Oops

I didn’t sleep well last night. Maybe you didn’t either. I kept worrying about whoever made the envelope error that resulted in the wrong announcement for Best Picture. “It’s La La Land…. No, it’s Moonlight.”

As cute cousin Michael said, “That was awkward.” (The go-to word for the millennium. That and “random.”)

I have always beat myself up for my own errors, so I’ve been fretting about the person who made the mistake. How are they? Are they beating themselves up? Did Trump do it? (the inside scoop)

 I was glad Moonlight won. I would have liked Hidden Figures or Fences, too. I liked Loving for the story it told, but it wasn’t a great movie. Not Manchester by the Sea. It was just too depressing.

I haven’t seen La La Land, and I probably won’t. This doesn’t seem like the time for an escapist movie, a romance to take me away from real world problems. As speechmakers like to say, art is about truth, and I’ll add that the truth is that there are serious issues in our nation, issues for journalists and artists and activists….

Dad pointed out that all the movies I liked were Black movies (or, he said, “half Black” in the case of Loving.) I liked Hidden Figures because it was a good movie, and it was about an historical truth about Black women, a truth that isn’t in our history books. (Neither was the Japanese Internment when I was in high school anyway.)

I also liked August Wilson’s Fences, but I suspect mixing the genres of film and stage theatre didn’t work for a lot of people. And I liked the James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro. Though Baldwin died in 1987, the script rings true today, as the contemporary images woven through the film argue. (It wasn’t up for best picture and didn’t win best documentary, but I thought it was great.)

So why do I, a white woman (pasty some would say) like all these Black movies, you and my dad may be wondering. As a woman and a lesbian and now a disabled person, maybe I identify more with the outsider’s narrative than I would have in my younger heterosexual and agile years. Maybe. But as a girl and then a woman, I have always noticed sexism in our culture, and it has always pissed me off. So in some sense, I have always identified with the narrative outside of the power structure.

These days, with Trump and his buddies in office, I feel my vulnerability as a disabled lesbian more than ever. And I want to see  the human story of the unseen in my newspapers and my art.  Perhaps I am more open to that story than I was in my less vulnerable years.

I don’t want an easy movie right now. I want a movie that helps me understand voices and histories that both are and are not my own, even if those stories are hard. As Reverend Barber III says in The Third Reconstruction (a book of both hope and truth), “Peace with God means conflict with the world.”

I have thought a lot in the last months about my friend Dave’s observation that I like to be safe and comfortable. That’s true. So maybe I seek films that make me uncomfortable—or really films that make other people uncomfortable.

And maybe I need to let go of perfectionism in myself and others. Maybe that’s part of God’s peace, too. Perhaps to see and hear truths I need to be willing to make mistakes. Perhaps relinquishing this perfectionism can be a tiny part, a tiny step along the way, but a beginning to truth. And perhaps the truth will set us free. And for sure it will be uncomfortable. 

Cresting the 5-0 Hill

Dearest Sister Jen,

         Sister Jen, you have always been the little sister I looked up to. Well, maybe not always. There were the days before you could spell, when my friend Ande and I tortured you by spelling her name, “A-N-D-E” and pretending when you called out to mom (“Mom! They’re spelling again!”) that we were just saying it.

Even when you were trying to keep up with an older sister who wasn’t always as kind as she should have been, you had your limits, your sense of self. I remember the time Ande and I made mud pie and tried to get you to eat it. You refused, and I was flummoxed. What? You’re refusing me?!

Similarly, there were the years when you traded me dimes for my larger nickels, and then there was the day when you wouldn’t trade any more. You weren’t taller than I was yet, but I think that’s the day I started looking up to you.

Though I was too often unkind, we did have fun together. Do you remember riding my back as we cleaned up my room (Alas, we never cleaned yours). We pretended that there were alligators and that they couldn’t bite me, so you rode on my back and I carried you around the room picking my things up off the floor and putting them on the bed for me to put back on the floor later.

And, of course, I helped prepare you for school: I’m pretty sure you were the only first grade student who could spell “idiosyncrasy.” That’s probably why you got to be a crossing guard and then were selected for the Morehead.

On the famous trip out West, we shared a cozy warm (even hot) room, unaware that Mom, Dad, and Little Brother Matt were freezing, Matt sleeping on the floor with just a thin blanket. And there was the Monopoly game where Matt trounced us and yet enjoyed the game less than we did. Apparently, he didn’t like his new nickname or the alliterative newspaper headlines announcing his win: “The Mighty Mole Makes Millions.”

I have loved your sense of humor, both clever and incisive. In high school, when you and Ellen were talking with someone who had a booger showing in their nose, one of you would just blurt, “Booger.”

You’re the one who told Dad I wanted a car, (I didn’t have the guts to ask for such a thing), and you and Mom came to Davidson on my 21^st birthday to give me a toy car, a symbol for the real one I would later buy with my birthday money.

From time to time, someone saw me and said, “Jennifer?” I was of course flattered to be mistaken for my smart, beautiful, gutsy little sister.

Before I came out to the family, you knew me well enough to know something had gone awry and wrote me a letter asking me to be real with you. My coming out letter crossed yours in the mail, and I received an envelope from you in return with lots of headlines, like Ellen Degeneres coming out, and only the note on the outside: “You’re in.” The note and the headlines made me laugh and breathe easily for the first time in years. You have supported Ann and me from the beginning.

You and I have lived on opposite sides of the country for decades now, and I wish I could see you more, but I always look forward to our Christmases and our week at the beach together. I remember fondly the year after my brain surgery when you read aloud my childhood friend Heather Newton’s novel.

And of course I remember that you had brain surgery a few years before I did and gave me excellent advice before my surgery: 1) Always accept help. 2) Whenever they say, “Morphine,” you say, “Yes.”

I also remember that you came to take care of me one week when Ann needed some space. Though my memory is bleary from those days, I have two crisp memories: 1) When my headache got so bad that I needed to go to the emergency room, you got me in the backseat of our little Honda and crammed the wheelchair in the front. (I still find it amusing that it didn’t occur to either of us that they would have wheelchairs at the hospital.) 2) You were so friendly with the nurse, a burly, hairy guy, as you two talked while I waited for treatment. You were offended on his behalf that he had to pay for parking while he worked. Though you live the life of the wealthy now, you have always been interested in people and their stories and have treated everyone that some people might have looked down on with grace.

         Welcome to the other side of the 5-0 hill. Today, you’re on the crest, seeing both the way you came up and the way you’ll go down. I’m looking back down the way you’ve come and also, for once perhaps, a few steps ahead of you down the other side.

         This side of the mountain gets a bad rap, but it’s lovely, too. There are upsides to down hill. Your beautiful children are growing up; your husband stays by your side (I remember you saying a year or so ago, “It helps that he still looks good.”); you have job you like with people you like; and you’re still funny, smart, beautiful, and gutsy. 

         And you have an older sister who adores you.

What is there to life, really?

At a social work class on disabilities where I was presenting last week, a student asked, “You’ve already graduated. Why do you still do this work (for disability justice) at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work?”

The question stumped me, and I gave a lame, though partially true, response about the fact that because I can’t work and I live on SSDI, (I might have added savings, investments, insurance, my parents’ gifts and Ann’s retirement, but the statement would have been too long), I have the time to focus and enough money to live, so that frees me to work for social justice.

My response was true, but it only revealed a smart part of my truth. The larger truth is that I want to live a meaningful life, just as I did before my disabilities. I suppose we all want to live meaningful lives, and we’re trying to figure out what that means for ourselves. To me, to live a meaningful life means to work passionately because I care so much about what I’m working for. It means living a life that is meaningful to myself as well as others.

Maybe because my life has been rooted in the Southern Baptist faith of the church where I grew up and in the bright shadow (is there such a thing?) of the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s, I believe my life is about love and justice. My brain tumors didn’t end that, and neither did my graduation. Since my brain tumors, my daily work has shifted from underserved students in American high schools to working for a more nuanced cultural understanding of people with disabilities. So my daily work has changed, but my belief in what’s right—a world where people can make choices about where and how they live—has not changed. I have also believed that justice begins with education, another piece that has not changed. 

My Auntie Myra always had a cross stitch framed on her wall that had the image of a flower blooming by the stitched words, “Bloom where you are planted.” I admire Auntie Myra, and I suppose the words were meant to be encouraging in a time and place of struggle, but I always found them depressing. “I will not be planted,” I said to myself each time I passed the cross-stitch.  “I will keep power in my own life.” (My mom had a refrigerator magnet with different words but a similar sentiment: “Celebrate what is.”) The strong women in my life seemed to me to be sporting women’s wisdom that told me to make do with what the world gave me and to be happy about it. I would not.

I will not. My call is to celebrate what is right and just, to celebrate love and kindness and wisdom. But my role is also to challenge what is wrong, unjust, small-minded and small-hearted.

My twenty-seven years of employment in secondary schools moved me further and deeper into an education that supported students living in poverty, often with the additional oppressions of languages other than “the king’s” (or the CEO’s) English, and whose memories of childhood went back to other lands and to the ravages of war. And sometimes the vulnerabilities of undocumented, poor, imprisoned, addicted, uneducated and/or disappeared parents.

As I grew in awareness of injustices, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s exhortation, “It’s always the right time to do the right thing.” https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/martin_luther_king_jr.html

challenged my slow-moving self to move into spaces of injustice to see what I might do there, rather than waiting longer to learn what might be possible before moving.

I finally moved after meeting people in rural Central America, first to do volunteer work in rural Michoacan in the 1980s and in the 21^st century to come to know and learn from people in rural El Salvador, who had built a community after seven years in refugee camps, fleeing the violence and terror of many American-funded and trained brutalities.

A commitment to radical love drove me to my work in secondary education, and two brain tumors drove me from it. The shift, however, is away from a particular way of doing things, not from a life’s work for justice as I understand it. After my brain tumors and their treatments, I became aware of unnecessary injustices of people with disabilities. 

I had experienced discrimination before: as a Southerner, a woman, and a lesbian. Each experience broadened the world I belonged to. When I faced my own discriminations and oppressions (micro and macro) due to my disabilities, I took a detour from my path through the world of secondary education: I didn’t head to the other side of Justice Mountain; I’m just walking a connected path now, a path on the same side of the mountain, one that has me more aware of both my privileges as a married white person with adequate resources and also my oppressions as a Southerner ("Yes ma'am"), a woman (“Hear me roar”), a lesbian ("Hear my partner roar, too) and now as a disabled person (“No. I will not get better. I am better.”)

As I studied disability justice on my own (it wasn’t part of my social work education), I learned about Ed Roberts, the father of the Disability Rights Movement. Roberts tried to kill himself after he experienced permanent paralysis from the neck down and overheard a doctor tell his mother, “You’d better hope he dies because if he doesn’t, he’s going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life.” (As a side note, if you’re ever around a person you think can’t hear you, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want overheard. I heard two Intensive Care Unit nurses whispering about the nurse who had cared for me overnight after my brain surgery. They clearly disapproved of her, and I heard one say, “One of these days, she’s going to kill someone.” She was also someone I had known before my tumors. For her sake and for mine, I was glad she hadn’t killed me, and I didn’t like the gossiping nurses.)

Anyway, Roberts stopped trying to starve himself to death after his final nurse left and he had power in his life again. In a “Sixty Minutes” interview by Harry Reasoner, Roberts talked about this move from despair to power: “We make such fundamental errors in taking care of people all the time. Think about your own life. If you had people taking care of you, making all your decisions, what is there to life, really? In almost all of social programs we set up take care of us or put us away in institutions to be cared for.” http://mn.gov/mnddc/ed-roberts/sixtyMinutes.html

My experiences weren’t as stark as Roberts’, but I had a doctor who didn’t want me to take the risks that living people take. My doctor didn’t want me to die, like Roberts’, he just didn’t want me to seek ways to live a meaningful life if that meant I’d need to risk failure. As my doctor in this medical world of ours, his opinion might have limited my ability to take a new path because he was afraid I would fail. His opinion and his power pissed me off. I think I still have the right to risk.

I see myself as a social justice activist, and I went in to public school teaching and leadership because I believed that education was the place where I could make a difference for people in the U.S. who were oppressed, but then I had to leave my teaching career after 17 years and finally the field of public school leadership after another five years. What does my life mean now? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself since I woke from neurosurgery. And in asking the question, I assert that, as a person, I deserve to live life on my own terms.

Thinking about this, I listened this weekend to Leonard Cohen’s song about loss:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything).

That’s how the light gets in.

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/anthem.html

(It’s excellent. You can listen to it from Cohen’s 2008 London concert on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wRYjtvIYK0 )

So I seek now to ring the bells that still can ring (or at least the bells I can now ring). That’s why I’m still doing this work though I’ve graduated: if I can make a difference to people who experience pain and misunderstanding, whether it be students with disabilities or the people they will serve, I want to do that.

Though I no longer teach in a classroom, I still believe in the importance of education, and I believe my experiences as an educator inform the work I do. I still work with teenagers sometimes: I volunteer to work with high school students in the Seattle School District who aim to be the first in their families to go to college. I also hope to work with homeless teenagers in finding their own voices. (I’ll let you know if that works out.)

But my scope is broader: I know now that I love Iconnecting with others who’ve experienced life-changing health conditions, including the elders with whom I’ve explored poetry for the last sixteen months.

I seek to bring more love to the world. That’s it. My dad says that’s noble. Maybe. Or maybe it’s selfish: it’s a way to believe my life is still meaningful. Or maybe it’s both noble and selfish.

Anyway, that’s a fuller answer to why I do what I do.

With Feathers

Saturday, my partner Ann and I joined Seattle’s river of womxn and mxn marching through Seattle’s streets to say we’re angry and scared and paying attention. Our friend Linda’s daughter Emma gave me a “pink pussy hat” at the end of the march, which was great because the shadows were lengthening and it was getting chilly. I hadn’t brought my own mostly because I’m an over-the-50-hill Southern lady and I just couldn’t bring myself to display such a thing. (As we talked with our friend Leslie and our minister Ann a couple of days before the march, Pastor Ann opened her eyes wide in a moment of insight: “You know,” she said about those pussy hats, “that has another meaning.”

As Pastor Ann left the sanctuary, I said what any good Southerner would say to a somewhat naïve but lovely sentiment: “Bless her heart.”

My partner Ann didn’t need a hat for the march. In fact, a hat would have covered the wide pink stripe down the right side of her silky white hair: at once bold and lovely.

We had taken the bus from near our home with our friend Marion. (Marion had planned to take the #48 to our house, but the buses were all full, so her partner Wolfgang gave her a ride. Another friend and her partner attempted to catch the #48, too, but because the buses were all full, they went to the place where the #48 begins its route and waited two hours with a long line of others.)

The march stretched over three miles, and the first marchers arrived at the end point before the last ones had left the gathering space, so those who were late had plenty of time to join in.

As we marched, booms would travel from the back of the march to the front, giving us a sense of just how big it was. The first time we heard the roar, Marion and I looked at the blue skies above for the jet. That’s what it sounded like.

There’s been a lot in the news estimating how many people were there: 100,000+… 125,000…175,000…200,000? In marches nationwide, I’ve heard a million total.

That’s a lot of people, and I felt hope of a resistance for the first time since the election.

I wonder if Trump paid attention. Maybe. Whatever the number, it was Seattle’s largest political march ever. But a few years ago, after the Seahawks won the Super bowl, a reported 700,000 attended the welcome parade down Seattle’s snowy streets. That’s a lot more. At that time, the numbers in one city approached the national total of marchers on Saturday.

I worry that our culture still celebrates football more than it attends to a threat to who we might be as a country.

So I feel hopeful but not secure in the resistance.

The Sikh Valerie Kaur made me think about the possibility of hope in her rousing talk at a Christian church. I was particularly struck when she said, “The mother in me asks, 'What if? What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?... What if this is our country's great transition?" (The whole speech is short and worth hearing: http://stage2.sikhnet.com/news/video-valarie-kaur-delivers-rousing-speech-church )

Maybe this thing waiting to be born will be a different creature than Yeats’s “rough beast…slouch[ing] toward Bethlehem waiting to be born,” a creature imagined after World War I.

At church on Sunday, we read the story of Saul, a beast who persecuted Christians but had a conversion experience on the way to Damascus and became a good guy. The focus of the reflection was on the essential idea that even the most awful people can change. I like that idea, but I kept focusing on the line, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”

I have seen suffering in El Salvador, Michoacan, Ethiopia, Cuba, and Seattle. I have read about World War II, Rwanda, and Syria. And the lists go on. I have seen that there is a grandness, a largeness of spirit, that grows out of suffering. That’s all well and good, a thing to admire from a distance, but I don’t want the suffering to enter my world.

Trump seems to be the parallel to Saul, and maybe he will be enlightened, but like Ananais in the story, I doubt it. To be honest, I’m not thinking about Trump suffering, though that seems like it would be healthy. I’m worried about my own suffering. How much will I need to suffer in this brave, new world? I want to be faithful to a vision that we might have a more just world, that this may be the darkness of the womb and not of the tomb, but I would prefer not to suffer along the way. Really, suffering is not my strong suit.

So I’ve been thinking about hope, about the vague and energizing spirit of it and the more exacting and nagging question of hope for what.

One of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson, writes about hope as a kind of spirit, a substanceless thing to be described only through metaphor:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

Perhaps hope in this time will be asking a crumb—or more—of me. Perhaps I will learn, as the poet, actress, teacher and activist Leticia Nieto, said, “There’s hope, but hope is not what you thought it was.” Perhaps hope will be harder than I had hoped.

It is true that through my struggles with brain tumors and disabilities, my soul has grown deeper and wider. Perhaps it’s time to grow again, and I know from experience that growing may be more painful than I want it to be, but I’ll be richer for it.

Perhaps this is another way of agreeing with the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche: “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”

And perhaps for now that is the thing with feathers.

Be Not Afraid

"Let's get together," my friend Dave suggested over email as if we'd seen each other over last six years since I left my work in schools. Dave had read my Facebook and blog posts and knew that I have been struggling since Trump's election--especially since Trump started appointing people to his cabinet and other leadership positions.

Simultaneously, I've heard from elders, Jews and people of other faiths who were in Europe during Hitler's rise: Pay attention. This is how the Third Reich began.

"Okay, I'm paying attention," I've  thought." But how does paying attention change anything? I've noticed things haven't gotten any better since I've been paying attention."

It's not that I expected Dave to give me all the answers or that I would believe him even if he did; it's just that Dave's a good and thoughtful person, and I knew I could count on his thoughtfulness, intelligence, and wisdom. 

My friend Stephen had told me the night before about the Jewish tradition of the Hidden 36 saying that there are in this world at any one time 36 people who will save the world from misfortune. (You're probably one of them, so go to https://www.hidden36.com/call-to-action/ to order bagels for a food bank or a food voucher for a person or family in need.) 

The Hidden 36 don't know who they are, and we don't either. It's good I'm not Jewish because I think there are more. Waking from my nap just now, I quickly listed my first fifteen and figured if I kept going I'd get to 36 pretty fast...and I suspect that there are really good people I don't know.

Dave is certainly one of the good persons of this world, so we got together for lunch and a good talk. 

As I ate my crepe and salad, Dave observed that I was a person who sought peace and comfort. Yep. He pointed out that the American experience of a safe and comfortable world is not the experience most people in the world have. He also pointed out that, in his travels, he's seen so many people affected by war, political instability, and poverty. 

"I have, too," I thought to myself. He continued that there is surprising joy in those places, and I remembered how surprised I was during my summer in rural Michoacan in the 1980s. The people there were poor, very poor, and they experienced more joy than I had imagined possible. (Yes, there was tremendous pain, too.) I also thought of my friends in rural El Salvador who experienced torture and the murder of their communities in the 1980s and yet are teaching me about kindness and faith.

Dave also pointed out that the struggles I've faced--he alluded to my brain tumors and disabilities without naming them--have probably deepened me as a person, enriched my life in ways I would not have anticipated. That's true. He noted difficulties in his own life and, acknowledging that neither of us would have asked for those times, said that difficult times had deepened him, too.

"All of this is true," I thought, "but the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocides and the list goes on are too terrible to grant as darknesses that deepen us and are therefore okay."

He didn't say they were okay; merely that as a person of faith (any faith, I will add) I am called to keep my faith even when the world goes dark. After all, God hasn't changed since the election. My country has changed (and will likely change more).  I am changing, too. 

Dave reminded me of the New Testament story where Jesus is asked, "Should we pay taxes to Caesar?" and Jesus replies, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." In this passage, Dave pointed out, Jesus separated our responsibility's to the state and to God. Dave's perspective was so clear and thoughtful, so full of kindness and humility.

Dave separates church and state in his mind. He told me, "My mission isn't to fix the system. It's to save people." As excellent as his points were and as solid as his faith is, I don't separate church and state, however. My whole life has been both about the individual and the system. My work in schoolS, for example, was about teaching individuals as well as confronting the system. (I was more effective with teaching individuals, and it certainly brought me more joy.) 

On Christmas Eve in our church, our minister told the story of Jesus's birth and asked us to consider who we are in that story: Were we Mary or Joseph or even the donkey, headed to a foreign land under the proclamation of a powerful leader? Were we the angel who appeared to Mary and told her not to be afraid, that she'd be having God's child (how do those two ideas fit together?), or were we Joseph whose fiance was pregnant with someone else's child? Were we the inn keepers who had no room or the person who offered up a stable? Were we the baby born to give hope to the world or the animals in the stall who watched him? How about the emperor whose power was challenged by this baby? Maybe we were the wise ones, astronomers, who carried gifts from afar. Or maybe we were the shepherds watching their sheep by night who were frightened by an angel. 

No question. I'm a scaredy cat: I'm a shepherd, and having a celestial voice tell me not to be afraid wouldn't give me peace but would scare the heebee jeebees out of me. If I follow the shepherds' story, though, I'd see a bright star, follow it, and end up at a manger by a new baby, his parents, barn animals, and rich guys with fancy gifts. If I follow the story, I am not afraid: I am a believer from the beginning. 

In hearing the story again, it helped to consider the world that Jesus was born into: a world of corruption and despotism... and I see that the world has other possibilities. 

As I write this, stuck for a moment about what to write next, I glance to my right, and I see a page of my favorite Martin Luther King, Jr. quotations. I read: "We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope."

As I read this, I wonder, "How will I keep faith and hope if my country becomes the Fourth Reich? How will I be part of the hope in this brave new world?"

I suppose I will do what I have always done in a new and perhaps more courageous way: I will seek to bring more love into the world.