Writers Circle Prompt: Resolution

 

You don’t need a New Year resolution to change your life, I say.  

Prayer might work, but resolution rarely does.  

Yet:

The idea of the new year resolution always visits me this time of year.  I have sometimes ignored the habitual target setting.  This year, however, I wrote a poem about what I would like to change: my perfected procrastination.  My poem compares trying to change this habit to trying to fill a bucket with droplets of water.  Both are difficult to impossible.  But writing about it, I reasoned, might have some impact.  Later, I realized I didn’t like the poem except for one word, “ingrained.”  Here are the lines:

 

“Imagine changing
your dominant hand!
Habit is ingrained.”

Ingrained!  As if a person was a wooden board treated with an immoveable dye lot, a color like beet juice that just won’t let go.  My ingrained procrastination mostly pertains to writing.  With a paragraph now and then I treat the board, hoping to dilute the beet juice coloring.  I see no progress, but try again and again, a paragraph here, a page there, sometimes liking the page so much I imagine I see a lighter shade of beet in the wood.  Then I say to someone—anyone—I’m writing again! With two exclamation points.  I more than say it, I brag it, I delight in it, I imagine a whole book written, and me on a reading tour at bookshop after bookshop.  Of course, the next day I must needs go to the Post office and shopping, and when I sit down at the computer, I must do the wordle and crossword puzzle and words with friends, and before I know it, it’s time for The News Hour and Jeopardy, and then at 8pm it’s too late to start anything.  Tomorrow, I think.  I had such a good start yesterday.  But tomorrow comes and I am still ice skating on the frozen lake of achievement and self-admiration.  Procrastination plays tricks with my head, and I’m still ingrained with it, my wooden self is beet red.

 

 Tears in a Bucket

 

Catching my tears in 
a bucket, I laugh 
at imagining I could fill it

and then half smile at thinking
one day can ring change
with new year wonders.
 
As if we could wish 
away habit with 
impulse, as if we
could use magical 
words to invent new
and good beginnings.
 
Procrastination's
my pitiable
habit.  Though it is
not as tragic as
use of weapons, it
diminishes me.

Because habit is
easy, we think it's
simple to alter.
Imagine changing
your dominant hand!
Habit is ingrained.
 
Yet today is New
Year’s Day, another
day with another
chance to end habits—
the hard ones that play
over and over.
 
Would you rather fill
a bucket with tears?
I ask, then laugh and
grit my teeth with great
determination.
This time I may win.

Please respect my copyright.

© 2024 Susan L. Chast

Landback

"The movement goes beyond the transfer of deeds to include respecting Indigenous rights, preserving languages and traditions, and ensuring food sovereignty, housing, and clean air and water. Above all, it is a rallying cry for dismantling white supremacy and the harms of capitalism."

From FIX, November 2020:                                                    

"Returning the Land: Four Indigenous leaders share insights 

about the growing landback movement 

and what it means for the planet."

Last year I read Braiding Sweetgrass: INDIGENOUS WISDOM, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE TEACHINGS OF PLANTS  by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and since have been learning about the multiple contemporary realities of Indigenous people in North America, especially reading social histories of those who lived in places I have lived: Massachusetts, California, New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.   As Euro-Americans (we) requisitioned land and cut off indigenous use of it, we changed most of the names of cities, land formations and waterways.  We made no attempt to preserve the livelihood, customs, and culture of the displaced and disinherited people.  Indigenous stories reveal not only what we destroyed but what we might have learned from being better neighbors (I know that is an understatement).  Thank God and Earth alike that people from many tribes still exist to tell their stories and to salvage something from re-educated colonialists.  I'm grateful that I know a little more now than I would have known then.  Grateful that I am learning how to listen.

In the article quoted above, the idea and practices of "Landback" are held up to view.  In each case, note that action is underway but there is more to do.  I am impressed by how much of it would help solve the climate crisis we share.  I am not surprised that much of this work involves support for Black Lives Matter and others among BIPOC peoples, how much naturally accepts the many identities a person might have (intersectionality).

In Quaker meeting today, Pamela read aloud a page from A Lenape among the Quakers: The Life of Hannah Freeman by Dawn G. Marsh.  The author revealed Quaker complicity in Indigenous displacement--even sanctioning taking children from their parents for re-education.  As of yet, I cannot put words to how horrible this is/was.  Is it possible that we saved these people from a worst fate?  If only I could believe that.  Meanwhile, I begin to see why learning this and giving back seems so right to me.  

Also in Quaker Meeting today, Anschel pointed out that no secular word exists for the action of doing good, no name for the person except "do-gooder" which has negative connotations.*  "Benefactor" seems a patronizing word.  Altruist?  Humanitarian?  Volunteer?  Bleeding Heart?  Good Samaritan?  Helper?  When enough of us show up, we'll learn the word.  Maybe then we'll be neighbors engaged in "neighboring."

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* His source is "On Doing Good: The Quaker Experiment" by Gerald Jones.

Reparations, and other ways of working toward Justice, Peace, and Salvation

 

My Quaker Friends and I are beginning to think reparations, and finding ways to give back.  This does not have to do with guilt, but the fact of owning and earning things because they were taken from Native Americans and African Americans who did not have the same access to owner-ship and earning-ship that I have had.  In other words, quite literally, this is not mine, and if nothing more, it should be at least shared. 

For me it's a spiritual quest just to understand.  For example, I've been thinking of giving my house and its land back to the Lenni Lenape who live in this area, but I realize that I invested my money here so I could sell the house and use the money to move in to an "old folks' home."  I've actually been looking at them.  A residence costs the full value of my house up front, and I will have it to pay if I sell my house.  But should I have this option from stolen land?  Are there other ways of growing old and being cared for when a person (me) doesn't have children?  My Mom is still in her house at age 97, but my brother lives nearby.

You get the train of thought.  It's eye-opening to think of how I might/could live differently.  I've been actively contributing to African-American people in need, as well,  because  I can.  I don't have much, but what I have to spare will be better used by others.  I do not think of the money once it is out of my hands.  And few know about this activity of mine.  (Well, any readers here now know, but I think I only have three readers.)

What I discovered today is that everything I learn has a foundation in things I once knew and had forgotten.  Let me use "land-back" as an example.  I enjoyed 40 acres of woodland between the ages of 7 and 15, right outside my Grandmother's house.  I keep returning to trees as friends, and trees populate my poems.  Before I went to Graduate School in California, I was part of the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice in Romulus, NY, near Lake Seneca, where we said no to the military industrial complex and nuclear bombs.  After Grad School, I was right back in the same area.  The Cayuga Nation land-claim lawsuit was heating up while I was teaching right there at Wells College in Aurora, NY.  I heard some people I worked with and created theatre with saying that if they were asked to leave their homes, they would sit on their porches with rifles.  I've heard since that the lawsuit was won, then lost.  I don't know where it is now.  Have any of these people asked the Cayuga Nation what it wants?

I am donating money to support Water Watchers trying to stop petroleum pipelines from destroying the crops and water of Indigenous land.  Donating to those who help elders survive through long winters by providing food and healing herbs and protein.  Showing up for Black Lives Matter whenever I can, and continuing to support Black efforts for justice and for healing in the face of prison systems and white body supremacy.  Thinking about how to live, now that I am retired on both pension and social security.  Examining how to help pass legislation that would help all people have homes, food, water, and healthcare.

Thinking about what's next. The life of our planet may be waning, but we'll all have more chance of survival if Indigenous and Black and Brown and women's and children's intelligences are finally in the mix.

There are friends, family, cultures we each know, and then there are those strange to each other.  But as Valerie Kaur says from her source in Sikh wisdom, there is no stranger, only those who do not yet know each other.  The work now is to get close enough to know and unite and move on to Just and Peaceful Days (Beloved community) in the many projects of healing, repairing, reparation-ing--you know--all of it.

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Helen Sedgwick: Editing as the Creative Process

Helen Sedgwick is the best teacher I have ever had! After watching this, I know why I didn't finish writing my novel. I'll let the panic subside--after 11 years, why panic? I never finished the first draft!! I've refined the first 160 pages over and over again without knowing the end. I'll slow down to enjoy. If it feels like work and not pleasure, I'll work on something else for a while. Love you, Helen! Thank you for reminding me that we are artists creating art.

Helen Sedgwick: 

Editing as the Creative Process

Streamed live on Oct 1, 2021, at:

Wigtown Book Festival 

(Copy from You-tube)

"The idea of editing is enough to fill some writers with dread – but Helen Sedgwick wants to change all that. As part of our series of events for writers, in this online seminar Helen will talk about the interplay between writing and editing in her own creative work, and how editing is an essential part of the creative development of her novels. Covering the different types of editing there are and looking at how the editing process feeds into structure, plot, character development and storytelling, she will dispel the common fear of edits and show how editing can be exciting, creative, and even liberating. With examples from her most recent novel, Where the Missing Gather, and her own experience as both author and literary editor, she will give you a fresh look at the process of editing your own work as the craft at the heart of creative writing. "About the author: Helen Sedgwick is the author of The Comet Seekers and The Growing Season, which was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year in 2018. The opener to her Burrowhead Mysteries crime trilogy, When the Dead Come Calling, was published in 2020, followed by Where the Missing Gather in 2021. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University and has won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. She is the 2021 Dr Gavin Wallace Fellow. Before she became an author, she was a research physicist with a PhD in Physics from Edinburgh University. She lives in the Scottish Highlands."

Remember

I want to remember that I changed the focus of this blog today.  It was "Susan, continued . . ." and in many ways it still is.  But I am decentering self, finally.  It is not just a record of me "attempting to capture the words I breathe."  It is listening, taking, giving, growing, and changing.  I hope I will write more and less self-consciously in this new decade.

Also:

Yesterday, President Biden brought all troops home from Afghanistan, leaving a mess of military trash and death.  Maybe this exit will cause change.  It will if we dedicate ourselves to full employment in environmental rescue and maintenance.  I hope our military forces and most recent immigrants become climate warriors.  That is the way to full employment.

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Living for Change, for Beloved Community

 Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015)

I've been slowly reading Grace Lee Boggs' autobiography, LIVING FOR CHANGE, in which she takes care to trace the evolution of revolutionary thought that she and her husband Jimmy Boggs took part in, that took them and their Black comrades beyond what Marx had written to see the role of individual transformation in societal transformation. What a clear picture she provides of the time it takes for thought to evolve--even the difficulty of taking time to think--and how ideology joins with action to provide room for change. Gosh. And I am most impressed about how education takes center stage for adults as well as for children. About public schools, she writes:

"Instead of seeing our schools as institutions to advance individual careers, I argued, we must start turning them into places to develop our children into responsible citizens—by involving them in community-building activities, such as planting community gardens, preparing school and community meals, building playgrounds, cleaning up our rivers and neighborhoods. In this process our children will be learning through practice — which has always been the best way to learn. While they are working and absorbing naturally and normally the values of social responsibility and cooperation, they will also be stimulated to learn the skills and acquire the information that are necessary to solve real problems" (175).

I agree, I agree! Everyone can be a leader, problem solver, change agent--and many can be articulate speakers and listeners. Start where we live.

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Dear God and Dear Earth (Weaving for Spiritual Nurture Retreat 2020-2021)

From my Art Journal 2021

Dear God, dear Earth who share and show us creation:

Do you see your creation in me?  How do I show you physically, mentally, and other ways?

Do I see you when I look up and down and within, even when I don’t remind myself you’re there?

Let me always have my radio tuned to your station in the day, the night and the ocean—so many colors surround me!

And if I don’t know you as I experience you, let me recognize you later, reflecting on my experience—a moment recalled in tranquility like a poem.

Call me eccentric.  Call me mystic.  Call me Susan, or even “Hey, you!”  

I am not everything all the time.

In retirement at age 69, I let go of forces that have oppressed me, that seemed to demand command from me.  Now I try to embrace humility and plainness.  I am privileged to have earned a retirement, and try to use it well in learning, laughing and serving.  I find myself drawn to other senior citizens.  I wish everyone had this time to wind down when they have a good 30 more years to live.

I do not know if my life will be a pattern.  I can’t focus on that now.  I won’t stop meeting that of God in others in order to write a book of myself. I would like to know myself better, but not in an all-consuming project.

There are so many stories to hear!  And so many ways to stop supporting war, oppression, and exclusivity.  As I come to recognize white supremacy, I reject it and cringe at all the work I have to do to climb away from it.  None of the ways out provide an easy climb.

As Parker Palmer says, “Our complicity in world making is a source of awesome and sometimes painful responsibility – and a source of profound hope for change.”  I have entered the labyrinth of the journey toward wholeness, and I am not alone.

If I clear the path, others may breathe too.  I may find myself in danger.  I would give up everything if that would help BIPOC breathe.  Oh, my friends.  Let me be as willing to be in danger for this truth as early friends were willing to suffer cruelty and death for their beliefs. 

Let me be present to assist others in danger.  I have been somewhere else.  Working.  Playing.  Watching silently when people are sentenced to prison unjustly.  I will myself to observe, to listen, and to speak instead, no matter how uncomfortable.  I will myself to help lift other voices, especially BIPOC, who I have not listened to well at all. 

This is less reform than re-creation.  Of myself and of this world.  Maybe a few smaller things to start with (like the pattern of my day).  And maybe with frequent retreat to a distance from where I can see the bigger picture.

I believe that if I learn to care for people, I’ll be caring for wildlife, too, and all aspects of Earth. 

I seek forgiveness for what we have allowed to happen to others!  What we have done to the earth impacts first on the most oppressed people.  Let me see this, let me start there in some small way. Dear God, help me enter places where my senses suffer, instead of avoiding these places.  Maybe then I will also forgive myself.

Let me “see no stranger” as wonder and pain guide me onward.  I want to converse with others, and truly listen.  I want to bring all of me, and not be too proud to answer, to ask.

And I am a woman, a she-her, they-them woman, capable of power and sharing power.  I know what I know through this identity.  I am not afraid to admit it.  Forever, it draws me closer to the earth.  Forever being a woman makes me love birth, though I have never given birth.  Everyone has a mother.

I have howled at the moon, held the candles and the match and the drum and the knife.  Everything I have done opens my spirit now.  I have been a vegetarian and I have fished and raised and gutted chickens.  I have stopped eating angry food.  Each thing must have life before it feeds another.

I move around pretending I have the strength of a tree to witness all things, to dig in my roots, drink in the sun and the rain, and to let my heart open like a flower.

I am a woman who embraces trees, who plants them in my tiny yard and watches them, watches them throughout the seasons.  I watch them for many years.

I used to perform ceremonies for the life of trees and moss and water, earth, air—using fire and sound and movement.  Now I watch.  Simplifying everything so that I can learn, reform, transform.  Have a reason to live my full life.  30 more years is possible.  Imagine what we could create in 30 more years if we listen!

Imagine how we might learn from each other ways to have small victories.  Imagine nurturing our spirits with each other in small retreats, and then going back out strengthened to be conscious, intentional, focused, and in love with creation.  How we may transform in this transformation!  How we might spread the good news. 

Dear God, dear Earth who share and show us creation:

Do you see your creation in me?  Do I show you physically, mentally, and other ways?

I look at you when I look up and down and within, even when I don’t remind myself you’re there.

I remind myself multiple times a day to tune in to your reality—in the day, the night and the ocean. So many colors and tones surround me!

And if I am not aware that I experience you, let me recognize you later, reflecting on my experience—a moment recalled in tranquility like a poem.

I am no longer trying to be too much or bigger or any other way than a learner in your light.  Let me see you in all life.  Let the joy I feel in writing this praise turn into hope.  Let my hope be full of courage. Let it be shared.

     © 2021 Susan L. Chast

Coming Out Day 2020

 

NCOD logo designed by Keith Haring

 

It's "coming out" day, and all around me people have been declaring themselves—some with many intersections. Truly, it's a beautiful thing. It makes me feel old fashioned in the labels I know, though. I see that the labels make it easier for people to find each other for support and family.  I don't know if I will ever know them all, and hope you will forgive me.

I, who have called myself asexual for many years, really have something like a river of sensuality flowing through me. I am content to know it, and also content to live alone. I think if I talked to people who talked about such things, I would find the right word for it and would be delighted. But I've rarely talked about sexuality since the early 1980s when I was new to feminism and anything personal was political.  After those days, when asked what I was—whether living out a hetero or lesbian relationship at the time—I usually  just said "sexual." I rejected the label "bisexual" as I had only one relationship at a time. Maybe saying I was simply sexual was a short-cut way of saying that it's a complex question.  I am lucky to have been born into the body that suits me, and with a freedom to experience untroubled attraction and love. I am blessed to have had a soul mate among them.  Further, I am grateful for the friendships that are equally important relationships; I am blessed by the soul mates among them as we journey toward wholeness.

I've met many people who were troubled about gender and sexuality.  As a teacher in theater and creative writing, I have listened a lot.  I'd love to experience a world in which all people knew the options and got to know themselves as free, loving, and lovable.  I wish all of you reading this could make that world come to  be. 

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 © 2020 Susan L. Chast

 

 

After morning at PhYM's Plenary Session on Addressing Racism

I recently took--along with a marvelous group from Green St. Friends Meeting--a 28-day challenge by Layla Saad in Me and White Supremacy.  I worked hard at it, and will for a long long time.  I am beginning to hear and cringe at micro-aggressions.  This morning I heard many refer to "we" as white Quakers doing something to help Black Quakers as if they were not part of "we."  Do I do that?

I wanted to call it out (without naming names), but the clerk moved us on to a group picture and a moment of silence at the end.  Efficiency on Zoom is so much more powerful than in person.  Assuming it's necessary to hold deadlines for so many people, and believing this morning generated ideas that will be picked up and acted on later, however, I urge myself to voice this and other contributions to the dialogue through letters and phone calls and writing.  Always writing. 

I wrote this essay-poem in worship earlier today, but I could add these new observations to it.  Language expresses where we are in space, time and openness.  But let me not bias my observations against a bias.  Or should I?  Should I? 

On Language

How young are we when we notice that learning means

acquiring languages? Not soon enough for us to become

world citizens conversant with multiple living tongues,

but early enough to learn to read multiple sign systems.

We use them for self-preservation. Passive grammar is

among the first: Not taking responsibility, but assigning it

to objects and thin air, like “It broke” instead of “I broke it”

and like “He died” instead of “I killed him.”

Impersonation might be next, soon followed by

choosing the signs we want others to read on us

rather than being genuine and unmasked. Offstage,

we wear signs as easily as make-up and costume.

And before we learn that unlearning might be good,

we have swallowed the codes of dominant culture,

which we have less skill to use strategically than

outward signs, less ability to control as we use them.

And then we learn Silence. Did all or some of these

languages keep us safe? At what point did trauma

cause us to let go of direct child-like speaking? Or

were layers a game to be smart, smarter, smartest?

With children to raise, we see the complexity

of learning, the necessity for instilling safety in movement

and language. Without children of our own to learn from,

       we gravitate to nieces, nephews, neighbors, students.

This morning in meeting for Worship, O pointed out that

the Bible book of Matthew records Jesus saying we have 

to turn around, humble ourselves, and become like little

children again.  How young would we have to become?

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© 2020 Susan L. Chast

Within the Systemic . . .

On the second day of Me and White Supremacy the lesson is White Fragility--ways we make working against racism all about US.  We draw attention, we cry, deny, demand, forget we're trying to remove obstacles white privilege leaves in the way of people of color.  I'm working through my gut resistance to being called "white."  I think it gets in the way of the work that I want to do. But find it is the work I am called to do.

At last, accepting I am white people,
obscured in a mass of  kin-like persons.

So that's what it feels like—a reduction—

Black people. White.  Established by law.

The distinction between us.  I am

white people and should converse with my own.

Two steps back to go one forward, to move

up to one step back then two forward. I

attempt to see systemic racism.

The Matrix—a Hollywood scifi film—

clarified "systemic."  Appearances

are deceiving.  Programming makes us live

how big powers want us to, and living

outside the systems is no fun. At least

within them, some people live the promise.

Outside them, some people see how they're rigged.

You're either on the bus or off the bus.

Possibilities are bounded by code.

Exceptions prove the rule. Exceptions

are necessary to make exposure seem a lie.

I made it, so you can too. You're just lazy

try harder. You are Black. I am White. Feel

the pigeonholing. Blue eyes or brown eyes?

You'll get your turn tomorrow, if we don't

achieve freedom today. Confusing, yes?

That's how systems work. First, make us believe

that we're different by natural law.

At last, accepting I am white people

I turn to talk with other white people.

See the lies. Hear the fake narratives. We

walk their line. See angry white people who

want ingrained systems to be natural.

Mommy will love them. Daddy likes them best.

Daddy rewards them for a reign of rage.

Terrorism is domestic, programmed

into systems that we must outgrow.

Tomorrow is Juneteenth, now a state holiday.

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© 2020 Susan L. Chast

White Supremacy and Me, and Believing in Myself

Layla Saad is an author, speaker & teacher on the topics of race, identity, leadership, personal transformation & social change.

Layla is the NYT bestselling author of the ground-breaking book Me and White Supremacy (2020), the host of Good Ancestor Podcast, and the founder of good ancestor academy.

I joined a group that is beginning to work on the 28-day challenge that Ms. Saad leads in this book. One might say that this is the last thing I need right now, to add another daily event in my life while I'm trying to put my next poetry book together and procrastinating fiercely.

Procrastinating fiercely. Ha! There's some kind of oxymoron.

So why do this now? The right group came together, or, rather, the right organizer: Lola George. I think she could help me be honest. Viv is there, too. Both could say along with me that they've done the work before, but this probe is systematic in unpacking the disease of white supremacy. I feel that I can be honest--honester and honester--in unpacking of my privilege and becoming a better ally along the way. I could stop unconsciously handicapping my black friends. I am handwriting the daily journaling. It feels more private than blog-able to me right now. I hope that allows me to be more vulnerable than I've been before. And also I hope to get to know more of Green Street Meeting for Worship in this process.

So, how not to make this an excuse for "procrastinating fiercely"? The answer may be in an earlier to bed and earlier to rise intention.

I have to want something more than I want to play games and TV and Netflix.

I want to believe in myself.

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  © 2020 Susan L. Chast

Digging for a Poem . . .

⚘   ⚘   ⚘   ⚘

. . . in the details of my life, in my inner monologue.
 
A neighbor took out my garbage.
She noticed I hadn't done it, and . . . .
In a loosened lock down, neighbors notice
what's close by and they speak from a reasonable distance,
a physical safety zone. As if we come out
of our bunkers to see who's still alive.

Surprise, surprise to notice my first thought is gratitude.
It's often a low grumble. Gratitude has replaced my inner
grumble of resentment and remembrance of past mistakes.
What was a weed in my garden turns out to be a rose.
I might be able to let go of the fear that as I age
and dementia sets in, all my anger, feelings of superiority,
and resentment will spill out, and everyone--even me--
will learn who I really am.

I just noticed an inner thank you instead of
What was she doing in my yard? It's my job . . .
and last year they snubbed me and why should I talk
to them now? Just because I called the police on them
five years ago for burning garbage in their back yard,
even though I knew better than to call police
on Arab American people. I did it without thinking.
It turned out OK didn't it? An exhale of relief.
I will not pick that flower but allow it room to grow.

Gratitude is revolutionary. I am happy to live where 
police assume good unless proven otherwise;
where the police know respect and de-escalation.
No one needs to act from dis-empowerment--not old,
young, white, black, Latinx. We are lucky.
But why is it luck and not the lay of the land?
It isn't that hard to feel gratitude instead of meanness,
to chance meeting God in other people.

Gratitude. Deep, deep earth, a moment located just outside
that is always the center of the world and never the center
of anything: What we do, what we learn walking around
our neighborhood.  We make room for each other. Gratitude.
I am one of the few white people. At times I try to see me 
through the eyes of neighbors unlike me.

Excuse me. Where's my Words with Friends partners?
Excuse me, I have to go and play a few rounds before 
I think about one more serious thing.  To think, to write, 
to live, to take a fun break, to pray.

Words With Friends takes me to Facebook time.
I get hungry for it just as I do for communal silence.
It is way too noisy in my home today with drive-by
graduations everywhere, and all the words in my head.

Happy Graduation Seniors!
I'm going outside to wave to them.
And then I'm going to put the garbage cans away.

 

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FYI:  The inner monologue is overactive mind/heart/body/spirit.  It is not "the still small voice of God."   I have to move through a meditative stillness to have any chance of that.  I also have to listen to others.

Internal Monologue (XKCD)

  © 2020 Susan L. Chast