landslide

I've been thinking an awful lot about landslides lately. And changing. And reflections. I heard this on my way to work this morning; it made me feel someone was listening. Enjoy it.




Stevie Nicks in Australia 2006

it's the fear

I lied a little, you know, in my last post. It does take a lot to make me happy - if a lot means truth, passion, risk, intellectual stimulation, friendship, laughter, love. I imagine those of you who know me well snorted a little when I wrote it doesn't take much to make me happy. Much indeed. I wish it were as easy as a damn Bird of Paradise.

Lately, letting go is excruciatingly hard. Just when I think I’m fully facing forward something shifts in my atmosphere, and I’m hovering again in the past. It isn’t just the guilt from drastically altering two lives in ways they’d rather not have altered – although there is that. It isn’t even the awareness of awaking alone most mornings this past year – although there is that, too. It isn’t doubt or financial ruin or residual anger or disappointment or self-judgment– I mean the fallout from those certainly nest inside but isn’t causing this latest strain. I think maybe it is the fear. Fear of being wrong again. And fear that I’ll have dragged myself and my ex and our little one through this massive, painful change only to have our lives different but not necessarily better. What if mine is the only one better? What then?

I want to believe that divorce doesn’t invalidate a decade’s worth of choices – of feelings and declarations and struggles that might have been fruitless but were waged nonetheless. I’d like to be able to believe I can move forward with lightness provided from my past rather than this heaviness that is sitting on me now. I’d like to believe I won’t repeat the same mistakes, but right now – today – I am uncertain, and the limitless future that usually excites is instead looming large. Scarily large.

they make me happy

www.flickr.com

It really doesn't take much to make me happy, and since I've been sick (hence the silence this past week), I figured a picture of my favorite flower couldn't hurt - and maybe it would make you happy, too!

the girl inside

Some days I feel more divorced than others. Some days I feel so much like a mother first and a sexy woman last that it takes everything I have in me not to succumb to a self-indulgent crawl beneath my sheets and disappear forever. And on days like that, I do two things: I welcome my warrior poses, and I pull out the poetry. This one by Lucille Clifton is rather fitting.


There is a girl inside

There is a girl inside.
She is randy as a wolf.
She will not walk away and leave these bones
to an old woman.

She is a green tree in a forest of kindling.
She is a green girl in a used poet.

She has waited patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the damn wonder of it.

-Lucille Clifton

tribute to Zinn at Busboys and Poets 2/15/10

Here is wonderful coverage of the memorial to Howard Zinn held at Busboys and Poets yesterday.

I miss knowing he is in the world.

she'll understand

Someday, when she once again asks "why?", I'll be able to show my daughter this poem, and she will understand:

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

-Mary Oliver

protecting the circle

I saw a link today on Racialicious to a collection of writings by Canadian men titled Protecting the Circle: Aboriginal Men Ending Violence Against Women. It's uplifting - and necessary - to have men commit to ending violence against women. The organizations who put the collection together have invited people to share. You can read it here.

this too shall pass

Sometimes there are nights (like tonight) after long days and tears and tantrums when instead of hot tea and irreverent literature, I'd like to spend time with an actual adult who can hold me and whom I can hold. Someone who can either make me laugh or let me cry, or if I can do neither will maybe just lie next to me so I can feel his heat. But out of my available options, there just isn't anyone good enough, so I am going to close my eyes and stuff my dream box with the words this too shall pass.

security

“Security isn’t what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection. I hunger for good sex.”

Last month, Deborah Solomon published a Q&A with Eve Ensler in the New York Times Magazine. For the record: I think Eve is brilliant. The Vagina Monologues was amazing, and I am sure her new book, I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World will be equally spectacular. I can’t wait to read it. What struck me the most about the Q&A, however, was her quote above, which is a powerfully concise example of what I think many of us are feeling but can’t necessarily articulate.

I know I’m not looking for what our society considers security (perhaps if security were defined as infallible human rights…but it isn’t in most contexts, and for the sake of this post, let’s define it differently): freedom from danger, risk, or anxiety. I have no judgment for people who are, but my question is this: if danger, risk, and anxiety are dichotomous – and I think they are – what happens to the other aspects we can’t always see? Because I know for me the hidden element in danger is exhilaration. In risk, it is the possibility. In anxiety, the catalyst. Without those, I’m not sure I’d be alive - or much use to anyone else let alone to myself. If those are absent and what is left is called security, well, no thanks.

Change. Connection.

My daughter and I share a house with my best friend and her teenage daughters. One of them is fifteen - an age that is also dichotomous. An age when what lies ahead are endless chances to change the world yet also filled with angst from just as many absent connections. It's an age when taking the risks necessary to follow dreams means exposing oneself without the safety net and perspective of maturity and experience. And for many young women like my friend's daughter, it is a time of freedom but one with much isolation and few allies. As I observe her struggling to develop an identity, to define her wants and needs, and to set her personal limits, I'm frequently reminded that for anyone for whom developing a consciousness matters, the process is universal and cyclical. The questions she asks at fifteen are the same I ask over and over at thirty-four and the same ones my friends in their sixties still ponder. And yes, it might be risky to ask them. Yes, the answers at one stage may come easily only to prove painfully inadequate at another. Yes, at times, we may find ourselves without them - without even hope we'll ever know them or imagine knowing them again. But what does a life look like without them? Safe? Serene? Still? Empty... Shallow...

For me, I can't do it. As uncomfortably complicated as my world is when I question and challenge and push to make things different, it isn't shallow. If anything, the depth taunts me. It threatens to drown me when I get tired of trying to stay afloat. But perhaps drowning in it isn't as dangerous as it is scary - isn't as detrimental as it is unfamiliar. Perhaps surrendering to the process could bring ease or respite. Isn't it that ease that loosens everything just enough to allow in a connection? To welcome change?

Security? No, thanks. I hunger for more.

What about you?

leaving behind

A sense that there is something you forgot, something missing that used to make you happy and has somehow been left behind. That often happens when you move on to the latest promises and developments and inadvertently leave the reasons you used to have fun in cold storage.

This is the beginning of my horoscope today, and oh how true it is. Even in the thick of the exciting possibilities surrounding me, a slight unease invades and that inescapable grief lurks in the background. Even while meeting new people - people who might someday be important to me - I feel an emptiness at a fundamental level.

Moving on to new promises and opportunities is beautiful. It is the only way to move forward, to seek a new life. It is cleansing and vibrant and fresh - much like a bracing breath of outside air after leaving a hospital sickroom. But in order for something to cleanse, something or someone - or someones - must be left behind. And it is the leaving behind that stings.

crystallizing

After meeting w/Chicago community organizers today in a brainstorming session for the US Social Forum in Detroit this summer, I'm left with the spoken word of resistance, the community of revolution. Everything I'm hearing is poetry: global, collective consciousness convergence, active analysis, movement, justice.
 
I feel like I'm home, and I know why I'm here - in Chicago - now.

It's beautiful.

Get involved. Wherever you are.

because

it's grey, snowing, and cold as hell outside, and I need a reminder that springtime and sunshine aren't going to desert us:

filled up

I fell madly in love with the twenty 6-8 year olds I taught in hip-hop yoga tonight. The implicit, immediate trust they laid at my feet left me breathless. Their joy in movement, their ability to embrace every second I gave them with pure, honest love leaves me wondering when does all that makes us whole as a child leave us? At precisely what point in our children's lives do the absences and inequities begin to splinter their existence? And if we know moments like today exist all day in different schools all over the world, why can't we provide? Why can't we stop labeling "special needs" and "at-risk" and "under-performing" and just capture the potential they exude out of every pore in their little bodies. Why can't we stop blaming the parents and the neighborhoods and the communities cradling those neighborhoods and instead take collective responsibility for our children? They are there. They are here. waiting for us.

disequilibrium

It's happened again. And my insides are shifting and tumbling over themselves trying to make sense of it. The problem with intellectual growth is the disequilibrium that makes you question everything you've done, everything you've been till now. Someone once used the metaphor of a underground garage: just when you think you can see the bottom, you discover another level.

I'm there.

I went to a conference a few months ago and attended a session facilitated by the author of the blog Race Has Nothing to do with You, a brilliant academic with the voice of a poet. Only another accustomed to wandering alone in this educational desert we've created could fathom the joy in finding a companion somewhere along the journey. And even though I don't know him personally, I am quite intimate with his anger, the derision, the sadness, the hope, the urge to get it all out there in poetry or prose, the danger, the desire.

It's bubbling, my mind. My heart, it's bleeding. I'm thinking about how one stays without staying the same. how one leaves without retreating. how one helps when every inauthentic voice tries to smother the flames of hope. how one lends space for creation instead of reiteration. how one loves through loss. how one learns through trauma. I'm thinking about my students and my child and me. I'm thinking about connection and recognition and value and hope and wondering how it all fits together - how it can't fit together in isolation, and how I don't want to be in isolation anymore.