Day 102: Rest

I love the concept of synchronicity, the idea that sometimes, things come together in unexpected but serendipitous ways.  Today, it's a column by Margaret Renkl in the NYT; she's an author whose writing I love, especially when she's describing the natural world, which she does with a deep sense of connection and joy.  Today's column is about rest, which she explores in the context of the commandment to rest on the Sabbath.  It's worth saying here that I am not religious, but the call to rest, to appreciate the world from a place of rest, and to allow wisdom to arise from rest, is one that resonates deeply.  In fact, there was a time when I took a weekly digital shabbat (idea taken from someone else), stepping away from email and texts and blogs and online anything from sundown one day to sundown the next.  I only left my phone on to receive phone calls from my daughter at college, or from my mom and dad.  I really loved the stretched-out feeling of that day.  And I loved that it challenged me to be present for my own downtime, instead of finding easy distraction in the form of digital lethe.  I spoke with a mentor on Friday about reinstituting this practice in my life - and then spent the weekend grading.  It did have to be done, but I would like to frame it as a rare instance, rather than the norm.  And then this morning, I opened the Times during a rare break in my day (reading and eating at the same time, and why yes, that is rather mindless, isn't it?), and there was Renkl's column, reminding me of the sacredness of rest, reminding me that I owe myself and the world space and spaciousness.

It occurs to me, reading this over before hitting "post", that this has implications for my magpie year.  But it also occurs to me that the goal of this year was to encourage myself to write, and to see what I learned by doing so.  And maybe what I'm learning is that I write better from charged batteries, and that recharging my batteries is a legitimate thing to plan to do.  I will mull this week, and you will be the first to know if I end up reclaiming a day from the online world. 

Day 90: Potential, Part III

In aid of what.  Exactly. 

It takes me straight back to that early idea I’d garnered, that people sat in order to create a little happy glow for themselves that wore off as they interacted with the world, whereupon they had to go back to the cushion to regain it.  Is that really why we sit?  So we can be happy?  So we can feel more connected to people when we’re on the cushion than we do when we’re actually interacting with them?  So we can come to see all of our stories about the world as just that – stories?  Do we really sit to get better at sitting?

A sidebar:  On a seven-day silent retreat last year, one of the teachers – an older, white, cisgendered woman – talked us through the metaphor of seeing our mental stories as a film.  That, as we sit and watch the rising and falling away of the stories that we tell ourselves about our lives, we can come to the realization that they are like a film, and we are the audience.  We may become absorbed to the point where a movie feels real – our heart races, we lean forward, our muscles tense when the hero is in trouble – but then we can suddenly realize, it’s a story!  And we can sit back and catch our breath and see how we are separate from the action on the screen.

This is true, and very helpful in many ways.  When my colleague dismisses something I say with absolutely no acknowledgement, it is easy to get caught up in a larger story.  No-one takes me seriously.  Or, I’m a failure and nothing I say is very important.  And if we believe and act on those stories, we’re trapped.  But at the same time, if I am a woman, and my colleague is a man, and this kind of dismissal happens regularly (and worse yet, he then repeats what I’ve said as his idea), it seems to me that to say that my understanding of that interaction as sexist and as part of a large structure of misogyny is just a story I’m telling myself – well, that’s simplistic.  And, perhaps more importantly, devoid of transformative potential.

So I wrote a question to the teacher, saying that, while I find it very useful to understand many of my stories about my life as, just that, stories, I wasn’t so sure that I was comfortable thinking about, say, racism as just a story and could she please address that?

Two days later, she said that she’d received that question, and offered a one-line answer about how, of course, we wouldn’t want to say that racism is a story.  Period.  The lack of depth and understanding were deeply troubling to me (and, I found out later, to at least one person of color in the room).  But also, I think, symptomatic of what I’ve been circling around with all of this writing – that mindfulness, as it is often practiced and described and taught today, has had its radical potential subverted by a paradigm of individual practice geared towards self-understanding and self-improvement.

What do I mean by that? 

When mindfulness is something we do on the cushion, with very little teaching about how to carry it out into the world, it is robbed of its potential.  When it is about a detached watching of the mind, decoupled from teachings about wise action arising from an understanding of the self and others and the nature of reality, it is robbed of its potential.  When we sit on our cushions offering compassion to people near and far, and then sit in a meeting unable to even recognize that we’re Othering the asshole across the table who just. won’t. listen.  Well, where is our practice then?

And I’m not saying it’s easy.  In fact, when people talk about how they couldn’t do a week-long silent retreat, I want to say, dude – that’s the easy part.  It’s doing a life-long engaged retreat in the world that’s really really hard.  And doing it without engaging in spiritual bypassing (I just love everyone!) is even harder.  It requires getting very down and dirty with some really difficult emotions.  Because here’s another secret no-one wants to say out loud about mindfulness – it’s not all about being peaceful and serene and happy.  If you’re going to be mindful of whatever arises as it arises?  Well, my friend, you are going to feel anger, and fear, and deep grief.  You are going to feel agitation, and a very strong desire to run away from all those things you’re feeling.  That’s what our minds and bodies do.  They feel it all.  It’s just that our minds keep wanting to stick with the emotions that we’re comfortable feeling (or that we feel like we’re allowed to feel – and there are all kinds of social constraints around that; another essay for another time), and tell us all kinds of stories to keep us in those emotions.

But, I think, radical change comes when we feel all the feels, as my daughters would say.

Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams, in her jointly-authored book Radical Dharma, talks about mindfulness and anti-racism work.  And she calls for white folks to come to anti-racism work not from a space of “what can I do for you (poor people of color)”, but, instead, to begin by recognizing the pain that the system of racism inflicts upon us.  Not to center ourselves, but instead to understand more clearly what Lilla Watson means when she says, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.  But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mind, then let us work together.” 

To understand that my liberation – the cessation of my pain and suffering – is bound up with the liberation of everybody else?  To feel that in my bones, instead of just in my head?  Well, my friends, that – that – is radical.  That is transformative.

And it can be one of the gifts of mindfulness, practiced, well, mindfully.  When it, first, engages with what Kabat-Zinn calls the whole catastrophe – not just the joy and the bliss, but the sorrow and rage.  And when it gets its ass off the cushion and into the world to continue that practice.  When the practice take place not only in the isolation chamber of our own minds, but in conversation with others.  In mutuality with the world.

If I truly look at someone else through the eyes of lovingkindness – eyes that recognize our common humanity – how could I possibly lock someone up at the border?  Separate someone from their child?  Draw zoning lines that limit the access of other people’s children to the education my children enjoy?  If I look at myself through the eyes of lovingkindness, how can I allow someone to encroach on my boundaries?  Dismiss me as worthless?  Waste my time with hateful and draining speech?

If I look at the world that way, how can I not want to find ways to adjust my consumption to cause less damage?  How can I eat an animal that has lived its entire life in fear, pain, and misery?

And, through all of this, when I regard myself with compassion, how can I not sit with my own fear of failure, my grief that the world is this messed up, the shame that I have contributed to these systems, the feeling that I am not enough and can’t do enough – how can I not hold all of that with love and offer myself kindness for being an imperfect being in an imperfect world?  Not alone in my imperfection, nor in the world, but in community with other imperfect beings.

If we all really could hang on to that, off the cushion, the world would tremble.

And so, when I see all the ways in which we turn mindfulness into an isolated, isolating practice.  When I see how the ways that mindfulness is practiced exclude broad swaths of embodiment in favor of those that align with one dominant model of being in the world.  When I see those who raise these issues being dismissed with the suggestion that they just need to sit with their feelings until they come into a more right understanding of them.

In honesty, it pisses me off.  It frustrates me.  I grieve.  And I also understand.  I recognize those things in myself and in my own practice and discussion of practice.  I see that I am implicated. 

I also feel fear.  To truly live this way?  What a commitment.  What a tremendous life’s work.  And people – to do this means, for me, that I’ve got to learn to set boundaries out of a place of love and care for myself. And that’s not the only fear. I quite literally cannot imagine what our world would look like if we lived from this place of loving presence.

That’s what I mean by transformative.  And by radical.  It seems to me that a practice like mindfulness, fully engaged with, changes everything.  And maybe that’s why, when mere mortals engage with it, we do it in our limited, human way.  We fit it into the systems we already know so well – here, in the West, systems which emphasize individuality and achievement.  It gets smaller, but also more approachable and manageable.  Explicable.  And the potential diminishes.  We practice mindfulness…unmindfully.

Day89: Potential, Part II

Once I understood that, not only did my aversion to sitting meditation decrease significantly, but I began, slowly slowly, to recognize all the ways in which I had been, at hugely important times in my life, attending with care and attention to the present moment, on purpose, without (and this has always been my struggle) judgment.  And with, as I came to understand later, compassion for myself in my struggle.

When I realized this in my mid-thirties, I immediately recognized that I’d been using mindfulness to manage a difficult relationship with a colleague.  Little by little, instead of reacting to hostility engendered by something I’d said by apologizing and trying desperately to make her like me, I had learned to recognize the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that drove me to fix it at all costs.  That didn’t stop me at first from trying to fix it, but little by little, the practice of awareness had begun to give me space.  And in that space, I could give myself the gift of time to decide – did I really do something wrong?  And if I didn’t, what would I like to do to respond to this difficult moment, instead of trying to survive it?

Mindfulness.

And once I saw that, I saw that my practice dated back even further.  To the way that I learned to watch the nerve pain in my leg, rising and falling and changing, without attachment to how it felt ten minutes ago, or how it might feel ten years from now.  Noticing that allowed me to see all the fears and stories I’d attached to that pain, and to see them for what they were – fears and stories that also rose and fell away.

Or the way I’d finally learned to manage lifelong insomnia.  From my early teenage years on, going to bed involved hours of lying awake while ruminating and fretting, worrying over what I should have done differently, or what I was going to do when the next crisis hit me.  In my thirties, mindfulness (not that I called it that at the time) allowed me to notice when I’d headed down those rabbit holes, and to kindly and gently call my attention back to my breathing.  (Note: for anyone who wants to have a sitting practice, I don’t recommend using this exact trick to fall asleep – to this day, I have to fight drowsiness when I sit in meditation, I think largely because of the neurological connections I built at this time.  I’m laughing again – the mind is a funny, funny thing!)

Dating back even further.  To when my first daughter was an infant, and I was driving back and forth across the Bay Bridge to visit my husband’s grandmother.  Thanks to his engineering class, I learned that, in the event of an earthquake, a portion of the eastern span of the bridge was meant to fall into the bay, to prevent the entire thing from pulling itself apart (this is good engineering, by the way).  And I obsessed over what I would do if that happened while I was on the bridge.  I calculated how fast we’d be going when we hit the water, and that, unfortunately, we were likely to survive the fall.  Which meant drowning, unless I could get a window cracked before we hit the water and the electronics shorted out, so the car could fill and equalize the pressure so I could open a door and get us out.  I imagined the whole thing in my head again and again and again. And again.  And again.  It was awful.  And then I read about neuroplasticity, and about the ability of the brain to rewire itself, and I decided I was going to get off that superhighway of bridge-collapse-drowning despair and rewrite the neural connections.  But to do that, I had to notice when I started down the story so that I could step away from it.  Which I did.

Mindfulness. 

I could go on and on.  But what this all means is that, as I have begun to come to realize, I have long had a robust mindfulness practice.  One that has given me deep insight into my mind and its inner workings, as well as into the fundamental interconnectedness of all beings (the realization of which is, in itself, yet another essay).  A practice that did not, in spite of my flirtation with meditation in my twenties, rely in any way on sitting meditation.

And yet, to this day, when people talk about their years of mindfulness practice, I have trouble claiming the depth of my own, precisely because it was not a silent sitting practice.

And isn’t that interesting.

My reading and talking to other people suggests that I am not alone in this.  That being able to complete long sits, and, especially, long silent retreats, are considered some kind of gold standard against which all other practices are held.  This strikes me as a limiting and limited way of assessing and judging practice.  Totally aside from the problematics of assessing others’ practice, when assessing our own, is it really productive to judge it on the basis of: I sat for X hours, or Y many days in a row, or Z number of retreats this year?  As a friend recently asked me when I spoke with her about going on retreat (and I should say here that I am not against retreats in general, and that my retreat experiences have been intensely valuable in my overall practice, and that I’m looking forward to finding the time and money to go on another one):  in aid of what?

Day 88: Potential, Part I

I've been thinking a lot about that realization I had the other day that I'm not writing about (some of) the things that are on my mind the most, because I really want to get them right.  So, in the spirit of letting go of that a little, here's a short series on something that really has been occupying a lot of mental real estate lately.  Imperfect, but out there.

“Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”  - Jon Kabat-Zinn

I don’t think it would be an understatement to say that mindfulness has saved my life.  At the same time, it is also true that I have often felt, and still feel, alienated from and resistant to mindfulness. 

I know.  It’s complicated.

I’m not even sure where to start.

I think that, because I am a linguistic anthropologist, it’s perhaps best to start with the ways that words like meditation and mindfulness are used, and the prototypes that build up around those uses.  Of most interest to me is how those prototypes exclude certain practices and people, in ways that are actually antithetical to the practice of mindfulness.  In ways that rob mindfulness practice of its potential to radically transform social structures and relationships. 

In my twenties and thirties, living in Berkeley and even after moving down to Southern California, I knew lots of people who engaged in what we might think of as present-oriented activities, especially yoga and meditation.  In that context, my exposure to meditation often came from people who talked about how hard it was.  Especially when talking about sitting for long periods, or going on meditation retreats, from which they would come back talking about excruciating physical pain, mental and emotional storms, and, at the end, a fantastic feeling of peace and oneness with everything that, inevitably, they would describe as “wearing off”.  From my perspective, I could go for a hard workout, work on my dissertation, and drink a glass of wine with the same effects, and with a lot less expenditure of time and money.

More seriously, I felt (and still do feel) a very deep resistance to the idea of putting myself into a situation that causes extreme physical pain, just for the opportunity to watch that pain mindfully.  As someone who has lived with chronic nerve pain, and who had survived several bouts of deep depression, I just could not, for the life of me, discern the need to create more pain for myself.  It felt unkind.  And also limiting, in the sense that it seemed like a practice that couldn’t be open to everyone.  I knew people, myself included, who just physically could not sit for ten hours a day.  To do so would be to ignore the very real limitations of my body.

Unfortunately, in some settings and with some people, to say that is to show, not discernment, but resistance.  And the prescription is to get on that cushion and suck it up.

I tell this story in conjunction with the definition of mindfulness above, to point to the ways in which mindfulness practice, in the West, has come to be identified almost solely with sitting meditation, and with the project of self-knowledge and self-improvement.  And I want to suggest that, while the self-knowledge gained through individual practice has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, I feel strongly that by limiting our understanding and practice of mindfulness to that, we also limit its radical and transformative potential to the transformation of the individual. (The assumption being that that is sufficient.)

My resistance to what I perceived to be a potentially damaging practice caused me to avoid sitting meditation entirely (even though I had had a sitting practice in my twenties).  I have come to see that as a form of wise discernment.  Even as I was avoiding sitting meditation, however, that same wise part of myself knew that mindfulness, and the Buddhist tenets upon which secular Western mindfulness is largely based, had something important to offer.  In seeking out information about the practice of mindfulness, I also continued to carefully watch and attend to my aversion, exploring its causes and conditions, noting how it felt in my body, and what stories attached themselves to it.

And I’m laughing at myself right now.  Because even though the next part of this story is about how I came to realize that I’d been practicing mindfulness for more than two decades before I allowed myself to call my practice “mindfulness”, I had not, until the moment of this writing, realized that, in all of the careful ways that I recognized and attended to my aversion to sitting meditation as it was being offered to me, I was practicing mindfulness. 

That is funny!

Two books changed everything for me, slowly slowly, but surely.  The first was the wise little book Buddhism Without Belief, which not only gave me permission to practice secular Buddhism, but also brought me to an understanding of non-attachment which let me – a parent who could not imagine feeling non-attachment to my children – begin to recognize the Four Noble Truths, and to explore the practices offered by each one.  That is the subject of another essay.  The second book was called The Mindfulness Revolution; it is a collection of essays about the practice of mindfulness, gathered together in one place.  In one essay, the author said something along the lines of: we don’t sit in meditation to get better at sitting or breathing, or even to get better at meditating; we sit in meditation to strengthen our ability to be present in our day-to-day lives. 

What?

Nothing I’d heard from anyone I knew who sat in meditation had led me to believe that the practice that took place on the cushion was meant to be a practice that continued off the cushion.  I literally thought that the goal of meditation was to create a peaceful feeling that lasted for a while after the practice ended, and then wore off and had to be renewed.  And I couldn’t make that make sense to me.  But this – this made sense.  I understood it in my mind to be like going to the gym.  At the time, I hated exercise.  So when I exercised, god knew it wasn’t to get better at exercising – it was to be strong for picking up my daughters and swinging them around, for grabbing all the bags of groceries in one trip in from the car, for going camping with my dog and my family.  In other words, I exercised so that all the muscles I built up in the gym were available to me in my real life.

You mean meditation works that way?

Turns out, the answer is yes.

Day 53: Talking with plants

A friend of mine just sent me a link to a neat article from the NYT.  I love it because it speaks to a laundry list of magpie objects:

• What we don't know about plants could fill many books; we are surrounded by them, we eat them, they are critical to our survival on this planet, and yet we treat them as inanimate and uninteresting to a very large degree
• Scientific objectivism - so many things to say about this, including:
• the need to decolonize science
• which is related to the need to recognize other ways of exploring and knowing our world
• and also related to this funny thing science does where it's so important not to anthropomorphize that we go to the other extreme and refuse to use appropriate basic terminology to describe what we see (like not using the word "learn" to describe some plant behaviors - why not?  because it maintains the specialness of humans?)
• Interconnectedness.  I love the last quote in the article, about going about the world being surrounded by subjects, rather than objects.  Can you imagine if we did that all the time?  How differently we might be in the world?  This is a broader project of decolonizing our mindsets - instead of thinking of ourselves in a top-down relationship with objects to be used, what if we thought of ourselves in reciprocal relationships with beings that had their own interests, needs, and desires?  

So many things to unpack and think about...

Day 49: The mission of education

I'm in the throes of getting ready to lead a faculty learning community (FLC) about contemplative pedagogy.  I've been using contemplative pedagogical methods for years now, and have been part of an FLC on this subject, but I've never led one by myself, so I'm a bit nervous.  That's not what this is about though (I'm sure I'll feel compelled to write about that at some point).  Nor is it about contemplative pedagogy per se (although I know I need to say what I mean by that at some point).  Instead, as I was re-reading the first assignment for the FLC, I found this quote, and I just needed to share it, because it says something that I believe in completely, but that I think is usually not at all on the minds of those making decisions about education today:

"When I think about the reforms needed if higher education* is to serve our students and our world faithfully and well, I think there should be a litmus test for every project that claims to strengthen the mission of our colleges and universities.  Does this proposal deepen our capacity to educate students in a way that supports the inseparable causes of truth, love, and justice?  If the answer is no, we should take a pass and redouble our efforts to find a proposal that does."  (emphasis mine)
     - Foreword, Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning (Daniel Barbezat and Mirabai Bush)

Can you imagine a world where that was the litmus test for education?  The mind boggles.

*For my money, this applies to all levels of education - and perhaps should be even more important at the K-12 level.

Day 48: Grace

This past weekend, we made a decision as a family (I'll keep the details vague for now) that turned out not to be a good decision.  A very large part of the reason why it turned out not to be a good decision had to do with the fact that, while I was very clear about the commitment of time and energy that came along with our decision, I hadn't factored in my (new, not-so-improved) stamina levels.  It was one of those situations where a limit that I didn't know I had came and smacked me right in the face. 

It sucked.

I spent quite a bit of time telling myself that I could gut it out.  When the sane voice in my head says, "I can't do this", that voice usually replies, "Of course you can!", which is technically true.  But this time, that small, sane voice in my head agreed that yes, I could, but then asked: what would I have to give up in order to do that?  Because I would.  My energy levels are not inexhaustible.  I mean, they never were, but the limit used to be a lot further out, and it also used to be the case that I could run on reserves for a while and then catch up later.  I don't have the same level of reserves, it turns out.

So we reversed our decision.  And that also sucked.

In all of that, while I did give myself permission and grace to cry uncle rather than gutting it out, I have also done a whole lot of self-denigrating blame.  I haven't given myself much grace.  Other people have stepped in and offered me the grace that I'm struggling with, and in so doing have also offered me a template for what it looks like to think about this through that lens. 

In this sense, I think that this autoimmune diagnosis offers me a chance to (read: insists that I) come to grips with something that I have largely preferred to deny: that life is messy, I make mistakes, I am not in control of everything that happens.

Which also sucks.  But it turns out that living as if those things weren't true comes with its own very particular sort of misery.  The freedom of looking back at this last weekend, and, instead of thinking "man, am I an idiot", getting this tiny glimpse of, "well, life is messy and I didn't see that coming" - it's a very spacious sort of feeling.  (Before my critical voice jumps up and down and insists that I damned well ought to have seen it coming!)  Spacious is good.  Spacious does not suck.

Grace.

Day 44: (Mis)representation, Part 3

At the end of Part 1, in which I shared the true confession that I really believed that roadrunners were emu-sized, Ellen commented, simply: Misrepresentation matters. 

Yes!  Exactly!  That is exactly it.  This is the other half of my Day 29 post, representation.  Representation matters, because it reminds us that our way of being and seeing the world isn't the only way.  It offers us another standard for normal.

And misrepresentation matters, because we form our ideas of how the world works based not only on our own experience, but also on the stories and images that we hear and see.  We experience those, too.  In many cases, these pervasive images and stories about people become more powerful than our own experiences.  And then, in turn, we interpret our experiences through the expectations that come from those images and stories. 

Let me give you an example.  One day many years ago, when I was a student in the Bay Area, I was driving somewhere in Oakland, and I got lost.  This was well before cell phones, so I pulled over to get out my handy dandy Thomas Guide, and two guys came up to the car to see if I was lost.  They gave me directions, and I thanked them, and I got where I was going. 

If you know the demographics of Oakland, you know that the chances were good that these two young men were African-American (in fact, they happened to be).  At the time, Oakland had a very high crime rate.  And representations of African-Americans were (and still are) often of urban youth, portrayed as gang-involved, dangerous, etc etc.  When I told someone about my experience - feeling grateful that these guys had been able to help me - her first response was, I can't believe you talked to them, they were probably planning to carjack you.

Now, here's the thing.  If it had been her, and she'd pulled over and been approached in the same way, she would have double-checked to be sure her doors were locked, pulled away, and told people (and believed) that she'd narrowly avoided a carjacking.  Her experience was interpreted through a lens that she already held, and then reinforced that lens and made it real. 

We often suggest that if people could only meet one another, they'd understand that their stories about The Other aren't true.  But I think what I'm saying is that it isn't quite that simple.  If we interpret our interactions with other people through powerful preexisting lenses that are informed by pervasive misrepresentations, the chances are high that we will interpret what we see in light of our beliefs, and we'll end up reinforcing those beliefs, rather than disrupting them.  I'm not saying that it's not important to create many many opportunities for people of different backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, and so on, to interact.  But I am saying that it isn't sufficient.  And I am saying that we need to think carefully about how people are represented.  We often mock or roll our eyes at folks when they call out problematic representations - but they all matter.  It's not about being politically correct - it's about realizing that all those "little jokes" and "mistakes" add up to something really big and intractable.

Because it's not just about thinking that roadrunners are emu-sized, or that rabbits hatch from eggs.  It's about thinking that a young woman who gets raped after having several drinks or while wearing something revealing was asking for it.  Or that she actually wanted it, but then was too embarrassed to admit it, and so made a false accusation.  Right?

Misrepresentation matters.  Amen.

Day 43: Lingering childhood misperceptions, Part 2

(Not my misperception this time!)

Imagine the scene:
A ten-years-younger me, more energetic, svelter, in front of about 35 students, in an aging classroom with blackboards, big windows open onto a quad.  I'm leaning against the desk up front, leading a discussion about I don't remember what - something incredibly insightful and educational, for sure.  Students are lively and engaged (except the dude in back who was attending carefully to his fantasy football picks, but there's only so much I can do), asking questions, offering answers.  Basically, your standard college classroom.

A student raises her hand and asks, a propos of I can't remember what, why the symbology of Easter has all those rabbits and chicks and eggs and things? 

An aside: my students know about my magpie brain.  They know that I delight in finding lovely shiny thought-objects and taking them home and turning them over and poking at them.  They also know that I can be easily distracted by a new bright and shiny object, like an interesting question.  And they know (because I tell them) that I think curiosity is the number one hallmark of a lifelong learner, and that I really want them to be lifelong learners even more than I want them to be linguists.  So they ask random questions, and I answer them.  The one thing that saves me and them is that I tend to be unexpectedly excellent at relating apparently-disparate bits of information - so whatever distraction they think they're offering almost invariably leads us right back to whatever it is that we're covering in class.

So, student raises hand, asks question, and I take it as a totally legitimate turn in the conversation and hop up to sit on the desk and start talking about spring and the return of life after the winter and Eostara and fertility and how this relates to resurrection in Christianity and in other religious-symbolic systems as well, etc etc.  As you do.  And then I say that nothing really symbolizes fertility like rabbits (which, I point out in an aside, breed like, well, rabbits) or like seeing a little chick hatch from this seemingly-lifeless oval rock-like lump.

And this young man in the front row, right smack in the middle, gets this dawning look of horrified enlightenment on his face.  He may even have made a sort of mumbling oh no really sort of noise.  All I know is that his neighbors and I all looked at him, and I asked him what he'd just realized.  And he, in tones of embarrassed misery, says:

"I always thought the rabbits hatched from the eggs!"

People, you'd be proud.  I did not laugh.  I didn't even snicker or make smirk-like motions with my mouth or eyes.  I did say that no, rabbits are mammals - and that they aren't echidnas or platypuses, so no body-external eggs involved in their birth. 

And then I went home and promptly ensured that both of my daughters knew very clearly that rabbits didn't hatch from eggs.

Because, of course, I totally know where he got that idea - from the Cadbury egg commercials, right?  And all the Easter bunny delivering eggs stuff.  And he just never revisited it in light of later information (like, mammals bear live young - barring, as I'd mentioned, the echidna and platypus).  It stuck around there, in the recesses of his mind, until the dawning light of a random classroom conversation got him to put two and two together.

I suppose one moral of this story is that my willingness to entertain apparently-random questions has broader educational implications than I give credit for.

Other morals to this story will be addressed in Part 3 of my little narrative.

Day 21: What did they see?

There have been various of my usual sorts of things tumbling about in my mind, capturing the magpie's attention to greater and lesser degrees, over the last few days.  I'd been thinking that maybe one of those might come to the forefront today, asking to be written about, when I saw this article, entitled, "Video shows last moments of Dallas man, restrained as officers joked". 

And it just seemed like something that needed to be acknowledged. 

Because it's not the first time.  And, although I wish with all my heart that this next bit weren't so true that it's appallingly easy to type, it won't be the last. 

There are so very many things to say about this.  Things that acknowledge complexity.  But in my mind there's also something very simple here.  It's not OK.  It's not OK to watch someone die because of something you did to them, while laughing.  Ever. 

I keep stalling out there and trying to figure out what to say next.  I know that what many people say at this point is that police officers sign up for a job that is dangerous, and they respond as they do because of their training and because they're working in dangerous environments.  And that many of them - most of them, even - are good people.  They'd also say in this case that this man was mentally ill (he is the one who called the police because he was having an episode of his illness), and on drugs. But saying that in this context is sort of like saying that Brock Turner had Olympic prospects.  Or that a 16-year-old rape victim should have been told that pressing charges against her rapist would ruin his life.  It's really not the point.  It privileges the narrative, the perspective, the life, of a person who did something callous and fundamentally inhuman.  It turns the victim into the perpetrator, and erases their perspective and humanity from the story.

What I keep coming back to, especially in cases like this, where we're not talking about a split-second reaction, but rather about a prolonged, extended act of callous violence and disregard for the suffering of another human being, is - what did those officers see?  Not whom did they see, because it seems to me that they must not - they could not - have been seeing a fellow human being; but rather what did they see?  Does mental illness inherently make someone less worthy of consideration as a human being?  Does Blackness?  I mean, I get that the data are in on that one - for many people, the answer is yes. 

And I don't think it's just a matter of, police officers have to make split-second life-or-death decisions, so sometimes they get it wrong (that was certainly not the case here, or in so many other cases).  That is, in so many ways, too easy.  It not only lets those who actually commit these crimes off the hook, but it lets all of us off the hook.  It allows us to refuse to take responsibility for all of the many many narratives floating around that tell us that the mentally ill are somehow less human; that people of color are somehow less human.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that, even in a situation where someone poses a danger, it is possible to see them as a human being.  And that's why I don't buy the argument that officers need to be able to just act in the face of danger, full stop.  Sure they do; but whom do they see as they move towards action?  What narratives, life experiences, beliefs inform their vision?  We know that people of color, and especially Black men, are seen as larger, older, more dangerous than white men of the same ages and sizes.  That's a cultural lens.  It's the racist smog we breathe.  Put a gun in the hands of someone steeped in that smog, and it's nearly impossible to prevent tragedies.

It's the laughter that makes me ill.  What would it take for me to laugh at the dying suffering of any living being?  What justifies that distancing of one self from another?  What do we have to tell ourselves to make that seem in any way normal; or, worse than normal - understandable, justifiable, something that we support?  I do not believe that police work requires inhumanity.  I don't buy the narrative that we need tough people to do the tough work - not if our definition of tough people is, people who don't see the spark of humanness in other people.  It seems to me that the only people who should be doing that tough work are people who are able to see that.  And that we need to provide the support and structure to make that possible.

There is so much more to say here, so much to consider, so many intertwining forces that come together to create these tragedies, again and again.  But mostly, my heart cries out: how could they laugh?  How can they live with the knowledge that they laughed?  What are we doing to ourselves to create a world where that happens?

Day 18: Making meaning

“For those of you accustomed to being taken from point A to point B to point C, this presentation may be somewhat difficult to follow. Pueblo expression resembles something like a spider’s web – with many little threads radiating from the centre, crisscrossing one another. As with the web, the structure emerges as it is made, and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made."  
          - Leslie Marmon Silko


I was reading something written by a friend of mine, and she included this quote, and it just hit me in all the right places - so I thought I'd share.  It made me think of what I wrote yesterday, about not really knowing what themes would come up, but seeing that they are beginning to arise, and trusting that they will make sense.  That meaning will be made.  

And boy howdy, does this make me think of so much of my life.  Where I struggle through whatever is happening (usually a whole lot of whatevers all at once, and why does it work that way?), and what it all means is an ever-present question without much of an answer, except for the persistent sense that it does mean something if I can just hang on long enough to figure out what it is.

And then it speaks to the meaning-making part of my mind.  And, I think, of the minds of all humans (and probably other animals, too).  That we seek out patterns.  This is how epistemologies arise - we observe, we patiently listen and watch, and we trust that out of what appears at first to be structureless, unconnected bits and pieces, like magic - like a spider's web - meaning will be made.  I love that we are implicated in the meaning making. And I try to be respectful of the fact that we are implicated in the meaning making, because it suggests that each of us may make different meanings out of similar events - not because one of us has it right while others are viewing the world mistakenly, but because we are each part of the meaning-making process.  And that is something to respect and celebrate at the same time.

Day 16: Synchronicity

It was warm today.  I really shouldn't gripe about muggy weather - I know that our humidity issues aren't the same as those in other parts of the country (to be fair, neither do those other parts get humidity in the single digits, so I figure I get to complain a little bit when ours goes over 50%, right?), but the air just feels warm and heavy, in a kind of annoying way. 

At the barn this morning (where it was abundantly clear that there was no way to get there early enough that I could beat the heat), I figured it was a good day to give Disco a bath.  Not only did she really need it, but she's also been off lately, so it was going to be a handwalking day - a good time for a horse to dry after a bath (read: before rolling around in her stall to really grind the dirt in her wet coat).  You know it's hot when, instead of fussing about the hose, she stands quietly and looks almost happy (except for the face-spraying part - she's not so sure about that).

Afterwards, we walked around rather slowly.  She's off.  And I'm off.  And I don't know if I've mentioned, but poor Tilly has been limping lately, too.  All of us in our left lower/hind limbs.  It occurred to me today that we'd make a funny sort of conga line all walking along together - step, hitch, step, hitch!  (Or, with them, stepstepstep hitch! stepstepstep hitch!  but you get the idea.) 

We're all going to get better, I'm sure, but in the meantime, it's nice to know that the hitch in my gitalong and I are in good company.

Day 8: Connecting

On the way to an appointment this afternoon, driving along the Coast Highway with the top down, I got a call saying that they were running about 15 minutes late.  As it was, I was going to be early.  So I pulled off, got out of the car, and sat myself down on a flat spot to watch the ocean for a while.  It's a perfect day - clear, 80, onshore breeze.  And I just sat, enjoying the sun, and the breeze, and the expanse of the ocean in front of me.

There are ground squirrels everywhere in the bluffs that overlook the coast - they run around and play and chitter at one another.  There came a point when I looked over to my left and saw, sitting there just quietly, a ground squirrel. She was up on her hind legs, front paws resting on her belly, gazing out at the ocean, completely at peace.

I was moved by such a heartfelt sense of deep connection - there we were, two busy beings, taking a moment out of our days to regard beauty, to sit quietly with the world.

Before I left, I bowed to her presence, which so enriched my own.