Do you think it's a sign that I should be living somewhere else when changes in the weather that even hint toward seasonal shifts make me so homesick I think seriously about taking I-5 south to I-90 east out of the city, rather than to work?
I miss big weather. I miss blizzards, thunderstorms, tornadoes, winds I can barely walk against, and all the rest of it. Big weather's not always a picnic. Sometimes it's devastating. With nothing but loneliness for it as context though, I even miss worrying about big weather. I miss the collective bargaining Plains people do with big weather. It's conversation with God, negotiation with The Fates, and often even strategy based on hard data and/or experience. Regardless, at some point, you gotta just sit back and watch the show. Watch. The. Show. Here's the thing about big weather: it's not about you yet it encompasses you. It connects you to the people to whom you belong over generations of stories, all of which are seated in the context of big weather. "That was the year it was so hot the corn burned up before we even hit August." "The drift was right up to the eaves of the barn on south side, and we were sliding down from the peak." "My main memory of that storm was coming up out of the basement in the morning to find the willow tree out back of the house was coming in through the back door."
I miss openness. Nothing pisses me off like someone referring to my home as "the middle of nowhere." The Plains are not easy to get to know and I get that. (Being from there, I don't feel that in my chest, but I understand that it's true for many people.) I think I first understood that after reading Willa Cather for the third or fourth time. Cather was a transplant, and it took her some time to come to love the region, but she did come to love it. I rarely hear others speak of the Plains at all. When they do, it's usually to bemoan the "lack of" something. When I drive home and roll through the Badlands, Sandhills, and family farms of north central and northeastern Nebraska, all I feel is openness. There are so many stories there...of family and love and tyranny and oppression and steadfastness and manipulation and peace and persistence and violence and community and genocide and resilience and hopefulness and...so many stories, and if the people of the Plains seem tight-lipped and wary of outsiders, sometimes it might be that they think everyone can see what truly only they witness, that all those stories are stretched out and exposed, as part of a landscape of pure openness that offers nothing to hide behind or under.
I miss people being quiet for awhile.
20100224
20100205
"Hearts are torn between what's wrong and ain't..."
I've been neglecting this blog. Rather, I've been neglecting my desire to blog, I guess.
This week, I've been thinking about how I spend my time or prioritize my time, focus, etc. Mostly, I am driven by habits --habits resulting from messages I've internalized. Here's one. I work. That's what I'm most comfortable doing. I can make just about anything into work, it seems. When I remember that humanity is important to me, I am ashamed of this. Most often though, I'm not remembering that. Instead, I am letting myself off the hook, because working hard means I'm not lazy.
I think I have learned some stuff in the past fifteen or so years that has challenged me to examine my worldview. That's an understatement really. Sometimes I feel like challenging my worldview is the main thing I'm doing...intellectually. That does not mean I'm challenging it in other ways, however. I guess I can consider it a nod to the persistence of my cultural heritage that, in this country, my make-up has not been completely obliterated and replaced with only an attachment to the emptiness of white power and privilege. This is not to say that my ingrained attachment to the emptiness of white power and privilege hasn't obliterated most of my cultural heritage (or even that it doesn't connect to my make-up), just that I suspect I'm "working out" (pun intended) my fear of laziness along some kind of fourth dimensional line touching class, gender, geographic, and ethnic histories in addition to whiteness.
This has fucked with my ability to engage for my entire life. That's more apparent to me with each passing day. When hopeful, I find this apparency liberating. I'm not much hopeful though. Mostly, this apparency is terrifying, and I've been wondering if, throughout my life, I've been not terrified of some shit that by all reason should have terrified me (and that, when other people have reported similar shit, I've even gotten that it was terrifying and rolled with that) exactly because I've been saving every drop of terror for this extended moment of understanding that I am primarily driven by the fear of laziness-derived worthlessness. After all, what's my skill set to break that habit? Maybe I should work. on. it.
Now I have wasted ten minutes on this self-indulgent and whiny blog post when I could have been getting some shit done.
I know that writing this down is a step on the 2300 mile walk home to be fully terrified. So that's a good thing. I just wonder if when I'll prioritize it.
This week, I've been thinking about how I spend my time or prioritize my time, focus, etc. Mostly, I am driven by habits --habits resulting from messages I've internalized. Here's one. I work. That's what I'm most comfortable doing. I can make just about anything into work, it seems. When I remember that humanity is important to me, I am ashamed of this. Most often though, I'm not remembering that. Instead, I am letting myself off the hook, because working hard means I'm not lazy.
I think I have learned some stuff in the past fifteen or so years that has challenged me to examine my worldview. That's an understatement really. Sometimes I feel like challenging my worldview is the main thing I'm doing...intellectually. That does not mean I'm challenging it in other ways, however. I guess I can consider it a nod to the persistence of my cultural heritage that, in this country, my make-up has not been completely obliterated and replaced with only an attachment to the emptiness of white power and privilege. This is not to say that my ingrained attachment to the emptiness of white power and privilege hasn't obliterated most of my cultural heritage (or even that it doesn't connect to my make-up), just that I suspect I'm "working out" (pun intended) my fear of laziness along some kind of fourth dimensional line touching class, gender, geographic, and ethnic histories in addition to whiteness.
This has fucked with my ability to engage for my entire life. That's more apparent to me with each passing day. When hopeful, I find this apparency liberating. I'm not much hopeful though. Mostly, this apparency is terrifying, and I've been wondering if, throughout my life, I've been not terrified of some shit that by all reason should have terrified me (and that, when other people have reported similar shit, I've even gotten that it was terrifying and rolled with that) exactly because I've been saving every drop of terror for this extended moment of understanding that I am primarily driven by the fear of laziness-derived worthlessness. After all, what's my skill set to break that habit? Maybe I should work. on. it.
Now I have wasted ten minutes on this self-indulgent and whiny blog post when I could have been getting some shit done.
I know that writing this down is a step on the 2300 mile walk home to be fully terrified. So that's a good thing. I just wonder if when I'll prioritize it.
20091208
"Yeah, don't you figure, he's got bigger fish to fry..."
In brief and still in frustration:
When will adults bent on involving youth in an endeavor figure out that "youth empowerment" doesn't mean designing something and then taking it to youth through traditional, normative structures and systems and expecting youth to engage with it passionately?
Does this ever work?
More pointedly, does it ever work for youth who are already burnt out on...kicked out of...completely unseen within...unengaged by...or unsafe within those traditional, normative structures and systems?
I haven't seen evidence that it does.
Yes, this is a rhetorical question. Yes, I am actively engaged in combating this through advocacy efforts informed by actual youth. Right now, though, this very minute, I just want to be pissed off about it.
When will adults bent on involving youth in an endeavor figure out that "youth empowerment" doesn't mean designing something and then taking it to youth through traditional, normative structures and systems and expecting youth to engage with it passionately?
Does this ever work?
More pointedly, does it ever work for youth who are already burnt out on...kicked out of...completely unseen within...unengaged by...or unsafe within those traditional, normative structures and systems?
I haven't seen evidence that it does.
Yes, this is a rhetorical question. Yes, I am actively engaged in combating this through advocacy efforts informed by actual youth. Right now, though, this very minute, I just want to be pissed off about it.
20091119
"Out of all the flags I've flown, one flies high and stands alone..."
Tomorrow, November 20th, is the eleventh annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance. More information about it can be found at http://www.transgenderdor.org.
Since 1999, I've attempted to spend TDOR away from public events held to mark it. I spend much of my time and consciousness on community organizing, advocacy, popular education, social justice work, etc. The few TDOR events I've attended over the years, while certainly memorializing in tone, included a How-can-we-turn-tragedy-and-pain-into-action? capstone. I don't condemn this, but it doesn't work for me. The only focus, the only emotion, I can summon on this day is love...love for sentience, I guess...and also grief, for the destruction of it. It is a difficult and willful act for me to maintain that focus, actually. The call to action is so tempting...because it is a turning away from loss.
So, I take a day off from action and am simply in love and in grief. In some ways, it's an annual reminder of my daily disassociation. It takes this day --and a couple others like it during the year-- to knock me into...what...I'm not sure...that particular layer of vulnerability that is an ache for the triumph of kindness, of collective access to awe of knowledge, existence, connection - of being. To stay there, hopeful in that vulnerability, it helps for me to be alone.
Clocking out now...see you soon...
Since 1999, I've attempted to spend TDOR away from public events held to mark it. I spend much of my time and consciousness on community organizing, advocacy, popular education, social justice work, etc. The few TDOR events I've attended over the years, while certainly memorializing in tone, included a How-can-we-turn-tragedy-and-pain-into-action? capstone. I don't condemn this, but it doesn't work for me. The only focus, the only emotion, I can summon on this day is love...love for sentience, I guess...and also grief, for the destruction of it. It is a difficult and willful act for me to maintain that focus, actually. The call to action is so tempting...because it is a turning away from loss.
So, I take a day off from action and am simply in love and in grief. In some ways, it's an annual reminder of my daily disassociation. It takes this day --and a couple others like it during the year-- to knock me into...what...I'm not sure...that particular layer of vulnerability that is an ache for the triumph of kindness, of collective access to awe of knowledge, existence, connection - of being. To stay there, hopeful in that vulnerability, it helps for me to be alone.
Clocking out now...see you soon...
20091115
"Sadly, in search of, and one step in back of..."
I'm the oldest of three siblings. My sister is almost six years younger than me, and my brother is seven and one half years younger than her. Since my sister was little, it's been espoused in my family that she's much like my mom and I am like my dad. Some nod to the Law of Averages --or maybe an unstated rural Plains belief in an Everything-Comes-Out-In-The-Wash sort of fairness-- has dressed my brother in a mixture of the two.
Never having been much interested in the divination of the qualitative or quantitative "greater" influence --Nature or Nurture?-- on a person's development, I relaxed into these assessments over time as just another thread of family narrative. I find place in the storytelling, the marking of the intersections of experiences as a way to give context to perspective and depth to personal history; so, the existence of these assessments has become the meaning.
Lately, though, I am returning to this book again and again - envisioning some almost irritatingly layered Venn diagram of family players building to an intersection of my mom and dad that is barely readable. In the small white space contained by the intersecting lines, I search for my brother, my sister, myself. At thirty times magnification, the space balloons, making it easier to see the complexities possible within it but overwhelming to attempt an investigation of the layers that created it, the history that built it.
Given the limits of linear time and the ability to identify or embrace potential, I find this...frustrating. I notice I waffle between a search for the essentialized --purpose, right (vs. wrong), etc.-- and a siren call into the depths of design via chaos. Then again, sometimes I am just depressed and return to a third reading of poorly written fantasy literature for adolescents.
More to come...
Never having been much interested in the divination of the qualitative or quantitative "greater" influence --Nature or Nurture?-- on a person's development, I relaxed into these assessments over time as just another thread of family narrative. I find place in the storytelling, the marking of the intersections of experiences as a way to give context to perspective and depth to personal history; so, the existence of these assessments has become the meaning.
Lately, though, I am returning to this book again and again - envisioning some almost irritatingly layered Venn diagram of family players building to an intersection of my mom and dad that is barely readable. In the small white space contained by the intersecting lines, I search for my brother, my sister, myself. At thirty times magnification, the space balloons, making it easier to see the complexities possible within it but overwhelming to attempt an investigation of the layers that created it, the history that built it.
Given the limits of linear time and the ability to identify or embrace potential, I find this...frustrating. I notice I waffle between a search for the essentialized --purpose, right (vs. wrong), etc.-- and a siren call into the depths of design via chaos. Then again, sometimes I am just depressed and return to a third reading of poorly written fantasy literature for adolescents.
More to come...
20091105
"You've got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything."
Maybe it's time to actually post something to this blog.
I have been contemplating paths...a.k.a. choices, context, and/or circumstances resulting in particular positionalities. Take your pick.
"Paths" might be more poetic a shorthand...or maybe just pathetic. Regardless, I won't fill this post with that debate.
When experiencing love -contemporary or that reached through waxing nostalgic- I sometimes hear the refrain present in multiple conversations overheard, "If I'd never...I would never have...and thus never...which lead me to [insert here: my soul mate, you, my one true love, etc.]"
I hear this like a sci-fi story based on a worldview foundation absent from my brain. I can explore it and understand it, but I cannot find myself within it. I could probably speak it, and maybe even fit into the conversation without an accent if careful...but why?
It's too obvious to pin this all on an exploding of the "I," since a collection of moments and contexts could be argued to perfectly sync with another collection of moments and contexts, and only that one - if of course those collections could be somehow suspended from influence or without trailing stories anchored...elsewhere. Well, maybe it's not too obvious. Nonetheless...
I guess I'm searching for a metaphor that's...off the beaten path, if you will. Maybe I'm visioning areas of temperature in a body of water that morph and overlap, influence each other and move away. Maybe it's a field of alfalfa rushed with wind right before a thunderstorm. How can such a small section feel turmoil next to complete stillness, then wave gently in the face of fury, then fall...all the while anchored to dirt, immutable by the wind only because of the crop that leeches its very strength?
Maybe a seemingly destined endpoint, a culmination of singular love, is a salve to festering of a futility so frightening when control is the goal. What if control is not the goal? Anyway, goals are for field sports, right?
Finally, an appreciation for "nonetheless" - how did this guy sneak past the rules? Why does he get to be one word, clearly comprised of three? Nobody -nothing- cared to involve control, maybe? I have no idea and no desire to research him, actually. Instead, I will bask in the glow of his impossibility.
I have been contemplating paths...a.k.a. choices, context, and/or circumstances resulting in particular positionalities. Take your pick.
"Paths" might be more poetic a shorthand...or maybe just pathetic. Regardless, I won't fill this post with that debate.
When experiencing love -contemporary or that reached through waxing nostalgic- I sometimes hear the refrain present in multiple conversations overheard, "If I'd never...I would never have...and thus never...which lead me to [insert here: my soul mate, you, my one true love, etc.]"
I hear this like a sci-fi story based on a worldview foundation absent from my brain. I can explore it and understand it, but I cannot find myself within it. I could probably speak it, and maybe even fit into the conversation without an accent if careful...but why?
It's too obvious to pin this all on an exploding of the "I," since a collection of moments and contexts could be argued to perfectly sync with another collection of moments and contexts, and only that one - if of course those collections could be somehow suspended from influence or without trailing stories anchored...elsewhere. Well, maybe it's not too obvious. Nonetheless...
I guess I'm searching for a metaphor that's...off the beaten path, if you will. Maybe I'm visioning areas of temperature in a body of water that morph and overlap, influence each other and move away. Maybe it's a field of alfalfa rushed with wind right before a thunderstorm. How can such a small section feel turmoil next to complete stillness, then wave gently in the face of fury, then fall...all the while anchored to dirt, immutable by the wind only because of the crop that leeches its very strength?
Maybe a seemingly destined endpoint, a culmination of singular love, is a salve to festering of a futility so frightening when control is the goal. What if control is not the goal? Anyway, goals are for field sports, right?
Finally, an appreciation for "nonetheless" - how did this guy sneak past the rules? Why does he get to be one word, clearly comprised of three? Nobody -nothing- cared to involve control, maybe? I have no idea and no desire to research him, actually. Instead, I will bask in the glow of his impossibility.
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