houses

It's a rainy beginning to December.  "You live up in the sky," David says when I descend three staircases to the warmth of the kitchen to put on the tea kettle. Some days I wear gloves in my cold bright bedroom while I sit at my desk.

 I am grateful to be in this house -- it is the most diverse community situation I've ever lived in... we are young and old, American and African and European and hyphenated existences, Black, White, and Asian, queer and straight, conservative to anarchists, religious to spiritual to uncertain. Living together revolves around the kitchen table-- endless cups of tea with a changing cast of housemates while we process our days and desires and fears. 

Realizing I am in Baltimore for the long haul has felt a bit daunting-- the full responsibility of belonging to a place-- and exhilarating. 

Adulting.

    On Friday I found out that I didn't get accepted into a program I'd pretty much been banking on since the beginning of the year. I was already imagining my life immersed in Spanish again and what it would feel like to be on the airplane to Colombia come February. Turns out, it isn't my future. I'm still processing the loss of an imagined version of myself but more so, I'm leaning into what staying means. For so long there's be school or a program or re-defining experience glittering on the horizon giving shape and limit to the spaces I inhabit, sheltering long-term decision-making and responsibility. Baltimore has suddenly become not the place I'd think about returning to but the lead contender for where I will call home.
       The past month, in this space of waiting, I've felt more grounded and secure than a lot of last year-- largely due to relational time. There is always so much pressure to be defined by our work but that's such a small part of what makes my life meaningful. I've wanted time for the past two years-- time to create, to know a community, to show up in my relationships, to continue being at the prison for my friends there, to develop my Spanish. I'd rather live with a little more uncertainty and simplicity then sacrifice these times and spaces. I'm probably going to take a part-time position later today.  Now the project is to listen to this directive moment... a moment of staying here.
   
       

Granted.

Adriana and I are beginning our grant work on anti-oppression ministry in the church, specifically anti-racist ministry. The past week has been like Christmas with brown packages of books arriving on our doorstep and phone chats and coffee dates with an incredible woman whose been part of the resistance to white supremacy since SNCC.

This is work that stabs into my heart. This summer while working at Peace Camp in SE Baltimore one of my campers and I were walking to the park when he said, "I know what God looks like, I saw him in a movie. He's your color." I was startled to hear a five-year old Black child tell me that God was white like I am. As I attempted to explain to him that movies chose actors but that Jesus was most likely his color, I recognized how Christian media and his church experience had already entrenched the idea of a white God.

Just this week in Baltimore there was a hate crime-- vandalizing the anti-confederate statue that had been installed at Wyman Park (and removed by the city 22hrs later). The womb of this statue was kicked in and it was spray painted with the word "nigger."  At the same time in Harford County the KKK burned crosses on private property so in their exercise of free speech the neighborhood was terrorized and there was no legal ramifications. These are overt expressions yet the systemic and subtle persistent white supremacy, structural, institutional, and systemic racism of the U.S. remains too often ignored.

As I continue my reading and this grant work I'll be reflecting here.  Today's thought from Perkinson connects to the idea that ally and anti-racist are not nouns but verbs/adjectives describing actions... "In my estimation, only a lifetime of unrelenting struggle against the ideology of white superiority and the materiality of white control (struggle "for," i.e., redistribution of the power, property, and privilege that white skin has assembled for itself historically in this modern world) could ever qualify one for embrace as an ally. I have not yet proved worthy."

confessions of a conflict avoider

This week I did a 40-hr training course in Mediation & Conflict Transformation skills from the transformative/relational framework, which is a theory of conflict resulting from fracture in interactions and the human spirits yearning for understanding & respect where restoring the quality of interactions leads to shifts in empowerment & recognition. (Brilliant.)

One of the many things I am still thinking about was a chart that had styles of conflict and that avoidance was low on personal goals and low on relationship goals. For a long time I thought of avoidance as highly relational, I was after all saying nothing because I wanted to preserve the harmony and I'd take responsibility for how I felt, what I could do better, etc. It's taken me a long time to realize that avoiding conflict or ignoring it or choosing only to deal with my internal side of it isn't a relationship bridge- it's a barrier of its own. It doesn't allow the relationship to grow or for the other participant to acknowledge harm, clarify, or simply have agency in how they'd respond to my emotions. I have suffered a lot of things over the years because of avoiding the way I'd been disappointed, hurt, had trust broken, etc. and being willing to "forgive & forget."  One of the trainers of the course defined forgiveness as extending the possibility to rebuild/regain trust. I thought about how often in avoiding conflict, I haven't given people a chance to recognize how they've broken my trust (I'm looking at this one-sided because I also tend to be accommodating so if the conflict is originating in someone else catching a feeling about something I did I'm quick to apologize.)  I woke up from a dream about a friendship that dissolved almost 5 years ago and I felt a sense of grief, that I have lost so much because I didn't know how to be direct, how to say even "this hurts me." I've been a champion (for the past few years) of asking for what you need, saying what you want, etc. but the slowness of making that my own reality, and the cost of not seeking to grow through a relationship by directly exploring our conflict is settling on me in a new way.  I'm thankful to feel more empowered and certain of my voice these days and excited to approach my conflict more directly, seeking collaboration and understanding of the deeper roots, instead of turtling up in my shell.

love only makes us wider

I have never liked change, which is perhaps why I fling myself into it-- drastically, sometimes impulsively, other times reluctantly-- as if I could lessen its power and constancy if I throw myself into it enough times hoping to change Change into a constant familiarity that doesn't unsettle me.

Americorps is racing towards an end (with still a month of summer peace camp to come and anti-oppression lessons to plan and endless paperwork and, and, and) and I am grateful for all that I didn't imagine would be part of my life that Notre Dame Americorps and the nuns vision has drawn me into... like the life of this city, the sense of home here and that this city's struggles are mine. "My liberation is bound up with yours." The interwovenness of community work and life... running into families I know while wandering the neighborhoods of the Southeast, being invited birthday parties and graduations, seeing kids from one program with their siblings at another-- running into them in the park, the library, even protests, Cameron running off the school playground to hug me on the sidewalk, of my co-teacher telling me to call her if I'm in the streets-- this is the way I have wanted to become part of a community.  Harrisonburg and Salinas and Baltimore-- the smallness of being known in a place.

Yesterday, I had an unexpected evening off and sat in my kitchen with the windows open drinking cold coffee while my jasmine trees fragile stalk swayed at the lightest stirring of the hot breeze. I have been thinking about "chosen family," about platonic love, about transience.  The past two years in Baltimore have been some of my happiest and busiest, full of connection and spaces of constructing and deconstructing my ideas. I'm grateful for the radical spaces here.

I felt the conviction of this yesterday:
Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

:  the sense that no matter, I can accept love as a condition of my existence.  In accepting this condition, I can be freed from trying to get others to affirm/prove to me my value, worth, favorite status.  I can love without demand or insecurity, can appreciate and seek deep connection, affection, and intimacy without fear.

We exist, therefore we are wanted and needed in the universe and this is what it means that we live immersed in love, this is how a God who is a radical love that erases boundaries shows up in the world-- through relationships, through poetry, through struggle, through sorrow, through living.

re-reading letters

I stumbled across this letter, from three summers ago and thought of how my poetry teacher told me I would likely struggle forever over the with the theme of in-articulation and of one of my favorite poems by Jacqueling Berger... The Failure of Language.

memory/or defining god to your agnostic lover... 

Mm. I love the thought of the incarnation as God becoming a creature. I don't think I'd ever thought of it in exactly those terms before... it seems very apropos to deep ecology and God's presence as an element in all things.

You asked me a couple of weeks ago what I mean when I say God... I am still struggling to articulate that and I'm not sure... I mean a lot of things when I say God:  the force, mysterious, of Life, of birthing, of beginning, the essence of consciousness-- as beyond my grasp as how a redwood tree grows or the intelligence of mycellium or electricity and movement creating thoughts and sound and sight. Is God like the internet, containing everything but more-- conscious of all that is contained in a way we can't understand. An afterlife. What does that mean? Yet when I sit and pray I know deep inside myself in the truest way that I am connecting with a thing outside myself. I ache for God, and for mercy to have patience, to accept the revelations the Godself willingly gives, to accept the limitations of my own animal body and perception. Jesus. Not the fullness of God in a way we can comprehend, because we can never hope to comprehend and contain God in our understanding-- but the fullness of God- to me an incarnation... maybe that is the mystery of Christ, learning to incarnate full-animal-body humanity and divine spirit, non-dualism. The incarnation of Hagia Sofia.

Yesterday I sat in my friend's empty house with the patio doors open and woodwind music playing and witnessed a rainstorm gather, one solitary drop at last falling on the melon-orange tiny petals and rolling lavishly off the the thick tongue of a leaf below. Then a chorus of fine mist as thin as wisps of waterfalls carried off by wind. It climaxed in a brief exultation of lush, heavy beads-- fat and extravagant-- throwing up tiny applause of splashes and just as suddenly dissipated. The sun reached its palms to cover the entire porch as if it were a lover stretching out to press against everywhere the rain had laid down. It felt like a private, intimate gift between the sky and I to watch it quiet and still. "As for me I know of nothing else but miracles."

(What miracles have you seen today?)

God. It's an empty word (like love or f*ck, useless words.) But, maybe the emptiness of the word-- the nothingess and everything is in a way another way of knowing 'god.' I like to refer to God as Uncreated One, Ein Sof, etc. Maybe when I say God I mean... this mystery that we can know pieces of.