Clearing the Mirror, Stopping the War

and if ever i touched a life i hope that life knows that i know that touching was and still is and will always

be the true

revolution 

I recently heard these words by Nikki Giovanni.* They thrilled me.

In couples therapy 101, we counselor types learn about reflective listening as a means of reconnecting, particularly after conflict. I like this definition of reflective listening from the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy: "Be like a mirror--reflect what you think, feel and sense that the speaker is saying and feeling. Work to clear the mirror so that you can reflect more clearly."

I imagine many of us would agree that the dominant communication norms in contemporary U.S. society promote debate, not dialogue. Winning, not understanding another's words and feelings. Winning brings to mind a battlefield. In a combat zone, people get hurt--or killed--by violence. Seems to me we would be wise to mind our metaphors and determine if warfare is really the tool that will bring us the outcomes we want in our relationships, lives, and world.

In the last few years, I've become more and more committed to figuring out how to keep the aspirations of justice and peace on a single map. I did not delete the earlier posts on this blog (although several of them still spark embarrassment) because they reflect shifts in my thinking and ways of being in the world. They also remind me of the one thing that is constant for living beings: change.

Injustice still sparks rage within me, rage that can feel as big as an ocean. But I decided to put more energy into understanding that rage before acting on it. Ruth King's characterization of rage has been particularly illuminating:

Rage is fierce clarity and untapped fuel; a natural resource of misused energy that requires our loving attention. Embraced with compassion, the trapped energies of rage are liberated and become an intimate teacher of balance, integrity, and resiliency, greatly enhancing our relationships and our service to the world.

Work to clear the mirror so that you can reflect more clearly. As it turns out, clearing the mirror can be a lot more scary, jarring, and painful than emptying a magazine in the arena. A clearer reflection, however, returns a sense of belonging. And a sense of belonging does wonders for generating not only peace but also sympathetic joy, or "the realization that others' happiness is inseparable from our own."

These days, in the face of so much verbal combat, I seek to clear the mirror enough to perceive that our blaming and shaming reflect our suffering. And suffering warrants tenderness. As Tara Brach argued, the origins of an addiction to blame--whether that blame manifests inwardly or outwardly--are injuries. Blaming becomes a kind of armor to protect us from more harm. Unfortunately, such covering has unintended side effects--namely, feeling alienated, isolated, disconnected.

So I'm working to clear the mirror. To step over my fears and see that we are all connected. To remember that touching is the "true revolution."

* Tara Brach read this excerpt of Giovanni's "When I Die" in her 2009 retreat talk "Bodhisattva Path."

Exploring the relationship amongst weddings, (hetero)sexism, and the loss of our original shapes

We arrive in this world with birthright gifts--then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them. As young people we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures like racism and sexism our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.

Amen, Parker Palmer! Soon I will marry the love of my life. My partner is an amazing human being, full of "birthright gifts." I feel blessed at the possibility of sharing the remainder of our lives together and publicly making a commitment to our relationship with friends and family encircling us. My love and gratitude for this person is what makes my growing dis-ease with our upcoming wedding so painful. I have needed to do a bit of digging to figure out what is going on. It turns out that looking backward has helped me to understand the present, particularly its trappings. To borrow from William Bridges, "Journeys, unlike point-to-point trips, have a way of doubling back on themselves so that you find yourself dealing again and at another level with issues you thought you had left behind."

Almost eight years ago, I began to identify as queer. At the time, this decision was professional, political, and personal. As an academic, I had long been drawn to the "queer theory" found in the pages of books like Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands. Although she and I had vastly different life experiences and ancestral histories, her words offered me a glove into which I could slide--without kicking and screaming--and still breathe. As a politically active feminist and educator, "queer" made sense to me. At that point, I had spent most of my life following heteronormative rules. Having recently entered into a significant relationship with a woman, I found that "straight" no longer applied but "lesbian" did not either. Queer seemed to be a "slot" with enough space for my lived experience. On a personal level, "queer" opened up all kinds of possibilities for ways of being in this world. Although I was using the term primarily to describe my sexual identity, I found it freed me up in other areas of my life, where "images of acceptability" had overshadowed other dreams and distorted my "original shape." I began to use queer as a verb. I queered my dissertation. I queered my understanding of family. But mostly, I queered my sense of what it means to be a woman.

Words cannot do justice to the experience of using "queer" as a tool to peel off the layers of expectations in pursuit of my birthright gifts. I invested so much time and energy in my childhood, adolescence, and young adult life trying to mold myself to surrounding expectations of beauty and dominant notions of "femininity." As a young kid, I was precocious. I had things to say--observations to share, feelings to express, perceptions of the world about which I wanted to dialogue with somebody. But I seemed to keep violating so many rules! In a heartbeat, my curiosity seemed to morph into accusations of being "impolite," "unladylike," "inappropriate." So the silence began to wash in, as a kind of protective cape at first. Unfortunately, its delicate threads became a woolen blanket, smothering a sense that my original shape included a strong voice with the power to cultivate and share insights. Like so many young women I encounter today, I frequently ended sentences with, "I'm sorry," or, "I don't know," as if taking up space in the world as a thinking, speaking human being was a violation.

As for my body, I starved it. Stuffed it. Poisoned it. Consistently glared at it with disgust in the mirror. What is still embarrassing to talk about now is how much I came to despise my skin and the lengths to which I went to transform it. It is pale and freckled and sensitive. As a child, I did not see models of beauty anywhere that included it. The beautiful ones in my whitewashed suburban community had olive complexions. I do not remember how many times I burned my fair skin, trying to approximate that distant beauty. So I could be seen--so I could see myself--as lovely. And loveable.

The philosophy of queerness allowed me to begin removing all these unwanted deposits of shame and judgment. For the first time in my adult life, I began to appreciate my body and all that it allowed me to do in the world. I gained confidence in my ability put words on a page that someone else might actually want to read. Ultimately, I finished a dissertation that felt like a genuine accomplishment because connecting with others in an inquiry process nourished me. I had an image of radical acceptance tattooed on my skin to remind myself I could choose not to abandon my birthright gifts. I stopped betraying myself for the approval of others at every turn and began to see my "true self" could offer me the comfort and solace I thought I could only receive from others.

Brene Brown wrote, "What we know matters, but who we are matters more." I absolutely believe that coming home to myself--my true self--allowed me to meet my life partner and our relationship to stick, as I arrived at a place where I allowed myself to be seen, vulnerabilities and all. So I was surprised when several old deformations of my original shape reappeared upon deciding to make a lifetime commitment to this person and our relationship. I felt ugly. Unacceptable. Inadequate.

To understand this reemerging self-betrayal, I began paying attention to the barrage of external messages I was receiving. The incessant pop-up ads on my computer that, alerted to my recent engagement, tried to sell me every kind of product imaginable in the service of making me a perfect "bride." More painfully, the primary question I received upon encountering people I know was, "How's the wedding planning going?" despite my recent completion of a master's degree and the exciting new beginning of a career pathway. All at once, "bride" seemed to eclipse every other slot, and I was having a hard time digging through the incessant chatter about white dresses, good hair, and svelte bodies to the selfhood I worked so hard to uncover.

I remain grateful for compassionate friends, mindfulness practices, and Chrys Ingraham's searing critique, White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture, which helped me to establish protective boundaries, thereby keeping insidious social pressures at a safer distance. These words by Ingraham particularly hit home:

White weddings, while important in themselves, are a concentrated site for the operation and reproduction of organized heterosexuality. More so than other prominent heterosexual practices and rituals, e.g. dating, proms, and engagements, weddings are culturally pervasive, symbolically prolific, and are rarely questioned or examined. Yet, they are so taken for granted they seem naturally occurring and function to naturalize a host of heterosexual behaviors that are, in fact, socially produced. In other words, one is not born a bride or with the desire to become a bride yet we have an abundance of evidence that shows that many people believe otherwise. But that's putting the bride before the fairy tale! From the moment we enter the world, culture works to install meaning systems about everything from sex to gender to social class to ethnicity to sexual identity. Heterosexuality, whether naturally occurring or chosen, is organized by those meanings.

As I continue to grow and work with others who are trying to recover their original shapes, I aspire to promote Palmer's message of courage and renewal. I do not think we can come back to our wholeness until we begin to see clearly the deforming social messages not of our own making, cultivate support networks committed to discerning our selfhood, and actively practice the feeding of our true selves. As for disrupting the sexism, racism, heterosexism, and other forms of institutionalized oppression that distort and destroy so many lives, I do not believe we have to fit into a narrowly conceived "activist" slot to effect change since we often unwittingly contribute to harmful expectations via our moment-to-moment actions, thoughts and emotions. As Julia Serano argued, "the one thing that all forms of sexism share...is that they all begin with placing assumptions and value judgments onto other people's gendered bodies and behaviors." I for one can get behind new social beginnings that involve suspending assumptions and judgments so as to clearly discern others' and our own birthright gifts.

On my wedding day, I will be wearing a dress. It will be turquoise.

Discerning Transition from Change

I recently pulled William Bridges' The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments, off the bookshelf and am finding it incredibly useful, both for my work with clients and for thinking about this period of major change in my own life. What immediately caught my attention was Bridges' emphasis on the difference between change and transition. As he wrote, change is a "situational shift"--getting a job or losing a job, for example--whereas, transition is "the process of letting go of the way things used to be and then taking hold of the way they subsequently become." This more abstract language became instantly concrete in the second chapter of the book, when Bridges described losing his wife to cancer.

His partner, Mondi, actually provided some of the most poignant renderings of transition. Bridges included excerpts of her written "updates" to friends and family about her experience with cancer. This update, in particular, moved me:

I really like new beginnings. I like the challenge of finding meaning in heretofore impossible situations...I like being in the middle of what's true and what's real, and what's at the center of things. I've always liked thinking about death, and I've always thought of death as a new beginning. Now I have to put my money where my mouth has always been. I accept that challenge. I'm willing to be awake and conscious if and when I become ill and die. For a person like me, who has such a strong interest in her spiritual development, having cancer is quite an opportunity. I also hate new beginnings. It is devastating to me to think of not seeing my children become middle-aged and my grandchildren grow up. It tears my heart apart to think of leaving Bill--he whom I have spent 37 years of my life with, for better and worse and everything else that happens in a good marriage. My friends are my treasures. I don't want to let them go...Who am I if I'm not a therapist? It's not that I don't think I'll still be here, therapist or not, but I'm just not too familiar with that non-therapist woman. And what about leaving this body? I've lived in it for fifty-six years, and it has served me so well. I don't know who I would be without this body, thought I feel quite certain I'll still be me and I'll be around.

Bridges went on to say that Mondi began to see transitions everywhere as she became more ill. I took his and her larger point to be that we can relate to big and small moments in our lives as transitions--as opportunities to begin anew on a daily basis--if we so choose. His words eloquently capture this possibility of perceiving new beginnings around every corner:

There are beginnings and endings all along the path. You are constantly letting go of who you thought you were and how you thought your life would be...To the extent that you can let go of who you used to be and honor the experience of being in-between lives, you discover a rich and wonderful way of living. There is no beginning that doesn't require an ending, and no ending that doesn't make possible a new beginning.

The "in-between" space he described seems to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the transition process for those of us who are uncomfortable with uncertainty. Bridges called this state the "neutral zone" and emphasized its potential for creativity if we allow ourselves to live in this chaotic space while "a replacement reality and a new self is gradually being formed." He also challenged the idea that our life revolves around stages, as is frequently found in human development literature (e.g., the adolescent stage). Instead, he asserted that the transitions are the focal points in our lives, while stages often serve as the rest stops between them.

Importantly, Bridges underscored that endings and losses tend to signal transition. Rather than view such events as disasters to avoid, he recommended the following response to such alarm clocks, which can wake us up if we let them:

Whatever its details, an outer loss is best understood as a surrogate for some inner relinquishment that must be made, but one that is difficult to describe. What it is time to let go of is not so much the relationship or the job itself, but rather the hopes, fears, dreams and beliefs that we have attached to them. If you let go only of the job or the relationship, you'll just find another one and attach the same hopes, fears, dreams and beliefs to it. And, on the other hand, you may find that you can let go of those inner attitudes without actually terminating the outer situation.

Upon facing such a loss, he therefore advised that we ask ourselves, "What is it time for me to let go of?" This inquiry draws attention to what we need to unlearn--not add on. As Bridges noted, we can easily miss the inner message of the transition by focusing all our attention on the outer change, such as finding a new job, place to live, or romantic relationship. I also want to highlight his emphasis on the futility of asking, "Why is this happening to me?" We really seem to love quests for causal explanations in the United States, but the hunt for clear causes can distract us from the letting go process that permits us to grow and begin anew. In his no-nonsense words, "forget speculating about the identity of the sender and ('Hey, time to wake up!') read the message."

So why go through all this deprogramming, chaos, and uncertainty? Because transition renews us if we open to it. I again defer to Bridges' powerful words: "It is as though the breakdown of the old reality releases energy that has been trapped in the form of our old lives and converts it back to its original state of pure and formless energy."

I could go on and on about this book, so I'll close by recommending you experience The Way of Transition for yourself. As Bridges pointed out, "until something makes sense in the context of our experience, it is just hearsay."

A Stanza I Liked So Much I Got It Tattooed on My Arm

This past week, the very talented Josiah Schmelzer tattooed my arm with a Rumi quote that has guided me for several years now:

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."

Why a tattoo rather than a wall hanging?

The simple answer to this question is that these are words by which I want to live.

My own healing has centered on seeing clearly how often thinking in terms of dichotomous judgments--right or wrong, good or bad--has not only narrowed my thoughts and actions but also limited my ability to connect with others. "Ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing" have also contributed to a lot of internal suffering, mostly in the forms of anxiety and self-judgment. Trying to soften and open to whatever comes my way, on the other hand, has promoted a sense of belonging as well as the dissolution of us/them boundaries.

One of the trickier aspects of navigating this shift beyond right/wrong thinking has involved boundary-setting. After all, the goal of creating more spaciousness around our experience is not to be mistreated by others or to jump headlong into someone else's suffering. But when we are experiencing a sense of harm caused by another or feel an intense desire to save someone, remembering that the stories we tell about others and ourselves are partial, and often distorted, can help us to pause. In that pause lies the freedom to act and speak in ways that cultivate our lives for peace, not war.*

Rumi's poetry reminds me of all this and more, so I now wear it on my sleeve, so to speak. * I'm thinking of Victor Frankl's quote here, which I first heard from Tara Brach: "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Enjoying the Path that Leads to Nowhere

Not long ago, I headed to Indian Lake Park for a hike. In addition to being a beautiful place to clear my head, the park held other treasures, particularly an old beat-up sign with an excerpt of Corinne Roosevelt Robinson's poem, "The Path that Leads Nowhere":

Other pathways lead to Somewhere, But the one I love so well Has no end and no beginning-- Just the beauty of the dell, Just the wind-flowers and the lilies Yellow-striped as adder's tongue, Seem to satisfy my pathway As it winds their scents among.

All the ways that lead to Somewhere Echo with the hurrying feet Of the Struggling and the Striving, But the way I find so sweet Bids me dream and bids me linger, Joy and Beauty are its goal,— On the path that leads to Nowhere I have sometimes found my soul!

In our current society, so dominated by hyper-competition and outcomes-based thinking, I was thrilled to come upon a message of relaxing into the present, without struggling or striving.

When I am mindful enough to pause in my daily life, I am amazed at how often I am working hard at some goal: checking tasks off my to-do list, hiking for "x" number of time, engaging in some self-improvement project, and on and on and on...

Being productive is not a problem, but the anxiety driving that productivity surely does not contribute to an abundance of joy and ease. So I like Robinson's words. They suggest that a sense of well-being requires presence, stillness, and gratitude. I will also take the liberty of translating "finding my soul" into realizing that we are more than the sum of our parts. As Tara Brach wrote, "In the moments that we move through life realizing that we belong to this mystery, that this mystery is living through us, we are awake, alive and free."

On the relationship between shame and perfectionsim

As I hang out my shingle for the first time in my life, a pesky inner voice keeps shouting, "Who do you think you are!?" I am confident others know some variation of this voice, too. The sage on vulnerability, shame, perfectionism, and their interrelationship, Brene Brown, might say this mean-spirited messenger represents a kind of morphing shame. Whereas the old shame went on and on about never being good enough, the transformed one likes to yell, "Get off your high horse!" This shape shifting makes sense within Brown's framework because, as she notes, shame revolves around a fear of disconnection. Whether that fear of severed ties comes from a sense of inadequacy or of self-importance, the result is the same: we feel alienated, alone, and/or like we do not belong. In other words, when we believe we are separate, we suffer.*

http://youtu.be/psN1DORYYV0

Enter in perfectionism. I have boiled down this amazingly powerful force to constant striving (particularly for those of us driven by a fear of failure). Rest is not possible for the striving perfectionist because that would mean letting down a well-trained guard that says, "No matter what you do, you will never be good enough. So keep on trying. Even when you realize that the oodles of self-judgment you are heaping on yourself for making mistakes are wearing you out and your ideal state of being is a mirage, REMEMBER: if you stop trying to prove yourself, you and your life will mean nothing!" A devastating aspect of such perfectionism is that it hinges on the distorted belief that we are our actions and our actions alone. To stop striving means to fall into a giant abyss of nothingness. This sense of being inherently not-okay--of constructing an identity that revolves around stamping out our imperfections--is the ground on which shame establishes itself and thrives.

Sounds pretty grim, right? The good news is that we can recondition long-held beliefs and transform them into a sense of belonging and wholeness. Just repeating the words, "I am enough," over and over again, can begin to get some sufficiency neurons firing and wiring together, to borrow very loosely from the folks who study this stuff.

However, and as Brown's research shows, a dramatic shift in our relationship to ourselves and the world does not spring from the soil of logic and reason alone. Rather, it requires a leap of faith. To borrow from Brown, "it's our fear of the unknown and our fear of being wrong that create most of our conflict and anxiety. We need both faith and reason to make meaning in an uncertain world."**

This stripe of faith is not about believing that everything is as it should be ("should" signalling that judgment from somewhere is still hard at work) or that a reason underlies every event. Rather, such faith is about learning to be comfortable with uncertainty. After all, everything, including ourselves, is constantly changing, and that process of change is often unpredictable and out of our control.

This faith is also about trusting that we are part of an interconnected world, even when we cannot perceive our connections with others, the environment, or, perhaps most painfully, ourselves. It drives a willingness to say to ourselves--even when we do not yet believe the words--"I am enough. As is. Not less than. Not better than. I am enough." Full stop.

Danna Faulds gets the final word on bringing these words of sufficiency to life with her poem "Awakening Now"***:

Why wait for your awakening? The moment your eyes are open, seize the day. Would you hold back when the Beloved beckons? Would you deliver your litany of sins like a child's collection of sea shells, prized and labeled? "No, I can't step across the threshold," you say, eyes downcast. "I'm not worthy" I'm afraid, and my motives aren't pure. I'm not perfect, and surely I haven't practiced nearly enough. My meditation isn't deep, and my prayers are sometimes insincere. I still chew my fingernails, and the refrigerator isn't clean. Do you value your reasons for staying small more than the light shining through the open door? Forgive yourself. Now is the only time you have to be whole. Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the light of your true Self. Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain. Please, oh please, don't continue to believe in your disbelief. This is the day of your awakening.

* I borrowed this idea from Tara Brach who said that all suffering arises from the belief that we are separate.

** This quote comes from Brown's book The Gifts of Imperfection.

*** This poem was published in Fauld's book Go In and In: Poems from the Heart of Yoga.

On becoming a therapist!

I last wrote on this blog in 2011, when I decided to jump ship from my academic life, return to Madison, Wisconsin, and enroll in Edgewood College's Marriage and Family Therapy Program. A few days ago, I graduated from that program and had the honor of giving a commencement address. Since I explained the transformation of my professional life in that five-minute speech, I figured one way to revive this blog and explain its name change--from "On (un)becoming an academic" to "On beginning anew"--would be to share the words I spoke on Sunday:

Today is a great day for gratitude! As Gregg Krech instructs, "To live a life of gratitude is to open our eyes to the countless ways in which we are supported by the world around us."

So thanks to all of you for being here, and a special thank you to Dean Campbell, the Graduate Council, and the Marriage and Family Therapy faculty for giving me this opportunity to speak with you. I also want to thank my peers in the MFT Program, my Edgewood Colleagues, my parents, and my partner for all of your love, support, and encouragement and for making the special effort to be here today. I am truly grateful.  

I just came from a mindfulness retreat on equanimity so it seemed appropriate to gear my talk toward this lofty, if abstract, aspiration. Some describe equanimity as a vibrant and powerful connection with what is--not with what we think should be, what we long for, or what used to be--but connecting with what is, right in this very moment, in this very place. Said differently, equanimity is the ability to be near all things.*

I'm guessing that most of my fellow graduates would NOT describe the last few months as full of the spacious stillness of mind and heart that characterize equanimity. At least I imagine those closest to me would say I resembled one of those robo hamsters, spinning on a wheel at the speed of light, more than a calm Buddha-like figure, mindfully experiencing the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of my daily life. 

http://youtu.be/sLMdsxVqDX8

But I thought equanimity remained a useful theme for today because underneath all the busyness, my time at Edgewood has served as a kind of homecoming. After committing myself to slowing down enough to listen inwardly, I decided to steer my life off the academic tenure track and toward the path of a healer. Having begun to come home to the life that's right here, I am more willing and able to lean into the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows of this lifetime, which is what I understand equanimity to be all about. 

While thinking about what I wanted to say today, I flashed back to my 2008 faculty orientation. At that time, a university leader encouraged us to race toward the future. By racing and competing, we could make the university great. Then as now, I had just come from a mindfulness retreat that emphasized the power of the present--rather than the future--to generate joy, lovingkindness, compassion, and, you guessed it, equanimity. In fact, the teacher of that retreat** said when we are perpetually preoccupied with what comes next, we are not able to embrace our own lives, genuinely connect with others, or make wise decisions about the future--our own future as well as that of generations yet to come. Needless to say, 2008 was a confusing year for me. 

Now, in 2013, I am grateful to have Edgewood's Dominican tradition directly in front of me AND as a guide for the future. The Dominican mission asks us to forge meaningful relationships, engage in open-minded reflection, and participate in compassionate action. I've found these goals easier to realize when I've stopped running long enough to step off the hamster wheel and pay attention, both to my inner and outer worlds. 

As of today, at least, I try to practice a motto different than “Race toward the future.” In keeping with the animal theme, it’s a message that appeared on a bone-shaped dog tag and read, “Sit, stay, heal.” (That’s heal with an “A” in case you thought I was talking about the heel that means to act in a disciplined fashion, which does not mesh all that well with my other favorite bumper sticker slogan: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”) In seriousness though, I like to imagine what this world might be like if a whole slew of us disregarded the many messages we receive in this society to run, escape, and go numb and, instead, we sat. We stayed. And we healed. 

I cannot think of a better way to highlight the possibilities that arise when we connect with our experience in the present than by closing with the poignant words of Mark Nepo: 

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are  when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved,  and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed,  and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.  Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world  but to unglove ourselves  so that the doorknob feels cold  and the car handle feels wet  and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being,  soft and unrepeatable. 

Congratulations class of 2013 and thank you again!

* Thanks to Cheri Maples for this definition of equanimity. I heard it at the mindfulness retreat taught by her and Sharon Salzberg in Madison, Wisconsin, in May 2013.

** Tara Brach was the teacher of that 2008 retreat. 

On coming home

The title of this blog largely explains my hiatus from posting anything: I finally broke the chain and unbecame an academic. At least officially. This undoing has created quite a bit of instability in my life--financially, job-wise, and relationally. Yet when I can muster the patience and compassion to listen inwardly, I know I am coming home. Thank god for external resources that foster such listening.

Tara Brach immediately comes to mind as my central sanity safe guarder. In fact, I have listened three times to her recent talk, "Presence and Empowerment," because it so poignantly captures the consistent suffering that results when we try to control everything. She also offers guidance on how to let go.

This teaching also introduced me to the poetry of Kaveri (whom I think is family practitioner Kaveri Patel) and her powerful reframing of anxiety. Despite my numerous and varied Google searches, I could not find Kaveri's poem that Tara read. Given the profound effect this woman's words had on me during the past week, I decided to transcribe and post the poem here. May her words be useful to somebody else out there and a better researcher than I give this poet her proper due.

I have been searching for a place to call home. A place where I could always feel safe, no matter what weather system was moving through the landscape outside.

For years I have tried to find the right anecdote to anxiety, to protect myself from the future, or heal from past regret.

I am both humbled and amused at the place I return to again and again when I am lost and looking for home.

The present moment.

I can drop all the story lines to what could be or what might have been, who I should be or should have been.

Sometimes it is not so easy. Still I find some peace with the following phrase, said with utmost kindness and care to the anxiety:

Thank you for trying to help me; I am safe here now.

I remember the human brain and how it is wired for danger, stress, and negative experiences. I know the anxiety is only trying to help.

On Righteous Anger (Or, Being Seriously Pissed Off)

Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of attending a talk by Colman McCarthy, the author of I'd Rather Teach Peace and director of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. This book inspired me when I was in graduate school, and McCarthy inspired me again yesterday, particularly when he read aloud Mother Teresa's "Meditations from a Simple Path," which is worth quoting in its entirety:

Anyway

People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people may accuse you of selfish motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you may win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable.
Be honest and transparent anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People who really want help may attack you if you help them.
Help them anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you may get hurt.
Give the world your best anyway.

I left McCarthy's talk feeling affirmed about my commitments and work toward social justice and peace. Then I awoke this morning to an e-mail from the provost forwarded from my department chair, which was forwarded from the dean of my college. The original e-mail included a link to the YouTube clip called "2011 Mediocrity: 'Designers.'" That e-mail also said, "In my opinion, watching this video should be mandatory for anybody who has any interest in excellence."

Well, I watched the video, and the first thing that came to mind was, the last time I checked, education involved people, not cars. This first thought sparked the writing of an e-mail that appears below. I just sent that e-mail not only to my chair, dean, and the provost, but also to the new president of my aspiring-for-excellence university. My next action, when I can find the time and courage, is to create an Xtranormal animation that depicts an imagined conversation between a senior administrator and me about the relationship between excellence, equity, and neoliberal dictates. As McCarthy said yesterday, we will know we are working for an institution that supports peace-making when we have as many peace educators as engineering and mathematics educators.

And finally, my e-mail:

As someone who prioritizes equity--defined by Patton, Shahjahan, & Osei-Kofi (2010) as improving access and the removal of barriers to higher education for historically disadvantaged groups--as much as excellence, I find this video very troubling.

How can we address the significant issue that those K-12 students who are "waiting for Superman" (i.e. low-income students who are disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities on account of ongoing pervasive institutionalized racism in the United States) do not have consistent, continuous access to robust learning opportunities in public educational institutions that would promote both their capacity for creativity and the cultivation of their talents since so much of their "learning" is scripted and rote? In other words, given many educational policymakers' emphasis on narrow forms of accountability--standardized test scores--and business-like solutions to human problems, particularly the reality that 1 in 4 U.S. children now lives in poverty, how can we make "excellence" a viable possibility for the majority of U.S. K-16 students? As Charles Payne (2008) wrote in So Much Reform, So Little Change, “To the extent that the problems [in urban schools] we are trying to solve are problems of connectedness, a strictly academic approach may not take us all the way” (p. 96).

I am for excellence but not in the absence of honest, substantive discussions about equity.

Returning to my blog to say a little something about institutionalized heteropatriarchy...

I haven't written anything in a long time because I've actually been busy enjoying my new departmental colleagues, students, and campus and community work. Perhaps I really do need to rename the blog "On (re)becoming an academic"...

On the heels of a simultaneously energizing and deflating weekend workshop on LGBTQ issues in educational research, I am once again inspired to post something with the sincere hope that it ripples outward. Also motivating me is the public outcry against Waiting for Superman (many wonderful critiques are located here ). Below is the e-mail that I just sent to the American Educational Research Association's executive director.

A bit of context: The executive and social justice directors of this organization will be the lead authors on the report regarding LGBTQ issues in educational researchers. So far as I know, neither of these authors have lived out of the closet or extensively studied queer lives and theories. Moreover, the organization has openly struggled with the Queer Studies Special Interest Group, of which I am the current chair, over when a "research" organization ought to "advocate" for and with systemically marginalized social groups. I won't go into that history here, but you can read up on it (as well as other reflections on this past weekend) on Bill Tierney, Therese Quinn, and Catherine Lugg's blogs if you are interested.

And the letter...

Thank you again for your work organizing this past weekend's workshop. If you're feeling as tired as I am, I hope you have a chance to experience a little R&R.

I came across a blog on an L.A. teacher who committed suicide, and the parallels between the blog author's words and many of our own this past weekend compelled me to write to you. I know that on Saturday afternoon I was not as composed or centered as I would have liked to be out of frustration and exhaustion. The blog author's words about teachers to a non-teacher audience ("the spectators and grand-standers in this conversation") remind me of many workshop participants' words about queer youth and workers following John Easton's [the director of the Insitute of Education Sciences] presentation. As she wrote in blunt terms,

"Is this just a game to you, or what? For those of us in the trenches, it most certainly isn’t. Enough is enough. Deal with the real issues, approach us from a place of humility and respect, and offer genuine support. Put up, or SHUT UP."

As you and [the social justice director] author the report, I request that you "deal with the real issues," "approach us from a place of humility and respect," and "offer genuine support." I full well realize the limitations of AERA's ability to "advocate," but I also think if the organization is going to have a social justice director and take public stands on policies and practices that have generated and sustained great suffering for many people, it ought to stand on the side of justice in its report on LGBTQ issues in education and call into question clearly and directly the compulsory heteropatriarchy of U.S. educational institutions. To again quote the blog author, "Enough is enough."

And with that, I am going to return to my research and teaching responsibilities, which, not incidentally, I attempt to undertake in ways that integrate research, advocacy, and activism. I again appreciate your willingness to listen to the concerns of the Queer Studies SIG and myself during the past few months.

Respectfully,
Connie

And just for fun, an image that inspires me (with credit to definatalie, it's creator).

On holding our "membership organizations" accountable

This morning, I sent out the following letter to all the division and special interest group (SIG) leaders (of which I am one) in the behemoth American Educational Research Association:

Dear AERA division and SIG officers:

As leaders of the Queer Studies SIG, we write to heighten awareness about AERA’s troubled and troubling LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer) research initiative. We welcome your support via a letter to President Kris Gutiérrez (kris.gutierrez@colorado.edu) and Executive Director Felice Levine (flevine@aera.net) that calls for greater accountability, inclusivity, and transparency in this and future AERA-funded research initiatives.

First, we appreciate AERA’s commitment to and interest in LGBTQ scholarship. Since the 2009 AERA annual meeting, however, when most members first learned about the “GLBT Issues in Education” research initiative at a presidential session, we have asked AERA to make decisions more transparently about the initiative’s scope and selection of the working group. In response to these requests, AERA leadership did revise its call for ideas (see: http://aera.net/Default.aspx?id=9206) and organize a presidential session, “Complex Ecologies of LGBT/Queer Issues in Education,” at the 2010 annual meeting.

Nevertheless, at this session, which we were led to believe was an opportunity to shape the form and content of the LGBTQ research initiative, we learned that the planning committee had already invited participants to its three-day research workshop in September and relied largely on a criterion of “seniority” to select them. Additionally, only one full-time AERA staff member attended this presidential session, thereby preventing the open dialogue about the initiative that we anticipated. We raised our concerns about the continued lack of transparency regarding the LGBTQ research initiative at the May 4 open business meeting. During this meeting, outgoing President Carol Lee and Felice Levine verbally endorsed inviting the incoming Queer Studies SIG chair, Connie North, onto the initiative’s planning committee.

Although this individual invitation creates an opportunity for increased participation by Queer Studies SIG members in the initiative, we remain concerned about the damage already caused by a flawed, undemocratic process. Accordingly, several AERA members continue to urge the leadership to stop and start over, thereby increasing the likelihood that this initiative will generate a much needed and valued published report and research brief. Other members suggest that the September workshop
take place, but ask the planning committee to do the following:

(1) Revisit the data-gathering process and determine whether the initiative should ask different questions, select different participants, create different mechanisms for input, and follow a different timeline. Use AERA membership to do so in a public online space.

(2) Ensure that the September working group includes a diverse group of participants via a transparent selection process, informed by the aforementioned revised data-gathering mechanisms.

(3) Make transparent the planning committee selection process (begun in 2008), the research question development process (including the participants in this process), the initiative’s budget, as well as the processes by which the working group is to write the draft, solicit feedback from AERA membership, and revise the report.

Such actions will help to ensure that the LGBTQ initiative is worthwhile and endorsed by not only AERA members but also other organizations who are committed to social justice, interdisciplinary educational research, and improved educational outcomes for all youth.

If you choose to send a letter to AERA’s leadership, please cc Liz Meyer, the Queer Studies SIG program chair (emeyer@education.concordia.ca), and Connie North (connie.north@gmail.com).

In solidarity,

The Queer Studies SIG Officers

On honoring students and their teachers

I read the following statement at the University of Maryland, College Park College of Education Graduate Student Research Conference on April 26, 2010:

What you are going to witness today are the products of a long process that started with a small group of educators who teach in extremely diverse schools in the surrounding area. This teacher group inquired into what constitutes high-quality learning environments. After many long and heated conversations with just us adults, we decided to bring our students into the inquiry process by asking them to create visions of their ideal education. These visions took the form of powerful poems, raps, essays, visual art, and letters to Arne Duncan as you soon will see and hear from the students themselves. So instead of spending the rest of my brief time up here describing what they will show you, I want to request something of you, the audience. And I’m going to use a little story-telling to do it.

About a month ago, a Department of Education representative came to speak to faculty and students here at College Park. After he spoke, I was harsher than I wanted to be when critiquing his claims—for which I remain regretful—but I am not sorry I spoke up, because I want to challenge the message I heard again and again in his presentation, which was that communities and schools are overflowing with inadequate adults. Indeed, these “non-experts,” including parents and teachers, appear to be the source of our educational woes. Unfortunately, this deficit-speak reminded me of far too many conversations I continue to hear about young people, all of whom I know to be full of gifts that we can and will perceive if we take the time to observe carefully how they go about interacting with their surroundings and listen attentively to their lives speak.

Please do not mistake my critique of deficit-oriented thinking as an excuse for the despicable educational conditions that far too many students face on a daily basis, to which many of the students here today can and will speak. We cannot ignore the numerous problems that our local communities, nation, and globe face, and as an educator I aim to honestly examine my surroundings—including the adults and youth who inhabit them—without a lot of artificial sweeteners to disguise what is a savage amount of suffering. In fact, I am nothing short of outraged at the mis-education far too many youth receive in the United States and right here in the backyard of our very wealthy nation’s capital.

But that Department of Education representative was the misdirected target of my ire because we—all of us—are sacred and deserve to be treated with respect and care. We need to learn how to honor that sacredness, which is too rarely embedded in the federal, state, and local educational policies that ultimately become punishments and bribes rather than effective courses of action.

So today I hope to contribute to a transformation of our deficit-laden educational landscape by honoring these wise students and their wise teachers all of whom are the experts in the room on their own lives and experiences with schooling. I ask you to honor them as such and learn from them so that together we can realize their visions for a better tomorrow.

I will close by quoting a wise Oglala Lakota teacher, Will Peters, whom I recently had the privilege to hear speak while spending a week on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. As Will said,

This world is on loan to us from our children. We have a responsibility to take care of it out of respect for them and their future.

On becoming reacquainted with Wounded Knee

A week has passed since I left the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Sixteen undergraduate students and I spent a week there as volunteers for Re-member, a non-profit organization that "seeks to improve the quality of reservation life through relationships, shared resources and volunteer services." Although our work refurbishing a woman's house, significantly destroyed by a fire, was meaningful, and I learned many important lessons from the teaching of Lakota speakers like Will Peters, my trip to the Red Cloud Indian School Heritage Center will haunt me for life.

On the fifth day of our trip, we went on a tour of the Pine Ridge Reservation. We had heard about the challenges facing the residents of the rez: an estimated 85% unemployment rate, an average annual income of between $3,000 and $8,000, the lack of electricity and running water for many, which resulted in the desperate burning of furniture and shoes when the temperature plummeted to -45 degrees, and the local vendors demanded $300 for a truckload of firewood. We also had learned of the U.S. government's repeated betrayals of and violence toward the Oglala Lakota peoples. However, witnessing firsthand the extreme poverty and photographs of the Wounded Knee massacre at the Heritage Center brought distant statistics and stories into immediate relief.

In my estimation, December 29, 1890 marks a wound that cannot be healed. Approximately 300 Oglala people, many of whom were women and children, needlessly died that day. I try to imagine that fear more than malevolence caused U.S. cavalrymen to shoot all of these people, who were seeking refuge on the Pine Ridge Reservation, with machine guns. According to the Lakota people I heard, the murdering ensued after a deaf, mute man's gun discharged while soldiers forcibly removed it from him. (25 soldiers also died as a result of their own gunfire.)

This version of the massacre differs dramatically from those told elsewhere. Regardless of the "factual" details of this tragic event, I will always remember the photographs taken a few days later. The frozen, exposed body of the Minneconjou people's leader, Si Tanka (a.k.a. Chief Big Foot), battling pneumonia when he was killed. Cavalrymen standing over stacks of corpses with seeming pride written on their faces.

The "Indians" defeated at last. Or, another indelible trace of humanity's barbarity.

On the morning we left Pine Ridge, the director of Re-member brought us to the Wounded Knee Memorial. From the top of the hill where this commemoration sits, one can see how vulnerable a group of people would be upon setting up camp at its foot. Once again, history and its devastations became palpable.

As I re-settle into life in my comfortable bungalow, the daffodils in full blossom, I aim not to forget the people I met, the images I saw, the stories I heard, the tragedy I witnessed on the Pine Ridge Reservation. But I also aspire to remember the compassion, humility, and remarkable forgiveness expressed by Lakota members like Keith Janis, Will Peters, and Laurence Swallow. As they taught me, amidst human cruelty also exists exquisite beauty, created by individual and collective human acts.

On loss

In the past week, I lost a lot. An opportunity to shift my career pathway. A teacher participant in my inquiry-to-action group (ItAG). My partner's beloved dog, Ruby. I also gained some new insights, thanks in no small part to Pema Chodron. She wrote,

No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are very rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear...the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, or distract ourselves, but by all means make it go away.

I have been trying to lean into the fear and pain rather than run for cover. In the process, I have discovered some wonderful aspects of my present life, which I was taking for granted while so focused on future steps.

For one thing, I finally looked up and saw numerous colleagues, friends, and students who value not only what I do but also who I am. These folks are helping me envision ways to stay where I am and not only make do but also enjoy that space, which holds a multitude of possibilities. Indeed, I may have to change my blog title to "On (re)becoming an academic"...

I also have had to sit with the reality that I can only take responsibility for my own words and actions, not those of others. Losing a study participant after sharing my critical analysis of our ItAG's process with its members means that the adolescents associated with this teacher will no longer participate in what I think would be an amazing opportunity for them and others: the presentation of their educational visions to a university-based and policy maker audience. Yet, as Charlotte Kasl wrote,

Being real with people does run the risk of evoking strong feelings or conflict and can sometimes lead to loss. It also has the potential to deepen understanding, draw you closer together, and change the direction of a relationship.

Perhaps some day that potential will be realized. In the meantime, I take solace in knowing that I honestly faced, to the best of my ability, the tensions and fissures that have been troubling me for months.

As for losing Ruby, an amazing companion and source of support to my partner and me, I have received the gift of witnessing selfless love. This love reminds me of another loss that a woman I respect and admire experienced this past week--the death of a long-time partner. As she wrote, "If you really love someone, there are indeed times that you need to let them go--as painful as it is." I trust that Dori and Ruby have found peace.

Through the many tears of the last few weeks, I have come back to believing a central lesson of Chodron's: usually fear underlies anger, and sadness underlies that fear; in the sadness--the undoing--lies an amazing learning opportunity. In Chodron's eloquent words,

Sometimes...everything falls apart, and we run out of options for escape. At times like that, the most profound spiritual truths seem pretty straightforward and ordinary. There's nowhere to hide...Sooner or later we understand that although we can't make fear look pretty, it will nevertheless introduce us to all the teaching we've ever heard or read.

On Challenging My New Favorite Term: "Edupreneur"

So I've been swamped with new semester stuff but realize my sanity will likely erode if I do not write something other than comments on student papers or academic manuscripts. I have had lots of blog-worthy fodder as of late, including a forwarded e-mail for United Teachers Los Angeles activists that Brian Galaviz sent to Education for Liberation Network members. In Brian's message, he described Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as an "edupreneur." To provide a bit more context, Duncan's edupreneurship included portraying Hurricane Katrina's destruction to New Orleans as an opportunity, which immediately reminded me of Naomi Klein's work on disaster capitalism.

In any event, I love the term edupreneurship, as it captures so perfectly much of what I have witnessed in higher education since I became a faculty member. For example:

• Instead of simply saying we need to downsize our graduate programs for economic reasons or some other ones, we are "right-sizing" them, as if we are talking about the alteration of a more marketable hamburger rather than organizations run by and (supposedly) for people.
• Instead of looking at our own backyard (including its hard-to-ignore, foul-smelling shit) to determine what we want to keep and change as we trudge into the 21st century, we are looking to our "aspirational peers" for guidance on what we should be. These peers do not merely offer a vision of something better; they rank higher than we do on such important scales as the U.S. News & World Report's list of best public research universities. So what we are really talking about is competition, and we are, yet again, a number on a report rather than an institution comprised of human beings who have diverse needs and interests (aspirations?), some of which do not include being #1.
• Instead of publicly praising scholars for their work on improving the fields in which they work, the surrounding community, U.S. society, and/or the world beyond our national borders (or, dare I say it, their activism to begin re-funding the public educational system that policymakers and lobbyists have actively depleted for years), we celebrate the attainment of big grants. That's right, $$$$$$. And the federal public monies given in my field, teacher education, go to those willing and able to Race to the Top. Sounds like more competition and another ranking system to l'il ole me...
  

Believe it or not, I'm actually not opposed to some concepts associated with neoliberal economic thinking, such as efficiency. At present, the large class sizes in our doctoral program mean students do not receive the attention and care they deserve. Accordingly, "down-sizing" our doctoral program makes a lot of sense, both from the perspective of the students enrolled in the program and the harried, worn-out professors teaching and advising them. Still, think of the difference in framing between the following two statements: "We care about the quality of your education and, more importantly, you," and, "We need to right-size our program to compete with our aspirational peers." I'm with George Lakoff who argues that framing matters a lot and that framing according to our values is a more effective way to bring about progressive social change than trying to explain to people like my provost that their reasoning is faulty. So as I draft my resignation letter during the upcoming month, I am going to think about the most effective frames I can use to ensure my institution's recognition that I am voting with my feet, not leaving for "personal reasons." This blogger is more interested in re-humanizing my professional life than assuming the mantle of edupreneur.

On Connectivity

The current product of my latest research endeavor:

It started with six of us.

Different realities

in the same geographical area

telling our stories.

Counter narratives to policy talk and

efficiency speak.

We went around and around—

teacher and student renegades,

entering the conversation

on what education should be.

Our children are desperate for connection.

We all are.

We have a responsibility

to expose them to the world beyond their doorstep.

You can be in an all-black school,

an all-white school,

and still learn what is going on out there.

Throw some yellow paint on the book.

We cannot stay in our little world—

these are your citizens in my school.

Our kids have the same issues,

not the same opportunities.

Everything you seek

is already there.

The luxury to work intimately

with 12 or 13 kids

to build trust

to engage each student

to hear every child’s voice

to make a difference.

I compensate for the numbers—

put out fires,

contact parents only when something goes wrong.

I do what I have to do

don’t even know where I am some days.

My students do not walk across campus,

to breathe fresh air.

They have blackboards without black.

Broken windows.

Boarded-up stores.

Their stomachs growling.

Some have lost their homes

their moms

their lives.

The frustration must burst

in them.

We are accomplices,

not connecting with children,

in ways they deserve.

We tell them:

Be quiet.

Get in line.

Check off this list of requirements.

We don’t teach get-along skills,

just send them home.

They know they are being cheated.

We put up ridiculous barriers.

If The World Is Flat,

why this wall in Mexico?

why this graduation test?

It’s a set-up. A pipe. A farce.

600 in, 200 out.

Kids are failing,

with our names attached to the scores.

We separate students

and keep them separated.

What message are we sending?

Get the credit,

discredit others.

We have created a monster.

I always say curriculum ain’t everything—

you never know where talent is going to come from.

We have to model how we expect them to act.

When we pay attention—

let them know they are the end product—

they walk a little taller.

Surrender our power,

let their lives speak.

Where crisis is occurring,

incite them.

If Bill Gates can talk about 21^st century education,

so can our students.

I don’t think any of this

is going to change Arne Duncan’s mind.

Trained to sit in rows all their lives,

the students learn something important—

to find their voices.

Now we just have to listen.

We are the gatekeepers of education.

Unless we have these conversations in living rooms,

there will be no change.

Accountability measures strangling public education,

the Department of Education bullying us,

but I’m feeling a little empowered.

I did not go to share.

I went to learn,

and I learned a lot.

On feeling at peace

Ask yourself, 'How do you want to feel in your life?' Not, 'What do you want to do with your life?'

On this cold January evening, I continue to reflect on the elegant question--the first one above--that a wise woman asked me yesterday: "How do you want to feel in your life?" I did not have to think about a response. It came to me immediately: "I want to feel peaceful."

Lately, I've been realizing just how much "big feelings," to borrow from my brilliant, lovely friend Erica Meiners,  have guided my path, often on an unconscious level. Erica suggests, "Get in touch with big feelings--what we love, what brings pleasure, what are our fears and what makes us angry and consider these feelings as public, not private." She adds, "Feelings are not simply by-products of organizing or research or work life, they are a central component of contemporary political life."

I could not agree more. I've spent most of my adult years pursuing ways of being and knowing that do not reproduce the alienation, hyper-competitiveness, hyper-individualism, social hierarchies, and demands for conformity that imbued my youth, including my early twenties when I left (fled?) the country for three years to "serve" as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal. My drive both to belong to a community of some kind and to fight injustice emerged less from an intellectual curiosity or some other rational rationale than deep-rooted feelings of hurt, rage, and anxiety. These feelings have not merely been private, although they have been a source of far too much harsh self-measurement and judgment behind closed doors (which relates to my last post on Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided ). Rather, these big feelings have significantly shaped--if not constituted--my public speech, political activism, and writing, including this blog.

Having recognized the major role of these big feelings in nearly every aspect of my life, I am approaching my work in a different way--a way that I think will improve it because I am no longer trying to impose my own traumatic associations with phenomena like academic achievement on those who have had non-injurious experiences with them. The topic of big feelings, particularly negative ones, also reminds me of a documentary I recently watched called Enlighten Up. In it, a wise yogi instructs, "Be your true yourself...As much as possible try to get rid of what you are not." As I try to be in the present--simply be, without critiquing my own words, actions, or feelings--I will also try to have faith that what I am is adequate to guide me well. As Mary Daly said, "Courage to be is the key to the revelatory power of the feminist revolution."

On Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided

In vastly different settings, positive thinking has been a tool of political repression worldwide. We tend to think that tyrants rule through fear--fear of the secret police, of torture, detention, the gulag--but some of the world's most mercilessly authoritarian regimes have also demanded constant optimism and cheer from their subjects.--Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided

I have finally escaped the death jaws of end-of-semester grading and can resume my favorite pastime: reviewing fabulous texts and Blingeeing grade-A douchebags (because really, no other label quite captures this entry's blinged out queen--Joel Osteen; plus, I would like to rid the world of the myth that, and I quote Naweko San-Joyz/Nicole Dial, the "vagina is a filthy pit" by applying the word "douche" to people whose actions actually are vile). Indeed, I might as well begin with Pastor Osteen.

Until I read Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, I held most of my contempt for Minister Rick Warren and his homophobic douchebaggery. But then I read the following in Ehrenreich's new book:

Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, argued that pastors like Osteen reassured low-income people with subprime mortgages by getting them to believe that 'God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and bless me with my first house.' (p. 182)

Such "advice" is not only despicable, but this "gospel" also takes lessons straight from our nation's other leading douchebags: several CEOs, like the Lehman Brothers' Joe Gregory and Countrywide Mortgage's Angelo Mozilo. Ehrenreich notes that as poverty and insecurity increased in the U.S. at the dawning of the twenty-first century, "an unimaginably huge buildup of wealth" accumulated at the tippy top of the economic spectrum. Speeding along this concentration was the growing belief by business executives (and readers of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret) that visualizing success manifests it. In her cutting words, "...in a short period of time, about $3 trillion worth of pension funds, retirement accounts, and life savings evaporated into the same ether that had absorbed all our positive thoughts" (p. 191).

I appreciate most the historical elements of Bright-Sided. When I read Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a freshman in college, I ashamedly noted that my European heritage was heavily tied up in Calvinist Protestantism (the shame being a key ingredient of this legacy). Ehrenreich brilliantly details both the past fallout of this punitive Calvinist worldview, describing the many women and men who fell prey to "socially imposed depression" and "invalidism" on account of its torments, as well as the positive-thinking counter revolution that this doctrine inspired.

She also underscores how Calvinism--without the theology--as well as the "concrete therapeutics" (a la William James) it motivated live on today. I intimately relate to ongoing elements of Calvinism in U.S. society and, particularly, Ehrenreich's reference to academia's investment in seeing "busyness for its own sake as a mark of status." She is worth quoting at length on this point:

In academia, where you might expect people to have more control over their workload hour by hour, the notion of overwork as virtue reaches almost religious dimensions. Professors boast of being 'crazed' by their multiple responsibilities; summer break offers no vacation, only an opportunity for frantic research and writing. (p. 76)

Anyone else in the ivory tower feeling this? I also find compelling her point that even today's positive thinkers maintain a key toxic feature of Calvinism: "an insistence on the constant interior labor of self-examination" (p. 89). Subjecting one's inner life to "relentless monitoring" facilitates more self-flagellation than joy, for that I can vouch.

So what positive wisdom does Ehrenreich impart to her readers?

[T]ry to get outside of ourselves and see things 'as they are,' or as uncolored as possible by our own feelings and fantasies, to understand that the world if full of both danger and opportunity--the chance of great happiness as well as the certainty of death. (p. 196)

AMEN! And to conclude this entry, I am going to attempt to realize her suggestion. I am currently writing from Denver, Colorado, where my family lives and the destination of my holiday travels. The D.C. Snowpocalypse, as Roxie called it, resulted in three sadness-inducing flight cancellations. Then Papa Jack stepped in.

Now, if I subscribed to Osteen's delusional "prosperity preaching," I might believe that positive-thinking manifested itself in a first-class ticket to Denver. Because I am practicing "a certain level of negativity and suspicion," as Ehrenreich counsels, I understand my current situation as follows: my father possesses enough money to have traveled frequently with United Airlines. Consequently, he has secured not only "premier" status with this corporation but also lots and lots of "free" miles. This cornucopia of miles, accompanied by Papa Jack's socially savvy call to United, landed me a fancy schmancy seat to Denver only one day after my planned arrival.

In sum, economic privilege, not "visualizing victory," resulted in my pre-Christmas Colorado alighting. Instead of doing my usual Calvinist schtick of self-berating for this good fortune, I conclude this entry with gratitude for the opportunity to be with my family during the holidays and my father's 64th birthday, which falls on Christmas Day. Additionally, I am hoping (rather than cloud-cuckoo-land praying) that the many stranded travelers I encountered en route to Denver also found their way home. Finally, I renew my commitment in the fast-approaching 2010 to Ehrenreich's purposeful recommendation: vanquish real threats "by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world" (p. 206).

On the TINA Thesis

I am writing from Chicago where I just attended Kevin Kumashiro's 6th International Conference on Teacher Education and Social Justice.  At this event, Kevin introduced me to the TINA thesis--There is No Alternative--which has echoed through the halls of academe as a justification for budget cuts and furloughs. (Apparently Zygmunt Bauman helped to coin the term.) Now I don't know about you, but if I had a nickel for every time I heard, "There is no alternative," during the past couple of years, I could pack up my cinder-blocked office and retire. The resignation, hopelessness, and fear that result from the repeated utterance of this thesis is what I, with the help of my conference buds and therapist, want to take up here. During the first day of the conference, I was pleased when Bill Ayers proposed moving away from a politics of fear and defensiveness and toward a politics of hope and confidence. As he reminded us, the latter can help us to stop acting as if we are barricaded in a corner with no way out. Ayers's presentation brought to mind "the drama triangle" that I have used repeatedly in my personal relationships, teaching, and activism.  More specifically, Ayers spoke of the trouble with viewing President Obama as our great savior. So long as we sit by and wait for him to transform U.S. society, we fail to get off our butts and do something. In the language of the triangle, we frame him as a rescuer and, in turn, ourselves as victims. Moreover, President Obama quickly becomes a perpetrator when he doesn't save the world all by himself and then howl at the moon. The triangle is a therapeutic device and a tool that I see as crucial to social activism and transformation: we must take responsibility for our own words and actions rather than blame some bogeyman or seek a savior.

This notion of responsibility-taking (I prefer response-ability-taking) does not mean that the struggle for a different reality is an individual one. In fact, I have been reading Charles Payne's  So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools, and repeatedly find similarities between the failing urban schools that Payne describes and my own higher education institution. To cite two examples: Payne notes that the "denizens of demoralized social spaces do what they have to do but without much heart or hope." Check (particularly in faculty meetings). In a section entitled "Leading with the Negative," he adds, "The weak social webbing of bottom-tier schools [and my institution]...degrades the human resources already there." Check. As he explains (because his words are so right on), "the inability to learn from experience has to do with the lack of time for shared reflection and pooling of information, but even if there were more time, distrustful people have difficulty learning from one another."

With these illustrations, I mean to demonstrate that dysfunction and demoralization are neither figments of our imagination nor individual experiences. We are dealing with powerful, systemic forces that--due to their insidious pervasiveness--can easily appropriate us. However, if we wholeheartedly embrace the TINA thesis in response to these alienating conditions, we have leaped onto the drama triangle where chaos and divisiveness reign. In sum, I am leaving Chicago tomorrow excited about the groundswell of we-will-find-alternatives-to-this-madness energy that I experienced at this conference. We are moving. Let's hope we can continue to connect in ways that defy the "warped character of social relationships" that Payne found in many inner-city schools and, instead, contribute to the building of robust, democratic, equitable forms of public education.

On Resolve(d)

Although I have plenty of things to do in preparation for my first Thanksgiving with my partner's family, I feel the need to take a few moments to gush about the documentary Resolved and recommend it to anyone who identifies as an educator. Because I want you to see it, I will not say too much about what happens in this documentary about a high school extracurricular activity (and course in some, usually affluent schools): the policy debate team. Suffice it to say that the majority of very well-to-do, largely private-school attending students are in it to win it. They talk a mile a minute--called "spreading," short for speed reading--and accumulate giant bins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dj4pQe11eZc

of information, carried to tournaments on dollies and, in at least one instance, skateboards. If the debaters have money to get to the tournaments, can access sophisticated databases, are well organized, and/or have a photographic memory, this information becomes a weapon that they can thrust upon their opponents in the blink of an eye to win either the affirmative or negative side of an issue.

Enter Richard Funches and Louis Blackwell, two black students from the "inner city" of North Long Beach, California. Now, one could argue that the framing of the documentary definitely has a kind of "downtrodden as savior" feel to it. But to pull out a favorite W. E. B. Du Bois concept, one could also assert, and I would like to, that these two youth bring a sorely needed double consciousness into the policy debate arena, and educational activities more generally. They draw on Paulo Freire's ideas to ask their opponents if the structure of high school policy debate does anything to improve the conditions of people's lives. In one particularly poignant scene, Louis pushes someone from the opposing team to admit that the argument he is making will have no relevance to his life or community once he finishes the round apart from advancing or eliminating him from the tournament.

As I watched Resolved, I kept thinking about how vehemently some of my students (and their faculty advisors) resist critically examining institutionalized norms, particularly how those norms favor some while excluding, marginalizing, and/or alienating a whole bunch of others. I therefore especially appreciated when Louis, in tears, decried some judges' unwillingness to examine their complicity in advancing a style of discourse and institution that often does more to reinforce hierarchies and divisions than to promote meaningful learning and dialogue. Richard and Louis intimately experienced what happens when a stunningly compelling--and just--rationale slams into beliefs that those in power (in this case debate tournament judges) hold dear. And, because I love an opportunity to Blingee the rulers of our land, I will mention that Samuel Alito also made a cameo appearance in the film. You may be shocked to find out that he welcomed more diverse, uh, consumers and clients into the debate community so long as they played by the (his?) rules.

(And if you are shocked, please, please read more about Alito at even this decidedly non-partisan website.)

Given my own anger and frustration as of late at the institution paying my monthly bills, I was pleased to happen upon Francine Kelley's commentary (thank you, Carla) called "What is your net effect?" She notes,

If our ultimate goal is peace and harmony for humanity, then the very notion of 'fighting' for something is incongruent. Fighting implies aggression, and aggression may result in surrender and domination, but these are not the same as peace. Anger met with anger breeds more anger. Aggression met with aggression results in more aggression. Judgment of another feeds a sense of separation. Besides the obvious effect on others, anger, aggression and judgment also constrict the individual who is expressing them.

This wise woman also asks us to think about how often our opposition to something eclipses a strong vision of what we are for. On this day of gratitude--and grieving for the senseless genocide of "American" indigenous peoples--I am going to keep trying to face my inner self with courage, honesty, and compassion, believing, like Kelley, that such work will help to create world in which we have "no need to 'fight' for anything at all." That is the definition of peace after all, isn't it?