Let’s go deeper and downer, into the muck, the brown swill, and then let’s keep going, down and down to the liquid core, the molten mess, where we can heat our frozen guts and send sweet heat up along the capillaries the branches the rivulets the lightening.
Recently I was writing about “training myself to focus.” I know that means a lot of things – what are some of them? I wrote down twenty strategies I use.
First, I show up. This means when I think of my time, I put my working hours first. My perfect calendar has very little on it. This assumes that most of my time will be working. And it is true: I work hours every day. On a travel day, or a day filled with commitments, that might mean working a few hours at night. On a good day, I have a few hours under my belt before I get my morning coffee.
Read MoreI know a little about abusive relationships. I think we are coming out of one. I felt myself shaking today, and remembered this is what animals do when they come down after having been alert to danger. If they don't have to flee, the deer/gazelle/horse shivers all over as they go back to grazing, releasing the adrenaline and other chemicals that have been racing through their system in case they needed to run. All the women I know are collectively trying to shake off what settled on our psyches these past four years, battering us with lies and threats of violence.
Read MoreLast night I had popcorn for dinner. I was watching Rachel Maddow for the first time in weeks. It used to be our habit to watch her while we ate something delicious J cooked up - rockfish in miso sauce or stir fry with snowpeas. As the political climate in our country blew the end off the thermometer I found I couldn’t watch her, or anyone.
Read MoreIn the year 2000 I went to a talk at our downtown library given by two women from Afghanistan. I’d heard about the oppression of the Taliban` and my friend Toni said she was going, did I want to join her? I stood at the back, ready to leave if it was boring or an obvious come-on for funds to a sketchy non-profit.
I stayed the entire time, listening to these young women tell of the horrors of Taliban oppression and the heroic acts of their comrades, women who had organized to fight the fundamentalist warlords and the Soviets after a period of Western-style reform with a king who had modernized Afghanistan. We
Read MoreWhiteness: my family messages
The idea of being vanilla, which is white ice cream, is synonymous with being bland. If someone says they have vanilla taste, or vanilla sexual preferences, it is understood they like things tame, predictable, tepid - without strong sensation. Blandness is the reduction of feeling or powerful sensual sensation. It is what the Brits strive for, as when the Queen keeps her emotions in check and “soldiers on” no matter what is happening. It is all those red and white signs that say, "Keep Calm and Carry on." Originally used to help with morale when Britain was threatened by massive air attacks in WWII which eventually came, it has come to be shorthand for British sensibility.
THE DEBACLE
The television
The news
The virus
The travel ban
The bewilderment
The warnings
The worry
Read MoreCan we please talk about this, white people? This is an opening - summer, 2020. Black people are saying what they have said so many times before - and white people didn’t hear them. Hear what? That my friend goes to a grocery store and a clerk follows her from aisle to aisle, where the cans next to where she is looking suddenly need rearranging….
Read MoreWhen I was fourteen I got arrested often. The voter registration drives in the South were inspiring people in the North to look at their embedded race problems. I lived on the South Side of Chicago, in integrated Hyde Park, but I went to school in an all black neighborhood close by. I saw how color lines were strictly re-enforced, but no one ever talked about it at home or in school.
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The gift of Trickster is to remake the world in new terms. With the multiple gifts of uproar over a virus and upheaval over police brutality, new truths are surfacing. Our racist President now lives at 1600 Black Lives Matter Plaza. The fence he had erected to secure the perimeter of the White House - the People's house - started as a high, barren hurricane fence. Today it is a vivid collage of ever-changing art: layer after layer of public emotion, displayed loudly and in defiance of our cold clod of a leader.
Read More“It’s a walkabout,” I thought as I strolled in my neighborhood. “The kids – they are searching for meaning.”
Read MoreI wake up feeling like there is a lead blanket on me, a thick version of the one a doctor's assistant lays on my chest for an x-ray. I think about Minneapolis and George Floyd. I feel the weight of the enormity of frustration that explodes periodically in one American city or another: it was Chicago when I was in college; Los Angeles when I was working at the Natural History Museum. And again when Rodney King was beaten and the jury – moved to all white Simi Valley – brought back a “not guilty” verdict.
Read MoreThe political discourse has fallen into predictable ruts of us versus them, science versus other systems of thinking, blaming and predictions. Instead of navigating and commenting on those tropes I am more interested in what is emerging. Here, in no special order, are questions I am thinking about:
Read MoreWhen Trump won in 2016, a group of former Congressional staffers wrote a 23-page handbook and put it up online. It was called "Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda." In it they suggest ways people can peacefully but effectively resist the move toward authoritarianism that Trump's election signified
Read MoreThis pandemic is bringing up cruel, but predictable, inequalities: poor people, black people, Native Americans, Hispanics - they're all dying in greater percentages than their share of the population. It seems we are at war with ourselves.
Read MoreActually, a lot. Being white you probably don’t think about your skin color often. If you do, you have the assurance it is the norm, or the best.
Read MoreMy connection to color prejudice comes mostly from high school. I was one of the few white students at Hyde Park High, on the South Side of Chicago, in the 1960’s. In my school there were six tracks - dumbest to brightest by the school’s assessment - and the darkest kids were in the lowest tracks.
Read MoreBig Bad Beautiful Brown came about when I was working with my friend Charlotte Sherman. Charlotte and I met online in 2009 when I contributed to her Kickstarter - she hoped to fund a trip to Mississippi to do research for a book she was writing.
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