05 June 2020

Friday Morning Ruminations



 Gianna 'GiGi' Floyd, 6, sits atop ex-basketball pro Stephen Jackson's shoulders as she makes the announcement
GEORGE Floyd's daughter Gigi, 6, has appeared in a heartbreaking video where she shouts "daddy changed the world" after her dad’s death sparked a global protest movement.

Protest against police brutality and its connection to racist city monuments continues for a second week after the murder of George Floyd.  George Floyd's daughter proclaims "My daddy has changed the world!"   Demonstrations have swept through the country and the world--even in Catskill NY, the tiny county seat in which I was born.  My niece-in-law Tina Martinez documented its "Enough is Enough" action on FB.  

Other posts from fellow high school alum were discouraging.  They are angry to be inconvenienced; they feel threatened and want above all to support Law Enforcement as it exists.  I'll have conversations with them as way opens.

I zoomed the entire Memorial Service. Here it is:
 



The Rev Sharpton gave the eulogy--a work of immense power as well as intimacy.  Get your knees off our necks.  I sobbed as the service made George Floyd a man to me again, a blood and flesh human being.  I cried standing silently through the 8.43 minutes it took for a police officer to kill Mr. Floyd.  How have I lived with comfort alongside such on-going injustice and inequality?  Open my eyes that I might see . . . is not only a women's power song.

As full as I am spiritually and emotionally, I have only written snatches of poetry since my post here last Friday.  I'm forcing myself to write now so I don't lose everything.  This week I read a manuscript for a friend, and helped plan a retreat.  I had a Journey to Wholeness session, a Spiritual nurture session, and a  qigong/meditation class.  I read a ton of news news and FB news, and responded to the useful/spiritual/longing comments I saw.

Sitting up here in my second floor apartment, I remind myself of my grandmother.  I wonder if I am channeling her?  No, she would do more.  Here's an old poem I wrote about her: 


Dream  
          (UC Berkeley Graduate School 1987, revised 4/25/12)
 
Product of the radical seventies and one decade late, I

Don my turtle hood to exit luxury, traveling light
And slow back to the proverbial road not taken

Halt the erosion of truth, the Grandmother called
from her White House upon the hill, where she sat
Typing out letters and letting them fall

Evergreen-trees lined the night as Australia
Became a no-nuke zone and an actor aligned
His springtime in America to re-organize the right
And Grandmother wrote “Dear Editor” from her remote site.

I, turtle, move slowly through acres of passivity
While fateful animals pile earth on my shell
And play out the original rite of creation
Grandmother calls out for my group to smite
The pharaoh and his henchmen—like Moses to fight.

The living image stays now though I close my eyes to sleep:
Old women awake in a tower, turtle inching straight,
Pharaoh underground spinning orders that make
Wrinkled hands type letters, clocks tick, bosses take
Money moves, truth dies, turtles walk, I sleep at night
My eyes focused upward to see her steady Light.


Do I have a steady Light?  

I spend much more time channeling a wider universe (nature/God) than I ever knew grandmother to do.   She didn't waste time with FB, but she had piles of junk mail and random pleas for funding all round.  I believe she gave a little to many places, as do I.  She had been an artist and art teacher, whereas I was a stage director and theater professor and English teacher.  

I knew grandmother as teacher, sculptor, mosaic maker, potter, landscape painter, and expressionistic.  She worked in charcoal, pencil, oil, pastel, acrylic,water color, clay, concrete, block printing, copper, and glass.  She also did graphic design and illustration in a manner reminiscent of her early training in Germany's Bauhaus.  She did some form of art and public exhibitions until she died.  She also wrote letters to the editor until a few months before she died.  Her issues were preservation of the Hudson Valley environment, prevention of the spread of nuclear technology, ecology, recycling, local labor.  The Athens NY Town Hall has a plaque thanking her, Mary Berner, for helping to create Citizens to Preserve the Hudson and for keeping nuclear power plants out of the Hudson Valley. She lived alone from the 1960s when her husband died, through the 1990s when she needed assistance and moved in with my parents.  Her dates are 1901-2003.  

There's magic in people who live a century and more, I believe.

Less of my writing is public than Grandmother's was.  She wrote persuasively for government and public consumption.  I write poetry, some of it political.  My issues are peace, anti-racism, community-centered law enforcement, alternative energy, democracy, LGBTQ rights, and women's power.  I phone banked for Obama (we won), Hillary Clinton (we lost), paper ballots and voting in the primaries.  I will phone bank for whomever the democratic candidate happens to be.  I'm involved locally through the town library, reading and writing in its groups. I'm involved in Delco adult literacy programs.  I grow deeper and deeper spiritually through the influence of Quaker faith and practice. 

Yet in the Covid-19 pandemic, I've been idle.  Since George Floyd's death, I've been idle.  Between bouts of grief, I've been listening to music and podcasts, watching irrelevant movies, and relevant documentaries.  I haven't been exercising enough.  

Grandmother never hid her light under a bushel.  Do I?  Where are my words?  I look for them, and end up reminiscing.

The Reverend Sharpton reminded everyone "There's a difference between those who call for peace and those who call for silence."  Sharpton's words start at 01:32 in the video of the memorial for George Floyd (above).  I did not appreciate the Reverend Al Sharpton until I heard this eulogy that spoke intimately to the family and yet reached out powerfully to African Americans and the entire United States citizenry.   
Do not use your Bible as a prop.  Do not use George as a prop. . . . let us stand for what is right. . . . People call me to blow up issues. . . . You get away too much with hiding things. . . . When I stood at that spot, the reason it got to me is that George Floyd's story has been the story of black folks.  Because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck. . . . What happened to Floyd happens every day in this country, in education, in health services and in every area of American life. It's time to stand up in George's name and say get your knee off our necks!
He moved me to tears.  Here are my words.
Wishing for a Time Machine, Acting without One.

How far back do we have to go to change 
the history of African Americans?  
How deep do we have to go to dig up and to destroy 
the European-American roots of racism?

Radical change is change from the roots.
Few European Americans know roots exist,
that they spread beliefs and practice underground 
as roots touch and overhead as rhetoric flows tree to tree.

Pretending room for growth is limited creates 
the competition in which fear and racism are strategy. 
Democracy doesn't need to run on scarcity, but 
capitalism--our form of it--relies on it.

Racism is a strategy for subjugating and bypassing others.
It's built into our systems until we guarantee wages 
and health care for all.  Racism and classism are again and again
winning in our Congress, they're built into everything we do.

Unawaress is no longer a good excuse. The roots
of racism spread in search for a certainty that our churches
and government could guarantee in other ways. Then the roots
of racism might be made to turn back and to strangle their trees.

Not very poetic, at all, my words.  Not personal and moving.

I need to overcome a numbness when it comes to the truths of my heart.  Here is the week I most need to speak, but I am silent.  I listen and react, but then submerge myself into light entertainment and distance from the muses that could help.  Who else has the privilege of turning away from the fight?

That's what I need to write about and overcome, the myth of powerlessness.  The way privilege neglects and perpetuates what it cannot face.  Why?  Because it can.  White Fragility.  There's a poem in that.

This writing took 4 hours.  Maybe later.  
The truth of my heart. 

"I'll think about that tomorrow," 
--Scarlet O'Hara
Gone With the Wind.


 © 2020 Susan L. Chast



29 May 2020

Friday morning ruminations

          Riots across the country in response to this week's police murder of  George Floyd in Minnasota. In LA, protesters managed to block a freeway.  From the New York Times:
MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota’s governor activated the National Guard on Thursday as angry demonstrators took to the streets for a third straight night to protest the death of George Floyd, a black man who was pleading that he could not breathe as a white police officer pressed his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck.

The order by Gov. Tim Walz came as the city asked for help after vandalism and fires erupted during demonstrations and as the Justice Department announced that a federal investigation into Mr. Floyd’s death was a top priority.
Many of us ask "What is there to investigate?  Witnesses' videos show the unnecessary murder."  May this be the last police killing, the last institutionalized violence against African Americans (and any other clearly inequitable treatment of non-white people in the USA--including immigrants.)  Dear God/Earth/Universe, I pray!

          Last night's Poetry Cafe at Pendle Hill, enjoyed through Zoom, elicited a poem from me in a brief 8 minute writing time.  Noted in italics are lines/ideas provided by guest poet Cathy Cohen:
About the Edges
Crossing narrow bridges 
may be a new way to orbit.

We play Chutes and Ladders throughout our pandemic
to avoid each other by six feet.

We get as narrow as possible and feel the strain
after the wideness of home spaces alone.

The virtual porousness of the home
sprawls where there is no touch at all.

But I would welcome teeth cleaning or haircut,
anything to remember where my edges are.

          And then there are rallies against pandemic restrictions, demonstrations about climate change and clean energy, and a continuing concern that Black Lives Matter.  School is out though it hasn't been in for quite a while.  People are antsy.  Imagine all of this continuing to escalate over 4 years as if a world war.  We play at class warfare, and some people pay more than others.

          As I wrote to my old Poets United teammates:   
We share each other's grief.  Each new event is another straw on the camel's back--each could be the one that breaks us and yet we keep moving on.  Quite often I feel dazed.  Why is it my lot to survive and witness?  Witness and grief, pouring from love, and continuing to love, may be the actual ministry we are called upon to contribute, called upon by whatever holy spirit fills us.  It's a lot to carry. 

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© 2020 Susan L. Chast


 

27 May 2020

Wednesday Morning Free Writing with earthweal




earthweal weekly challenge: PROTEST IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC  Posted on

26 May 2020

Free Writing with Tanya: the May 18th prompt

Story Portal prompt, a line from the poem Anchorage by Joy Harjo:
"We keep on breathing, walking, but softer now,
the clouds whirling in the air above us."
Use this as your opening line and free write for 12 minutes. See where it takes you.


"We keep on breathing, walking, but softer now,
the clouds whirling in the air above us."
We sense beings around us and do not want to wake them.  It is not danger we breathe so much as slight annoyance.  Rather than apologize for our presence, we show respect for theirs.  We are human, but I sense they are not.  As the clouds lift, I see we walk among a grove of trees whose branches intermingle--tall , tall--and made taller by the crest of the hill on which we rise, ever walking to a destination we are unsure of.  We call it safety, but I know it is by common consent East.  We walk East to join others in mind of spirit in the Mecca of sunrise, a place holy to all faiths.  The barriers have come down.  
          I slow as we near the top.  My breath is labored, but I will make it if I release my body to move at its own pace, as if it were a horse I trusted my life to.  I feel encouragement whisper through the lower leaves and the higher needles.  I feel the carpet of moss and pine ends add a bit of spring to my steps.  Maybe we will find safety somewhere ahead, if  even the trees are helping us.  They link our mother, Earth, with everything else, they are the signs and flags of her health.  Over these past months of travel, their anger has changed to pity and annoyance, so this encouragement is like the fresh breeze that rises with the clouds.  It feels my lungs with joy.  
          Now on the top, I burst into song:  "Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something right."   
          The words are from The Sound of Music, the moment when Maria accepts her relationship with Captain Von Trap, just before they start their family's trek away from Danger.  We must have done something right, something the trees approve of, a sign from our mother.  "Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something right."  I don't remember the rest of the words.  
          People around me are grinning.  The feeling of respect doesn't leave because I have burst the silence with sound.  No balloon pops.  The mood rises gently with the clouds and I feel a collective sigh of relief.  It is not that we have been holding our breath, but we have been so very ashamed of being human that feeling acceptance and joy is a weight off us.  Here at the hill top, we look down the way dense with trees.  The path is still unclear, but we have renewed energy for moving into the unknown.
We keep on breathing, walking, more confident now, lightly as clouds rising, lightly as burdens fall.
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  © 2020 Susan L. Chast

25 May 2020

More Writing with Tanya


Alice Walker says "writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence."
 "Being saved/ saving" is your story portal for today: Challenge yourself to make it a story with a beginning/middle and end.
10 Minutes.
GO.
What saved me from the inconvenience of violence?  So many things!  But let me share a story I know about a woman I will call Joan: 
          Joan was pretty messed up by the violence of the Vietnam War--back when images of war were not censored from the USA, when we could see blood and burns and body parts and naked girls running down the street arms uplifted and crying.  She went for various psychological treatments, all geared to lift her from depression and try to make her want to live.  Needless to say, violence does not cure violence.  What finally helped Joan was finding her way to a commune where even eating became a path to learning non-violence.  She stopped eating animals and made friends with many of them, though she still ate animal products like eggs and milk.  She always asked permission for eating anything, giving back in care and love as a true steward of life in all its forms.  
          But war continued.  And Joan couldn't listen to the radio news without re-triggering depression and even convulsions.  One day a friend suggested that her response to violence could be a political action if more people could see it, if she transformed it into public action.  After several shy attempts to make her concerns into narrative, Joan decided to show what happens to her in the face of violence.  She created a solo performance.  
          She came on stage in peace, hanging up a sign with the 4-H pledge.  Do you know it? 
Cornell Cooperative Extension | 4-H Programs
4-H Clubs, Cornell Extension
The sign backed all the action of her piece.  
          She brought with her a basket with materials to demonstrate how to re pot a plant and also carried a transistor radio--a cassette player that looked like a radio.  She unpacked her basket and began the demo, switching on the "radio." It played--I actually don't remember what she played--but my memory tells me it was something soft and Simon and Garfunkel that transitioned into Joan Jett's "Born to be Bad"--which can't be, because that song came out years later--unless she WAS Joan Jett?  Anyway, when the music switched it was interspersed with news of war--Oh--maybe we were in Desert Storm by that time?  I don't remember.  When the sound changed, she began mutilating the plants, slowly picking up the violence until pieces flew.  
          I was in the audience.  I remember moving into a gasp and then a silence.  The show ended with a freeze of her, exhausted, slumped over the mess.  We sat there quietly too. Then Joan unfroze, went to the corner where there was a straw broom and cheerfully began to sweep up the mess.  
          Did she talk to us?  I don't remember.  But it was a relief to walk out into the fresh night air with my friends, tears streaming down our faces.

The End.
 © 2020 Susan L. Chast
(12 minutes including looking up the 4-H sign and Joan Jett Songs.  Then slightly edited.  )

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