Contrast / Sight.

Most days when the earth begins to spin my horizon away from the sun, I sit drinking tea or debriefing the day with Jimmy and Roy at our table beneath the cherry and palm trees. Our neighbors have a lemon tree (that always makes me think of Palestine and the MRI gang) they often sit outside too, music and Spanish spilling across the street. Yesterday I  played tag with the neighbor kids until dark when we stumbled through a spanglish game of charades and another neighbor leaned on the fence watching in amusement till their mothers called them home. I like my neighborhood. 


And these piercing moments of beauty and life sustain me because my heart is blurred by the vastness of evils and goods. Sometimes the news (our posturing towards Iran, Syria..., SOPA) or memory, or stories (of migrants dying in the desert- and even there, women raped, of isolation, betrayals, of relapses into drugs)-- it can ache so deeply I feel like abandoning all faith. Darkness rushing in (with all the agonies and personal tragedies and brokenness of Soledad Street that seem to seep into the tiniest cracks of light and absorb them, the reminders of all the seeds of monstrosity I carry inside myself, the complexity of how we don't set out to hurt each other and yet we so often do, over and over-- in obscure and infinitesimal, obvious and subtle ways-- and heal each other the same way.)  


There are so many people in my community that I admire and am surprised by. Yesterday, I sat next to Sandra outside La Perla and she told me about how her favorite job was running a body shop, particularly the process of stripping down a car all the way to its bare metal frame (the death of it, its skeleton laying in the lot) then rebuilding it piece by piece, bringing it back to life. I was struck by how redemptive-toned the language she used was, perhaps there is something inside us that it drawn by those metaphors. Remy taught Tony and I some watercolors today and he played us a harmonica song. Later we took a walk down to the community garden and Javier gave us a tour. Watching people on the street take care of each gives me hope.


But the situation is still complex, there are politics and fights and scuffles and rudeness and exasperation and failures. Beauty. Terror. These things don't balance each other, they merely provide contrast. Perhaps that is how life shapes a landscape inside us-- chiseling through a million winds, storms, floods, flashes of light. Perhaps that is the feeling of being alive, to constantly hold the tension of the sorrow and the beating, strength of joy, of our desire to live.


One of Larisa's friends commented on her most recent post (which is something I want to reflect on and relate to my own work-Read Her Thoughts): The most important person I am with is the person I am with now. And the most important task for me in this moment is to do good to this person."  This is the philosophy of personalism that the Catholic Worker encourages.  I am trying to challenge myself to be reflective in my practice, to see both the individual person and the long haul. It's difficult... the complexity of the street, the slowness of change, the excitement of seeing the women organize. I feel overwhelmed by all I have to learn (by all that is leftover or could be done), but then there are simple interactions: I remembered someone's name, sought her out to let her know she had mail (a small thing), yet twice later she brought up how I had remembered, how I'd even remembered her last name, how she'd told her boyfriend how I remembered. -- so often, the deepest desire is just to be seen. 


Sipaj. 

Community Development in the US of A.

There's an exhaustive amount of questions and theory and living to dissect in my head. I miss sitting in Common Grounds and being able to discuss these issues.

Today a member of my community, a favorite of mine-- a 70yr. old man with bright blue eyes and weathered skin who I helped build a shelter for, gave me the first 20 pages of his biography to read. It's actually pretty well-written and fascinating. Moving here has shattered misconceptions I had about "the homeless" (and made me think about how often we use adjectives about people's situations to classify them versus returning to the fact of humanity. They are homeless people. Undocumented people. Migrant-worker people. Drug-using people. etc.). Many of my new friends are kind, smart, & strong-willed but for whatever reason (bad-decisions, bad habits, lack of ability to adapt, or lack of skills in stress/conflict management, social ability, etc.) have fallen out of what is defined as "normal" society. How do I accompany them in the unique struggles of their community and in their individual stories? It's frustrating to see people who are very capable and intelligent but lack the resources or social skills or coping abilities to function. I have been spending a lot of time thinking about "mutually liberating partnerships" and meaningful work. One exciting thing I'm working with is a woman's group, Bill-- a co-worker of mine and an amazing community organizer, has helped them establish a reading room and coffee shop micro-enterprise that is in the beginning stages but its amazing to see the women finding their voice and learning how to organize, communicate, and make their imagined futures a reality. 

[Excerpts from a letter to a friend] I've been thinking about land right's a lot. I think we hear about it as an issue in the third-world more with peasants or whatever but I've been surprised to see how it's an issue in the US too. In the coming weeks the police are planning a sweep of the homeless encampment where lots of my new friends live and we have a weekly community forum where someone asked, "where is there a place I am allowed to sleep?" The PD has said they don't want to criminalize homelessness, but it does in effect become criminalized where it is illegal to camp just about anywhere. I have been thinking about private property and how even "public" places forbid camping (or sleeping)... or with the Occupy Movement-- sleeping bags, lying down, etc. It seems like the system always benefits those who have property to protect and defend. 

Parallels that come to mind as I think of what you're doing and would love to hear your take on-- ownership/agency despite the potential of transitory. Your community faces violence, outbreaks of fighting or threatening. My community also faces violence, I've been to two memorial services in the past two weeks. They face intervention because they don't own their land. Some of my community has little investment in their surroundings besides trying to secure a place to sleep-- they are given disposable objects and get new donations rather than hold unto things (which is also understandable because it's hard to be homeless and have to lug things around but it can become a cycle.) So how have you worked on increasing ownership or desire to participate in your own community there? 

... everything that moves, loves and is afraid. (Defrees)

What I would call church: Tramping along behind Aaron, starring into tide-pools- eyes wide- as an entire world reveals itself in the pooled remnants of crashed waves: bullwhip kelp, sea anemone, hermit crabs, snails, crimson and purple starfish, egrets, seagulls, oyster catchers with tangerine beaks and amber ringed eyes. Aaron calls out scientific names and describes systems and life cycles while I squeal at the sticky tentacles harpooning my finger as the oral disc of an anemone closes. 


Life. Ineffable. Holy. Silly. Unexpected. 


Dorothy's can be a high stress environment because of the struggles and reality of life on the street, of trauma, of exhaustion, of the lack of ability to control ones environment/situation. The people I've met have quickly become friends whose well-being and community I care about. I have been thinking about my work in the day room and what it means to interact with someone in a way that empowers and brings dignity. 

stray thoughts

Power structures. Trauma healing. Self-care. Secondary-trauma. Coping mechanisms. Human needs. Living in situations of high stress.

hmm.

Oh.

Before I left Addie sent me these words of wisdom, "I don't know if they re-invent us as much as they re-arrange us. And breathe new things in to us. I worry (that using re-invent) might make you view all that is inside of you, all that has happened to you, your past, your history, your memory, your love and life... might make you miss how solid and true all of that will be forever. ... Those versions will only re-arrange, shift, transform, grow deeper and more honest."

That was a much truer picture I think. Now to be here, after so much time, I am overwhelmed (in a non-negative way) at all of the newness, the sensory overload of sorts. It will take me time to begin to explain in this blog but some beginning thoughts I've been processing.

What does it mean to treat someone with dignity? What does it look like to accompany others toward empowerment? How can we create an environment that helps give people agency, helps them search for meaning, and space to express themselves?

I am humbled by the beauty of the people I've been interacting with, both guests to Dorothy's Place & Kitchen, other volunteers, other companions, the board. This is a community that is dwelling in both brokeness and beauty. One board member said, "working with the poor is a unique way to experience our humanity." There is a quote on the wall of my home, "as long as we are in the world the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because love is the resetting of a body of broken bones."

word.

"It is not easy to hang out on the street with Christ, but the consolation is you get to hang out on the street with Christ."

love/hate

I have an exhausting relationship to church.

spirit animals

I'm moving in a week and I feel kind of terrified. Moving is a form of reienvention, a way of recreating myself with less and more of the things that shape me. I wonder at how much of who I've become in mennoland will remain with me, and I want it too. I miss my home already, MAMA house, and living with a fox, cheetah, and meadow lark.

My mad for life list so far...
1. be less abstract
2. don't oversleep
3. take public transit adventures
4. wear heels every now and then
5. try a new athletic pursuit/extreme sport

2012

Bless constellations.
Bless the blackness of the river at night, railways, and silhouettes of the blanket-capped.
Bless face paint.
Bless the smoke-like rapids, tumbling and dissipating endlessly.
Bless shapeshifting waters.
"Bless strength that does not exclude softness."

And curse fear-- its root in all our self-destructiveness,
our selfishness, and the games we play with others.

And appreciate others more.
Appreciate this moment more.
Appreciate our fragility more.

those impulsive winter blues

Mama House. Mooncats. A week of avoiding saying goodbye while drinking tea and coffee with people I've grown to love. Shenandoah Valley... a place that more than any where else in the world (which is saying a lot) has become: home. The last thing I wrote on mine and Addie's prayer wall was: Oh God, I'm scared, a fitting beginning.


Thia left a note in my suitcase that says:
Keep being afraid.
Keep being brave.
Keep trusting.
Love, love, love.


I have been thinking about this Simone Weil quote Addie remembered me reading last Spring, "For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer the truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms." (pg. 16)

language.

I should've been born in a small mountain town. I might've been able to remain there.

My hair is growing long again. I want to write about woman's studies, Nietzsche and our prayer wall, Raising Abel, the circles I burn into the middle of pages in my journal, to explain the pages of the mixtapes Em and I made, all the conversations and questions that repeat in my head as I try to sleep ... but, maybe its all this, one of the best words in the English language: (Addie's favorite.)

in·ef·fa·ble/inˈefəbəl/

Adjective:

Too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words: "ineffable beauty". Too sacred to be uttered. Defined by Claire:  1. the wheaty hilltop sunset in West Virginia or the amber-gold blackening the trees up in the hill pasture, or that paragraph about memory and loss

these gray mornings

Grey windows tease with the idea of snow. Addie and I stayed in bed till 11:11a.m., I am going to miss conversations drifting into sleep and waking to tell our night dreams. This week realizing I am leaving, and not certain of any returning to this little town that has been so much, I feel like a gatherer of details trying to memorize the light rods hovering just above the grass, the crunch of my shoes in the mulch of Parkwoods, the intricacy of the branches outside my Shenandoah St. window.

We have torn through each
others veils with our talons,
birds of prey seeking the
meaty flesh of living. We
shredded each others
defenses-- we have tousled,
swooped, destroyed the separations.
      We share our earth-bodies
bit by bit-- a touch, a tare, a
sigh, a silence.We mingle elements
dying and reborn in shared language,
a linking of the eyes.
            Our living has been a
collision, a wounded leaping
the art of molting has been our
soaring. We have given to life
our bodies, our entire existence
shedding our deathstyles.
Sucking the bone, feasting
on  the gristle, the muscle, the meat
and patiently spitting out
what could not be swallowed,
what could not give sustenance.
We have devoured our living
with a ferocious will to loving, to
sacrifice everything to the terrible
beauty of a communion which bears all.

madness

"If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."

Winter Bones

Who knows where a beginning begins? Did it layer over me like a film of dust filtering through sunlight on the train ride between Oregon and California? I didn't image this summer that the West Coast would be coming back to me so soon. Here I am, returning, departing. I thought graduation would be the consummation of my wandering, but it's always different then you think. Roots can be tattooed around your arm, planted down into the soil of your heart-- and transient as ever.  Maybe what I was chasing these past six years was to come to rest internally. So much has healed, and in the healing life branches out, evolving, emerging. I am always, and never, home.

Advent

"Come, Lord Jesus," the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out of a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment.  Perfect fullness is always to come, and we do not need to demand it now.  This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves.  This is exactly what it means to be "awake," as the Gospel urges us!  We can also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, alert, awake are all appropriate!  Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and a forewarning about the high price of consciousness.

When we demand satisfaction of one another, when we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that our anxiety or any dissatisfaction be taken away, saying as it were, "Why weren't you this for me?  Why didn't life do that for me?" we are refusing to say, "Come, Lord Jesus."  We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always given by God.

"Come, Lord Jesus" is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope.  The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.  We are able to trust that he will come again, just as Jesus has come into our past, into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world.  Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and "Come, Lord Jesus" is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope.  

Richard Rohr

Moments of Splendor

Today I feel filled with awe at the generosity of God and the convergence of my life in strange ways... Dorothy's Place. I have been reading Reverend Rick (The Zen Priest's blog) and filled with joy that this man occasionally refers to himself as "a perpetually relapsing Jesus Freak", reads Martin Buber, and wrestles with what it means to have a "mystical relationship with" Jesus and practice Zen Buddhism. I look forward to asking him questions and exploring my own love of Thich Knat Hahn, mediation, and Jesus. Does faith need a label? 

Oskar

"I think you could fall in love with anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. Like if you followed them around invisibly for a day and you saw them crying in their bed at night or singing to themselves as they make a sandwich or even just walking along the street and even if they were really weird and had no friends at school, I think after seeing them at their most vulnerable you wouldn’t be able to help falling in love with them."

It's Official.

“The world will be saved by beauty.” – Dostoevsky

My grandma says I must’ve inherited gypsy blood so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by now at my unexpected migrations.  This summer after my Women Studies course, I took the Starlight Coastal to visit Aaron in California. I would’ve never imagined then that in less than six months I’d be moving to Salinas, though scribbled in all my journals from Sr. year is the sentiment that the West coast was calling me back.  Salinas. John Steinbeck’s backyard. 

I’ll be joining the Franciscan workers of Junipero Serra in January and working at Dorothy’s Place Hospitality Center (its roots are in the Catholic Worker houses.)  "It is the mission of Dorothy's Place Hospitality Center to live, to love, and to work in harmony; to serve the marginalized, to create partnerships that are mutually liberating, and to pursue social justice with respect and dignity for all, in the spirit of St. Francis and Dorothy Day." 

Their work includes: a community kitchen, day room, health clinic, a Women's emergency shelter, silk screening/food service micro-enterprises, an art studio and gallery,  after-school programs for farm worker youth, the House of Peace, and outreach &  advocacy for the marginalized and powerless.

I’ll be living in an interfaith intentional community called Companions of the Way that is dedicated to simple living, non-violence, presence, the “sacrament of conversation,” social and environmental justice.  

Needless to say, I'm very excited. 

Occupying Wall Street

[a blurb from an email to Larisa and Jess]

I am back from Occupy Wall Street now... (though I really want to return there.) Goodness... the whole time I was there I was just imagining how awesome it would be to be camping there with you and Larisa.  When I first arrived at Zuccotti park it didn't seem like much more than masses of people camped out in tarps- it was a really cold morning and people were still curled around each other, dreaded-locks like medusa's snakes tangled over their heads, hats pulled over faces. Then suddenly Julia ran into someone she'd met before and the whole places sort of unlocked and unfolded, sleepers began cleaning up their mats and I realized there was an entire little community enclosed within this small space-- there's a people's library, food station/kitchen, prayer tree, art section, media, info, info in Spanish, a comfort station handing out blankets, an empathy table! And the structure keeps improving and responding to the needs of the people and the protest. They were even composting! and I met this guy wandering around at breakfast time saying, "Hey, if you're glutten free and can't eat what they're serving I'm buying you breakfast." It was incredible to witness such diverse people (black, white, brown, immigrants, visitors, business men, old, young, hippies, anarchists, straight-laced middle class folks) with different agendas actually listening to each other, dialoguing, trying to figure out what America could be. 

 OWS gave me a lot of hope-- not that the system will change easily or quickly or at all... but that people are remembering their humanity and compassion and want something different. I kept tearing up just for the possibilities. Something is happening. Resistance is happening. It's powerful-- the intersection of lives. And the consensus and general assemblies and refusal to be framed by media or demands, the process of how to hear and respond that is emerging... it's all such an embodiment of what we studied. I went to a ton of workshops--- one that Eve Ensler was at! 

   

 One of the best things was the human mic (since megaphones were banned) the process is one person speaks in short sentences and then their words are repeated by the nearest crowd so they are amplified and carried-- and how beautiful that these words become our own, participating in the listening and internalize and speak out the others words, responding in unison and echoing the voices to make others heard... the "others" story becomes part of me-- creating space inside my own body and repeating in my own voice (and even when there was disagreement, you were forced to chew and recognize the human desire and thought, to hold the difference inside you... and the speaker had time to reflect and be articulate- I was so impressed)... It was so powerful. There is a process of step up/step back where people who are traditionally privlidged are asked to give room for people whose voices aren't heard so there were so many people of low economic status and non-white sharing their experiences. It made me believe American can be different, the occupy movement is a womb, a place where new ways of seeing, of being together, of wrestling with the difficulty of so many different needs is being born. I went to a BDS workshop led by some Israeli women (ugh, I miss you guys so much.)

I could go on forever but in summary: 

Percy Bysche Shelley's Mask of Anarchy...

// Rise like lions after slumber

in unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

which in sleep had fallen on you--

Ye are many, they are few//

of course it has its flaws and there are so many issues that people are concerned about... It's exciting.