Archive | Spirit Matters
People ask me what I do when I get up so early (between 5 and 5:30 most days). They assume I am doing something earnest—meditating or writing or channeling my spirit guides. The truth is sometimes I do those things, but rarely before my coffee. Mostly in the wee hours I luxuriate in secret time, found time—a quiet unpunctuated by beeps and whistles and honks. The barely blue hours are when I feel the glamour of solitude most keenly: flowers cut like I like them, bulletin boards scrawled with my big ideas, feet and permakitten propped on the table, fingers painted an unlikely yellow, coffee cup resting without a coaster, and absolutely no media or people blaring. (My house growing up was quite loud.) I may be 46, but inside me a 6-year-old is crowing with great glee and satisfaction: IT’S MY HOUSE AND I CAN DO WHAT I WANT.America Possessed
I go for whole weeks totally numb to the abject horror of our current administration. It’s not that my numbness is excusable. Nor is it that I don’t care. It’s that I reach a point of saturation in which the immense and odious destruction is more than I can bear if I’m to stay afloat in the ocean of my precarious life. Then out of nowhere it arrives again on my chest, as unavoidable as an anvil: this total absence of humanity and compassion–this sociopathology, this evil–reigning over one of the most powerful nations on Planet Earth. Continue Reading →
(Stop) Policing the Black Man
Anyone who has read Freud knows that past is present when it comes to the traumas of our ancestors, especially when we do not consciously heal our family lines. This is also true of nations, which is why so many international wars stem from centuries-old conflicts. It is also why every person living in the United States, regardless of their race, religion, or where their ancestors lived 150 years ago, is impacted by slavery – its unmerited entitlements for white people; its dehumanizing exploitation and abuse of black people. Nowhere is this legacy more evident than in the U.S. criminal justice system’s grave mistreatment of people of color – especially black males. Policing the Black Man, an essay collection edited by activist and academic Angela Davis, lays out how African American men have remained endangered by our law enforcement system since “Juneteenth” – June 19, 1865 – when the slaves in the former Confederacy of the southern United States were officially emancipated. Continue Reading →