Beautiful and devastating things

As I've refined Peace Studies these last four semesters, I've gotten clearer and clearer (and more in love) with the fact that my class invites students to surf the space between the personal and the political. Readings in sociology, history, and political science? Uh-huh, of course. Reading and writing memoir? You bet!

Increasingly, the writing assignments they do for me are short (500-800 words) and personal. As in, What is your gender? Are you conscious of it and how it influences your interactions? Do you act differently around men or women? Are there implicit or explicit expectations of you because of your gender that you like or don’t like? OR: Is feminism relevant for you and your generation?

My motivations for this personal tact are fairly shameless: at that age, they tend to be good at writing about themselves (and if they're not, it's good to start them in the hopes they cultivate a lifetime of introspection). And, because I think the concepts will mean a lot more to them, and penetrate a lot deeper, if they personalize them.

But when they bare their souls to me.... how do I grade that as an English assignment??

I've had boys reflect on their experiences with masculinity and having to be tough, and girls talk about how their sexuality alternately empowers and disempowers them. Later in the semester I will have them write a story of an experience they had in which they were aware of their race. These kids consistently write the most beautiful and devastating things.

The most appropriate response is to honor and thank them for their story, and to be humbled by their sharing it with me. I am often humbled.

So I write them long comments, ask them lots of questions, and offer them lots of praise. But I also circle their typos and grammatical mistakes, and beg them to be more careful about paragraph breaks and run-on sentences. I do it all hoping they don't get stuck at the grade as my judgement of them, but instead hear me saying (whispering, across traditional teacher-student lines) I see you, I honor you. Thank you.

Crossing Borders

Our first few hours in Mexico, Mark from Frontera de Cristo took us to the border wall, had us stand in a circle, and invited us to reflect on what borders mean to us.

We had just driven through Cochise County in Arizona, where we had passed four different kinds of military or police vehicles, and through the Port of Entry in Douglas-Agua Prieta, where we had been mini-interrogated by Border Patrol. I had felt nervous on the US side, and found myself relaxing now that we were on the Mexico side where, it seemed, no one was going to hassle a bunch of teenagers and young adults in beat up old minivans.

Asked to think about borders, I struggled to rectify what I had just experienced on a militarized national border, and what I know of migrant deaths and the human rights crisis in the desert, with what permaculture and anthropology have taught me about borders.

Permaculture urges us to mind the edges. The space where two systems meet is often the most productive and diverse, like the transition from meadow to forest or the shallows of a pond. And in a postmodern anthropological thought there is much discussion of syncretic culture, the complexity that emerges when two or more cultures collide, meld, overlap and borrow from each other. In our increasingly globalized culture, a lot is syncretic, for better or for worse. (This idea is even present in the Anne Fadiman quote that is the guiding principle of this blog: "The action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where the edges meet.")

And I am reminded now, in retrospect, of what the Christian story (and by extension Quakerism) has to say about the borders of empire and how they are to be challenged in favor of justice and belovedness.

I am grateful for this grounding in permaculture, anthropology and Christianity as I process my experiences on La Frontera. It helps me to see that borders are points of interaction and fertility, and opportunities for human connection, rather than simply divisions or boundaries to be guarded and defended.

*Photo: The border wall ("aesthetic fencing" version) from the Mexico side, the obelisk that marks the true border, and crucifixes.