Part 2 of 3: from my mind

Inspired by the writing of my friend Kazu Haga, I'm speaking from my heart, my mind and body.

Part 2: Which brings me to looking at my mind, its fears and confusion. I made a drawing this year about this: "At the gates of the temple - the gates of truth - stand two dogs, paradox and confusion."

If I let it, my mind can go off the rocker today with vivid images of fear, death and destruction. The manifestation of deportation, walls, climate change spiraling out of control with guns everywhere, black and white images of history. It's like America elected the emperor from the Hunger Games, and I better strap in. And, I don't KNOW any of those things. As of November 10th, they are still projections, ideas, fears.  I think that maybe they are more likely now, but I refuse to view them as inevitable. That would be to relinquish the incredible power I have seen in myself and the people around me to co-create history alongside those in Washington - to stop the Keystone pipeline, to bring a democratic socialist  so close to winning the primary that despite a broken election system, he won 22 (or more) states, and pressured Hilary Clinton to adopt 2/3rds of his platform.

I think we need to be very careful with the power of even the liberal media to doom and gloom ourselves into the opposite extreme of idealist hope: absolute cynicism. Another paradox: I KNOW that yesterday in CA and many, many other states, incredible legislation passed to begin dismantling the prison industrial complex. I KNOW nearly every single incredible true-blue female progressive on my ballot was elected into office. It's not that who has been elected president isn't important, but something else is happening locally that is not just a CA bubble, but rushing mighty water.

And  I KNOW the work that is being done by people I love and listen to. In the face of limitation, we are getting more creative, more fierce, more whole-hearted and more efficient in our changemaking. All I know are lyrics from my favorite Brasilian protest song by Chico Buarque - "Apesar de você, In spite of you, tomorrow will be another day. How could you ever stop joy, the very day breaking? How could you stop the rooster from crowing, water flowing up, people loving each other, without end."

And again, our lady Rebecca Solnit: "Presidential elections are a form of madness that comes over us once every four years. They fit the great-man or -woman narrative of history, seducing us into forgetting how powerful we are. They erase our memory of grassroots power, direct democracy and civil society."

I want to be more deeply schooled in people's history, rather than fear. Do what needs to be done to hold the line. I want to surround myself with beauty and spiritual nourishment to the exact extent I am exposed to ugliness and destruction. Balance this dark with light. 

I'm also deeply, deeply confused. How is it that people I love, people in my family who volunteer, do laundry for their sick friends and take care of their dogs, send their kids to piano lessons taught by people like me, voted like this? How there such dissonance between those values and the decisions they make in the ballot box? How is it possible that the media created a monster that has now spiraled out of control and separated my family from their most core values, their most core wisdom? 

I want to understand what that has to do with their struggles, confusions, anger. I want to watch "Michael Moore in Trumpland." I want to grow my spiritual warriorship and network of support to sit more closely to some of my Ohio family members at Thanksgiving and Christmas, instead of recoiling from them. There is no basement, as Dr. King said. This is my Beloved Community as well. Because it obviously didn't work just to stay on my own side of the table, next to people I more easily identify with. I want to more strongly support my fellow white people to unbuckle the racism and sexism that stunts their humanity and produces a culture of addiction and numbness. Just like my own fears, I want to welcome these parts of my culture home into true human nature - their innate kindness, generosity, longing to contribute.

We, both the 1/5th of the country that voted for trump and those of us who are working to create another world, need to have supportive spaces to express and heal from our fear, anger and confusion. We all need to keep being whole.

So I want to work even more closely with YES!, the organization I see doing this work most efficiently. And I want to keep making art that enables all our hearts to open through story, beauty and mystery.

Part 1 of 3: From my heart

Inspired by my friend Kazu Haga, I've been sitting and listening alot in the past day to my heart, my mind and my body, and want to share from all those intelligences.

Part 1: I'm heartbroken. I'm staring into the face of the very real possibility that the most vulnerable people I love, the most vulnerable places I love, could now experience even more suffering and loss. That the path towards the restoration of a life sustaining, thriving and just world for all just got a whole lot steeper, a whole lot harder. My life my not change very much, considering what I look like, but many other people's will. I am afraid. I went to aikido, and let myself fall to the ground, over and over.

And, I read what is being written here on facebook and know my heart is broken alongside other incredible hearts.  I'm bouyed by the writing here by people I know and respect -  each speaking with an incredible wideness, a whole-hearted clarity, a commitment of fierce love,  and kindness on how to be with each-other today, tomorrow, onward. We are calling each other. We are talking to strangers. We are listening. We are, as Rebecca Solnit says, falling together.

To me this is a huge clarification of something I remembered over dinner on election night. When the Dali Lama was asked by a reporter who his greatest spiritual teacher was, his response was Chairman Mao - "He shows me what I most love." When I fully accept the results of this election, it offers an incredible clarity, and incredible taking stock. These people and these places are what I love, and I will not, under any circumstances, cease to stand with them. I will put my body in the way.

Absolutely, I want to organize more efficiently, and get to work, but I don't want to too quickly pole-vault over the vast emotions of sadness, confusion and fear, because they are simply the other side of my love. I believe they hold the very compass that guide me as I take action, and sustain me. I want to follow the direction of nearly every great spiritual tradition and merge with that, get curious about it, listen to what is there. In my opinion, the activism of the last forty years has been deeply stunted from clipping civic action from grief, confusion, exhaustion and dark. If I clip this again, I'm likely to just create the same type of change that has been going for the last eight years. Which obviously hasn't been working well enough to prevent this.

Thoughts while singing Motown alongside #BlackLivesMatter

"The duty of privilege is absolute integrity." - John O'Donohue

Many of you know that for the last year or so, I've had the immense pleasure of teaching beginner singing classes for adults at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage. And one thing I've seen over and over is that one of the quickest ways I can support them in re-accessing the sheer joy of singing is through the world of Motown music. On the first day, I watch an entire room of nervous adults instantly shift to swaying back and forth, closing their eyes, singing and smiling, as soon as Marvin Gaye comes through the speakers. Or Stevie Wonder, or Nina Simone.  

And, being a white woman teaching classes filled with a majority white students, it feels irresponsible to sing, learn and teach from this content without speaking to the larger context of what my black brothers and sisters are clearly articulating within the #BlackLivesMatter movement. I'm obviously by no means an expert on this subject, I have only my experience and thoughts to share on an immensely complex topic. I'm not writing this to simplify anything. It's merely a humble the invitation for all my fellow white singers to have a deeper conversation on how our love of music really does require of us to dismantle the institutionalized racism that permeates this country, and within ourselves.

I want the singing of this music to be an invitation to witness and honor the incredible history of black artistry in America, showing yet another way my life is inextricably linked with people that look very different than me. I can't really imagine my life without the music that has articulated and accompanied nearly every great emotional process I've ever had. What great love has not been cherished while belting the words to Stevie Wonder's "You are the Sunshine of My Life?" What wedding has not included a lip synch of Etta James' "At Last?" It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from writer Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God): "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me." 

Sometimes I think racism is a sort of cultural schizophrenia, fracturing and dividing those natural emotional and interpersonal connections, overriding it with statistics, and lump sum identities. 

It's not that Black Lives Matter is highlights something new happening in American culture - it's merely more clearly articulating and documenting the unacceptable legacy of violence against people of color in this country. And what I want for my students to feel on a new level how much these lives matter - how the loss of these men and women is an interrupted family tree of cultural richness that has shaped the country and, I would argue, music throughout the entire world. To feel viscerally the level of squandered genius of all the lives lost in the school-to-prision-pipeline, lives lost on a street.

I think the invitation of Black Lives Matter is to honor that legacy institutionally - this culture shouldn't just matter inside my heart and head, but in the structures that form my world, the structures that form government, schools and neighborhoods.  I want to bring that identity, that legacy, to the forefront as my culture begins reassigning priorities and resources. I want to my singing of Motown to live alongside my singing and listening to all those other songs, stories and assertions of black culture in America today.

And I want ALL those songs in the air around all me.

PS. And, if you want to start singing, my a new series of my class begins November 7th, here at the Freight.