finding myself in it. I am finding new ways to exist. And in these new ways, I am finding ways to allow for differences. I am finding ways to allow more than one right way to live. More than one right anything. Joy exists in many moments. My joy is teaching me how to live. It is telling me about ethical theory, about who I am, about why I'm here. Joy is giving me new ways of seeing justice.

I want to examine (later, another day) how joy interacts with justice. For now, it is enough for me to be grateful and to know that I will have more chances to listen.

Biomass

2010-11-04T08:26:00.002-04:00

It feels early in the silence. I have been up for a while now, but maybe it doesn't matter when it comes to the eerie feeling of being awake before any one you could talk to is.

In the hours before the rest of the human world joins me, I am at peace. I woke up in a pleasant mood this morning. Like my body was rewarding me for sleeping eight hours. I like waking up when it is cold in my room and I am underneath a pile of blankets.

In the morning, I root around my pantry for food. I grind and brew coffee. As I consider pulling some espresso, I am also considering school.

I consider the woods that I was in this weekend. What if I could just stay there? What if I didn't have to worry about politics anymore? What if I could exist outside of the systematic ways they have for categorizing me?

Running away hasn't been this appealing since I was 12. But every time I find myself too stressed out to deal I close my eyes and remember the woods. I remember the ideas, the garden, the tiny house. I breathe and I wish I were breathing the scent of the dirt. Wish that I was surrounded by biomass and not concrete.

Is this what burn out feels like? When you begin to fall asleep in class, when you start eating on a normal schedule? When what ever the organization that you are working with becomes a chore? I want to be learning to garden. I want to be thinking about the ecosystem, and I guess I wouldn't mind thinking about academic ethical theories but why are we in a classroom? Why are we closed off from the rest of the world?

My toes stretch into the blankets on my bed. I wish I could just stay here a bit longer. Wish I could just skip the rest of school, all the parts of my life that aren't about persons, all the parts that don't exist when I am with my friends. The woods don't see the lines of the grid in my smile.

Fish Oil

2010-10-31T22:42:00.001-04:00

http://www.buddhanet.net/mp3/huxter/huxter_mindfulness%20of%20breath.mp3
http://www.buddhanet.net/mp3/huxter/huxter_healing%20painful%20emotions.mp3
Sometimes, I think I am a slacker because I never do things the night they are assigned. It just takes me a while to consider the assignment fully. Like this paper: A meditation. I have meditated on breathing and difficult emotions. (And haven’t we all meditated on difficult emotions? But, honestly, it was incredibly helpful.) I don’t know what I’m doing here any more. I am sick. Maybe that is where I should begin, maybe that is the rightful beginning of this story: I went for a run. When I returned home, I listened to this meditation on difficult emotions and I tried to hold my anger. I tried to understand and sit with my disappointment and feelings of weakness. When I was done meditating, I took seven of the thirteen pills I take at various points during the day. These pills are new. They are not something I do with out thinking. Among them, I finger and hesitate two: the fish oil. I do not want to take them. I do not want to have caused the death of these fish. My body is sore, exhausted. My head hurts. It is still bruised from last week. I am sick. I am trying to be aware of my body, trying to exist honestly, trying to accept this: I am sick. It is bitter, sticky. It sits in my throat, on my tongue, just behind my teeth. As I meditate, I am pushing at the idea, trying to will it away. In my hand: the fish oil pills. I take them. I hate myself, for just a moment. I am trying to be compassionate. I do not know where this act lies.
This meditation is in my head. I listened to it last Thursday (the twenty-first) and it has been rolling around in my bones. I wonder about letting things go, wonder why I am taking the pills. In a panic, I stop thinking.
And then I am in a bookstore and I am staring at this book and it is in my hands and I am reading it and it makes sense. I knew the name Chodrin was familiar... I am thinking about this meditation again, thinking about dealing with emotions and she is telling me to go to the places that scare me. She is telling me to experience the emotions. Telling me to not let these things make my heart hard. It is so easy, I know, to begin to hate the world. It is so hard to begin to love it. But how? Do I take these pills that might make me better?
The ocean is over fished. We are killing it. It takes our poisons inside of it, cleansing us. It baptizes us. It creates us, giving us life. We are killing it.
Grief is clinging to my bones like honey on a stir stick. It is filling my skin and begging for my attention. I am sick, and it needs my attention. My body doesn’t feel like every one else’s during meditation. I am not relaxing, not sitting up straight. When we open our eyes, I am disoriented, dizzy. I do not know how to hold this emotion. It seems too big, too heavy for me. I am sitting next to it, though. I acknowledge it.
It is still early in the week. I have not written anything for this paper and I am beginning to worry about it. I do not know how to breath or deal with difficult emotions. I do not know how to accept this.
I pass out. It is public, embarrassing. When I wake up, I understand briefly how to accept it. I know the words around it, take the pills, receive the treatment. I am learning to rest. I am learning to live lightly, in ways that I didn’t ever expect to have to live. I am learning my limits and how to fill them. And then, just as quickly, I am full of shame. I tell myself that because it changes it is not me (a mantra from the meditation). I try to tell myself that it is okay to be angry, sad. I try to tell myself I will still be there on the other side of this emotion. I wait for it to leave me, but it lingers until I am running and it is dark out and I am exhausted. When I rest, I am no longer hurting. When I go to bed too early, when I I am shaking and I have to eat every two hours, when I am tired, I am trying. Compassion is learned, so I am learning.
By the time the weekend comes, I am too tired to deal with difficult emotions. I go back to breathing. It is an old favorite, a new voice. My breaths are jagged at first. They are uneven. My thoughts pull away from the meditation. They tell me stories, beg me to pay attention to my responsibilities. I am trying to sit, trying to balance myself. The meditation is over and I start it over. I try to relax. Try to calm myself enough to do this. This time, my breath is slower. It comes evenly, quietly. It is gentler. My head spins so quickly I feel like g-forces just pushed me upside down. I lie down, restarting the meditation. Breath pulls in and out of me. The world spins. I want to be in bed. I turn off my computer. It is too much.
In the morning, I ignore myself. I make breakfast but only drink coffee. The fish oil is in my hands again. I breath, slowly. I let myself swallow the pill. I wonder if this is compassionate.

Corporate Sponsored Slumber

2010-10-13T14:13:00.001-04:00

What can I say about life that you don't already know? I mean, you too have meditated on love and isolation. When i read things that make me tingle I know that they are not new ideas. They are coming back to me. Like Snow White, I have woken up from my Disney inspired slumber. I have found myself in the words that other people write. I have found myself sighing with contentment at calls to revolution.

How do we go from here? Nobody answers that question. Those who do are ignored. We are asking the wrong question. We keep asking, what should the entire society do? when we really need to know what we, personally, can do. We need to know how to survive and we're wrestling with ethical questions.

This is an ethical issue, of course. How could what we are to do be anything else? But it is more than that. I t is a desperate attempt to leave the isolation of the wold world, to allow ourselves into the new world. It is a way of saying we need love.

To Transition

2010-10-12T22:22:00.002-04:00

If you will allow me to vision fifty year into the future:

It's been fifty years and I hardly remember the way they used to do these things. "Objective" news went out with the idea of objectivity. Maybe we just all got too caught up in the crisis. I don't know. I do know one thing: Gil Scott Heron was right. The revolution wasn't televised.

When the world fell apart, there were a whole lot of people that weren't ready for it. We didn't know how bad it would get. Maybe some of us feared the worst, but some of us... Well, some of us were ordering McDonalds when the world ended.

Dealing with the shock of it all became a specialization in itself. Those of us who had some warning tried to soften the fall, but to be honest we lost a lot of people in the first years to culture shock. After every body played their survivalist fantasies out and realized they would probably not be wintering in Aspen this year, there was some upheaval.

We got real good at talking people down those first few years. We became experts in love because if we hadn't, we would have lost our sisters and brothers, mothers and children.

The education was fast. It was like a child learning language- all of us pawing at the ground, trying to nurture the soil back into a living system. In the first year, we figured out what didn't work. After five lean years, we had our first good crop rotation. After that, it was just a matter of tweaking the details and teaching the kids.

Transportation was the big hurdle for the engineers. Really, transportation of water. Imagine having a city full of people and the closest clean water being too far to carry for most of them to walk, even if most of them hadn't been on a diet of slim jims and corn sugar. Now add that most people expected showers every day and flush toilets and you'll understand why we left the big cities the way we did.

When the old world gave its last rattle, a lot people wanted to set up a government. A new money system. An economy. Some kind of meta system to guide us through our post-civilization life. Maybe it was just the influence of the post modernists, but I never saw it as a good idea. It never happened where I lived, anyway.

We tried a few different ways of dealing with deviance. At first it was like the wild west. Trial and Error showed us how to get things done though: three rules. Be kind to your tribe, punish those who are not, punish those who refuse to punish. Some researcher told us other primates functioned well on that system, so we tried it. it works for us, but we hear about other ways of doing things all the time.

Medicine was definitely the worst. At first we worried about gunshot wounds, broken bones, pneumonia. But then we began to realize how sick many of us were: cancer was our plague. Those who didn't die of heart disease in the first few years had time to heal themselves. Any one with the big C wasn't so lucky. No doctors had the resources for chemotherapy or the transport options for expensive medicines. If your liver failed in the old world, you could get a new one. Lots of people were put on dialysis if their kidneys failed. After the collapse, you just... died. At first it was tragic, but then it was like we just got it. Death happens. It happened before energy intensive treatments. It happens after. It doesn't make it easier to lose someone. Just easier to deal with theoretically.

I mean, I don't know what we expected. It was harder, I think, in some ways. but in a lot of ways it was this huge sigh of relief. Like, the entire world had been hurting and all the sudden we just stopped hurting ourselves. People call it the collapse, the revolution, Armageddon, the end time. We just call it the Transition.

2010-10-01T18:45:00.002-04:00

I've been finding new ways to exist in the world, lately. New ways of accepting how I interact, what food tastes like, how often and when I want to sleep. I've been finding ways to move, to push at the ties that inactivity have put around my feet. I've been trying to reclaim my life because I think I gave it away during that time I was trying to be normal.

I want to love quickly. I want to grow into being that kind of person. The person who laughs easily and cries sometimes, too.

The sky gives me secrets if I look up. The soil will tell me stories if only I will stay long enough to listen. I am trying to give myself the room to hear the things that I have forgotten to listen for. It's been so long...

Faith is seeping back into me, coloring my skin again. Trust is a little easier. But the exercises hurt sometimes. For so long I have been loving with a limp and now I am reclaiming my stride.

Healing ourselves is always the hardest part, I think. It is always the thing that no one ever tells you how or when to start. You don't even know when the bleeding will stop. For me, what ever this world has been and who ever I've been in it... It's time to move forward.

The music of the world rubs my skin, tapping at my head. It is time, every thing seems to be saying. Things are changing. Things are getting better.

Liberation from Suffering

2010-09-29T12:27:00.001-04:00

“Let the Dhamma and Discipline that I have taught you be your teacher when I am gone. ... All individual things pass away. Seek your liberation with diligence.”
Buddha, as quoted by Armstrong, page 186

I get the feeling that my style of reflection is supported by Buddhist teachings. Shifting inside of a paradigm that is crumbling (New reports suggest that 1 in 7 Americans lived below the poverty line in 2009. These figures are conservative at best, using the cost of living from 1955.) it is a time when many of my classmates have been searching for a kind of liberation. It is a time for many of us to question how we have been told to learn, how we have been told to think about ourselves. I have been reflecting on community. In Intro to Philosophy I answered “Who Am I?”, and it is time to revisit that.

Buddha is compassionate. All of the texts suggest this, over and over. But we cannot examine this compassion without also examining identity. Buddhism teaches that we are all energy, all one community of life. There is no “I” as such, only cause and effect, no moments, only patterns. Ecologically, this is an important concept. The gopher tortoise in Florida is an endangered species. The tortoise itself is a magnificent creature worth saving. They generally live 40-60 years and during that time they will tunnel through an average of about 4.7 acres of land. But the real reason the gopher tortoise can’t be allowed to go extinct is because 200 other species live in those holes. When an area where gopher tortoises live is paved over, the tortoise is stuck underground and starves to death. When all the tortoises are dead, those 200 other species will have no where to live. We see this in tons of ecosystems: plowing fields kills the grass and without the grass the fungus will die and the worms will starve. Without the worms, the birds won’t come. If the birds don’t come, your soil won’t receive enough nutrients. And within a few annual cycles, you will kill the field. It is impossible to look at parts of a system and identify them fully. I don’t see why that wouldn’t apply to humans as well: Buddha’s teachings are understood in the context of Hinduism and his time. I can define myself through my relationships, through the causes of how I got here. Recognizing the entire ecological community as my identity is not too much of a stretch for me.

Compassion necessarily flows from this realization. Buddha wouldn’t kill an animal because he is that animal. The relationship between me and humanity, between humanity and animal life, and between animals and the community of life is not metaphorical. It is real, dependent and absolutely paradigm shattering. It is time for us to let our ideas of individuality, of Independence, pass away. In a time when many people are starving, we still lock up our food. In a time when humanity is at its absolute largest and requires the most energy it has ever needed, we are killing the community of life we depend on.

Seeking liberation from the answer I provided to my intro to philo teacher about Who Am I is a start. Our larger identity must be reclaimed if we are to end human suffering.

Holy

2010-09-27T11:23:00.000-04:00

I grew up like any girl who would later become me: Best friends with a Phillipina girl who wouldn't realize that she isn't white until we were both twenty and revolutionaries. Unhappy and middle class and quiet. Believing in angels and a fundamentalist god, and eventually magic. Hearing stories. Telling stories. With a sister. Imagining my way out through a little door in the back of my closet. Always knowing there was no way out.
And you are like a miracle to me: you who believe in the way people can be better, in the way our society can be better, in the way out. You who are still telling stories about the door. I want to believe in you so badly sometimes I doubt my faith just on principle: something I want this badly can't be real. There can't be a way out that won't hurt, won't tear me open and leave all of my insides behind. There can't be a way out that won't kill me. But I do believe you. I know what it's like to find the door when you are hurting. to know that the passage you are about to walk will hurt more than anything you've ever felt and that when you arrive, it will be worth it. Maybe I am the only one who could believe you. Maybe if I had been anyone else I could not conceive of the pain you have to feel to find the door, to stare at it and flirt with it and make up stories about it, until one day: you just walk out. Maybe being anyone else would leave me without the callouses that I have earned. I am ready to find the way out of this world. I believe in you and what you're doing because when the home or world that you're in is abusive, terrifying, unloving than some one has to tell you: "It's going to get worse before it gets better." And for a moment, in the journey, when it is too dark to see you will forget why we are even trying. I will, too. When that time comes, it's okay. If it didn't hurt this bad, it wouldn't be the way out. And maybe I am the only one, in the myriad of possible Courtney's I could have been, who will be following you. Maybe I have to follow you, though. Maybe when you talk about the door I will not be the only one who knows that even if it hurts, it won't kill me. Even if it is hard, it is incomparably easier than staying here.
You are a miracle to me because your scars do not match mine. The ways we carry our pain are different. And yet, we are walking, running, dancing. We are moving in a time when the world would rather us be stagnant. We are singing in a time of silence. We are holy in a time of the profane.
I'd like to honor my pain the way you are teaching me to do, the way you have shown me. I would like to find dignity in this world, and restore grace. In this incarnation of who I am, I have not forgotten what it is like to be on the other side. In my pain, it is easy to pretend like the oppressors aren't hurting, that "they" are happy, fulfilled. I can feel them, too, though. And their scars don't match ours either and if we were to stand toe to toe our eyes wouldn't align. Maybe being anyone else would allow me to escape without them. But anyone who would grow up to be me would never shut the door in the closet behind her. We have found a way to honor and experience our pain and it changes everything. We have to love past now, have to find a way to lead our people out of the old world. Like Moses, we have seen the shackles binding our mothers and brothers to a life of misery. But we, in a time of the blind, have been given vision. In a time of the deaf, we have been given the music of the new world. And we aren't just leading the Israelites out of Egypt, we are taking the Egyptians too.
You are a miracle to me because when you talk about escape you don't mean to the top of a mountain. You are escaping by changing the entire world. With our mismatched scars and our songs, we are building something holy in a time that honors the profane.

Degrees of Faith

2010-09-20T10:06:00.000-04:00

Daniel Quinn wrote in “The Story of B”, “There is only one degree of having faith, and fifty degrees of losing it.” Something that has been standing at the edges of my mind, tumbling around my unconscious probably. Buddhism doesn’t ask for faith.
I have been raised in faith systems. Faith has always been a virtue in the religions I have studied. Only in faith could you really understand my parent’s religion. But Buddhism asks you to realize the truth. Not to take the teachings to heart, but to allow your heart to find the teachings. But before Buddha got there, he needed to lose faith.
I, too, have lost faith (at least in some degrees... maybe I am a 42, or maybe I am well past 50 and now have faith in a different paradigm altogether).
So, the four encounters: an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and an ascetic.
And, in parallel: my church met in a nursing home. You could see the sick and the old every week. Death was normal. But faith... faith allowed an out. Faith could swallow the uncertainty of life.
The fourth encounter for Buddha was an ascetic. A man devoted to finding the cause of human suffering. For me, it was someone devoted to stopping it.
Suffering (for humans or non-humans) might be how we all work down the degrees of losing faith. But maybe Quinn had the context all wrong: losing faith doesn’t leave you adrift. It leaves you firmly planted on the ground, awake as it were. It lets you do something our cultural stories don’t really want us to do: see the edges. Much suffering is unnecessary, and we can stop it. We don’t have to live like this.
The four encounters are tickling my mind, too. Finding new ways to parallel that feeling at the end of a day filled with philosophy and social critique. Finding places in my mind between the water crisis and the oil spill. Maybe in order to move out of the system that gives suffering, we must shift past faith. Maybe the new way of living is really already there, and all we have to do is see.

Systems of Thought

2010-09-19T22:38:00.002-04:00

I am trying to build a system. Systems building in philosophy is weird because nobody really does it anymore and maybe that's because we're all so caught up in specialization, but I don't know. Maybe it's just because it's easy to break a system if you can break any part of it. maybe we're too afraid of being out argued.

I believe it is ethically wrong to destroy the land, plants, animals, and air that we rely on. I do not believe it is wrong because we rely on them, but I might believe (some days) that we can find out that it is morally wrong by admitting we rely on them. I also believe rape is ethically wrong.

Okay, so now we figure out how to deal with those:

Kant proposes the "categorical imperative", which is his way of figuring out if something is ethical. The idea is that if your ethical choice is not the ethical choice you think would be a good universal moral law, it is not an ethically sound choice. Kant's ideas are complicated by the fact that he only applied moral worth to privileged, white, adult, men. But let's throw out Kant's prejudices and use only his basic idea. Now we have an ecologically sound idea that Daniel Quinn expounds on nicely. If everyone else can't do it, you shouldn't either. Ecologically, Quinn interprets this into his "law of limited competition". It states that any species can use any tool they can to hunt, trap, and prey on their food but they may not deny their competitors access to the food. Practically this means that I may hunt deer, but I may not clear cut forests (destroying the homes of thousands of species) to build cattle ranches which I protect with fences and poisons to feed only humans. He tells the parable of the law of aerodynamics. If a person does not know the laws of aerodynamics, they still work on that person. If a person creates wings out of wax and feathers and jumps off a cliff in Icarian ecstasy, they will still fall to the ground. Likewise, humanity can ignore the laws of life, but they will not "fly". They will crash, just as if they were flapping heavier than air wax wings. Quinn suggests that it is ecologically immoral to break the law of life BECAUSE it doesn't work.

Ethically, this is pretty radical. That the universe could be set up in such a way as to evolutionarily prefer, to existentially prefer, the ecologically ethical is absolutely paradigm shifting.

But what about rape? Rape is not selected against evolutionarily, one might even argue it selected for. So, do we scrap the idea of a moral universe? Or do we allow that while SOME rules may be ecological necessities, others are merely social?

The systems of thought that allow Dependent Rational Animals (to quote MacIntyre) to destroy the environment for so long without ever looking down and seeing that our wax wings don't work is the same system that allows for institutional injustices like racism and sexism. Rape, we get the feeling, is intrinsically immoral. SO let's look down. I'd like to create/find/follow an ethical theory that recognizes that rape and ecological destruction are both ethically wrong, and for the SAME REASONS.

Breathe

2010-09-12T16:35:00.003-04:00

Deep breaths. Try to understand breathing. Wonder where the air goes. How your body metabolizes everything so quickly. Breath faster, testing the limits of the system. Feel light headed. Hold your breath.

Slowly, try again. In. Out. In. In. Out. Out. The rhythm soothes you into concentration. The more complex the pattern, the more difficult it is.

You give up on this one too. Again: In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

Breathing has been one of my biggest challenges. Maybe meditation is something better done by people who have overcome basic physical challenges... But even with 20 years of practice behind me, every time I think about breathing I get it wrong.

I am sick right now, I have a cold. We're all familiar with the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night because you can't breath. That feeling has me thinking about air.

I spend time every day trying to learn how to breath. I do it slowly, laying down (so I don't fall over), and with as much awareness as I can muster. I follow the breath into my lungs, allowing my diaphragm to lower into my stomach. I feel the air cool my mouth and throat. I feel it against my skin and in my ears and on my eyes. Breathing has become a central goal of my existence.

I think breathing is one of those things that get trampled in our rush to distance ourselves from the bodies we inhabit. Maybe its just a part of that hatred for anything that reminds us we can't actually exist outside of these sacks of carbon. I don't know.

I just read Plato's "Symposium" again. Much talk about higher and lower love. If I'm reading it right, higher love is intellectual and lower love is bodily. I don't really get it.

Ernest Becker calls us "Gods with anuses". Maybe evolution didn't set aside such a different way of living for us after all. We all still have to breath.

Culturally, of course, we have done away with the necessity of breath. Smoking is pretty normal and air pollution is even more so. And why not? If the world's air gets too bad to breath, we'll just make some more. Or move.

We have some nice cultural metaphors for breath though: an office job is stifling, we are drowning in debt. Maybe we should cool things down and take a breath of reality, eh?

So, I'm learning how to breath. I'm learning to breath when I'm angry or sad, when I'm tired, when I'm sick and I wake up and my entire body is aching. I'm learning to forget about all of the little rhythms the social world has constructed for the way I live or breath and stick with what my body does when I'm not looking:
In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

Some Thoughts on Buddhist Thought:

2010-09-12T16:32:00.002-04:00

Some Thoughts on Buddhist Thought:
I am told that Mythos is a different kind of knowledge. I like that. Mythos and Logos are interesting concepts to me. In logos, I have rejected (and this story will be so familiar to every other college student that you barely need even to read it) my family’s religion. In mythos, I have found a new way of finding the world sacred. It is an odd feeling to wake up and find you are no longer an atheist. It would be even odder, I think, to see a flower bloom and not think “holy”. Maybe logos has no room for creation stories, but every time I hear about the turtle we live I know that there is something true in it.

The class is now talking about world views. Worldviews have long been a stumbling block for me. I can never feel with any certainty that my ideas about metaphysics are as accurate as my ideas about racism in the (in)justice system. Maybe it is something about crossing cultures that creates a deep instability of teleology. My grandmothers taught me good luck charms and told me about angels. Public school taught me about standardized testing. I still am not sure how to build a worldview from the ground up, but I’ve been trying to build it from the top down: I do not want to eat other animals, therefore I respect animals, how much do I respect animals?, quite a bit, are humans special?, maybe just to me because I am human, but probably not overall.

Something from the text I've been reading jumped out at me: being awake. Maybe it is because I am an active dreamer, maybe it is because I have see a thin line between reality and what ever madness lies beyond, but the concept of seeing reality is beautiful to me.

I am a Robot Woman

2010-08-11T23:59:00.002-04:00

My sister tells me, casually, that she is a robot woman. I laugh and look to her, waiting to watch her dance or make a goofy face or somehow explain the statement. She goes on to let me know that this is just what she's inferred. Just what she understands when she hears curvy women claim that they are "real women". She says to me, without much pain in her voice, that not all thin women are photo shopped.

My little sister is a night manager at a cupcakery. Yes, it is a bakery devote to cupcakes. She is also 5'11", about 125 lbs, and stunningly beautiful. She tells me that women have told her that they hate her. Just flat out, no reason other then her weight. She is slender and long legged and long haired and green eyed. Her look is IN.

She laughs, almost bitterly, and tells me that she doesn't pick what look is in fashion. That, in fact, being the "in" look has its downsides. Being stared at all the time, being hit on all the time, being considered public property (because after all, she is beautiful. And what's life if you can't experience the little things- flowers, sunsets, beautiful women...).

She is the kind of woman that other women are told to become: aesthetically, anyway. People who look like her cover magazines. When diet plans are advertised on the internet, they are sure to be accompanied by a woman who looks as much like her as possible.

She is, it seems, public property. A man's world's idea of what a woman should be. She is what they keep telling us to be. And so when I hear feminists say things about thin, pretty, white women I can't help but think of her. I know how hard it is to not look like they want us to. I do not have her metabolism. I know what it's like to be a fourteen year old girl and feel ugly. I do. I know how much you hate that feeling.

But next time you see the lovely woman smiling at you from behind the cupcake counter and you think "how is she so thin? If I worked there, I'd be 800 pounds! Every thign must be so easy for her!", stop. Next time you want to hate on my little sister, remember:

She is not a robot woman. She didn't pick the beauty standards. She doesn't try to conform to them any more than you do. She is not photo shopped. She does not have a personal trainer. She did not call you fat in middle school. She likes classic books, she is reading Moby Dick. She has had her heart broken. She is a real woman.

So stop pretending like it is at all acceptable, in ANY SITUATION, to tell someone you hate them because of how they look.

(Was that the most big sister-y post ever?? DO I WIN A PRIZE?)

Lovers

2010-07-31T00:20:00.003-04:00

It's been a while, and I've been thinking about lovers. Or rather, a single lover. Not a specific, but the general singular lover. With me?

I mean, love is crazy, right? Because we act weird with our intimate partners. And yet, who we are with our lovers is more "us" than we could possibly be outside of that relationship. When you're a lover the world is like an inside joke. You react to your partner in a way that only you can, you see the world through the eyes of your relationship.

Suddenly, your lovers favorite color is beautiful. Inexplicably, her favorite food is easy to make. When you stargaze together, the universe isn't terrifying (or maybe it's just terrifying in a different way). Somehow, you are a we now.

I am talking about the kind of relationship that defines who you are. I think love has a lot to do with that kind of shared perspective. I think that when people stop creating boundaries between themselves in a relationship we get a taste of perfect love.

I've talked about this before, to some people who kind of thought I was wrong. One of them told me, basically, that the kind of relationship I was describing was unhealthy. When your tastes become "our" tastes, when I change to become "us", that is a change that I shouldn't make, according to them. But I think that living in that "us" state is absolutely healthy, beautiful, and right. I think that we should expand it, in fact. I am suggesting something radical.

I have many love relationships. People who I am a "we" with. But not enough. I think we should get better at love. And I think when we do that, when could possibly do that, when trust is appropriate, when respect is commonplace... I think we're gonna be ready for the next step.

This is about Love, and I am a lover. I am still learning how to love, just like I am still learning how to breathe, and talk, and write, and dance. One of the most beautiful feelings I've ever had though was a moment when I realized that I was thinking for us.

Maybe we aren't ready yet. Maybe I am wrong about this.

I think love is a cause though. I think it is a revolutionary action, rather than a victorious reaction.

Why does racism still exist?

2010-07-06T23:32:00.000-04:00

Racism exists because….

Because change is slow, because domination is hard to quit, because the racial contract disallows any sort of sustained interrogation of racism by white society, because white moral cognitive dysfunction allows white persons to be racist without acknowledging race, because we have a market society that requires a lower class, because sub persons sustain us, because we haven't lived with love in so long that we forget what love even means in any context. Because race has to be reciprocally defined, because we think race has to be defined, because race isn't really defined at all, because race creates itself. Because racism gets written off as classism and because race is defined by class. Because context creates color. Because we race morality, because we race space, because we have defined person by the "ideal", rather than the edges. Because white is the ideal. Because space has morality. Because we can still be a-historic. Because we invent a fictional people with which to define race. Because all white people benefit from the racial contract. Because race can be defined from the outside, because people are raced, because whiteness is achieved. Because prisons are filled with black bodies doing forced labor and white people won't call that racism. Because disowning yourself is easier than owning yourself. Because only white bodies get to be talking heads, because black bodies are always bodies, because bodily differences are equated with moral differences. Because asserting your humanity is hard. Because asserting some one else's humanity is only slightly easier. Because we punish people who challenge the racial contract. Because affirmative action isn't enough. Because nobody wants to be a nonperson. Because personhood is reserved for those who can look the part.

How to Love

2010-07-06T23:24:00.003-04:00

Do you remember falling in love at first sight? Before you knew that some people were bad, before you knew people would let you down, hurt you?

I barely remember trusting so much that I hardly even registered trusting. But maybe that's part of what recovery means? Finding ways to love immediately, fully, unconditionally. Finding ways to be in love the way we did as children.

When we heal, as a world, I think it will be with love. When we finally find ourselves well- that will be because of a love that has nothing to do with who we love and every thing to do with how.

I don't know how to love like that yet. I don't know how to be the person I need to be. I'm okay. I'm okay, though.

When we are ready, we will know.

Stale

2010-07-06T13:49:00.003-04:00

Maybe we've come to far to go back now, but I think the conversation has gotten stale. We get it- we all hate those other people. Except for... I don't know. It just seems awful, right? So, maybe we disagree on some things. That doesn't make your opinion right, and it certainly doesn't make me a horrible person. And, you know, vice versa. I love people who I disagree with, fundamentally, on really important stuff. I love someone who believes that some rape victims share the blame for their attack. I love someone who thinks that gay people shouldn't participate in pda. I love someone who thinks that if people get sick and they don't have health insurance... well, they should have thought of that before. I love these people because I believe they are fundamentally good and that even when they are doing bad things, even when they are being horrible and oppressive and inconsiderate, well, even then... There but for the grace of god I go, right? Because it has been me on that side of the argument. And so while I try to be better and sometimes I am but sometimes I'm just not, I know they are too. My mom always tells me that people are doing their best. She says they're just trying to feed their kids too.

It doesn't make it okay. But maybe we can't ever have a better conversation if we don't at least remember that we all love some one we disagree with. Maybe that's okay sometimes- sometimes, it's about recognizing where we are and what's going on. But when it's about change, maybe then it would be better to say I love you? Maybe it's time to admit that we are only as sure as they are, that things are only as good as we let them be.

I believe we can get better. And I think it's gonna happen because of relationships that are positive and nurturing rather than antagonistic and bitter.

Independence Day

2010-07-03T23:30:00.003-04:00

I have been having dreams lately. They are vivid, fulfilling. They tell me things will get better.

I have been asking you lately (and you, in this case, is probably every one I know) if things will be okay.

I don't know if they will. If they could be.
(I change my mind about twice a day.)

But I know that I love. And that matters. Even if it only matters just a tiny bit, even if it only matters for a moment, and is completely over shadowed in the coming months. Even then, it will have mattered.

The revolution is coming, is what I've been hearing. The sky will explode tomorrow night in the shallow celebration of what nobody believes to be true any more- we are not living in the best of all possible countries, living the best of all possible lives. The rockets reveal some shared sense of shame.

We will all be drunk tomorrow night, will have been drinking since four, will have no idea how we got here or how we'll get home. And that feeling is familiar to us. We don't know why things hurt so bad, but they do. And we don't know how to get home, how to sober up and turn things around.

I have no pride in our independence from each other, any more. I need you. I need my community, and I need to be there for you too. I'm so sorry. I never meant to be this far gone.

Sarah Palin

2010-05-23T12:56:00.003-04:00

Let's talk about in-fighting. It comes in a lot of different forms- from disagreements between individual members of small-ish teams working on small projects, to huge, ideological disagreements between entire factions of a movement.

How should the group address these issues? Can we agree to disagree? Should we keep fighting it out? Are we doing damage to each other and to our own cause? If we were to present a united front, what could it possibly look like? And would there be anything we could all agree on?

There is Rape. Capital R Rape because I want to also add the third party to this discussion: the not-feminists-but group, the Brittney Spears feminists. I don't think we can say that Brittney Spears fans are uniformly in this group, but I'd stick the young Brittney herself in it (possible even older Brittney- idk, she's kind of dropped out of the spotlight... which is probably good for her, right?). Anyway, these women are anti Rape, pro job opportunities, and think Judd Apatow movies are hilarious. They don't really think about abortion, but if pushed they might support keeping it legal, but "never actually HAVE one" (-actual quote from, like, 5 or 6 different girls I knew in high school). These women/girls might never identify as feminists, might never be claimed as feminists by the movement, but they have been born in a time of feminism and they are kind of uncomfortable with the way that girl they used to be friends with was treated when she came forward about the band director.

Sarah Palin is in this group and while she is roundly criticized by feminists, I think we should make some concessions. First, I disagree with her politically. Second, I also disagree with Senator George Lemieux (R-FL) on a lot of issues, like the oil spill. The oil spill that happened in my state, to beaches I visit, killing animals I love and causing potentially disastrous results for the place where I live. All that said, I have never heard any one else who lives in my state, who also loves the beaches and the little sea creatures and all its wildlife, say "I HATE GEORGE LEMIEUX". Why would they? He's not famous, he's a nice guy who reaches out across party lines on issues like gay parenting, and he is doing what he thinks is best. I disagree with him, and I write to tell him that every once in a while, but I don't lose sleep over my concern with what it means that Lemieux holds office, that he was elected office, that other people like him and agree with him. Palin attracts all those responses. And yeah, she's famous. But feminists have a special bone to pick with her: she is a woman who is not a feminist. Lemieux might cause more damage, but Palin has betrayed us. She is a woman who is in power and is not perfect, who disagrees with us on EVERYTHING it seems like.

And that hurts. It feels like if women could just band together, if we could just stand together on even one issue firmly, then people would have to listen. But by expecting Palin to be better and by punishing her and hating her when she isn't, we create and maintain a double standard that is distinctly un-feminist.

Scattered Thoughts

2010-05-18T13:05:00.003-04:00

Some thoughts:
1. When the detectives on Law & Order say, "if you cooperate, we can help you", they might as well say "If you don't cooperate, you deserve to be killed by who ever is trying to kill you because you are not worth my time and energy, because you are a coward, because you have no sense of civic duty, because I get to decide these things." And at the end of the episode there is always this moment of discomfort after they make an arrest where you realize there's such a small chance of jail time and there are so many more criminals and hell, is jail even the right solution to this? People who spend time in jail don't usually become model citizens when they get out... And then the music is over and a new episode is on and you don't feel anything except for sick anticipation of who will be killed, mugged, raped, or found in an amnesiac state.

2. I have been asked to sign these petitions.
There is so much to petition against lately. I wonder if it's a good sign because of all the action that's being taken? If the signatures really matter? If political awareness boils down to signing a few of these a week? I hate politics most days, but they are too important to ignore.

3. I've been reading "Accidental Asian" by Eric Liu, former speech writer for President Bill Clinton and second generation Asian American. I am finding myself relating to him. I have also lost a culture, although I hardly get recognized as anything but "not all white". I wish my grandmother could answer all the questions I have for her. I am also finding myself not seeing eye to eye with him on many things: I am not powerful, I do not travel in the high class, politically influential circles. But I do know the shame of not knowing my own language. And for now, that solidarity is enough.

4. I wonder how much of my identity is tied up with all of the ways people categorize me outside of my identity. I feel invisible through the tinted glass of people's stereotypes.

5. The harsh winter ruined the orange I ate yesterday. How long until global climate change changes everything?

Crazy

2010-05-14T01:01:00.002-04:00

I am gathering my thoughts, holding them to my chest. I have been closing my eyes, keeping my lips shut tight, so that none of them can escape.

I should write more, about justice, I guess. Well... It turns out that justice means some very specific situations.

Why do women try to kill themselves so much more often than men?

Why do we fail more?

Why are we crazy? Psychosis is gendered. I could be put away for telling you this, and I am not crazy. But in a white suit you are allowed to force people into little rooms and sturdy straps and all the things that keep you from saying what is true:

We're not crazy. something really is terribly wrong with the world, it's not okay that women are raped and assaulted and treated like shit, it's not okay that black people are treated like subhumans, it's not fair that we torture people and animals and the land. I am not crazy, but I have hallucinations and they are like this:

I walk along a busy road and I am undisturbed. I meet new people and I casually mention I am gay when they ask about boys. I do not know anyone who killed themselves. I do not know anyone who is being hurt. I do not know anyone who has been hurt. They are brief moments when I trick myself into forgetting about glenn beck.

Why are women crazy?

awareness is key.

2010-04-25T00:35:00.002-04:00

I wonder how closely compassion and creativity are related, and whether creativity is a gift or if the chance to share it is. I have written the words to so many people's stories, poems on scraps of paper passed between classes that gave definition to relationships and to dysfunction. I have loved, hurt, and grieved with my friends.

Activism is necessarily tied with compassion. But change is tied with creativity. It is this combination that gives power, along with motivation and the means to devote to your cause. I wonder how to bring these traits together?

Maybe get creative people to listen to stories that make them hurt. Maybe to let compassionate people talk and paint and dance, giving them approval and love until they show us the creativity that they always had. Maybe it's both, for everyone.

Awareness and support might be the building blocks of change. In order to have creative solutions to problems, we must recognize the problem and we must give space for solutions.

I talk about awareness in a negative light a lot because many times awareness doesn't come with an outlet to act. I talk about vulnerability a lot, but only in contexts of awareness. Maybe I've been missing the vital connection between them...

how to love even though glenn beck has his own tv show...

2010-04-24T14:34:00.001-04:00

We are so bitter. So disappointed by the world, so heart broken. We are grievers, singing and crying and dancing for the pain we feel.

We are lovers who speak out, who stand up, who stand out. We are lovers who become what we were never supposed to have to be. We are lovers who do it anyway, for our children.

We are mothers and fathers who have seen our children pulled from our arms, our wombs. We are mothers who have cried with our babies in our arms, because we are hungry too. We are fathers who have punched through walls because our daughters are harassed in the street, because our daughters are felt up on the subway, because our daughters are raped by their best friends.

We are daughters who weep for our grandmothers, dying at home in an apartment that smells like stale smoke because she can't afford the treatment for lung cancer. We are daughters whose mothers have poured their third drink already. We are daughters who prayed to Our Father for safety in the night.

We are viewers who are offended by rape jokes, who don't think the fat black woman is a punch line, who will probably not stay tuned. We are viewers who don't think “Rosemary's Baby” was worth Samantha Geimer being drugged and raped. We are viewers who wish that the LGBTQQ community had advocates other than Tila Tequila.

We find ways to love through all these things. Love finds us unexpectedly, in the people we never meant to mean so much to. Beauty surprises us, and with every sunrise we are taken aback because we half expected the earth to stop spinning. Tear stained, exhausted, bruised, we have been hurting, have been hurt. These scars mean every thing to us. We are trying though. Today we will try a little bit harder to love the woman at the bank, the man in the car over, and the stray cat who sleeps under the car. Today we will heal a little more of ourselves. And tonight we will dry our tears and treat our wounds and convince ourselves to do the same thing tomorrow.

I don't mean you, you're great, it's those OTHER GAYS/FEMINISTS

2010-04-24T13:45:00.004-04:00

I love cooking dinner for a lover, or making coffee in the morning before they are awake and then bringing it back to bed so we can have our first kiss of the morning and it will taste like coffee. I almost always do the dishes after these activities because I like seeing the product of my work and dish washing is on the ever decreasing list of things I can do and feel productive about. I dust, vacuum, and offer to throw in their clothes if I am doing a load of laundry.

I cry when the world overwhelms me, which happens about twice a month. I love with as much of myself as I can spare and trust with very little.

I am beautiful. No, really. You don't hear that from enough women, so I'll repeat it: I am beautiful.

I am quiet, patient, sweet. People love me. That it, until the big reveal.

I am a lesbian. Not a Katy Perry, boyfriend having, girl-kisser. Not a Lady Gaga celibate bi-sexual. No, I date exclusively women and I am happy with that.

The issue is the straight girl normal thing, I think. People get to know me and finding no tell-tale "masculine" flags, no counter culture indicators, assume heterosexuality. My sexuality has been written off as cute, surprising, unbelievable, and a damn shame. I just seem so... normal.

I don't even know how to explain to a casual acquaintance that there is something more than faintly hetero-sexist about equating "straight" with "normal". I am constantly put into the position of being told that I'm not like the others, that I am basically straight, I just like girls. Even in groups of gay people, I find my sexuality being discounted because I do not really participate in "gay culture". I am not "gay enough", I have not seen the edgy movies and I don't really want to.

But I like women. Isn't that enough to make me gay? I could probably rewrite this post and talk about being feminist, because it's really a similar issue. "But you're so sweet!" "You don't yell at me!" "Like Megan Fox?" But I think I can do a dual wrap up:

Being a lesbian (or a feminist, or an anti racist, etc) does not mean that I fulfill 5 out of 8 lesbian stereotypes. It means that I am attracted to women. In the case of feminism, it means I support equality of genders. And I do not have to watch The L Word or wear the women symbol to be gay or anti-rape. (How was that for sentence structure? Pretty terrible, eh?)

The norm-ing of certain traits as "straight" (or, I guess "non feminist"?) that do not actually affect the issue is a way of creating a straw man so that you will never have to address a group's actual needs. If lesbians are real people who are in real relationships and eat at the same restaurants and watch the same tv shows as you do, it is super hard to say they lead immoral life styles and don't deserve marriage or happiness. And if a feminist is a caring, loving person who has children maybe, or wants them, or is someone you love, or is just someone who doesn't ever really think about it but is really bothered by her sister being harassed in high school and the authorities looking the other way because she was just a girl, well... that makes it really hard to villain-ize us as this monolith of women, trying to force all men into subservient positions in society and personal relationships.

I like reading books that other people find boring, I hate standing in lines, and I don't get "Tegan and Sarah". That doesn't demote me from being gay. It just means that I am also human.

Abuse Negates Love

2010-04-24T12:48:00.002-04:00

It's time for full disclosure, and I think you know what that means. (No, it does not mean I will be telling you about my obsession with a certain female pop star from the 90's.) It's time to talk about... love.

"Abuse and neglect negate love. ... Children are told that they are loved even though they are being abused."
bell hooks, all about love, page 22

Our relationships are so intertwined with manipulation, it is hardly noticeable anymore. Between grades and friendships, you are still penalized for being late. bell hooks is dealing with some thing we don't like to talk about. When abuse might casually come up, we basically all defend our parents. They did their best, we say. Anyway, it's not like they were abusive... All of my friends have relationships with their parents that lack perfect love, love with out fear. That dysfunction can stem from dishonesty, distrust, or disrespect. Boundaries are ill defined and manipulative behavior is about par for the course. We never, never talk about they way our parents treat us as wrong and unloving. If they are less than understanding, well it's for our own good. If they are violent, they are only instilling respect.

These things, I think are hard to hear from someone who has never been there. That's why our class discussion between someone whose parents beat them and someone whose parents didn't wasn't both sides of the argument. I'm the other side, and I know there were others in there. It's something we don't talk about, something we many times can't talk about. Those kinds of wounds, once recognized, run really deep. I was raised in an abusive home. But I was lucky and surrounded by great adults. My father has been jail for what he did to my sister and I since I was 15, and I have the words to define my relationship with him very well. He didn't love me. He created an environment of random fear, our behavior being twisted into reasons to lavish affection on us, or to make us endure what ever new punishment he had decided to try that day. Those are the types of things you can't say in a class discussion, I think. Things you really can't even say in a graded paper. But we can not talk about abuse with out hearing from the abused. We can not talk about abuse without recognizing it as abuse and condemning it. Love meant very little to me growing up. If my father loved me (and I believed he did for a long time) than love couldn't be enough.

bell hooks gives me a new vocabulary to speak with. Love isn't meaningless to her, or to me. Love is enough, more than enough. Love has to be in my relationships. bell hooks is right about another thing- too many of us do not know how to love. Even my closest relationships have been marked by manipulative behavior. That behavior can range from anger and sharp words when I step out of line to just being cut out of some one's life. We tend to rely on ultimatums and bargaining to get the other in our relationships to change. It's time to change the way we treat the people we want to love. Historically, our western society has fallen short of love on almost every count. We have not loved our wives, our children, and we certainly haven't loved our slaves and our slums. If we are ever going to see change, it has to start with love. And it has to start with people admitting that we need love, and love hasn't been present in our lives thus far.

Magic Eight Ball

2010-04-24T11:17:00.002-04:00

((Guest Post Party!! That's right, this is a post written by some one who writes about the same things I do, only most of the time in a different way! Anyway, here's Athia Choudhury on our African American Philosophy Class:))

I don’t know what I was looking for when I came into this class. Maybe questions. Possibly answers. I tend to subscribe to Foucaultian philosophy more often than not and when pandering to the whims of life, I live by the mantra: if you don’t like the answer, change the question.

But that’s not good enough anymore.

In the midst of it all, I find myself dancing past questions that I don’t like the answers to. Anything to avoid confrontation---a head on collision that is bound to end in guts and gore being unceremoniously heaped onto my front lawn. However, I’m afraid that if I keep moving in this direction, there will come a day when I stop questioning entirely; forsaking everything I begrudgingly allowed old dead men to teach me.

My hands mold around a spherical device in utmost concentration as I shake the mystical Magic Eight Ball that has the power to determine the future.

“Oh majestic Magic Eight Ball, in all your magical glory, will we be able to rid the world of the ‘isms’ before global warming destroys humankind or the sun burns out or we’re invaded by a colony of passive-aggressive aliens?”

“Probably not.”

So I try again.

“Oh, omnipotent Magic Eight Ball, will it be possible for us to liberate the oppressed and the marginalized?”

“I don’t think so.”

So I try again.

“Oh, most benevolent Magic Eight Ball, will the voices and unspoken dreams of these people finally carry beyond the sounds of industrialization, bigotry, greed, and hatred?”

“Look, kid. I’m a plastic toy. How about you take some responsibility and figure this shit out yourself?”

Perhaps I’d be more productive if I changed my philosophy to: true mimectic power belongs to writers and poets. Rather than ignoring questions whose answers disgrace the name of question-answering, I could re-write or create, even, a new discourse---in the language of the subaltern, one which features the dialogue of Yellow Skin, White Tone: Transgressing the Spheres of Otherness (it would, no doubt, be a romantic comedy).

I live in a world of theory and arbitrary text, dubbed “ice queen” by my father (and other less flattering terms by my siblings) because of it. I have shielded myself through literary canon, but you can only invest so much in paper and ink, really. So I struggle with accessibility--- in my activism, my writing, my awkward interactions with other human beings.

I pose one question: How can I bring theory to life?

I know feelings and inclinations can’t offer the stability of empirical proof, but I feel like poetry could change the world. Now, it has been a fantasy of mine for years to undo the damage of the modernist movement by bringing poetry back to the people. Poets from all corners of the globe will crawl out of seedy bars and quiet coffee shops, enter graciously into the sunlight and find enough of the right words to stir a million revolutions.

Suck on that, Magic Eight Ball.

Reflections on African American Philosophy

2010-04-22T10:23:00.000-04:00

It's been quite a semester, huh? This time last semester (in Native American Philosophy) I was feeling hopeful, inspired. This time, I feel sick. Grief has left me feeling helpless. Maybe we all feel like this, a little bit, sometimes. Mills is right about the whole beneficiary thing. All this privilege and I have no idea what to do with it. I have considered selling it, maybe in an auction.

Last looks are hard, but I need to see this as a system. Racism is intimately connected to all of the other things I learn and read about. And I am still trying to find answers as to why. Is it political in origin? Economical? Does it matter?

Last looks: It is a warm summer night, and I am on the beach. The white man I am with is twice my size, but it is late and this is the "bad" part of town. We're an hour away from his truck, where our shoes, wallets, and cell phones sit.

Three black men approach us. They are drunk, maybe homeless. They are catcalling and I am uncomfortable. The man I'm with reaches into his pocket and pulls out a knife. He tells them to back off, keep walking. I am scared now because I am with this man and he has a knife and we are too far from my shoes and my autonomy. I am dependent on him to get home, or I am stuck in this neighborhood at oh dark thirty with no wallet, no shoes, and no cell phone.

The men keep walking. The man I'm with proceeds to tell me how those people are always drunk, making trouble, messing with women. I cry that night, but say nothing then. I am complicit, silently giving him my approval of his chivalry.

I think about lynching, and I know that we haven't changed enough. The white woman still acts as some sort of justification for racism, a blanket-all explanation for any sort of violence expressed against people of color. Mills said the racial contract is enforced by violence. That night, it was.

Sometimes people do little things and I wonder if I should let them go. That night it was something big, and I know I shouldn't have let it go. It's time to reject the contract. I don't know what big steps to take, but I know what little steps I am taking. I don't know where to go from here, but I'm gonna start walking.

Denim Day

2010-04-21T16:30:00.000-04:00

It's denim day.

And sexual assault is inexcusable.

Save the World: a guide to better environmentalism

2010-04-14T18:58:00.000-04:00

Many environmental activists seek to affect change through policy change, purchasing power, and education. Local charities, grassroots organizations, small collectives, global nonprofits, national campaigns, and historic groups have worked together. We have seen some pretty important changes that are for the good of the environment (1). Issues that many environmentalists raise are overpopulation, genetically modified foods, and clean air, water, and soil. Traditional activism has saved our planet in many important ways, and yet... We still find ourselves hurtling head over heels towards global climate change (2 and 3), massive oil shortages (4), and serious battles with diseases that didn't exist in a serious way 100 years ago (5 and 6). Our food, water and air is killing us. We have fought hard, but we are losing.

We can save the world. We can do this through self examination. Who are we including in the revolution? Who are "environmentalists"? Who is showing up to our meetings, and who is dropping out? What areas do we not have meetings in? Are there forces as work we are, for the most part, ignoring in environmental justice work? The missing piece is more like the missing half: it is social reality, and justice work within that social reality.

The first issue that could benefit from a social justice perspective is the problem of over-population (7). Environmental activists feel like they're hitting a brick wall on this one. People keep having more kids, populations are on the rise, and it seems like no one is paying attention to the increasingly obvious problems of limited resources and unlimited growth. Why? Is there something innate about wanting children that we can never out smart? Will the human population be driven to our death by a biological urge to reproduce? (8)

We should be considering the women who are deciding to have children and the women who are choosing not to. In countries where population is declining (9) because of a lower birth rate (rather than emigration or high death rates), what is different? Women's education is valued, sex education is comprehensive, birth control is available, and women have a choice between children or a job.

These differences are not incidental. According to the Populations Reference Bureau, "recent data from many countries [has] shown that women with at least a secondary-level education eventually give birth to one-third to one-half as many children as women with no formal education". (9) 3 billion people live on less than $2 per day while 1.3 billion get by on less than $1 per day. Seventy percent of those living on less than $1 per day are women (10). When women are educated and given power over their own bodies they have less children and they do it later in life (11). When women earn income, they reinvest 90% of it into their families (men give back to their families at around 30-40%). They improve their health and have healthier babies when they do decide to have children. Investing in women is a powerful way to turn exponential population growth around and improve lives.

Another issue environmentalists are exasperated with is "food". It is bad for us. It gives us cancer, it makes us fat, and most of it has no nutritional value (12, 13). It is puzzling why these foods are even on the market. Who wants to give their child diabetes? (14) But even as the health advocates and environmentalists switch to locally grown, organic diets (15), we know that 49% of all adults eat fast food at least once a week (16).

So we must ask ourselves who is eating this crap? The answer is kind of complicated, but it boils down to this: people who can't afford to eat anything else. The solution is a hybrid one, part environmental activism and part social justice activism.

First, we need to build organic local food industries (17). The biggest response I hear to why people don't eat healthy food is "It's expensive!" They're right- currently it is way too expensive for most people to live off of organic food. However, buying organic when you can will help build the businesses you buy from and eventually help them lower costs. Investing in your local farmers will pay out in the long run for everybody, but for those of us who can buy some now we should. Another way to increase business is to request local, organic food at your grocery stores, restaurants, and schools. Creating a market where good food can be economically viable is the first important step towards eating better food, and it is a classic environmentalist move.

The second part requires social justice work. Why can't people afford food that is good for them? Why can't people who work hard live well? Living wages are not standard fare in our economy (18, 19, 20). The working poor are struggling to pay their rent, they are the people who will go into debt if they get sick, who might miss their rent if they have car trouble. And they aren't working easier jobs than people who get paid more. They working invisible jobs. We must create jobs with living wages. David Shipler suggests altering the current wage structure, creating more vocational programs (in both the public and private sectors), developing a fairer way to distribute school funding, and implementing basic national health care (21).

The final issue I'd like to dissect here is land abuse, including clear cutting, slash and burn farming, soil depletion, soil erosion, and pollution. Let's talk, specifically, about what land we abuse, because maybe that is more important than the myriad of ways we abuse it. We do not abuse all land equally.

We dump our tv's and old computers in Africa. (22,23). Winona LaDuke, in her book "All Our Relations" (24), tells the story of the Mohawk nation, a reservation near the New York-Canada border. General Motors has left a Superfund site with approximately 823,000 cubic yards of PCB contaminated materials. It has contaminated the land and the water, and the fish in the water. A traditional fishing village, many Mohawk families used to eat 20-25 fish meals a month. Now the fish is contaminated, and they are forced to rely on outside food sources. 65% of people on the reservation are suffering from diabetes. Katsi Cook says, "Our traditional lifestyle has been completely disrupted, and we have been forced to protect our future generations. We feel anger at not being able to eat the fish. Although we are relieved that our responsible choices at the present protect our babies, this does not preclude the corporate responsibility of GM and other local industries to clean up the site." Katsi had organized the Mother's Milk Project. "Women are the first environment", and the chemicals in women are stored in their bodies and given to their children in breast milk. Katsi studied 50 new mothers over several years and documented a 200% greater concentration of PCBs in the breast milk of mothers who ate fish from the St Lawrence river, compared to the general population.

Why? I think it has to do with racism. Dark skinned peoples own the land that we abuse, but are they really owners? Charles Mills gives his thoughts in "The Racial Contract" (25). Mills argues that we live in a racial polity that divides people into "white" and "nonwhite", or "persons" and "sub persons". Non-white peoples are valued less. Non white spaces, or non-European spaces, are said to be wild, barbarous, or "Where There Be Dragons". Non European space literally contains monsters for early Europeans, and the "Heart of Darkness" symbolizes not just a moral darkness, but a "lack of Christian light". Now we devalue indigenous lands in more insidious ways, calling them underdeveloped and "virgin" territory if the space is not industrialized the way European space is. Even when we might admit to civilization being there, we call it "barbaric" and still have an excuse to intervene. Mills theory of the Racial Contract holds up under scrutiny- the land we most abuse, the water we poison most is not our own- it is Non White, Non European land.

Racism is a social justice issue, but it has important environmental consequences. We know that our environment is shared, that damaging one part of our delicate ecosystem effects the rest. We also know as social justice activists that "All oppression is connected", as StaceyAnn Chin says (26). So how do we combat a social issue that threatens us all? Break the Racial Contract. Talk about it, refuse to let other people not think about it, and don't let companies think you don't care. We are supporting this behavior, and we need to stop it.

Things are rarely as simple as one intersection, or even two or three. Our interactions are affected by economics, by skin color, by gender, by sexuality, by language, by religion, by age, by physical ability, and most often by most of these things, all at once. Let's save the world, and let's do it in a way that allows for contextual analysis of our relationships. Let's survive the next fifty years, and let's do it by building a community that fits the needs and gifts of all who inhabit it.

Fifty years ago, people demanded peace, they demanded civil rights, and they demanded environmental justice. Today, I demand the same things. I want us to unite and create lasting change. And I want to do it in a group that is diverse, accepting, loving, and constantly aware of the interactions of our isms.

(1) http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=377
(2) http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/climate-change-deniers-vs-the-consensus/
(3) http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/climate-change-a-consensus-among-scientists/
(4) http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
(5) http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html
(6) http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2003/pr27/en/
(7) http://www.overpopulation.org/
(8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_imperative#Reproduction
(9) http://www.prb.org/pdf07/07WPDS_Eng.pdf
(10) http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18263
(11) http://www.girleffect.org/learn
(12) http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html
(13) http://books.google.com/books?id=66dsGQAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:Michael+inauthor:Pollan&hl=en&ei=HNauS-LvA8T7lwf276HPAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CEsQ6AEwAw
(14) http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Safety/gmo/problems_with_genetically_modified_foods_2902100104.html
(15) http://www.foodsanity.com/
(16) http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/?chartid=94
(17) http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/?chartid=94
(18) http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0805063897
(19) http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/
(20) http://www.povertyinamerica.psu.edu/
(21) http://www.amazon.com/Working-Poor-Invisible-America/dp/0375408908
(22) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7897631.stm
(23) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7543489.stm
(24) http://books.google.com/books?id=S2avAZImrSEC&dq=winona+laduke+all+our+relations&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=WdTFS-DAIIOB8gb495jiDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
(25) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=2961
(26) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ofsVwH4O_k

Burned

2010-04-10T23:33:00.000-04:00

Let me be clear about what I need, because that is something we don't like talking about and I question the wisdom of that. I want a relationship with you. My mother always told me to talk about things, told me that I couldn't expect people to read my mind. “I'm sorry, I didn't hear your head rattle” she was fond of saying when I would answer her questions by furiously nodding my head behind her back as she unloaded the dishwasher and I read a Baby Sitter's Club book.
I need a safe place, a place where my gender, my race, my sexuality, me abled-ness, or my economic status do not inform my worth as a human being.
I need love and trust, and I need to be able to love and trust others. I need relationships with the people around me.
I need food, and water, and shelter. I need these things even when I am struggling in school, when I am distracted, when I am sick.
I need support from my peers, and from my superiors. I need approval when I do good work.
I need your attention.
These needs are universal, and they are rarely met. These needs are so much a part of us that we hardly ever say them, but rather we suffer silently. And that's what my mother was trying to break me of. That's what I want to talk about, I think. I want to ask some questions about vulnerability, and activism. I want to talk about people and the ways and times we care.
All of us care. Everybody in this room, everybody in this world, cares. Some care about their family, some care about friends, some care about country. There is a lot of fertile ground here- why some care about some people, but not others, why some people care about people but not animals, the environment but not women, women but not racial minorities, racial minorities but not sexual orientation minorities. We could talk for a long time about what is important and why these things are important, and to whom they are important. But I want to talk about the people to whom none of these things are important anymore.
Recognition of the universality of caring is what my argument stands on. We all care, we all have needs. So why aren't we all a part of loving, caring activist movements?
The adults in my life are no longer activists. The parents of my friend's have collectively scoffed at my dreams of saving the world. They tell me, “I though I would save the world, too.” I see them caring and I wonder how long I have before I lose my fire, too.
The Revolution is under way, I have heard. Raise your fist, I am commanded. Paint your faces, draw your lines, wrap your hands with tape, and put your game faces on. Now is the time for action!
We are living activism for today. I want to talk about activism for tomorrow, activism for next year, activism for when I hear my friends' children say they want to save the world.
These people are not, it is my contention, abandoning the Revolution. They are not letting the Movement down. We, their fellow rebels, their sisters and brothers, are smoking them out. We are creating activism that leaves its members dancing on embers, speaking with flames in our hearts, warming our hands so close to the stove that we are forced to draw back, blistered and raw.
We are burning out.
Activism has been unable to meet our needs, thus far. This is horribly sad, and undeniably true for many of us. Our communities have too often left us cold, sad, unsupported, in a group that advocates... Well, we, having never stated our needs out loud, feel let down and inexplicably guilty. That is why we burn out. That is why activists are young, and why we are “busy lately” and we have other priorities.
Our experiences with activism has been about being strong, about being invincible. We go out and face the world, with our talent and our voices. We stand up against injustice as leaders and crusaders. And then, we disband, and we go home. It seems to me that this is the weak point in our strategy. We go home, and we pour ourselves a drink or pack a pipe or pretend like it doesn't hurt that we are hated and we are not as strong as we have to pretend we are out there. We don't talk to each other about this. We bandage our own wounds.
But healthy activism isn't pretending to be okay. Healthy activism is helping each other after the fight, is being honest with each other. Healthy activism means being vulnerable. I want to show you my scars, so that I know you will not flinch. I want to love you, so I know that you will not scorn me. I want to stand in front of you, naked of all pretense so I know that you will not turn away.
If we can look in the mirror as activists and as friends and lovers, we will see where we have left needs unmet and where out needs have been left unmet. It is time to remedy this wound. It's time to hold out our hands and say what we need, and to renew our commitment to each other.
I want to say I love you, tonight. I want to let you know that I'm here, for you, any time. I also want to let you know that some days, I need a hand or outstretched arm. And tomorrow, I want us to be renewed, and re energized. I want our fire to burn bright and I want us to be warm in its loving glow.
Thank you, good night, and I love you.

a desperately needed statement of purpose

2010-04-07T21:51:00.004-04:00

I'd like to address class justice as it interacts with race and gender. I worry about the environment, and I worry about environmentalists. I think most people are trying as hard as they can, and maybe we can help each other out more. I imagine the conversations I have had over my lifetime, sorting them out by color and shape on the table in front of me. I find myself listening again and again to the little girl who is telling me about being homeless. She is stuck in my head, staring at the wall, for the rest of my life. I will stare, too, at the table in front of me. I want to shred all of the experiences I have ever had and imagine a new, just world.
The is world just because people enjoy taking care of each other, and we never teach anyone to hate. The shreds of my life know that we must be taught to hate. The world in my head is beautiful because we do not force it to be ugly.
I want justice to be possible. I don't know if it's possible to get there fast enough.
My suggestions are for an inclusive justice movement, one that huge portions of the population desperately need to be involved in. I want justice to be self involved, self critical, and self sustaining. Injustice can be known and disavowed through education and intellectual responsibility. I want to build an infrastructure to get there.