Refuse Refuse

I like to think of myself as an active, doing, person and as a teacher, I have to be. But as these Blogposts testify, I also enjoy roaming the landscape of the mind and thinking about (and then writing about) things. When it comes to action for social justice, I feel that the things I write about it are an action of sorts, posing questions and giving information that helps others consider points of view that help build a narrative that can deeply influence action. 

 

My wife, by contrast, is a doer. Her response to the political climate has been to write postcards with a group, work at a foodbank and recently, join a garbage clean-up group called Refuse Refuse. (That’s a verb followed by a noun.). Now she organizes clean-ups once every six weeks or so. I’ve gone to most of them and can report that they’re very satisfying and a good antidote to sitting around in weepy despair. Just get out and do something, even if it be as simple as picking up garbage.

 

Besides the social benefits of meeting your neighbors in a 4 or 5 block radius, I find it super-fun to pick things up with these grabbers. (See the person 6 people in from the left with her grabber.) Amazing how they are so fine-tuned as to easily pick up a tiny cigarette butt. And so I wandered my neighborhood streets, eyes peeled for every scrap of paper or plastic, grabbed it with the grabber and dropped it in the bag. Sometimes we’d pass people who thanked us for our work and that was nice, though unnecessary. No one was doing this looking for credit and praise. It just feels like an easy and satisfying way to be of use, with the benefit that the next day, the streets we walk will be more pleasant to walk through. 

 

So if you’re feeling hopeless and paralyzed with despair, get a group together, put on an orange vest, grab your grabber and go out to make the world a more beautiful place, one cigarette butt at a time. 

Teacher's Oath

Back in November, I was absolutely convinced that we were finally ready to break that damn glass ceiling and elect a black/ Indian woman with a beloved teacher running mate. How sweet that would have been. How different these last few months would have been and the next four years. 

 

The quote that keeps coming up for me is "Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know." I thought we had finally learned it. That kindness is better than cruelty. Simple living better than excessive greed. Knowledge better than ignorance. Justice better than tyranny. Truth better than lies told without shame and believed without thought. Accountability better than privileged immunity. Things like that. 

 

I was wrong. 

 

And so, like so many, overwhelmed by the shock of it all, trampled by the constant assault on every single front—education, immigration, economy, human rights, civil liberties, constitutional rights, outraged at 80 million of my fellow citizens and furious with 90 million more who didn’t vote. My strategy was to carefully monitor my news intake, accentuate the positive in my active teaching life, soothe and comfort myself and others through music, escape through an all-engaging TV series (This Is Us). And recently, go to a rally just about every week.

 

But now I feel something new on the horizon. A slowly growing surge of those genuinely resisting the onslaught and doing it together. The brave individuals and institutions who are choosing not to cave in and ignore, from Costco to Harvard to the thousands of lawyers in cities throughout the country retaking their oaths to uphold the Constitution. The despots trying to take the country down are depending on our silent complicity, their ability to sow fear and strike terror into our hearts to ensure our compliance, our inability to stay focused on what matters as we distract ourselves with mindless entertainment. 

 

But it looks like we’re not going down without a fight. As citizens in a country that began as organized resistance to tyranny, that amidst all its flaws, mostly guaranteed free speech and encouraged lively debate in schools and public discourse, we have a long history behind us that just maybe we’re not willing to give up. The image of the lawyers retaking vows is so powerful. It’s the moment to ride that wave and have every profession do the same. Doctors have their oath—“First do no harm,” teachers have their Mission Statements to promote critical thinking, foster a safe and inclusive environment, the Unions have their old slogan “Don’t mourn— organize.” 

 

I wish I had the skills and outreach to organize teachers. How I would love to see a national outpouring of teachers throughout the country, cities and towns alike, all on the same day, take an oath to re-affirm their determination to teach American students American history, re-instate lively debate, nurture comfort with uncomfortable truths and cultivate genuine critical thinking. 

 

Anyone out there know how to do that? Another Union slogan—“In unity there is strength” —and the tyrants are depending on us to sit quietly afraid for our jobs. We need to all stand up together or they will win. If we don’t, the children we have vowed to nurture and protect simply by becoming teachers will be the losers. Anyone with me here?

 

Surfing the Tidal Wave of Change

For reasons I’ve stopped questioning and just trust, woke up this morning curious about what I wrote on this day ten years ago. Here’s what I found. Note that this was before the Toddler King rose to power. It was a follow-up to a post I had just written about an Iranian officials claiming that promiscuous women caused a recent earthquake, a Nepalese official suggesting that “beef-eating” caused it, a Texas GOP lawmaker claiming that gay people caused riots in Baltimore and the death of a million unborn children. 

 

What is going on here? Why the rise in Fundamentalism? Why the ten steps back just as we were beginning to move forward? Why are so many making such outrageous claims and blaming earthquakes, riots and baby genocide on “promiscuous beef-eating gay women?”

 

Here’s a formula. Rapid change= high anxiety. The one sure thing you can say about the “interesting” times we live in is that things are changing more rapidly than we can assimilate. Heck, I can’t even count on my Niji pen still being manufactured and when offered the new choices at the stationary store yesterday, one was too fat, one too thin, one too tall. It made me anxious. 

 

Anxiety is related to stress is related to a constant low-grade fear. In a world that is unstable, unpredictable, unreliable, anxiety rises, sometimes all the way to fear. Fear of the other, fear of the unknown, fear of the next change just as we were getting used to the last one. 

 

Fear is the lowest form of the brain functioning, the emotion that sends us into the basement of our mind where all we can do is flee, fight or freeze. The access roads to the higher realm of neo-cortical thinking are blocked in such a state. That would help account for the outrageous non-thinking highlighted in my last blog. When we can’t think clearly, we reduce the conversation to blame. And always someone or something else. 

 

Fundamentalism is the home of the non-thinker. The fundamentalist of any religion or philosophy gives up the birthright of the human brain in exchange for an easy (but false) security. And all of this is perfectly understandable given today’s world. When change sweeps us away like a Class IV rapid, we reach out to cling to the nearest rock. Enter religion, dogmatic politics, gang membership (both the street kind and the good-ole- boys clubs). We’re desperate to hold on to something that is sure, dependable, un-demanding. Something that only asks us to believe, not to think. Something that is simplistic and black and white, no bothersome nuance or shades of color. Something that promises protection from the “them” through compliance and complicity in the club of “us,” something that reduces complexity to “good (us)” and “bad (them).”

 

So while such regression is understandable in the light of the way the brain and psyche function, it is counter-productive to what the situation demands. Instead of clinging to the rocks, we need to release to the flow, surf on the tidal waves of change, tap dance on the shaky foundation, improvise like the jazz musician responding to the moment. While the fear and anxiety and stress are real and not to be lightly dismissed, we can turn their energy toward the higher realms of thinking and feeling, transform them through the active imagination and the probing intellect and the compassionate heart. We need to unthaw the rigid mind and exercise our flexible thinking, unlock the fortressed heart and let love begin to breathe again, unbutton the imprisoned body and get dancing. Let’s use all the colors in the crayon box, let the volume move with nuance between soft and loud, let language regain a range larger than “awesome!” and “cool!” 

 

We won’t get much time on the soapbox—headlines don’t do subtlety and ambiguity—but we can stem the tide of ignorance with informed knowledge, move beyond mindless blame to recognizing our own demons, offset sheer stupidity with breathtaking imagination. We can ride out the tsunami of rapid change, find a few eddies and quiet pools off to the side and keep hope alive through the time-honored practices of exalted thought and feeling. No blame, no shame, light the flame, claim your name, play the game. You get the idea.

 

PS I found my old Niji pens online. 

 

PSS Ten years later, Niji pens are nowhere to be found.

  

Crossing the Finish Line

It was an auspicious first day of May, with a brief bout of tears. The happy kind. (Still waiting for the Niagara Falls of Grief that I’ve been holding back since November). 

 

The occasion? Getting to witness my 13-year old granddaughter Zadie win her 200-meter race! There is something stirring about watching people push themselves to the limit to defy some horizontal gravity. Yes, there is a competition with other runners, but for me, the greater focus is each person alone heading down the track with everything they've got. 

When Zadie was 2 or 3 years old, she was walking outside with her Dad and started to run away. Terrified that she might run into the street, he took off after her— and was barely able to catch her! She has been a speed demon her whole childhood, running, running, toward some unknown horizon. And now all of that has found a place and a form on her track and field team. Watching her cross that finish line got the tear ducts flowing and when I went to hug her congratulations, I pointed them out to her. I was a Proud Pop-Pop! And then again, when she ran the last leg of her relay team and once again, crossed the finish line first. 

 

All of this was a surprise punctuation mark to a wonderful four days with Zadie and Malik while Mom was off at a Conference in Cleveland. We only heard of this track meet yesterday and were so thrilled to get the chance to witness it. As for the rest of the time, it was some of the usual go-to activities—Rummy 500, basketball out in front of their house with their new set-up, watching the Warrior basketball highlights together (Game 4, not Game 5!), going out for ice cream (Salt and Straw!). The kids were at school every day, so no big hikes or events out on the town. But Karen and I did get to do an Art Project and a Singing Time with Malik’s class at school, with his teacher who is one of our former students! Weather has been pleasant and today spiked up to 80. Portland is in full bloom with dogwood and wisteria and cherries. We loved walking Malik to and from school each day, in company with a herd of other parents either walking or biking together. Also a grand pleasure to meet up as I always do with two wonderful college friends and discuss grandparenting, music, poetry memorization and our astonishment at the state of the world.

 

My daughter is now home again, we leave tomorrow and have 9 days to prepare for the next adventure of biking in France. And so it goes on…

 

 

Final Exam

This another great find from social media. Here’s my assessment of how I did (or still am doing), as shown by comments in italics:

 

42 lessons life taught me

Written by Regina Brett, 90 years old, of the Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio.

"To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 42 lessons life taught me. It is the most requested column I've ever written. My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:”

 

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good. — Yep. 

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.— Good reminder.. 

3. Life is too short – enjoy it..— Doing my best here. 

4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and family will.— Yep.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.— Without fail..

6. You don't have to win every argument. Stay true to yourself.— Got better at the first part.  No choice but to follow the second.

7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.— Yep.

8. Save for retirement starting with your first pay check.— I think I might have waited 10 years or so. When you’re 24, who’s thinking about retirement?

9. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.— Thanks for affirming that.

10. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.— Good advice and mostly, I’m on it!

11. It's OK to let your children see you cry.— Yep. Sometimes in front of the whole school where we all were.

12. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.— Excellent reminder. 

13. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it... —No comment.

14 Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.— Every morning and then some. 

15. Get rid of anything that isn't useful. Clutter weighs you down in many ways.— Hmm. Work in progress.

16. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.— Yep.

17. It's never too late to be happy. But it’s all up to you and no one else.— Hard-earned truth. 

18. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.— Never did, never will. 

19. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.— Hmm. No to the fancy lingerie.

20. Over prepare, then go with the flow.— My teaching North Star!!

21. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.— Yep. And I wore purple (upon advisement) for my TED talk. 

22. The most important sex organ is the brain.— Thinking about that.

23. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.— Yep.

24. Frame every so-called disaster with these words 'In five years, will this matter?'— Sometimes. 

25. Always choose life.— Yes, I believe I do. .

26. Forgive but don’t forget.— This I have learned and the sign is that I can tell the same story without calling up the cellularly-remembered outrage and sense of betrayal. But I have not forgotten a single detail. 

27. What other people think of you is none of your business.—Getting better at understanding this. 

28. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.— Work in progress.

29. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.— Yep!

30. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does..— Pondering.

31. Believe in miracles.— Yep, because I witness them in my classes. Not so much in the political landscape. 

32. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.—Okay. 

33. Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.—Amen!

34. Your children get only one childhood.— Yep. Grandchildren too. 

35. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.— Hope so!

36. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere. — As for the first, more or less. Again, agree with the second but works better if I don’t take my phone out walking with me..

37. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.—Good point! The Devil you know, etc.

38. Envy is a waste of time. Accept what you already have not what you think you need.— Work in progress.

39. The best is yet to come... Hope so!

40. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.— I do. .

41. Yield.— Improving

42. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift.— Sometimes hard to remember in these dark days. But always aiming for it. 

 

How did you do on the test? Share it with a friend. 

 

The Coffee Parable

(I found this intriguing story on social media. See if it works for you.)

 

Let’s say it’s a beautiful day outside and you decide to go for a stroll. You pop by the local coffee shop to pick up your favorite brew. And as you turn around from the pickup counter, someone accidentally bumps into you and, as a result, half of your coffee ends up splashing all over the floor. The question I pose to you now is why did you spill the coffee?

 

The obvious answer that comes to mind for most people is the reason why you spilled your coffee is because that other guy bumped into you. If he didn’t bump into you, you wouldn’t have spilled your coffee. This is true.

Perhaps taking it one step further, the reason why you spilled your coffee is because you weren’t paying attention to your surroundings. If you had glanced over your shoulder before deciding to turn around, you may have been able to avoid that collision and thus saved your coffee. That might be true too.

 

But both of these are almost beyond the point if we were to consider the situation on a much more literal level.

 

Inside Out

The reason why you spilled your coffee is because your cup was full of coffee. If that cup was full of hot tea, you would have spilled hot tea. If the cup was filled with lemonade, you would have spilled your lemonade.

At the very core of it all, the thing that you spill is what was within you when you got shaken or jostled. The thing that comes spilling out is whatever was inside your cup when you got shaken or jostled. Getting bumped simply released what was already there. If you didn’t get bumped, nothing would have spilled, but in life, you can only expect to have your world shaken, jostled, and turned upside down every now and then.

 

Start at the Beginning

Now, this story isn’t really about coffee, of course. The point is that whatever is inside you is what will come out when you get shaken. If you are already filled with anger and resentment, that’s what will come out when things don’t quite go your way and you get bumped. If you are already filled with frustration, that’ll spill out ten times hotter when you get jostled.

 

Many people assume that they’ll be happy when they’re successful, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. It’s completely backwards. You must first start from a mindset of happiness and gratitude before you can really achieve any kind of real success. That way, when the world inevitably bumps into you, the thing that will come spilling out of your cup is happiness and gratitude.

The challenge, then, is figuring out how you can choose to fill your cup with positive vibes, humility, kindness, compassion and ambition, rather than resentment and frustration. It needs to be a conscious choice. So, start there. Fill your cup with joy, so when you do get shaken, all it means is you now have room for a refill.

 

Interesting? Right now we are all of us being shaken and jostled at 7.0 on the Richter scale. Rather than causing reactions, it is revealing what’s already inside of our cup. All the toxic narratives of the Patriarchy, White Supremacy, unchecked Capitalism that have been raging inside some cups are splashing out and burning anyone within reach. At the same time, our highest humanitarian impulses that have been waiting to be called on are overflowing in others. 

 

My work as a teacher is to help fill everyone’s cups with joy, connection, communion and great music and dance. And help re-fill them when the contents spill out. Well, not a perfect metaphor— the hot coffee of kindness still spills out so we can’t drink it and gets our clothes wet. But you get the point.

 

Me and the Boy

 I was a “boy’s boy” growing up— sports, occasional fist-fights and the smug certainty that mine was the superior gender (despite Suzanne Anderson beating me in arm wrestling in 4^th grade). The one cliché that didn’t apply was building and fixing things, an aptitude that continued to elude me my whole adult life. 

 

By the time I got to college, the feminine side of my psyche, nurtured by Whitman, Chopin and a growing interest in teaching young children, began to grow along with my hair and embroidering flowers on my bell-bottom jeans. I took a class on Feminism and two years after graduating college, got a job at an elementary/preschool where most of my teacher colleagues were women. A few years later, I had two children, both girls. Who later filled our house with their friends, also girls. As a music teacher, I found myself wholly at home teaching the girls and puzzled about how to reach the boys. Especially as the school grew to a Middle School. 

 

By the late 80’s, Robert Bly, Michael Meade and James Hillman began organizing Men’s Retreats, noticing that men embracing their feminine sides was an important step, but fell short of the possibility of embracing a positive masculinity. So by 1990, I joined a Men’s Group of mostly men who knew each other from the school with the hope of investigating what a non-toxic masculinity might look and feel like. 35 years later, we’re still trying to figure it out!

 

But somewhere along the way, I noticed my relationship with the boys I taught shifting. I somehow learned how to appreciate their energy and help turn it into a positive musical experience. When my granddaughter Zadie was born, I was thrilled and delighted. Familiar territory and happy to be in it. By the time my grandson Malik was born, I finally felt ready to grandparent a boy. 

 

And here we are, my wife and I up in Portland caring for the grandkids for five days and loving every minute with them both. But particularly appreciating my comfort with Malik— playing cards, playing basketball (he beat me in HORSE!), watching the Warrior’s game. He also makes his own breakfast and lunch, reads voraciously, can be wholly tender and sweet alongside his boyish swagger and confidence. 

 

I’m fully aware that the very notion of masculine and feminine, even discussed as different energies within both boys and girls, has been called into question and sometimes downright dismissed. I also noticed early on that in staff meetings, the women teachers would agree that this was all socially constructed and then in their casual conversation, those parenting boys and girls would confess, “They’re SO DIFFERENT!” It seems logical to me that nature’s choice of division of labor through creating two sexes in mammals would have some effect. 

 

Simply put, the energies needed for killing animals and nurturing children are different. Long after such division of labor is actually practiced in a world where both men and women go to the office, those energies would still be present in our ancestral cellular structure. Not one iota of this means excusing men from child-raising and women from kick-boxing. But it seems wise to start the conversation of balancing the two energies from the foundation of  where they both begin. 

 

But I’m not going to solve that here. Or anywhere! I’m just happy to have a chance to bond with my grandson. That’s all I really wanted to say.