I’m going to ride your heart – Bleached
Have you noticed our conversations are almost always about safety?
Will you listen to that fear? Will you listen to my need?
fighting what feels natural
what has been conditioned to feel good
finding providence
hard-won wisdom
What imagination led us here?
he said practice creates habits
a reference to his dangerous life,
a prophetic retrograde
“So (re)invent us, still weeping the solutions we came from, imagining ‘things’ would be fine if only a single interpretation could be shared, meaning enforced.”
Laura Mullen, Complicated Grief
Golden fur and morning light warms calmly.
Energies, swirling, occasionally oppressive
as unconscious as the way we sell love.
The mural reflected a range of fruits found in this region,
geographic signifiers, orbs of light and juice. Positive
transformations expressed through practice, ritualized execution.
Repeat, forcing action. Asking for it, suppressing.
The real economics of what we dream, imagine, and desire
divided, found between centuries of exclusion, forced space.
Think about how resistance is holding what remains.
All my dreams have wound around need.
This time of year the radiator sings at night. The gray mornings are carbon copies of Cleveland’s skies. Those years full of bravado that only darkness holds or youth demands. To the east, the pastel light spins out into easter yellows, baby blues, and softened ripe peaches.
I watched him dip his boots into the fountain, one at a time, muddied from the urban forest he was paid to curate.
When we talk about the work be explicit.
Do you care
enough?
We all have somewhere to be
someone to hold (ourselves mostly)
accountable for what happens today.
She told me she cut her hair short:
she “didn’t want to look corporate”
like me.
I faced west.
You laughed softly
off to the side
watching me embrace myself.
I dreamt of a place where we had no values to derail the conversation.
as emotional as overhead
nothing so much as an ache
a wanting for tenderness
rejecting structure as destiny
believing too soon – too fast
as familiar as knowing too much
inside returns for counterfeit gains
competition policed through transformation
the early morning air was refined
smelling sweet with pastries and gasoline
a fountain’s song of resistance proportional
to the rush that values order over opposition
“That’s the biggest thing there is – the sky! It’s there, and it’s an abiding puzzle, presence and invitation.”
—William Stafford
What you have is what you walk away with.
Leave nothing behind.
A particular kind of status quo,
founding tensions of contradiction.
Yet, this is worth unraveling.
Where does all this information go?
Why are we competing with brutality?
When does resilience become fight?
I haven’t finished reading The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure.
Does that make me a bad feminist?
The Rocky Mountains were sunny
as snow fell thousands of miles
away from you.
It’s felt reasonable
to learn about scale
as a measurement
of time and impact.
We carry those
worth holding onto
get what we deserve
and survive by making
room for more.
that feeling when you are rendered invisible
that process when you have no ability to move forward
that entrenchment when you know everyone is battling each other’s evils
that line around and that territory where power thrives
14th St & Rhode Island Ave NW, DC
Did you hear that?
It was the collective sigh of those who bear their souls to empty rooms.
This week I did everything I wasn’t supposed to do and everything I wanted. Sometimes they were the same thing.
On Friday, I spent the day in a space designed and curated to invoke imagination. The plan for action called for disruption not-so-cleverly disguised as profit. Some bragged about organizing “cockfights” and others advocated for righteous indignation. The ferocity of their arguments were fueled by unconscious privilege and unchecked assumptions about who would benefit from that specific vision of change.
A call to home confirmed this truth: struggle and hope are symbiotic. Like fog on a window produced from warm bodies and breath, redemption is a process.
I’m going for it.
This is the first job that I chose, deliberately. In the not-so-distant past, I’d be with the one that wanted me in that moment; rent was due. It was more desperate which was familiar.
This is a new feeling.
A recap of the past negative space*:
Museum of medical curiosities:
Vaginas in jars, human horns, input about the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng (e.g. they raised over 21 children and maintained separate households), jars and jars of fetuses, a giant’s skeleton, and a history of the forceps.
It was the intimate possibility of how grotesque the human body can be, neatly displayed in tightly sealed jars, that validated my skewed body image – in a good way.
Philanthropology:
Professional development: Relationship building, inspiration, intentional knowledge fortification, and strategic epistemological adventures.
Personal development: Deflections, sidewalk propositions, anarchist bookstore, blue-eyed funk, and missed Amish apple dumplings.
The experience of focusing on the space outside the intended focus provided the best learning. It ended up being more accurate and balanced that way. The undercurrents of access, influence, and unintentional nepotism were the white noise to the dance of my own rhythmic exploration. I’m building my own portfolio of success.
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Change is inherently risky but the alternative is not my modus operandi. Within the next few months, I will no longer be in the same place and that fact is both surreal and acutely corporeal.
As the days grow closer to the launch, I feel more and more like a situationist. I’m constructing situations that fulfill my desires, presently and for the unknown tomorrow. The geography of such an architecture is fraught with dérive but that’s where the beauty lies.
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* Negative space – the space that surrounds the subject to give it meaning and shape
I’m feeling the tension of transparency. Talking points are not on a spectrum of disclosure.
Sometimes I wish I had the luxury of ignorance but that sounds incredibly pretentious.
I fear the (inevitable) numbness of privilege that’s associated with moving up a class. There are doubts tangled around every conversation and the heavy dread of diminishing self-confidence is illogical but still it lingers.
Assumptions of belonging are dangerous.
Watching those with privilege and wealth access opportunity and exercise their option of choices while ignoring the reality of the majority is a melancholy pursuit. Do you spy what I spy?
Did you feel your heart sink when the rich white man uprocked the evening designed to honor women? The crowd cheered; some even had tears. The injustice was ignored because of the $100k donation and the women danced on the sacrifices of those who had come before them.
Perhaps what I’m really feeling is the tension of working within a broken system where hope is a commodified ideology. Or it could be the looming holiday season of forced consumption. Or it’s the slow realization of not fitting into a place that was never designed to accommodate you in the first place. There are many hypotheses to consider for the sadness of consciousness.
Communication isn’t my strength which is probably why I’m fascinated with expression of ideas.
Networks, intimate favors, and secret hand shakes are the basic elements of nonprofit hustling and philanthropic giving; the great washing machine of money laundering.
I dream of effectively expressing what I really want to say without spinning cliches.
A few things I learned yesterday:
1. crows have memories that last forever so be nice them
2. interactions with young, like 13 years old, boys are beautifully brave
3. when analyzing information, look beyond the obvious and start there
4. finding oneself in spaces where you can literally feel a tension or dynamic should be internalized and remembered like a crow
5. there is nothing better in this world than a west coast sunset
Who gets to determine the pace of progress?
After reading this article about passing as stupid results in prestigious job,I would use this as Exhibit A that patriarchy, does in fact, still exist. Despite the rhetoric that education is the bootstrap on the American dream boot, not all are welcome to pull themselves up.
Diane Ravitch’s recent post on stripping the joy from education and the buzzkill of measurement solidified a belief that there has always been class war in the school rooms of America.
If being clever means being diabolical in a culture that sucks all joy out of learning and continues to structure a patriarchal society, then I will never play dumb.
This is in no particular order and could be paraphrased:
week in recap:
A dream of violence against a midget who was after my box of pastries; translation: feelings of insignificance with fantasized empowerment.
Wealth and parody walk a fine line. Attending a day long meeting whose purpose was to inspire and champion the cause is exponentially more difficult to engage in as I learn more about philanthropy, funders, social justice, and nonprofits. Peacocking wealth in a fabricated slum hut was probably the worst part of the spectacle followed closely by a professionally produced montage of employees set to the song, “Proud” (aka the Biggest Loser theme song). I was the only one in the crowd who understood the tragic irony.
Random street encounter results in confessions that were bold but true.
Cocooning can mean ready to pounce.
I’ve been finding myself in spaces that are out of my comfort zone, the slippery slope of trying out new things and new ways of thinking. Yesterday was no exception. The irony of sitting through a precision workshop for eight hours was not lost on me. It was noted that I think out loud which pretty much takes me off the executive track or even the ability to meet with the executives. [Note to self: celebrate and honor this] Learning the language of Power was the hidden subtext of the day’s activities.
The workshop was an immersion into a hyper-masculine way of thinking and ultimately practice of precision. Learning how to answer concisely is not a bad thing and learning how to ask questions that are more direct isn’t either. It’s the big picture of how these techniques are used to influence conversation and potentially alienate those who don’t think this way (i.e. non-executives or people who are not in positions of Power) that left me drained, drained of hope and creativity. It also left me with a new-found skill of listening for this technique so that I may either avoid or engage. Fight or flight.
Now I wish I didn’t hear it all around me.
Having an opportunity to observe a culture that is the opposite of your constructed reality is a rare privilege and requires a perverse sense of adventure.
Deconstructing signs that on the surface seemed to demand a forced dichotomy was exhausting. In fact, realizing that the human experience is homogenized despite one’s circumstances was a chance to expose the soft underbelly of the fabrication.
Understanding one’s place between these two realities is an intimate undertaking. Cultural scopophilia never felt so good.
Messages of transparency must be delivered authentically, otherwise it is propaganda.
