Not Afraid of Thunder

Obvious Hiatus

2011-07-04T15:18:00.003-04:00

This blog is going to go on a brief hiatus while I get my life situated in the Philadelphia area. And figure out what to write about now that I am not teaching in a classroom.

Stay tuned for another reincarnation of a blog focused on "where the edges meet" and maybe, possibly, just perhaps a new and fancier URL.

Thanks!

Angelina

Letter to the Land

2011-05-13T12:58:00.004-04:00

For her final project in Environmental Science, Annelise is asking everyone to write a "letter to the land" about their learnings from, and connection to, Woolman's 230 acres of forest, scrub, meadow, garden, and buildings. This is mine - slightly edited for a wider audience.

Dear Woolmanland,

When I first came here, the dryness of the land in August was totally different than the lush humidity of my home back east. I was accustomed to four dramatic seasons. Here there are really… two. I had read about madrone and manzanita long before coming here and was glad to finally meet them in person. (For the record, madrone looks a lot like the rhododendrons of my childhood in the Delaware Valley.)

I was called out here by a leading (as Quakers say), by a vague vision of a garden in a forest (I would later learn the word permaculture and its resonance with this vision and my life), by archetypal evergreen trees that still crop up in my art, and by the ghost of Utah Phillips (whose spoken word I loved when I was a teenager, and who, I learned after I arrived here, loved Woolman.)

This place has helped me to understand and become clear on many things. Through learning about the history of mining in the Sierra and seeing its effects – the canals, tailings and erosion in our woods – I have (re)-learned that even most seemingly wild places have been touched and changed by humans. This is an important lesson for a woman from the built-up suburban East. Learning about mercury poisoning in the Yuba and its tributaries, minerals in our out-of-commission wells, and the invisible ozone that comes to settle here in the summer all helped me to understand that our ecological work can no longer be focused on purity. We’ve lost that battle. A lot of damage has been done – to the natural world, and by extension to our bodies (connecting environmental issues with health care is another lesson learned here). Instead, we need to focus on regeneration, restoration, and resilience in an altered landscape. I am grateful to Woolman, the land and its people, for helping me to understand this, and for inspiring/reminding me to stay grounded in love, ingenuity, and creativity.

The culture around sense of place that is so strong at Woolman, and that inspired this most excellent project of Annelise’s, has also been an important lesson for me. Talking about relationships with the land – awareness of watersheds and foodsheds, wildlife, human and geological history, etc – helped me to understand that I am actually rooted elsewhere. And that rooted-ness is rare in this day and age, something to be valued, protected, and cultivated. So I am hungry to return to the Philadelphia area with tools and awareness sharpened at Woolman, to thoroughly embrace and love that place that I am from, to be its conscious denizen.

So thank you, Woolman, for calling me out here, for offering up your lessons (which have been many more than are listed here). And thank you, Woolman, for sending me home. I will always remember the sound of the wind in the pines, my wild neighbors (dear, quail, turkey, lizards), the stars and quiet at night, and that view of the mountains while rolling down Woolman Lane. This is where I learned to be a teacher - that I am a teacher.

May future generations hold this land as the laboratory for teaching, learning, nourishing, challenging and growing that it has been in my experience. May the healing continue, may it long be a sacred space.

With gratitude and respect,

Angelina Conti

Peace Studies Teacher, Fall ’09 – Spring ‘11

Beautiful and devastating things

2011-04-23T18:32:00.006-04:00

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

2011-04-17T15:54:00.009-04:00

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.

Bodies and lives, sense of place and solidarity

2011-03-11T14:36:00.003-05:00

We spent half of class today digesting a chapter from Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest about oppositional culture and its lead up to oppositional consciousness and social movements. (Personally, I would have used "resistance" before "oppositional," but I didn't edit that volume so I guess I don't get a say.)

One section dealt with different kinds of social movements: liberation movements, which seek to reform, change or overthrow systems of human domination usually based on identity (Women's Rights, Gay Rights, etc.); equality-based special interest movements, which use the language of liberation movements for a specific cause (Abortion, AIDS funding, etc.); and social responsibility movements which identify societal ills (nuclear weapons, drunk driving) that effect everyone, then create an identity around that.

For the authors, environmental movements fell into the third category. They posit that Environmentalist isn't an aspect of identity that society ingrains and reinforces like race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, etc..* Theoretically one has to cultivate an identity as an environmentalist, so social responsibility movements have a slightly different process than the others.

I sort of get that...but I think it's predicated on the idea that the environment is something other than us. That talking about environmental degradation is talking about something other than our bodies and our lives. The tsunami in Japan has me ruminating on the fragility not only of human lives and ecosystems but of all that we've built and think is permanent. Increasingly for me, health care is in the mix here too - one group of corporations poisons water, air and soil, and another group benefits off what that poison does to human bodies. Lately, I am taking it all much more personally.

So how do we build a movement that rises out of that place? Where its about bodies and lives, sense of place and solidarity in the natural world, and a riotous anger for what is being done to us - all of us?

*I've been reading Derrick Jensen lately, and I think he would point out that its Western Civilization that doesn't instill identity as an environmentalist. And that it is so fundamental in other cultures that there isn't always a word for it.

We've done a lot of damage

2011-03-06T18:39:00.004-05:00

Highway 49 is the primary route north into the foothills and to school. It runs from 80, which is a major east-west arterial (also how you get to Bay from here). Driving it today with overcast skies and a comforting drizzle, I marveled at the land: old farms and pasture, rolling hills, and forests of pine and oak. After Auburn, which is sprawly, there isn't much until you hit Grass Valley. The mobile home communities come first, then an old mine and a western wear store, later a strip mall, then the highway widens and you're officially within GV and Nevada City limits.

To relatively untrained eyes, we're out in the boonies. And with a 230 acre campus -- most of which is forest and scrub and includes cows (and various wild animals), a big garden, orchard, and pasture -- we seem rural and pristine. And we are - the stars are amazing at night, it's blissfully quiet -but this land has a human history that isn't far beneath the surface, and that I am just learning to see.

Our woods are full of mine tailings - big piles of stone that were waste product from mines - as well as dried up canals and logging roads. Our irrigation water for the garden and orchard comes to us via the Nevada Irrigation District, affectionately known as the Ditch, a network of ditches built by gold miners to bring snow melt from the Sierra. There's mercury in many of the water ways from hydraulic mining (importantly, there are not dangerous levels of mercury in our well). Go a little further east, and you hit moon landscapes that are the legacy of hydraulic mining that literally washed aware entire hillsides. Even further east, and you hit a band of national forest that rolls practically into Nevada. Lead levels in the soil of many parks and recreational areas are very high, also from mining (which ended decades ago).

Having lived an urban and peri-urban existence up until I came out here, this is a new lesson for me on human impact even in rural and seemingly wilderness areas. I've found the juxtaposition of mining history and contemporary attitudes about pristine wilderness curious. I think a lot of people think they are living a simpler and more natural life out here, but there are poisons in unexpected places.

Increasingly, my thinking is that environmental work has to start from that place: We've done a lot of damage. There are few untouched places left. It's not strictly about preservation any more, but restoration, careful management, and how to live in poisoned bodies on a poisoned planet.

(And for me, that work has to start in cities. Do you know anyone looking to hire an educator/writer/editor/documentarian/permaculturist in Philly? I'm looking.)

No desks, no blackboard

2011-02-28T16:11:00.003-05:00

I’m in that odd transitional place right now of looking for work. I’ve decided to leave my current job, but haven’t determined what is next. It feels a little like being an awkward Tarzan-wannabe with unreliable vines. In this economy it’s more than a little nerve-wracking.

Of course I’m applying to teaching jobs. I have the all-important two years teaching experience and a clear commitment to the nourishment and accompaniment of nascent humanity, aka “education.” When I started here I was just trying on the idea of being a teacher or educator. Now I own both those words willingly. Applying them to myself feels a little like claiming I have super powers.

But I’m not strictly a classroom teacher. I don’t dislike classrooms at all. I actually love the book-ends of time, the learning space created, the ritual of white boards, lesson plans, class discussion, activities, notes, homework, etc. I love the pre-class planning rush that feels like a theater production going up on the first night.

And the garden is also my classroom – and the kitchen, the woods, field trips, and city streets. And, in retrospect, my work as an educator began long before I claimed it as a label, when I worked in publishing and journalism, community organizing, and anti-racism work.

Education is very closely related to ministry, art, and writing for me. They are different aspects of the bread of life that we offer each other, that which is most essential. Through giving and receiving, we teach and learn and re-learn how to be human.

So while I would be very happy to find a teaching position at Friends or independent school (sorry public schools, no teaching certification), don’t mind me if I look a little broader.

I see the classroom everywhere.

In the moment

2011-02-17T14:38:00.005-05:00

In general, I'm a planner. I'm not a control freak about it and I'm not afraid of spontaneity - I just have a mind that benefits from a basic structure to keep me on task (or, in some instances, to riff off of.)

So as a teacher I plan, and I like to make an agenda for class. For instance, tomorrow we'll do a free write ("Write a brief history of a made-up war between made up nations, as it might appear in an outdated and slightly offensive high school history textbook") followed by a yarn discussion on cultural narratives of violence and nonviolence. I'll no doubt spend time tonight going over the readings I assigned (excerpts from Kurlansky's Nonviolence and an essay by Starhawk) and making notes on key points I want to emphasize and make sure are understood.

And then, tomorrow, undoubtedly something magical will happen. It happens all the time. I'll be struck by some random, last minute (literally) inspiration to change my plan. Suddenly it will make sense to change order, or do a different activity, to let a discussion go long, or to have my amazing TA perform Dispatch's The General at some other key but unplanned time in the flow of the class. The results will be phenomenal - and the inspiration would never have struck had I not done the planning.

What is it Parker Palmer says - methods are what we use until the real teacher arrives?

This kind of in-the-moment teacher inspiration is relatively new to me, though I've witnessed other facilitators work with it many times over the years. I've been congratulating myself these past three semesters that I've been able to stay open to it and to trust it. I think it might be a mark of maturity, at least for me.

There's also an element of trust, and of giving up control - to inspiration, to my students, to our shared organic experience of teaching and learning.

And a reminder that planning goes hand in hand with inspiration (and trust) is a probably a good life lesson.

Who has the power?

2011-02-15T14:52:00.002-05:00

The first writing assignment in Peace Studies is a 100-word essay in response to the prompt: “In our society, who has power? What kind of power is it? What to they do with it?” It’s due the second day of class, and is designed to get them thinking and to give me a taste of them as writers and thinkers.

Peace Studies is all about power. Throughout the semester, we discover and discuss different kinds of power - the power of domination and oppression (power over), the power of satyagraha*, social movements and nonviolent resistance (power with), and the power of our own stories, lives, identities and liberation (power-from-within).

But on the first day most of the students are still working with power as we commonly understand it and encounter it – the power of wealth, government, military, and media. More often than not, they write about power that is based on control and concentrated in the hands of the very few:

“I believe that the governments, and people with weapons are the ones who have the power.”

“In our society, I believe the President, Congress, Senate, Supreme Court, along with many rich people have power.”

“I think in the global society, the media has a huge amount of power.”

“In our global society, those willing to ignore their morals and sacrifice their humanity have power.”

Their answers are consistently thoughtful, knowledgeable, and sophisticated – they show impressive understanding of interconnected and global systems, and say a lot in a mere 100 words.

As much as I find these answers sobering – they are so familiar with domination and control, and rarely do they express their own power – I also get excited. It means that Peace Studies (and Woolman as a whole) is going to be a huge adventure for them.

And I feel so lucky that I get to come along on that adventure.

*A term developed by Mohandas Gandhi meaning “truth force” – an attempt to define nonviolence but something that it is, rather than what it is not.

This was also posted on the Woolman blog: http://blog.woolman.org/

Alien teacher from another planet

2010-11-29T20:40:00.002-05:00

I am gradually developing/discovering my own bag of teacher tricks. One already described on this blog is the "snake" class discussion (in which the students call on each other, rather than me calling on them). I am now thinking of this as the "yarn" method, partly because we've recently been using a skein of blue yarn as the talking stick. I like this description because yarn also means to tell stories. And because I like to imagine the web that forms between the kids as they talk to each other and toss the skein.

Today in class I finally owned/acknowledged another tool that I regularly employ: the resident alien. I first discovered the resident alien in my 12th grade (that is, when I was in 12th grade) Dreams in Literature* class. It's a method used is pseudo-Jungian contemporary dream interpretation: describe an object, symbol, thing, etc. in your dream as if to an alien from another planet who has no concept of it.

We first tried it with gender a few weeks ago, but today in class it was Describe race as if to an alien from another planet that has no concept of it.

At first the kids wanted to know if the alien had a skin color (yes: they're all green). Then they asked if the alien could see color (um, yes: same color perception as people.)

They hemmed and hawed, then dove into genetic variation, arbitrary interpretation of genetic variation, and divisions and hierarchies among people. We talked about the idea of social constructs and chewed on ideas of ethnicity, labeling and code-switching the labels we use for people or ourselves.

It was a good class. I was struck at one point with a geeky-teacher desire to wear costume alien antennas (in my family we called them "deely-boppers") and get in character. Props! Props are fun.

So is discovering your methods, and growing into them, as you go.

*You'd think from the name of this class that I went to a super alternative woo-woo high school. I did not. I think this class was a little bit of a fluke.

Sometimes the benchmark is a question

2010-10-16T16:22:00.002-04:00

The first day of Service Week was short for my group: we helped with distribution at the River City Food Bank in Sacramento, then headed back to where we were staying in Davis. With time to spare before dinner, we did a little debrief. I suggested we go around in a circle and describe what we had done that day, and talk about any questions that had come up for us.

One student talked about how she had interacted with a client at River City who was about to be evicted, and how she realized that she had enough money in her bank account to pay his rent. She hadn’t offered to pay his rent, and was keenly aware of that decision. Another student, responding to an anecdote about a family with only $4 to spend on dinner for three, noted that she had spent more than $4 on iPhone apps in the past few days.

As we went around the circle, the students wondered together about their responsibility to the people they had met. They mused about structural violence (a concept we'd been discussing in Peace Studies), nutrition, and food access. We ended on a thoughtful note and the group broke to prepare dinner.

As the kids scattered, the other adult in the group turned to me and asked about benchmarks: did I have particular answers in mind for them to the questions they were asking? I think she felt like we'd left with some big ones hanging. Her question got me thinking.

I've been facilitating service experiences for young people long enough to know that this contemplation of privilege and wealth can be an important and early stage of the process, and that there aren't many easy answers. My own relationship to service learning is nuanced enough that I know I want my students to get a little uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that they shut down. My agenda is partly that they come to a place of human solidarity, of activism and service in conversation.

It's true that sometimes I go into teaching, into the classroom or into the field, with an idea of the topics I want my students to grasp that day. I’ll make copious notes on structural violence, or Walter Wink, or nonviolent resistance, and be sure we hit all the key points before our time that day is over.

But sometimes the benchmark is a question.

And for service trips, the kids hit it on the first day: What is my responsibility to the people around me, people I do not know and may have no immediate connection to? What is my responsibility when I have too much, and others don't have enough? Why do economic, governmental, and educational systems privilege some people but not others?

I don't have easy answers for them. The hard answer is that they are implicated - in everything. And the truth is that they will spend their lives asking questions, doing service, being human, and trying to make sense of the world.

And it will mean so much more when they come to the answer, whatever it is, on their own. That they start asking those questions under my care is success enough for me.

go read Friends Journal

2010-10-07T20:53:00.003-04:00

Its been awfully quiet on this blog this school year. I've been doing a lot of reading and teaching, but not a whole lot of writing here.

While I work on getting my reflective juices flowing, check out my article in the online edition of Friends Journal's education issue, readable here.

And, there is a review of Spirit Rising in the current issue of FJ - unfortunately not readable online.

Like it's their job

2010-08-22T16:34:00.002-04:00

While orienting coworkers to our evening check-in practices last night, I said something along the lines of "If the kids push boundaries with you around bedtime, don't take it personally. Teenagers push boundaries like it's their job."

Today I've been thinking, what if pushing boundaries is actually their job, not just something they do reliably and with gusto? In the same way that it's a baby's "job" to play - playing is the best thing they can do for their relationship with the world at that stage.

This idea is patronizing because it's sort of about development, and because it's harder to determine the "jobs" of adults of all ages (we get mired in all kinds of seemingly important things).

But still, I think the push back that often comes from teenagers is important. In my experience, they are keenly aware of power, of connection and division, and of "the rules." They are actively transforming and actively watching their peers transform. They see society quite clearly, but often they haven't yet signed on or resigned to how things "are supposed to be."

If nothing else, working with teens keeps me honest and keeps me on my toes.

Peace Mix Fall 2010

2010-08-11T18:28:00.004-04:00

The first semester I taught Peace Studies, I had the idea of making a CD of music to accompany class readings. I wanted it to speak to an around issues of power, oppression and liberation that are the undercurrent of my class, rather than being a compilation of explicit "peace songs." And I wanted it to be relevant to my high school aged students.

Initial track lists felt overly folky and were drawn from my fairly limited music library, so I didn't assign the mix last year. But appeals via Facebook inspired dozens of suggestions from friends and colleagues, enough even to make a Peace Mix five times over.

After listening and reading lyrics, I selected the tracks below. I was hampered by the 80 minute maximum of most CD-Rs, and had to cut some songs at the last minute because the CD was too long. Other songs, like Live's "Shades of Grey" were harder to come by, and so aren't on this iteration of the mix.

I made a list of all the songs and artists that were suggested; I have some inkling this might be a bigger project than I envisioned.

The track order roughly follows the subject progression of my class: violence and nonviolence; social movements, structural violence, solidarity and service; gender power; social class; race and racism:

1. Utah Phillips & Ani Difranco – Anarchy

2. Ani DiFranco – Fuel

3. Brother Ali – Uncle Sam Goddamn*

4. Bob Marley – War

5. Dispatch – The General *

6. Gil Scott-Herndon – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

7. Against Me! – White People for Peace

8. Flobots – Fight with Tools *

9. Old Crow Medicine Show – I Hear Them All

10. The Coup – Heven Tonite

11. Hedwig and the Angry Inch – Origin of Love

12. Spoonboy – Fireball or “What I learned from TV” *

13. Ani Difranco – 32 Flavors

14. Traci Chapman - Mountains o’Things

15. John Lennon – Working Class Hero

16. Arrested Development – Mr. Wendal

17. 2 Pac - Changes *

18. KRS One – Woke Up

19. Utah Phillips – Natural Resources

Conscience compels me to encourage you to procure this music via legal means. And my inner school marm wants you to know that some tracks contain "adult language" even though I tried to keep it to a minimum. Songs with an * were suggested by my former students. Oh, and those Utah lyrics? Hard to find.

Sincere thanks to everyone who helped make this possible. (And thanks to Oliver Danni for stringing them all together in a YouTube playlist here).

How we did Spirit Rising (in brief)

2010-07-26T17:36:00.003-04:00

This is a (very) refined version of remarks I gave at an event for Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices at Friends Center in Philadelphia on Sunday, July 18th.

***

In creating Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices, we attempted to make our process look as much as possible like our envisioned final product: ecumenical, multi-cultural, and international within the Society of Friends. For guidance and inspiration we had the work and wisdom of Friends organizations like Quakers Uniting in Publications (QUIP), which sponsored the book and its predecessor Whispers of Faith, and the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), who have been building bridges and friendship among different Friends communities for decades. There is also the long and rich history of ecumenical work among young adult Quakers that stretches back several generations: the role of Hicksite and Orthodox young adult Friends in reunification of several north American yearly meetings, the World Gathering of Young Friends and its previous incarnations, the long history of Young Friends of North America (YFNA), and the work of the Young Christian Quaker Association (YCQA) among Friends in Kenya, to name a few examples.

There are several ways to talk about how cultural, theological and geographic differences were navigated during the creation of Spirit Rising. The honest and succinct way is to say that we navigated faithfully, carefully, awkwardly, and imperfectly. That gives you some sense of the multi-year, multi-faceted process that included dozens if not hundreds of Friends around the world.

Another way is to talk about the logistics. In early 2008 QUIP formed an editorial board of 10 young adult friends from across the theological spectrum of Friends and from around the world, including Bolivia, Kenya, Canada and the United Kingdom, but with a pretty heavy and unintentional weight towards North America and US Americans. We had three editorial board meetings. At the first in Greensboro in 2008 we crafted the language in the Call for Submissions and brainstormed ways to recruit submissions. At the second, on the Oregon Coast in 2009, we made initial and substantial selections for the book and noted what was still missing an still needed to be solicited. In Richmond this past April, which was more of a conference and celebration than a meeting, we talked about how to carry on the work and how to let it go.

In all of these instances the editorial board and QUIP Friends talked. A lot. We talked in our formal meetings and in informal social situations (like bowling alleys or at the beach). Much of our time was spent parsing out the differences between our traditions and learning each other’s languages of faith. That is, though we all spoke English and conducted our meetings in English, we quickly learned that we had very different meanings and relationships to certain words and practices.

When the editorial board selected submissions for the book we selected both for quality and for diversity, attempting to balance the two, and took turns facilitating our sessions. That’s a loaded sentence – an entire article could be written about that process, and different editorial board members had different experiences.

From my work on the youth book I’ve developed a rough toolkit for cross-branch and cross-cultural work which I think is applicable outside the Quaker world. It’s a work in progress, but here are the tools more or less in order:

1. Prepare and educate yourself in order to cultivate cultural sensitivity. I spent a long time among Friends in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting before I knew that pastoral meetings existed, or that the largest population of Friends in the world is in Kenya. It’s hard to engage with that diversity if you’re totally ignorant to it. If work among the branches of Friends interests you, undertake a project of self-education to support you in your work. The websites of FWCC or the Quaker Information Center are good places to start, as is reading Spirit Rising.

2. Cultivate your own Quaker translator. Think of the John Woolman story in which an indigenous Lenape leader hears “where the words come from” while Woolman is preaching, even though they speak different languages. If we can learn to listen past the words someone is using to hear their meaning, we can begin to understand what Friends hold in common as well as the very real differences that exist between us. If we get hung up on words we wont get very far.

3. Practice hospitality. When we really practice hospitality, whether we take people into our homes or show them around our cities or help them coordinate their travel, we’re taking care of them and accompanying them. This act of care or accompaniment is basic, tender, biblical even – if we share that act of humanity with someone, if we open our homes and lives, it becomes much harder to make someone an other.

4. Acknowledge the hurt, the distrust, and the history. This is not really the historic schisms and the relationship that your meeting or branch may have to the next meeting or branch. This is your own hurt, distrust, and fear – your relationship to religion, to Christianity, nontheism (etc.), to your own branch of Quakerism and what you secretly think and feel about other people who are different than you. Acknowledge what triggers you and makes you afraid. This helps build your Quaker translator and practice hospitality.

5. Once you have begun a friendship or rapport with someone, have the hard conversations. Certainly we should emphasize commonalities among Friends, but differences themselves are also life giving, and are very real. Gay rights, beliefs about Christ and relationships to Christianity, and the role of women in Friends communities are only some of the flash points that exist among Quakers. Don’t avoid them. There is nothing more transformative than a respectful, tender conversation with someone who is your friend but who believes very differently than you do. It may take awhile to get to a place where these conversations are possible.

6. Engage with the disparities of wealth both worldwide among Friends and in your home community. The misdistribution of wealth and the roll of US American imperialism and neo-colonialism in that distribution of wealth will make you crazy. As friends in the first world we are particularly implicated and challenged. Do your best to love around and despite of this reality.

7. Ask the big questions. The last point requires a little more explanation.

Something a QUIP Friend said early on has really stayed with me. I don’t think he was trying to be prophetic, but his words worked on me that way: “The work that you are doing,” he said, “is a microcosm for work that must be done with deep fissures in society.”

I think the question “What does it meant to be related to these people we do not know, whose lives and beliefs look very different from our own?” is the question right now, not just for Quakers but for all of us who live on this planet. Our technology, civilization and environmental degradation have both made us more connected and more aware of how we as human beings have always been connected and interdependent. How might knowing each other transform, nourish and challenge the ways that we live now?

I think we did our best to live into these questions – faithfully, awkwardly, imperfectly – in doing this book.

Fox v. Public Libraries

2010-07-06T22:42:00.003-04:00

Over the course of two days, at least five national Fox affiliates ran news stories critical of public libraries, all with a similar tone: "Libraries are nice and all, but.... are they really necessary? They kind of cost a lot of money."

Here are links to the stories:

Minneapolis-St.Paul (can't find a link to the original story, this is commentary)

It's possible I'm naive and things like this happen all the time. But, really? While budgetary conversations are certainly happening everywhere, the unity in tone of these pieces is suspect.

I don't know whether to be flabbergasted or sort of weirdly grateful to FOX for showing it's true colors. Though maybe they do that all the time.

Has anyone seen coverage of this library assault anywhere? The Chicago story seems to have gotten the most press. I've found: Huffington Post

Working philosophy on education (Summer '10)

2010-07-06T12:05:00.002-04:00

In an effort to define what I thought a Quaker philosophy of education might be, I came up with this:

It has to do with embracing and educating the whole person, educating in an environment that affirms and cultivates an integrated and holistic humanity, and that puts service and social justice in conversation with fidelity to ones own vocation. When we talk about social justice, when we talk about making our pedagogy of education available to all because all need it, elitism and privilege become something we have to talk about. It's not OK to have elite educational institutions that talk a good game about social justice but fails to look at its own privilege.

Teacher in the Summer: Treme

2010-07-01T16:38:00.004-04:00

I have been living without broadcast TV for five months, under a nice mossy rock at my alternative rural school. So local news, especially in HD, especially when it's late-night FOX, is fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way. ("Oh my God, did they just attack public libraries and transit in one night?!")

But by far the best TV adventure has been the HBO show Treme. My mom is hooked on it, and once I understood that it is not in fact a detective show (not sure where I got that), I was willing to give it a go on On Demand. (I allow myself one show at a time, and am sort of in mourning, I admit, for LOST.)

The show takes place in New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina, and begins as residents are allowed back in to certain neighborhoods. The cast of characters are loosely connected - a trombone player, public defender, English professor, restaurant owner, bar owner, contractor - but have in common their devastation and their commitment to NOLA. Sometimes this commitment is an active love, sometimes it's the sense that these people are totally rooted, that they wouldn't make sense anywhere else.

I wont gush about how racially diverse the characters are, for three reasons: 1) They are mostly Black and White (as of episode three), but I suspect that will change 2) I wish that racially diverse shows were no longer remarkable, 3) Race is at the heart of this story, as it is often at the heart of many great American cities, just as it was at the heart of what happened, and continues to happen, after the storm.

The show had me early on. When John Goodman's English professor character is asked by a snarky reporter if he thinks New Orleans is indeed a "great" city and deserves to be rebuilt, Goodman snaps: "You don't think New Orleans is a city that lives in the imagination of the world?" I love a large, imperfect, gritty city that I know lives in the imagination of the world, for better but often for worse. I could tell this show had something for me.

And considering it's HBO, there's surprisingly little random graphic sex. What there is a lot of is stunning and devastating filmography and a delicate, respectful story line that knits people together while simultaneously showing the deep chasms between them. The story line touches on the financial struggles of residents after the storm, the loss of tradition, racial tension, gentrification, and police brutality. It reminds us that this kind of livelihood and psyche scrambling devastation - and the humanity it impacts and inspires - can indeed happen within the bounds of our seemingly safe nation.

And there's lots of amazing music, including cameos by big names.

I'm curious to know what people in New Orleans think about it. I really hope they feel respected. In my opinion, it's almost too sophisticated for television. But then again, I live under a mossy rock.

Luckily it's been renewed for a second season.

Alchemy

2010-06-10T18:03:00.003-04:00

This last month saw a two quiet but momentous things in the life of this soft-spoken teacher and writer. Two weeks ago I finished my first year of teaching, with the requisite tearful-and-joyful graduation ceremony at the Woolman Semester. I’ve learned a lot this year – being an educator is funny like that, you discover the learning is a two way street. I suspect my second year will be a hugely different but still wild ride.

And, in late April, the first book to have my name on it was published. Granted, it has the name of many people on it – Spirit Rising is an anthology with 10 editors and 200+ contributors. (But due to an alphabetical advantage, the book was catalogued under my name in the Library of Congress. I’m not gloating, though. Really.)

It’s interesting that I was hugely congratulated for the book, but not for completing my inaugural year of teaching. That speaks to something I’ve been trying to parse out and express on this blog, so far without success: I suspect myself of having a deep and subtle inferiority complex about being a teacher. I don’t know where I picked this complex up. (Perhaps college. I picked up a lot of unconscious junk there.)

I think it’s important to be honest about this complex, though, because I suspect I might not be alone in it. And I think it is probably related to how teaching is generally regarded by American society - and the fact no one congratulated me. There’s that cliché adage: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” There’s also that slimy fact that teachers are underpaid basically everywhere. And there’s the total lack of glamour – this sense that working in American schools can be like manning the trenches in a noble but ugly war. (Perhaps all this actually indicates how Americans really feel about our education system, not the vocation of teaching, but in my experience there’s rarely a distinction made.)

This all contradicts what I know experientially, rationally, and emotionally: that good teachers are alchemists. Healers. Liberators. Midwives to nascent humanity. I know this from the golden moments I’ve had this year – and a few of the crappy ones - but more imporantly from the many important teachers I’ve had in my own life. Teaching transforms because learning transforms, because accompaniment transforms. Teachers have one of the most important jobs in the world.

I teach for the same reasons I write books: both nourish. And I believe deep in the fiber of my being that when humans are nourished, our capacity for goodness, justice, creativity and love is immense. I did not set out to be a teacher and am often surprised to find myself on this path, but I also know that teaching makes total sense for this reincarnated activist, fancy intellectual, shy writer, and almost-seminarian.

So please congratulate me for being a teacher. I will appreciate the reminder.

A car owner's manifesto

2010-05-31T20:59:00.003-04:00

Five ways to redeem yourself with the sustainability gods (or to rationalize your decision to purchase a cute used Toyota):

1. Be generous. Loan the car to friends. Support others in being car free.

2. Use with intention. Plan and combine trips (post office and thrift store and groceries and library).

3. Fill the seat belts. Car pool. Offer to drive people places.

4. See how long you can make a tank of gas last.

5. Regularly re-discern whether the car is still needed. When it's not, let it go.

Denial and it's sister, petroleum

2010-05-31T20:38:00.003-04:00

Earlier this month I bought my first car.

I did a lot of things right, as far as buying a car goes: I didn’t buy more car than I needed, got a model that gets good fuel economy, did lots of research, negotiated an excellent loan, etc. I had been contemplating the purchase for months and was clear that as long as I work and live in the country, in the foothills, a car is necessary. The car is a sensible teacher car.

Necessary because nothing is walkable here, and I’m not brave enough on a bike to take the twists and turns and precipices of Newtown Road. Necessary because I do not go home to a family life to counter balance my work life; I have to build my own off-campus non-work support and social systems. Building local networks and friendships was hard here without a car.

The day I bought the car I wanted to unwind in the evening by watching a movie and, ironically, selected The End of Suburbia. I went into it suspecting what was ultimately true, that it wasn’t going to tell me anything I didn’t already know: the oil is running out, and life as we know it will be unsustainable once it does.

I know that. Have known it for awhile. There's a huge oil spill in the gulf. Why the hell did I buy a car?

Why do we all buy cars? Why do I know people who are radical environmentalists and own cars? Why do I know simplicity-and-integrity-minded Quakers who own cars?

I'm not sure why, but cars are not a given for me. I don't assume their presence in my life forever. They're not something basic I expect to own or to have at my disposal like bowls or socks or underwear. I lived for a long time without one, and in the city was really happy being car free.

So now I am starting to fall for my new wheels. AND I feel like an alien space ship just landed in my driveway. Like I made a decision totally contrary to what I believe about lifestyle and to what I know about where the world is headed, but a decision no one is faulting me for, and a decision that, given my circumstances, made good sense.

What's that quote about the 1920's - something about dancing towards war wearing elegant velvet blindfolds?

Choosing failure

2010-05-13T14:12:00.002-04:00

I caught an NPR story earlier this week about a school in Rhode Island that fired all of its teaching staff in an effort to turn around a district in which the majority of kids were regularly failing state-determined standards.

I do understand that sometimes schools can become dysfunctional organisms that need help, but I bristled when I heard that story. I thought about the student I failed last semester (whom I adored) and the student who might fail this semester (whom I also adore) and how I tried to work with both of them so that they could pass and about how they had tons of support in our small school community. And about how, honestly, there has been an element of choice in both of their failures.

There are some obvious differences between my work as a teacher at a small semester program and the work of teachers in public schools. I'm aware of those differences, but also feel very much in conversation with public education because I am product of it and it is the academic home of so many of my students.

Some of the questions are the same: Who's fault is it when a kid fails?

The school, the parents, the guidance counselor, the kid? How much do you weight structural violence, pathetic school funding, lack of support at home? And in a holistic learning environment like Woolman where we honor other growth and work and acknowledge that grades aren't everything, is it OK accept a kid's decision to fail if that is what they are used to and what is easiest for them?

Our global issues teacher uses an iceberg model to approach societal issues. The kids identify symptoms, causes and structural causes (or triggers, patterns, and structural causes) in a conflict or situation. It helps them get to the root of understanding.

Student failure - and the implication of specific teachers - are at the tip of that iceberg. It's hot up here in the spot light. Everybody is looking at you.

But guess what, there's this huge behemoth lurking underneath it - maybe you don't see it because you're not on top of it - and you all are implicated.

Did you do the assignment?

2010-05-04T14:24:00.002-04:00

Dear _____

Am I right that you did not hand in your Social Class essay? Do you intend to do it?

Thx,
Angelina

I write notes like this a lot and deliver them to my students' mailboxes. There are a couple things going on here:

1. An assignment is missing.

2. I’m making it clear that I know the assignment is missing.

3. I’m allowing for the possibility that the kid may have given me the assignment, or e-mailed it to me, and I lost it (this has happened once or twice).

4. I’m leaving the door open that the assignment may be turned in late, and I’m making it clear that I am still willing to accept the assignment even if it is late.

5. I’m allowing for the possibility that the kid may have chosen not to do the assignment.

6. Notably, we are not having a face-to-face conversation.

We’ve been talking a lot recently about what happens if kids don’t do their work.

Several of them don’t do their work on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes this is an act of rebellion against our admittedly rigorous school. Sometimes kids are overwhelmed or unprepared for the work, and not doing it comes in lieu of asking for help. And sometimes we get kids who are just used to not doing their work, and that’s a hard habit to break.

Right now the education staff is in fairly unanimous agreement that if kids are way behind, they don’t get to do extra stuff like going to a slam poetry competition in San Francisco or an immigration rally in Reno. This is a tough line to hold, though, because we’re also clear that those experiences are part of this semester program’s experiential element. And because sometimes kids get more out of those experiences than writing essays.

There’s also this element of honoring choice. I had a student last semester who decided not to do most of her written assignments. There were several factors involved in that decision, but I think it ultimately had a lot to do with self-care. As frustrated as I was, I also appreciated her decision. That’s not to say it’s easy when students selectively opt out. It’s especially hard in a residential setting when kids bail on group projects, though really all non-participation hurts a teaching and learning community.

But if a kid can articulate to me that they’ve made a conscious, considered decision not to do something, I’m inclined to honor that (after some pushing). That decision is a learning experience. Advocating for oneself is an important skill. Experiencing the consequences of a decision is also a learning experience. If the thoughtfulness and articulation is not their, I'm less generous.

I’m not going to give them a grade they haven’t earned, but my love, appreciation and trust for them is not necessarily shaken by missed assignments. I’m learning not to take it personally when a kid doesn’t do the homework, because it seems so rarely personal. Some of the same kids who don't do essays contribute a lot to class.

Possibly I am a push over. It’s probably telling that I write notes and rarely confront a kid over a missed assignment. But I’m pretty sure they know they didn’t do something. And taking responsibility for work and follow up? That’s a learning experience, too.

I’m clear that our relationship is not just an exchange in which hard work is the price paid for a good grade. I care more about their care and feeding as human beings. I am grateful to work at a school where it’s understood that the teacher-student relationship is bigger than the classroom and grades, and where its OK for me to talk about the love that is part of teaching for me. I do love my students – as complete, imperfect, awesome human beings (and sometimes as ornery little twerps). That comes first, and doesn’t necessarily go away when homework is missing.

Maestra de Paz

2010-04-30T14:44:00.004-04:00

Telling people I'm a high school teacher is one thing, and saying that I work at a semester program is also fine. But telling people I'm a Peace Studies teacher? That gets interesting.

Sometimes I chicken out and say I teach high school English, and then pray that nobody asks me what books I teach (Scarlett Letter? No. Great Gatsby? No. My Gender Workbook? Yes!)

"Peace Studies teacher" does not exist in any kind of mainstream educational lexion that I know of.

But sometimes people nod earnestly, or are really interested. Sometimes people step back and reexamine me - I guess I don't look that radical upon first impression. And sometimes people are like, "WAH?".

And then all the old activists and peace workers ask me what we're reading. This has happened several times now. I can't tell if they have ideas of what we should be reading - if I pass or fail some test with them - or if they are genuinly interested, or perhaps searching for some ellusive peace curricula.

I too am searching for an elusive peace curricula - and am always open to suggestions - but am pretty clear that my class is really about power, about naming it and transforming it. We look at the history of nonviolence and nonviolence theory, and social movements, but we also spend a lot of time on gender, race, and class.

I ask the kids to surf the space between the political and the personal. I think identity politics have a bad name amongst some folks, but I'm clear we can't get to peace unless we ask some hard questions about power.

That's what I try to say to people when they ask. It often feels like the begining of a conversation rather than an explanation.

Mexico #1

2010-04-19T17:06:00.002-04:00

We walked out to the border fence through arroyos – dry creek beds that run with seasonal rains. The way was lined with water bottles and discarded clothing, bras and other bits left behind. The “wall” was round steel posts, at least twelve feet high, driven into the ground, filled with concrete which meant no resonant percussion at the border. We were denied even that silly resistance. The kids climbed, though, and we learned how easy it is to go up, and probably over. Up and over was the plan for everyone we met, almost 40 migrants in the desert that day, mostly men, with faces that ranged from apprehensive of us to bemused. They asked us: “What do you think of us?” and hailed from places in the US that were familiar and close to home. They had done the jump many times, were returning to lives and jobs and families in the US.

In a quiet moment, our group leader asked us to sit and breath, to think of the dozens if not hundreds of people in the desert around us, waiting to cross. The land had seemed quiet, populated by scrub and cattle, but suddenly it was full of eyes and breath and stories.

The people we saw were not carrying enough for five days in the desert. I have hiked for five days in the desert. I am worried about those people.

In an art exercise later, that arroyo became the long road of human history and migration to new life in strange lands, an image that dances now with what I know about NAFTA, maquiladoras, and the wall. And the footprints in the sand, in that long road river of humans walking, included my own.

Giving up control in class discussions

2010-03-29T17:40:00.006-04:00

I've been having this problem in class discussions that my supervisor, the Head of School, first pointed out last semester when she observed my class: often the kids talk to me, not to each other. She suspected it's because I respond to them - I nod, and make generally affirming "Hmm" and "Ahh" noises. I also generally facilitate class discussions and call on people, so it sort of makes sense that the kids direct their thoughts to the Boss Lady who stands at the head of the class.

It's not ideal though - I could see other kids checking out because they weren't involved in conversations. I had been meaning to try a method Derrick Jensen describes, in Walking on Water, of having groups of students take turns facilitating discussions.

But today we stumbled into another model. We'd just taken in a whirlwind of information on masculinity, violence, and feminism, including brainstorms the kids had generated. I told them I'd noticed this phenomenon where they talk to me and not to each other, and suggested we try an experiment.

I called on M, she said her bit, and then she called on someone else. Once that person was done they called on someone else, etc. People raised their hands when they wanted to speak, and I occasionally reminded them all to be aware of how long people had had their hands up, and to invite those who hadn't contributed to speak. But mostly they ran the discussion themselves, talked to each other and looked at each other. They even called on each other if they new someone had particular thoughts or opinions. I raised my hand at one point to, and when an intern TA tried to defer time to them, they insisted he contribute.

And we made our way like that. It was amazing. Nearly everybody talked, and nearly everybody kept track of who was wanting to speak. We didn't talk explicitly about what feminism is and why we're learning about gender, masculinity and feminism all together - but they did talk a lot about sexual politics and consent, and the relevance of gender conversations to their own lives.

At the end of class I congratulated them on a thoughtful, respectful and well facilitated discussion.

M said: "That conversation never would have happened in a public high school."

Amen.

BFFLs

2010-03-26T16:30:00.002-04:00

We couldn't run school without the young men and women who are interns here. They take major leadership in the kitchen and garden, TA classes, help with homework, do tuck-in most nights, and are a vital part "holding the container." The kids also LOVE and WORSHIP them.

Case in point, while settling in for class yesterday:

Student (to intern-TA): "Sit by me, we're besties."

Someone else: "Besties?"

Student: "Best friends. We're also BFFLs. Best. Friends. For. Life."

Intern (without missing a beat, and only sort of kidding): "Well, as your BFFL, I want to tell you that those hip hop lyrics you were just singing were unbecoming."

Maybe you had to be there to get how sweet it was. It was sweet.

What's a "real man"? What's a "real woman"?

2010-03-23T17:57:00.014-04:00

We started our unit on gender power yesterday, and to get the ball rolling I assigned the first chapter of Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely. It's an introduction to gender studies and self-examination from the perspective that 1) gender is something that's performed and formed in relationship and is not biologically ingrained, and 2) There are, perhaps, way more than two genders.

I thought the book would be extra fun because throughout the chapter there are various pieces of a "Gender Aptitude" quiz, which asks multiple choice questions like:

1. If youfell in love with a heterosexual man, you'd be:
A. Reassuring yourself that the old Greeks had friendships like that
B. Pleased as punch
C. Nervous as hell
D. Curious, curious, curious

2. Are there things you can't do in the world because of your gender that others can?
A. No. Well, maybe I can't have a baby, but who wants to?
B. Well, duh. Of course!
C. I used to think it was because of my gender, yeah.
D. Maybe a long time ago, back before I met the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion.

Then tallies them and tells you what your gender aptitude is, all the way from Gender Freak (read: totally liberated) to Captain James T. Kirk ("Ah, Captain, you finally get to truly go where no man has gone before.")

I thought it would be just like those quizzes in Seventeen Magazine only radical and edgy and....actually substantive. And funny, and infuriating. It would give them a lot to respond to. And, because the author has been trans and now identifies as genderless, it would give us a place to start from that wasn't based in a binary, even though much of the rest of the unit is about men, women, masculinity and feminism.

We started class with the writing prompt (I've stopped calling them free writes): "Describe gender as if to an alien from another planet who has no concept of it."

As they went in a circle and read their descriptions aloud there were a range of answers, but everything we needed was there: a vague sense that biological sex and gender are in conversation but are not the same thing, many manifestations of the all-to-familiar gender binary (including some that were positively Gone With the Wind-ish), and a lot of confusion and "Um...I don't know...but..."

Then I gave them some definitions:

Sex: Biological, involving genitalia and hormones

Gender: 1) "Neither natural nor essential, but rather the performance of self expression within dynamic relationships" (Bornstein)
2) " State of being male or female, in reference to social and cultural differences rather than biology" (Dictionary)
3) About identity, not physicality. (Angelina)

Then I said, "So what do you think about all this, what did you think about the Workbook.......?" and all hell broke loose. Turns out the questions were two restrictive! Clearly the writer had an agenda!

One of two men in the class said he noted - and did not appreciate - that the answers geared at him, a heterosexual man, automatically gave him a lower "gender aptitude." He said he felt comfortable affirming that he was a "real man" because, in his opinion, real men show a range of emotional styles and also feminine charecteristics. His idea of real was not society's, but he felt like Kate Bornstein was assuming that it was. Many of the women concurred - of course they were real women, even if they didn't fit societal expectations.

Then we got off on this amazing discussion of what it means to be "real," and who gets to decide it, especially when, God forbid, we are defining gender for ourselves. Then J, is who somewhat scientifically and impirically minded but also kind of an imp, exclaimed: "If everyone gets to define "real" for themselves, then what's the point of using that word!?"

Apparently several of them had been discussing this in the airport on the way back to school after break. (Hearing this made my day).

Then we talked about the failings of language, and about language, naming and power. Bornstein was nice enough to supply this Rumi quote: "Language is a tailor's shop where nothing fits."

And then we talked about dichotomies, and Starhawk's idea (in Webs of Power) that they are often at the root of violence. We talked about the idea of a gender spectrum (which is maybe just a modified dichotomy) and other ways that we could graph people's identities.... like clusters of related words and meanings (from the TA who is a linguistic genius), constellations of relationships, etc. (I taught them "ontological" and told them to use it while trying to flirt with cute nerdy people at parties).

J especially was in to the idea of clusters. Then M, who had been quiet to this point but who's gears were clearly turning, said: "Do we really even need gender? What's the point?"

We parted ways with several questions in mind. How do we define gender for ourselves, in relation to people and to society? What's it mean to be "real"? What do we think of this idea of there being more than two genders? When we're talking about language, gender, etc, where's the power?

They were still talking about the quiz at dinner.

Kate Bornstein would have been proud.

My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely
by Kate Bornstein

The Garden

2010-03-06T01:02:00.003-05:00

A documentary called The Garden is quickly becoming one of my favorite teaching tools for Peace Studies. It's teachable both because it shows good documentary film techniques and because its a recent, compelling example of people organizing and advocating for their rights. And because it connects to food and agriculture and food equity - all big pieces of our program here at Woolman.

The documentary follows Mexican and Mexican-American farmers who worked plots in the largest urban garden in the United States, 14 lush acres in South Central Los Angeles given to the community after the LA Riots. When the "real" owner reasserts his rights to develop the land, the farmers fight, and what emerges in a complex tale about money, local politics, and back room deals - as well as solidarity, strife, and good community organizing.

In Peace Studies class we're in the middle of a unit on social movements , and just getting ready to start filming on student documentaries. The Garden was perfect for curricular movie night tonight.

And even though the copy I had was messed up - no subtitles for the considerable amount of Spanish in the film! - we made it work. We paused it often so the students who speak Spanish could translate for those who don't, and so we could answer each other's questions about the political intricacies we needed to follow. It felt good that way, helping each other along.

The South Central garden itself is ultimately bulldozed. This part of the film is a hard couple minutes of people protesting, crying, and being brutalized by police - not to mention footage of a 10+ year old garden with established plants being plowed under.

There were several wet eyes in the room, mine especially, mostly because while watching that footage I kept thinking: this is why I do what I do. This is what I'm trying to give them. Not the protest tactics so much, though that's part of it, but the kind of identification with others that unmasks the powers of domination all around us, the kind of identification and seeing that leaves them raw and empowered and open to transformation. I want to feed and nourish whatever it is that made my students cry at that movie. I don't fully have the language, but I think human solidarity and equality are something as delicate and precious as that garden, and as worth defending. And I think, in their hearts before their minds, my students get that.

So I teach them about structural violence, domination and power, cultures of resistance, oppositional consciousness, and social movements. I give them big concepts, words for things they may already understand on some level. I assert in each of our units on gender, class and race that none of this is purely theoretical and intellectual for any of us - we all live gender, class and race every day. We all live power, privilege, and violence everyday. We are all experts.

I throw it all at them, and I hope some of it sticks, that they will pick it up some day and use it. And if they find something is not a useful tool, I hope that they will fashion something new from it. I have reason to be hopeful.

Find out more about The Garden here: www.thegardenmovie.com

Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices

2010-03-03T23:39:00.003-05:00

Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices, the anthology project I have been involved with for three and a half years (!), is now available for pre-order from QuakerBooks of FGC. Right now there is a %15 discount.

It's amazing to me that it has a cover, that it has pages (all 375 of them), that very soon it will exist in book form and not just on people's computer's and desks. That soon we will release it to the world like those birds on the cover. It feels right and mostly ready - though maybe you never truly finish a book, you just let it go. Here we go!

Texts

2010-01-25T22:57:00.005-05:00

So, I think I'm going to assign a sizable chunk of Mark Kurlansky's Nonviolence: History of a Dangerous Idea.

Even though if you were to read it straight through you'd get the impression that the "history" of nonviolence is largely the history of white, western people. Which it is not.

BUT, my class does have a United States focus. And Kurlansky is readable, readable, readable.

If I were a better Peace Studies teacher I'd have A Force More Powerful, under my belt by now.

Oh well.

Mummers 2009

2010-01-01T16:04:00.002-05:00

The Mummers make me think every year - this time from the warmth of my living room - as much as I love the phalanxes of banjoes and string bands.

Performing as fish, pirates, aliens and cowboys is one thing - but American Indians and Arabs, pantomimed by largely white performers to a largely white audience, in a city that is majority people of color, in a nation that is becoming so? Gah.

How come the ethnically Polish, Italian and Irish groups - or for that matter, all the WASPS - don't ever spoof themselves? Jazz leprechauns, anyone? Italian cobblers, comic carabinieri, confused greenhorns?

Philadelphia, I love you. But when are we going to have this conversation? Or, when are white people going to listen to the critiques that have been raised by people of color for years?

This isn't us. Or maybe it is. And that's the problem.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T17:03:00.003-05:00

Until recently, I didn't consider myself to be someone who knows Jesus very well. I grew up pretty secular, have drawn sustenance from a variety of traditions, and am just now in life coming around to an interest in Christianity. (True I almost went to seminary, but almost going and actually going are two very different things.)

I have f/Friends who have powerful, personal relationships with Jesus and/or with his teachings, and I think that's pretty rad. I feel like I'm just getting to know him (Shane Claiborne, Marcus Borg, and several important mentors have really helped me along.)

The other day I was in a group of people talking about homeless people in Nevada City and Grass Valley. I forget who was talking - I think it was one of my students - but they noted they'd seen a homeless man who was panhandling with a sign that said "What would Jesus do?" My student clearly had some notion of Jesus' care for and emphasis on the poor (oh, maybe cause we read about it in Peace Studies...), and thought that sign was pretty creative and hilarious.

I surprised myself by saying, without really trying to sound like a know-it-all, that I thought the sign was flawed: "I don't think Jesus would necessarily give money," I said, "but he would probably invite the guy to dinner. Jesus wasn't very interested in money." One of the other adults, possibly a little peeved with me, said "You know, I don't think I know Jesus well enough to know what he would say." Then I wondered if maybe I know Jesus better than I think I do.

So in honor of knowing somebody more than you think you do, in honor of the Kingdom of God being at hand, and in honor of creative and hilarious subversions of power (which have become a daily occurrence for me since I started teaching high school), Merry Christmas.

Peace Studies: The Soundtrack

2009-12-10T22:57:00.003-05:00

As this semester winds down I'm making copious notes on how to improve my English: Peace Studies curriculum. Several things I'm clear on:

1. We're dealing exclusively with nonfiction. Not because I don't love fiction (I do), but because I think that the thing my two classes have in common is the self and people's history: how gender, race and class relate to experiences of social power, how the voices of women, people of color and other marginalized people are left out of history, and how that is all related to violence and nonviolence. So bring on the memoir, the oral histories, and the poetry.

2. Our focus in the class is primarily the United States - on violence, nonviolence, social movements, and social power in American society. That doesn't mean we wont talk about Gandh's salt march, Jesus, and Te Whiti when we talk about the history of nonviolence. We will.

3. The gender unit will focus largely on feminism and masculinity, because these kids don't know the first thing about feminism, and because thoughtful conversations about masculinity that include empowered men and empowered women are hard to come by. And because I have a feminist agenda.

4. The social class unit has a big emphasis on poverty, but also on the labor movement, and schools and educational inequity. Still need to better integrate those, and find a really strong piece of memoir. Using Dorothy Day and excerpts from Studs Terkel's Working was OK, but could have been better. Suggestions?

5. The race unit needs to somehow balance a BIG discussion of whiteness, the construction of whiteness and white privilege, with prisons, and with the reality of our multiracial American society.

6. And next semester, we will have a soundtrack of teaching songs that I will assign the kids along with the readings. Get ready for Utah Phillip's quoting Ammon Hennacy ("If you want to be a true pacifist, you must go out into the world without your weapons. Including the ones you were born with") and Gil Scott Herndon talking about how the revolution will not be televised.

I'm taking track suggestions - music, spoken word, etc. The class units are 1)Violence and Nonviolence, 2) Social Movements, 3) Gender power, 4) Social class, 5) Race and Racism. Ideas? (I know, I know: I try to do too much in one semester.)

Kids, for homework your job is to listen to this rad mix CD I'm giving you on the first day of class. Welcome to the Woolman Semester. I hope you like it here as much as I do.

Whiteness

2009-12-05T01:35:00.002-05:00

Amidst the rush and crazy of final presentations at school, we’ve been trying to eke out a decent unit on race and racism in Peace Studies class. I’ve been working this whole semester with the solid foundations of my predecessor, sort of living into and modifying a syllabus that is a hybrid of his focus and mine. So we read some James Baldwin (Fire Next Time), some Bell Hooks (Yearning), some Cornel West (Race Matters), some Thandeka (Learning to Be White), some Tim Wise (White Like Me, which the kids loved), and some Elizabeth Martinez (Des Colores Means All Of Us).

We played the Race Game and talked some about white privilege. Then, for the unit paper, I assigned them a piece of memoir: “Write memoir (autobiography) about an experience you had in which you encountered societal expectations of you and your racial identity. We have read a lot of memoir in this class so you have many good examples to guide you. 750-1000 words. Due Monday, December 7^th.”

And in the course of about an hour three kids checked in with me wondering if their experience of race were valid enough for the essay. My student who is of Puerto Rican descent was thinking of writing about how people assume he’s white – and I was like “Yes, write that! Write that! (That’s really profound!)” He was sort of already off and running and just needed a little encouragement.

But two other students, who are white, talked to me about never really having had an experience where they were aware of or reminded of their race, or encountered a societal expectation of them based on their race. They weren’t sure what to do.

I had a smart teacher moment. I said: “Not having had experiences in which you are reminded of your race, or encounter societal expectations of your race, is in itself an experience of your racial identity. It’s a unique (and problematic) privilege of white people. Go think and write about that.” We mulled it over together a bit – they weren’t totally surprised by my suggestion – and then they were off and running too.

I want to create a space where all of my students can engage experiences of their racial identity as legitimate and real, where whiteness is not the absence of race or identity. We read all about how it's not, but you can intellectually understand something without emotionally understanding it. The work goes on.

Vocabulary

2009-11-21T16:25:00.003-05:00

Several words have re-entered my vocabulary, or increased in frequency of use, since I started working and living with teenagers:

"Like" (I'm really, like, interested in the linguistic and cultural origins of how this is used...)

"Wack"

"Blows"

"Dude"

"Fly"

As well as a slew of curse words I really didn't need encouragement to use...

No wonder I get mistaken for one of the kids.

Teenagers

2009-11-12T11:41:00.002-05:00

Teenagers are amazing to be around because their transformation is constant. They are constantly negotiating identity, spirituality, sexuality, ideas, philosophy. It can be scary and alarming, but also awe-inspiring, to be around.

My challenge lately has been to stand in support and solidarity to that upheaval, but to not let it dictate or set the tone for my life. It's quite a challenge. They outnumber us.

Stalking the wild medicinal called adulthood

2009-10-27T22:50:00.002-04:00

I spend a lot of time thinking about protracted adolescence, about adulthood, and about the shifting sands of maturity and stability that have been my 20s and the 20s of so many of my friends.

I am a teacher of high school kids now, not the boundaries-confused 20-year-old I was when I started working with a teenage youth group. I feel further away from the experience of teenage intensity that I remember, and have a hard time understanding it somethings. I've got a decade on most of these kids.

When I introduced myself as "Angelina, the teacher" several times to surprised looks on our recent school service trip, it touched a nerve I didn't know I had: I no longer want to be mistaken for being younger than I am, let alone for a high schooler or college kid. I respect those age groups, but that's not where I'm at. "Do I need a haircut?" I wondered. "Is it that I'm short?" "What about my doesn't say 'grown up'"? (One friend claims it's because I dress "cool" - by which she means "not conservative." Casual might be the most accurate.)

And I've found myself oddly perturbed by the number of early 20 somethings I work with. They outnumber us older folk (I am marginally one of the older folk), and though I like them all individually, en masse they freak me out a little. It's totally an irrational response - but I think some part of me was ready to leave that energy behind.

So I wonder what the state of adulthood is - what is it that I'm wanting to move towards? Is it a steady well-paying job? A car? A home you own, or pay regular rent on? Is adulthood having a partner? Babies? It's hard to sort out the messages I get from society, from the media.

Or maybe it's not the state of "having" anything at all, not a constellation of responsibility or ownership. I know I perceive and respect connections between people better now, can hold and appreciate complex human relationships - step families, ex-partners, adopted grandmothers - as the nuance in people's lives. I'm fairly certain I'm a better friend than I've ever been before. I know to pace myself; I have a better sense of my energy. I'm better at trusting, generally need less control, am not determined to have a plan than I was only a year or two ago. I have a sense of vocation - a new concept when I applied to seminary - which is enough of a sense that I leave room for change, have not applied the reigns too tight.

Still, adulthood feels elusive - sought after, healing, quenching - but elusive.

It's times like this I think I should have been an English major

2009-10-26T19:49:00.004-04:00

Excited to be teaching one of my favorite books, Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, I had to admit to my students I didn't know what the deal was with this mythological, fantastical book being called a memoir.

What was even more curious was that my 1977 edition had "Autobiography" as the subject on the back, while their 1989 editions said "Nonfiction/Literature" and also "Fiction/Literature." It made me think of all the bruhaha around A Million Little Pieces and Rigoberta Manchu Tum's work - the seeming rage that comes from autobiographies that have supposedly been faked.

But I guess with Woman Warrior, it's obvious that some part of it isn't "true" in the legal or journalistic sense - I mean there are hairy boulder ghosts, older-than-time men and women who train mythical warriors, and other fantastical events. Maxine Hong Kingston is being pretty open with us that something else is going on here.

So I tried to tell my students about the Hero(ine) Cycle, emphasized the idea of "talk story" that occurs throughout the book, and suggested that maybe things that aren't factually true can still be emotionally true, or possess some inner truth. That fiction and traditional storytelling can tell truth too.

I hope it sticks. And maybe they'll encounter the book again - after all, if Wikipedia is telling the truth, it is one of the most widely taught books on college campuses in the United States.

I wonder if it is often used as an opportunity to have conversations about the power of storytelling? Or if the engagement is generally more superficial?

Woolman queries

2009-10-22T15:37:00.001-04:00

“If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

– Lilla Watson, (Australian aboriginal educator, artist, and activist)

“No one is free when others are oppressed” – Author unknown

“Work is love made visible.” – Khalil Gibran

Query

When you see oppression and inequality, what do you feel? How do you respond? We all respond in different ways, and though our actions may seem large are small, they are often powerful.

Oppressor and Oppressed

2009-10-21T14:42:00.002-04:00

"What has drawn me most strongly to nonviolence is its capacity for encompassing a complexity necessarily denied by violent strategies. By complexity I mean the sort faced by feminists who rage against the system of male supremacy but, at the same time, love their fathers, sons, husbands, brothers, and male friends. I mean the complexity which requires us to name an underpaid working man who beats his wife both as someone who is oppressed and as an oppressor. Violent tactics and strategies rely on polarization and dualistic thinking and require us to divide ourselves into the good and the bad, assume neat, rigid little categories easily answered from the barrel of a gun. Nonviolence allows for the complexity inherent in our struggles and requires a reasonable acceptance of diversity and an appreciation for our common ground." - Pam McAllister, You Can't Kill the Spirit

Loving Pam McAllister this week.

And loving that I get to use her work in class.

Consequences

2009-10-17T22:51:00.004-04:00

The thing with teaching Peace Studies to teenagers is that discussions about power - who has it, why, and what they do with it - always hit close to home. Even if they don't see the other kinds of power they might have - racial privilege, educational privilege, class privilege - they are usually keenly aware of power in their relationships with adults. And since we strive to be a relatively egalitarian teaching and learning community here, the kids are quick to point out when they think we get a little too authoritarian.

Recently when we reminded them that sneaking out at night is grounds for getting kicked out, they identified that reminder for what it was: threat power. They pulled the concept from a Kenneth Boulding reading in my class that nobody, including me, really liked but which has stayed with us for weeks. If you do or don't do this thing, this other awful thing will happen. That's threat power.

When we talk about "consequences" in discipline situations, to some degree that's threat power too. And in the past my style with kids has been to be clear - to be clear about expectations and rules, and to be clear about consequences, so that when something is broken nobody is surprised by what happens next. I used to, and still do, think of clarity as one way of decreasing the hierarchical power in a situation between teens and adults. At least when you're clear it lays the structure bare, nobody is manipulating surprise, obfuscation or unknown awfulness. When you're clear it takes away "because I say so" - which is about as hierarchical as you can get. Which is a step in the right direction, right?

But the thing with teenagers is that they are often finely tuned to test boundaries, and sort of geniuses, be in conscious or not, at manipulating power. Being clear about the power doesn't always appease them.

So when it's 10:15 and I'm tired and having an honest to goodness altercation with a kid about bed time - when we're halfway through the semester and bedtime has always been 10:00 pm on weeknights - and I'm suddenly turning into a shrill ninny that I barely recognize, I have to wonder where I went wrong.

Part of it is the kid, and all those, teens and adults, who have gone before her and just want to do what they want to do and don't care. But part of it is that it is so easy to step into the role of enforcer, of consequence reminder, of threatener. And it is especially easy to step into that role when your power is threatened. With simple body language and minimal speech - tactics I would have been proud of had she been protesting something besides bedtime - she managed to make the rule look absurd and me look like an asshole. And part of it is the pain and confusion of the quick sea change - one minute you're the teacher they like and respect, the next minute you're the enforcer they loath.

Since starting work as a high school teacher I've thought things about teenagers that I never would have thought before comings here. Really jerky, overly general, old people things. Things cool young teachers shouldn't think. Things too harsh and embarrassing to write here.

But I always catch myself with a realization: Individual kids may be jerks, or behave jerkily, and that's valid. (And sometimes I wish I could say "You are really being an asshole right now, you know that??" and not risk getting in serious trouble.) But when that turns into a"Teenagers are so..." thought I've stepped outside of myself and into the Enforcer. When things become general the power plays are easy to fall into.

I'm still figuring out how to transform those bedtime moments, how to both call out the kid but do it in a way that calls them, calls us both, into another kind of relationship where we're both pulling at the power and renegotiating it. Where the power is both laid bare and owned by all parties involved. I think it starts by owning the pain and naming the situation - "I'm feeling really disrespected in this moment, and confused that you are making an issue out of this" - and goes from there.

And where we go to bed on time.

Maybe I can't have both.

Badass

2009-09-28T21:20:00.004-04:00

"Angelina, I really appreciate that you say things like 'Rosa Parks was a badass lady' in class. It makes me feel more comfortable saying things like that."

Badass. Always a compliment, safe for high school classrooms.

Lessons

2009-09-24T12:55:00.003-04:00

Wednesday afternoons at the Woolman Semester are always a welcome change in tone for me: after lunch we have half an hour of meeting for worship, followed by half an hour of worship sharing, then chores, then community meeting. I work with the group of students, currently called the Quaker Life Committee, who care for community meeting and come up with queries for us all to contemplate together during worship sharing.

This week the query was: "We've made a lot of decisions at Woolman to simplify our lives. Which of those decisions resonate with you? Which do you think will stick after you leave here?"

My worship sharing group met in a cozy, a little-too-warm corner of the meetinghouse. By the end of our thoughtful go-round, several of us had gotten drowsy. I managed to rally, but some of my students succumbed to sleepiness.

It was one of those moments when I realized the large umbrella that is my job: teacher, cook, driver, college and life advisor.... and now alarm clock.

I tried to get them going, and reminded them that they would be late for chores. They resisted, lying limp (though conscious) on the floor. I decided tickling would not be appropriate, so I banged a little on the piano and played what I remember of "Edelweiss" from eighth grade keyboard class.

They started making jokes about nonviolent resistance.

"We're just using what you taught us!" one quipped.

"Yes," I replied, with my best snarky voice, "and I am not amused!"

Then they started singing "We Shall Overcome."

I'm not sure how I emerged with my pride intact, but they did eventually get up off the floor and we all walked out of the meetinghouse together and went our seperate ways for chores. We were only a little late.

Later that night while some of us were doing dinner clean up, two of the girls called over Jasmine, our environmental sciences teacher, and demonstrated how they had used the tenets of permaculture while washing pots: use the water more than once, from one slightly cleaner pot to one super dirty pot. "It's stacking!" they exclaimed, laughing, while pantomining their actions, sans pots.

So, what do I like about my job at the Woolman Semester?

We laugh. A lot.

The lessons of the classroom are applied, for better or for worse, all the time.

And my relationship with my students goes beyond the table we sit around during class twice a week. We cook, clean, joke and share together. That's the kind of environment I want to teach in. That's the kind of environment I want to learn in.

The Guest House

2009-09-24T12:27:00.000-04:00

The Guest House

This being human is a guesthouse.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

Who violently sweep your house

Empty of its furniture,

Still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

For some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

Meet them at the door laughing,

And invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

Because each has been sent

As a guide from beyond.

- - Jelaluddin Rumi (Persian Empire, 1200s), as translated by Coleman Barks in The Essential Rumi

Query

What thoughts and emotions visit you on a regular basis? Are you able to explain their origins, or are they sometimes a mystery? How do they affect your life?

When you look at your personal history timeline*, what events or times in your life do you have a lot of emotion about? What are those emotions?

* For those of you not in class, we drew/wrote about our lives in terms of spirituality, ideas and philosophies, big life events, emotions, sexuality/relationships, etc. It was an exercise both in creatively presenting visual information...and in telling our stories and listening to others'.

How I grade (high school) essays

2009-09-20T21:04:00.002-04:00

Find a quiet place where concentration is possible.

Couch at home is good. Makes it sort of feel like not-work.

Use a non-red pen. Purple is good, as is bright green or blue.

Stay hydrated. Hydration is key.

Scribble legibly in margins. Use "?" and "HUH?" because I am a cool teacher.

Include lots of questions in the comments.

Take breaks (fold laundry).

Utilize chill background music when needed. Emmylou Harris is good.

Slow and steady. Slow and steady.

Break up the difficult kids with the always-a-dream-to-read kids.

Laugh. A lot.

Big questions

2009-09-10T11:59:00.000-04:00

“...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. “
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Query
What big questions do I ask on a regular basis (consciously or unconsciously)? Who do I ask them to – myself, my family, friends, society, the universe, God? How do these questions – and whether or not they are answered – influence how I am in the world?

Day in the life

2009-09-07T21:54:00.003-04:00

6:00 am - Wake up

7:15 - Quick breakfast with some of my students, last minute prep before class

8:00 - 12:00 - Two back-to-back Peace Studies classes. Documentaries, zines, violence and shame, Walter Wink

12:00 - Lunch

12:30 - Dish crew

1:15 - Rare moment of quiet while the kids are in Nonviolent Communication class

3:00 - Shared work. Harvest apples and pears (!) in our orchard, process them

5:00 - 6:00 - Back-to-back advisee meetings outside under a tree

7:00 - Head home "early" for the night

So far I love it.

Prompts

2009-09-03T12:01:00.003-04:00

I teach a class at the Woolman Semester called Humanities & Ethics. My joke has become that the title of the class is a little bit of a misnomer - it's not about the traditional academic disciplines of humanities and ethics that you might encounter elsewhere in college. Rather, it's an experiential (read: no homework) class about our own humanity and our own ethics. The goals of the class are processing, introspection, storytelling and story-listening, and discernment. It's about exploring who we are, what we believe, what we are experiencing at Woolman, and how we are in relationship with the world and the people around us.

I'm planning to incorporate a query, in the Quaker tradition of queries, and a quote into each class, often as journaling prompts. Queries are searching questions used for individual or corporate introspection and discernment - sometimes meetings will use queries at the start of worship or in yearly meeting sessions, other times in the context of worship sharing. Quotes will be a way to introduce students to a wide range of voices - sometimes it will be poetry, sometimes prose. Rumi and Rilke are on deck for upcoming weeks.

I'd hoping to make a habit of posting queries and quotes here weekly. Feel free to answer them in the comments, or to suggest other resources.

So to begin:

"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

- Howard Thurman (writer, educator, theologian, civil rights activist)

Query: What makes you come alive?

in loco parentis (the snarky version)

2009-08-30T22:52:00.004-04:00

In loco parentis means...

1. I coordinate your trip to the urgent care center for a mono screen.

2. I remind you about safety - specifically not balancing on a precipice with your pack on - on the wilderness trip.

3. I nag you about hydration. A lot.

4. I ask you TMI questions about your romantic life and sexual health and how they relate to your experience here. Perhaps unlike your parents, I am not embarrassed. I ask more questions.

5. I know what meds you take, and it doesn't phase me.

6. I tell you to go to bed.

7. When I boss, usually you comply.

8. I am, like, SO in your business.

Prepared (life is strange and beautiful)

2009-08-23T19:22:00.005-04:00

About a year ago, when I was getting ready to go to HDS, they sent me information about a secondary teacher certification program I could do in addition to my MDiv. I looked at it and thought, "Hmm. Maybe I should check that out. I might want to work in a school someday." I had this weird image of my future self as a beleaguered education professional - bogged down by the bureaucracy, but loving my work with young people.

And here I am - except that I bypassed the MDiv and the Haverford-esque schools I imagined myself at, and went straight to work at an alternative school based in peace, justice and sustainability. I marvel at that some days - no masters, but here I am, with a good job that integrates a lot of my skills and interests.

I still have moments when I feel unprepared. I haven't read through the readings as thoroughly as I would like, I'm a little rusty on Peace Studies and peace activism, I haven't trained formally as a teacher....

But I also have moments when I feel really ready. I've spent a lot of time with teenagers. I know them - none of these kids so far, with all of their quirks, are more than I can handle.

And when I think of how I've been prepared, I think of all of the teachers, youth group leaders, elders and mentors who have invited me to learning, let me learn by doing, walked with me, and most of all, prepared me for this work by preparing my heart.

Authority?

2009-08-20T23:13:00.002-04:00

Two seconds after meeting a parent:

Parent: "So, Angelina, you seem to have some authority. Have you taught before?"

Ha.

Welcome to California

2009-08-09T19:38:00.003-04:00

Guy in food co-op: "Do I know you? You look very familiar."

Me: "I very much doubt it." (I almost said "I came here from Pennsylvania yesterday.")

Guy: "You must have one of those faces."

Me: "Who do I look like?"

Guy: "A girl I went to high school with."

Me: "Where'd you go to high school?" (Maybe he's a Wallingford-Swarthmore ex-pat...who knows.)

Guy: "Nevada Union." (head jerk in direction of local high school) .

Me: "Nope!"

Does this mean I pass for a Californian? Or was he just trying to pick me up?

Part of my wants my presence to scream "East Coast!" And part of me is grateful it's not obvious I'm from out of town.

Book prayer

2009-07-15T21:34:00.002-04:00

Book

You are already hear among us,

risen up like a gift.

I pray for the patience

to see you, your pieces and your whole,

to walk patiently, listen well,

ask for help, to craft carefully but not to over-shape,

to laugh as much as I cry,

to take it one step at a time.

I pray

to be faithful to your cacophony

symphony

of Spirit-filled voices,

Amen.

To be a Friend

2009-07-03T16:40:00.003-04:00

The past 24 hours have been hard for the FGC Gathering community. First, early yesterday a young man fell while skateboarding, badly cracked his skull, and was flown to a hospital in Roanoke.

That would have been enough, but then yesterday afternoon another member of the Gathering community - an elder and minister among Friends, a long time activist for peace and LGBTQ rights, a mother and grandmother - was killed in a bicycle accident on campus.

Nobody's died at Gathering in a long time. This is hard. The shock and grief and shock is palpable everywhere, felt by the gathered body.

Going into lunch today I noticed that people had started "cards" for Tom and his family and for Bonnie's family. As I thought about what I might write, I drifted along the big pieces of flip chart paper to the end of the table. There I encountered a third card, this time for the driver of the dump truck, who's name we do not know, who struck and killed Bonnie.

The three were out together, weighted together, equal, there for all to sign. There was clear recognition of the driver's pain too.

This kind of inclusion and forgiveness, for lack of better words, seems obvious thinking about it, but it is something we rarely see in our adversarial culture.

In that moment, I felt particularly proud to be a Friend.

Interesting thoughts on darkness, transformation, racism, and the divine

2009-07-02T09:28:00.005-04:00

From China Galland's book Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna (excerpted from pages 152-153):

To say that one is 'longing for darkness' is to say that one longs for transformation, for a darkness that brings balance, wholeness, integration, wisdom, insight, I now realize. For a long time I didn't know what I meant when I said that, when I felt it - a longing for darkness. I remember standing in front of that statue of Kali Varanasi and thinking of this Madonna at Einsiedeln. Now I find not only the Madonna but the beginning of words to name that longing and desire.

Late one night over coffee, when I said that I was longing for darkness, a friend said "Watch out! It's dangerous to say that. You don't know what you're calling to yourself."

The association of the word "darkness" with something negative, with evil, is precisely the problem I am naming. That kind of association is one of the cornerstones of racism. Racism is evil, not darkness. There is a redeeming darkness and this is what I seek.

***

Seeing the Madonna of Einsiedeln proved to me that the longing for darkness is a deeply felt human need that cuts across, goes beyond, and at the same time includes ethnicity. This is a multivalent darkness. This is the darkness of ancient wisdom, of people of color, of space, of the womb, of the earth, of the unknown, of sorrow, of the imagination, the darkness of death, of the human heart, of the unconscious, of the darkness beyond light, of matter, of the descent, of the body, of the shadow of the Most High.

***

Like light, darkness has a wide range of symbolic meanings. The color black can signify the stage just before enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism - imminence. space; burning; the final stage of the soul's journey to beatitude in a Sufi tradition; wisdom; fertility in Old Europe; purity in Turkish tradition;mourning in the West; and the first step in the medieval alchemical process, the nigredo .

***

The scientific disciplines of astronomy, astrophysics, particle physics, and cosmology have turned the world inside out in the last decade, metaphorically speaking. The world that we see, called the 'luminous world,' is now believed to be only a fraction of what exists. Ninety percent of the universe is apparently made up of dark matter, about which we know very little.

***

This elusive dark matter that cannot be seen, only felt, as we observe its gravitational effects on galaxies, is 90 percent of what exists. We cannot see it, know it, or measure it, yet science maintains that it's there. Whether new discoveries will render the existence of dark matter obsolete, paradigmantically we have reached the limits of light. The world is not as it seems. What is, is not evident. The lessons of darkness.

Gone to seed

2009-06-25T21:52:00.006-04:00

I read a New York Times article late last year about personal libraries and different motivations for amassing them. According to the author, various schools of thought hold that personal libraries are 1) a self portrait of one's brain (especially useful for attracting a mate), or 2) an emotional and totemic history of thought and creative development, or 3) a repository of books 'to read' in the future, a store of knowledge for whatever awaits.

All of those motivations for accumulating books are true for me, and are a facet of the strong tendency towards bibliophilia that is a legacy from my parents. I've resigned myself to having lots of books; I try to let the silly or mistakenly acquired ones go, tend to retain nonfiction and pass on (or borrow) fiction, and have generally enjoyed building a library. I love a good book sale.

This past year my books have been largely in storage, and I've missed them. I didn't really need them, but I missed them. In some ways they are a mirror. In other ways they are companions, guides along the way. I like having them around.

This summer I'm working again at QuakerBooks of FGC, generally as a bookstore staff person - cashier, customer service, etc. Part of transitioning to Gathering at Virginia Tech has involved unpacking and processing loads of used books, which are a new inventory phenomenon for the FGC bookstore.

Most of the used books came from the personal library of Elizabeth G. Watson, a Quaker writer, feminist, activist and minister who lived a long and inspiring life and died in 2006. The books donated to FGC are heavy on poetry, with loads of Rilke, Tagore, and Dickinson, as well as feminine/feminist spirituality, and Christian theology and spirituality. There were a lot of titles I was very tempted by.

I knew Elizabeth Watson only by reputation, and admittedly have not read any of her books (Guests of My Life, Wisdom's Daughters, etc.), but experiencing this piece of her library gave me enormous appreciation for her brilliance, creativity, and spirituality. I have some sense of her now, whereas before she existed only in a mental register of "well loved and respected Friends."

While we were unpacking and sorting the books, Harriet and I talked about how it was a little sad to see them all scattered, especially because so many were marked up, full of notes and personal messages. It felt like breaking up a collection.

I had spent the evening wondering if this is what would become of my library when I'm gone - divvied up and donated by my heirs.

But then I decided that it was fitting. Perhaps when book lovers die, we really go to seed: all the books we have loved, or intended to love, scatter to the wind to take root and grow new ideas in someone else's life, in someone else's library. Perhaps that is a good way to live on.

I picked a few of Elizabeth's. I look forward to their fruits.

Carry it On

2009-06-20T17:45:00.004-04:00

Today, one of my best friends invited me to go to a dedication of a mural her organization had helped organize. The Community Arts Center has long had a relationship and collaboration with several different schools and organizations in Chester, and this particular mural was on the side of the parish building at Calvary Baptist Church.

It's not well known, but Martin Luther King Jr. lived for three years in Chester, attended what was then Crozer Theological Seminary, and preached his first sermon at Calvary Baptist Church. Following in the footsteps of Dr. King would take you through Chester.

It was kind of amazing to sit in that church, think about its history, delight in the diversity of people who were there and the diversity of people who were involved in the project, and then consider all that in the context of Barack Obama's presidency.

Then, driving back home across I-95, through the lush green trees of Delaware County, I noted the dramatic change both in the upkeep of buildings and the racial background of residents between Chester-Upland and Wallingford. It was a reminder of the racial and economic extremes and segregation that exist in this county, and how much further we have to go.

The event was also a reminder of how much farther I have to go - of how white my life is, how much I don't want that and need to work on it, and a reminder of the potential for connection and community that exists right where I live. No need to travel.

I don't think Barack Obama is an infallible saviour, but I do have moments when I forget and then remember that he's the president, and am like "Oh Wow!" A song was sung during Festival Week at Pendle Hill that keeps coming back to me (and appeared on someone's t-shirt while I was at Intermountain Yearly Meeting):

Rosa sat

So Martin could walk

Martin walked

So Barack could run

He ran and he won

So all our children could fly*

*An internet search didn't reveal who truly wrote this as a song (Amy Dixon-Kolar?) and what the full lyrics are. The sentiment has been expressed by several people, famous and not famous. This is how I learned it.

Bindweed

2009-05-29T12:04:00.004-04:00

I have been thinking lately about my relationship to patriarchal images of God. I really don’t want to start a prayer with “Lord.” I recognize that it is really potent and important language for others, and that I very much respect that – it’s just too male and hierarchical for me. Those are my immediate associations, sans a background in Biblical languages and theology, and they are not cosmologies or ways of power that sustain me. I do not want to cultivate them with my life or my ministry.

I often have to remind myself of the other images of the divine that I have been given, in dreams, reverie, worship and artist-mind metaphor: the divine as a wise crone or old woman in the mountain, as a wild trickster in the woods, as a flow of living water.

(And, you know, as a force that likes to call on those of us at the margins, homeless babies, drunks, old ladies and shepherds, to be his prophets – there’s that too, let’s not forget.)

The remembering of these experiences, and the reclaiming and creative resistance to what does not sustain feels constant. It’s a big piece of the work I came to Pendle Hill to do, to begin.

And I’m a bit daunted. It's really exhausting work.

But as it often does, the garden gave me a really good way to understand this situation.

A lot of my time in the garden is spent pulling up weeds – some innocuous, sweet little annuals, but also a lot of bindweed. Given the opportunity, bindweed will twine around other plants, shading them from the sun (and probably choking the life out of them.) It’s is one of those weeds that re-grows if you leave even just a piece of the root in ground. You never get all of the roots. Bindweed has permanent residence in the garden along with the vegetables.

But if you know the weed – if you recognize it and name it, have a daily or regular practice of pulling it out and hemming it back, it makes space for other things to grow and become deeply rooted and strong.

That sounds like good spiritual practice to me. Thank you, garden.

On the edge: lessons from the suburbs

2009-05-19T21:07:00.005-04:00

As my time at Pendle Hill winds down, I have been catching up on my work-study in the garden. Since it’s founding in the 1930s, Pendle Hill has had a large vegetable gardens that provide food for the kitchen. The growing methods are organic, with elements of biointensive, permaculture and other sustainable techniques thrown in.

Some of the beds I work in are probably decades old and their fertility has been carefully and respectfully maintained. Moving potatoes this afternoon the soil was dark, loamy, light, and rich - totally different from soil in a new, recently tilled bed. It was enviable, soil that has obviously been well cared for. The whole garden has the well-earned patina of a place where humans regularly collaborate (joyfully, carefully, respectfully, sensually) with the divine.

Right now the garden feels particularly alive. The asparagus has been up for a few weeks, the arugala and radishes are spicy and fresh, the blueberries are coming in, and the dark green of kale and potatoes is really exciting. There’s a robin nesting in the eaves of the greenhouse, where a lot of plants are still waiting to be put out, and the chatter of birds and bullfrogs is deafening at times. The birds especially make me feel like I live in a rain forest, and work in a garden at the edge of huge, healthy woods.

The garden is steps from some woods (and Pendle Hill has many amazing trees), but it is is also steps, literally, from 476, the major intra-country highway that runs from I-95 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. From the pea and beet beds, through some trees and over the earthen sound barrier - and there it is. Four lanes? Many cars.

The highway is loud, and makes conversations in the garden difficult. It is a constant background roar - and I, unlike some, can't seem to convince myself its the sound of a river.

I remember when they built that highway. I was five or six, and the cutting down of all those trees was, I realize now, one of the most traumatic events of my early life. I have a memory of standing in the wood shop at the Arts Center (immediate neighbor to Pendle Hill), looking out through the courtyard door on a view of stumps to the horizon (I was little, so the horizon was pretty close, in actuality, the highway isn't all that wide.)

My whole life I've hated that damn highway. It was a cornerstone of what I was fleeing when I quit the suburbs after college for the city and vowed never to come back.

The highway, like strip malls and ugly housing developments, are a constant reminder to me of what we are ruining, what we do not value, and the ugliness we are capable of creating in the name of progress and convenience and class mobility. While the suburbs are about escaping the crush of the city (and "crush" could mean a variety of things, like crowdedness, pollution... or, oh, maybe racial diversity?), they are not, really, about being close to nature, though greenery seems to be prevalent.

These are the lessons I learned growing up here:

The suburbs are about holding nature under our heel and making her do tricks. Not living at the edge of or with wildness, at the edge of a glorious unknown. They are not about wonder. They are not about stewardship.

They are nature tainted and deeply damaged. We will keep cutting down the old mother trees that aren't protected because that's what you do with trees that are in the way. Those lessons came back painfully when I first came to Pendle Hill in January, when it was hard to get away from the roar of the highway. (Notice I'm not even touch the lessons about community that the suburbs teach...that's another post.)

But lately another lesson has been emerging.

In the winter it did not take much to find huge magnificent trees. Now there are bullfrogs in the wetland pond - one of several ponds in this area that drain to the creek. You can hear the highway roar from the pond too. And there are clutches of trees everywhere - the triangle between road, creek, train. In protected little glades and forgotten stone gardens. Huge ones at train stations and in random back lots.

I haven't read that book The World Without Us, but this winter and spring it became clear to me how quickly nature would reclaim everything if we were not around to stop her. The trees are waiting, patient. They've been here far longer than we, and they are not going to go any where. And they are pretty sneaky.

There is a lesson here about closeness, about survival, and about cooperation. I find it in the organic garden, which flourishes with life and wildness so close to the highway. And in the 300 year old beach tree that's also literally steps from the highway. The tree was growing when William Penn landed here and I like to think of it as our resident nature deity, so massive and powerful is its presence (and had Pendle Hill and Swarthmore residents not fought the original highway plan, it would likely have been destroyed, along with most of Pendle Hill).

The lesson is in the juxtaposition - strip malls and wetlands, highways and ancient trees - where we can see what we have made, what we are doing. When the highway is this close, it's hard to ignore. But when the garden, and so the potential for partnership, is this alive, and there are so many birds and amazing trees, that is also hard to ignore. We have to hold them both. The suburbs offer both.

The lesson is to acknowledge that we have done profound damage by building our highways, strip malls, and cancer-cell housing developments. But that all is not lost - that that spirit still exists, that we can find it, partner with it, and protect it.

This thinking has changed how I understand the place that I'm from.

I guess the suburbs could teach me something yet.

working philosophy on education (spring '09)

2009-05-10T17:39:00.003-04:00

I understand my role as a teacher/educator to be to invite people to knowledge and new experience, to accompany them in their learning and growth as an ally and support person, and to actively acknowledge the whole, integrated person that each person is, even if I am teaching just one subject.

Lately I have been thinking about how our culture often teaches, and how we insist that learner's (be they first graders or grad students) master certain tools. I am not so radical as to be ready to throw out all the old tools without trying them - I can get persnickety about grammar, group facilitation, and many other established ways of doing things. It's not that I'm beholden to the tools - I just think they might be useful, and we could be short changing ourselves by rejecting them.

So, as a teacher I understand my job to be partly offering tools, but with a caveat "I offer this to you because it might be useful to you, and I want you to have useful things. If you discover that it is not useful, or that it is the wrong tool for the task, or more seriously that it detracts from the work and does not serve you, I will not be offended if you lay it down. If that happens, I very much encourage you to fashion new tools from the old ones (and to teach me how to use the new ones, old head that I am)."

Three Quakers walk into a Safeway...

2009-05-03T16:13:00.001-04:00

Cruising to the checkout at a Safeway in Silverton, Oregon, the cashier was surprised I didn’t have a frequent shopper card. Maybe my accent was also suspect.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “I’m from Philadelphia.”

Her gaze meandered to my two friends, both Quakers, who were next to me in line. She took them in: a petite Latina woman and a very dark black man (who’s African - but I’m not sure whether or not that was obvious.)

“Are they from Philadelphia too?”

“No,” I answered (playing the talky American), “He’s from Kenya, she’s from Bolivia.” I didn’t give the “many branches of the Quaker church” explanation that I would employ later while hiking.

She thought about this, looked a little befuddled, then said “Oh. Well I guess you’re all a long way from home.”

Yes, I thought. We are.

***

Waiting in the airport, Harriet (who is tall, blond, and English), is approached by a man who asks if John, our Kenyan Friend, is an “elite runner.”

“Usually,” the man says, “when you see someone like that accompanied by a young woman, he’s an elite runner and she’s his handler.” Harriet came back mildly disturbed from this conversation - John was a little amused.

We suspect “like that” meant a young, well dressed, African man. Though Harriet was dressed way too casual to be anybody’s handler (and lacked a Blackberry).

***

Working on the Quaker Youth Book Project has been a learning experience in many ways, and not all of the lessons have been explicitly Quaker. While we were at motion in the world together - particularly after the meeting, when five of us hung out in the Portland area for a few days - I was aware of the double takes and blank stares that indicated it was odd for people like us - of diverse races and national origins - to be together and have an easy way together.

One thing I am working on understanding is how claiming spiritual Friends and brothers and sister in faith from around the world, and opening myself to the reality of their lives, puts me directly in opposition to a racist, US-centric culture.

I encountered this culture in the double takes we inspired walking together through the woods, the Safeway, the airport. Even when it is kind - as was the cashier - there is a subtext of those people shouldn’t be together, this is unusual.

I encounter it when I consider financial resources and, even though mine are scarce, realize how vast they are in comparison to what other Friends are working with. When I realize how inequitable the distribution of resources is among Friends worldwide, simply because the distribution of resources among people worldwide is fundamentally inequitable.

Being part of such a diverse church also offers me a glimpse of the Kingdom, to use some explicitly Christian language: a glimpse of what we can be like when we lay down all of our weapons, even those of privilege that we were born with, and meet each other face to face.

For our editorial board we (13 of, including family and elders) lived together in a house on the Oregon Coast for four days. I glimpsed the Kingdom when we cooked and ate together, minded a baby together, worked together, had the hard conversations where we named and honored our differences, and tried to live our lives (if only for four days) in respect and care for one another.

It was at times awkward, difficult and imperfect. It was alsoprofoundly beautiful and exciting.

A friend at QUIP, the organization sponsoring the QYBP, noted that our work is not only relevant to Quakers. Rather, the work we are doing and the questions we are wresting with are a microcosm of fissures running through society.* I have often thought this - that the work we do to live together as Friends when we engage our diversity enables us to better engage larger societal work of living together, but had not yet put it so eloquently.

Towards the end of our hike at Silver Creek Falls south of Portland, we ran into a family of two older parents and a college aged son. They wanted to know how long the 5 mile loop had taken us (I think they were a little unprepared), and while we were answering that they became curious about where we were all from and why we were all together - a native Oregonian, an East Coaster, a Brit, a Bolivian, a Kenyan. We explained then, each in our own eloquence (we’re writers and editors after all), and it was then that I muttered something about “Many branches of the Quaker church.”

“God bless you,” the woman said as we parted. At the time, she didn’t seem like the type to say that - an incorrect judgement on my part - and I was surprised.

But in retrospect, it was quite fitting.

*Thanks to Terry Sorelle for putting words to this.

You are wanted - the Quaker Youth Book Project

2009-01-13T15:28:00.006-05:00

So, you'll have to pardon me while I use whatever Quaker audience I have to promote (again) a project that I'm involved in - and tell you a little bit about why I think it's so important.

The Quaker Youth Book Project, on which I've been working for about two years, is into its final months of collecting nonfiction writing and art by Quakers ages 15-35 from all around the world and across the branches of Friends. Submissions are due by February 28th, 2009. All information on how and what to submit is available here: www.quakeryouth.org/quipbook.

I first started working on the QYBP two years ago in the depths of winter in Philadelphia, writing grants and proposals and querying a few Friends to get their ideas and suggestions. (The project was not my idea, but rather is a continuation of a collective leading felt by Quakers Uniting in Publications (www.quaker.org/quip).)

It's not my baby anymore - there are dozens of people directly involved (including an amazing editorial board of young adults) and many many more who are excited about the Project - but it still feels like some of the most important work I've done so far in my life. I constantly marvel that it came at such a tumultuous and transformative time for me (that's another post). It's a gift I have not entirely unwrapped yet - I'm humbly anticipating, as best I can, what it will bring next.

There are a handful of other books that gather creative work by teenage and young adult Friends, and they are mostly out of print. This project is exciting because it will be very international, include Friends from all branches of the Society, feature teenage and young adult contributors, and will be multi-lingual so that it can be read by Friends everywhere.

When I talk to Friends (and this Project has afforded me the opportunity to talk to many Friends), no matter who they are -- Bolivian Quakers, Kenyan Quakers, FGCers, FUMers, Convergent, British Friends, EFCI Friends, Conservative - there is often a simultaneous movement of energy around youth concerns and a profound sense that there is much work to be done.

The issues vary: shrinking population numbers and a dearth of youth, the dominance of older Friends and pastors, youth concerns that challenge the status quo, truly inter-generational communities that are striving to remain so, a hunger for revival and renewal, meetings and churches trying to work with cultural and generational differences, etc.

We are all working to live in community, whether its in our own micro or macro Friends community, the broader family of Friends, or the larger societies we live in.

And I'm fairly certain that telling stories and making art, whether we do it with words or with images and color, is central to what we need as people to remind us and to allow us to create who we are, where we come from, who we are held, loved and held accountable by, and what our future may be. There is value in the crafting of stories - in the self reflection and creative work this project encourages young people to undertake - and value in their telling, hearing, and broadcasting. Stories nourish and challenge us.

Practically, this book will be a snapshot of contemporary Quakerism at the beginning of the 21st century. It will provide Friends all over the world the opportunity to learn about Friends far away from them geographically and theologically. It will highlight differences and underscores commonalities; it will trace the shared root and the flowering branches. I am confident it will spark more than one passionate conversation and a deepening of understanding among Friends.

It will also, most importantly, give voice to rising generations of Quaker writers and artists, ministers and leaders, and give Friends everywhere, of all ages, the chance to hear those voices and be challenged, encouraged, amused, concerned, renewed and maybe transformed by them.

I am of the opinion that our diversity as Friends - among nations and races, economies and theologies, ways of worship and witness in the world - is one of God's greatest gifts to us. (Profound challenges are also often tremendous gifts.) Within our own house, we are challenged to find ways to live together, to claim common history, to own diverse experiences and beliefs, to find our common roots. It seems like good practice to lives lived in larger world, particularly a world so deeply in need of what we have to give.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of invitation - invitation to speak, invitation to dance, invitation to join - and about how at it's deepest an invitation extends a hand and says "You are wanted." Imagine if Friends of all ages spoke to each other that way - "You are wanted, we are incomplete without you."

So this is your invitation. If you are a Friend roughly (roughly) between the ages of 15-35, I hope to hear from you. And I hope you'll spread the word and invite others, no matter how old you are.

Mummers 2009

2009-01-01T19:59:00.004-05:00

I like to imagine the following conversation happening somewhere in a Mummers club or warehouse in South Philly sometime early in 2008:

Mummer Joe: Yo, so, what theme should we do next year?

Mummer Tony: I dunno. Pirates? Or are we due for Indians again?

Joe: Nah, we did Indians two years ago. Remember? We still got the headdresses down at the shop. Plus, it's Quaker City's year for pirates.

Tony: Right. Aliens, how about aliens?

Joe: I dunno, that's so tired. I'm sick of tentacles. We need something new.

Tony: Hmm. I know! Cowboy aliens - aliens with straw and horses? Alien hoedown!

Joe: Uh.

Tony: No? Hmm.... Oh oh! I know. JEWS! Driedel driedel driedel, I made it out of clay! Shtetl wenches! Gigantic driedels! Stars of David floating down Broad Street!

Joe: Unique. I like it

Every year, the Mummers fascinate me - so not PC, so ancient world mummery meets Philly's white working class history, so public drunkenness, so male. Ritual of reversal? Tourist trap?

I snarked to my best friend that you get a prize if you spot a Black mummer - in a city that's nearly equal parts European American and African American. She said she'd seen two.

*For those of you unfamiliar with the Mummers, here's a Mummers website.

This post must be very interesting if you have NO IDEA what I'm talking about.

Narratives

2008-12-28T17:25:00.003-05:00

Narratives of the middle class, liberal arts, and otherwise:

1. Adulthood is moving away from home, throwing your life to the wind and landing where you have opportunities for school and employment.

2. Loneliness and alienation are normal. It's hard to have community while you're slogging through grad school (or 60 hour work weeks).

3. That fancy undergraduate degree means you're bound for graduate study, administrative (as in you're the boss) work, and capacity-building positions. Read: lot's of computer screen time.

4. You got into an Ivy League institution. Of course you would go. It's your chance, you're window. (Who are you to say no?)

5. Success is being interesting, over-committed, well paid, privileged, guilty, secular, and liberal.

I'm ready for new stories.

List-making, privacy, and indie publishing

2008-10-02T12:08:00.003-04:00

Having worked at a small nonprofit press and bookstore, I regard the big online book sellers with trepidation and buy from them only with severe guilt. Did you know that some of them are notorious for taking forever and sometimes failing to pay smaller book publishers that they order from? The place I worked last year finally had to write off big debt from an invoice. True story.

However, they do have excellent list-making and other user-based (and, lets admit, user-tracking) programs. I'm fond of the Wish List option on Amazon. It reminds me of what I want to be reading -- and what I should probably purchase directly from the publishers, if they sell direct.

I sometimes wonder about list making and the purposes it serves to us - as people, as writers. A way not to forget? Fostering some sense of accomplishment? Helping us reorder things in our brain? Some f/Friends of mine recently put together a great writing workshop model, and list making was one of the exercises. As a way of getting things out and getting the writing started.

Bloggers seem to do it too -- ten things I'm happy about, ten things you don't know about me, etc. Maybe it's one of those easy-blog-post-models that people whip out when they're strapped for time or ideas.

Lists, especially on commercial web sites (even if you never buy from them) also raise really interesting privacy concerns. I sometimes wonder what portrait someone would get from me if they made a composite of my blog, my Amazon lists, and my Facebook profile.

So in honor of Amazon and easy blog posts, and of having nothing to hide, here's a selection of FIVE books from my Amazon wish list. They're not all new, but they from my four favorite independent small publishers:

Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racism Reflections from an Angry White Male by Tim Wise. Softskull, 2008.

The Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scape-goating of Femininity.

Seal Press, 2007

Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity by Matt Bernstein Sycamore. Seal, 2006

Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire by David Graeber. AK, 2007. I'm even more excited about Graeber's Direct Action: An Ethnography, which isn't out yet.

Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-it-Ourselves Guide By Scott Kellog and Stacy Pettigrew. South End Press, 2008.

What do you want to be reading? What lists are you making? What information about you could be gathered from internet sites where you list favorites, or things you want to do, get, be?

Get ready go

2008-09-30T14:13:00.008-04:00

This blog is undergoing a transformation -- sort of like my life -- so be patient with me. I'm playing around with the header and redoing some of the categories, contemplating ditching blogger all together (thoughts?).

In the midst of a crazy summer, this blog quietly had a two year anniversary. So I took stock and discovered that I've posted about 50 times in those two years (which is not a lot for a blog, but more than I thought), and inspired only a handful of comments, mostly about Quaker stuff and mostly recently (for which I credit QuakerQuaker).

I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about what makes a good blog, what this particular blog is about, and how personal to be. Most of the good blogs I read have unifying themes, even if they're loose: Quaker ministry/rants, feminism and labor, living in capitalism, knitting, knitting and thriftiness, unschooling and art, etc.

I don't so much have a unifying theme - more like a concept: To stand at the intersections of traditional boundaries of life -- where religion meets culture, where consumption meets media, where agriculture meets resistance, where the domestic meets the academic -- and speak to what I see.

Or at least that's the idea. The thing is though, I'm pretty sure the compartmentalization of people, their lives and their varied modes of interacting with the world is false. Exists only because people who have been fragmented -- told that certain parts of their life don't fit together when we ourselves are evidence of that unity -- are easier to control and easier to sell things too. So that's part of the witness here too: writing from the false fissures, writing across them, and writing in defiance of them.

But on a general day to day basis, that means that I write about anything and everything: how I'm angsty about the class aspects of buying local and organic food, how my soil has lead in it, Hillary Clinton and feminism, gentrification and West Philly, etc. And occasionally I post nice photos.

So I guess the surface unifying theme is that this little blog, Not Afraid of Thunder, hosted by the awkward Blogger, is an outlet for my work. And my work often, but not always, deals with fragmentation, syncretism, and unity. So I get to play Adrienne Rich or Terri Gross (sans interviews for now), and dabble smartly (I hope) in a little bit of everything, ideally without succumbing to bloggy narcissism.

I hope that sounds like a compelling ride to you. Tickets are free and its wild, but there really are no guarantees.

Will the real Horatio Alger please stand up?

2008-08-23T22:48:00.006-04:00

Watching Obama and Biden in Springfield last week, and now watching day after day of the DNC, I am repeatedly struck (like a hammer to the head) by something: that American Dream, rags-to-riches success story. They've both got it. Working class Catholic kid from Scranton. Working class, biracial, single parented kid from the heartland (and Hawaii). Both standing on the shoulders of their parents and grandparents, who worked hard to give them a better life. Both going on to higher education, both being hugely successful in politics. That's how they told each other's stories -- if you work hard enough, you can succeed in America.

It's nothing new -- my own family story resembles it, as I think is true of many Americans -- and in this election in particular, everybody wants to be Everyman. Obama is generally pretty clear about talking about his privilege, and not making it sound like everyone can do what he has done. And Democrats in general point to the American Dream as something to get back to as a nation -- if our country was working, they insist, the American Dream would be in sight of everyone.

But though the message is not an explicit, its still there: "You must work hard to be worthy of assistance." Never mind deeply intrenched systems of privilege and power based on race, class, gender and sexual orientation -- systems we inherited from Europe, cultivated on our own, have had many successes combating but still live with.

I can't be the only person who learned, in high school, about Horatio Alger, his dime store novels and the propagation of the rags-to-riches idea as a way to pacify the working class in the early 20th Century. (I really was taught that in high school - at a public high school in a Republican county in Pennsylvania. Granted, Ms. Sharp, my sophomore year history teacher, was a bit of a lefty, and the district included a progressive college town.)

Implicit in Alger's trope is the idea that success and stability must come through work -- that down on their luck youth can pull themselves up by their boot straps and make in America. Also riches weren't so much Rockefeller riches as a middle class existence.

Work. Work. Work. Capitalism. Capitalism. Capitalism. Have you noticed how much the Dems say things like "want to work" and "work hard?" Just in case anyone wanted to accuse them of being fat cat socialists.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I'm to the left of the mainstream Democratic Party (as cute and preferable they are to what we've got now). And at the risk of showing my socialistic tendencies (or maybe my religious ones), here's a different paradigm:

That you, as a child of god, as a human being, deserve to be taken care of, to be fed, housed, healed, educated and welcomed simply because of who you are and your implicit right to dignity and a high quality of life. Perhaps you do not have the right to be rich, but you have the right to have what you need. You should not have to work to survive and thrive. You could labor for the love and joy of it, for your own enrichment (monetary and otherwise) and that of others, out of a sense of service, or creativity, or vision. But your basic needs should be taken care of.

Just saying.

I always thought so

2008-08-19T12:17:00.004-04:00

Adbusters' recent cover story on hipsters, Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization, has been making the rounds on several blogs I read. The article has 1485 comments. Do you think maybe it touched a nerve?

The article is short, and while it throws out some good ideas and touches on important concepts like the exploitative nature of cool-hunting, it's mostly just a rant. It's a shame Pierre Bourdieu is long gone. He'd have a field day with this one.

Some key points from the article:

1. Hipsterdom thrives by cannibalizing meaning from previous cultural and counter-cultural movements and trends. It does not create meaning.

2. By failing to challenge societal dysfunction (like most self respecting youth movements), it "mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society."

3. Hipsters try to obfuscate or erase their true social class (and thus their privilege and social power) by adopting cultural markers from the working class - Pabst, v-neck t-shirts, etc. There's an interesting tangent here about where hipsters will be in 20 years - the general assumption seems to be they'll assume their place in the middle class.

4. No one actually wants to call themselves a hipster. It's a touchy subject.

5. Hipsterdom is fed by advertising and consumption. Cool-hunters take note of innovators and their supposed authenticity, reproduce and market the innovation and sell it back to other hipsters. Coolness is consumed, rather than created, and there's a never-ending rush to be at the forefront of innovation. Thus allegiances, loyalties and affiliations are hard to maintain.

So, um, yes. I agree. Mostly.

I don't think it's particularly odious, as does the author, that hipsters draw upon previous styles and movements, and create their aesthetic out of an amalgamation of fashion and cultural markers from generations other than their own. Done well, that kind of magpie creation can actually be pretty amazing. There are important questions about cultural appropriation - but somehow I suspect hipsters don't care about that. Still, this doesn't make them the end of Western Civilization. Fashion aesthetics by their nature borrow from and recycle the past (hello, capris?). Modern media and mass marketing have just intensified it.

The real gremlin in the room is consumption and the co-optation of meaning. Not the lost and wayward youth who are trying to find meaning through consumption -- they're just the symptom. Hating on hipsters is easy. They're annoying. But it doesn't really address the deeper problem.

Rather than being the end of Western Civilization in and of themselves -- really, do a bunch of strung out white kids in clubs get to decide where we're all going? -- hipsters indicate what we're headed for. I think the hesitancy to self-identify as hipsters indicates that people KNOW that, and it makes them nervous.

That nervousness gives me a small smidgin of hope.

Ode #2: Farmer's Markets

2008-07-21T14:37:00.005-04:00

I was recently introduced to the neon insanity that is the Pat's and Geno's corner in South Philly. Clearly this is a destination for locals and tourists alike, I thought, all drawn by the undulating neon glow and pervasive odor of simmering meat. How did I live my whole life without encountering it?

When I worked in Reading Terminal Market (selling vegetables), nice people would often wander up and ask us where the cheese steaks where. We'd smile and point towards Rick's (who's in Pat's family, I believe). Rick's always has a line, even more so during tourist season or when there's a convention in town. You know you live in a cheese steak town when competition between cheese steak men, their racial and immigration politics, and their problems with the bosses are big news.

But I think I've had a cheese steak like three times in my life, at least two of those in a grade school cafeteria in the suburbs. I'm definitely far from a fat-fearer, but those things just scream "CORONARY DANGER!" to me when I look at them.

I guess it goes to show that there are many ways to interact with food in Philadelphia, that there is layer upon layer of culture and cuisine here. (That same cheese steak evening, I learned some of the best Mexican is to be had in the Italian Market.)

Personally, I love Philadelphia for its farmer's markets. I love the sycamore canopy of the Clark Park market, the bustle of Reading Terminal, the "shambles" of Head House, and the weirdness of buying strawberries in the courtyard of City Hall.

There's also a strong and growing local food movement here: the Fair Food Farm Stand, the Food Trust, and Farm to City all focus on bringing local farm goods into the markets and restaurants (and sometimes schools) of Philadelphia, and in marrying local food programs with urban nutrition education. And city farms like Mill Creek in West Philly, Greens Grow in North Philly, and Weaver's Way in Germantown focus on producing food right here, in the midst of the row houses and streets. There are also too many Community Supported Agriculture programs to name -- Local Harvest is a great resource to help find them.

The agriculture areas all around Philadelphia are amazingly verdant, and it's astonishing the variety of food that will grow. It's not just your standard tomato-pepper-corn-zucchini stuff, either: figs, wee kiwis, all kinds of random melons, emu eggs, lots and lots of meat and obscure cheeses, all kinds of tree fruits, as well as new varieties of familiar vegetables are just some of what I've encountered. When you hang out at farmer's markets, heritage varieties of vegetables come out of the closet like dolled up and still with it old aunties ready for a party.

That's something I learned when I started vegetable gardening, and am still learning: the shear variety of edible food that exist is so far beyond the uniform, waxy and over-packaged things we get in supermarkets. There are so many more good things to eat.

Farmers markets are, if nothing else, a sensory encounter with the abundance that surrounds us, a reminder that our bodies are constantly in congress with our environment, our cities in a dance with our farms. It's a good lesson, and one I learned first in Philly.

Philadelphia Ode #1: Art

2008-07-09T15:53:00.009-04:00

I'm getting ready to pack up and leave the city of my birth. Actually, the packing has already nominally started and the give-away pile is growing. In preparing to leave I've been noting all of the things I love about Philadelphia and the things I want to share with friends who are just moving here.

So sort of inspired by some friends insisting I know a lot about the city, and sort of inspired by a need to document all I've discovered in three years living here (and a life previous to that living nearby), I thought I'd write some of it down in a series of elegies/odes.

I'll miss Philly's art scene, as much as I've feel like I've only scratched the surface. I cut my teeth (like, back in high school) on First Fridays in Old City, when I swear the galleries were more forthcoming with food and beverages (but maybe I was starry eyed) and the art was a little more interesting. Vox used to be on Second Street, and they could alway be relied upon by amazing/crazy art in a fire-trap space. Since fleeing the destruction of the Gilbert Building they're now just north of Chinatown. The Clay Studio, which to me has always seemed like an anchor on Second Street, can be relied upon for the full gamut of ceramic art, from functional vessels to all kinds of sculpture. They also have a pretty amazing pottery sale the First Friday in May.

I understand now that Gallery Row (Second and Third Street, primarily between Market and Race) is just the tip of the iceberg -- not even the tip, maybe just a weird nubbin off the side. A lot of the really cool stuff now is in Northern Liberties, Fishtown and Kensington, and also west in random bits of downtown and across the river into West Philly. I wish I'd explored Crane Arts and Space 1026 more. (I'm sure there's an art scene in South Philly too, I just know less about it.)

First Friday at the Fringe/Live Arts Festival is the best, and weirdest, of them all and when the really interesting performance artists and participatory art opportunities come out. On that note, the Fringe always has something interesting to offer in the way of performance (dance, theater, etc) art - I once saw a play about Joe Hill staged in a wing of Eastern State Penitentiary.

Personally, I'm geekily devoted to Puppet Uprising and Spiral Q Puppet Theater, and feel really lucky to have lived in a city with such an innovative and radical puppetry scene.

The big time museums in Philly sort of go without saying - Philadelphia Museum of Art (pay what you will on Sundays), Institute for Contemporary Art (free on Sundays), the Barnes in Lower Merion (go before they uproot it and plunk it on the Parkway). There's also the Rosenbach, which is wee but full of books, art and antiques (and the repository for Maurice Sendak's life's work - there's a big show there now devoted to him.)

You don't need to go to a museum to find art in Philadelphia though, since we have an active and collaborative Mural Arts Program in the city. I can't say that I love every mural, but some of them are really beautiful. We also have Isaiah Zagar (thank God) and his slightly renegade, organic, multi-colored mosaics of found objects that center around South Street. Of things that mean Philadelphia to me, Zagar mosaics are up there high on the list. The Magic Garden is an active and evolving work of art, they're still trying to save it, and its open daily from 11am-5pm.

I know that there's a lot more than I've talked about here -- film festivals (Gay and Lesbian, Independent Film Festival), expensive concert venues (Kimmel Center and Academy of Music), not so expensive concert venues (R5 Productions), writerly venues and communities, artsy movie theaters (google "Ritz, Philadelphia"). Not to mention tons of theater companies (Pig Iron comes to mind) and community based arts organizations (Painted Pride, Village of Arts and Humanities).

There's a lot of art in Philadelphia. In my time here I've tended to focus on the affordable and accessible, and in my experience the museumy-big venue-city sponsored stuff is rivaled by the stuff that is affordable or free and lived daily and in neighborhoods. I feel fortunate to have lived in a city, among artists and arts supporters, who seem to get that art is food, that it feeds people and communities and is vital to the life of a city.

Warriors for Aslan

2008-06-09T11:54:00.004-04:00

I was wary going to see Prince Caspian. I tend to be resistant to movie adaptations of books (especially books I love) and I’m a little dubious of Walden Media, their conservative Christian owner, and his insistence that movies have a moral message. I'm also unclear how much of the hype about them is just that: hype.

Don’t get me wrong, I generally prefer that movies have some kind of content, and I’m not opposed to moral messages. It’s just that I’ve been and continue to be unsure of Walden’s agenda and am unfamiliar enough with their work to be unsure of how honest they are in their delivery. (I’m pretty clear on my disdain for Disney. They do good things sometimes, for sure, but don’t get me started on those damn princesses.)

Seeing Prince Caspian answered some of my questions about Walden and raised others.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t really like it. I was willing to see it twice with different sets of friends, if that’s any indication.

It was a lot better than the Walden-Disney version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (which I thought was lame and tried too hard to be Lord of the Rings.) The movie also adds some themes that I thought were really interesting, including a Pevensie dark night of the soul: having been touched and used by Aslan, Peter and company are stuck wondering when, if at all, he’s going to call on them again. It was an intense theme done well and accessibly so that kids could get it.

Peter’s malignant pride and the damage it does in unnecessary battle is also interesting – he’s lost faith that Aslan is going to help, and so charges ahead at great loss of life. Lucy even says it (in a line added in the movie): “Peter, I think you’ve forgotten who we’re fighting for.” I really wondered if this rushing in and being stuck and desperate in war was allegory for the Iraq War – was meant to be particularly resonate for a nation at war. I dunno, maybe that's a stretch.

Because I’m geeky and saw the movie twice, I kept finding myself wondering what was Lewis and what was Walden, what they’d changed and what was faithful to the book. So I decided to re-read it.

At first I was amazed by both how faithful the movie is to the book (some lines are taken verbatim) and how carefully and lovingly it had been adapted. I think an adaptation can be true to a source without following it exactly. Whole characters and relationships are different in the book: Trumpkin is definitely not a battle-hardened non-believer, there’s no competition between Peter and Caspian, and no Caspian-Susan love interest (duh). The filmmakers did try to preserve some of the talking-animal cameos that appear in the book, I think as a sort of nod to the source, though those characters are not named in the movie.

All in all it works – it’s different, darker, more modern, and has less of the “Cherrio chap, all is well!!” tone of the books than can get a little old. And I kind of liked that.

But then I got to the end and was amazed by how significantly the movie ultimately deviates – in tone, narrative and message - from the book. In the book there is no Narnian attack on Miraz’s castle, and no heart-wrenching slaughter of Narnians behind the drawbridge. There’s also no wholesale slaughter of the Telmarines by the river god. Basically there’s less slaughter.

Sure in the book there’s a duel, some treachery, a few beheadings and then the beginning of a battle, but then…

Aslan saves the day with a gigantic, jubilant party of woodland and fantastical creatures that snakes through the countryside, where he heals the sick, liberates the oppressed and abused, engages everyone with love, and invites them to join the dance.

I kid you not. The dance party shows up just behind the walking trees, who effectively scare the crap out of the Telmarines and end the battle.

I understand that battle scenes are flashy and fancy to do in CGI, and that that's what people have come to expect from fantasy movies like this, but I think this narrative change goes beyond adding some more umpf to the plot line.

The Narnia books are Christian allegory. I wouldn’t change that about them or ignore it – sure, sometimes its clunky, sexist, racist, heavy handed, 1950’s British Sunday school Christian allegory, but it is also at times deeply powerful, telling and instructive. I don’t think I really understood baptism, having been raised without it, until I read the description of Eustace’s transformation from a dragon back to a boy in Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

So where are the “morals” in adding significant amounts of violence to a children’s story that didn’t originally have it? What about de-goryfying that violence to maintain a PG rating, and failing to show the repercussions of violence?

What’s more, where are the morals in obscuring the healing and liberating power of faith (or God, or Jesus)? Especially if you’re a media company with an interest in Christian morals?? Is this a secularization of Lewis’s narrative, or a whole different kind of Christianity?

What’s your deal, Walden Media?

On the Richmond young adult Friends conference

2008-05-30T10:23:00.008-04:00

For those of you for whom an super-Quaker post is surprising or not very interesting, be forewarned: this is about to get very Quaker.

About a hundred young adult Friends gathered last weekend at the Earlham School of Religion (a Quaker seminary) in Richmond, Indiana for a conference titled Living as Friends, Listening Within. The theme was leadings and callings (discerning vocation and/or God's will for you) and the conference intentionally brought together Friends from across the branches of Quakerism, including independent western Friends, Conservative Friends, and Friends from meetings affiliated with Friends United Meeting, Friends General Conference, Evangelical Friends International. The conference was sponsored by FUM, FGC and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (For those of you wanting to know more about the branches, go here.)

The balancing of these two goals -- exploring leadings and callings, and fostering ecumenical fellowship among Friends -- was delicate and faithful and interesting to watch. The two goals often, but not always, functioned in tandem (sometimes quite well). In some ways the combination was very appropriate -- many Friends are feeling called to heal the divisions in Quakerism, though there are several ideas of what that means. Sometimes one or the other of the conference goals would take precedence. Even if we weren't working with it explicitly, it seemed like we were always aware of our diversity, of the relative unusualness of our gathering together.

Overall, it was a really beautiful weekend. The care, respect, tenderness and love the planning committee of young adult Friends have for each other was abundantly evident, and it set the tone for the weekend. The conference was well organized, responsibility and visibility was well shared, and several onion layers of support people (including a pastoral care team) were available, accessible and well used. There were lots of resources on Friends events, organizations, publications and communities. (I and some of the other editorial board members who were there talked about the Quaker Youth Book Project and distributed the Call for Submissions.)

You can read the epistle (a letter from a gathered body of Friends to Friends everywhere) to get a deeper idea of what the weekend was like.

Throughout the weekend two images were working on me, both having to do with ecumenical work among Friends. The first was this sense that I had finally waded deep enough into the water, far enough from my comfort zone of the shore, to find a deep, cool, gentle and tantalizing current of movement among Friends. I've had a sense of this current for awhile, I sort of knew it was there, but this weekend I finally went deep enough to feel it working on me and pulling me to new places. I don't know where it's taking me, but when I couldn't feel the bottom anymore I looked up to find I wasn't alone. Many other Friends, many of them young adults, are moving in the current too. This was really exciting and humbling.

The other image is not as positive. During several intense meetings for worship, which were often punctuated by song and by weeping -- and were quite moving -- I kept getting the sense that we were wanting to eat the fruit of Friends unity (or the bread, pick your metaphor ) without doing the careful work of cultivation.

The story of the Little Red Hen ("Will you help me grind my grain??") kept popping into my head, but also those Bible verses about being the branches and bearing fruit, and sitting under the vine and fig tree and being unafraid. Those are all plants that you cultivate. God is a gardener, and I think he calls us to that kind of intentional cultivation in partnership that good gardeners and farmers practice.

There are difficult conversations to be had, and we only brushed the surface this weekend because it's hard to do a lot in a weekend. Those conversations are about theology, God and Jesus, sexuality, queerness, racial diversity, welcoming and affirmation, continuing revelation and the Bible, our common history as Friends, the divisions in our history, and the myriad ways we have wounded one another.

At the risk of sounding like a naysayer (which I am not), I think intensely emotional meetings for worship, and songs about rising up to take our places, are not the work or are not all of the work of cultivating unity among Friends. They feed us and inspire us for the work, but they are not the entirety of the work and are not grounds for self-congratulation.

I think my fear -- and it's a fear, so I'll name it as that -- is that Friends will come away from this weekend high on ecumenical fellowship and not do anything, not let their experiences work on and transform them. That is not enough.

This is what I know. When you love someone or someones -- a partner, your family, a community, an organization -- there has to be a willingness to do the hard work. The first step is to know one another, which I think these conferences (at Richmond and Burlington, NJ last year) and other events and inter visitation of similar flavor, accomplish. They are just the beginning, and I am so grateful to Friends who open that door.

But then you do the hard work. In my opinion, the start of the hard work is to speak our own truths, and listen - listen - to others speak theirs. Friends, I think we're ready to do the hard work.

And in so many ways it is already being done. Models exist for us to look to: FWCC , the World Gathering, QUIP, convergent Friends, Quaker bloggers, Friends doing yearly meeting inter visitation, etc. etc.

And maybe after listening we will all go home to our individual meetings and churches and there will be renewal and deepening within the branches. Or maybe nothing will happen. Or maybe there will be increased communication and growth between the branches. Or perhaps whole new meetings and churches will emerge, and national and international bodies of Friends will be transformed and reorganized. I am so excited to tell cranky unprogrammed Friends (who say things like "I just don't know about those pastoral Friends....") about my friends from FUM and EFI meetings and churches and see their jaws drop.

Who knows what will happen. But we have to do the hard work first. And then we have to call others to the hard work.

When my own yearly meeting reunified in the 1950's, it was the young people (along with some supportive older folks) who lead it. They gathered together for years beforehand -- dated each other, married each other -- and when they gathered they often wore red or white roses to identify them as Hicksite or Orthodox. It was a way of saying "This is my tradition, in case you were wondering. Now let's meet as Friends."

Friends, where is your roses?

Something I have been working under and striving to articulate is a sense I have of the diversity of Friends as an incredible blessing, an incredible gift to us. The diversity of Christians (not to mention the diversity of the world at large) is so vast, some of the differences seemingly so deep -- I am so keenly aware of living in a deeply fractured and disconnected world -- and here we have the opportunity to hone tools of fellowship, communication, listening, and love in our own house.

Several of the keynote speakers reminded us that the world needs us, as Friends, that our message of an immanent God is powerful and transformative despite our small numbers.

More and more I believe that our diversity -- our theological, racial, geographic, gender identifying and sexual diversity - is one way that God prepares us for that work in the world.

Yes, there will be singing

2008-05-12T11:56:00.005-04:00

Along with trying to say a silent grace before meals, I've recently been trying to remind myself, daily, that I live in a country at war, both with other countries and with its own people and parts of itself. To that end:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCOb2YlTJkw (this is the real link)

Sorry for a short post -- I hope to have more for you soon.

Why I'm voting for Barack Obama

2008-04-20T13:11:00.003-04:00

It's been a big weekend, lots of waiting in long lines for long hours to see the Democratic Candidates. On Thursday some friends and I went to a taping of the Colbert Report in Philadelphia -- it was the last show filmed at Penn, and Clinton and John Edwards were special guests. Clinton's skit was funny, but the show ended on a definite but subtle pro-Obama note. Eventhough he wasn't there, they beamed him in by satellite and let him get the last word without much joking, which Colbert-in-character then reinforced (campaign distractions? on notice!).

On Friday night Obama spoke to a crowd of 35,000 on Independence Mall in Olde City Philadelphia (think Founding Father stomping ground). 35,000! It was the most diverse crowd of people I have every seen at an event that big -- more diverse than any protest, march, community fair, or charity walk I have every been too. And people waited for nearly three hours, sticking out the blarring and repeating campaign soundtrack, to hear him speak.

We were sitting on the grass in front of the Liberty Bell pavilion, listening to him (he only spoke about 20 minutes) and I looked around at one point and realized we were sitting literally on top of ruins of George Washington's house. The structure was discovered during the revamping of Independence Mall, and includes the foundation of a bay window in the room that Washington used to greet important dignitaries, as well as a passageway probably used by slaves to go from the house to other buildings. They've covered up the ruins now, but noted the structure by outlining it on the grass. I almost laughed it felt so fitting -- to be sitting on vestiges of this countries deeply imperfect founding, listening to a man whose candidacy and
presidency, I believe (and hope), will be a turning point in the United States.

I will be voting for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania's primary on Tuesday -- ambling up the street to vote in the basement of a convenience store, on a busy block in my beautifully diverse and complicated neighborhood. Here are some reasons why:

He voted against the Iraq War, and has maintained that stance throughout, but is able to do so in a way that clearly demonstrates support for men and women serving oversees.

His campaign has not taken a single cent from lobbyists or corporate special interests -- real evidence that he is serious about challenging the insider-politics game in Washington.

He is not afraid to engage with faith, to surf and articulate the importance of faith and religion in secular government, speaks openly and eloquently about his own faith and conversion experience, and is actively reaching out to evangelical Christians. This might not be important to you, but cultivating true ecumenical and interfaith dialogue (which to me means that respect is expected, but agreement is not) and resisting a red state/ blue state or culture wars paradigm is deeply important to me.

His candidacy has excited and mobilized people traditionally disenfranchized and disenchanted by democracy in this country, notable young people and African Americans.

His racial politics, outlined in his speach in Philadelphia on race in America, and his refusal to "disown" Rev. Jeremiah Wright (or his own grandmother), have the potential to deepen the national conversation on race in America.

I believe that true leadership listens, focuses, unites and excites -- that a good national leader focuses the concerns of the people and inspires them to act on their own and other's behalf. I see this very clearly in Barack Obama.

Not a moment too soon

2008-04-13T16:26:00.006-04:00

On having gotten in to an ivy league school....

2008-04-04T11:19:00.005-04:00

I always thought that snarky joke about not telling people you went to Harvard was just a way for people to feel superior (don't tell the peasants, it'll just make them jealous), but now I sort of get it.

I generally get two responses when I tell people I got in: general thrill and excitement for me (which is great - thank you), and a more subtle "Woah - Harvard" followed by an uncomfortable awed silence and, sometimes, an immediate emotional distance. People sort of step back and reconsider me. A few times it's felt like a chasm opened up. I don't like it, and have gotten sort of sheepish about telling people.

It's not really about jealousy, I don't think. It's more about what "Harvard" means to people and what its loaded with -- privilege, prestige, power, access -- and how they've been taught or have chosen to understand themselves in relation to all that. The waspy upper class American reality that Harvard is rooted in (as amazing as its financial aid is now) is not inclusive or equitable, and has wounded a lot of people, myself included. It also sort of exists in the imaginary for a lot of people -- as something well known but that hey themselves may never interact with. I think that's what comes up, even if its in relation to somebody they love and support. We're also talking about immediate emotional reactions here -- not what people said after they had a moment to think.

I have some real concerns about going to a graduate school that creates distance between me and other people - particularly if its a divinity school, which is supposed to prepare me for ministry and a life of service to people. I want my ability to connect to increase, not decrease. That anxiety might sound odd to you -- but it's something I've really been wrestling with.

And then my friend K. hit the nail on the head when he pointed out: "The privilege stuff is real no matter where you go; the blessing in disguise, I think, of the Harvard name, is that those issues become very prominent, and you have to wrestle with them out in the open."

Oh yeah - wrestling. Contradiction. Sort of like the ultimately fruitful tension between activism, service and social science that defined my undergraduate experience (but was maddening while it was happening).

What was that I said about not being afraid of thunder? Did I think this was going to be easy?

War fatigue

2008-03-20T20:29:00.006-04:00

It's spring. The moon is full and high in the sky on the vernal equinox. Tomorrow an orchestra of birds will greet the sun and the tulips will continue to unfurl out of the thawed soil.

And the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq slipped quietly by, pushed aside by coverage of the recession and the race for the democratic nomination.

About a 1,000 people (which is a police estimate, so who knows) attended a protest in DC. Some stopped traffic, threw paint, and got arrested. A thousand.

That's really pathetic. Really, really pathetic. Particularly considering the majority of Americans are now against the war. Maybe people are just waiting until November, and a democrat to save us.

But who am I to talk? I wasn't in DC either. I've been to enough big demonstrations to know that they can be incredible shows of mass sentiment and citizenship, and also huge exercises in resource-sucking self-congratulation. I want to find other nonviolent ways to resist the war, but am a little strapped for ideas.

I have been thinking, at the risk of being cliché and obvious, that the war in Iraq is my generation's Viet Nam. Only with one exception: no draft. People don't live in fear of being called up. Unless you yourself are enlisted, or you love someone who is enlisted, I think the experience of this war is very different. I am not advocating a draft, but I think it would be a huge motivator for mass resistance. Now the war is fought largely by people not privileged by our society: people of color, the working class, young people. Imagine if the middle class college graduates started receiving draft papers?

I also think media coverage is vastly different now than it was during Viet Nam (or during the Civil Rights Movement), and I would lift up the argument that experiences of the media then, of little kids on fire with napalm, dead American soldiers, or teenagers being water cannoned, taught the media all it needed to know about how to filter the news. We don't see nearly enough footage of bodies, of flag draped coffins, of civilian casualties. That sounds morose (and naive – some of those images are closely controlled), and I have respect for the dead. But war is somehow less real when you're not reminded that it involves people dying.

People I hang out with talk about it, sometimes with sadness or deep senses of frustration, but more often with an exasperated, dismissive snort in George Bush's direction. This is not really helpful.

I’m aware in all this of my own perspective, so I’ll take responsibility: It amazes me that I can live a full day and not think about how my country is at war, not think of myself as someone who lives in a country at war with pieces of another country. That is a tremendously priviledged and myopic place to stand. I am not alone in standing here, but I still feel a deep sense of shame about it.

How do you make a war personal to people who have the option to ignore it?

Bungee Barbie

2008-03-12T12:25:00.005-04:00

I had this great International Women's Day post all planned, with little mini-bios of some of my favorite real life heroines and where I would seat them at a fantasy dinner party at my house (inspired by that Judy Chicago piece that I will some day see in person). That post went the way of several other well intentioned posts: draft limbo.

So instead let's talk about Barbie.

She just had her 49th birthday last week, and NPR did an In Character piece on her on Sunday that included an interview with Peggy Ornstein, who's done research into the phenomenon of little girls tutoring their Barbie dolls.

I thought I was the only one, but apparently its really common for little girls to torture their Barbie dolls (Orenstein quoted a percentage that I didn't catch it, and also described a little girl lining up all her Barbies in the driveway and getting her mother to drive over them).

Personally, I would wrap Barbie up in rubber bands, attach her to a bungee cord, and throw her off the porch. My dad called it "Bungee Barbie" and thought it was pretty funny. "Bondage Barbie" might be similarly apt.

Orenstein had some good explanations for the torture, but I liked Todd Hayne's (who made a movie solely with Barbie dolls) explanation better: girls are acting out their unconscious resentment and dubiousness towards Barbie's feminine ideals. I think that was probably what was going on with me.

But I also wonder how much of it is little girls acting out internalized misogyny. Can you have internalized misogyny at age 8? I kind of think so. I think it might be that pervasive in society.

It's also interesting that the little girl in the driveway and I both had the support of a parent. I think that's more a sign of a parent being an ally in dubiousness about Barbie's feminine ideas than an ally in misogyny, though.

So did you torture your Barbie dolls, or somebody else's Barbie dolls? If so, how?

Warm Spell

2008-03-05T19:09:00.002-05:00

A warm spell here in Philadelphia and suddenly everything looks different. People getting on the trolley could be people in any city I don’t know, where I am a visitor boarding a transit system that isn’t daily and usual like water. Bums on the street are suddenly not the bums I recognize – Cathy who rides the 34 to hang out around 12th and Market, the man in the wheel chair under the overhang of Filbert – but are new people, part of a tide of strangers liberated from their winter shuffling and bundling of layers.

The warming is welcome – but global climate change is strange, is personal. We’ve had one significant snow here this winter, and it’s like some climatic boundary has shifted north, to the counties above Philadelphia, so that the city proper is suddenly, truly, part of the south. Pretend-winter has been one long, semi-cold barren stretch. And as beautiful as the silhouetted trees are against the sky, I don’t like it. It’s like being a kid at the Jersey Shore riding a particularly powerful wave, wondering whether the momentum is going to fall out beneath me or if I’ll skin my knees on the sand first.

What comes next, or what will stop coming next, and how sad I will be to see it go?

Mushrooms are amazing

2008-02-24T22:12:00.005-05:00

"Part of the problem is simply that fungai are very difficult to observe. What we call a mushroom is only the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger and essentially invisible organism that lives most of its life underground. The mushroom is the "fruiting body" of a subterranean network of microscopic hyphae, improbably long rootlike cells that thread themselves through the soil like neurons. Bunched like cables, the hyphae form webs of (still microscopic) mycelium. Mycologists [mushroom scientists] can't dig up a mushroom like a plant to study its structure because its mycelia are too tiny and delicate to tease from the soil without disintigrating."

"A single fungus recently found in Michigan covers an area of forty acres and is thought to be a few centuries old."

From Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," pages 374-375

Cold and flu prevention

2008-02-23T15:30:00.005-05:00

So far this winter I've been relatively healthy, and am finding myself surrounded by people who are sick. At the risk of sounding like your mother, I wanted to share some of the mostly really obvious things I've been doing to keep the flu at bay. For me its all about prevention, on keeping my body healthy and well nourished so it can fight off infection.

1. Eat well. When I don't eat well I get run down, and in the winter when I get run down it's over. I try to cook a lot of food on the weekends so I can just reheat things during the week --frozen veggies, which I'm not crazy about, admitedly help to supplement easy dinners. I also drink lots of OJ and take a multivitamin. I know there's lots of disagreement about multivitamins, but I notice a difference if I don't take it. When it gets to be the depths of winter and cold and flu season is in full force, I also make a pot of chicken rice soup from scratch with lots of vegetables, then I freeze a lot of it and ration it out over the remainder of the worst of winter. I realize soup from scratch is alot for some people -- especially if it involves an entire chicken -- but I think it's really worth it. Good chicken soup is an entire meal, as well as traditional flu season comfort food.

2. Pay attention to fatigue. If I'm bone tired after a normal day, it often means something is up with my body (mental fatigue is different though related). I sleep a lot in the winter, often going to bed kind of early. I try to have several stretches during the week, usually an evening or on the weekend, when I don't do a whole lot and the emphasis is not on being productive. This is a big duh --humans need down time, we're not machines -- but comes as a revelation to a surprising number of people.

3. Drink herbal teas. I've been reading and experimenting more this winter with herbal tea. I'm talking dried herbs plus boiling water, not tea bag blends by Celestial Seasonings that list "other natural ingredients." Last year my friend turned me on to nettles. Every herbal blog or encyclopedia I've read agrees that nettles are great for you, but they don't often agree on what they're most beneficial for - some say arthritis, others hay fever. Nettles are nutritious in general - high in vitamin C and iron - so if nothing else they keep you well nourished. I drink nettle tea at least every other day. I also drink ginger tea nearly every morning at work. Ginger tea is usually described as a digestion aid, but I find it chases away early warning sore throats nicely. I've also been experimenting with rose hips (also high in vitamin C) and catnip. Both are not very tasty, but enjoyable enough with honey. I've found catnip to be a pretty potent relaxant too. In general with herbal tea you just pour a cup or so of hot water over a teaspoon or more amount of herbs, let it steep and then drain it (or you can use a tea ball).

4. Use a neti pot. Neti pots are a traditional-but-still-widely used hatha yoga remedy. They're sort of little mini tea pots that you use to poor lightly salinated warm water through your nose -- in one nostril and out the other -- thus flushing out all of the gross things that can accumulate in there. I got one way back in college to use for my allergies, and then forgot about it until a recent New York Times article about how they're in vogue. It try to use a neti pot at least once a week. It takes some getting used to, but I kind of like it; it reminds me of swimming in the ocean and getting salt water up my nose.

dp 2: empty upstairs

2008-02-17T22:29:00.003-05:00

17 hundred block of Chestnut Street: I like the old brick facades peaking up above the cold-cream-smooth lower levels of Sephora, like a face job gone wrong.

First names and candidate love

2008-02-15T14:43:00.007-05:00

Election related thoughts for the day/week:

1. The whole first name thing really doesn't do it for me. In college, one of my best professors called the entire class out for referring to a woman in an ethnography by her first name, noting that it was gendered, assumptive, and disrespectful. There is something about last names and formality and respect. I do last name only, or first and last name when I'm talking about someone I don't know or trying to be formal. (Hanging out with Quakers a lot I tend not to use titles, but that's not always true - I'm not opposed to it like some Friends).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not all about formality. But I would like this female candidatee to be shown all due respect deserved by someone running for president. I don't like a lot of the snarled sentences I hear "Hillary" in the context of.

I was ready to go on a tirade about this, but then I realized that her campaign totally uses it too: Women for Hillary! Hillary for President! I think this is probably one part not wanting to be thought of in relation to her husband (I don't really blame her), one part wanting people to see her as approachable, and one part stupidness. I don't know about you, but I'm not on a first name basis with Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama. I sure as hell don't refer to Obama as Barack.

I guess last names can cause all kinds of issues for feminists, though -- she used Rodham until Bill became big, and suddenly that didn't pass muster with America anymore (It would have been fine for me, my mama and I have different last names, but I wasn't of voting age then). Perhaps that is a topic for another post.

2. Oh my god, people are really crazy about Obama. The NYtimes ran a really great article* about his campaign's engagement with race a couple days ago, and the image they ran with it was such a picture of loving adoration and devotion (not to mention diversity) that I totally laughed out loud. People really love him!

As subjective as that is, I think that's one of the things I like about him, too: he gets people really excited, particularly whole legions of people (some people of color and young people for example) who are often disenfranchised or disenchanted by the usual dog and pony show of elections. And my sense of him, again also subjective (I swear the posts on concrete issues are coming, folks), is not that he's some shinning knight on a horse that people want to swoop in and save them, but that he's the kind of leader who inspired and motivates people to step up and do their own work.

People are so completely hungry for his message of change and hope -- really, I don't think I understood how hungry we were in this country for that message until now -- that they're willing to overlook his lack of experience. Although I'm not sure experience ever really counts for much -- as much as I abhor voting for subjective reasons, I know it happens all the time.

So there you have it: one concrete reason I like Obama is that people like him for totally subjective and non-concrete reasons! Ah, elections.

*Go read the article. It was really excellent, and explained some things I've noted about him -- like how he managed to talk about being a candidate of color running for an office only ever held by white men without actually saying "of color" or "white."

Margaret Thatcher would thank you

2008-02-06T18:38:00.001-05:00

I was debating whether or not to write about the democratic primaries, thinking something might have been decided yesterday and whatever I would write would be a moot point. But that didn't exactly happen, so I think I'm going to take the next weeks and months to write about what is feeling particularly important (an exciting) right now.

Firstly, I'm kind of amazed and thrilled that the two democratic front runners are a white woman and an African American man. That there isn't an old white man in the running at this point feels big and momentous, and like something to celebrate. Suddently it is not only possible but entirely likely that at least one very old and very deeply rooted boundary of gender or race will be breached by the next president. It's about damn time.

Over the weekend I was talking with my uncle, who lives in Chicago and voted yesterday, about the candidates. Having been an Edwards supporter, he was trying to decide who to vote for and while thinking out loud said "It's really hard to choose - and I guess it's extra hard when you're a woman."

It is extra hard. For awhile I was walking around wondering "Do I really have to choose between being a feminist and being an anti-racist??" and fantasizing about the two of them running together - though I'm not sure who would be VP or how that woud work.

It became extra weird when Oprah's fans were suddenly denouncing her as a "traitor to her gender" for endorsing Obama, and the New York chapter of NOW released a scathing press release calling Ted Kennedy a betrayer of women for doing the same.

Something does not compute for me with the idea that women should support Hillary Clinton simply because she is a woman (and a Democrat). That kind of thinking seems simplistic, and I'm insulted by it. How do the Margaret Thatcher's and Ann Coulter's factor into that picture - or do women loose their appeal if their political persuasion is different? Will only liberal progressive women further the sex, as far as Democratics are concerned?

Perhaps my lack of zeal for Clinton is rooted in priviledge - I've been living off the fruits of my foremother's work my whole life, and am fairly certain I will see a female president in my life time. So while the prospect of having one now is exciting, I also know it's not going to be my only opportunity. It's amazing to think that my grandmother (who is for Obama, by the way) was already a little girl when women finally won the right to vote. A lot has changed in eighty some years.

I think there are also deeper issues here about voting and how we talk about voting - people vote for candidates for all kinds of weird, anectodal and impressionistic reasons. When Harding won in 1920, people were convinced it was because newly voting women picked the nicer looking candidate. My boss told me a story today about encountering a woman post-2004 election who, after learning my boss had voted for Kerry, snarled "Do you know his wife doesn't even wear a brassiere?!"

It disturbs me both that race and gender can become weird and anecdotal, and that we feed a culture that expects and rewards non-informed choices in democratic voting. A political and media structure that tries to a divine and manipulate the moods of voter choices diverts energy away from fostering a population of informed voters.

So I'm going to inform myself. And I'm going to focus on being able to articulate exactly why I am so excited by Barack Obama, and why I would be immensely proud to be an American were he elected.

Stay tuned.

Financial aid by any other name

2008-01-29T20:21:00.001-05:00

In my last-minute filing of college applications, I was struck by the number of Harvard grants having to do with families.

I wasn't totally surprised by the grants for people descended from specific donors like "Joseph Ernest and Ocavia Walton Goodbar" and "Robert Pennoyer," or for descendents of specific Harvard classes like 1889 and 1902. Harvard is filthy rich and old, and it makes sense to me that people give it money with the stipulation that some or all of that money benefit their descendents. I don't really like the legacy phenomenon, but I get it.

It was the scholarships restricted to "Students with the name Baxendale or Hudson" or " Students with the name Thayer" that totally fascinated me. Is the descendents vs. same last name thing the difference between restricted and designated funds?

Not totally surprisingly, most of the family names are Northern European-sounding, though in all fairness there's a checkbox for "African American students," "Native American Indians," "Students of Jewish faith," "Students of Greek birth or parentage," and "Students from Southeast Asia," etc.

What I want to know is this: If you randomly have the last name Thayer, maybe because your name got anglicized to it at Ellis Island or because your ancestors were forced to take it, but you are not related to the Thayer who gave Harvard money, do you get to cash in on this scholarship? Because I would be totally in to that. I'd be thrilled for all the random Thayers out there.

What's more, what if I changed my name to Thayer? Can I cash in? Is that legit? If it was, I think more people might do it. And I'd applaud them.

When my alma mater announced late last year that along with other elite schools like the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard it would be reducing the amount of loan debt shouldered by students in an effort to attract more middle class students, I sort of almost cried - for myself, not for the future students at those schools. (Fruedian slip alert, I first typed "death" when I meant to type "debt.") I was really close to calling up the office of financial aid and asking them if they were honoring that plan retroactively.

Though there have been vast improvements in financial aid and educational access over the past, oh, fifty to a hundred years or so, for me it's still often felt like an elitist dance, with access often determined by how much debt you're willing to assume, and how limited you're willing to have you're future career choices be based on that debt. I've decided I'm not really willing to assume a whole lot more, so that's going to make graduate school very interesting.

I think debt is often predicated on assumptions about future wealth, too - that a degree from said school will move a person along the social class ladder, increasing a base salary, etc. Which is funny, because I feel like I learned to doubt and deconstruct class hegemony at college, and took very seriously my college's emphasis on preparing students to live lives of service (and at least for me, wealth gets interesting when you're talking about service). Ah, academia, how you simultaneously support and undermine social hierarchies!

Kicking out Rupert Murdoch

2008-01-14T20:50:00.001-05:00

I was in a letting-go-of-attachments place recently so I did what I had been thinking about doing for awhile: I deleted my Friendster and MySpace accounts.

Reasons: 1) they creep me out 2) privacy concerns 3) social networking sites are really not how I maintain friendships 3) spam 4) they keep trying to sell me things 5) some of the coolest people I know don't have them, and still seem to be awesome and have great social lives.

They did not go quietly. MySpace wanted me to confirm like three times that I really wanted to delete my account. A couple days later when I was still recieving spammy friend requests I realized the whole thing hadn't gone through. I think it's good and dead now.

I really think I might have a pre-social-networking-site sensibility. E-mail and cell phone are enough for me, either as ways of keeping in touch or as facilitators for in person hang out time. I don't really want to maintain friendships, social groups or flirtation via something everybody can see. Call me crazy.

I've kept my Facebook account for the time being. Yes I know it's elitist, but Facebook feels slightly more active and more secure to me, even though for awhile there I kept getting bitten by zombies. I do use it occasionally to get e-mail addresses.

Now I'm contemplating unfriending all the people I'm not actually friends with on FaceBook - like the freshmen I was an upper class advisor to or the random guy who lived next door my junior year of college - in the interests honesty and actually being friends with your "friends".

That would be rude though, right? And Facebook would tell on me - everyone would log on to see "Angelina deleted Joe College from her friend list"? It's probably even ruder than not saying hi to people you went to college with when you see them on the trolley.

I'll have to think about whether I want to be that hardcore or not.

***

Update: My friend Ben sent me this great article about Facebook:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

What do Facebook, Wal-Mart, the CIA, and immortality technology have in common? Why, investors and venture capital, of course!

Tomatoes in winter

2008-01-12T20:38:00.000-05:00

Even though I'm not super into the word locavore, eating local food is pretty important to me. I'm sold on the idea that local veggies require less fossil fuel to produce and ship (smaller farm infrastructures, smaller distances to market), support family farmers and businesses, and keep dollars in a local economy. The American food system, as dependent as it is on fossil fuels, is unsustainable in the long term, so it makes sense to me to start embracing and supporting alternatives now. I also really like being in touch with the seasons - broccoli in the spring and fall but not high summer, that amazing period when honesy crisps are available, asian pear season. It helps to ground me where I live, and I'm lucky to live in a richly agricultural area.

But we're in to winter now, down to mostly root vegetables (and bread and animal products) at the farmer's market. Eating local is important to me, but so is eating vegetables, and I think vegetables from far away are slightly better than processed frozen ones. So I've ventured back to the conventional produce stalls at Reading Terminal. Bring on the brawny non-organic kale.

Price is part of it too. $4 for scrawny late season greens at the farmer's market just makes me sad. I spend a lot of time thinking about food and how it's a cultural commodity - something people consume for meaning as well as function - and the cost of food, social class and priorities (paying 25 cents for a single large carrot totally motivates me to walk the extra three blocks to avoid an ATM fee). I'm an underpaid nonprofit worker, and sometimes I need to take a break from expensive local food. More and more, winter is becoming that break. I feel OK about it.

That said, Michael Pollan totally put it all in perspective when I saw him at the White Dog this week with my mom: local food is expensive, he said, not only because of higher production value (smaller scale, etc.) but also because it's not subsidized. More often when you buy from farmer's markets you're paying closer to the true cost - meaning that what is sometimes the true cost of food could be considered, well, expensive.

That wasn't really a revelation to me, but hearing it again has me wondering now about those innocent looking onions at the Iovine. You gotta wonder, where's the line?

Shameless self promotion

2008-01-05T17:08:00.001-05:00

Allow me to talk Quaker for a minute and tell you about a project I'm involved in at work, which has just raised enough money to officially launch and now has a website: the Quaker Youth Book Project, which is being sponsored by an organization called Quakers Uniting in Publications (QUIP).

The vision is for an anthology of nonfiction writing and art by Quakers ages 15-30, also edited by young people, from all branches of the Religious Society of Friend, and hopefully from all over the world, speaking to young people's spiritual experiences and engagement with Quakerism. We're just now recruiting an editorial board who will shape the call for submissions later this year and are anticipating publication in 2009/2010 ("anticipating" always being the operative word in small press publishing).

The Religious Society of Friends has had a series of schisms since George Fox first started causing trouble in England in the 1650s, and there are now at least four distinct branches of Quakerism that are often affiliated with national or international associations or governing bodies. (For a better explanation of the branches than I could write, see the Quaker Information Center.)

Quakers in the United States (who are, ahem, nearly if not definitely outnumbered by Friends in Africa) can really run the gamut from non-Christ centered hippy peace activists to very definitely Evangelical conservative Christians (with lots of stereotype defying in between). Because parts of the Quaker family are not organized hierarchically while others are, the possibility for variation between local meetings or chuches is even more impressive. The theological diversity also exists globally. There are a lot of differences between the branches, as well as some similarities.

Lately I've been thinking about this diversity as a gift, as an opportunity to explore, in microcosm, some of the religious and cultural differences that happen among Christians, among Americans, and on the world stage -- as an opportunity to do some of the really hard work of dialogue in my own house, so to speak. It may be cliche, but I have a large extended family, so thinking of Quakers (and more broadly, Christians) in that way is constructive for me: we don't necessarily have to agree with or like one another, but there is an imperitive to at least respect if not love one another -- which is not really an imperitive limited to Quakers or Christians. I find the possibility for dialogue, for listening and learning in contexts were agreement is not necessarily expected, to be really exciting, so am particularly excited to play a role in this book project.

QUIP isn't the first or only Quaker organization or community to explore ecumenism among Friends. Friends World Committee for Consultation has been at it for a long time, as has Young Friends of North America (though I confess to a be a little foggy on the history, demise and resurection of YFNA) and sites like QuakerQuaker.org have become a clearing house for communication about cross branch dialogue and synthesis.

So there's definitely a precedent, and even though it's a project in the context of work, and eventhough it definitely wasn't my idea, I feel lucky and excited to be along for the ride.

Go check out the website. I worked hard on it: www.quakeryouth.org/quipbook

What does it mean to Mum?

2008-01-02T20:16:00.000-05:00

Grad school applications are still kicking my ass, so I'll go for an obvious Philadelphia-in-the-New-Year post: The Mummers!

For those of you not in Philadelphia, the Mummers Parade is a New Years Day tradition in Philadelphia. Mostly-male mummers glam up in dresses, make up and metallic sneakers, or elaborate feathered body suits and glittery person-propelled mini-floats, and march up Broad street from South Philadelphia to brass and marching bands. There are elaborate mobil theater sets for people to dance in front of, weird "cake walk" dancing that involves two steps forward and one step back (and bobbing umbrellas), and, my personal favorte: phalanxes of banjos!

I know that sounds kind of weird, but it's something unique about Philly, OK? Kind of like our Mardi Gras.

And like Mardi Gras, it's also about alcohol. Lots of alcohol. Lots of public drunkeness on Broad Street. (One well meaning gentlemen, who for some reason had a cane in each hand though he appeared to be fine on his feet, shook the canes at us demanding "Where - WHERE - are your alcoholic beverages?!")

The roots of mummering are disputed, or at least complicated: there are definitely some ancient pre-Christian revelry influences (supposedly the word is German in origin), but the Mummers also come out of a tradition of minstrel shows, Black face and Vaudeville. Women were banned for a long time. You wont see Black face anymore, but the ethnic stereotypes are out in force: people in stylized Indian and "Chinaman" costumes, overized sombreros, etc. My friends and I were joking that we should have played ethnic stereotype bingo.

There are also a lot of pirates and witches and scarecrows and fish and other pretty benign costumes. The Fancies -- the guys with the elaborate feather mini-floats -- are often less ethnically and racially charged than the Comics (who mostly just dance around), and more serious about their craft and competition. But despite the gradual inclusion of women and people of color, even today the Mummers are mostly white men, often dressing up like women and people of color. An the audience is largely white.

Is the anthro "ritual of reversal" theory still hip? If I've got it right, its that idea that celebratory events - like Carnivale - in which people dress up like their social betters and break the rules actually only reinforce oppressive power structures, rather than subverting them.

I think that idea might offer something to this situation. It helps to know that most of the groups are blue coller and march with flags from various European countries - Ireland, Poland, Italy. In a lot of ways, the Mummers Parade is when Philly's working class white - and probably largely Catholic - community has their day. But they don't make fun of rich people. No. They make fun of people further down (at least traditionally) on the social power scale. Maybe the reversal isn't there - but I think the the idea that what looks like subversion is really just reinforcement is important. The Mummers parade would not be a safe place for openly gay men in drag, despite all dresses and make up on big burly South Philly guys. It's arguably not really a safe place for women either, particularly as the night wears on and people get drunker.

My love for the Mummers is complicated, sort of like my love for Philadelphia. It's unique to my city and I grew up with it - and it's a rediculous and sometimes beautiful spectacle - but it's also really skrewed up.

That's why this year I was excited to see what seemed like signs of something new. For awhile we walked just ahead of a gold Chinese dragon that was snaking its way above the sidewalk crowd (and whose handlers were smilingly handing out flyers about Chinese New Year) and at one point there was a really excellent step team of African American teenagers performing in the street (I assume they were part of the parade line up).

I would be really gung ho for the Mummers to turn into a more broadly inclusive Philadelphia tradition, where everybody gets dressed up (whatever that means, glitter and drag or not) and acts silly to bring in the New Year.

It's that question of holding the center: how do we expand a tradition to be more inclusive, without loosing the tradition? I think we can do it, because the basic building blocks of the Mummers - family, community, collaboration, artistry, revelry, debauchery - are fairly universal. The cake walk itself is a fairly basic dance, and doesn't really require stereotyping somebody else. And it's not about the flags at all. I have no problem with ethnic pride and national flags - it's just that it would be cool to have other flags added to the mix, other dances, other kinds of music.

Christmas hysterics

2007-12-18T18:56:00.000-05:00

Actually, it hasn't been that bad, aside from roving accordian players in Trader Joe's and the Christmas tree depot across the street catching fire.

But I'm thoroughly engrossed in grad school essay writing and gift wrangling, so I'll be back in the New Year. Probably with some anthropology-fueled diatribe about gift giving and Christmas decorations.

Screen time & story time

2007-12-04T18:08:00.000-05:00

It's been about six months since I/we pulled the plug on the TV.

I can't take all the credit. The roommate who owned the bunny ears moved out in June and I failed to replace them. So the TV sat unused for awhile until my new roommate and I converted the spare bedroom into a guest room slash movie watching room. We now have a DVD player for movies, but the TV doesn't get any reception, let alone cable.

And the amazing thing is, I mostly don't miss it. There have been a few evenings when I've been under the weather and wanted to collapse in front of the TV for my a Simpsons-World News-Simpsons media meal, but beyond that (and sort of wanting to watch the CNN/YouTube debates), I'm FINE. Really.

It has me feeling sort of baffled about time. How did I ever have time to watch TV? At this point in my life, I am definitely not super Type A or overscheduled, but after interacting with my roommate, working on various projects, hanging out with friends, cooking and eating food, etc, my evenings are pretty much done. Is there some weird TV-watching time-use formula, sort of like the consumption formula? Instead of "the more you have the more you want," it's something like "the more time you waste the more there is to waste?" Or is it how you use time that influences how much of it you think you have? Is time like rich food: a little, used well, goes a long way?

I recently re-read Momo by Michael Ende, who also wrote The Neverending Story. Unlike The Neverending Story, Momo is out of print in the US and has never been butchered by movie producers, so its a lot less well known here. It's explicitly (and sort of hoakily-beautifully) about time, as well as consumerism and capitalism, friendship, imagination and storytelling. Momo is a homeless girl who lives in an abandoned amphitheater on the outskirts of a European city, and passes her days playing with her friends and telling stories until the Men in Grey appear. The Men in Grey are nefarious time bankers who live on hours stolen from people who have been convinced to "save" their time by not day dreaming, playing, or doing anything that isn't productive and stream-lined. It was published in the 1970's but is still amazingly insightful.

TV is only a subtle presence in the book -- one of the main characters starts out as an amazing but penniless storyteller and is "discovered," only to resort to rehashed narratives and canned plot conventions for TV specials -- but it's definitely part of the stream lining the Men in Grey advocate. I think Ende wants us to understand TV as canned and stream-lined stories, and a poor substitute for what has been happening among gathered people and around fires since there were people. That TV makes the storytelling experience more passive, and less about personal and community history, is definitely something to worry about.

I maintain that stories are how we teach and remind eachother to be human -- that listening to each other's stories is a basic act of love. Maybe that means I should be even more turned off by TV's addictive blue glow and constant attempts to get me to buy into concepts and products. (When I hear corporate brands and development campaigns described as "really just stories" I want to shout "keep your capitalist paws off the stories, assholes!") But actually understanding that there are basic storytelling themes and conventions -- love, reconciliation, living in community, redemption, prodigal wandering, the search for truth -- at the root of a lot of TV shows actually makes them vaguely redeemable for me. In the end, I think stories might be more powerful. Maybe I am an optimist.

Last Saturday my friend R came over for a couple hours in the afternoon. We spent awhile on the couch picking out flower seeds and planning a garden, and then baked cookies before going our seperate ways for the evening. At some point mid-baking, amidst a conversation about what the Beatles meant to us when we were teenagers, I thought Woah, this is what I want. At some point in an earlier part of my life, that kind of activity and quality time with friends who live nearby is exactly what I imagined for some future fantasy version of my life. Those moments when I stumble into that vision are nourishing and exciting. Not surprisingly, TV never has anything to do with it.

****
Oh, and what I said about later first snows in Philadelphia? Nevermind. This picture was taken December 2nd. Apparently we are doing winter this year.

United States of Jesusland

2007-11-24T16:08:00.001-05:00

I've been working on grad school essays for divinity school applications recently. If we're close (or even if we're not that close) I've probably confessed my grad school aspirations to you recently. If not, surprise! No, I'm not thinking of going for a masters in political science, or journalism, or that old stand by anthropology, but an MDiv -- the degree ministers get, eventhough I was raised agnostic and practice right now with a nonpastoral faith community. I know -- I think it's a little crazy too, but also exciting.

In writing those essays and trying to explain why I'm interested in divinity school, I've been surprised to find myself going back to that red-blue map that was so prevalent after the 2004 election and its juxtaposition with the far more powerful purple map. The most recent presidential elections have come at pivotal times in my life -- senior year of high school, when I was just old enough to vote, and my senior year of college, when I was a burned out organizer with little hope that Bush would be defeated. Throughout my life, whenever I would have an experience of an arch conservative throwing down the Bibe, I'd immediately have a strong desire to be able throw it back. I felt it during those elections acutely. But I was dumb about the Bible. (I'm only slightly less dumb about it now.)

After both elections I was deeply disturbed and saddened by the reality of and emphasis on divisions in America -- between Democrats and Republicans, between Christians and non-Christians, between the right and the left. Wanting to be able to better speak to those divisions is probably one of the reasons I want to go to seminary. I still want to be able to respond when neocons quote the Bible, but now its less about wanting to throw it back and more about wanting to pick it up, open it, point, and say something knowledgable and constructive.

So more and more I'm excited by people and resources that blur those boundaries and aren't fearful about stealing back and forth across supposed fronts in the "Culture Wars" (is it possible to be a CO in those wars?) I've been reading Shane Claiborne's book, and today stumbled upon a really exciting blog, Revolution in Jesusland, which follows two lefties as they explore the progressive evangelical movement across the US. I plan to add it to the roster of blogs I lurk on -- hopefully the knitting blogs wont mind. I suggest you check it out.

(Thanks to Martin for lifting up the blog on QuakerQuaker.org)

Disappearing Philadelphia

2007-11-18T20:12:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I imagine Philadelphia as a sleeping giant. This is less about the Next-Great-City thing than it is about being fascinated by broke down old buildings and forgotten corners.

After decades of minimal development, so much of the city is still 18th and 19th century low rise, even downtown. The skyscrapers cluster together mostly west of City Hall and its not uncommon for the first floors of older structures to be in use while the floors above them are abandoned -- both in poorer neighborhoods and in some the older, ostensibly redeveloped eastern parts of the city.

But that's changing. There are a lot of sky scrapers in the works, and even though considerable care sometimes goes in to converting older buildings in to businesses, restaurants, boutiques, condos etc., I wouldn't be surprised if many are lost to the grinding wheels of development and the city looks radically different in ten years. So I'm going to start documenting forgotten corners and abandoned buildings with my point and shoot digital camera.

Not because their destruction is imminent, but because I think they may have something to teach me/us. I am not sure that it's an all important lesson -- as much as I am fascinated by decay, I also try not fetishize it. And I'd definitely rather buildings be used and people have quality housing and places to work than the city be full of empty spooky structures. So maybe its a sad quiet but not uncommon lesson about human fickleness, change and values through architecture.

In this post: 1) the Valu Plus Store/palace at Chestnut and Juniper 2) The empty Art Deco-ish building on the first block of south 11th just past the CVS 3) cobblestones and dumpsters on Clover Street, 13th between Market and Chestnut.

Settling in and stocking up

2007-11-14T19:12:00.001-05:00

I was going to write a post about the rediculous anarchist movie that I got from Neflix earlier this week, but seeing as how it was released in 2002 I suspect it's not news to anyone but me. You should go look at the link and maybe even Netflix it yourself, though -- I really think it wants to be a CIA-funded after school special.

So instead, I will sing the praises of my current favorite small book publisher: South End Press. They're a nonprofit collective based in Boston that's been majority women for decades and at least 50% people of color since the 90's. And damned if they don't keep publishing books that I absolutely need to read about the nonprofit industrial complex, gender, the media, and sustainability. Most recently its Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, and I'm excited about the forthcoming A Do-It-Ourselves Guide For Sustainable City Living too.

I think fall is going to be brief here in Philly, and daylight savings a week ago reminded me why I've never liked November. Allowing myself to be liberal with purchases from South End's inventory has been part of the prepping for winter that I am now seriously engaged in. Plastic is going up on the drafty double hung windows, the war with the mice has begun in earnest, and I'm brainstorming ways to stay sane in the colder, darker months. Hopefully there'll be lots of cooking with friends, movie watching, pot lucks and art projects. Clearly I've given in the LLBean/Landsend etc. admonishment to "stock up!", only instead of ribbed turtlenecks I've been accumulating books and yarn for knitting projects (both from my new favorite website, and from torn apart old sweaters). This winter I will be serious about self care. Really.

In the mean time I hope to soak up as much as I can of fall's warm colors while they last even if they come in the form of fabulous global warming sunsets.

Finally, Finally Fall

2007-11-01T19:58:00.000-04:00

We had the hottest October on record here in the City of Philadelphia, and there was something so unnatural about wanting to wear short sleeves to Peoplehood. Normally the crisp autumnal rustle of October is my favorite time of year, culminating in Halloween (my appreciation for which has changed over the years), but I think I may need to reconsider November as my new favorite month: the balmy temperatures seem to have finally given way to cool nights and appropriate fall foliage.

The weird whether has me marveling how quick people are to chock something up to climate change these days. It's not just for hippies and environmentalists anymore. I think we've reached a critical mass where the differences from even a few years ago are obvious to everyday people -- CNN is even on the bandwagon with its "Planet in Peril!" feature online (and presumably on TV). Having lived in the same ecosystem basically my whole life, I'm fairly certain I see changes: hotter autumns, later snow, less crickets and lightning bugs, less summer thunderstorms.

I found a video by way of a Quaker blog today that is a very short, concise argument for why we should take action on climate change. If the profile on YouTube is true, its part of a series of videos by a high school science teacher about climate change. It's pretty interesting, though the director seems to think his original video -- "The Most Terrifying Video You Will Ever See" -- was flawed and demanded follow up (I'm not sure I see the flaw).

**

Having lived so much of my life on an academic calendar, fall always means new beginnings and a fresh start: the chance to try on new or recycled pieces of identity. I inevitably start going to meeting again -- I think I've really only seen the inside of Central Phila monthly meeting in October for the whole time I've lived in Philly -- and consider big projects that get abandoned well before February's icy darkness. I think the "big projects" model might be one bad pattern I'm ready to lay down in my 25th year (which seems like as good a time as any to lay down bad patterns), so instead I'm considering a new fall theme: take it one step at a time, and brainstorm practical ways to survive the winter. Unraveling sweaters to recycle for yarn has been a good metaphor for the former: often I can't see more than one stich ahead when cutting the seams, and the next stitch reveals itself only when the one before it has been cut.

A big piece of my life recently has been preparing, or procrastinating on preparing, for the GREs. In big projects mode, I started out with a goal to do three math and one or two verbal sections a week to leave time to review the many mathmatical factoids I have starred (starred means "news to me!"). That hasn't totally happened, though I"m feeling surprisingly unstressed about the test on Saturday and I've been flashing back to that 80's movie "The Labrynth," which has David Bowie in scary spandex and which I watched a lot when I was young, and the heroine's oft-repeated "You have no power over me!"

Feeling like I needed to study rather than hang out with my friends made me reconsider whether or not I'm ready to re-don a familiar old pattern: school. I think I need more time to consider how I can take that tool up again but in a new way.

**

In closing and in other news, I'm going to try to be disciplined (big project alert!) and post here once a week at minimum. I'm sure that will make all of my regulars happy -- all three of you. And it will be good writing practice for me too. If I seem to devolve into media analysis, its because I'm stumped for ideas.

PS thanks to Adam for the picture! Are you sleeping?

Dumbledore is gay!

2007-10-22T12:18:00.000-04:00

J.K. Rowling totally outed Albus Dumbledore last week at a reading at Carnegie Hall:

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds "true love."

"Dumbledore is gay," the author responded to gasps and applause.

Cause gay people can't find true love or something? Though overall I think this is pretty exciting, and seems very intentional and fearless on Rowling's part, I'm also a lot disappointed that Dumbledore's love for the evil wizard Gellert Grindelwald is so tragic. Rowling even calls it that.

Another tragic pop culture queer love affair. Cause we needed more of those.

Maybe Minerva McGonagall and Madame Hooch can be happy together, in fan fiction if no where else.

At the simmering edge

2007-09-28T14:51:00.000-04:00

I never know how infuriated to be with articles about West Philly, the feed-me blob that is University City, and gentrification. It doesn't help that lately the phenomenon itself has been making me kind of crazy.

The snap shots newspapers try to do generally don't impress me (That PW article about crusty punks? Blah) and usually fall into "yes this is complicated and very nuanced, but development ain't so bad" line of thinking.

There's an Inky article today by Melissa Dribben about the brew pub and its place on the "gentrification frontier" and how various people feel about the change the brew pub so clearly portends. She manages to get in some decent observations before falling into the usual cliches and managing to do a gallingly sweeping history of West Philly.

I've been working with the idea for awhile that this kind of frontier-pioneer language is racist and classist and rooted in a culture of imperialism. Think of a frontier as something to be tamed, something empty, wild, full of possibility? Like the Oregon Trail? Wrong. There were Native Americans living in western states back then, just like there are low income and people of color living in gentrifying neighborhoods now. They're not part of the landscape like overgrown weeds or precarious abandoned houses -- and a neighborhood is more than houses.

I'm not saying development is bad. I just want to know who it's for. Is it for the people who already live in a neighborhood? Does it address poverty?

This is what I know. Last night I was sitting in the bay window working on my computer, and I looked outside to see four cop cars pulled up around the church, and three or four young Black men with their hands in the air leaning against an SUV. Then more cop cars came and the kids were being frisked pretty bad -- I don't think I understood before last night how frisking is as much about violation and dominance as it is about finding weapons --- and were being questioned ("Where do you live? Where DO YOU LIVE?" "Are you American?")

Then everyone stood around awkwardly, including the six or so cops. Then the kids got on their bikes and rode away. Wrong kids I guess.

If that's neighborhood change, I don't want it.

Femin-knitty

2007-09-09T10:19:00.000-04:00

I've been looking at blogs and Flickr pools a lot the past few weeks, especially those related to gardening, knitting, and general crafting -- mostly to blow off steam at work when I need to look at something pretty for 10 minutes before diving back into a writing or editing project.

The various knitting pools and groups on Flickr, and a lot of the bigger knitting blogs, are totally fascinating and so
far I've noticed several really interesting trends: 1) Balls and skeins of yarn posed and photographed as if they were food, in bowls and often with actual food 2) Calling arty photographs of yarn "yarn porn" and describing pictures of unusued yarn collections as "stash flashes" (though maybe that's a reference to a camera flash and not the other kind) 3) Pervasive sheepishnes about large yarn collections and big purchases at yarn stores -- though I feel like its not a revelation anymore to note that women, still, consistently berate themselves for indulging or overindulging in something they enjoy, be it yarn or food, 4) The frequent use of cutsey precious language to praise other people's work.

And the knitty bloggers and Flickr-ers are largely, though not entirely, women. No surprises there.

Please don't get me wrong, I like to knit. And I have several badass knitter friends (not all women) who regularly make totally amazing things. I'm inclined to agree that the appeal of knitting and crochet is that it offers a simple way to create hand made objects, and that it can often be meditative and relaxing (once you get past the snarly learning phase). I also agree with people who have noted that knitting is a reclaiming of an old, even pre-industrial creative form that that was often women's work. I know from experience that knitting feels good and somehow old and like it has a lot to offer -- and that it's nice to give things you've made to the people you love.

But knitting and crochet also surf -- and this is where I think a lot of the dynamism comes in -- a line between the domestic and the artistic. How many people who knit -- especially people who make up patterns and dye and spin their own wool -- identify as artists? Some definitely do, and some of the bloggers are really articulate about it. But my sense is that a lot of them would be quicker to describe themselves as "crafty" and to describe what they do as a craft.

My desktop dictionary defines a craft is "something made by hand" and Wikipedia describes it as a "practical art." Both emphasize skill and a certain amount of visual appeal, but its clear that a craft is something that is useful and not beautiful or moving for the sake of being beautiful or moving (like, say, a painting).

I kind of think -- and this is not a new idea-- that the distinction between craft and art is a little arbitraty and definitely gendered. I'm not trying to lump felt-and-glue tea cozies in with Picassos, but seeing as how for so long women were masters of a lot of domestic crafts -- sewing, knitting, crochet, food, etc. -- and how most cultures, at least traditionally, used ornmentation of everday objects to communicate and reflect cultural and religious feeling, calling things "crafts" and considering them below art seems like a way of devaluing women's work. There's a class component too -- even though you can be an artist without going to art school, I think traditionally being, say, a painter or sculptor assumed a different kind of training and clientele than being a furniture maker (for men, being apprenticed), or sewer (learning from your mom).

To bring this back to knitting, it seems to me that a lot of the language around knitting on Flickr that implies sex, naughty-ness, excess and indulgence is bizarrely reinforcing knitting as a female practice and as "not totally serious." And while I'm not ready to extoll the artistic value of every hand made chunky scarf I've ever seen, it seems to me that the several-years-old knitting craze is a good opportunity to think and talk about different art forms and traditions and to scout out and claim a re-articulation and practice of art in the everday.

That's my feminist class-based analysis for the day. Knitters of the world, unite. You're artists, and we all need art.

*Thanks to EPS for the knitted uterus and fallopian tubes!

Symphony

2007-08-09T10:12:00.001-04:00

I'm pretty much in love with the corner my house is on.

We had friends over for dessert last night to celebrate my roommate's new job, and most of the party was dominated by an outdoor church service in the park put on by the AME church across the street. That park, petite as it is, gets used for jazz concerts every Friday, not to mention regular Food Not Bombs distros, punk concerts and the occasional surprise New Orleans Jazz Band or loan violinist. There's also the daily energy of individual kids and summer camps that use the jungle gym, the guys that hang out and play cards and chess, and everybody else who moves through on foot, bicycle, or scooter.

The diverse use of the park is a good representation of the collisions and coexistance that go on in the neighborhood. Residents in the general area include radical puppeteers, fancy choclateers, Penn employees, aged Black Panthers, and retired singers who have travelled the world, not to mention families totally new to the block, collective houses, and folks that have been there for decades. The punky cafe and bike shop, and sligtly less punky yoga studio that proceeded the decidedly unpunk brew pup that's about to open up across the street, communicate some of that coexistance and change too.

As the gospel music was wrapping up, the local punk band started rehearsing. I'm not sure who or where they are, but they're close enough to be pretty loud. Their often-rehearsed big hit starts out with a lilting, almost waltzy violin intro, and then intensifies into deep gutteral singing and moaning.

The rumble and clatter of the trolley punctuated the violin along with the sounds of people out and about and kids shouting on a hot summer night, I thought about how sometimes, SOMETIMES, this kind of coexistance with a subtext of gentrification can be sustainable. I often feel like the second advance wave of change in a way that makes me sad and conflicted, but last night I felt like part of a pretty amazing, if cacaphonous, symphony.