I’ve really wanted to discuss it, but I’ve not really known how to go about it, because as I mentioned in Jess’s post, although I was very deliberate in choosing “radical love” as a concept to work with, I also am not exactly sure what the “solid” definition of “radical love” is.

Believe me, I agree with a certain critique put forth that stated that discussions about “definitions” can be completely and totally academic and alienating. But I also thinking that confronting why “love” (without the radical”) is considered such a treacherous thing by so many women of color is completely important and necessary. I agree with the critique Fire Fly put forth that the idea of “loving” the people she organizes with sounds like her worst fucking nightmare–given what has happened over and over and over again in the feminist blogosphere alone (much less real world organizing where your physical body is a part of the interaction), I have to say, it’s my worst nightmare too.

But at the same time–there is the love that maia talked about.

when i think of radical love. i think of being a birth assistant for working poor african immigrant teenage moms. and loving them. even though i may not particularly like them. not the kind of folks i want hang out with on a saturday aft. but loving them tenderly through an incredibly vulnerable moment of their lives. and that creates a bond between us. and yes they yelled not nice things to me in their final moments of labor. and they resent me because i am a stranger, not their boyfriend, not their mom. but because we have been really vulnerable with each other…the quality of the relationship is…more human(?)
and i think about working in the villages in palestine. and how there are these settlers coming to attack us internationals. and the palestinians are taking care of us. and we are taking care of them. and frankly i dont like everyone in that village either. but we are still putting our lives on the line for each other. and frankly maybe we are all a bit ‘idealistic’ but that barely begins to explain why we would do that for another. and we are not bff. we barely know each other. but we are living. and taking care of each other. because if we dont we are all screwed. does that make sense?
and it was in this village that i really learned what i now call: radical love. because this village centered relationship-building and maintaining. we sat in meetings for incredibly long times because everyone has to feel heard and considered and everyone has to be on board with the next decision.
i guess i learned that you take care of folks first then they trust you.

and her words remind me of the love I have for three amazing women of color in my life, who have agreed to act as tias for my sweet babybfp. How I asked them to act as aunties to my girl for very political reasons–my girl is going to face a fucking tough road in her life, and each of the women, I think, are complete experts in things that she will have to deal with–being a sexual being, a racialized being, a Latina, a girl living in the diaspora, etc. But at the same time–I asked the women to be tias for my girl because I love my daughter with every fiber of my life and couldn’t imagine a greater gift I could give her–AND I love each of these women so much my heart can hardly contain itself when I think of them. There is political and there is love.

So what is all this mess of “feelings” and “emotions” and “political”? Love is a risk, for sure. How much of a risk should women of color take to ‘feel’ this thing? Should they take the risk? Should it even be a part of organizing? Should it be a part of “building a new world”?

What about our current organizing would have to change to incorporate “love” into it? Would we want to do that? Would it be safe for us?

What is this thing called “love”? And what does it mean to radicalize it? Is that possible? Is it desirable?

(Poem after the jump.)

Day 49 (2003), with the president

2-18-03: “First of all, you know, size of protests, it’s like deciding, well, I’m gonna decide policy based upon a focus group.”–George W. Bush

In a matter-less crowd with aching knees

(“First of all, you know”)

Like I’ve asked too much

of yoking, tried the strength of the bendable

asphalt miles mindful of broad movement,

careless with smaller ones

(“it’s like deciding, well”)

My aim is high, my sign

sturdy, inked neatly, PEACE

on both sides: a

message for a sky

bereft of storytellers, chopped

by a cop ‘copter solely

At ground level, marching legs, ignored

by TV news and far-reaching marchers

(“I’m gonna decide policy”)

Between reaching and reached

hundreds of thousands of knees,

menisci hard-pressed,

in the narrow meeting space

between femur and tibia,

to anticipate and absorb shock

of this magnitude, facilitate

movement that is smooth, clean,

decisive

Jess and I have spent a considerable amount of time talking about how difficult it is to put “walking” ideas (or ideas that spring into the consciousness while walking) into typical blog posts. My last entry was almost painful to write because I just couldn’t figure out how to express what was flowing so easily around my body.

How could it flow like water through my body, but get so badly stuck on my finger tips?

I’m not going to force anything today. I’m going to write down my notes as they flowed out. And hope that you understand.

***

These days I use Rachel’s language to tell people that they have woven their spirits into negative things and that to recover their health they need to retreat for a while, pull their spirits back, and learn to walk straight again. Would that we could follow such simple instructions, because our spirits do contain our lives and our life choices. We do indeed weave our spirits into the events and relationships of our lives. Life is as simple as that.

~~Caroline Myss, PhD Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing

***

….

What was sucking my energy at such a young age? K and F. Having sex every Saturday morning.

Having sex—–> Rape.

Every saturday, I heard him raping her.

Weird bad things happen because of sleep.

F= Rapist
M=Rapist
V=Rapist.

Sleep=The time they get you.

***

as i meditated today, i realized how many women i know, how many little girls i know, how i myself know—how quiet rape often is. how it is done in the middle of the night after everybody is asleep. how often times you wake up because you feel good. how when you figure out through the sleepy fog what the hell is going on, you don’t yell, scream, fight, move, because it’s night time, and everybody is asleep.

the night is like a different world, and screams don’t belong in it.

we’ve been taught that since we were babies—left alone to ‘cry it out’ by our parents, right?

***

Call my spirit back
Call my spirit back
Call my spirit back…

Rape.

What is it to me?
Subjecting myself. Manipulating bad situations.

Dealing with what is going to happen anyway.

***

I don’t even know if I like to write all that much. If I learned to write like I do because it was the only thing I had. The only place I didn’t have to work like hell to negotiate.

***

What do I do if I figure out I really don’t like to write all that much?

***

I read this and almost threw up.

this has been sitting on the edges of my mind since I first read about it so many months ago, and made the choice not to click over and read the gross fucking details.

Today I read it all. I spent hours surfing all the stories.

The taste of vomit swirling around my mouth, keeping me centered.

***

three men I know to be rapists, only because I knew them at night.

***

People thought that there was nothing wrong with the disappearance of the daughter

–silence, quiet, absence–

means all is well, for some reason.

Why are screams the only thing that alert us to danger?

***

I slept in the same bed with a man that was regularly raping/abusing all three of his daughters. He didn’t rape me, but he touched me–because he thought I was sleeping.

I wasn’t asleep, because I’d already been tricked once before. I couldn’t sleep. And so while I thought others slept, I forced my eyes shut, but listened to the sounds of the night. Inspecting each noise over and over again, looking….

And then the hand was there.

I did not open my eyes. I knew immediately what was happening.

But unfortunately, for all my training in recognizing the sounds, the the quiet–I had forgotten to figure out what to do if it happened again.

I had been looking the wrong way.

***

The alarm saved me that night. The blaring woke up the entire household. The quiet was gone, if only for a while. I stayed away from the house after that. Stayed away from the family I had grown to love.

But it never once occurred to me…not until later when I found out what was happening…that there was any need to worry about the daughters.

***

So many years after finding out about the girls–I still beat myself up–how could I not have seen? What would have happened if I had pressed harder? So many different situations felt wrong to me, but I said nothing.

But who was I but a 19 year old fucked up kid?

***

But you know–the thing is–that guy–he really cared. And that’s the thing I know about dudes that rape, that molest, that “try to surprise you”–they care. They really do.

Oprah says love doesn’t hurt. Others make abusers out to be these sick predators in shiny bright clothing. And I don’t doubt for one second that there are men like that–men who deliberately maliciously put on the shiny clothing.

But the three men I knew…They were all good men. Caring men. There was something wrong with them to be sure–but there was something *right* with them too. When you spend time with a man who is a rapist–you can’t help but get to know the best of that man just as surely as you get to *feel* the absolute worst of the man. That’s what rape is to me–every day living with a human being who gives you many many compelling reasons to like him/her.

I got into a fight with that man’s close friend once. And that man wound up at my door, tears in his eyes. Telling me how much I meant to his close friend. How much they all missed me. How they wanted me to come back, no questions asked no expectations.

Did I think to myself–yeah, you just want me to come back so you can finish the job you fucker!

Honestly, it didn’t even cross my mind.

***

i saw a little old man walking his granddaughter down the street.she was small, about two or three. just able to talk and walk at the same time.

he was old, graying—typical michigan libertarian sorta guy with his faded blue jeans and VFW fishing hat on.

for some reason, when i saw them, at first i smiled, but as i got closer, all i wanted to do was punch that asshole grandfather in the face.

punch him after i had explained to that little girl, ala uma thurman, exactly why i had to punch him and how if, when she grew up, she wanted to come find me and revenge her grandfather, i would not resist. but right now, punching in the face was just a simple matter of world order.

instead of punching him, however, i smiled, said “great day out, huh?” and kept walking.

***

I lay on the floor after my walk. I am shivering.
All the people I know who are survivors–they are inside me pushing, yanking, tearing, biting, using knives, crow bars, bits of glass, to unweave “RAPE” from my body.

It is hard work.
I don’t move for a long time.

***

The question is not “Why won’t she leave him”

NO
NO
NO

The question is–why are we all standing around acting like it is her job alone to stop it? Like we don’t know very damn well what disappearances, silence, quiet, submissive means?

***

Audre Lorde had breast cancer. And after a while, she wound up getting a mastectomy. She had quite a show down with the various nurses taking care of her because they kept trying to get her to wear a prosthesis and Audre told them no.

Her logic? Society did this to her–made her sick–cut off a much loved piece of her body because of that sickness. Now society could very well face what it had done to her. She would not hide the violence behind a prosthesis.

She refused the quiet.
And it was the women who were outraged about it.

***

I wrote his name down of a piece of paper and set it on fire. I let it burn out in the toilet.

before i flushed–i peed

on his burnt fucking rotted carcass.

he wants to know my body so badly? he thinks he knows me?

then here is my fucking gift to him.

Piss.
And flush.

***

My body is not me–but mine.
~~yoga saying

***

Abhyasa, or practice, is really about making something a priority. As we enact that priority, an energy builds in our life to support it.

***

MINE.

***

what will happen

when women collectively

finally stop resisting their self control

and take care to put the

world

back in order?

And none of that is the point.

All that up there? That is the distraction from the point. Because the point is more like this: (after the jump)Someone I love, the other half of one of the most important relationships of my adult life, told me last week that it seems like I’m too busy for her, and it’s been feeling like that for a while now, and so maybe we should just let it go.

That, and this:

In the last few years, I hear (and participate in) a lot of talk about self-care and sustainability in activist circles. Conversations that weren’t happening at all in political communities I was a part of 10 years ago are now commonplace, substantive, and centered. Yet I’m not sure how much that talk has turned into changes in behavior. I mean: almost everyone I know is overloaded, tired, close to burnout, most of the time.

****

Walking with my friend Hilary this past Thursday, I kept catching myself doing this performance of a dragged-down posture, leaning low and forward for a few steps, like I was going to drag my fingers along the dirt path as I walked, in a dramatic expression of how tired and overwhelmed I felt. Meanwhile it was a beautiful afternoon, and I was outside in it at 4:30 on a weekday, and almost all of the things I was feeling overwhelmed by (as a group) are things I love and find meaningful and fulfilling. So then I kept straightening up from that dramatic dragged-down posture and saying — I know, I know, it is ridiculous to feel weighed down by a life that is full of awesome people and projects. I’m just tired. It’s just been an extra lot lately. I’m tired. It’s maybe too much of it at once, but really I know it’s all good.

A couple years ago, a really rad person I know was cooking in his bright little kitchen and talking about how he’s been feeling this “too much” feeling for years — always rushing, always like there’s not enough time in the day, always overwhelmed. I said something about how, well yeah, even when it’s really good stuff — projects you love, people you love — at a certain point it’s just too much for one person to do. And he said, no, I’ve actually been thinking about whether that’s part of the scarcity mentality that makes capitalism work. Even as my life fills up with really great stuff, instead of feeling enriched and satisfied by this abundance, he said, I stay stuck in this mind-set of scarcity — not enough time, not enough balance, struggling struggling struggling … the feeling of struggle being so much more familiar than the feeling of calm, of satiation, of peace.

A lot of the time I do feel all this differently. Life feels full of substance, meaning, inspiration, love, learning — and then one project gets a little bigger than anticipated, or one new to-do tips the balance, and suddenly it piles and piles and … I’m tired. I’m overwhelmed. It feels like I’ve forgotten, again, how to balance gracefully.

Talking about this with Hilary on our loop through the mountains this past week, I remembered saying so many of the same things to the same person on the same trail a year ago. And within this one single walk this past week that is part of a circling and circling series of walks, Hilary kept having to reel me back in from listing all the calls I had to make and e-mails I had to send and sentences I had to edit and errands I had to run and etc. to remind me, again, that all that was beside the point, that the point was:

One of my closest friends had just written to say, maybe you’re too busy, maybe we should just let it go.

The point right now is not the to-do list, it’s love.

***

Why do we do activism? Why do we engage in social-justice movement?

I think it is about love. I think it is about radically loving and being unable to accept violence, whether it is the violence of war or the violence of rape or the violence of poverty or the violence of displacement or …

So why do activism in a way that is more violent than loving? Surely it’s a kind of violence to put production ahead of people, to fail relationships while successfully meeting deadlines.

What kind of justice, or peace, can grow without strong relationships at the root?

***

To be clear: I don’t want to suggest that a simple change of mind-set will allow us all to re-feel overloaded lives as easy ones, or that we are individually responsible for this overloadedness. Many of us live in a context in which meeting basic needs requires many hours of hard work, and on top of that most of us don’t have collective structures to share childcare, housework, and more. Our overwhelmedness is in many ways structural, not something we’ve individually created, nor something we can individually change.

I know that.

What I’m hoping for is that we can collaborate to change that structure together in ways that concretely center love, and self- and mutual care.

I don’t mean it as a slight when I say that lately it seems like we talk about self-care and sustainability within activist circles more than we actualize these ideals. I mean to acknowledge us for having conversations we weren’t having several years ago, and to trust that we are collaboratively working to create better ways, and to understand that that is a big challenge that will require a lot of unlearning of messages of productivity and industry we’ve internalized, and that it will take time.

And meanwhile, sometimes some of us buckle, break, lash out, cry from exhaustion, have little left to give, little left for love. And I hope in this meantime we can love each other in those moments, too, and try to make them a little less painful.

***

In a beautiful piece of writing called “Bringing Down” (which will be published in the new make/shift due out this week), Jen Benka says, “it is possible that resistance to poetry and resistance to political participation in the United States have been rooted in the same fear, and that this fear has been, in part, one of feeling deeply; and that this fear has been, in part, one of assuming responsibility for the interconnectedness of our lives.”

Why is it so often easier to plunge into “projects” than love? To get things done before/in the way of getting close?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the poem, but I think I disagree with Sharon Olds and that disparaging-or-lamenting thing about getting “fucked senseless” being “The American Way” in “The Solution.” I think the desire to sometimes have one’s brains fucked out is not a bad thing —

I wish we’d all get down out of our heads and our plans and into our hearts and our bodies and the present moment a lot more.

**

No, I don’t know what Frantz Fanon would say about this seeming opposition I’ve set up between violence and love. And I certainly am not meaning to offer some kind of facile (and insidiously/maskedly violent) liberal fantasy of universal love as if we are, or the world is, uncolonized. And also I want to bring in, put together with all the rest of this here, some stuff about intimacy and consensual violences.

I may not be ready to write this essay yet. I may need more time. You’re watching me spill out some notes for it, and a lot of this still needs processing. Or maybe it’s just right that all this isn’t processed yet, that there is a spill creeping out in a bunch of different directions, some aspects bleeding into others, some looseness, some lack of conclusion, all this uncontained.

**

I’m also thinking about normative models of relationship/love and how those are still too often privileged even within social-justice movement, especially within the professional-activist/nonprofit-industrial-complex model.

I’m thinking of my friend who works full-time-plus in a feminist organization telling me how the people in the office who have norm-abiding relationships (monogamous, two-party, sex+cohabitation+shared finances+&c., whether hetero or same-sex), and/or who have kids, are given a pass on going home early, while the single, or polyamorous-and-not-cohabitating, or non-parents, are expected to take one for the team, stay late, come in on Sunday. Of course, it is a good sign of progress that parents’ need to balance work and childcare is recognized in ways it didn’t used to be. But it is a problem if we only recognize nuclear-family-based relationships as worth considering when we think about respecting our coworkers’ work/life balance.

I’m thinking of my friend who wrote me this past week to say it seems like I’m too busy for her, and maybe we should just let it go, and how everything in me revolted against that idea, and how much it matters to me that she and I have built a friendship on a queer foundation that doesn’t categorically privilege certain types of relationships above others. I’m thinking of how much friendship matters.

(Have you read this piece Yasmin Nair wrote about friendship and love, last Valentine’s Day?)

**

A different rad person I am just starting to know said something the other night about relationships as the foundation of social-justice movement. If we’ve struggled with each other, healed with each other, loved each other deeply and fully, through all kinds of everything (am I drafting a rewrite of “richer-or-poorer”?), we are so much tighter-woven, so much less impervious to attacks by the Right or the greedy or whoever else might want to weaken our movements. If there’s trust and substance and depth and complexity to our connections with each other, our movements are stronger. Also: if there’s all that, if we’re loving each other while we organize, we’re starting to embody, to live, the visions we’re collaborating to realize. They’re already here.

So why do I keep slipping (back) into this space where it is easier, or seems more pressing, to get things done than to get close? Partly of necessity (work has to get done cuz bills have to get paid; political and creative projects do entail the doing of things; etc.). But, stop, that’s not addressing the question. I’m not trying to suggest we should just be hanging out and fucking and relationship building and crying on each other’s shoulders and, voila, that’s gonna pay the bills or that’s political action. I started to answer as if there were a real binary here, as if work and love are mutually exclusive. Ask again. Why do I keep slipping (back) into this space where it is easier, or seems more pressing, to get things done than to get close?

Why can’t I balance those things more consistently? Why can’t they be better interwoven, more simultaneous?

Yeah, capitalist/productivity culture. Yeah, ridiculous cost of living and demand to work tons of hours to make ends meet. Yeah, technology and culture of more-more-more, now-now-now (smartphones and all that). Yeah, individualism/isolation and heteronormativity and the privileging of the atomized nuclear family. Yeah, various cultural/community contexts I’m living within that are about products over people, speed over substance, stimulation over feeling. Yeah, I know, all that.

**

The point is, TB, I love you, and I love us telling each other, years on end, so many silly and serious things as we bumble and glide, glide and bumble, through our days. I love how much we’ve asked and figured out about gender/queerness alongside each other, how there are certain mountain trails that are layeredly marked with all the conversations we’ve had on them, how (I hope) we are in this together for the long haul, how … you’re right, we do have something more intimate than can be shared in a blog post, and I love that that is true and also want to make that sort of thing known, in public space. You know, like straight people do with those weddings I get so cranky about. I like knowing you’ll laugh at that line right there, and maybe you’ll ask me again if I’ll shut up and show up if you ever decide to get gay-married, and maybe you’ll say something about how you’re not even necessarily with me on all this tying-it-to-political-activism I’m doing, and …

..

Hilary and I found a little rock-and-stick sculpture on the trail this week. It was holding a key. She took a picture of it. It was charming because it was real and uncontrived (by us, at least), but it’s making me laugh how much that is exactly the kind of neat/obvious symbol I don’t want on this walk.

**

If we’re making change for love, how can we make love — of ourselves and each other — the real root from which all the rest springs?

There are so many things that came up for me–so many questions. I can’t even write a correct essay about them because they are far ranging, follow no logical order/pattern.

* So many of us have experienced excruciating back pain–back pain that literally knocks us down for days at a time–why have there been no devices created (ala wheelchairs, scooters, etc), whereby those who are going through back pain can remain mobile and a part of their environment–rather than bed bound up in some room somewhere?

* I have discovered the beauty of acupuncture. It’s completely changed my perspective on the world and how medicine works. First–acupuncture is not something I could afford in most situations. In this case, I can afford it because the acupuncturist I go to runs her office on a sustainable model the centers the health of the community. Second–since I’ve started going to regular appointments, my back as improved *considerably*. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still achy, and the last appointment really seemed to undo a lot of dependency I was placing on one part of my back, thus causing a different part of my back to have to work for the first time in years–which ached like hell.

But I am mobile. And I have stayed mobile since I’ve been going to treatments. The treatments don’t hurt. They are very gentle and relaxing. I would go even if they didn’t work for me because I usually drop into a deep meditative state and leave feeling emotionally renewed.

As I went for my walks this week, I reflected on how gentle and guilt free these treatments are. How the acupuncturist doesn’t make you feel shamed for being a crying mess, being unable to walk, have horrible diarrhea, etc. I told her about how the sole of my foot always seems to vibrate when I’m getting treatment and she replied that when energy moves, you never really know what it’s going to do to you.

Can any of us imagine telling our doctors that a medication made the sole of our foot vibrate?

For acupuncture, it seems like it all boils down to energy held within the body–a practical explanation with no guilt, no fear, no stigma…And the response to that energy is to manipulate it, be patient with it, listen to it, feel where it is and encourage it to go other places–not punish it.

Or, as my therapist said–it’s easy to chop down a tree, much harder to work the roots out.

Which is not to say I give up on Western medicine entirely–but more to ask, having seen my back improve so much under gentle guidance and do nothing but get worse under almost brutal medications/therapy–is it right of us to demand that Western medicine treat our bodies that same way? If we do, how will things change? Will things change? How would we want them to change?

What would a medical praxis that operates in a capitalist structure look like that centered working the roots out rather than chopping down the tree?

* Is mobility a human right? I was thinking on a walk about how most of us have been mobile in some shape or form since we were about five or six months old (the time we start rolling over/crawling). It seems like a natural human tendency to attempt movement (I say “natural” very cautiously), whether it be a baby watching her hand move from her side to the front of her face or a grown up moving from her chair to her kitchen.

If mobility is a human right, how can we justify structures like prisons, borders, reservations (which don’t forget, started first and foremost, as POW type camps), walls, etc?

How can we justify not fully funding wheelchairs, walkers, seeing eye dogs, wheelchair accessible vans, accessible buildings etc?

How can we justify not funding research on mobility options for those immobilized by back pain–or immobilized period?

* When did walking transition from meaning “to roll, toss, journey about” to putting two feet on the ground, lifting one, then lifting another…? Why did it transition in such a way?

* How many of us think about our relationship with walking with “gratefulness” coloring our thoughts? That is, I may have to do X,Y and Z in order to walk–but *at least I can still walk* and for that I am “grateful”?

Why are we grateful to still be able to walk instead of pissed off that the times that we can’t walk aren’t accommodated in anyway at all in this culture?

I could go on and one with this forever. I have so many questions. And absolutely NO answers. I’m going to be content with that for now.

My Cilantro: Always moving towards what is best for her.

(My block, where I’m starting from:

)

Google Maps has told me it will take 1 hour, 11 minutes. I wonder: At whose pace?

This distance I’m about to cover feels minor with any kind of wheels involved (car, bike, bus), like it’s just one neighborhood-ish over, like it’s basically the same part of town I live in. On two feet I remember quickly how sprawling this city is, how neighborhoods that feel like neighbors are not exactly.

Yet: This jasmine. I smell it before I see it. And it smells like three decades’ worth of L.A. springs I’ve lived through, but mostly it smells like adolescence. In high school, there was a ratty couch on my best friend’s porch (one of so many symbols of the class-crossing lives we both lived, where our respective single moms’ hustles or weird relationships – sometimes these were one and the same – jumbled financial precariousness with “good” neighborhoods, in this case a large-but-crumbling house her awful stepfather owned, a ratty couch on a fancy porch).There was jasmine all over that porch, so that all of our adolescent conversations and afternoon porch naps and late-night half-secret cigarettes smelled like this. She and I could never be close now/I miss her.

Walking through the city you are from, there are associations everywhere. Walking anywhere, are there associations everywhere? I want to believe that the homecity version of that is different, particular — that that jasmine wouldn’t do that to someone just passing through.

In my dreams, lately, I keep finding myself living in my grandparents’ last homes. This is not something that would have happened in real life, not in the families I’m from. But, my last two grandparents (one on each side) having died in the last few years, being grandparentless now, I keep finding myself, in dreams, wandering through rooms they lived their last days in, wanting to inhabit them. Last night I was turning on burners on a tiny stove that is not the one my grandmother actually cooked on, but it was covered with her pictures.

Also: As I wind slowly, on foot, through a series of different neighborhoods, I keep crossing under or walking a block alongside this freeway. From a driver’s perspective, all of these neighborhoods are simply off it, undistinguishable, blurred together, just “off the 101.”

Walking on sidewalk – an especially unyielding surface – for more than 10 minutes, my left ankle starts hurting. After 20 minutes the pain crawls up to my knee. Then my left hip, eventually my lower back on that side. By tonight my whole left side will be tight; it’ll remind me of my maternal grandmother in bed a few months before she died, after a surgery, telling me she felt like a frozen chicken they’d pulled from one end to the other. Like they’d just snapped her apart, and now she was thawing, sore all up and down that side. It all starts, for me, from the left ankle. I have “very bad foot mechanics,” doctors and salespeople at running-shoe stores tell me. I wear orthotics and sneakers every day, but still if I walk for more than a few minutes on sidewalk, this hard surface that really is not good for any body (it’s got no give, less even than the asphalt cars move on), my weak left ankle can’t handle the impact, and so I feel the walk all day and into the next, feel the connection so clearly from ankle to knee, knee up thigh to hip, hip to lower back, sometimes even up to my shoulder.

Hardly anyone else is walking these side streets.

Occasionally I pass a woman pushing a stroller, teenagers holding hands. I pass a school that looks like every school I ever went to, LAUSD-issue paint, a certain era’s L.A.-public-school architecture.

Last night in my living room some people were talking about how “THE HUMANITIES ARE DEAD.” I’d had a couple glasses of wine and was trying to imagine this kind of world without humanities. It took me a few minutes to realize they were talking about the humanities within the specific context of the U.S. academic industrial complex, not The World.

At a certain uphill point the sidewalk gives out. There’s nowhere to walk but the middle of the street.

This “humanities are dead” business is reminding me of the too-many conversations I’ve had lately about whether “print is dead.” Someone else always initiates this conversation, wondering, “Isn’t it? Isn’t it?” It happens so often that I’m starting to wonder if what might be dying is failure to imagine beyond large institutional frameworks. That corporate book publishing, which in really recent history has established a book business that is about gigantic advances and megachain bookstores, or a magazine-publishing model that mandates the wasteful and expensive printing of tens of thousands more copies of a title than can actually sell just to secure newsstand placement in one of those megachain stores — that those things are looking, quite clearly, and for very obvious reasons, unsustainable does not look, to me, like the Death of Print. In fact, I find myself saying over and over, I think we might see a lot more exciting small-scale, independent book and magazine publishing in coming years.

And in fact, I say to myself on Sundays like this, several months into a ritual of not turning on my computer this one day of the week, my mind and my heart need print like my body needs to be outside sometimes. I read and I write differently on the computer and off it. Reflection and creativity feel different inside and outside, in print and online. These are not easy opposites, and I’m not trying to set up silly hierarchies among them, but we all need lots of different modes and ways. BFP and I have worried about whether this project is suggesting that getting outside and walking THE necessary, healthy, self-caring thing that everyone *needs* to do in a way that is setting up a new oppressive mandate, like anyone needs another one. And we don’t mean to say that. What I mean to say right here is that I need to read sometimes online and sometimes in print, and that I get different things out of these different formats. And I need to get outside and move. Those are pieces of the balance *I* need. Other people have different needs. A world that is mono-mode, or one-size-fits-all is not, I don’t think, a world of life.

I don’t want to be simplistic or deny the kinds of pain and loss that are/will be real if or as academic humanities dwindle, but I can’t not think there has been a kind of death already if we are talking about that diminishing as the Death of the Humanities, if we are already failing to imagine humanities beyond departments in hulking and in many ways troubling institutions. And then I can’t not think that if and when we remember/imagine beyond them – for some of us in the room last night, myself included, who don’t have graduate degrees or institutional jobs in the humanities, this remembering/imagining is not hard – we know that there is, actually, a lot of life left there. And maybe even the death of institutional modes or models will even be freeing?

(Death as a failure to imagine? Failure to imagine as death?)

I get to the park where Irina’s performance is supposed to start in a half hour. The college-arts-conference tour bus is already parked out front (they’re early?!), and when I walk up into the park, Irina is there giving a talk to a crowd of out-of-towners, talking about the community space they’re sitting in and the South Central Farm , which is a story many of us who live here and care about economic justice and/or community organizing and/or democracy and/or institutional power, etc., keep telling and telling and telling.

I find a spot next to another artist friend and wait. There are colorful paper bullhorns on a table, props for the performance. One at a time, the other performers arrive, in the window of time we’ve agreed on, and come smiling, confused, up the hill. They’re artists, activists, organizers; some of them are friends and some are people I’ve crossed paths with at other community events and some are strangers to me, and there is something gorgeous and charming about each of them ambling up the hill, smiling, looking confused, seemingly on time but the audience arrived early — now what?

Irina finishes what I’m guessing is an impromptu talk created on the spot to fill all this extra time an early audience wants filled, and the audience, these college-arts people (teachers? students? I don’t know), from all different places, today bus-touring L.A., start asking questions about youth and community organizing and coalitions and things. One of them points to the cluster of people I’m sitting with (performers in a performance that seems to no longer be happening), a homecity activist who’s been organizing with youth in L.A. for years, and says this activist/performer’s Boy Scouts shirt reminded her, the traveling college-arts person in the midst of a youth-centered community park in L.A., of how we can do amazing things with kids and arts and stuff within, like, the Boy Scouts. And the activist/performer laughs and says she was meaning to signify something a little different by wearing this Boy Scouts shirt, but anyway, see, the thing is, yeah, it’s true, sometimes it’s cool to kinda intervene on these established institutions and all that, but — do you see where we’re sitting? What if we looked at the indigenous traditions that have been paved over, the communities that have been displaced by the systems and institutions that today predominate, and what if we thought about organizing youth in a way that was rooted in older, other traditions and frameworks. I dunno, she shrugged, performing a kind of performance that wasn’t what we’d planned for but anyway the bus had arrived early and an out-of-town college-arts person had tried to make a point using the shirt on somebody else’s back and so this is the accidental performance by that somebody that was happening — I dunno, she said wearing that Boy Scouts shirt, sometimes you really just kinda have to say Fuck the System and do something else.

…I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t live in fear of walking alone at night because I need night walks as much as I need food and water. I need the cool air and the sleeping houses, I need the shadows and the fat spiders up in the arches of the old bridges. I figure it’s a toss-up between possible rape and eternal house arrest, another nice double bind for me to negotiate my way through. River By Davka published in Make/Shift

I love the darkness of the world–I love it especially when it’s the middle of the dog days of summer, and overwhelming heat fades into a just right coolness that bathes and reinvigorates tired skin. I’ve remained awake well into the early morning hours just so I can get a moment of relief, so I can find a smile and a cool hand on my forehead.

But if the darkness is where I find relief, the light, the sun, is where I battle on…

It’s been dark and gray in Michigan for days, for weeks. On my walk, I jump over huge puddles of melted snow only to land in wet, shit like mud that covers my boots. Big loose clumps of snow fall around me and on me like long wet rain drops.

And as I walk, I imagine a different world….

When I started blogging on tumblr, I was very excited to see the huge amounts of erotic smutz all over it. I am not much of a fan of porn, but the art of erotica is something I really enjoy. I DM’d everybody telling them all about my wonderful discovery–hooray, beautiful erotic images coming at me a mile a minute! How beautiful, how sexy!

But then the excitement of newness wore off, and as all us lit crit chicks so often do, critical analysis time set in.

Why were all these women frolicking in the sun, literally becoming one with nature–white?

Is it because the porn world (even erotica!) is racist? Or is it because women of color relaxing in the sun (rather than working) is so far beyond the realm of imagination of most people, it just never occurred to anybody to take pictures of women of color outside?

All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the
branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves
of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of
myself…~Walt Whitman

There is no historical memory of sexual joy, of frolicking, of good old fucking, while out in the open air for women of color. While Walt wrote about the lusty rudeness of a beautiful tree, Native women were negotiating extermination policies that were intimately linked to their sexual and reproductive capabilities. Black women were fighting off Masters, living for years in molded attacks rather than subject themselves to rape.

And from that we get where we are today: Latinas, Chicanas and black women fighting men off in pantie fields by wearing heavy clothes and covering their faces with what I can only imagine are stifling hot bandanas. Native women sitting on top of piles of depleted uranium.

So many bodies devastated.

This is the outdoors that I identify with. It terrifies me to see this picture, even as it brings peace and comfort. I want to look like that when I am dead. I want flowers to come from my body. I want to nurture the worms and the shit mud and be a place for the snow to rest.

But…not yet. Please not yet.
The prayer of a woman of color.
Please not yet…

pazenlavida @bfp could you imagine how great it would feel? to feel the wind blowing through my bush? ::daydreaming::

Right now, I am alive, and I miss the burn of the sun on my arms, on my hips, on my open thighs. I miss a feeling I’ve never had before. I miss that feeling for my daughter, who last summer, refused to go outside without her shirt on any more. I wish I was in Europe or South America, where at least on beaches, it make sense that women are topless. I wish there was some place in the world where, at least in the imagination, it makes sense for women of color to open every part of her body, from the tips of her nipples to the inner layers of her vuvla, to the sun.

I wish that there were Take Back the Night marches for the daytime.

This was one of the few smutz pictures I could find of a woman of color outside that wasn’t dependent on tired animal fetish stereotypes (aka The Black Tiger Woman). And even as this woman is not an animal, she can’t escape the reality of brownness in a white supremacist world–white women interact not with the camera or the viewer–but with the sun, with flowers, with fields, with memories. Their ties to reality are minimal. That woman in the top picture may have a job at a grocery mart, but you’d never guess it. She (and the women who look like her) gets at least one moment in time where the only thing that exists is her pleasure and the world.

The woman of color in her picture, however, gets a quick night of servicing the camera after she has spent all damn day servicing the needs of non-tipping mother fuckers that probably grabbed her ass and leered at her tits.

Which is not to say that I think that every single picture in the entire world of women of color getting it off or being sexual in the outdoors is racist trash or problematic–I’m sure that every person reading this can direct me to 20 lovely pictures of women of color outdoors in all sorts of marvelous angles and positions. What I’m getting at here is that the daytime is not any safer for women than the night time is–that sexual safety and joy exists in pictures for some of us and for others of us, we don’t even get that. That for some of us, an outdoors that is sexualized and beautiful only exists in so far that menial labor can be connected to that space.

And I miss the sunshine…

I imagine this woman with this joy surrounded by blue sky, her skin bare, uncurling like a cat in the sun after a long winter locked up under clothes…

you got me rockin and a’reelin….

To the queer community in the U.S., who has made a fabulous reputation of embracing the slutty whore in us all by doing exactly what I am talking about here–bringing the slut out of the darkness of the night and into the glory of a sun soaked march–I say a thank you and offer profound admiration.

But I do wish it didn’t make me cringe with horror to imagine parades of slutty sun worshipers marching down the tulip lined streets of Holland Michigan. As if the two worlds are so far apart, in different rooms of Dante’s hell.

I can’t believe that Michigan and liberation are so far apart, I can’t believe they are separate worlds…I simply refuse to accept that my world will always be simultaneously so monitored and so unsafe.

could you imagine how great it would feel? to feel the wind blowing through my bush?

Can you imagine it?
Can you?

Can you smell the wind that mixes sun and bush together?

Can you see the glory of your lover, of yourself, through the brilliance of the morning sun?

Do you feel safe?

About once a week, my friend Hilary and I walk a 45-minute loop in the mountains above Hollywood. We curve, midway, on this brief flat stretch between uphill and down.

Last week Hilary was out of town and I walked there especially early one morning, alone, to get some exercise, quiet, and air before starting a day I knew would be difficult. I took the uphill part fast, wanting to drop deep into physicality, to pull down from and out of my hectic head by pushing hard, getting my heart rate up, breathing heavily enough to hear it.

But when I got to the flat midway curve, I realized the physical exertion hadn’t cleared my head yet, and I thought about how often Hilary and I pass these trees while talking about difficult and draining things. Sometimes these are very personal things (our little microdramas). But so often it is capitalism and climate change, climate change and capitalism, over and over and over, looping around and around and around.

So on the downhill half of the loop last week, I was thinking about how consistently we pair those two things. More after the jump.

Obviously climate change is related to a global economic system that is based on cheap oil and endless expansion. (The former spinning out to carbon emissions, the latter to hyperconsumption/disposability/waste; the two connecting at continual extraction of natural resources as if they are not limited, usually from the homelands of people who don’t profit but instead suffer illness, displacement, war, and more as a result of that extraction, and a false notion of the “cheap” movement of goods and people across great distances, etc., etc.).

And certainly many people are talking about the connections between the environment and economics — from scary missing-the-point conversations about “greening capitalism” to Van Jones’s work to connect environmental justice to economic justice by creating “green jobs” that “lift people out of poverty” while fighting global warming.

I think the connections between capitalism and climate change, environmental and economic justice, are deeper than that. But then, yeah, as anyone who’s talked to me for more than five minutes is well aware, I think a whole lot of problems trace back to capitalism.

Which brings me to another walk, on another mountain, with another friend.

A few months ago in the hills north of San Francisco, my friend A. pulled me aside during a group gathering and asked if I was up for taking a little walk with her. There was something she wanted to talk to me about. I had no idea what that something might be, but I like A., and I am always up for a walk in the mountains, and so we were off. It was afternoon and the sun was brightly bouncing off a gold-brushy hillside as we skim-talked about this and that for a few minutes before A. let me know why she’d asked me to take this walk with her: She wanted to ask me about capitalism.

I smiled. I’d thought maybe she was having issues with a co-organizer or a struggle with her family that she wanted to talk through. But no. She wanted to ask this big, honest, amazing question, because she’d noticed that a lot of the people we both organize with whose ideas she respects identify strongly as “anticapitalists,” and she felt like she didn’t have a strong enough understanding of what capitalism really is to truly know why I and so many of our mutual friends identify strongly with challenging it, and whether she might also identify with that. The afternoon was gorgeous and I was smiling and wondering hard how to answer her question.

I think I know what you mean, I told her. I talked about how I went through a period of reading all kinds of “anticapitalist literature,” from very theoretical essays about things like “precarity” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest to an anthology called The Anti-Capitalism Reader, which I thought would finally make it all clear to me, but then it didn’t quite. I told her I started doing all this reading because it had felt really, really unclear. I mean, it was clear that we didn’t live in a just economic system if the legal system involved city-government officials and one property owner in a decision about the future of land that was feeding hundreds of people, but those hundreds of people, who were actually using the land and growing food on it, were not invited to participate in decision-making about it (see: South Central Farm, LA, 2006). It was clear that something was fucked up if some people could profit off other people’s housing and health care without having any meaningful stake in the quality or stability of that housing or health care. It was clear that something was wrong with a few people making a lot of money off the labor of many people, while many of those many people struggled to buy food. But could I explain clearly and certainly that all of those things are related to — let alone integral to – capitalism?

I kept reading articles and books (in the scattershot autodidact fashion in which I tend to try and learn things), hoping that at some point it would all cohere. And I kept feeling like narratives of economic injustice (i.e., what’s wrong) were really clear, but I didn’t exactly need books to tell me that, and explanations of how economies work were really obscure and unclear, yet their authors kept claiming that the people calling for justice just don’t grasp “how things really work,” and I kept feeling like I didn’t have the time to try and seriously grapple with Marx, and, wait–

I remembered this really lucid definition of capitalism I’d just heard in a workshop. I pulled my notebook out of my pocket and read it to A. Hmph. It didn’t sound so lucid anymore. I mean, it did, kind of, but a lot of other things needed explaining first for it to make sense. (Over time all of these pieces of explanation and information, from not only books but also news stories and people and experience, had piled into knowledge, some degree of understanding.)

So, yeah, it’s hard. I told A. how in the midst of this years-long project of trying to really “understand capitalism” by reading about it, I started feeling really frustrated with most of the texts I could find, and just with the fact that economics and economic theory is often obscure and abstract, when what we’re talking about, at bottom, is really simple and concrete: food, shelter, distribution of resources. Part of that, I think, is the absurdly abstract and disconnected kind of advanced capitalism we’ve been living in–and that is lately revealing its absurdity and monstrosity quite clearly, as bets on disconnected bets on disconnected bets turn into widespread foreclosures and layoffs, &c. It’s a system that is grossly divorced from the real and concrete. And I think that disconnect makes it easier for people benefiting from it to claim that people fighting for economic justice, by focusing on concrete issues like housing and food, are naive idealists who “just don’t get it.”

I was veering off again. We were out on this clear day with this clear view and I wanted to say one clear thing to A. about why, even in the face of all the complexity and obscurity of economic theory and bla bla bla, yes, I will absolutely identify as, and work and live as, “anticapitalist.”

I think individualism alone justifies resistance to capitalism, I told her. Even if I can’t succinctly explain all the tricky-abstract-insidious ways it works, the most basic (and of-the-dominant-culture) dictionary definition tells me that capitalism is founded on the notion of individual, or private, property–that is, individual/private ownership, and individual/private profit–and competition among individuals within a “free market.” It’s based on a sense of individuals as separate, atomized, and in competition for the basic stuff of life. It doesn’t value cooperation, community, sharing; it fails to see connections between parts; it places basic sustenance in the hands of this abstraction, “the market.”

There are a million and one other clear things I could say about why I think capitalism is a devastating system that needs to be replaced, but individualism is one foundational one that A. and I were able to get to in a 30-minute walk before we had to meet other people for lunch.

Some other things that feel clear about capitalism that I didn’t get to that day: It structurally privileges people who own equipment or land over people who create things by working with that equipment or land. It does not recognize costs that are not immediately financial (e.g., long-term environmental impact). It is extraordinarily short-sighted and narrow, reducing a complex, interrelated world of systems to a financial bottom line. The only success it knows is endless expansion; it doesn’t value depth, conservation … In the U.S. version it will measure money spent to lock people in cages, or cancer, or anything, as growth (i.e., success).

The connection between climate change and capitalism is not just that the environment is hurt by free-market capitalism’s imperative of endless growth, or industrial capitalism’s dependence on cheap oil. Those connections are real, but there is a better connection between environment and economics. The natural world offers promising models of alternative systems, other ways–ways that are rooted, local, biodiverse, sustainable; ways that value difference and interconnectedness, patience, relationship.

But wait. While I love noting connections between things, I’m wary of facile connection-making. And I’m really skeptical of nature metaphors. Every time I’m tempted to envision an economic system like a permaculture garden, I’m also nervous about the ways different nature metaphors have been used to support unjust systems. Rebecca Solnit has written insightful critiques of nature photography and the landscape-art tropes that reinforce ideas of the “virginal” and “untouched” as beautiful (see As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art). And many, many people have used Darwin’s natural science to validate free-market capitalism as “natural,” what with its competition, survival of the fittest, and all that–isn’t nature a kind of free market in which the strongest survive?

And yet, wary as I am of connecting environment to economy via facile nature metaphors, I want very much to say here that there is a reason I keep talking environment, economy, economy, environment as I walk mountain paths at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century with thoughtful people I love.

We don’t need metaphor, really. The connection between climate change and capitalism is very literal and concrete. I think of Vandana Shiva’s call for a soil-based economy to replace our oil-based one in an important new book recently published by South End Press, Soil Not Oil. It’s a vision that is at once huge and complex, and simple and already here.

A soil-based economy means staying rooted in the local (as distinct from the sprawl that is global capitalism/imperialism), means using resources in such a way that they will last, means an economy that is about concrete things like food and land created and cared for in community (as distinct from an economy that is about abstract profits on packaged debts and atomized-as-if-disconnected-and-consequenceless global movement). A soil-based economy is a deep one (h/t Bill McKibben), a rooted one, a connected one. It is, at least in Shiva’s vision, a just one. It is, instead of colonial/imperial sprawl and non-consensual resource extraction from other people’s homeland for distant, disconnected profits (see Al Gedick’s Dirty Gold: Indigenous Alliances to End Global Resource Colonialism, another important new South End Press title), caring in a lasting way for the near, and minding connections.

It is a way of dealing with resources and life other than mining people’s homelands in Africa and South America to benefit U.S. and Canadian corporations, and it is also no more wealthy kids playing domestic colonizer in Brooklyn, displacing “immigrants whose countries are being raped by your parents’ retirement fund,” as Danny Hoch puts it in Taking Over, his show on gentrification.

BFP and I have been talking a lot about “movement” as a positive thing, but there are many kinds of movement. There is the kind of cheap-oil-based, colonial/imperial movement of goods and money all over the world; there is the displacing movement of privileged kids into newly hip neighborhoods; there is sanctioned movement, and there is blocked and punished movement.

There are also many ways of walking.

I’m starting to feel drained and sad about, ugh, fucking capitalism, again, and so I want to bring in another kind of walk, and another friend.

One of the people I’ve been walking with most regularly for the last few years is my friend and collaborator Daria. We don’t often walk together in the sense I’ve been talking about (erect on two feet, one step linearly after the other). Rather, Daria and I walk a winding sort of path that has lots of offshoots, and we’re usually seated while we do it. As friends and as coeditors/copublishers of make/shift, we usually walk together while seated over meals and meetings and conversations and many different kinds of work as we collaborate in our little shared corners of social-justice movement. And amid a beautiful and transformative friendship in which almost every conversation bounces between a slew of seemingly disparate topics that are each and all addressed within a context of shared political vision, and amid meetings about magazine distribution and editing and planning events and a whole fuckload more, we talk a lot about economics.

Over what turned out to be the most expensive drinks I’ve ever paid for (oops and ironically), we insisted there has to be a better way than capitalism and explored organizing strategies we’d heard of or participated in. Carpooling to make/shift events, we’ve many times talked about how personal money choices relate to a politics of economic justice. And last week over dinner at my place, we talked about unemployment rates and the economic stimulus package and how it is maybe the best that could possibly happen within this system and how this system is so limited and I said, for the gazillionth time, something about how there is no real way out of this climate-change problem that doesn’t involve a serious change in economic system.

And yet we’re living in a culture where most people don’t want to get real about the seriousness of climate change, and even more people don’t want to even begin to question capitalism. So I was sitting across the table from someone with whom I’ve been engaged in serious, hopeful, deep, committed social-justice work for years. We do this work together after-hours, on top of demanding jobs, on top of other relationships, and just life, because we believe in it, because we think we have a responsibility to, because we are hopeful, because so many things, and yet-

it’s hard to have real hope that this society will even begin to move beyond capitalism–even for the sake of its own survival. We’re looking at each other and sitting with this sense of futility, this hopelessness amid the hope that is the basis of all the social-change-minded walking we do together. And it’s not that our sustaining hope is a naive hope or a simplistic hope. But we do need some kind of hope to keep doing it, and so what do we do with this moment, when we are looking at each other across the dinner table and saying, at the same time: this economic system is simply (literally) not sustainable, and it is very hard to seriously envision this society shifting to a different structure.

?

I have to have faith in the local, I tell her. I have to put hope there. I have to question my own search for the leftist econ-theory expert who will clearly and finally explain this damagingly obscure economic system, abstract to the point of mystification of causes and consequences, disconnected from bodies and food and soil as part of its method. I have to stop searching for that ultimate expert theorist, and also for the one who has a grand vision of the way out of all this. I, we, have to remember that, as Vandana Shiva notes, village farmers in India already know the way out for their communities. It is not a new vision but something that exists already, that they’re struggling to save. Many of us are building ways out in our own communities: local time banks; food and cooking and childcare co-ops; community gardens.

Yes, it is really hard sometimes to believe that all this will somehow add up to a shift, to a world that operates really differently from the one we’re living in under globalized capitalism. But the only way that even might come to pass is lots of different, community-specific ways — each of us participating in social-change movement in our various, community-rooted, imperfect, flexible, and shifting ways.

Resisting capitalism is something that happens on personal levels, yes (see the ideas and stories at the wonderful Web project Enough). But it is really something that demands collaboration for structural change. We have to create and protect all kinds of different ways of relating and being and moving in the world that center love and life, and that can last.

“Nature” has been used as a defense for a violent, predatory economic system that is designed to benefit a few at the expense of many. I think social Darwinism is a flawed and dangerous metaphor. Yet there is a real and important connection between the environment and economics. The latter system is a social one that has to deal with a natural one–not a personified natural world whose violences and competitions are extracted out of context and highlighted to justify human violences and greed, but a literal natural world of finite resources that need to be cared for, and that we can choose to hoard and fight over or to share.

“We need another relationship, and that relationship has to be one, not of owning, not of private property, but one of caring, of giving, of responsibility. And this is a life-and-death matter, learning how to be citizens of the earth, not just consumers in a global marketplace,” Vandana Shiva says in the documentary The Shape of Water by Kum-Kum Bhavnani.

I am grateful as can be for the awesome people I am walking alongside as we try to create our own communities’ versions of something like that. Right down beneath these hills, in a manic bustle laid over a desert, are the communities I’m connected to, and regularly walking through.

(Photos by David Rothbaum)

I emailed Jess a few thoughts, and then found that even that was too much work. I listened to a few songs that made the tears overflow, and finally I just called it a day and went to bed.

Today I feel much better–but I think it is important to post about what happened last night. I’m still not able to entirely make sense of all the emotions that were flooding me. Things from my past, things from the present…rejection…

I think that there are ‘consequences’ that come with slowing down and taking the blinders off. I say consequences in quotes because I don’t quite know what word I want to use–and consequences seems too judgmental of a word. As if a person needs to be punished for living with blinders on.

I recognize that people (I) use the blinders of life to make it so that problems can be negotiated and dealt with in a way that is safe for the person doing the dealing. So I don’t like the idea that when blinders are removed, people are going to be ‘held accountable’ or punished by what they see.

But it needs to be put out there. That seeing things as they are, accepting things as they are, negotiating your own place in a world that you recognize and accept just as it is…

It’s hard. And you have to be ready for it. And you have to have the time and the resources and the energy to listen to what is unleashed by reality–and hopefully you’ll have a community to. One that will be there to stay awake while you sleep or hold your hand while you sit.

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while were young…

Nobody in their right mind loves Michigan uncritically.

Everything that could be wrong with a state is what’s wrong with Michigan. Most of us dream of leaving from an early age. I remember hearing an interview with Michigan native, Madonna, where she said she wasn’t really sure what she was thinking when she moved to New York. All she knew was she had to get the fuck out of Michigan. All of us understood that meant without being told.

I knew I was going to leave Michigan too. From the time I did my first report on Italy in the fifth grade. I was going to get out. I wouldn’t stay where I wasn’t wanted–and Michigan made it very clear, it didn’t want me there.

I spent my youth holding on–just holding on–until I could get out. And when graduation time rolled around, I was ready.

But I didn’t go as far as I thought I would. After many travels, I wound up on the other side of the state, as firmly entrenched in the world of Michigan as I had been before when I dreamed daily, hourly, minute by minute, of leaving…

***

As I put on my shoes, I can hear the constant drone of the freeways. Yet another police car with it’s sirens blasting powers by. Before I step out the door, two airplanes and a helicopter shake the house as they prepare for landing.

***

The south east side of the state is all I know of Michigan any more. After I left the city of my birth, I rarely went back, and although I have vague plans to go see a tulip time festival with my kids, I never manage to follow through on them.

SE Michgan has been hit by industrialization in a way that the west side of the state was only beginning to experience when I left for good. The “Big Three” have spent the past hundred years raping Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, and hundreds of cities in between of pretty much every ounce of blood they have.

The Big Three backed the building of massive freeways from Saginaw to Detroit, Ohio, and Canada to better transport massive shipments of first cars, then airplanes and tanks, then cars again. The freeways were for the companies, but eventually the workers used them too–for escape. Factory workers used I-75 to sneak up North for some quick fishing on the weekend, youths used the Ambassador Bridge to find a place that would serve them alcohol before they were 21, and eventually all the people who could afford it (i.e. white collar workers, well paid factory workers) found the peace they were looking for out in the suburbs.

Escapism mixed with practicality created a huge chunk of Michigan this is little more than vast strips of concrete punctuated by a few trees here and there. It’s a concrete jungle that allows you to trick yourself into believing you’re not in prison.

***
I want to die with you on the street tonight in an ever lasting kiss…

***

Flint Michigan

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When you walk into down town from one direction, you can see abandoned stores from decades ago. They smell vaguely of cat urine and sun heated wood. Somebody slapped a coat of blue paint on them years ago, and the blue is now crumbling away with the rest of the building.

Up the street, three family owned businesses have gone out of business since I moved into the area. Across the street a co-op that was started during the Great Depression as a way to bypass a failing system is still busy, but often too expensive for my family and others like mine to afford.

***

I want to guard your dreams and visions…

***

It’s only very rarely that it’s a joy to go for a walk here. More often than not, it’s a struggle, a pain, an effort. The closest *real* park (as in, it has birds and trees and wild flowers and leaves and maybe some bunny rabbits or raccoons–as opposed to a small plot of grass with a walkway forced through it) is about a 20 minute car ride into Ann Arbor. I have not been strong enough mentally to try the bus.

To drive out to a nice park where you can’t hear the drone of the freeways is often such a hassle (and expensive–$4 gas anyone?), it’s just not worth it. But walking around the local neighborhood…well…see for yourself.

Michigan, day one

Michigan, day two

Michigan, day three

Notice anything?

Inspired to get outside and take an invigorating, life affirming, healing walk?

I sure wasn’t. And that’s why I didn’t. The fam and I got in the car instead and drove around. We documented our surroundings, became more aware of them.

Michiganders spend a lot of time trying to outrun their surroundings, to make the bleak grayness as blurry as possible so certain things just aren’t noticed anymore.

So that the miles and miles of concrete grayness doesn’t swallow you whole.

***

The only places in town that ever stay busy are the bars.
When I lived in Flint, a city more ravaged and abandoned that this one, it was the same way.

***

On the other side of town there are multiple factories/warehouses. The small river that runs right through the center of town was harnessed by entrepreneurs of various kinds, and almost all of them closed up or left decades ago. But they all left their crap here–and none of us has been able to figure out what to do with the mess.

There is one factory in particular that is an especially sore thumb. Huge and white and surrounded by barbed fence, it looks like it’s been out of commission for years. And yet that stupid fence still protects it with an unsettling fervor, reminding us all that even an empty, abandoned, rusted out piece of shit factory is worth protecting–from us.

***

Only rarely do I go for walks by myself. During the day time, it’s not that I’m afraid of my surroundings, it’s that I don’t have the energy. And so I use the unending restlessness of my kids to motivate me. Can you imagine getting antsy kids all ready to go and then saying ‘never mind’ because putting your own shoes on is just too much work?

We’ve had neighbors comment on how great it is to see a family out walking. I haven’t told any of them yet the real reason the whole family is out there. I sense that they have their own reasons they aren’t out–and I don’t like to intrude on their space.

***

The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive…

***

When I leave for my walks, I always have that choice of not coming back. It’s something I think a lot of people forget–but also why songs like Born to Run resonate with so many of us.

We have the choice to not come back.
We have the choice to keep walking, to keep driving, to go and go and go until we reach the place where it’s sunny and beautiful and warm and brilliant.

We have that choice–but every time–we eventually make the big circular turn and come back home.

Our walks, our drives, our thoughts, never take us any place but home. A depressing, ugly, gray, polluted, noisy, just plain dreary home.

So when Michigan is what is, when Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, Ypsilanti, Willow Run, Dearborn, and so many other ‘lost’ factory cities are what they are…why the hell do we make that loop? Why the hell do we turn around?

Why do we love this place when it is what it is?

***

There is a disturbing trend that many photographers follow–the one of taking pictures of burned out abandoned homes/buildings. Detroit seems to get the brunt end of this deal, but Flint and Ypsilanti also get it–eager ‘artists’ who can find the beauty in death and worship the way light falls across the fractured window frame or the collapsed ceiling.

I think there is beauty in death too, and so I can appreciate these pictures. But after a friend told me she wanted to send a wild pack of dogs after the next person who says how ‘tragically beautiful’ an abandoned library in Detroit was, I really stopped to think.

I became obsessed with the ugly horrible factory with its protective fence.

Why aren’t burnt out factories photographed the same way living and life structures like libraries, homes and stores are?

Why can’t I find anything beautifully tragic about a dead factory?

Wasn’t there just as much life at that factory at one time as there was at the burned out house?

When I stand in front of that factory, I feel sort of uncomfortable–like my body is on complete alert. The sidewalk in front of the factory is broken and uneven and glass is everywhere. There is another factory across the street, but it has no windows and you sort of feel like anything could happen to you and nobody would see it.

It is just an ugly mess on that corner. An ugly lonely mess.

But at one time, there was vibrant life.
And there still is.

It’s just we’ve all be looking in the wrong place, at the wrong thing.

***

It’s easy to love the dead. The dead is unchanging and more often than not, idealized. It can be what you want it to be, crystallizing the supportive memories and abandoning the painful ones. It conforms to your needs the way you need it to.

It’s not that easy to love life. Because what is life but the abused? The violated? The ugly? The never going to be ‘fixed’ or leave the asshole either total frustration?

It’s not easy to love the fierce vitality of life–because it fights back. It’s what keeps getting up after it’s been hit. It’s the Cool Hand Luke that becomes the ‘problem’ you never intended it to become and just won’t go away.

Why do we love this problem?

In the ugly factory’s parking lot is the secret, the answer.

The concrete that plasters the ground is thick and huge. It takes up at least a block worth of space. And every last inch of that concrete is broken–busted through by weeds.

Ugly, awkward, fierce weeds that grew anyway, even when they were told not to.

And that is what South East Michigan overflows with.

Food that grows anyway.
Youths that refuse to back down.
Teachers that bark, “sit back down, we’ve still got three more minutes!”
Healers that keep neighborhoods strong enough to get back up again.
Community centers that manage to feed the old folks on a few local donations.
People that dance in the street.

The broken hero that knows what the highway can bring her, and turns around to go home every single time–because what’s at home is worth fighting for–because *she’s* worth fighting for.

There is beauty in the fierce weeds that are strong enough to destroy the best capitalism has to offer and still flourish.

We just have to learn to look away from the grandeur of death and toward the tiny crack that just keeps getting bigger no matter what gets plastered over it.

***
Together we can live with the sadness, I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul…

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There’s no place left to hide in South East Michigan. It is almost totally and completely destroyed–devastated down to the once life sustaining dirt.

It’s a place where “walking” is defined by car rides, broken down bus journeys, and songs and dreams.

But there is life in this land, in this body.

And we may be in a fight with it, or a fight for it, or in a fight because of it–or maybe all three at the same time.

But we all know that it’s a fight. And eventually, maybe someday, we’ll all trust each other enough to share our secrets–our love–with each other and recognize together, as a community, we’re worth it.

That the ugly ain’t as ugly as we thought it was.

Someday we’ll get to that place.
Till then..

***

The kids know why I need the shot of Flint as we are driving down the road. W* slows down so I have more of a chance to focus the camera. My son sees that I am very slowly turning from the front of the car to the back where he is at. He scoots down in his seat as low as he can so that I can get a clear shot.

Baby bfp screams from her side of the seat, “take a picture of me too, what about me, get me too!”

There is life here in this car. And maybe resistance is in offering to share the ride with you.

In asking you to share a ride with us all, with life.

Come on with me…