{strangers on barstools}

Barstool poets, prophets, and philosophers are not just drunks, but they are often drunk. I meet them sometimes, though admittedly, not often. The infrequency makes it noteworthy.  

Early in my romance with David, we met a man. Well, first, he met this man, Ivan,  downtown at Great Lakes Coffee. The man was a physicist and philosopher and quite intense – they sat at the bar chatting for quite a while. He rubbed David the wrong way but intrigued him enough that he told me all about the encounter. Two days later, I was sitting outside of Avalon and a gentleman engaged me in conversation, it turned out to be the same man. We talked about levels of consciousness and I found him intriguing, but the conversation was just short of satisfying. If you have read articles or books about subjects you really wanted to understand, that promised to explain it, but never really added anything to your existing knowledge, you will understand the feeling I got from that conversation. I kept thinking he was just about to speak the sentence that would tie all the loose ends together and establish some cohesive theory, but that never happened. The conversation was just a series of concepts that floated in different directions. Interesting, but unsatisfying. David and I have since seen him around the city, but neither of us engaged in another conversation.

Earlier this week, David and I met a gentleman, at a bar, drinking syrupy Grand Marnier and coffee and scribbling in a composition book. Now, the teenage poet, is still alive somewhere in me – and she stands right up and starts looking over the shoulder of anyone with a speckled black and white notebook at a bar. I immediately noted the little squiggle connecting a heart to a hastily drawn star and the fact that he was using some crappy ballpoint pen. These facts immediately made me suspicious, I mean, how many legit philosophers doodle that kind of doodle with an ordinary pen?

His name was Bob or Bill, I think. He and David had been chatting when I came in and when he walked to the restroom, with two beautiful wooden walking sticks to assist him, I was given the overview. He had been living in the Santa Fe mountains, refused to use computers, was a Religious scholar, was called to Ferndale, Michigan by God who had told him to begin working on a book about Main Street America. Interesting. David was eating and finishing something on his laptop, so when the guy returned, I started asking questions. He told me I looked like a preacher’s daughter, then he explained his Main Street theory. We spoke about his travels and his children. But, we never really go to the heart of anything.  It was the same kind of conversation I had experienced with Ivan. Intriguing but unsatisfying.

Sometimes a stranger is just a stranger and a conversation is just a brief exchange of facts and banter. Perhaps hoping random encounters will be magical kills the possibility of magic.  

{what matters}

I am so heartbroken by what is happening in this country. It isn't about guns or violence- they are just horrible symptoms of the real malaise, which is deep and pervasive fear.

People fear each other, they fear that someone will get what they think belongs to them. They fear the scarcity of resources. Fear being scorned for talking about issues like sexism, racism, and inequality. Everyone is afraid to be uncomfortable, to insult, to be insulted. We have turned inward and have forgotten that family and community are what make life worthwhile. Overcoming obstacles together make our relationships grow- it does not diminish them.

We are constantly tuned into electronic boxes that tell us to be afraid. TV has inflamed our collective fear of life to such a degree that we’ve forgotten that we are here to LOVE one another and make and experience beautiful things.

People often look at me like I am a complete lightweight when I talk about LOVE after circumstances like the ones we are currently facing. BUT ITS IS THE ONLY FORCE POWERFUL ENOUGH TO CHANGE OUR HEARTS AND MAKE THINGS BETTER. LOVE for one another is the only way we are going to understand each other and stop feeling afraid of each other.

LOVE is how we are going to heal this tremendous pain in our hearts, and make no mistake, we ALL feel it this pain regardless of color or gender or sexual orientation because it is like cancer at the very heart of our society. This great fear is the natural legacy of an entire society built on the domination and subjugation of other human beings, and frankly, until that is addressed head on, it is going to continue. This strange capacity for establishing fanciful hierarchies is the natural legacy of the genocide of native peoples and slavery of Africans that NO ONE seems willing to discuss. Keeping painful things hidden away never makes them go away. It makes them fester until they burst. Every upheaval in human history demonstrates this fact.

But, when we begin to have honest conversations, acknowledging that we all suffer, albeit differently, we all do suffer as a result of this horrible legacy, we can start to heal. Black folks feel angry, white folks feel guilty, women, non-Christian, brown, and LGBTQ folks feel anxious and fearful, really, WE HAVE GOT HUGE ISSUES to work through, and unless we say these things out loud to each other, we cannot really begin the long, difficult process of healing.

The media is hellbent on convincing us that everything is terrifying and dangerous. It simply isn’t true. LOVE is the antidote to fear. Loving one another is essential now. There are bad people of every skin color and age and religion and gender, but there are still significantly more good and loving people. People who are willing to go out of their ways to help each other and who want to understand one another.

I keep advocating for more conversation because it ultimately leads to compassion and LOVE, it also leads to better action. If we listen to each other then we inevitably grow to LOVE one another, and you simply cannot shoot someone you love. It has been my experience that if you know a person's story, it is impossible not to feel empathy and compassion for them. So many white Americans feel like they have no right to discuss racism and this feeling keeps them silent when they witness it. We are all going to have to get very comfortable having uncomfortable conversations if we want to come through this without a great deal more violence. We have to rebel against the power structure that relies on our fear and start listening to one another instead of letting fear own us.

I am sending my LOVE out to each one of you, today. It is the best thing I have to give.

{desensitization and its opposite}

Over the last decades, there have been numerous academic discussions about the way that violent  television, film, and video games (to name a few sources) are desensitizing American people by creating a culture of violence without consequence. These types of media, the arguments say, are disconnecting us from the real dangers of things like guns and murder. While I do believe that you are what you consume (food, news, literature, media, etc.), I simply can’t believe this is the whole story.

To desensitize means to make a person (or an entire society) gradually feel less shock, anguish, and distress at scenes of violence toward and suffering of others by continually exposing them to images and representations of this sort of cruelty, making such things commonplace. I don’t know about you, but recent events have done just the opposite to me. I cannot stop crying. I am not even sure how to begin to take action, because there is SO MUCH, and so much of it matters deeply and is going to be instrumental to how our society’s future unfolds.

Think about some of what we have witnessed in the last few months; lack of any kind of justice in the Freddie Gray trial, the bigoted slogans and misogynistic behavior of Donald Trump being accepted and rewarded, a heroin epidemic so out of control that cops have begun to carry the heroin “antidote” with them, Stanford rape victim’s letter and absolutely inadequate sentence for rapist, Davontae Sanford freed after 9 years of wrongful imprisonment, Orlando massacre, and this is just what comes to mind without really spending time to reflect, this is just what’s at the immediate surface. I don’t have the fortitude to spend time making a better, more complete list. I am not a weak person. I am a strong, righteous person of action, but the enormity of all of this fills me with such agonizing frustration. What is going on? What can I do? Why aren’t we better? Brothers and sisters, why aren’t we doing better?

Here is what I think is going on, and you are probably not going to like my opinion.

I began thinking about this yesterday before I learned about Alton Sterling and before the news of the shooting of Philando Castile. I was leaving my house and saw that someone dumped a dead animal, probably raccoon or groundhog, on my street. It was mostly covered in a plastic bag. Whoever did it, obviously thought it was just an animal and deserved no kind of burial or respect, that it deserved to be thrown on a random street in a plastic bag to rot in the sun.  This got me thinking about how this same kind of thinking has been applied to all cultural others for time immemorial. Most significantly for us, in U.S., as a justification for massacring indigenous people and for the enslavement of African people, and continued mistreatment and subjugation of both. But, of course, it has happened on an ongoing basis for every new group entering this country from Irish to Muslim. This capacity that humans have to think of those who are different as somehow less important, and less human, is the basis of just about every problem we are now facing. Saying this is not a lack of patriotism. It is the very definition of patriotism. Sitting around feeling afraid that by extending equal rights to your fellow citizens (and refugees) because that might diminish your freedom, and thinking of them as less human as a way to justify this behavior, is a complete failure of patriotism. To hoard and withhold the freedom you claim to prize and mistreat those who have less power is an abuse of power. It is a failure to be a good American and worse still, it’s failure to be a good human. This scarcity thinking isn’t serving us, it is destroying us.

In the same way that a person’s psychological demons keep on coming back until they get resolved, the legacy of the inhumane treatment of other humans, upon which this country was built needs to be ACKNOWLEDGED and worked through or we are going to keep seeing the reverberations and they are going to increase in intensity and discomfort. We need to start discussing all of this. All these false hierarchies people erect are not going to protect them when the foundations upon which they are built crumble. Unless we start working toward a society where there is real equality for everyone, no one is going to be safe in any tower. Things are becoming so volatile and all of us who are others or allies are getting fed up. We want things to change, but instead, they appear to be regressing.

Humans need progress and when the tide of history moves backward, we band together and revolt- we fight for progress. That time is coming.  One thing that seems to be a sign of this coming revolution is the opposite of desensitization. When I looked up antonyms, I found ideas like compassionate, humane, softhearted, sympathetic. There are all components of what I’ve been feeling, and what I imagine many of you are also experiencing, but I would call it more of an over-sensitization or a hyper-sensitization, a saturation of feelings that never really absorb because they don’t have time, they are flooding us. The rains of injustice keep coming and we don’t have anywhere to escape to. The status quo is no longer adequate. We all deserve better.

{when you are certain}

Last night, before our bike ride. We were standing on Cass outside the Hub bike shop with a couple dozen cyclists when a woman and a man came our way. The woman approached me first, she was thin and had short cropped hair. Her clothes were clean and she was wearing a netted navy tank. It could be seen through, which alarmed me. Public nudity, or partial nudity, typically alarms me. A man was trailing behind her. He was carrying an unlit cigarette and saying something to the crowd of cyclists about biking. Whatever he said was odd, but funny. Neither of them seemed to pose any kind of threat.  His clothes were also clean. He seemed, based on what he’d said and his overall manner,  to be intoxicated.

The woman spoke to me, I was the only woman directly near her. She mumbled and looked just past me. “He’s an idiot, men are idiots, aren’t they? What an idiot…” She waited for my response. I told her liked men and knew some pretty wonderful ones. She pointed to David and asked me if he was wonderful and I told her he was. I then told her that I grew up without my mom and my dad raised me, which was pretty wonderful, too. She nodded towards her companion, “Well he’s an idiot. Do you get hot flashes? I am having hot flashes- they are horrible.” She tugged at her tank to move the air. I told her I didn’t get them yet and she said I better hope not to get them. Then she asked me for money.

If you know me, you know that I play these requests by ear, I don’t feel bad giving cash to strangers, as long as it feels safe. David and I try to plan ahead, packing small bills in a place where we won’t have to make a big deal out of opening a wallet or purse. And when the person asking is a woman, I always give what I have, because I cannot imagine how much harder it is to be a woman living on the streets or addicted to drugs. This has not always been my policy. I used to give Cliff bars or little packets of tuna fish, but it was disheartening to get yelled at because people don’t usually want food, they want alcohol or drugs. Anyway, all of that to say that if I had had cash, I would have given it to her. I was all prepped for the bike ride and did not. So I told her I did  not have my purse and she quietly and calmly told me to have a great day and walked on. Her partner lingered in the crowd as she moved down the sidewalk.

At just that moment, out of nowhere, several Detroit  police vehicles approached, blocking the Southbound lane of the street. One of the officers corralled Michelle (I learned that this was her name) and routed her back to where her partner was. They circled around her. Standing behind the doors of the police vehicles.  She sat on the sidewalk and they took turns yelling things at her. She was disoriented and clearly mentally ill, possibly on some substance as well. She sat on the sidewalk complaining about hot flashes and tugging her shirt. The officers did not express compassionate behavior, they were aggressive and antagonistic,  like boys poking a dog with a stick. I began to record the scene on David’s camera very obviously so that they knew I was recording it. Some Wayne State officers arrived and calmed the Detroit police down. I stopped recording and walked over to talk. I told the one who indicated that he was in charge of the situation, that I had been speaking with her minutes before and she was not hostile or aggressive, just hot. We talked about how challenging it is to handle situations with folks who are mentally ill because jail is not where they belong. He was gentle and he diffused the situation, which I have no doubt the Detroit police were planning to escalate. He told me that they try to send people who are mentally ill and causing a disturbance to the hospital but they are out the next day and that there were no great resources available. I have no doubt the scene would have played out differently if not for his wisdom and compassion.

The police left the scene letting Michelle and her partner resume their journey. As she passed me, she again told me she was so hot from the hot flashes. I told her to take a few deep breaths, it always helped me, and she did, then she went on her way. I  felt strong emotion as she walked away,  wondering how she lives in the world. What kinds of things happen to her, as a small, vulnerable mentally ill woman with little protection from anything.

About 10 minutes later, our ride began, and as we approached Warren, we passed Michelle, who was now wearing a new shirt that covered her breasts. She was screaming at the top of her lungs to everyone who passed. Not violent, but definitely causing a disturbance. I was so certain she was gentle when she walked away earlier, but now she was fairly hysterical. It reminded how uncertain certainly can be.

Later that night in Hamtramck, we stopped to fix a flat tire and the group was all standing around on Conant. We noticed a tiny calico kitten across the street about to jump into the road where it would surely be hit. We ran over and scared it back into a yard where its mother and siblings could be seen in the distance on the front porch. It had some kind of infection or little scabs in its eyes and I had to fight not to shove it in my sweater to take home. There was a metal fence around the yard and the kitten kept getting bold and heading back toward us, so we’d stomp our feet and make noises to scare it back to its mama. Finally, an older woman with a heavy accent came out and we told her the kitten was about to run into the street. She said they were wild but she fed them and wanted to keep them rather than calling the Humane Society. All the other kittens began tumbling clumsily and adorably down the steps and goodness, they were darling. She and my soft-hearted friend Vikki kept talking, but I walked away feeling certain that all the kittens would be dead before the month was up.

Reflecting upon the events the next morning, I realized that I felt a similar desire to protect both Michelle and the kitten, knowing that neither was for me to protect.

{all those tiny deaths}

Throughout our lives, we all experience things that dismantle our worlds and make us feel as utterly minuscule as we truly are. Think back to your first broken heart, the first time you lost a family member, or when your beloved childhood pet died. You had never experienced blows like these, they were brand new to your ego. Whatever your first mini-death was, something in your heart died with this first great sorrow. To this day, you probably cannot pinpoint what that something was, but you know how much it hurt. What you probably also recall is how insignificant you felt. As your own suffering filled the rooms you moved through, life kept flowing. Television shows still played, dinners were still eaten, and new cars and shoes were still purchased. You may recall how people in your life continued to worry about trivial things and, out of politeness, you fought not to scream that whatever it was they were fretting over was small and meaningless compared to your new great pain.

You probably remember how nothing changed while your heart stood still. How everything seemed to happen in slow motion while you watched from within the distorted fishbowl of your overwhelming sadness. This feeling is so universal, it has been illustrated in film countless times, we can all visualize it. You may recollect the one day when the water was drained from your emotional fishbowl and your soul took the heartache, neatly folded it up and put it away. You remembered that you were not dead. And life resumed. 

I call this pain the hungry ghost feeling. In Chinese Buddhism, hungry ghosts are the results of extremely unhappy or violent circumstances.  These ghosts can also linger as a result of neglect by living ancestors.  I have always pictured them wandering around lost, hands out, mouths speaking words that no one hears, moving through the world with the feeling of complete and utter dissatisfaction. In fact, when one has the hungry ghost feeling, I think the primary indication is that  one is temporarily incapable of being satisfied. Usually, healing from these tiny deaths requires time. Sometimes other conditions must also be met.

The other kind of tiny death we experience happens at times when we do nearly die. Times when something happens and we narrowly escape death feel the inevitable weight and possibility of our own mortality. Most of us suspend thoughts of this fact so that we can live. But from time-to-time, we are reminded that our bodies, like the bodies of all of our ancestors, will return to dust.

I have had a number of these experiences. In 2004, I was traveling in Thailand with a group of friends. We were on a small island that had to be gotten to in a boat taxi. During the day, these taxis could come directly to the beach we were staying on. At night, however, if you wanted to take a taxi to another part of the island or leave the island altogether, you had to walk over large, dark rocky hills. I became ill with food poisoning. I was vomiting and unable to drink water for an entire day. After dark, I began to wonder if I was going to die in the poorly lit little beach cabin. I knew I was too weak to make it over the rocks and wondered how I would even get medical care if it was required. I went to sleep, and when I woke, news of the tsunami that killed more than 250,000 arrived. I had the feeling that death was everywhere and I would not escape it. The realization that my life would end became certain instead of abstract, for the first time. A few days later, we returned to Bangkok and in the early morning light I wandered through the city streets reading the names of hundreds and hundreds of posters for missing people. People from every corner of the world, lost in the water, dead in small waterlogged cabins, or buried under rubble.  

These wee deaths of the ego are absolutely ubiquitous reminders of our relative size and importance in the universe. Knowing they are common to everyone does not make them easier, but moving through them does. Once you have endured one, you know you can withstand the next. Call it self-efficacy, strength, or experience, it does make the journey feel a little lighter knowing that the small death will kill something in you, but something else will fill the space and you will also  learn something about how to live from it.

{ if / then}

As a younger woman, I was obsessed with Surrealism, and especially, the female surrealist artists. To me, they represented a freedom and boldness that just did not exist anymore. The way that surrealism was influenced by dreams (or the subconscious),  indigenous art, the drawings of children, and creative works by those considered insane or in mental institutions, was fascinating to me because these were such raw and untraditional inspirations. It made for art worth looking at. Art not always technically well-executed, but always part of a larger conversation about what made art critical for the continued evolution of culture. The ladies, in particular, seemed to dive deep, with intensely personal art full of dark, mysterious, symbolism. I also felt that many of them: Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Leonor Fini, in particular, made rich and masterfully beautiful art that told exploratory stories that sought full exposure all that lurked beneath the surface. The courage and beauty of their works still take my breath away.

In those years, I spent a great deal of time with other artists and we all wanted to explore and see how far we could push things. Playing with all kinds of media, but also, diving deep into ourselves for whatever was there that needed exploration and expression. The collision of these two experiences happened frequently  and friends and I would often spend hours playing Surrealist games.

The most popular of these games and one you have no doubt played yourself, is Exquisite Corpse. In this game one person draws part of a body, then folds a sheet of paper over, exposing only the ends of the lines they have drawn. The next player continues the drawing, not seeing the work of the previous, likewise, he or she hands the page to the next player with only the tips of the drawing’s lines exposed. This player finishes the drawing. After every player has finished, the page in fully unfolded, revealing the body in its entirety.

Another common Surrealist game is ‘if/then’. In this game, players all get a small square of paper. Each writes an ‘if’ statement, such as, if the sky were full of doves, or if tomorrow never arrived.  The sheet is then handed to another player, with the ‘if’ statement hidden. Players all add a ‘then’ statement to the page. When all the players have finished, everyone opens the papers and reads the statements together to make a full ‘if/then’ statement.

Usually, for the first round or two of either game, there would be absurd drawings with heads at both ends and statements that made little sense and caused lots of giggling. But, something amazing would happen by second or third round; everyone would synchronize. I don’t know if I will ever fully comprehend by what mechanism this occurred, but, it always did. Somehow the creatures sketched would wind up with mostly matching scales on each section, or dragon heads and feet. The ‘if/then’ statements would go from things like  if the jackalope ate a rainbow then the semi truck crashed yesterday, to if answers came easily then questions would be meaningless. Synchronicity would find its way to us and everything would align in a most magical way. No one would speak about it. We’d all just look at each other and grin so wide our faces nearly cracked.

Now, I think everything works this way. It is like Rumi said, “What you seek is seeking you.” Given enough attention, you can harness synchronicity so that it feels less like an inscrutable force of nature and more of a reliable law of matter. It can take a little time, but things seem to right themselves and order find its way out of chaos with a little bit of concentration.

{great, again}

I keep seeing the ignorant Make America White Again billboard and reading about how shocked and upset people are by it. But, what I don’t understand, is how people don’t get equally upset about Trump’s campaign. Make America Great Again, is a veiled way of saying exactly what this billboard says outright. It is a racist slogan. Any prior time in American history, any halcyon days of greatness, that this slogan may be referring to, would have been days of institutionalized racism, or even worse, of slavery. Trump has disdain for everyone who is not Trump. Period. It is silly that we are even discussing this person as a potential leader, but we are and that is indicative of a really dangerous trend in American culture. Blue collar white folks who want to feel better about themselves by creating some illusory race hierarchy and scapegoating other groups should ask themselves if they can really believe that Trump cares about them. No way, guys. You are just a means to fulfilling this bigoted narcissist’s need for adulation.

We need to get focused and re-direct this cultural narrative because it is alarming and does not position this country on the right side of history or of anything else. Bigotry is toxic and doesn’t serve ANYONE. We really need to talk about this and we really need to stand up against racism and bigotry in any and all forms when and where we can.

After my recent trip to Atlanta, I am reminded of how much has NOT changed and how much hate is right below the surface of things. Walking down the street at night, where many other people were also walking, a white man in a pick-up truck pulled up to me and yelled, “girl, you better get off the street, there are black folks everywhere.” As is typically the case, all the great responses came to me later and dumbfounded I simply replied: “are you serious?” He responded with some of the foulest most hate-filled words ever spoken to me. I felt as if someone had slapped me, but no one on the street even looked back. “Is this so common that no one even takes note?” I wondered.

Sitting in the back pew at the Ebenezer Baptist Church days later, I was overcome with emotion. I hid behind my sunglasses as tears rolled involuntarily down my face. We have not come very far, but we think we have. This false sense of cultural achievement is dangerous. It makes us think that we can stop talking about civil rights and feminism when really, we are mere toddlers in terms of our development of an equitable society. A cursory glance and any day's headlines will tell you we are not an equitable society and in America, some people matter and others do not, contrary to what most American's think.

Let’s not be lulled. Let’s talk about these things fearlessly and really try to change attitudes and beliefs and corresponding behaviors in our own families and neighborhoods. America is not making progress, so Americans are going to have to do it for ourselves.