Portland, July 27, 2020

I have good news: Portland is not burning or trashed! It’s the same old complicated, messy, beautiful, wonderful city it always was. My son and I walked around this morning, about 5 hours after the last protest ended, just to get some pictures and to spread some love. We bought coffees from a favorite spot, searched high and low for a bathroom (seriously, the lack of public bathrooms might be the most unexpected horror of the pandemic, amiright?), sat in the sun at Pioneer Courthouse Square, drooled outside Powell’s Books (which is only open for online orders), and then went to the protest block (yes, one main block) and got a little tear gas residue and a little teary-eyed.

A brief tour of Portland this morning:

Everything’s pretty empty because of the pandemic.

Pioneer Courthouse Square. (It doesn’t usually have polka dots. That’s just a happy art installation.)

Murals outside the Apple store and down the block. Most of these businesses have been closed since the Stay-Home orders.

This is the block right before the protest zone. You can see some graffiti on the parking structure across the street.

This is the Federal Courthouse building where most of the action takes place. It’s made of concrete and marble. It would be very hard to burn it to the ground, even if people were actually trying to do that.

People cleaning up trash in the street.

The end of the block. The buildings you can see further down are also Federal buildings, but we didn’t see much graffiti or damage there.

This is the park across the street from the Federal Courthouse. Protestors have food and medical stations set up here. There’s a lot of talk about businesses suffering from the protests, but this 3 block area is mostly Federal buildings and parks and most businesses downtown are closed or limited service because of the pandemic, so I’m not sure how many are being directly affected by the protests at night.

And that’s it. It’s a strange thing to watch somewhere you love on the news, to hear lies about it and watch it become a pawn in a political battle. It makes your heart grow bigger for that place, makes you want to shield it and defend it. That’s why I went downtown myself today. I can’t control a government’s actions any more than I can control an individual protestor’s actions, but I can witness reality, and I can carry love and peace with me and release it into these precious streets.

(A reading suggestion for such a time: Ilya Kaminsky’s parable in poetry : Deaf Republic)

future reapers

Hot days give me a headache. Literally. I am not a big fan of ye olde summer, but it will keep coming around annually. The other day I went up into the loft of our garage/barn/shed and smacked my head on a low beam and banged my teeth together so hard that one of my front teeth cringes every time I have a cold drink now. Also, I hurt my wrist doing yoga and haven’t been able to down dog for a month. I could really use some yoga about now. Especially with the Federal invasion in my hometown streets and so many more presidential months to endure.

On the other hand, the poppies I planted a few years ago have self-seeded all over and keep surprising me with their happy little faces in unexpected places, the peaceful goddesses are rising, and hot days are also an excuse to lie in the grass and stare at the underside of trees.

Everyone I know is bent close to the earth with a lens, looking for something, anything, beautiful to focus on. “Look at these pictures of foxes!” someone posted online, desperation in the giving and receiving. I poured over them eagerly. Yes, foxes still exist. They are still lovely. So many lovely things still exist.

I’ve been trying to pay attention to my dreams lately, hoping maybe my subconscious (or perhaps the Divine) might inspire me while I sleep, but my dreams are painfully utilitarian. Recently, I spent an entire night cleaning a dream house. Once I registered an unknown child for school. Maybe that’s the kind of things dreams are made of in a dystopian year. Sparkling windows and fresh linens, the smell of carbon-paper enrollment forms.

I’ve been thinking of something Donna Cates said in her post this week: “the future unrolls from nothing other than the entire material of the present, like a roll of fabric unfurling.” I’m looking at the fabric in my hands wondering what I am weaving into the future. Do you see this thread that I spun from my fury? Here is the one where I walked away. Here is a cord made of poppy and nettle, a twist of rabbit fur, an image of a fox; I held it for awhile in my cringing teeth.

Then again, Jay Griffiths asks, “Would society be different if its profoundist models of time were not structured in a past-to-future narrative at all, but if time were seen as an unarrowed thing - if, for example, the Bible began with the rhapsody of a psalm and ended with the sashay of the song of Solomon?”

Perhaps I should imagine a garden, where my life is the fruit planted by gardeners long-dead, where others will one day reap the harvest planted in my body. (Forgive me, future reapers, there is still poison in my veins, but I have swallowed rhapsody for you as well.)

Last week, I found an old frame in a trunk. It enclosed two perfect butterflies mounted on paper. A google search tells me they are common to Asia, particularly India. Their antennae are delicately intact, a single one of each pair curving softly toward the right, like tiny signals from a dying hostage: “The way out is over there,” or perhaps, “Remember the way the sun glints on the Ganges.” I do not know, but I put them on the shelf in my office, where I can stare at them and wonder.

at the close of a year

It’s Sunday night here - a time that always feels like an ending, but is actually a beginning. It’s late in this twilight space. I should be tidying and settling down to sleep, but it’s the last night I’ll ever be 48 and I want to write a little.

I made signs this week and I’ve tacked one up on my office wall: “Power to the Peaceful”, where I can see it while I work. I have been reminded these past days how quickly I can lose my inner equilibrium, how easily righteous anger can spill over into just plain old ugly, demeaning anger. What a balance this is, to be appropriately angry at injustice and yet not dehumanize those who refuse to (or can’t) see it. To destroy immoral systems and yet somehow care for the redemption of the people who perpetrate them, including yourself.

So the sign is up where I will see it daily, a reminder that peacefulness is difficult work, that the power that comes from it is not the kind that follows in the wake of guns and rigged systems, but the kind that flows inside vines and seeds, rivers and bloodstreams. At the end of this year of living I feel such a call to go deeper with the practice of peace, to move it out of an intellectual space into a lived space. The upheaval around us, the upheaval inside myself, only makes it more clear to me that this is important work.

~ My favorite part about birthdays is the freshness, the whole new year lying ahead, full of potential. I have written out some intentions, thought about how to maintain my attention on those things in the long term. I’m sure I will be writing about them over the next months. Right now they are so fresh and tender, small buds just emerging from under the dark of leaves; I want to keep them close and quiet.

For now, as darkness falls and I can feel sleep calling to me, I’ll share this section of one of Kyce Bello’s poems that I have put in the footer of my blog. I keep it as a prayer, a dream for going forward:

Make me a figure with a womb

And relict heart.   Make me

the seam that holds the tattered land together

and let me be the speaker that sings

rise, rise

all across the shapely ground.

Kyce Bello || Refugia

Love to you, friends.

tonia

a way in

Yesterday we went to the city to walk. Portland is a river city and we love walking the length of it, crossing and recrossing the river on the many bridges. Going anywhere by foot changes your view of a place, takes you into a sensory experience far different than rolling by enclosed in a car. We intended to stay near the waterfront, which is a pedestrian-friendly, beautiful space that attracts joggers and strollers, but when we got there I found I wanted to go deeper into the downtown core. The last few nights have been violent there, fire and anger; I wanted to see the aftermath for myself. The city already feels surreal, stripped of its business people and tourists by the pandemic. Those who remain are the ones who have nowhere else to go. We passed tents and camps, street preachers and ravers, a woman lost in some kind of trance, dancing herself free of her clothes, countless sleeping bodies slumped against walls or stretched out in doorways. Grafitti was everywhere, the same few messages repeated over and over: “I can’t breathe.” “F*** the cops.” We passed a couple of police officers, walking slowly, heads down in conversation, each with an unconscious hand over their holstered guns. Men in hard hats were pulling broken glass from windows, replacing it with sheets of plywood. No one was smiling, no one was making eye contact. There was a palpable grief in the air. I found myself unconsciously placing my hands at my heart in the Anjali mudra (prayer position), breathing deep, exhaling a prayer of peace into the streets as we walked them. I live so far from those streets, in every way, but these are all my neighbors, every one, and I wanted to join them somehow, in some small way.

I’m not suggesting there’s anything noble in walking nearly-empty streets in the aftermath of the struggle, I’m only saying I live far from so much of the collective pain in our world and I need a way in. I need to pinch my flesh, wake it up, quit thinking that my life is the status quo instead of the privileged exception. (Honestly, I feel like curling up in the fetal position and plugging my ears until it’s over, but that, too is a privilege not granted to my neighbors.)

For those of you who are feeling the same, a few links:

~ Want a reminder to connect? Helen shares her heart.

~ Want to do more than post social media memes and outrage? Mireille Cassandra’s 10 Steps to Non-Optical Allyship

~ Want to do something? Colin Kaepernick has been leading with non-violent and effective protest for years now. He holds camps to train young Black and Brown people to do the same and to be safe in interactions with police. Consider supporting his work.

Or take a look at Campaign Zero.

~ Want to understand? Ibram X Kendi’s work is well worth the time.

“Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It's a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.”

Love to you, my friends. This is heavy work, life-time work, so be gentle as you go. Breathe, pray, turn off the hourly updates, connect with real people, remember small changes are vital too. xoxo

the holy hum

This year, Earth Day and the New Moon are riding close to one another, which seems fitting. We are now, more than ever, aware of the Earth’s call, but the New Moon phase echoes the darkness we feel as well. A New Moon phase is something like walking a familiar forest path at midnight: the darkness teases out sounds, experiences, and emotions we were unaware of when we traveled the path in the light of day. It’s a time to step tenderly but purposefully until we can see our way clearly again. We may feel things we didn’t expect, we may be frightened, or exhilarated, perhaps both at the same time.

It’s been nice to talk with some of you this week about this muddle of emotions, the pull we feel towards change, even the confusion we have about what to do next. No one knows the way. We are all children of the Earth born into the Machine-gods’ realm. How do we learn the language of our birthright again? How do we learn the steps that bring us into the dance?

Wendell Berry offers these thoughts in his essay, People, Land, and Community:

“…as [the mud daubers] trowel mud into their nest walls, [they] hum to it, or at it, communicating a vibration that makes it easier to work, thus mastering their material by a kind of song. Perhaps the hum of the mud dauber only activates that anciently perceived likeness between all creatures and the earth of which they are made. For as common wisdom holds, like speaks to like.”

What if the longing so many of us currently feel for change, the buzz in our chests that disturbs our peace with the status quo, is not a sense of dread, but the holy hum of our true home singing to us, like calling to like, pleading us back into our intended harmony? What if what we feel is the longing of Creation to bring us back?

Only beware…

“In a society addicted to facts and figures, anyone trying to speak for… harmony is inviting trouble. The first trouble is in trying to say what harmony is. It cannot be reduced to facts or figures - though the lack of it can. It is not very visibly a function.”

Part of the problem, Berry says, is that the things that are destructive to our world are systems that are easily explained and backed by information. Even though they make their gains by the oppression of ”nature, people, and culture”, they are surrounded by scientific reasoning and a sense of inevitability. A harmonic system, however, is not so easily explained.

“…it involves an order that in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible.”

Is it any wonder we are confused about what to do now? Our birthright is coherence with a complex system of mutual beneficence, wholeness, and health, yet we have only been taught the rhythms of dissonance. We are born into a system built on competition, where each decision, each tool used, has a logic that makes sense only on its own and takes into consideration only its own profit and success.

“Land, work, people, and community are all comprehended in the idea of culture. These connections cannot be understood or described by information - so many resources to be transformed by so many workers into so many products for so many consumers - because they are not quantitative. We can understand them only after we acknowledge that they should be harmonious…that a culture must be either shapely and saving or shapeless and destructive. To presume to describe land, work, people, and community by information, by quantities, seems invariably to throw them into competition with one another. Work is then understood to exploit the land, the people to exploit their work, the community to exploit its people. And then, instead of land, work, people, and community, we have the industrial categories of resources, labor, management, consumers, and government. We have exchanged harmony for an interminable fuss, and the work of culture for the timed and harried labor of an industrial economy.”

I fear the Problem of the Industrial Economy is only going to be solved by its inevitable collapse, but that’s not what I’m thinking about today. I’m thinking about how those of us who hear the hum can live in resonance with it (which is naturally in opposition to and in defiance of the Problem.) Last week a friend shared her happiness that with this unusual home-time she has been able to do so many things that she has wanted to do in terms of sustainable living, but she also feels a sense of dread knowing she won’t be able to maintain it when she returns to work. I understand that fully, and I want to offer more today than just an emotional invitation to join an inexplicable rhythm. I believe one reason we fail in these things is that we often take other people’s solutions and try to paste them onto our own lives. What we need is to understand our own place, our own resources, our own abilities. None of us alive now will completely escape the messy realities of our systems. We will have to compromise. We will create waste. We will have to decide which levels of exploitation we can live with. Our answers will not be easily explained or categorized, and they will not be universally applicable. We can only respond to our own situations with attentiveness and love. The important thing to remember is that we can respond.

Here are some ways to think, and some places to begin. I think they are accessible to most, if not all, of us.

Banner from The Far Woods, a couple of local artists whose Work I love.

• We can simplify our diets to take advantage of our particular resources. It isn’t hard to learn what the farmers in our own regions are growing. Then a plan can be put in place to support them on whatever scale we can manage, from roadside stands to Farmer’s Markets, to u-picks, to bulk orders, to CSA’s, to looking for their produce in the regular grocery store.

• We can examine our use of transportation to find the most energy-efficient and community-supportive means for us. It needn’t be all or nothing. Here at home, we cannot walk or ride straight from the house due to dangerous roads, so we drive to a parking lot a mile away and walk or ride from there when we can. My husband commutes to the city with an electric car and a bus pass. It’s not perfect, it’s what we can do.

• We can turn off lights, turn down the heat, turn off screens, dry the clothes on a rack. At least sometimes. And that’s a start.

• We can make our homes centers of production rather than centers of consumption. We can make birthday cards or poems or a loaf of bread or a pair of pants instead of paying others to do it for us every time.

• We can support the land by community clean-ups, voting against exploitative laws and businesses, and asking businesses we have relationships with to use more sustainable means and methods.

• We can reduce our reliance on convenience products by simplifying our wants. We can learn to snack on foods that don’t come in packages or boxes. We can take coffee and a water bottle from home. We can get out of the mindset that we deserve constant treats and make those things special and rare again.

• We can make our spaces safe for pollinators and other creatures by refusing to use pesticides. We can grow flowers to feed them and food for ourselves, even if it is a single pot on the front step.

• We can stop making so many online purchases. We can shop our local stores first and nurture a willingness to accept what is available to us rather than searching endlessly for the ideal product. By buying from a local store we can save local businesses, fossil fuels and trees, we can reduce plastic pollution, air pollution, and waste, wear and tear on the roadways from truck transportation, and our addiction to immediate gratification.

• We can choose tools that are fit for our tasks and not disruptive of the natural order. A good broom, a mop bucket. Fountain pens over disposable pens (this is on my list to conquer!), cloth bags instead of plastic or paper, a good knife instead of a plethora of one-use gadgets, a pot of mint instead of a box of mint tea bags, a healthy lifestyle instead of a cabinet of pills.

• We can hold simpler events. We can break up with Pinterest and decorate for these with natural and found items, make cooking and washing dishes part of the affair instead of relying on disposables, eschew favors and gifts that add to clutter, exchange gifts of pre-loved items and made things.

• We can make peace with our faces and our hair and simplify our beauty products. A healthy diet and water are the best path to pretty skin and hair. Apple cider vinegar and baking soda can do a surprising number of jobs. We can keep the things we really want to keep (for me it’s cruelty-free mascara, lipstick, and a touch of powder when I go out) and let the rest go. We can stop worrying about trends and find a simple, classic haircut that is easy to maintain.

• We can understand the true cost of the things we consume. Cheap chocolate is paid for on the backs of exploited people. The true cost of fairly-traded chocolate is expensive. The answer is to eat less, not buy cheaper. In the same way, budget meat is paid for by animals who suffer horrible lives and deaths, people who work in hellish conditions to butcher them, the land which is drained of fertility and poisoned, and government subsidies that promote it all. The electricity in my area is powered by dams that alter the rivers and damage endangered salmon populations and disrupt the rhythms of Native cultures. When we understand the actual price of what we are consuming so thoughtlessly, it can help us make better choices.

• We can commit to going outside and learning the hum of our own place. The Earth wants to teach us her ways. We can watch the birds build and take advantage of the seasons, which teaches us what we can be doing at the same times; we can learn the weeds that grow in the sidewalk cracks and use many of them for nourishing teas or addition to our meals; we can re-learn how to handle changing temperatures and the feel of the weather on our skin. The more we listen and watch, the more discoveries we make, the more the rhythms become our own.

• We can take inventory of our lives and time. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, we can choose one area at a time and ask ourselves how we could step out of the consumption cycle in our particular situations. We can make slow changes and take pleasure and pride in them.

I’m sure you have more and wiser things you could add to this list, but I offer this as a place to start.

This invitation to the holy hum is for all of us. It is not exclusive, it is not just for those who have time or money or health or off-grid cabins in the wilderness. It’s for all of us to join, in the ways we can. The more of us who do, the more we share, the louder the hum.

Happy Earth Day, my friends. <3