Bungee cords and boiling cauldrons

  

I’ve tried to start this particular blog post several times over the past week and a half, each time dropping it mid-process—either because I had something I needed to do instead or because I just couldn’t find a way to contain what I’ve been thinking and feeling in ordered sentences. Sometimes a linear form just doesn’t work, like when my mind is chaotic, more like a tangle of angel hair spaghetti than a coherent string of words. (As you’ll see, I keep hunting for the perfect metaphor. So far, to no avail.)

Disordered and disheveled. That's how it’s been of late, for me and a lot of folks I know. Highs and lows stirred together in a bubbling goulash of executive orders, determined activism, unrelenting doubt, inspiring words and deeds, politicians’ cowardice, rogue resistance, touching kindness—and always, hovering over this brew, that face and that voice. The specter of four more years of that face and that voice. The culinary image may be a stretch, but it works to describe my state of mind today. It'll soon seem wrong. I can’t find a way to reduce this all to words on paper. Not yet. Maybe not for a while.

To illustrate, here are a couple of bits from my efforts to write about this:

Photo by Lyn Ferguson, sign by Ann Noonan,
ideas and materials from Resonance Chorus sign-making workshop.
Music, art, and collaboration as activism

•         “I feel like I’m tied to the end of a bungee cord. On a hope-fueled high before the election when Hillary was polling so well, plummeting afterward as the ugly realization hit, rebounding fairly well with the encouragement of wise movement folks (summarized in this newly released video) and the commitment to get busy, crashing into the abyss on inauguration day, springing up again at the Women’s March, and then flailing downward in the first awful days of Trump’s manic spate of executive orders and proclamations …” 

•    “Some years ago, friends and I backpacked every spring in the Southern Utah desert. Each time, I had this surreal awareness: when we were down inside a canyon, living there for days on end, the canyon seemed like Reality. ‘On top’ was irrelevant—not just distant, but totally absent from my thoughts. Then, as we drove back to ‘civilization,’ I always had this head-shaking moment looking out over the desert, seeing only hints of all the canyons and washes I knew were there. Now this flat world seemed like Reality, and the living depths of the canyon we just left seemed other-worldly. That’s how this time since the election has seemed to me: two ‘realities” smashed together in a bewildering melange ...”

There have been other, also aborted stabs at the right metaphor—roller coaster, of course, and yo-yo, among others. I abandoned all of them, out of necessity, frustration, distraction, or a sense of flat-out futility. How could words ever capture this experience—so painfully concrete but so amorphous? I’m sure today’s bubbling cauldron would suffer the same fate if I left it for a bit.

In the time since I wrote the two paragraphs above (just days ago, actually), more “moments” have been added to the string of bungee drops and rebounds, canyon ventures and returns to the flat. Lots of mean-spirited decrees from the oval office, their supposed author captured on camera like a child posing with a trophy. These always interspersed with moments that remind me of the best of us—rogue Park Service employees posting now-censored climate data, huge spontaneous pro-immigration (aka anti-Trump) demonstrations at airports around the country, the acting Attorney General refusing to have her office defend the anti-immigration order. And then she got fired (of course). Up and down, this reality and that, back and forth.

On Sunday, I had an experience that made me smile, realizing that this is exactly how it happens. Here it is, in near-real time:

 

I was on an early-morning walk, stewing about all this, and I decided I needed to settle down and do a “be here now” exercise. I slowed my pace, paid attention to my breathing, and looked around at the morning. The trees outlined against the bright morning sky, “barren” and beautiful. Leaves frozen in the ice of a drainage ditch near a park. Dry grasses looking for all the world like a painting of the tall grass prairie. It was lovely and soothing. Until I pulled myself out of this calm moment, remembering that I needed to hustle back because we were going to an event and needed to get there early. I picked up my pace, put away my camera phone, and let my breathing do what it would. Perfect, I thought: just when I was settling into the moment of meditative bliss, I’m snatched back into that other, hectic reality. Still, after the week’s torrent of ugliness, ending with Trump's executive order / decree on immigration, I knew I needed this outing.

         

The event was “Sunday School for Atheists,” a program in the Warm Cookies of the Revolution series. We sang some protest songs, heard a really excellent (perhaps because it was so validating) talk about how non-violent protests ‘work,’ and ate cookies. And donuts and bagels. With chocolate milk, for those who wanted it (unflavored soy and cow’s milk also available). A bungee spring, a transition between canyon and top, another stir of the pot. And so it goes …

So what’s my point in all this? I guess it’s this: I have to get used to this pattern, be ready to manage wrenching shifts that I don’t anticipate and find some sort of sustenance in the good stuff, when it happens, because this is our reality now, and is likely to be for a long time. We can fantasize about impeachment all we want—and it may happen. But more likely, it won’t. So I’m reckoning that I need to find enough internal and external resources to sustain some sort of integrity and stay engaged for four years and enough resilience to withstand the body blows that could knock me off my pins and make me give up.

Like everyone I know, I’ve been reading a lot of interesting commentaries through all this. Some really help me focus on this goal of persistence. One was a piece by Lauren Duca, who wrote in Teen Vogue back in December—before Trump had officially begun his assault on the things I most value. She invoked the analogy of a frog that doesn’t know it’s about to be boiled because the water gets hot so slowly. “The good news about this boiling frog scenario,” she wrote, “is that we’re not boiling yet. Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner until America realizes that the temperature is too high. It’s on every single one of us to stop pretending it’s always been so hot in here.”

And another, this one a New York Times column by Zynep Tufekci 

[I]t is much easier to pull off a large protest than it used to be. … The Women’s March … started with a few Facebook posts and came together in a relatively short amount of time. … This doesn’t mean that protests no longer matter — they do. [But] protests should be seen not as the culmination of an organizing effort, but as a first, potential step. … more like Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus. What used to be an endpoint is now an initial spark. … More than ever before, the significance of a protest depends on what happens afterward.

And this, from Emma Roller, a freelance writer, reporting in the NYT on the Women’s March in DC:

There’s more to activism than protest, and there’s more to activism than only talking to friends who already agree with you. We have to be uncomfortable, for as many years as it takes.

The last sentence reminds me of the old saying about the role of a newspaper (repurposed to define the role of activism): “To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” And “the comfortable” would include me.

I need to be prepared to be uncomfortable—swinging from that bungee cord, stewing in that broth—for years, and to still remain faithful to the values I purport to hold, not becoming inured to the heat in the pot. As Marshall McLuhan famously urged, “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.” 

My honest, heart-felt, anxious question: Can I do this?

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2017. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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The space between The Dream and the dread

What a complicated, paradoxical week lies ahead, bracketed by two weirdly incongruous events, leading next weekend to a celebration of resistance and hope by hundreds of thousands of women (and some men) in locations all across the nation and beyond—a global event that includes around 400 marches in 40 countries at last count.  

The opening bracket is Monday’s national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights icon who is regarded as such a moral leader (despite certain moral lapses) that his image, name, and rhetoric have been appropriated by all manner of groups and causes. And the closing one comes on Friday, when the 45^th president of the United States will be inaugurated, a man who is regarded by many as a rescuer from the swamp, but by few as a moral leader. The contrast was highlighted over the weekend, of course, when the president-elect verbally bashed another Civil Rights activist, Rep. John Lewis, accusing him of “all talk, no action”—as if the scar on Lewis’ head came from couch surfing. It’s telling that Lewis wasn’t baited into a response. That, I suggest, is moral clarity.

Not the person who will be inaugurated this week

This morning, Monday, I heard my partner singing: “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around … I’m gonna keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’…,” words from a traditional protest song, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” I’ve sung it at a lot of events and actions, but this morning, it had an especially poignant feel because I’m feeling so disoriented by the contrast between Monday and Friday. I celebrated King’s work today—and, as important, his iconic moral stature— at a rally and march, as I would if we weren’t in such a mess. Standing in the cold before we took off on our route through downtown Boulder, we sang that very song.

It felt particularly good to be in a crowd singing protest songs. But it felt different from usual, as I looked down the week to Friday. On the one hand, these songs are perfect for this week, this off-kilter time—songs of resilience, the commitment to ‘keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’. But, damn! I hate that they feel so right precisely because of what will transpire at week’s end.

Still, I remind myself that there’s light at the end of the week-long tunnel: the Women’s March(es) on Saturday, designed to put the new president on notice on Day 1. This may be the ray of hope that unites Monday to Friday.

Not long ago, a New York Times column by Susan Chira worried about the costs to feminism of Hillary Clinton’s loss:

This was supposed to be the year of triumph for American women. … Instead, for those at the forefront of the women’s movement, there is despair, division and defiance. Hillary Clinton’s loss was feminism’s, too. … A man whose behavior toward women is a throwback to pre-feminist days is now setting the tone for the country. … Many who care about the place of women in American society are gripped by fears that men will now feel they have a free pass to demean women at home or in the workplace, that women’s health, economic security and reproductive rights will be dealt severe blows.

In what seems like a psychologically apt image, she described the Women’s March(es) as “an apt metaphor for the moment: movement as primal scream.”

The core point of Chira’s column, as I read it, is that feminism is at an existential turning point. It clearly isn’t, and can’t be, what it was in the 1970s. Since then, we’ve had decades of growing awareness of the complex intersectionality beneath the term “women.” There’s no going back from those painfully-learned insights. But we have little idea what tomorrow’s feminism (or whatever we’ll call it) might become—or, perhaps more to the point, we have countless ideas (for discussions of this question, read this and this). The question is how, and whether, these ideas will come together.

So tonight I’m thinking, this situation is just a microcosm of the the working edge of the movement: the marches offer an opportunity to stitch together the two sides of this strange seam in history. The task is simply to simultaneously resist the backward turn to the (distorted) view of the nation as a monolithic utopia before diversity and globalism made it so dang complicated—i.e., resist Friday—and embrace King’s “Dream” of what this nation (and the “women’s movement”) can become when we welcome both of these realities in our vision—i.e., embrace Monday.

No small task, but what better venue for beginning it than in the midst of thousands of fired-up women, many of us wearing defiant pink “pussy hats”? 

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2017. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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I forgot the tide pools

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Just click on the title “I forgot the tide pools”)

In my last post, I mentioned taking redundant photos of Haystack Rock from the beach in Oregon (and I shared a couple). But I forgot to add say that one day at low tide 

... a bit lower than this ...

I ventured across the jagged rocks at the foot of Haystack Rock to snap some photos of the tide pools exposed by the receding ocean. So, to offer a change of mood from recent politically heavy blogs, here’s one with no purpose other than to share amateur portraits of some lovely creatures that inhabit the liminal space between sea and land.

I'm sure there's a message here, too—maybe something about resilience and tenacity in the face of radical change. But I won't belabor it.

              

                              

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2017. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Entering 2107

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Just click on the title “Entering 2017”)

Not a bad view to welcome the new year, eh? We just got back from a trip to Oregon, welcoming the new year on the coast, and then moving on to Portland for the biennial National Multicultural Conference and Summit (NMCCS), a gathering of (mostly) psychologists—about 800 of them this year—who are interested in multicultural issues. I had originally waffled about whether to attend this conference, but after the election, I knew I needed to be there. Given the state of the nation, it was the perfect way to return from the coastal retreat to the cultural fray.

            

The time at the coast was, predictably, relaxing and rejuvenating. We were welcomed by a rainbow, proof that we were at the right place. Then for three days, we bundled up for cold walks on the beach, ate good food in small local restaurants (which were pretty quiet, once the New Year’s partying was over), took multiple redundant photos of Haystack Rock and some of the beach as it changed colors, and conversed with gulls accustomed to handouts. 

                                    
 

We slept with the window open and the ceiling fan on so we could hear and smell the ocean during the night.

And then, re-entry. NMCCS is something of a haven for people who are committed to diversity work. I think it’s the only place I regularly hang out where I am, along with other white people, in the numerical minority for days. My queer identity is a part of the “multicultural” programming, but the (relative) invisibility of this identity means that my whiteness marks me as an outsider, for a change. An important position to experience occasionally—more often than I typically do.

The beauty of this space is that people collectively assume that those around them are firmly invested in issues of diversity and work against oppression, so it’s never necessary to defend or explain a position that honors these issues as central (rather than peripheral) to how we do psychology and how we function in the world. As a result. it’s a remarkably non-judgmental gathering. People generally trust the good intentions of others, grant space for “mistakes,” and honor growth rather than perfection in understanding the experiences and perspectives that folks bring with them.

I always learn here, and I always feel challenged in realizing what I didn’t know. This year, it had an added impact for me: it was one of several recent experiences that have left me in a reflective mood about my own place in the world—appropriate for a new year. More on that later.

So, let me take you on a quick tour of my time at the conference and some of the insights I gleaned while I was there. I was very aware from the start of the vigilance that folks who gathered for this event are feeling in the wake of November’s election, with frequent references to the incoming administration and the mixture of anger and anxiety that its ascendance evokes. Both the pre-conference reception and the opening plenary began by describing this conference as a place of safety, where “all of your complex identities” are welcome, a place to “enjoy feeling brave,” to “renew your strength, encourage, and be encouraged.” It seemed clear to me that other folks came to this conference guided by an impulse similar to mine: to join with a like-minded community in nourishing energy for the challenges ahead. Sprinkled among these comments were summons to “carry the water, even when it’s not popular” and “speak up anyway.” These words of encouragement reminded me of a Martina McBride song, “Anyway,” which suddenly seems totally suited to this moment in history. Excerpts:

Anyway

You can spend your whole life building
Something from nothin'
One storm can come and blow it all away
Build it anyway

You can chase a dream
That seems so out of reach
And you know it might not never come your way
Dream it anyway

…..

This world's gone crazy
It's hard to believe
That tomorrow will be better than today
Believe it anyway

…..

You can pour your soul out singing
A song you believe in
That tomorrow they'll forget you ever sang
Sing it anyway
Yeah, sing it anyway

I sing
I dream
I love
Anyway

If feeling beseiged, these people were also inspired and inspiring. “Don’t let anyone take away your power,” one speaker urged, “the struggle is as important as the outcome.” More than once, I heard the presidential campaign and election described as a backlash—and this framed as good news: Those who resist diversity wouldn’t work so hard to stifle, deny, and discredit it if they weren’t frightened by how far we’ve come, what a force we can be for change. An empowering perspective that certainly inspires me to more action!

So, besides these general messages, what else did I learn? I’ll just mention a few sessions to suggest the flavor of the conference.

In one session, elders from several indigenous groups discussed their experiences with colonization. Most of the material they discussed was familiar to me from previous events and workshops I’ve attended. But drenched in two hours of references to colonization, this information took on a new quality that changed my gut sense of indigenous experiences, erasing any impulse to exoticize and leaving only the reality of systemic, persistent, to-the-bone deep marginalization. And remarkable resilience. 

Another workshop examined the roles of allies to marginalized groups, couched in terms of using the word “ally” as a verb rather than a noun: to be an ally is to take action, not just to invoke supportive rhetoric or adopt symbolism that carries no commitment to actually do anything.  One woman suggesting the term “accomplices” as a replacement for “allies” because it implies active engagement, even in the face of resistance. This was a challenging discussion for me. I agree with this position, and my agreement is another element in my personal reflections.

And then there was a session on aging. First, we shared hopes and fears about aging. Predictably, the fears were mostly about physical and cognitive decline and about social isolation. The hopes were mostly about remaining vibrant, presumably until the very moment of death. One African American woman who grew up in the rural South, living in a multi-generational home told us that aging and death had never carried any particular stigma because in her world, both were so integrated into life. Her comments led us to the topic of ‘good’ dying (and the book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. I recommend it highly). From there, we shifted to the ageism implicit in the concept of “super aging,” and from there, we were off on a conversation about daily microaggressions, those well-intended words and acts that are meant to be kind, but are actually patronizing, even infantilizing. I’ve written about this plenty of times here, so I won’t go on about it.

I left the conference feeling inspired by the community and the political power I’d just experienced. Then, the night we got home, I awoke around midnight to a feeling that something was missing in my life. I went back to sleep easily, and just before I woke up the next morning, I had a dream that left me feeling alone and lost, aimless. After a long talk with my partner and some reflective walks, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m hunting for something I used to have and now don’t. I have to find out what it is, and the answer is almost certainly related to this conference (OK, and maybe the beach). I joked with my partner, “Maybe it’s just a dog.” But honestly, I think it’s something more, some sense of purpose. Just what it will look like isn’t clear. But I’ve been here before, and I know a few things about my process at this juncture—words like patience, openness, exploration come to mind. I know I can’t force it, but I also know I have to be actively engaged in the search.

I’m confident I’ll find it, whatever it is. Meanwhile, the process itself brings a sense of meaning that feels good. As the woman at NMCCS said, the struggle is as important as the outcome.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2017. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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