Addendum: On Marriages, past and future (H)

Kissing the stomach
kissing your scarred
skin boat. History
is what you’ve travelled on
and take with you

We’ve each had our stomachs
kissed by strangers
to the other

and as for me
I bless everyone
who kissed you here

–Michael Ondaatje

Addendum: Dreams (H)

 

 

Warmth, friends, women,men, or somewhere in between or somewhere else, warm and breathing and heart-beating all around me. We are respectful of each other’s space to learn, to grow, to make mistakes, to figure out our own paths, and we are reflexively generous. With our ears, with our hands, with embraces, sympathy, support, sharing of experiences and food and our soft old clothes. We practice gratitude; we apologize; we acknowledge each others strengths outloud, bolstering them. When one is having a rough time, we gather around her, each in our own way, with offerings: text message jokes, a night out, a quiet cup of tea, a dog-eared book. When one of has a triumph–it can be big, or simply the daily triumph of an interview that goes well, a project completed, an act of bravery–we celebrate. Joy is bounced off of one face and reflected in and off each other, and it builds and and bubbles and leaves us ecstatic and full. Sometimes it becomes so much that we have to dance, and we do, laughing, and when we are spent we fall asleep, some on the couch, some in the bed. We are familiar with each other’s breathing and bodies, whether there has been sex or not, we know and hold each other in our gazes.

On Marriage (H)

From M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled:

…I draw the analogy between marriage and a base camp for mountain climbing. If one wants to climb mountains, one must have a good base camp, a place where there are shelters and provisions, where one may receive nurture and rest before one ventures forth again to seek another summit. Successful mountain climbers know they must spend at least as much time, if not more, in tending to their base camp as they actually do in climbing mountains, for their survival is dependent upon their seeing to it that their base camp is sturdily constructed and well-stocked.

What The Living Do (H)

What the Living Do

 

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

 

–Marie Howe

Goals (H)

June Jordan, in “Where is the Love”:

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect. It means that I must everlastingly seek to cleanse myself of the hatred and contempt that permeates and surrounds my identity… It means that the achievement of self-love and self-respect will require inordinate, hourly vigilance…

 

bell hooks in “Lorde: the imagination of justice”:

…they will not understand that it is the most militant, most radical intervention anyone can make to not only speak of love but to engage in the practice of love. For love as the foundation of all social movements for self-determination is the only way we create a world that domination and dominator thinking cannot destroy. Anytime we do the work of love, we are doing the work of ending domination.

Addendum: Working with the Mind (H)

From “The Body’s Grace: Matthew Sanford’s Story” on Speaking of Faith:

Matthew Stanford: There‘s a reason why when my son who’s six is crying, he needs a hug. It’s not just that he needs my love. He needs boundary around his experience. He needs to know that the pain is contained and can be housed, and it won’t be limiting his whole being, that he can—he gets a hug and, mmm, he drops into his body. And when you drop into your body, paradoxically, typically pain is less. But it’s when pain gets more intense and more…

Krista Tippett: And when you’re afraid and try to keep it at bay.

Matthew Sanford: …and then pull out of it, it really denies freedom. And it’s a great short-term strategy. That’s what I did when I was 13, I pulled out of my body to get it, but it’s a short-term strategy. And a lot of the process of my life is like embodying again and letting — and surrounding what’s going on so I can be part of the world.

And from the chapter “Falling Gracefully” in his memoir, Waking:

If nothing else, my life has taught me one thing: The mind and body that I have are the only mind and body that I have. They deserve my attention. And when I give it, I receive so much more in return. Learning to fall gracefully through one’s mind-body relationship is not a submission. One learns to fall gracefully in order to roll.

There is still so much to realize. My experience tells me that the silence within us can be experienced energetically as a nourishing sap. When this happens, consciousness changes shape. For example, I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without becoming more compassionate. A mental state like tolerance can deepen into a three-dimensional state of true patience. Nonviolence can become more than a moral principle, it can become an integrated state of consciousness that includes the body. And, of course, for good or for bad, the silence within us also contains the opportunity for choice.

Play (H)

consider the generosity of the one-year-old
who has no words to exchange with you
and instead offers up her favorite drooled-on blanket,
her green rhinoceros as big as she is,
her cloth doll with the long blond pigtails,
her battered cardboard books, swung open on their soggy pages.

If you were outdoors, she would hand you a dead beetle,
a fistful of grass, a pebble,
by way of introduction or just because.
And if, a moment later, she wanted it back,
it would be for the joy of the game
that makes of every simple object an offering:
This is me. Here is who I am.

In the same way, sun
drapes a buttered scarf across your face,
rose opens herself to your glance,
and rain shares its divine melancholy.
The whole world keeps whispering or shouting to you,
nibbling your ear like a neglected lover,

while you worry over matters of finance,
of “relationship,”
important issues related to getting and spending,
saving and hoarding,

though you were once that baby,
though you are still that world.

–Alison Luterman

Why My Friends Rock (H)

‘Cause they send me stuff like this.

From Nick:

…I will send you this Gandhi quote that I’m absolutely loving:

“Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase ‘passive resistance’, in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word ‘satyagraha.’”

I’m head over heals for the idea that the very word “truth” implies love. Seriously, this is all my mind has been focused on for the last 48 hours.

Also this:

“I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.”

Addendum: The Warrior (H)

I’ve been reading a great blog written by a friend-of-a-friend, and generally I appreciate her insight but was a little taken a back by a couple entries about “warriors“. The warrior is one of the male archetypes that our culture most glorifies and celebrates, which is by (a quarter of an inch of) extension celebrating the will to power and the will to do violence. But the idea that you can condone or celebrate that out there and not bring it back here just doesn’t make sense–not that it’s okay to do violence out there, either.

This is from Shepherd Bliss’s essay, “My War Story“:

The warrior image has damaged us. As we move into the twenty-first century we need to mature beyond wars and warriors. I disagree with those men’s movement writers and activists who speak so highly of the warrior. I appreciate some of his traits–like courage, teamwork, loyalty–but the archetype itself is bankrupt at this point in history. We surely need guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen, and citizens. If we are to survive on this planet, so threatened by war and warriors, we must get beyond the obsolete archetype of the warrior and value images such as the peacemaker, the partner, and the husbandman who cares for the earth and animals.

Letting go of a rape culture, hierarchy, violence, means celebrating men who fill roles other than “the warrior”. The process of self-re-creation and the revolutions in self-imaging are greatly supported by alternate images and archetypes that aver our new aspirations. After all, the brain doesn’t get rid of neural pathways, but it can create new ones.

So–Yes! Guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen. I especially like the last, the farmer (in my mind, vegetable farmer) who tends the land, nurtures growth, knows the balance of active and receptive, work and rest, shows patience, persistence. This concept of tending is key–caring for, supporting, rather than controlling or forcing. And what about the dancer who has an exquisite ability to respond to circumstance, bending when the moment calls for it, and staying firm when that is what is needed? The dancer works with energy, resilience, and grace; grace being, as Pablo puts it, “… the balancing opposite of power. It means rolling away and landing on your feet instead of bruised ribs, and small hand movements letting a stronger person tie themselves up when they try to hit you.” In other words, resilience, self-protection and disarmament that are firm and assertive, but not aggressive. And there is the healer, touching, mending, with the courage to open to great suffering. Again this theme of working with, supporting, rather than controlling, or being even a “benevolent patriarch”. And there is the poet whose work is the honoring of the inner life and creation of language; the teacher who is a guide to and within new knowledge; the bread-maker who creates and then relinquishes his creation, day after day, to nourish self and others. These are just a few in a plethora of alternative roles we can imagine self-actualized people of any gender filling–the seeker, the student, the scientist, the lover, to name a few more. Showcasing and celebrating these roles, creating them in our conceptual, social, and visual imaginations, is one important way that art and social media can work as a forces for positive social change.

Addendum: Giving Use (H)

I’m reading Cornell West’s Race Matters, and find a passage I want to copy. I pull out a notebook, and a piece of paper is falling out, edges crinkled, and I almost toss it aside. I pause, smooth the creases, put my pen to it. When I am done, I tape it to the wall. This is what I mean when I equate loving and giving use to–to make use of, to allow someone (or something) to be of use, of service, is to acknowledge the person’s (or thing’s) worth. This is not treating someone instrumentally, but giving him or her the space to work to capacity–what bell defines as joy. We are loving by not allowing emotions, skills, capacities, objects, to go to waste.

And being of use affirms and can even create our belonging to or with another person or community. Giving use in the name of creation or rest to land, paint, mugs and chairs and hammers and pencils and beds and foot trails, creates belonging between us and the inanimate world.

***

This was the passage from Race Matters, p. 29:

Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must by conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth–an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.