The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the

Blog #21, Day #23 (all right I'm not perfect) of Fun-a-Day, where overly optimistic artists commit to doing art every day in the month of January. I'm doing the best I can.....
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I've been thinking a lot about truth lately, and a few lines from an Ani DiFranco song keep on playing in my mind: nobody's lying, still the stories don't line up. why do you try to hold on to what you'll never get a hold on? you wouldn't try to put an ocean in a paper cup. 

I think I pride myself on looking for truth, and in fact I've written about how I want my writing to be about that seeking of truth. But I am aware of a certain arrogance imbedded in that statement. Why would I try to put an ocean in a paper cup?

I come from, on one side of my family, a lineage of science. My father's parents were both plant scientists. Time spent with these grandparents, as a child, was not the most heartwarming experience, but it was always very stimulating intellectually. I learned about all manner of plant, and was taken to the New Alchemy Institute, as a teen, to get my first taste of both community living and sustainable agriculture.

I know that these folks, these ancestors of mine, lived their whole lives believing clearly in some sort of objective truth that had nothing to do with human emotion, or agreed upon meanings. For them, the reality of science was absolute, and in some sense ineffable.  I saw their knowledge of science as its own religion. I remember being both impressed and scared of my grandparents, because of my decidedly mutable truths, both in my youth and in my growing awareness that there was a bigness I could not understand, or really know, but only seek.

Maybe I envy my grandparents their certainty, and desire it for myself. But I'm not fooling myself, and I sure as hell wouldn't fool my grandparents. I'm not living in an objective world, not by a long shot. I've even, for a time, thought that farming could teach me objective lessons. That's no joke, but it is one. The methods of farming, the objectives of farming, the interests of farming, they lead to a million different choices and possibilities. One outcome can be brought about by many different paths, and each outcome will be slightly different. Farm research folks might disagree with me, but if nothing else, the weather is the great leveler of control groups.

Or maybe it's just that I don't have the patience to really know a thing. I feel a thing, I experience and internalize it, and then it is shifted in meaning through my own lens, my own need. God is much like that, for me. I need Her, and so she is, and in that sense, ineffable and mutable, both.

This is getting a mess, but I guess what I want to write is that perhaps I should take my stabs at truth, and know that really I am not holding anything in the paper cup but air. And if I'm lucky, I'm floating on the ocean, a drop of it, or a fish, in my element, breathing in the ocean truth, and not worrying if it will be there, or not, for my next breath.

The Writing Life

Blog #20, for Fun-a-Day 2014-- a blog post a day for the month of January.
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There is a poem on my mother's mirror, that I wrote when I was 8. It's about being lost in a thunderstorm, and the light of my mother's love, guiding me home.  I remember making it into a poster for my mother, and her pride at receiving a poem from me.

That's all the affirmation I needed. I continued to write all through high school and college, poems mostly. I took classes on the craft of writing and the study of it, though didn't commit to an overall focus in it. I was afraid of committing too much to it because it never could butter my bread, so to speak. It never could be enough, I thought. But I've never stopped writing. I've had long dry spells, it's true. I've also had long time periods of questioning whether or not it's worth it to write. But I've kept it up.

I've had a strong sense, always, that writing is for reading-- that we are meant to engage in acts of communication with our writing. This means a fundamental interconnection between reader and writer, and a fundamental connection of the writer to the world. Writing that takes us out of the world is in fact grounded in it. Even the most alien of texts speaks to our lives, and sometimes I mean literally. Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood is a story about family, belonging, autonomy, and community in a deeply human way, though it is about humans and alien species interacting and breeding.

I've written elsewhere about the shift towards living truly in the world, more closely connected to it, with greater presence and purpose. I think writing this blog, and writing in general, as a practice, is part of that picture, for me.  Today I attended a writing workshop with the Burlington Writer's Workshop, and it was exciting to be back talking words and writing after almost 20 years away from it. It was a creative non-fiction group, and the writing was really fun to read and the conversation really satisfying to a part of me I hadn't attended to in a long time.

What makes us abandon the things that are closest to us? What makes us return to them, and find them newly green, when they have been neglected for so long? I feel like there is, for all of us, something waiting on the other side of doubt, on the other side of the smallness that was given us, or that we convinced ourselves of, long ago. I've made these changes and moves in my life, uprooted a family from stability and normalcy in defiance of this learned abandonment. That sounds paradoxic, but it's not.

Writing is a gift, a challenge, and a responsibility, like anything cherished. I hope I can remember the importance of this tool, this vocation, and this discipline, long after I have stopped writing a blog a day.

Zumba

Blame it on the Zumba, and the writing workshop I am heading tomorrow, but I've run out of time for an extensive post tonight.

I will say that doing things like Zumba-- basically an excuse to dance in a room with a bunch of women again, like I did back in college, though with lower lights, sexual tension, and alcohol-- and attending a writing workshop are all good say-yes-to-your-life things, so that's something.

But I love writing, not just reading other folks' writing, so I will return, with intention and time. Tomorrow.

Welcome Home, Vermont!

Signs that I am living in the right place:

• I am driving us home from Boston, and as we enter Vermont, I notice the traffic on the highway becoming increasingly normal, at least to me. Cars stay to the right, pass on the left, and generally behave. I sigh deeply, and feel at ease.
• I come back from being gone for the weekend, and notice 2 mouse poops on the kitchen counter. I think, Only 2! Life is good! 
• While visiting Boston, I insist on going for a 2 mile run in the freak snowstorm that appeared. I take an extra long time enjoying the giant snowflakes careen onto the frozen lake I am circling. When I get back, my mother tells me to take her cell phone next time because I was so long out in the snow.
• My partner and I argue over who gets to go up the hill in the dark with the giant toboggan to get the next load of wood for the stove. We both want to do it. 
• We arrive at a restaurant at 5:30 for dinner. The restaurant is pleasantly crowded with families and couples. Early dinner is normal here.
• My son and I come out of the restaurant, in the dark. It is snowing out. We decide to play chase down the street-- without coats or hats on. 
• Looking at the snowy road, I calculate in my head the likelihood I will run tonight, based not on the road, but on the gusting wind around the house.
• We bustle into our cool house and I am excited, as well as my partner and son, to crowd around the wood stove and start the fire.
• Looking at the weather for the coming week, I marvel and am excited to wander out in -16 weather, and imagine the trips we can make during this next cold snap coming to our shores.

It's good to look for, and find confirmation for this risk and lifestyle we are embracing. An aunt asked recently, So, can you take the winter here? as we sat around a roast chicken supper. I answered, easily, Yes, why yes I can. I talk to folks a lot about my fear of isolation, but the truth is I have folks to talk to about it, and the shared commitment to getting through this season, coupled with the sense of discovery of each day here, is helping me feel right at home, here in Vermont. 

An Ode to the Neighborhood

In honor of the city which I am visiting, tonight I post a poem about another city I lived in, Philadelphia. My partner and I often joke about how Philadelphia, and a particular neighborhood in West Philadelphia, is our ancestral homeland. We say this for a lot of reasons, but I think the biggest reason is that there we had the best sense of community and connectedness that we've experienced in our adult lives. It's hard to be away from it, though the choices we have made are the right ones.

I wrote this sestina in 2008, just after we moved away from the neighborhood. We moved away because I was following a job that made it possible for me to farm and get paid, a rare and good thing. But even though the choices were right, the missing was, and is real. Here's an ode to the neighborhood. I still miss you, West Philly.

An Ode to the Neighborhood, 2008

Monday mornings at the Satellite

café before I ever fell for a punk

kale smoothie or found a job, anarchist

dreams stirred my mocha. Green

monsters struck discordant rhyme, bicycles

flew over potholes at break-neck speed, and I was in love.

I'd never lived in a place that loved

you back. Other cities were a distant satellite

orbiting around the hot center of my longing. I'd bike

through Boston, Newark, Providence, feeling like a punk

in straight clothing, seeking out the green

center of life seething anarchic

hope—and find myself in endless pseudo-anarchist

meetings, hamstrung consensus blocked by love

less egos. Less radical activists in the Green

Party dedicated to their navels saw justice as a satellite

to their central passion—themselves. But here, punk

meets crunch, hipster meets play, and we're all bikers

we're all known to each other. Late night bicycle

posses take over our tree streets. Anarchist

collectives hash out their truths in  post-punk

movement organizing calling for a greater love

than capitalist competition. We know we're satellite

to the mainstream. We like it that way. Our greening

newness recreates itself with each attempt to coax green

life from brownfield, from abandoned row house. We build bicycles

from scrap, gardens from abandoned lots. We take the satellite

decay and breathe new life through concentric anarchy—

no gods, no government, each guided to each through love

of life splitting open all codes, all masters, all punk

odes and pacifist leanings lost in the world punked,

pushed aside for the inevitable twine of green

vine around the filthy palimpsest of blasted out blocks. With love,

you build something new. Neighborhoods with bicycle

collectives, food co-ops with wings, anarchist

meeting spaces, urban farms, and satellite

lives orbit the greater satellite of our punk longings—

for endless green on broken city streets, for anarchist rhyme to play on

low power radio stations, and for love to ride on a fixed gear bike down the hallowed halls of West Philadelphia.

Traveling

Another Fun-a-Day blog-a-day post, for your reading pleasure.

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So I'm in Boston again. I spent a good 5 years here after college and through grad school, and come back periodically to visit family. This weekend we are visiting with my father, who had a kidney transplant at Thanksgiving. I was in Boston for the holiday, so I got to be here for the surgery and first day out of hospital.

A kidney transplant is no small thing. There is much I don't feel I can comfortably share about it, because it's not my story to tell. But I can write about the resurrection. Yes, I think I can.

I wonder about resurrection. As a good (or not so good) Catholic school girl, I remember learning about the transformation of the resurrection of the body-- both in Jesus' body and the promise to the faithful at the end times, and the allied act in eucharist of transubstantiation, where the bread and wine become the body and blood of the risen Christ through the miracle of the ritual. Both of these always felt like long shots, somehow something I could never really understand, and frankly, were kind of creepy.

As an adult universalist christian Friend (who enjoys pagan and buddhist frameworks, as well), I am at best an uncomfortable christocentric christian, if that makes sense. The miracles of Jesus' death and resurrection do not really sit well with me, because of how they smack of a separation from humanity, a sense of elitism that has been utilized in such interesting and damaging ways over the years and millennia since Jesus walked this earth. But this experience of my father's extreme health after the transplant really feels like an example of resurrection. To have life after one's life has ended, to serve and heal another person, is a miraculous and powerful thing.

I also think that, in a basic biological sense, resurrection happens all the time. I love manure, decay, and decomposition because of the life that can spring forth from it. I love post-apocalyptic writing for some of the same reasons I love compost-- often it has a period of grossness, but what comes out at the end of the destruction and decay is pure gold, utopian in its possibility for what can grow from it, and purposeful, without waste.

To call my father on the phone, as he learns of his health, hearing him tell me how he doesn't feel sick anymore, after years of it, is also a resurrection for him, I believe. I see him as grabbing life by the horns of this gift, this miracle. I see him traveling to Alaska, as he always wished to. I see resurrection in each day he is given by this transplant.

So maybe resurrection isn't about a transformation, but rather a transportation-- a traveling of life from one form to another. A life ended can bring life to another. After decomposition is life anew. What was it I learned in chemistry-- that matter cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed? Or was that energy? Well, the results are the same-- our matter/energy move in time, and change, and change again.

I remember, in high school, I had two friends. We three were solid, and solid in our alienation from mainstream high school life. An example of this is one of our biggest jokes-- You know, like back in the day, like back when we were all couches? 

The infinity of what we were, what we can be, in a limitless timeline, is overwhelming. But these small transfers, travels, I can handle. I'll take them, and make good green growing things with them, and thank the resurrection of this life on earth.

Missing the Mark

Day 16 of Fun-a-Day. I missed a day, but am still committed!
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In seminary, when I took one long drawn out non-intensive biblical Hebrew course over the span of my last year of my M. Div., I learned that one of the words for sin was less about participating in evil, and more about making a wrong turn, or aiming poorly in one's actions. The results, though certainly not motivated by evil, end up being, well, wrong. And the consequences of these missed marks, as the arrow of intention hits some far off, unintended target, can be evil.

I bring this up because I am thinking a lot about something I learned, and re-learned, and learned again in a workshop about diversity, inclusion, and privilege. The Beyond Diversity 101 workshops, started and led by Niyonu Spann, have been powerful spaces of healing, challenge and growth for me over the years. Most recently, I had the opportunity to participate as an intern this past fall in Chester, CT, at the Guest House Retreat Center.

I learned about, and experienced really clearly, something that is really imbedded in the sinfulness of white privilege. We talked a

lot about the difference between intention and impact. The main point being that regardless of the intention of an action, communication, structure, if the impact is racist, then it is, in fact racist. One of the things that I witnessed, and participated in, was that of hearing someone's story of experiencing racism as a black person, and then a white person telling a story right on the heels of it that may have had the same emotional quality, but completely missed the mark of what was being said-- therefore recapitulating the racism. We miss the truth when it is crowded, and the story is re-centered to the next person who speaks.

One aspect of whatI see racism doing is the work of invisible-izing. And a part of white privilege is centering all story, all sharing, all truth around one's own story. The myth and reality of white people's tears is that they can change everything-- from stopping white folks from being held accountable to motivating lynch mobs. Telling a personal story on top of a witness about racism, though a small thing, is the seed of these larger evils.

Luckily for me, in the context of the workshop, I (and others) got the chance to stop and really listen to being confronted with the problem of doing this. I was able to really get that regardless of my conscious intention to connect, my unconscious discomfort with the truth of racism and the impact of making it invisible and more comfortable for white folks is sinful.

I cried a lot at this workshop, as I mourned the loss of my baby, and got deep into the sense of my own brokenness. And I recognized in myself the difference between this authentic mourning, and the tears (or jokes, or intellectualism) born of discomfort and some fantasy of my importance in the work I witnessed.

I am not saying that I am unimportant in a cosmic sense, or even in terms of my need to ante up and change my behaviors, my heart, my life. What is unimportant is my feelings about the experience of racism, as the locus of healing. There needs to be so much SPACE made for healing and growth, and white folks need to get themselves out of the way of this work.

And not by leaving. White flight is another aspect of white privilege. We can contribute to creating the space by witnessing, by listening, and by not trying to have answers. This list of 8 Ways Not to Be an Ally is really spot on, and I am grateful I found it. The time I spent in this workshop felt like a further step in showing up and getting out of the way.

There are a number of really great posts elsewhere about these issues, as well. Here are two:
It's Not All About Feelings
White Women's Tears

As a progressive/radical leaning person, I think I have always been willing to believe in systemic evil, meaning I could get my mind around it, accept it as real. In seminary, I was part of a group of four folks who wrote theses on structural evil. Katie Cannon sat in on a panel presentation we gave and it is one of the highlights from that time. But this personal level of work, looking through the lens of our identities, has helped me to see the evil and sinfulness in my life, and helps me know these connection to the sick systems I seek to resist. It has taken me many years to get here. I am grateful I have gotten here, and grateful for the many teachers that I have met and will meet on this journey.