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    • Feb

    23

    Unfurnished

    Filed Under from the heart, small happinesses, spiritual practice, uuism | 4 Comments


    At times I am aware of not having touched anything living in days. In the winter months, sometimes weeks will pass. Not a tree, not a flower, not an animal - not even the dirt outside my front door. Everything is cement, metal, plastic, carpet – or coated in several layers of polyurethane. The only thing I touch that comes from the earth is my food. Maybe this is why grocery shopping at Whole Foods or New Seasons is not only my favorite type of shopping, but an activity I rank among the most enjoyable. I spend the vast majority of time in the produce section, admiring the colors, shapes and variety. Life in those moments feels rich and abundant.

    Towards the end of my favorite film, The Thin Red Line, the character of Welsh voices over, “If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack.” That is how I feel sometimes about the natural world: on a daily basis, it is missing. The Pacific Northwest is full of natural beauty and opportunities for outdoor recreation; and there are dozens of parks in this city. But I get so caught up in the quotidian movements of my life that sitting down on the ground, sticking my fingers in the soil - things I did so easily as a child - such desires are balled up and stuffed like garbage into the deepest pits of my soul.

    But I can’t deny it. Sometimes I find myself waiting at the bus stop and - if the iPod isn’t doping me with tunes - I feel a compelling urge to put my hands on the lower bodies of the big elm trees. At first I hope no one is watching, but after a few minutes, I stop caring.

    I need to take more time for things of this nature.

    Today, Dan Harper wrote a thoughtful entry about observing sublimity in the landscapes where we live. After commenting on an essay about urban nature-life, he asks, “So what’s the role of liberal religion in reclaiming the sublimity of nature in our cities?” Well, as a humanist I believe in rationality, but as one who believes in the existence of spirit, I feel the lack when all I have in my life is controlled and plastic and straight edges.

    There are days I forget I’m not just a person, but a living creature, too. I can convince myself that life is all about ideas and conversations – even relationships with other people. Yet despite this, I feel the lack. I need my religion to feed me more than words; I need it to push me out of doors – out of the doors of the church sometimes ….

    (Photo by HSA: Smiling in the summertime; in the courtyard of All Souls Church of NYC. 2003)

    Popularity: 8% [?]

    Feb

    22

    bell hooks Lecture, Part 2

    Filed Under books, class, events, gender, heteropatriarchy, people, race | 1 Comment

    Throughout her lecture, bell hooks repeatedly referred to our society as a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (though perhaps not in that order). Whenever she would use this phrase – as easily and matter of factly as one might say, “in North America” – there were twitters of laughter in the audience. I recall squirming in my seat, glancing at my companions, and giggling nervously. At one point, hooks called attention to the snickers in the crowd; she pointed out that while the words seemed rough or dramatic, they were true. And we need to ask ourselves why we are uncomfortable with calling things by their true names? Instead, we find a way to make fun of them, or deem them “too harsh.” She invited the audience to call things as they really are so that we could begin to see them as they really are. I will have to be mindful of my own verbal blindness.

    When a lesbian mother asked bell hooks for advice on raising boys not to be molded by the patriarchal culture, hooks’ response was, “I am [an advocate] of homeschooling for boys.” This came as a pleasant surprise to me, having been home/unschooled myself from the age of 12. hooks also suggested the active, involved presence of males in the lives of the mother’s sons – men who modeled ways in which to be in healthy relationship with others.

    Another woman at the microphone asked for advice on how white women could be allies to black women, or women of color. “White women I love have done the work of educating themselves,” hooks said. She explained that she has some very close white friends. One of her friends is so adept that she can spot racism in a shared experience sooner than bell does. The friend can do this because she sees things through the same lens. Her friends, she said, share some of her interests and values, but also – and this is important - she isn’t seen as “other” by the white friends she holds dear. They are white women who have done “their work of unlearning racism, and then are able to have a subject-to-subject encounter.”

    A young man reminded hooks that she’d bemoaned the lack of black think tanks in the US, but she herself was working at a small, mostly-white school. He questioned why she was not instead a professor at an historically black college (HBC). hooks replied that she had offered herself to HBCs, but had been rejected. “Colleges and universities are by nature conservative institutions,” she said. They are concerned with training young people on how to be good workers and obedient citizens. This was no less true of HBCs, and she was just considered too radical.

    hooks spoke quite a bit about domination. One attendee questioned hooks on the possibility of ever doing away with the current dominant culture. Wouldn’t it just be replaced with another dominant culture? hooks’ reply was that it was really sad that “most people in the US probably believe that domination is normal and inevitable.” They say things like, “it’s natural! and we can’t break with nature.” Even leaving apart the dubiousness of that statement, if we were so concerned about what nature dictated, we would naturally shit all over ourselves – yet we’ve found ways around that. She talked about partnership models. There was also some conversation about The Chalice and the Blade, Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power, and the correlation between agriculture and the rise of domination.

    Midway through her lecture, hooks talked about knowledge of one’s rights and responsibilities. She lamented that black children weren’t being taught the things she was taught as a child: to love the principles of this country and to see them as valuable and attainable. Even though rights and dignities were withheld from her and other peoples, she’d been brought up with the sense that they were hers to fight for, and to have. She remembered taking part in assemblies in which the children wrote essays on Freedom and other ideals. If you don’t know what it means to have Freedom - if you’ve never even thought about it - how can you want to preserve it? She warned against cynicism - especially among young people.

    -End of summary.

    Edit: Thanks to Wendy for correcting me on the “white supremacist etc.” phrase.

    Popularity: 13% [?]

    Feb

    21

    bell hooks Lecture, Part 1

    Filed Under books, class, events, gender, heteropatriarchy, movies, pop culture, quotes, race | 5 Comments


    They like to call Coretta Scott King ‘the black Jackie Onassis.’ I don’t need a Jackie Onassis! Give me a Gloria Steinem.
    ~bell hooks

    The parents, the fellow and I went to see theorist and academic bell hooks speak at Reed College earlier this month. Of course, I knew who bell hooks was, but I’d never heard her speak, or even seen her in interview. I was excited because I consider bell hooks to be more than just an academic, but a person I can learn from: a wise person. My only hope was that she would be as radical and accessible as she seemed to be in the writings of hers that I’d read.

    First, hooks talked about anger. When she was in her “shrill” 20s, she said, she was often perceived as “too angry” to be listened to. Like many people who have begun to seriously reflect about the injustices they have endured and seen, she was in a lot of pain, and wanted people to know about that pain. But as she got older, she decided to cultivate a more inviting style of communication. This came from interactions she’d had with Buddhist teachers who had experienced “genocidal holocaust,” yet insisted on talking about forgiveness.

    Although some of her readers perceived her as going soft, she began to question what she called the “binary thinking” that exists among both progressives and conservatives. Both fall prey to a dualism that says there is always a victim, and an oppressor. By setting themselves up in opposing relations, people fail to be transformed - or to create transformation.

    hooks railed against the movie, Crash, which has been nominated for a few Academy Awards. She referred to it as shit, among other things. “A six year old could tell you who the hero of the movie is,” she said, pointing out that the only character in the story to transcend racism and sexism is the racist, sexist white police officer. He is the only person who is redeemed. hooks viewed the relationship between the black television producer and his wife as yet another depiction of a black couple sharing contempt for each other. She asked, why is contempt between a black man and a black woman so normalized in America that when you question it, even black people will say, “but it’s real!” She prefers Spike Lee’s, 4 Little Girls, as a movie that people can watch if they want to see a film that honestly looks at racism, post traumatic stress and mental health. She emphasized that black folks need to look at the effect that anger is having on our health. That anger needs to be recycled into something that counteracts despair and illness.


    She told us how she wrote a book about a little black girl and her loving parents, and it was very sweet and nice. But when the publishers showed her the cover they’d designed, it featured the little girl in some kind of chokehold by her mother, and the father nowhere in sight. She asked, “where’s the father?” and was told, “Oh, the target audience for this book doesn’t have fathers.” Eventually, the cover was modified to feature the little girl and both her parents.

    She talked about black women staying in their place. Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King are talked about as such regal, elegant women, which they were. But “Rosa Parks was chosen.” Rosa Parks was not the first black, working woman to refuse to give up her seat for a white man, but she was an ideal vision of a black woman: married, neat, “respectable” in all senses of the word. She was not a single mother, illiterate, or any other thing considered ugly. Coretta Scott King is touted as “the black Jackie Onassis,” she said. “Jackie Onassis? …. I don’t need a Jackie Onassis. Give me a Gloria Steinem.” She added, and they say, isn’t it nice … isn’t it wonderful that Coretta never married again? hooks said, “No!” Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great spiritual leader, but this didn’t mean he was the greatest of husband. She found it sad that Scott King never found love again. And the audience burst into a kind of shocked applause when she said, And do you think, that if it had been Coretta who had died, and left Martin Luther King, Jr. a widower in his 30s, that he would not have found someone else? She decided to change the subject, noting that she wasn’t intending to be controversial; she wasn’t trying to pick on Coretta Scott King. She was drawing attention to the forms that black women must adhere to if we are to be considered intelligent and honorable.

    hooks mentioned Cindy Sheehan’s arrest for wearing a t-shirt at a Presidential event. What kind of culture of passive acceptance are we living in, when this is allowed to happen, she asked. We are living in a culture of fear of our own government. She used the f-word in reference to the current state of affairs.

    And yet, later in the evening, hooks remarked that she was booed at a college event when she mentioned the possibility of Bush and Rice changing their views. “Why is that?” she asked. Why would people boo me for saying that? Again, the dualism and the binary mentality. I believe, she said, “that the doorway of possibility and change is open.” While one cannot make sexist, patriarchal, white supremist, capitalistic people into allies, (”don’t wear yourself where there is no space of openness”), she stressed the importance of always keeping the lines of communication clear - of always being ready to be in relationship with people whose opinions are markedly differently from one’s own.

    Coming up in Part 2: pride, raising sons, domination culture, white women

    Popularity: 10% [?]

    Feb

    20

    Choosing to Love

    Filed Under books, love, quotes | 2 Comments



    When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same.
    ~bell hooks, All About Love

    So I’ve been loving someone for the past month and no one ever told me how time consuming this was. I used to think lolling around doing nothing with anyone - no matter how fascinating a person - would be tiresome. It’s not. These days I sing little ditties I’ve made up, right into his smiling face. I bounce in my seat. I rock from side to side in contentment. Strange things bring me pleasure for no apparent reason. The other day the fellow and I were talking about religion, and I mused, “I think I’m a spiritual humanist.” His plainspoken response was, “Well, I’m a secular humanist.” At this, I actually felt happy!

    I was the first one to say “I love you,” which I’d never said to any man not related to me by blood or marriage. He said, “It makes me very happy to hear you say this,” but was not ready to say the words back. That was okay with me. I did not have any anxieties or fears about it. I understood that for him, Love might be a state of being, but for me, loving him was an act I was committing. Later, I read in bell hooks’ book, All About Love, that “to love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise,” and that “love is an act of will - namely, both an intention and action.”*

    There was a young man before this one who I’d abruptly and without warning “fallen in love” with. I never said anything to him about it, and he never said anything to me about it. I had no courage. After much thought on the matter I came to this conclusion: if I lacked the will to speak to him about my feelings, then I had no business trying to be in love with him; I was not ready. Almost immediately upon this realization, I felt elated and free. No more heartache and wringing of the hands. I was content with our friendship status. One week later, my mother introduced me to the fellow I’m seeing now, and after two months with him I decided: I am going to love him.

    Due to all this thinking about love, I’ve been paying closer attention to other relationships in which I claim to love. Am I really loving this friend or that relative? What in my behavior demonstrates that love?

    Recently a very good friend of mine has been having a difficult time. I called her because she seemed down last time I’d seen her. During our conversation it came to light that she’d been pulling away from some of her friends because she sensed that we were judging her. I remembered that a counselor had once told me that the way we related to our siblings as children was the training ground for how we related to our peers. I know that my friend’s family is very critical of her, always telling her she needs to do this or that thing to be better, more successful, etc. And I, being the oldest “responsible” child, am prone to giving advice. It finally dawned on me that my friend just needed me to listen to her, and not tell her all the things she should do differently. I relayed this to her, and she confirmed my understanding. I apologized and resolved in my heart to view her “complaints” about her problems differently. I started to tear up. I had not been as good a friend as I could have been; I had said things that had damaged our relationship - even if she wasn’t aware of it - because I’d gotten caught up in playing roles. The role of the know-it-all, or the disapproving sister, or whatever. Although I had claimed to love her, there were definitely some points at which I had stopped relating to her as who she was and who I was, and had been inauthentic, acting out of my own insecurities and pride. There were times in which I had not wanted the best for her, but had let annoyance and aggravation cause me to be haughty. I cried because I had temporarily stopped loving my friend and had gradually begun to place myself in the position of tolerating her, a horrible and horrendous thing. I went to bed that night thankful that I hadn’t lost her friendship, or her love.

    There is an acquaintance I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I did not like her at first. Actually, I had nothing against her, but some chitter chatter among friends of mine, and some obnoxious behavior on her part, quickly caused me to have some disdain for her. I disliked that she was always tooting her own horn, and that her life was so “messy.” Having always walked the straight and narrow, I had little tolerance for a woman who “created” problems for herself (as I saw it). Having made up my mind not to like her, I dismissed any positive statements about her from mutual friends. But one day, several weeks ago, I was reading something she had written, and finally broke down - I had to give the woman props for being pretty damned phenomenal. I had also, unknowingly, grown fond of her; it was actually taking effort to dislike her. I have a great deal of respect for her now. I’m ashamed of my own petty feelings about her; hopefully she’ll never know.

    It occurs to me that both of these women are part of my religious community, and if I cannot even love other UUs with my whole heart, then what hope can I have for loving the rest of the world? There are only a few hundred thousand UUs in the world; it is a good place to start!

    What I’m finding is that I have set up barriers between myself and other people without even realizing it. Placed myself in a relationship of opposition. Waged unconscious wars in my heart against them. The challenge is to recognize when I am doing it. It is a tendency in myself that I must be vigilant of. Even though I am a mild mannered person not prone to violence or even harsh words, it is still there. I must remember that. In her chapter on Values, bell hooks writes, that “when we choose to love we choose to move against fear - against alienation and separation …. To live our lives based on the principles of the love ethic, we have to be courageous.”

    *hooks quotes Fromm and Peck.

    (Photo by HSA: The doorways at the ruins of the convent Las Capuchinas, where I chose to believe in the spirit. Antigua, Guatemala. 2005).

    Popularity: 6% [?]

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