10.26 PechaKucha Talk "Without Darkness, There is no Light"

I was really trying hard with this topic to be super intellectual, but to be honest, I could not find a way to talk about darkness and light outside of the context of God.

Not religion, but God.  Creation.  Something from nothing type of stuff.  Something more satisfying than science or art.

I never used to consider myself a faithful or religious person.  In fact, I kind of avoided the whole messy topic.

I was raised Catholic and loved that has a child, and I loved the churches and the light and the sounds and the rules and the ceremony of the catholic church. 

but from the very beginning I was definitely a “wink wink” kind of Catholic.  

I felt like God and I understood each other and we were in direct communion with one another.  I didn’t’ want to tell the priests, but I really didn’t buy into their necessity.

My god was the kind of God that understood all of my jokes before I said them out loud. 

God was big and complex but we were way tight.

So, I was told as a young person that God made everything.

I think the story is typically told that

First there was darkness

Then

There was light.

I don’t think it is a given that light is born from darkness.

When imagining the nothingness of pre-light, It feels impossibly dark.

The pure saturation of darkness must have been too cold and heavy dense to give rise to any kind of entropy.  The whole thing must have been completely static and silent. 

There just HAD to be a profound spark and the spark is neither darkness or light. It is something else entirely.

When I was little, I had an audio book called “Creation” it was read by Burl Ives.  I listened to it all the time and I still vividly remember its images.

This is how it begins:

Before God created the Earth,

This was just an empty place. 

Without a trace of things that you and I know.

There was no land,

Not one grain of sand,

Where you and I stand.

There was no place to go.

There were no boys or girls or flowers or trees.

No fish no birds no chimpanzees,

No macaroni and Cheese, no summer breeze.

There were no puppies no guppies,

No pink lemonade,

It must have been lonely,

So, God formed a mighty plan and the creation of the world began.

He started by making light,

Then he separated light from what wasn’t bright… 

I sat on that thought for a long time.  Eventually I grew up and traded my assumption of God for facts.

I didn’t have time for considering God or darkness or light.  It didn’t seem to matter. I had tests to take and bills to pay.  Besides, all of that stuff seemed private and unrelated to what I was doing. 

Eventually things started to shift for me.

I became a mom. I made a person.  It was wild and magic and to be honest it was a miracle.

And one day I was in a yoga training and my teacher asked me to write down a word that described the thing that has served me in my darkest moments.  I summoned up a memory of a particularly dark moment, and to my extreme surprise, I wrote the word “God”.   I thought it was weird and I wanted to change my answer, and I looked around at all these yogis and figured it was probably what everyone wrote.  We later discussed our sanswers.

I learned 2 things that day:

1.     God is important to me
2.     That answer was not normal among my pears

I believe in the spark at the beginning.

I don’t think of God as a white guy in the sky with a white beard, but more often now, I imagine god as light.

I don’t think it has to be true that Light cannot exist without darkness.  Light, at least to my mind is not a response, or a cure to darkness.

I don’t really mean to split hairs about semantics, but light can definitely exist without darkness.  It just wouldn’t have a purpose.  It wouldn’t feel like anything.

It might be possible that light created darkness because it needed a mirror.  

There is another children’s story that I really love.  It’s called “The little soul and the sun”  It takes more than 6 minutes to read, so I will tell you my favorite parts.

In this story, the sun is made of bazillions of tiny flames each one is a little soul. 

One particular little soul or light wants to be the brightest possible light. 

God hears this and explains that she is as bright and lustrous and perfect as possible

AND

So is everyone else.

She wonders how can I possibly experience the scope of my own light if that is all I can see.

God recommends darkness and kind of walks away.

Another helpful little soul walks in and says, Imma do you solid and become darkness.  I love you so much that I want you to see your brilliance and I will extinguish my light and be darkness for you.  I just need you to remember who I really am and agree to not turn away from me if you don’t like what you see.

This is my how I currently think of God – as the light of a gajillion lights all traversing lifetimes together. 

All of us on a spectrum exuding different qualities of light - vibrating at different frequencies. 

The darkness and the light remain eternally in service of each other.

I imagine the broadest sense of the universe like 2 infinite fields one of light and one of darkness and where they crash into each other, that is the horizon and it is filled with spark and can’t stop creating.  That is where we live.

The little soul realizes that she is already at her fullest brightest potential but she cannot figure out a way to experience herself. 

And she so badly wants to experience her full brightness.

Another sweet little soul  - one of the bazillion candles -shows up and agrees to extinguish her light in order to allow her friend to to experience the power of her own light.

This sounds like a very “light-like” thing to do in my opinion

The new helpful little soul has conditions.  She explains the risks in this plan.   

Once her light is extinguished she will be hard to recognize.  She will be hard to recognize even to her own self. 

She will appear dull and less vibrant and dense.  She will not be able to reignite herself.  She warns her friend to not be confused by her no matter what she may do.  The price of this favor is to make sure the bright little soul is committed to remembering that the two are equals from the same place and the bright little soul must return the helpful little should back home to the light.

This is my new picture of God.  A million little souls.  A million little lights.  Some are dark and some are bright.  The darkness and the light remain eternally in service of each other.

I imagine the universe like 2 infinite fields one of light and one of darkness and where they crash into each other, that is the horizon and it is filled with spark and can’t stop creating.

10.26 My Friend Damien Told me something

The scale of darkness and light is a continuum whose edges extends beyond the horizon.  So long as we are anchored to a point, we will never see what extends beyond the horizon.  From here we can’t even know what might be available to us at another point.  In order to even grasp that we have to reposition ourselves to a new horizon.  We have to move away from the point where we are located to experience another point on this continuum.  We have to create relativity.  We don’t know if the new experience will be good or bad.  We just know it will be different.

My friend Damien once told me this story about Adam and Eve.  It weirdly upended my view of pretty much everything.  If I am to believe that everything happens for a reason, then I would have to believe that the entire reason for my friendship with Damien was for him to stop by my house one day for no apparent reason and tell me this story.

So Damien stops by and we start rapping about my impending wedding and I am struggling a little thinking about who should officiate this.  I mentioned to him that I am annoyed with sexism in Christianity which brings us off on a tangent about sexism in the bible.

Damien looks at me kind of incredulously and says, “like what?”

I look at Damien with matched incredulity and say “are you fucking kidding me?”

Damien says “no.”

So, I says “Oooook homie, what about Adam and Eve…I’d say that’s pretty much the beginning.”

Damien says “Ok, you tell me the story of Adam and Eve”

“Ok,” I say “Eve is created from Adams Rib (which somehow indebts her and all women after to him and all men after), then she eats the forbidden fruit, gets humans banned from the garden of Eden and is blamed for the pain and suffering.

At this point Damien looks genuinely befuddled and maybe just a little sad.

He says “you don’t get it at all”

For what its worth, this is not a phrase that gets said to me often.

He goes on:

“Adam was all alone. In paradise. He had no direction, he had nothing to do.  It was like a boundless solitary confinement.

So, God does him a solid and make Eve.

God tells them ‘listen, if you want to stay in this beautiful garden of grace and perfection forever, be my guest.  However, you cannot eat fruit from tree of knowledge, doing so will make it impossible for you to stay here and will experience mortality and suffering.’

So they avoid the tree of the forbidden fruit.  Until Eve doesn’t.  Eve is smart, she knows that this limited existence is not going to work.

Surely Adam is pissed about this, he is a GUY!  He has it made! This is awesome!

But Eve, is a woman.  She wants more.  Ignorance isn’t enough for her, so she convinces him to take the leap and bite the apple.  And thank god, she did!  What is the point of paradise if you don’t know struggle?  What is the value of immortality if you have no idea of mortality.”

My catholic mind was blown.

Throughout my entire life, this story represented shame and humiliation.  This story, as it was told to me was designed to make me believe that I as a descendant of Eve have a debt to pay for the reckless disobedience that was inherently my nature.

All it took to eliminate the constant thought bubble of original sin that plagued my existence as a female was to hear this story from a different perspective.   To find another point of reference.

The story didn’t really change, but I did and now the story has fully emerged from the shadows and is in fact quite bright.

It changed how I saw women, how I saw myself, how I saw suffering. 

My evaluation of Eve eating the apple changed drastically from a woman being seduced by a snake into committing a very dark and dangerous act that caused the suffering of all humans to a new view of the role of women as the people who are the bravest and most willing to seek out new perspectives and greater understanding.

It made me think that Eve and all women after her were embued with a special quality and tolerance for suffering uniquely qualified for leadership.

I had to see myself that way too. 

I don’t know if I believe that everything happens for a reason. 

I find it more likely that we direct our destiny more than we realize.

In any case, I think the entire reason for my relationship with Damien was for me to hear this story.

06.28 Showing Up White

I put my almost 7 yo in a summer camp at an African Cultural Center.  She is one of 2 white kids of about 50.

I don’t like the idea of her feeling like an only, but I made this decision anyway.  

I wanted her to witness the journey of young black people reclaiming their identity as Africans. 

To some extent, I wanted her to notice that as a white person, she is in the global minority.  This is a hard one since she experiences this from an inherent place of power and privilege, knowing I will pick her up every day.

I wanted her to have relationships with people that don’t look like her and have a different experience and perspective than her private school friends.  

I wanted her to get a picture of the wisdom and heart that come from Africa because I believe it contains many of the answers we seek to solve our global problems.

I wanted her to see black folks as leaders and learn how to follow.

I wanted these things because I love her and her future requires her to understand the world beyond whiteness.  The only place that this whiteness comes into question is around non-whiteness.

I have been asking her what it is like to be in this place.  I have been trying to counsel her about the experience.  She kind of shrugs and says its good.  She loves Mr. Woods.  I have met Mr. Woods, and I get it.  She doesn’t say much, but she has a few girl friends that she enjoys and she proudly sings me songs about Africa.  When she does this, my heart warms and I feel like I made the right choice.

I ask her what it is like to be the only white girl in the group.  She gets quiet and distant and tries to squirm away and avoid me.  She does not want to talk about it.  This is not great.  I continue to probe and she says it isn’t great.  She doesn’t really like it though she can’t say why.  I am not sure what to do with this and I don’t even know why I asked.

I tell her that being an only has its challenges, but in other ways she is not an only.  She is surrounded by a bunch of people that are from New Orleans, like her, that live in our neighborhood, and that are her age.  We take a minute to notice the kindness of the people at Kumba and I ask her if she feels safe.  She says “of course”.  I loosen up. 

I dropped her off at camp on Monday and I was informed that the group was going to the Whitney Plantation.  The Whitney Plantation is a museum dedicated to the experience of African American Slaves pre Civil War.  I have heard about it, wanted to go, but I had never been.

OH MY GOD!! SHE CANT GO LEARN ABOUT THE HORRORS OF SLAVERY AND BE THE ONLY WHITE PERSON!!!!!!! 

I cried for an entire day that it was time for her to learn about slavery.  I thought about not letting her go.  She is after all very small  still and maybe it isn’t time yet.

I wept that there was a need for a slavery museum.  It is so unbelievable and so real.

I decided that it would be wrong for our family to invite our child to learn about the African experience and opt out of the slavery part.  Black children do not get to opt out of the slavery part.  I don’t think white children should either.  This is our shared history.

So I went with her.

I was stiff and I smiled a lot.  I don’t think I looked relaxed or inviting.  I could not tell if it was appropriate for me to be taking up space on this bus or in this community.  I felt stupid to have assumed that my family was at all invited to be there.  Some people tried to take care of me.  I felt worse about that.  I didn’t want to need to be taken care of.  A couple smiles actually helped a lot.  That is really embarrassing.

The bus ride was great, the kids were fun.

We got to the museum and my daughter saw all of the statues of young slave children and she asked me who they were.  I explained that they were slave children.  She commented that they were all black.  I said “yep,  white people have never been enslaved in this country, this was only done to people from Africa.”

To be honest I can’t tell how much of that place she could take in.  I took in quite a bit.  About 5 times people asked me if I was ok.  I must have looked awful.  I said I was fine and smiled and nodded but I wish I would have fallen to my knees and wept.  I wish we all would have.  Because that is the appropriate response to learning about what my people were capable of doing to their people and what their people endured.  I wish we could have held each other and cried.  But that was never going to happen.

I noticed how annoyed and clingy CC was.  Now, I don’t want to over credit this to her whiteness, she was also very hot, tired and hungry and her mom was there so that she could express all of these things.  I witnessed several things about her interactions with the group.  They are personal to her, so I won’t say them.  I saw a picture of the work I have to do in my parenting.

My favorite part of the tour was at the end when our tour guide talked about the resilience of the African people.  She reminded the kids that slavery was not the beginning of the African story.  In other words, she reminded the children that they were not slaves, nor were African people slaves before this horrific period in time. 

My daughter and I talked a little on the bus on the way home about what she had seen and heard. She said it was scary and she didn’t like it.  We talked about what happened to white people to make them do this.  We talked about how dangerous and powerful fear can be if we don’t discharge it. We talked about how it was our work as white people to keep looking at the hurtful things our people have done while remembering that we are good.  We  must at all times work on cultivating forgiveness and love.  We have to learn how to be kind to ourselves so that we can be kind in the world.  She could take that in.  I don’t know if she believes me that everyone including her deserves kindness.  From my experience, most of us white people struggle with this.  This is especially true when we take notice of racism and of course slavery.

I still don’t know if inviting my family into this community is the “right” thing to do.  I don’t know if it is another way of asserting my white privilege to put my daughter in a space that was intended for others.  I don’t know if I should withdraw from this experiment.

My working hypothesis is that we white folks have to do whatever we can to keep moving towards having solid relationships with non-white people (and of course with each other too).  We need the perspective of others to help us understand the impact of racism on the world (outside of intellectualism).  We white people cannot eliminate racism without participating in its destruction through the creation of relationships.  We need relationships that we would will fight for and defend with all of out hearts (and at a cost to our privilege if necessary).  We can’t leave this work for people targeted by racism to do.  We have to do it for us.  We have to do it to preserve our hearts and our integrity.  

I think this means that we stumble around and look a little stupid, and make mistakes and show up when we aren’t invited and when we can’t tell if it is a good idea.  It might mean that we keep doing it and stop waiting until it looks comfortable or inviting.  

I don’t think there is any reason that racism should survive the fierce loving nature of the human spirit.  I like to believe that racism is not our whole story, it is just a thing that happened and it is almost over.

Quick Edit: It is very important to me that we, as a global society find a way to end racism. That means, trying lots of things. Sometimes, my actions and words are confused or incorrect because I have been raised in the presence of racism and have been trained to behave in racist ways. I reject this training to the best of my ability. If you find anything in this or any writing to be wrong, hurtful, or confused, please drop me a line. I will thank you, learn from my mistakes and do the next right thing.

06.20 Living Fat

For me, Fatness is a thing I have been trying to escape for as long as i can remember.  To be fat is to be ashamed or week or stupid or selfish or just incorrect.  I have been told over and over again that it is within my control and it is my fault that I can not or will not conform to the standard of a "normal" body weight and shape.  I have been made to feel responsible for other people's discomfort with my size and shape.

Sometimes this makes me feel defeated. Other times, I feel obstinate and defiant. I experience phases of devout effort to change my body one molecule at a time.  I become certain that my body is an important project and I am powerful enough to defeat fatness.  I have ignored my body for long periods of time and taken up residence in my mind and just prayed that my body would continue to carry my head around the earth.

I have cried.

I went to my first weight watchers meeting at the age of 11.  I went to a very special program at the age of 15 that was supposed to be a super fun time for fat kids to tell us about diet and nutrition.  We occasionally met each others eyes with an understanding of one another's torment. The Mary Kay lady came to lift our self worth by telling us how to apply lotion and make-up. She was so very disappointed that we couldn't express our gratitude through our humiliation.  We were scolded for being rude. For us, being fat was the worst possible outcome and our families were trying out this desperate hail mary to save our young lives.

I dieted. I did point systems, veganism, vegetarianism, paleo, atkins, southbeach, master cleanser, and whole 30.  I did them all, weather they made sense or not.  I ran. I walked. I swam. I did aerobics. I did crossfit, tae-bo, zumba, yoga, hot yoga, px 190, and spinning.

I went to doctors.  I tried to have an honest conversation about this struggle.  I tracked my food in 5 different apps.  I took pictures of it.  I fasted. I overate. 

I said fuck it.  I tried to forget again.

I began to feel the world get smaller as I got larger.  That is a metaphor and a real thing.  Chairs and doorways began to shrink, the amount of retailers that could provide me with shoes and clothes began to dissipate.  The cars I wanted to ride in were fewer.  Airplanes became a hell scape.

I got scared. What if I can't stop it? I began to freak out. It got worse.

I wondered why? What can I do if none of that stuff works?  I felt misunderstood and judged.  I haven't walked in a McDonalds in 15 years. I don't drink soda. I eat kale for fucks sake.  (PS, I also eat cookies..sometimes..just sayin).  I felt like I was becoming a non-person.

What I do now is try to not get involved in the why am I fat question.  I instead try to understand my overall health, which seems to be pretty good.  I could use less stress and more sleep, but I am pleased with everything I have figured out to live a good comfortable life.

Now, fatness has the power I assign it.  I continue to practice giving it no power.

There is no way to be.  There is no promise of a body that looks any way.  I strive for function and a long life.  When I feel discouraged, I find things that I love about my body.

My body can squat 230lbs.
My body can stand on its hands and its head. 
My quads are a national treasure.
My eyes are mostly green with gold and brown flecks.
My body made a human being.  
My body can bench press 190lbs.  
My body supports a whole family.
My smile is magic.
My body will destroy every shred of injustice in her path.
My body has a resting heart rate of about 60.  
My body runs touchdowns.
My body is constantly revealing more ability.  
My body hosts my soul.
My body realizes my highest intentions.  
My body will not be punished.  
My body will not spend another day being held to someone else's standard.
My body will continually teach me and others.
My body is learning to rest.
My body is learning to bask in grace.

05.16 Heart Sounds

All I have ever wanted was to be able to sing music that sounded like my soul the way that the ocean tastes like salt.

People who can do this make it look easy - like breathing.  

Dancers are like this too.  I am in awe of dancers. I love the way they make poetic sense of their bodies and articulate  feelings with every movement.  They glide and leap and bow and move exposing every experience and tell their own stories, even when they are telling someone else.

It is so awesome to me how difficult it is to choreograph the individual out of a dance or arrange a person out of a song. It is almost impossible

I studied music. I practiced music. I imitated music. I ignored music. I consumed music. I loved music.  I wanted to be music.  I withdrew from music.

There are lots of uninteresting reasons why this struggle is so real for me.  I have counted them and filed them away, but i haven’t detached from them enough to make them disappear.

Currently, I feel like the inability to merge with song stems from an internalized oppression of the highest level.  This affliction is born from the harsh and unrelenting pattern of perfectionism at any cost no matter how futile the effort.

I have such huge disdain for perfectionism and yet here it is somehow keeping me from making soul sounds.  How is this a thing.

I think I am brave.  I know I am brave. However, I have never been quite brave enough to surrender to music.

Everyone who deals in the currency of energy and has evaluated my presence and has told me that i need to sing.  Whenever I hear someone say this, it sounds like when someone tells you to wear a seatbelt or floss.  Its like not singing is putting me at risk for not being able to enjoy my life. 

As a child I used to sing constantly.  I used to never run out of things to sing.  As an adult, I have to try hard to remember songs that are fun to sing.  As I write this, it sounds crazy, but this is what being an adult has done to me.  

…so, the other day I found myself in the car singing. Badly.  I kept trying to figure out how to fix it.  I thought about the key of the music, the speed, the articulation of words, the breath, the rhythm, my proximity to all of those things independently and together.  It was seriously not fun and it sounded horrible.  

Suddenly I realized I was singing with my head - not my heart.  It sounded like head music.  Which is basically, is audible garbage.  It did not sound like my soul or taste like the ocean.  It was made from all of the fear and insecurity in my head that won’t shut up.

Then I remembered this thing that Brigette Martin said to me once:  

 "You can’t let your mind take over your heart.”

I am grateful beyond measure that this lesson showed up when it did.  It stuck around like a waxy little seed through a cold season and bloomed right here at the end of spring.

It’s worth noting, I don’t know how to do this, but now I know my work.

Music is an instrument of liberation - I will practice and abandon the idea of perfection.