"My purpose was, not to describe human experiences, but to show how a spiritual world is revealed in man through spiritual organs." ~Rudolf Steiner

errands

Library, Social Security office, Trader Joe's, customer service at UC Berkeley Sports/Rec. A friend gifted me the gym fees for a whole year for my birthday. I love this friend. Rode the recumbent stationary bike as my pain specialist presses me to do. Riding a stationary bike is boring. I have found that exercise that leaves me joyful is the exercise I actually do. This week, I have no easy access to swimming so I did the recumbent staionary bike. Yup, it is way boring.

Nothing to stop me from working on my writing, eh? So that's what's up.

white flight from city public schools

Me and my five siblings all went to Catholic schools, which, in Southside Chicago were not usually particularly academic. At my all girls h.s. I don't think the majority of girls wanted to go to college, for example. My folks set the expectation that all their kids would go to college but their Catholic side bogged us down in mediocre schools to prepare for college. Water over the dam. . .

My daughter graduated magna cum laude from an IVY.   I have read that most Harvard grades these day (my kid did not go to Harvard) get mostly A's so maybe graduating magna is not a big deal but, fuck that, I am very proud of her magna cum laude.  

 

When she started school, my divorced ex assumed I'd send her to private schools -- Catholic schools, as he and I had both gone to Catholic schools K-12. . .  but not me. Living in Minneapolis, which was known, back then at least, for its good public schools, I decided to send my daughter to public school. This was in the late eighties. I reasoned that if all the white families pulled their kids out of public schools, and many white families had already fled to suburbs but private schools allowed some whites to stay in the city and live in white bubbles. I decided I had a social responsibility to put my genius daughter (she was 'diagnosed' as gifted by her pediatrician when she was not yet two . . . and she is super smart) in public schools. Sure I took care to get her into a magnet school, which is what public education was doing back then, in the Midwest, to retain white kids. Magnet schools were better schools.All schools should be good and magnet schools seem to magnify educational injustice but one lives in the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be.

My daughter's school was also designated as an English as Second Language site so her school had lots of children of recent immigrants, and some of the kids were immigrants. I was thrilled. My daughter was going to school with a worldwide array of cultures!!!  Over sixty langauges were the first language of the students in that school. This thrilled me. And she seemed to love the fascinating kids she got to know.

and my daughter was a star in first grade. She was bored with classes but her first grade teacher was also smart; she appointed my daughter as tutor to a couple Hmong girls to help them read. This gave Katie, my kid, incentive. Hmongs, as not all may know, were a culture with no reading and writing when they fled Cambodia because of war. Hmongs landed in MN at very high rates because MN, at least back then, had such great social services.

In the second grade, my Katie was placed in the gifted kids program at her school. The gifted kid program, and I wish I were making this up, was comprised of one hour a week in the library with other gifted kids. Hanging out. The boys took over the, in those days, very few computers. My star, a budding feminist I guess, borrowed my micro-tape-record, which I had used when I did some criminal defense legal work: the cops wouldn't let lawyers copy the cop files so lawyers would take their micro-tape-records and dictate the entire contents of the police files so they could use them to prep for trial. My seven year old first lodged protests, complaining that only the gifted boys got to use the computers. The teacher in charge denied her accusation. So my star tape recorded the next one hour of enrichment in the library. I did not tell her that I did not think her tape would reveal much. Nowadays, a girl in her position could video, eh? Apparently her staking out evidence yielded results. AFter her tape recording, girls got half of the time on the computers: 30 minutes of computer enrichment a week. Unsupervised computer enrichment. The tech divide had begun: why did the boys know how to play on those computers but the girls had no idea what to do on a compouter? And why did the paid teacher assigned to gifted enrichment only twiddle her thumbs in the library for that gifted hour? The entirety of programs for bored, gifted kids.

Also in the second grade, Katie cried about how much she missed tutoring those Hmong girls. Cried in school, not to me. So she was allowed to spend part of each school day tutoring her Hmong friends again.  Her second grade teacher had done something right and her first grade teacher let Katie return to tutor new kids that year.  Katie was so proud to be the only tutor at her age!!

She could miss class a lot because she was/is so smart that she knew everything 'taught' in classes.  I was the same way. Each new year in grade school, I would read the entire content of all our textbooks for the year within the first week and then bide my time. The nuns tried to get my folks to enroll me in a, gasp, public school for gifted kids, but my parents demurred:  my one older brother, who managd to be an asshole at a very young age, like age 3 and up, my parents decided, would make our whole family life hell if they let me go to that gifted school. I think they were right but I wondered then and I wonder now: how did my two ineffectual, damaged parents decided to NEVER discipline Chuck the fuck (an endearment I only attached to him in my forties when my much younger sister and I compared notes: Chuck was a fuck to all the kids. Silly me, I thought all my four brothers had at least doted on the baby sister . . but, nope, our three other brothers hid for cover, leaving us girls vulnerable to Chuck's nonstop bullying and frequent violence. Where were our parents? Where indeed:|?*

Two pivotal events lead me to take my kid out of public school and put he rin Waldorf (the best decision I ever made): Tony Kennedy began to enlist his cousin to hold down my daughter so Tony, also age 7, could dry hump my daughter. She complained to the playground teacher supervisors who did nothing. She told me and I met with the principal to insist that my little girl had a right to be protected from being assaulted. The principal, a black woman as it happens, with a PhD, shrugged and asked me what I thought she could do. I said 'I don't know, maybe have the teachers paid to supervise recess actually supervise recess? My kid is screaming for help when Tony jumps on her. Help her?" Then the principal said "For your information, I have scheduled several home visits with Tony's parents and when I show up, no one answers the door. There is nothing I could do."

As I stood up to leave, I said "You could provide a safe envirionment for my kid and all the kids without talking to Tony's parents and I think I could sue you for failing to protect my child from this daily assault."

By the time I got to my car, I had decided my liberal guilt experiment of sending my great white hope to the local public school was over.

And, as an added note: in the first grade, her standardized test scores were al in the high nineties. In the second grade, her standardized test scores were all in the seventies and low eighties: her skills were atrophying in the magnet school, allegedly one of the best schools in Mineapolis.

*Chuck ended up living at home with our divorced father and brother Tom, then age 10, 11, 12, 13. Chuck hit Tom most days, telling him a voice in his closet told him he had to hit Tomy. When I found out about this abuse, I asked my dad to stop it. He shrugged broadly, waiving his hands helplessly and asked "what can I do? Chuck is  a man, I can't stop him." I said "You can tell Chuck he can live here anymore if he keeps hitting Tom." Dad said "I can't do that." He could have done that. And this is how my parents had always responded to Chuck's violence.  And no one needs to try and tell me Chuck was just a bully in general: Chuck knew he could not beat up the children of other adults and he knew he could get away with hurting us, his siblings, our parents lesser children. Only one of us got to be the first born penis.

the cunning in evil beings

I remind you that the nasty house at Hogwarts was called Slytherin and were sometimes seemingly tied to Voldemort, Rowlings' stand in for evil. I note this allusion to fiction because I agree with you, that DonJohn is cunning and manipulative. I happen to believe that evil often comes with evil genius, a deep cunning manipulative talent that is reptilian (slitherin?) to many.

We would be lucky if Trump were a stupid hapless idiot. It takes cunning and intelligence to be truly evil, imo. But I also think evil people can be somewhat analogous to idiot savants only evil savants: so badly wounded, maybe in past lives, that they are able to behave in a manner all decent persons consider despicable but to evil savants, well, their measurement of normal is part of their deep woundedness.

I have a few unfinished novels. My favorite one has evil characters, with Dick Cheney my main character model when I first outlined it, who get sent to Love Camps where it is not really a prison. Persons sent to Love Camps are deemed evil and must stay there to be loved deeply and well, to be guided to recover, using the arts and lots of love. The most gifted and respected members of the society in this novel work in Love Camps, for it is work only the most spiritually advanced humans can do. In my mind, I used Waldorf kindergarden teachers (and, I guess, all kindergarden teachers) who are believed, in the Waldorf tradition and Anthroposophy). Love Camp loving workers are like the most supreme high priesteses on the planet, the most spiritually evolved (and sure they can be males but I can use female centered language if I choose to).

In Anthposophy, kindergarden teachers are widely regarded (revered?) to be some of the most special humans whose karma brings them to work with children at one of the most key developmental points in their lives: lots of good things happens around age five and humans blessed to have angel kindergarden teachers often thrive more than others. So in my Love Camps, very spiritually evolved people, people who have worked through all their own shit and likely have already lived many lives, are entrusted to love the evil who are sent to Love Camps. . . It is not easy to see these characters, the evil ones sentenced to Love Camps, as healed so they likely spend their lives in Love Camps -- but this is their choice. They would be given deep nurturing, deep exposure to art, community, love . . . I think, other than procrastination and a lack of faith in my writing talent . . I think what has stopped me from finishing my Love Camp novel (it is about more than the camps!) is I can't imagine someone like Dick Cheney or DonBoy ever being released. Which would not be the end of the world -- perhaps it could be analogous to places that take in previously abused animals and provide them with good care for the rest of their lives. Love Camps would not be prisons, but richly artistic and spiritual places, saturated in beauty. High thread count sheets, superbly healthy and delicious meals. . . . and 'my' Love Camps are a loving response to both death camps under Hitler and prisons with too many black men. We could convert many prisons to Love Camps but they would be like what we think of as prisons except in the sense no one sent to live in one could leave until his or her healing master deemed them no longer evil. DonBoy is so damaged. I can't imagine him ever healing enough to be released from a love camp.

And, as if I have not already diverged far eough off course here, I will share one more story. I believe my mother was evil. She certainly was intensely narcissistic. I did not know this growing up. I remember the first time I ever saw a psychiatrist -- who only saw me for some med mananagement (I was close to catatonic with depression except, as he and my psychologist noted under oath, in my relationship to my then-infant) he was a dear friend to my first psychologist -- after he did his diagnostic intake with me, he said "It wounds like you were not raised in an environment in which you were able to develop self esteem, in which you were allowed to thrive", to which I responded "Gee, ya think?"

So, I grew up, tried to build a life but I am mostly a failed being. Still, I have had some upswings. And I don't think I am evil -- damaged, a broken-winged bird, but not evil. Once, a close friend of mind, also a PhD psychologist (so many of them in this world or just in mine?) asked to spend some time chatting with my mother just the two of them. This friend was, I suspected at the time, skeptical of my harsh judgment of my mother -- I never abandoned my relationship with my mother, I did become increasingly adept at dodging her cruelty but I showed up in her life as much as I could -- anyway, my friend Joni the shrink met with my mom to suss out whether my assessment of my mother was remotely accurate. In hindsight, I am surprised I agreed; I guess I deeply trusted Joni. After their meeting, Joni told me she had been surprised by how cunning my mother was. Spot on assessment of my mom, one I had not considered before. My mom's cunning, used so skillfully to use me as she offloaded the work of raising her endless stream of no-birth-control Catholic babies, preventing me from doing my work of being a child because I was always responsible for her latest babies, was masterful. I had never noted it for an instant, and I had had a lot of therapy by the time my friend Joni spotted mom's cunning, until Joni saw it.

draft: the roses were not from her

More of the story of my birthday roses. My only child, and only family, lives in Illinois, in Chicagoland. I don't know where she lives for she has shunned me since she was 19. She is now 35. Chicago is my hometown but I raised Katie in Minneapolis. I don't know exactly how she landed in Chicago, for it happened after she dumped me.
I was out when my roses were dropped off in front of my front door. When I got home and saw them, of course I knew someone had sent me flowers for my birthday and I was happy to see the box. When I picked it up, I saw that the flowers had come from Downers Grove, IL, a Chicago suburb. Tears stung my eyes. I fought off my cursed hope that the flowers might have been from my daughter. I know she is gone for good, I feel it deep in my mothering heart, but I am an imperfect human and hope, as Emily Dickinson so aptly put it in one of her poems, hope is that thing with feathers. Hope will float up on its own.
As I rushed into my apartment, putting down my things, rushing to open the flowers, finding scissors and then eagerly digging around for a card to confirm who they were from, I kept crying even though my heart was like a stone, even though I knew they would not be from her.
They were from a dear friend, someone I love very much. Actually, my deep love for her was just as instant as my deep love for my child, the love I began to feel within days of her conception. This friend who sent the roses is special. I met her on an island in Puget Sound. We were both at a four-day, residential weekend retreat. At the end of the first, introductory evening, just about everyone stepped outside to ring a bell in the courtyard outside the venue. It was a tradition to ring that bell, one after another.
like those soldiers in the Wizard of Oz who march in line but then the Lion, scarecrow, and the tinman, who have stolen some soldier uniforms drop out of line to help Dorothy . . . and we can see the lion's tail sticking out as they try to blend in, I got in line to ring the bell but hung back, having no intention of going out. It was fall in Puget Sound so it was raining.
When I ducked out of the line, I noticed a woman I had met a few times before. She was always warm and friendly and I moved towards her, imagining she would be easy company while I hid from the bellringing. I thought she was alone so I walked towards her. When i got close enough, in the unlit room with darkness without, I saw another woman was seated with her. And she saw me. She also saw that I had begun to turn, to change course. I wanted to change course because I felt this woman's great power, great loving power and I knew she would see me.Really see me, you know? So I decided to pretend I was headed to the restroom. I smiled a greeting and tried to scurry away to avoid that amazing woman who, I was telling myself, was too special for the likes of me.
This too special woman, however, stood up and said "I apologize, Jo, for cutting you off, but a special being has just entered our midst and I must stop and greet her" and she introduced herself and asked my name, then began to introduce me to Jo but I said I knew Jo. In the big circle of forty or more, everyone had been asked to say their name to introduce themselves. I, for reasons I don't remember but were likely connected to my profound introversion, had declined to just say my name. so my friend said "I am Maggie. What is your name?" This friend would never call me Tree, only Therese. And every time I hear her say it, even when I only 'hear' her say it in my mind's eye, I feel blessed. I feel love. I feel bigger, brighter, holier when Maggie greets me. She greeted me, that night in Thomas Berry Hall as if I were just as special as she. I am. We all are.
So getting a dozen gorgeous roses from my dear, dear Maggie was totally wonderful. Totally.
And my Katie bruise still hurts. I would be hurting if the flowers had been from her. No roses can repair my damaged heart.
But roses from someone who loves me: a healing balm!
When I cried about my Katie as I opened my flowers, I remembered some of Maggie's losses and remembered how she has borne up so beautifully, growing in love even as she endured loss after loss.
I changed my FB name to Therese because that's what Maggie calls me and my heart feels fuller when I imagine her saying my name. That's a good reason, right?
Katie always called me Mom. My heart always felt fuller when Katie called me Mom. I cannot hear her saying it in my mind now, no matter how hard I try.

a strong, mental dandelion puff

My daughter left me when she was 19. She is now 35. I truly have no understanding of why she left. We rarely quarreled. I made mistakes as a parent, as all parents do but I was definitely not abusive. Perhaps my biggest mistake was overindulging her. And I think she hated that I am poor, have not worked much because of a disability (not my fault, eh?) and she might be ashamed of having a poor mother. But this is all guesswork and it is getting unusual for me to write such defensive thoughts. She left. I did nothing to deserve losing my only child. She's gone.

When she was about to turn 24, in 2006, I decided I would give her what she seemed to want. I had used versions of her name or my pet names for her for all my passwords, so that meant I was typing out names for her all the time, and trying to will her to come back. As a silent birthday gift, I changed all my passwords so I no longer typed any version of her name.

And, gosh this seems so long ago and in 2006 my feelings were so much more raw than they are now, I was getting pretty good at not longing for her.

For her 24th birthday, unbeknownst to her, I gave her my withdrawal from wanting her.

And on her actual birthday, and I planned this, I meditated for an hour. Then I held an image in my mind of a dandelion puff, all fluffy white seeds ready to be blown by the wind to seed new dandelions. My plan was to mentally blow away every bit of that dandelion puff and, in doing so, I hoped, I would be blowing away the way I was trying so hard within myself to hang onto her.

Consciously, I was fully committed to letting her go emotionally. And I really believed the dandelion puff blowing, which was something I made up. would help me.

I did not foresee that I would be unable, even in a mental image in my mind, to blow away many of the seeds on that dandelion puff.

I tried to blow her away. I tried to let her go. And my mind, or spirit, just could not do it.

And here I am, 16 years into her withdrawal from my life, and my longing does not abate.

I shared with a former acquaintance, someone I confused as a friend for several years, my dandelion puff ritual. When I told him that I had been unable to blow away much of the dandelion seeds in my mental visualization he said "That is one tough dandelion."

I gave little thought, back then, to the weed I chose. Now, laughing at myself and loving myself, I am thinking about how ubiquitous dandelions can be and how hard it is to get them our of a lawn. One has to get every bit of the stem and the stem is nearly always longer than one things, to get rid of just one dandelion. It is best to weed dandelions when the ground is very wet. It can feel so lovely to pull a particularly large dandelion and tug it just right and see the entire root come out of the wet ground:  it tapers down to a tiny point but often there is more below ground than above and many miss all the below ground bits, or most of the below ground bits.

say, maybe that was my mistake. Instead of blowing at a dandelion puff, perhaps I should visualize weeding a lawn or garden patch full of dandelions, visualize pulling them up all the way to the end of each root.

I will try this sometime. Sometime soon. I am tired of my grief. It is always hard near my birthday.

that shit is biblical

Hymn by Sherman Alexie
Why do we measure people's capacity
To love by how well they love their progeny?
That kind of love is easy. Encoded.
Any lion can be devoted
To its cubs. Any insect, be it prey
Or predator, worships its own DNA.
Like the wolf, elephant, bear, and bees,
We humans are programmed to love what we conceive.
That's why it's so shocking when a neighbor
Drives his car into a pond and slaughter–
Drowns his children. And that's why we curse
The mother who leaves her kids—her hearth—
And never returns. That kind of betrayal
Rattles our souls. That shit is biblical.
So, yes, we should grieve an ocean
When we encounter a caretaker so broken.
But I'm not going to send you a card
For being a decent parent. It ain't that hard
To love somebody who resembles you.
If you want an ode then join the endless queue
Of people who are good to their next of kin—
Who somehow love people with the same chin
And skin and religion and accent and eyes.
So you love your sibling? Big fucking surprise.
But how much do you love the strange and stranger?
Hey, Caveman, do you see only danger
When you peer into the night? Are you afraid
Of the country that exists outside of your cave?
Hey, Caveman, when are you going to evolve?
Are you still baffled by the way the earth revolves
Around the sun and not the other way around?
Are you terrified by the ever-shifting ground?
Hey, Trump, I know you weren't loved enough
By your sandpaper father, who roughed and roughed
And roughed the world. I have some empathy
For the boy you were. But, damn, your incivility,
Your volcanic hostility, your lists
Of enemies, your moral apocalypse—
All of it makes you dumb and dangerous.
You are the Antichrist we need to antitrust.
Or maybe you're only a minor league
Dictator—temporary, small, and weak.
You've wounded our country. It might heal.
And yet, I think of what you've revealed
About the millions and millions of people
Who worship beneath your tarnished steeple.
Those folks admire your lack of compassion.
They think it's honest and wonderfully old-fashioned.
They call you traditional and Christian.
LOL! You've given them permission
To be callous. They have been rewarded
For being heavily armed and heavily guarded.
You've convinced them that their deadly sins
(Envy, wrath, greed) have transformed into wins.
Of course, I'm also fragile and finite and flawed.
I have yet to fully atone for the pain I've caused.
I'm an atheist who believes in grace if not in God.
I'm a humanist who thinks that we’re all not
Humane enough. I think of someone who loves me—
A friend I love back—and how he didn't believe
How much I grieved the death of Prince and his paisley.
My friend doubted that anyone could grieve so deeply
The death of any stranger, especially a star.
"It doesn't feel real," he said. If I could play guitar
And sing, I would have turned purple and roared
One hundred Prince songs—every lick and chord—
But I think my friend would have still doubted me.
And now, in the context of this poem, I can see
That my friend’s love was the kind that only burns
In expectation of a fire in return.
He’s no longer my friend. I mourn that loss.
But, in the Trump aftermath, I've measured the costs
And benefits of loving those who don't love
Strangers. After all, I'm often the odd one—
The strangest stranger—in any field or room.
"He was weird" will be carved into my tomb.
But it’s wrong to measure my family and friends
By where their love for me begins or ends.
It’s too easy to keep a domestic score.
This world demands more love than that. More.
So let me ask demanding questions: Will you be
Eyes for the blind? Will you become the feet
For the wounded? Will you protect the poor?
Will you welcome the lost to your shore?
Will you battle the blood-thieves
And rescue the powerless from their teeth?
Who will you be? Who will I become
As we gather in this terrible kingdom?
My friends, I'm not quite sure what I should do.
I'm as angry and afraid and disillusioned as you.
But I do know this: I will resist hate. I will resist.
I will stand and sing my love. I will use my fist
To drum and drum my love. I will write and read poems
That offer the warmth and shelter of any good home.
I will sing for people who might not sing for me.
I will sing for people who are not my family.
I will sing honor songs for the unfamilar and new.
I will visit a different church and pray in a different pew.
I will silently sit and carefully listen to new stories
About other people’s tragedies and glories.
I will not assume my pain and joy are better.
I will not claim my people invented gravity or weather.
And, oh, I know I will still feel my rage and rage and rage
But I won’t act like I’m the only person onstage.
I am one more citizen marching against hatred.
Alone, we are defenseless. Collected, we are sacred.
We will march by the millions. We will tremble and grieve.
We will praise and weep and laugh. We will believe.
We will be courageous with our love. We will risk danger
As we sing and sing and sing to welcome strangers.
©2017, Sherman Alexie

til tenderness becomes habit

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.               

~ Audre Lord