secrets

It's hard to write here when I'm holding onto secrets I can't share with the whole world. How many times in the past few weeks I've pulled up this site, started to write, and then erased every word I wrote. I just can't share yet. Not here. Not yet.

What I can share is my joy in this life that is mine - in the future I'm going to have with my daughter, friends, and family - and hopefully loads of new friends, acquaintances, and perhaps even new partners. My days have become filled with moment after moment of light and hope, and I am spending them doing what I love to do most: dreaming, planning, plotting, creating in full color. I have the most delicious vision. I do.

So, if my posts are sporadic in the next few weeks, just know it has to do more with necessary restraint than with early spring blues. I'd write about the state of the world or healthcare if I could,  but I just can't seem to keep my damn mind on anything but my dreams...and you know what? It feels fabulous.

beyond conservative v. liberal framework

I have a choice: I can be white—that is, I can refuse to challenge white supremacy or centrality—or I can be a human being. I can rest comfortably in the privileges that come with being white, or I can struggle to be fully human. But I can’t do both. Though the work is difficult, the choice for those of us who are white should be easy.

                                                                                    - Robert Jensen

Robert Jensen's article in YES! online is succinct and powerful. I, myself, am going to choose the struggle to be fully human. Read the rest of the article here.

The Left is Coming

Here is a great piece in Daily Kos about the US Social Forum this summer. As Cruz says, it is truly "an opportunity to work with other like-minded people and organizations who want to build a progressive, radical alternative to the economic and political systems currently enriching robber barons and making real change all but impossible." Read it. Come to Detroit this summer. Create real change.

Peeling

We change, don't we? People, I mean. Despite our best intentions  - and, at times Herculean efforts - to maintain stasis and control, sometimes we have no choice but to let go and simply be in our metamorphosis. We have no choice but to peel, layer by layer. We have no choice but to eventually face the mirror, wipe the steam away, and see ourselves in the reflection for who we really are - good and bad. And that might mean we've left those we've vowed never to leave. It might mean we've stopped trying, turned away from others we offered to love but who ultimately couldn't or wouldn't love us back. It might mean we've awakened suddenly lucid after slumbering in what felt like a foggy inertia. It might bring us pain - or ecstasy. Or both.

This thought above came to me today in Savasana. Still working on the intentions I set in class last week to let go of that which doesn't serve me and replace it with something better, I allowed my mind to wander while relaxing today. I think maybe I was testing it - seeing if the shift into the healthier space I felt last week after class was a fluke or not. It wasn't. As I lay there, heart pounding and dewy with sweat, and opened up to whatever washed over me, what I heard from some rusty region of my head or heart was this: we all change, and it's okay.

We change.

It's okay.

Deceptively simple words, aren't they? This past week, I've been awash in changing. I've felt the grip on old longings and expectations loosen and they have been replaced with an expanse of light and possibility and roominess. Before I fall asleep at night, I imagine walking into a room with a chalkboard. On it I write everything I'm holding inside that is unfulfilled until it is full of words and dreams and emotions. Then I take the eraser and erase everything. Every word. Every dream. Every unfulfilled emotion. And then, I visualize walking out of the room bathed in golden sunshine.

I am different, this person I've become. I may not be loving who I wanted to love. I may not be living in many of the ways I thought I'd be living. Sometimes it hurts, but sometimes it is delightful, too. And that's okay.

letting go

I've let it go. It being all of the "stuff" that has been dragging me down lately - all of the self judgments, doubts, aching nostalgia for situations that existed in my head rather than in reality. Something shifted inside of me last night - something elemental, visceral. I was at yoga, and before beginning our practice, our teacher had us set two intentions: 1) to let go of something that no longer served us well; and 2) to replace that space w/something better. He suggested we use the practice to work on letting go, and I was floored at the image that came to my mind of literally sweating out the emotions and people that have been clogging up my life. The purpose of yoga solidified for me in that moment, and as I moved through my asana, with each exhale and each bead of sweat, I let go.

Today has been infinitely better than the past few months. I've felt energized and excited about the future. For the first time in a long time, I didn't want to crawl into bed for a nap when I arrived home from work. Instead, I'm cooking, writing, and listening to music as my daughter impersonates the opera singer she met at her school today. We are happy and content.

I was worried last night I wouldn't be able to sustain this happy space, but if today is any indication, I can - and I will.

we are kind to snails

A friend of mine, a wise woman, is reading Good Poems for Hard Times and knowing it would make me smile and nod and sigh, she stuck this poem in my mailbox today.

For a Five-Year-Old by Fleur Adcock

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

a moment

I know I need to write tonight, but I just don't have anything to put out there that is at all interesting or uplifting or thoughtful. I think I'm stuck in what I call "situational muck". It isn't as if nothing is happening. Things are happening. Lots of good stuff percolating, but despite it all I'm a bit sad tonight. So rather than spew sadness here, I'll instead leave you with a poem I read tonight titled Happiness by Raymond Carver. It's a glimpse into a moment so palpable we can taste it. I witnessed one the other morning as I watched a man with his child cross the street. He put his hand up to traffic and gently shepherded her across. The adoration I witnessed in that 15 second occurrence was as pure as anything I've ever seen.

Happiness by Raymond Carver

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

Perspectives of a Movement

Book Announcement

The United States Social Forum

Perspectives of a Movement

Edited by the USSF Book Committee:

Marina Karides, Walda Katz-Fishman, Rose M. Brewer,

Jerome Scott, and Alice Lovelace

This is a remarkable and full account of the first US Social Forum, held in Atlanta, Georgia in the summer of 2007. More than 12,000 people attended from across the U.S. and the world, taking part in workshops, plenaries and other gatherings. The book is both a history of the event and a how-to manual for organizing for the future.

Another World is Possible, Another US is Necessary!

Read the volume that captures the organizing process of the first US Social Forum, including strategies and reflections of the organizers, speakers, and participants that made the USSF a monumental event for grassroots organizing.

Order directly from the publisher:

http://stores.lulu.com/changemaker

Changemaker Publications

Softcover, 369 pages, $25

ISBN: 978-0-557-32373-9

that woman

I'm not sure I know how to have fun anymore, and I wonder if I've turned into that woman: super complicated with ridiculously impossible standards. A woman with a clamorous conscience and waning tolerance for casual encounters, social ignorance, and inflated egos. Or maybe I'm just cranky and tired of winter and need some damn sunshine. Some freedom. Some balance.

I want to go on a picnic. I want to spread out on a blanket of green grass or a beach of white sand. Lying there, I'd sip on a bottle of prosecco and feel the bubbles spark on my tongue and giggle like a child at the tickle of it. Unearthed from layers of winter, my bare shoulders would become pink with sun, my cheeks warm, my nose freckled. And beside me would lay a stack of poetry from Neruda or Whitman or Rilke. Or perhaps even someone reading Neruda to me (in Spanish. It is so much better in Spanish.). And for a few hours, desires outside of the now would cease. Expectations would be met. Intimacy with the world around me tangible. And I would have fun.

Sigh. Want to come?

Ted Sizer

I'm so late in writing about this, but I recently read on Deborah Meier's website that education-reform advocate and founder of the Essential Schools movement, Ted Sizer, died this past October. While I was in graduate school and encountering my first inklings of educational resistance, I hungrily inhaled anything written by Sizer. His position that schools should discard one-size-fits-all models of educating children seemed like basic common sense to me; I was always a bit surprised when someone critiqued him as "radical". I mean what is radical about collaboration, democracy, trust, and depth of understanding?

His death is an unmeasurable loss. I'll leave you with the inspiration of his words:

“Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.”

a feast

"On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us - ah! what a dream, to live in that! - the other stifles us at the first breath."
- Colette

Tonight, I choose to live the dream - a colorful world of good food, better friends, a safe home, love, delectable kisses from children, laughter with teenagers. Tonight, I'm feasting on it all.