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