Category: General posts

Blue Star Bucks

Leave a comment

You can tell a lot about a town by its coffee culture. Where I have lived and worked on the east coast, it’s easy to find whatever you like from corporate coffee to privately owned shops with well made, hand crafted drinks. I was partial to Green Bean in Gladwyne where their beans are roasted at the Chestnut Hill coffee roasters. Their coffee has a caramelized flavor and nutty aroma. Of course there’s also a Starbucks pretty much ten minutes drive in any direction, and like many sub/urbanites, I have their app on my phone, and a stop at Starbucks if it was convenient was part of my routine.

But every latte I drank in every coffee shop over the last few years that I’ve been a bi-coastal dweller dividing my time between points east and Twisp Washington has been a search for the kind of perfection pulled and poured into every shot at Blue Star Coffee Roasters.

Blue Star, named for state highway 20 where their local store is located, roasts their own beans on the premises and date stamps each bag. At $3.50 for a large latte–no extra charge for soy milk–it’s not only the “Best espresso in America” according to a 2012 taste off in Seattle; it’s the cheapest hand pulled shot money can buy. Their coffee cards are stored on a Rolodex on the counter and hand stamped by the barista, who also hand picks his or her own wardrobe instead of the uniforms worn by his or her corporate counterpart. Yesterday, I asked if I was able to put money on my card, and the barista rang it on the register and hand wrote the amount on the back. Ironically, the total with a large soy latte and an equally large molasses cookie from the Okanagon Bakery was $25.25.

If you’re as old as me, then you might remember the darkly futuristic ditty by the same name (minus the dollar sign and decimal point) recorded in 1969 by Zager and Evans. It seemed fitting to me as I savored the fruits of Blue Star’s old style, human scale operation.

It’s all well and good to want to make millions of dollars and to create jobs and contribute to the fair trade coffee growers of the world. But world dominion comes at a price. There’s no substitute for the local, human, hand crafted. It is a small world, after all.

Has “God” been Co-opted?

Leave a comment

“Patience means trusting God’s timing!”  These words are currently emblazoned on the sign in front of the Calvary Baptist Church in Twisp.  It really struck me today driving past how closely aligned they are to my own tag phrase “Trust in Being.”  In fact, I find myself quite frequently nodding my assent to the signs they have posted there, resonating with their deep truth.

Not surprisingly, there is a vast ideological landscape between me and the Baptists.  Or me and any organized religion.  I’m what retired Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong calls “church alumni.”  And yet, as time goes by and I undergo my own deep internal healing around the nature of the divine, the ideology moves further and further from the map, at the same time closing the driving distances between me and other “believers.”

I grew up in a beautiful Episcopal church in Glassboro New Jersey, St. Thomas’.  The church dates back to the end of the 18th century.  It’s a charming stone building with stained glass windows and old style wooden pews with remnants of graffiti dating to its early days. The church sits in a grove of old growth trees and has a small cemetery, and I can easily conjure up the feeling of the place in each season: midnight mass at Christmas with its candle light and incense, Easter’s altar piled with lilies, its cool interior in summertime and the clusters of fallen leaves in autumn.  A lot of important things happened on my inner journey in that church, things for which I had no language in childhood, nor really any support.

It wasn’t until my awakening that I rediscovered my devotional nature.  At a workshop with Waking Down teacher, Krishna Gauci, after a gazing exercise, I felt a profound and familiar awareness in my chest as if my heart had enlarged and with it the volume of blood it pumped so powerfully; it wracked my chest, and my shirt visibly rose and fell with each beat. It was the same feeling I used to get at communion. Feeling into this, the tears poured forth bringing with them a slew of embodied memories of my childhood devotion. When I was in high school, my family took a vacation to Bavaria where my mother had grown up, and her uncle took us to every church in driving distance.  There, I met many forms of the crucified Christ including one in chains that was said to bleed once a year on a holy day.  I hung postcards of nearly every one in my basement bedroom.  There was an eros to it, a feeling of what I now see as mystical communion, a desire to be one with His suffering.

By the time I graduated high school, church became optional, and my attendance fell away.  As I moved through college and into graduate school, I found myself at odds with the doctrine of organized religion particularly around sexuality, which severed the ties that had been so conscientiously nurtured.  They lacked the depth of feeling and discernment to continue to seek within the bounds of Christianity for succour.  Instead, like many of my generation, my gaze turned to the east, to yoga, and west, to “sex and drugs and rock and roll,” so that by the time I landed in middle age, I was suddenly aware of a spiritual hunger so deep and unexplored that it could no longer be ignored.

In spring, Waking Down founding teacher, Saniel Bonder offered a telecourse called Christing 2.0 that drew heavily from the book The Meaning of Mary Magdalen by Cynthia Bourgeault. And one night’s discussion addressed a variation onthe question I raised in my title: has Christ been co-opted?  Many of us were feeling a renewed ownership of Christ and as a result of Christianity.  It’s given me a new vigor for this old love, a new language and relationship with the Christ as a central figure of western spirituality.

The nature of God is unfathomable.  It doesn’t care what we call it: He, She, It, God, Being, the Absolute.  It contains everything and is contained by everything.  In this moment and these days, I feel a continual deepening of trust in that which is.  Call it God. Call it Being.  But call It.

Controlled Burn

1 Comment

Yesterday, the forest service started a controlled burn somewhere in the Okanogan Forest that surrounds the western end of Twisp River Road where I live.  It was a high moody sky already yesterday afternoon, a little muggy with the smell of rain in the air.  By the time I finished having coffee with a friend at Blue Star, cool winds were tousling the pewter clouds, and the smoke from the burn was a concentration of grays tinged with black up over the hills.  It did rain a little, and the temperatures fell back down into the 50s by night fall. This morning, the air smells like Gouda cheese or a wet camp fire, or a little of both.  It’s not unpleasant, but it’s different from the sweet clear spring fragrance of lilacs and greenery that usually greets me.

Controlled burns are essential to forest management.  They take out what would be fuel once the dryer weather and fire hazards of the summer season start.  This morning, this feels like a good metaphor for spiritual work.  I’ve been reading the Yoga Spandakarika: The Sacred Texts at the Origins of Tantra with commentary by Daniel Odier. The Spandakarika, which translates to “The Song of the Sacred Tremor,” says in verses 4 and 5: “All the relative notions tied to the ego rediscover their peaceful source deeply buried under all the different states.  In the absolute sense, pleasure and suffering, subject and object, are nothing other than the space of profound consciousness.”  

In his commentary, Odier says “For a Tantrika, an emotion–for example, sadness–is a prelude to joy. The idea that the world was created and that one day it will be destroyed is unfathomable because we see the creation/destruction process as a perpetual cycle.”

Over coffee yesterday with my friend, we were talking about relating with difficult people, and she said “it’s all just patterns.”  And my whole Being nodded vigorously with this.  What’s so beautiful about the Spandakarika is its focus on the spherical nature of things, what Odier describes as “the manifestation of any emotion and its withdrawal.” The way the world is always being created and destroyed over and over in the vast imperceptible ages or yugas described in the Vedas.  Or the geological and biological history of the earth.  Or look at the film from the Hubble telescope trained in on a piece of “blank space” the size of a grain of sand.  You’ll see a mind-blowing illustration of “the space of profound consciousness.” Focus your own inner Hubble on the vastness of your consciousness, and see what worlds it contains.

When we commit ourselves to a deep and ongoing investigation of our nature, we’re bound to discover the need for the occasional controlled burn.  The old patterns that are still with us, lurking under the upswept branches of our highest selves, are fuel to both fire change and inflame our emotions.  While we’re still in this relatively moist spring, before the dry heat and volatility of summer, turn the magnifying class of investigation on the twigs of your unresolved issues, and let the burn clear some space for new growth. 

Mundane

Leave a comment

Water glitters.

Last night, the full moon
lit the sky like God’s eye.

It’s May, the river
is high and brown
with white caps
where it hits
now buried rocks.

It boils along its S turns
to meet its lover
the Methow
five miles down
where they couple
loudly all day long.

The cottonwoods shine,
wet paint, metallic
thread in the brocade
of pines that jacquard
the hill.  And to the West
the Sawtooths lose a layer
of snow every day.  Cavities
of brown pock the white.

I’m trying to tell you
there’s nothing
to write.

The Mother Experience Project

2 Comments

A story of infertility and in vitro fertilization.  The daughter who died in the womb.  The daughter born six weeks early.  “Trying to keep her safe in a world I couldn’t control.” The mother dying of cancer and blaming her daughter. The dancer, the hooper, the Circle Game.  The mother who lived in a Shanghai paradise and as an illegal immigrant cleaning houses and mucking stalls to raise three daughters.  These are some of the threads that ran through the ninety minute slate of performances, poetry, memoir, music and dance, at the Merc Playhouse in Twisp, Washington tonight to honor mothers and mothering.

The performance organizer, and one of its participants, Rose Weagant, opened the night with an overview of the dominant images of women with which so many of us were raised.  Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella, Belle.  Virginal heroines, orphans of dead mothers, whose stories not only end in but end at marriage. And evil step mothers killed off by their victimized step children “in the name of justice.”

What struck me about the performance was how rare it is to be offered so much authenticity about women’s lives in one sitting.  It was a richly nourishing experience that provided a deep immersion into the meanings of mothering from both sides of the womb.  Each woman’s story, and the two songs offered by the one male performer, presented a different facet of what mothering costs and what it bequeaths.  The challenges, as nearly every piece said, are ultimately gifts.  Over and over, woman after woman, this was a dominant theme.  I’m paraphrasing, but it resonated so deeply with earlier posts here, one speaker said that when we lean into sorrow and difficulty they get easier, not harder.  Under the stories of loss, abuse, misunderstanding, and estrangement was the truth: this has made me who I am.  I’m her mirror image, one said, and a mirror image is its opposite.  So much perspective about perspective.

Mother’s Day started in the US when one woman decided to honor her own mother in 1908.  Over the years, it’s blossomed into many things, a boon for the greeting card industry and florists, a wide array of traditions from fancy brunches to picnics in the woods.  We spent the day gathered with family and younger friends, mothers and fathers and half a dozen children who took a two hour hike in the Cascade mountains above Mazama.  The two grannies opted for a walk along the Lost River and a short, exquisite lie down on a bank of pine needles watching the clouds shift and vaporize and listening to the river’s icy rush.

I called home this morning and spoke to three generations of mothers in my family.  Mine, my sister and my niece expecting her first daughter on her own birthday in August.  She still sounds like a kid to me on the phone even though she’s twenty three.  She’s loving this experience of her pregnancy even though it’s had its own set of challenges.  She described the baby’s movement in her womb “like a wave in my belly.  Like a little animal living inside me.”  I remember when she was born, my niece.  I remember each of their births, my two nephews, their cousins, and the children and grandchildren of many of my friends.

When I was a child, I remember asking my father once why there wasn’t a “children’s day.”  And he said “every day is children’s day.” How right he was. Without mothers, none of us would be here.  Of course, we wouldn’t be here without fathers either, and their day is coming soon.  Father’s day usually falls right around my birthday, so that will be another post a month or so from now.

In the interim, I am honoring all mothers everywhere: the divine feminine force that births all that is.

 

Subhaga and Mother
Mom and me on Easter 2014

 

Mother

You welcomed me into your body
disguised as I was
in the seed of my father’s love.
I must’ve seemed incomplete
as a dream
those nine months,
a comma in the sentence
of your new marriage
a coming.

But I was ongoing;
only waiting
for this precious gift
of your making
to bottle me
like a jinni.

I was already old,
already formed
the way breath
waits in the air,
has been waiting
since it rose from water.
When I left you,
I was your daughter.

 

Yoga and Great Relief

Leave a comment

Today was the first day of my new yoga teaching gig at the Studio on Glover Street in the heart of  Downtown Twisp.  I was pretty psyched about it.  Expectant.  I had my people post flyers around town and had announced it on FaceBook.  The Studio added the class to its Web page.  It seemed like everything was in place.

My beautiful Beloved and I arrived at 9:45 so I could set the bhav or attitude for the room.  I had brought a small picture of my guru, Amma, and turned on the yoga playlist on my iPhone.  Then I stood by the door to wait.

it reminded me faintly of the old days when I gave parties, and I would ask some friends to gather a little early to keep me company while I waited to see if anyone was going to come. If the house and food and drink and music would magically transform into the alchemy of “party.”  Which in the complicated mathematics of the self equals “success .”

As I stood by the door this morning gazing through the red sheer curtain that screens the studio from the street, I felt that old worry. And it metabolized as disappointment. The hands on my watch swept slowly and inexorably toward ten o’clock. My Beloved sat meditating on her mat.

I felt a wash of old uncomfortable feelings: disappointment, unworthiness, embarrassment. At the same time, I remembered when I started teaching the yoga class I’ve taught in Philly for seven years. How many Thursday mornings I felt like the old Maytag repairman, waiting for someone to show up and leaving after half a hour when it was clear that no one would. Or one person would come and how long it took me to feel comfortable with that.

Developing a following takes time, especially being the new yogi in town. My Beloved sat serenely waiting for me to start. I sat on my cushion and closed my eyes and said the words I have said nearly every Thursday for the last three years that I’ve been teaching Yoga for Great Relief: we’ll start with a short closed eye meditation followed by gazing and then I’ll make a few comments and open up for sharing.

The meditation did its usual magic bringing me a deep sense of Being, and the gazing brought us into a communion. It drew me into the font of consciousness, the gateless entrance to what is.

When I began to speak, it was of the feelings that were alive in me, the percolating and shifting flow of those old familiar feelings. Speaking transformed them and cast them in the light of Wisdom.

Being human means being hard wired for self-preservation. And yet, this essential system often becomes our default, a pattern in which we keep our selves coiled in contraction as a way to keep safe from what might cause hurt. Being human means constantly surfing the edge between the finite and the infinite. That requires awareness. How does it feel now? Can I be with that? And Hatha yoga gives us a chance to cultivate and deepen that awareness.

And so we began. Breath, movement, effort and relaxation. And by the end, as we sat quietly after chanting to seal in the practice, I was home again in the great relief that this practice offers. Resting in Trust in Being.

Doing and Being: Facing the Day of “No”

4 Comments

Today, I taught my last yoga class for the summer at Yoga on Main in Manayunk, PA, where I’ve taught a weekly class on Thursdays for a number of years.  It was a particularly sweet class, well attended (for a Thursday morning) with two of my regulars, one new person, and two women who came “to hear me talk.”  It’s a beautiful thing whenever, as the Bible says, “two or more are gathered” in the name, the search for the truth.  I always open class with a silent meditation followed by a brief open eyed meditation, “gazing” with each person for less than a minute, meeting them gaze to gaze, Being to Being.  And then I give a short talk, just whatever’s been up for me recently that in some way illustrates the nature of Being.  Today it was the intersection of a few threads that came together in a recent experience that I referred to as the day of no.

For me, this day of no manifested itself in a jarring realization that the way I perceive myself is not always the way I am perceived by others.  As it happened in the personal and professional spheres at the same time, it felt like quite a combination punch.  A regular one-two to the psyche.  It felt like hell.  It felt like the way I know myself was so out of kilter with the way I was being perceived, or the way I was being perceived somehow missed the core of who I am.  I don’t mind telling you that it knocked the stuffing out of me and laid me low.

One of the women at class this morning, Julie, had some good questions about this.  “What do you do when that happens?” The beautiful thing about this sort of experience, for me, is that I no longer resist it.  Even though I felt contracted around the experiences, I didn’t try use the contraction as a way to muscle through it.  I just let it be there.  It was a soggy day out side, and I let the sogginess infiltrate to the inside of my Being.  I stayed in my pajamas.  I sighed.  I said out loud, “I feel like shit.”  I was aware in this feeling state that there was something to be learned.  Whenever there is dissonance of this degree, Being is really trying to get my attention.

I thought back to the experience I had over the weekend at the Transitions and Transactions conference about my name.  And I got that this self perception is always just that, a perception.  I can continue to refine it, to hone it more and more close to the Truth, and yet, because I am in this embodied form, this physical entity with her various, numerous names, no matter what I call myself, I am essentially nameless: the way that can be named is not the true Way.  My teacher, Allan Morelock (read his two beautiful books, Nothing Other,  and Raindrops Falling on the Ocean) has said “personality is impersonal.”  And that, I know, is the truth.

Julie’s other question was about decisions, and this is one that can take a very long time to parse out, but still I was delighted by her asking it.  For me, there is only Being.  Being is writing itself in and as and through me as My Life.  There’s never really a time when I decide to do something.  I just do things.  It sometimes feels like there is a decision, or a choice, but really, where does that choice come from?  Whether I sit around until I move toward food, sleep, drink, reading, walking the dog, or whether I respond to an invitation with a yes or a no, or whether I decide to go out or stay home, there’s a way in which it’s all the same.  Sometimes what we appear to “choose” to do appears to work out well and feels good, and sometimes what we appear to choose to do works out badly and feels bad.  Sometimes it’s neutral. But good, bad or indifferent; intentional, unintentional or accidental, it’s still Being that’s making it happen.

The Trillium Awakening teacher Rod Taylor told me once that all the stuff we feel like we keep hitting our head against is just Being showing us the core wound.  In Trillium Awakening, the core wound is a way of speaking about the edge between our finite and infinite nature, a place we’re always rubbing up against.  We’re infinite: everything is occurring in consciousness, there’s no separation, no other, and at the same time, we’re in these finite, limited bodies with their complex layers of differentiation, their needs, wants, dislikes, stories, patterns and conditions.

You can always count on Being to show you where you still have something to learn.  Sometimes life is like a rock tumbler, just knocking off the rough edges to polish you to your true shine.  The best and truest way to live is to just let come what may.  Rumi says:

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!

You don’t have to love them.  Welcoming awareness can be anything from a simple act of reception to a deep bow of surrender. Doing and Being are but two sides of the mobius strip of experience. The more we come to trust in Being, to get out of its way, the more easefully we can ride that edge and fall, finally, our true home.

One Name, One World

2 Comments

I attended a conference last weekend at the Manhattan Borough Community College called Transitions and Transactions II: Literature and Creative Writing Pedagogies in Community Colleges.  The paper I presented is called “Open Your Heart to the World” : Risk and Vulnerability in Teaching Ancient World Literature in the Community College.  The quote is from the Tao and here’s the context:

Without opening your door,
you can open your heart to the world.
Without looking out your window,
you can see the essence of the Tao.

These lines are particularly relevant to me, as someone who, given the choice, prefers to see the essence of the Tao from within rather than from without. For me to spend a weekend in New York at a conference is an uneasy proposition (see Poetry and Porousness!), and yet it was a rich experience for me on so many levels.  The most significant has to do with my own transition as a result of the transaction of sharing my paper.

The paper is about mutuality.  I mean mutuality as it’s used in Waking Down in Mutuality, defined by that organization’s Teacher’s Association as “a whole Being relationship disposition that holds BOTH self and others as equally valid and equally valuable expressions of Being. It can be practiced by any two or more people who care about their relationships with each other and want to find a deeper meeting.”  As a college teacher, I bring mutuality to my classroom as a way to facilitate learning.

That “deeper meeting” is becoming more active in my life, the ways in which Being is opening me to meet the world more deeply.  I submitted the paper under my “given” or family name, Crystal Bacon, the name I still go by at work and pretty much everywhere but my spiritual community which, oddly enough, includes Facebook and this Blog.  I had a name tag that said Crystal Bacon, and the bio the moderator read described this same person, Crystal Bacon.  Just looking at that cluster of letters is like seeing a familiar face in passing. There’s an identity to it, a story, a history.

It was ironic to me, as I sat listening to the credentials and achievements of this Crystal Bacon, that I was about to get up and read a paper about authenticity.  An image popped into my head of a sort of Tinker Toy-like crane from which an piece dangled, a sort of falling away of a kind of armature.  It was about my name.  After the session, the moderator said that she had tried to find my Blog but couldn’t.  I had to tell her that it was under a different name, Subhaga Crystal Bacon.  And this took me into a deeper investigation about who that is.

The name Subhaga was given to me by my guru, Mata Amritanandamayi known as Amma about six years ago at the Boston retreat, one of a half dozen that, in addition to public programs, make up Amma’s  summer tour.  It comes from the Lalita Sahasranama, the 1000 names of the Divine Mother: Om Subhagayai Namah, She who is auspicious.  For the next few years, it was a name that I only used between Amma and myself in prayer and meditation.  I thought of it as the name Amma knew me by.  It felt foreign to me, hard to pronounce.  I was not very committed to it.

Until I had my awakening.  This is one of those stories that could get longer and longer in the telling, sort of telescoping itself out from one stage to the next.  But once I had my awakening, and the identity of Crystal had fallen away, the name Subhaga seemed much more resonant.  One day, reading the Amma magazine called Immortal Bliss, I ran across an article about Amma’s favorite younger brother, whose name is Subhagan.  That sealed the deal.

There’s a way in which any name is not the true name.  This is a fitting link back to the Tao which begins on that very point: The way that can be named is not the true Way.  And yet, in this Third Dimension human realm, it is useful to name things.  The Buddhists say of the Dhamma, “words fall silent before it.”  And yet whole libraries have been filled trying to explain it.

The name Subhaga Crystal Bacon reflects the journey of awakening into consciousness.  It marks the serious start of the search at the feet of my guru, through the deepening interior search of meditation and finally the falling away of the constructed self.  Of course, I know that Crystal is a much more than serviceable name.  It is a beautiful faceted name, a reflector of light.  And that is who and what I am too.  But joined with Subhaga, auspicious, fortunate, it feels more complete.  It feels more like what I know myself to be from the inside.

ॐसुभगायैनमः

Om Subhagayai Namah!

Report from the Land of Research Papers

3 Comments

I wouldn’t want you to think I’ve disappeared from this plane.  It’s the end of the semester at my teaching job, and so the final papers are coming in day by day and needing to be graded.  It’s a very particular sort of practice, this grading business.  The essays are about the way racial caste is reinforced by the US justice system through mass incarceration and then examining some effect of that on society or some solution to its inevitable ills.

We spent the semester reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness, which is a pretty intense read, not so much because it’s exhaustively (and exhaustingly) researched, but because the news is so relentlessly BAD. Add to that my average class which is overwhelmingly African American with a fair representation of formerly incarcerated folks and the children, mates and family of incarcerated folks, and it becomes quite a heady mix.

Our time together is always rich, and this semester has been especially so.  I’m really consciously bringing mutuality to bear in the classroom, making a place where it’s safe for everyone to show up as they are and speak their truth.  Sometimes that truth is quite a bit out of kilter with what other students hold, and we have had some shouting matches and once a near call to “take it outside” between two young men on either side of the classroom and an ideological divide.  I had to actually shout myself that day just to be heard and sound a call to quiet, like a ref blowing a whistle.  It was all good.

Now reading their papers, I am confronted by how little effect I can have as a teacher of writing.  The content is often good, honest, raw, and knowing, but the expression doesn’t always match it.  I should add here that the course is in writing research papers, not criminal justice or sociology, so the outcomes I’m assessing have to do with framing a thesis, information literacy, ethical use of sources and so on.  Still, there is a good deal of delight in what I read.  

These students are the next generation in this emerging awareness of and movement to end race-based mass incarceration.  If it’s going to end, and they are almost equally of both minds: it can and it can’t, then it will in large part be up to them.  And yet when I consider how deep the layers are, poverty, ghettoization, and the inherent and (not so) invisible racism that underlies the process, it’s hard not to lose heart. 

Alexander’s book replaced Letters from the Dhamma Brothers as my primary text.  Students brought it to my attention, used it as a source.  When I first tried to read it, I was overwhelmed, but I assigned it anyway, and then I went online looking for some tool that would help them manage it.  I found the Veteran’s of Hope New Jim Crow Study Guide and Call to Action, and this has been a useful tool.  It asks the hard questions that the book raises about our individual complicity in this system, the way we are bamboozled by the media, especially television news, and both “reality” and fictional shows about law and order.  About our beliefs and understandings of the nature of race in the Obama America.  About the role of personal responsibility and how easy it’s been to blame black men for abandoning their families without wondering where they’ve gone.

What keeps me connected to the topic as the semesters and years go by is the way the students respond.  One young man, who to be frank is scrambling at this point to get everything in before the cut off date, a former felon who is in school on a grant, told me he couldn’t believe that “they allow” me to teach this.  He expressed concern for my safety, and one day, asked to speak to me privately in the hallway.  In tears, he told me he couldn’t read the book.  He couldn’t stand to read the relentless march of facts about the role of racism in criminal justice.  It was his story, and it was breaking his heart.  His resistance took the form of absenteeism and missed assignments, then at the birth of his new daughter, a rock lifted off of him, and he tore into the work with a vengeance.  It remains to be seen whether he gets the points to pass, but it will not be his lack of passion or intelligence if he doesn’t.  It will be the years and years of hitting the wall of race-based limitations that have directed so much of his early life.  One of his classmates has been to every class and participated quite powerfully and not handed in a single assignment.  Not one.  What to do?

All I can do is hold space.  I don’t mean to be cliched, but as I often tell them “a journey of ten thousand miles begins with a single step.”  Some succeed brilliantly.  Some muddle through.  Some fail.  All learn something that is bound to change their perspective on their journey.  And in ten or twenty or thirty years time, when they look at the nature and texture of race in American democracy, maybe they will see that collectively we made a difference.

A poem for Easter

Leave a comment

Easter

Before he came to hang upon the naked wood
scorned, thorn-crowned,
before the empty womb received the flaming seed,
godhead complete,
the moon-cracked earth received the planting song.

Every day, cocks crowed, shoots grew,
leaves, moon, eggs
grew. Every purple night, the cycles drew
on moon, shoots,
eggs pale as lunar light, moon-shell sheer.

Before the tree was felled and stripped of bark and limb,
it bore fruit
amidst the leaves that broke the heat in pools of shade,
and we ate.