Clean pain / dirty pain - Resmaa Menakem

 Article for prison justice:

Building on Resmaa’s framing, I have been also thinking about power. It seems that power can show up as clean or dirty, as well. For example, when we believe that you having power or voice means that mine is silenced or that power is a zero-sum game, I think we are acting from dirty power.

 

But, when we see that power can grow across communities, that it can be a source of community transformation and well-being, and that we are all stronger when we see, hear, and find solidarity with each other, I believe we are acting into clean power.

Podcast - University of Arizona, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Center for Compassion Studies

Resmaa: There’s a white spoken word artist that I heard the other day, and he said something else that made my brain kinda go ‘click!’ and go ‘yeah, that's it!’ One of the things that he says is that when it comes to white people, and he’s talking about his own people, when it comes to white people, it’s important to realize that white body supremacy is the water, not the shark.

And many times progressives are always looking for the Trump shark, or the KKK shark, or the Mike Pence shark, right, they're looking for the shark, right, but not the fact that they are steeped in the water. And when white progressives put themselves on this continuum of, you got Trump’s over there and you got ‘good’ white people over here, what is happening is they forget that that continuum that they're on, the one that says they’re a good one is actually a sliding continuum.

It is not a fixed continuum. It slides. And when white progressives...this is something that Jim White has been saying lately, is that progressive white supremacy is as damaging as devout white supremacy. What I mean by devout white supremacy is that those who are so dedicated and devout to the destruction of people of color. Those are the devout ones, right? But the progressive ones, that insidious type of white body supremacy...that even though they say they don’t believe in white body supremacy, they are steeped in white body supremacy and those notions of who black people are in relation to who they are is still steeped in white body supremacy.

And if that goes unexamined, they continue to wound people of color, and then feign...and then won’t take responsibility for that wounding. So part of it for me is that when it comes to healing this thing about white body supremacy, white bodies have to begin to get together to figure out how they’re gonna create a container, a cultural container by which they can begin to develop culture to begin to actually attack it.

White body supremacy...the abolishment of white body supremacy, currently as it stands...white people have no notion how to begin to deal with that culturally. They have a notion around segregation. They have a notion around assimilation. They have no notion around abolishing white body supremacy, or racism, or anti-racist things. They have strategy around it, but not culture.

The KKK, the devout racists, have a culture. They have symbols, they have colors, they have music, they have dance, ways of speaking, ways of standing, ways of being, all that different type of stuff. What does the white liberal have other than strategy and a racial resume, right? And if I’m a fourteen year-old white boy, having music and symbols and a shared historical understanding, even if I know that the shared historical understanding is abhorrent, I still have something that speaks to me more so than picketing, and sitting around, you know, something that I’m protesting. That does not sustain culture. And until white liberals begin to actually develop a culture around anti-racist, abolishing, somatically abolishing white body supremacy, until they begin to think about this as a culture and less about this as a strategy, they will continue to re-wound people of color.

Poem - The Last Move - Ada Limón

from Bright Dead Things

It was only months when it felt like I had been
washing the dishes forever.

Hardwood planks under the feet, a cord to the sky.
What is it to go to a We from an I?

Each time he left for an errand, the walls
would squeeze me in. I cried over the nonexistent bathmat, wet
floor of him,
how south we were, far away in the outskirts.

(All the new bugs.)

I put my apron on as a joke and waltzed around carrying
a zucchini like a child.

This is Kentucky, not New York, and I am not important.

This was before we got the dog even, and before I trusted
the paralyzing tranquilizer of love stuck
in the flesh of my neck.

Back home, in my apartment, another woman lived there.
In Brooklyn, by the deli, where everything
was clean and contained.

(Where I grieved my deaths.)

I took to my hands and knees. I was thinking about the novel
I was writing. The great heavy chest of live animals
I had been dragging around for years; what’s life?

I made the house so clean (shine and shine and shine).

I was suspicious of the monkey sounds of Kentucky’s birds,
judging crackles, rusty mailbox, spiders in the magnolia tree,
tornado talk, dead June bugs like pinto beans.

Somewhere I had heard that, after noting the lack
of water pressure in an old hotel in Los Angeles,
they found a woman’s body at the bottom
of the cistern.

Imagine, just thinking the water was low, just wanting
to take a shower.

After that, when the water would act weird,
spurt, or gurgle, I’d imagine a body, a woman, a me
just years ago, freely single, happily unaccounted for,
at the lowest curve of the water tower.

Yes, and over and over,
I’d press her limbs down with a long pole
until she was still.

Poem - Hermit Thrush - Donika Kelly

 

• From Bestiary

 

We never knew winter before this. 

Winter where none of the trees lose 

their needles, 

where ice creaks the limb, 

and the hermit thrush forages for insects 

on the forest floor. Winter where, 

finally, the white girls, after a long, 

long summer of bronze and muscle and shine, 

cover their legs. Winter, where we can finally feel 

beautiful, too. 

We say we. 

I mean I. 

When they cover their legs, 

I can feel beautiful, too.

On Being with Ross Gay

On Being with Ross Gay



Tippett: I wanted to talk to you about justice and how you grapple with that reality, that aspiration, that concept. And there has been an evolution of that. You have brought together the idea of longing for justice and working for justice with also exalting the beautiful and tending to what one loves, as much as what one must fight.

Gay: Tending to what one loves feels like the crux. And I’m very confused about justice, I think. I feel like the way we think of justice is absolutely inadequate, often. Often. Not everyone. And I am curious about a notion of justice that is in the process of exalting what it loves.

Tippett: So here’s something you wrote somewhere. You said, 

“I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting, but imagining, and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems.”

Gay: I also think that there’s a part of our bodies that are wired — and this is a thing that I noticed, that when I would experience something delightful, and sometimes I’d be like, “Oh, that’s wonderful” — so often, I’d be like, “I want to tell you.” It is this thing that actually makes me reach out towards someone.

And that feels bodily. I don’t know if a scientist has found this out yet, but when something good happens, do we gather around a thing? It is a feeling that I have, a deep feeling that I have, and I feel like it’s something that I witness, too, that people kind of want to share the stuff that they love.

Tippett: There’s this famous line from Cornel West, that justice is love made public.

[Mentions the Sun article from July 2013]

[Reading and talk: What's the difference between exuberance (commitment to wonder) and earnestness (too tight fastness to rube-like wonder) when reading the essay about the meanings of "touched"]

Poem - Silent friend of many distances / Let this Darkness Be a Bell Tower / Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 - Rainer Maria Rilke

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Translated by Joanna Macy

Poem - To Gabriella at the Donkey Sanctuary - Mary Szybist

All morning I’ve thought of you feeding donkeys in the Spanish sun—Donkey Petra, old and full of cancer. Blind Ruby who, you say, loves carrots and takes a long time to eat them. Silver the beautiful horse with the sunken spine who was ridden too young for too long and then abandoned. And the head-butting goat who turned down your delicious kiwi so afterward you wondered why you hadn’t eaten it.

Here I feed only the unimpressed cats who go out in search of something better. Outside, the solitaires are singing their metallic songs, warning off other birds. Having to come down from the mountain this time of year just to pick at the picked-over trees must craze them a little. I can hear it in their shrill, emphatic notes, a kind of no, no in the undertone.

Gabriela-flown-off-to-save-the-donkeys, it’s three hours past dawn. All I’ve done is read the paper and watch the overcast sky gradually lighten. Breaking news from the West: last night it snowed. A man, drunk, tied a yellow inner-tube to his pickup, whistled to his daughter, and drove in circles, dragging her wildly behind…

I know. But to who else can I write of all the things I should not write? I’m afraid I’ve become one of those childless women who reads too much about the deaths of children. Of the local woman who lured the girl to her house, then cut the baby out of her. Of the mother who threw her children off the bridge, not a half-mile from where I sleep.

It’s not enough to say the heart wants what it wants. I think of the ravine, the side dark with pines where we lounged through summer days, waiting for something to happen; and of the nights, walking the long way home, the stars so close they seemed to crown us. Once, I asked for your favorite feeling. You said hunger. It felt true then. It was as if we took the bit and bridle from our mouths. From that moment I told myself it was the not yet that I wanted, the moving, the toward—

“Be it done unto me,” we used to say, hoping to be called by the right god. Isn’t that why we liked the story of how every two thousand years, a god descends. Leda’s pitiless swan. Then Gabriel announcing the new god and his kingdom of lambs—and now? What slouches

toward us? I think I see annunciations everywhere: blackbirds fall out of the sky, trees lift their feathery branches, a girl in an out-sized yellow halo speeds toward—

I picture her last moments, the pickup pulling faster, pulling rougher, kicking up its tracks in the slush: she’s nestled into that golden circle, sliding toward the edge of the closed-off field—

I am looking at the postcard of Anunciación, the one you sent from Córdoba in the spring. I taped it to the refrigerator next to the grocery list because I wanted to think of you, and because I liked its promise: a world where a girl has only to say yes and heaven opens. But now all I see is a bright innertube pillowing behind her head. All I see is a girl being crushed inside a halo that does not save her.

This is what it’s like to be alive without you here: some fall out of the world. I fall back into what I was. Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.

What I want is what I’ve always wanted. What I want is to be changed.

Sometimes I half think I’m still a girl beside you—stretched out in the ravine or slouched in the church pews, looking up at the angel and girl in the colored glass, the ruby and sapphire bits lit up inside them. Our scene. All we did was slip from their halos—

Which is to say, mi corazón, drink up the sunlight you can and stop feeding the good fruit to the goat. Tell me you believe the world is made of more than all its stupid, stubborn, small refusals, that anything, everything is still possible. I wait for word here where the snow is falling, the solitaires are calling, and I am, as always, your M.

Poem - The Path - Lynn Ungar

Life, the saying goes, is a journey,
and who could argue with that?
We’ve all experienced the surprising turns,
the nearly-impassible swamp, the meadow
of flowers that turned out not to be quite
so blissful and benign as we first thought,
the crest of the hill where the road
smoothed out and sloped toward home.

Our job, we say, is to remain faithful
to the path before us. Which is an assumption
as common as it is absurd.
Really? Look ahead. What do you see?
If there is a path marked out in front of you
it was almost certainly laid down for someone else.

The path only unfolds behind us,
our steps themselves laying down the road.
You can look back and see the sign posts—
the ones you followed and the ones you missed—
but there are no markers for what lies ahead.

You can tell the story of how
you forded the stream or got lost
on the short cut that wasn’t,
how you trekked your way to courage or a heart,
but all of that comes after the fact.

There is no road ahead.
There is only the walking,
the tales we weave of our adventures,
and the songs we sing
to call our companions on.

By Lynn Ungar 7-27-17

Song - What Must Be Done - Greg Greenway

 I learned as a child there are two ways to see

The world as it is and the way it could be
Some people say that's just not my problem
Some people do what must be done
They see the hole in the fabric that must be sewn
They see the way blockaded and they roll back the stone
They see the day beyond the horizon
And they do what must be done

Chorus:

Some people do, do, do, what must be done
They do what must be done
They see the way beyond the horizon
And they do what must be done
 

I've seen the toll taken, the tears that were shed
I've seen the journey started and the ripples spread
Some people say that's just not my problem
Some people do what must be done...
They see the hole in the fabric that must be sewn
They see the way blockaded and they roll back the stone
They see the day beyond the horizon
And they do what must be done...

Sometimes the darkness is all we can see
We can’t envision what the future will be
But in our hearts is that which can guide us
So we can do what must be done...

We see the hole in the fabric that must be sewn
We see the way blockaded and we roll back the stone
We see the day beyond the horizon
And we do what must be done...

words & music by Greg Greenway (formerly of Brother Son). Last verse by Trevanna Grenfell

Poem - Say It - Ross Gay

If I told you we were slapping the beat to some

Barry White jam crooning from the boombox
and that every single one of us at one point or another
jumped up to shake what shook on us and there were lines of us
in step and a loon in every one of our mouths who knew
and one of us in his pressed shirt dancing his dead father’s
hunchbacked smooth another singing back up like hers
and another shaking his head no but meaning yes,
oh yes—and if I told you the proprietor of this roti joint
dragged his wife from the kitchen where she was busy
currying chana for the best doubles in Brooklyn
so she too might witness this unabashed racket, this stampede
of glee and goof, this clan of black clad—and if I told you
today we laid down one too young
to lay down:
praise the body its miraculous
stutter and thrum. Praise its slosh and drag and drone
and every particulate diving toward the dirt.
The rampant heart its last kick and holler. The blood
clot’s last long swim to the lung. Praise the lung
its last whistle, and the kidney’s no more—
say this; say praise
the machine hiss your father became
and the quick way he gave it up; say
praise the liver’s dread swell.
Say it again. Say it with your heart and neck
and lent throat gaped and flayed
to the sky. Say it covering someone’s hand
with yours, straightening your tie. Say it
to the earth’s fat mouth. Say it the way
you can turn on your heel to spark fire and make
your limber hip twist like a lesser storm,
or the way there is a storm between
your two good hips which are good
good music if you listen;
say it in your polished shoes,
to the organist say it too; praise the heart
its rivers and each rope twisted in the body,
and every bird housed in the body:
vulture, gull, raven, jackrabbit, cask
wick and flame a bird too; say
praise to flame a bird too; praise to the nerve
endings in your teeth, and to your tongue
like a blind man’s hand reading
her teeth, and the tongue inside the eyes,
and the nose in the tongue and the heart
in the tongue; say praise to salt,
tear, stain, and skin ripped apart
like a kite flipping in the wind, praise
the rip in the kite and the geese flying through it, praise
the wings you swore you had
when you were six years old and the wings
that remain today; praise
every flower you never smelled
and every dog you never kissed, and the skinny farmer
at the market with bad teeth who gave you
his last cantaloupe and peppers and snap peas who
you never kissed, praise the handful of freckles
dashed across your father’s face that you never
kissed until he would not wake again; say it;
say it again; say praise the sunlight
trapped on your father’s face
and the body’s slapdash racket
slipping away
if you want to or not
clean the dirt from your teeth and the glass
from your fists if you want to or not
tie both your shoes and fix your suspenders
and praise
the heart inside the heart
cracking its shackles, its thunderclap
shrug, its two thousand dolphins waving
goodbye. Praise, every day, the two thousand
dolphins waving goodbye. Shaking off
our hearts and waving goodbye.

Writing prompts

• Catalogue of unending gratitude
• Poem in a sun shape
• Letter about what you learned. Story = lesson.
• "Translate" a poem
• Wanting to tell [      ] about [     ]
• What did it taste like?
• Ways to be alone
• Ways to be silent
• Christmas songs (written? unwritten?)
• Songs of sorrow
• Take lines from poem Confluence by YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

Political Transitions

Today Georgia chose to elect a black man of faith and a Jewish man over a white man and a white woman clothed in hate.

Today groups formed around hate stormed the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the peaceful transition of power, egged on by our elected demagogue.

Tonight, the moon rises on new hopes and new fears and shines a pale light on a possible path forward if we walk together toward justice. 

“We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” -Ella Baker