be a rebel: like yourself

Sitting in fire

This is my first and final fall as a resident of the Pacific Northwest. And this is the first time I have been able to recognize the season. Fall is very different here than in the Upper Midwest. All the trees here do not turn colors all at once like they do back where I come from. Here in Seattle, it is rare to see an entire, single tree all red or orange; even single trees seem to turn color in patches. In my first falls out here, I kept waiting for all the trees to be red all at once. This never happens here so I never quite noticed 'fall'. This year, I see and feel fall.

Four years ago, when I first lived here, I was on fire with menopause. I moved here in September. For my first months out here, I lived on Whidbey Island in an unheated cabin. There was a space heater, of course. But I was on such fire most nights that I did not turn on the heat nor did I use blankets. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would go outside and dance in the rain, naked, to try and cool off. It didn't help. I never found anything that could cool my hot flashes, although, of course, I never took hormones. Hormones might have helped but I resist them.

There is no cooling off a months-long hot flash. Night after night, I stayed up all night reading. The insomnia was unrelenting.

I did not sleep for two years, or so it seemed to me.

This fall, I am still hot flashing. Now my hot flashes come and go, they don't last for days, weeks, and months.

A few weeks ago, in Berkeley, someone doing research on menopause interviewed me. She said that she has met women who went through menopause in a few weeks or, fantastically, overnight. She said that some women have no menopausal stress. This is incomprehensible to me. I've been having some kind of hot flashes for at least six years.

Why am I sitting in so much fire?

The Right Thing

The Right Thing

Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will—
The right thing happens to the happy man.

The bird flies out, the bird flies back again;
The hill becomes the valley, and is still;
Let others delve that mystery if they can.

God bless the roots!—Body and soul are one!
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Child of the dark, he can out leap the sun,
His being single, and that being all:
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Or he sits still, a solid figure when
The self-destructive shake the common wall;
Takes to himself what mystery he can,

And, praising change as the slow night comes on,
Wills what he would, surrendering his will
Till mystery is no more: No more he can.
The right thing happens to the happy man.

my grandbunny Fluffy

Fluffy came to live with me and my daughter when Rosie was five years old. She is a white, Gund bunny. She arrived on Easter Sunday.

Rosie loved her instantly. Rosie always slept with some of her dollies. Sometimes she slept with all of them. She usually put all of her dolls in bed with her after I had tucked her in for the night. This means that after I tucked her in, she would get up and carefully move all her dollies into bed. Then she could crawl into the center and fall asleep. I used to have photos of Rosie asleep with her dollies.

Once Fluffy arrived, however, all dollies before her were a bit displaced. Rosie still loved all her babies, of course, but Fluffy was number one. Rosie  took Fluffy with her to college, brought her home for holidays and they were never parted. I sometimes wonder if Rosie still has Fluffy.  Fluffy was machine washable, and she endured lots of Rosie's love but could it be possible she has not disintegrated by now?

I also loved Fluffy dearly. I often pleaded with Rosie to let me spend just one night with my grandbunny, Fluffy (sometimes I called her Fluffina to make Rosie laugh). Once in awhile, Rosie would agree, in principal, to let me sleep with Fluffina. A few times, I actually went to bed with Fluffy at my side, having attempted to cash in the night-with-Fluffy coupon. Rosie would always come into my room and tell me that she couldn't sleep without Fluffy.

For Christmas each year, Rosie would give me coupons. "This coupon is good for getting me to do the dishes without complaining." "This coupon is good for asking me to walk to the corner grocery store without whining." "This coupon is good for five hugs and ten kisses."

The golden coupon, each year in my Christmas stocking, would be "This coupon is good for spending one night with Fluffy."

I never did get to cash in the Fluffy coupon. Rosie could never part with her, not even for one night.

I miss Fluffy. I think it is wrong of Rosie to have encouraged me to love her bunny all those years and then to yank her out of my life as she has done.  Also wrong of her to have shunned me for fourteen years.

Words

WORDS

Anne Sexton. 1928-1974. American.

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous ones we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be good as fingers.
They can be trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

intelligence holds sway in nature

One must acknowledge that intelligence holds sway in nature. And if you really study nature, you can find this intelligence holding sway everywhere. And you will then think more humbly about your own intelligence, for first of all, it is not as great as the intelligence ruling in nature, and secondly, it is only like a little bit of water that one has drawn from a lake and put into a water jug. The human being, in fact, is just such a water jug, that has drawn intelligence from nature. Intelligence is everywhere in nature; everything, everywhere is wisdom. A person who ascribes intelligence exclusively to himself is about as clever as someone who declares: You’re saying that there is water out there in the lake or in the brook? Nonsense! There is no water in them. Only in my jug is there any water. The jug created the water. So, the human being thinks that he creates intelligence, whereas he only draws intelligence from the universal sea of intelligence.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 220 –  Fall and Redemption – Dornach, January 21st, 1923

to understand matter one must know how spirit works within it

 To understand matter one must know how the spirit is working within it

Physical science does not really understand matter, because to understand matter one must know how the spirit is working within it. Suppose a man wants to know all about a watch. He says to himself: This watch is made of silver. The silver came from such and such a mine; then it was taken by train to such and such a town and delivered to merchants. The watch has a china face inscribed with figures. The china was manufactured in such and such a town, then sent somewhere else … and so on and so on. But at the end of it all he knows nothing essential about the watch! Nor will he until he knows exactly what the watchmaker did. To understand why a watch goes, it is not at all essential to know how and where the silver was mined; what is important is to know how the watchmaker made the watch go, how he adjusted the wheels and so forth.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 350 – Cosmic Workings In Earth and Man: III – On Nutrition – Dornach, 22nd September 1923

This is long article by my friend, Steve Martinot, PhD. It's worth the read.

"

Gentrification and the Corporate Structure

By Steve Martinot

The issue of affordable housing in Berkeley (and elsewhere) has become a battlefield, one that will affect all neighborhoods in Berkeley. Because the need is great, and housing is a human right (by international standards), many social movements, local and citywide, have arisen to get that need fulfilled. But if housing is a human right, why are political movements needed to obtain that right? After all, doesn’t capitalism function best (and profit most) by producing for extant social needs? Why is there a battlefield? Because indeed diametric interests confront each other – humans needing housing we can afford, and corporations whose needs are for economic control over markets.

Underneath this confrontation, serious political purposes lurk. Various government concerns – ABAG, the Plan Bay Area, and the financialization of the region – are in operation. ABAG’s purpose is to reverse the “white flight” to the suburbs that occurred during the the 60s and 70s. At that time, massive social movements targetted “Jim Crow,” and fought to enable people of color to become full members of US society. Though racial discrimination was never fully abolished (it persists in education and housing), the economy changed. Industry “ran away,” technology turned into technocracy, and a financial economy independent of production became a more facile source of profit, supplanting productive capital while controlling its destiny from its heights.

The heirs of those who fled are the suburban technocrats, professionals, and executives of the area’s three major industries: financiers, IT technicians, transportation managers and their underlying bureaucracies. Today they spend time in traffic jams that clog their lives and their ability to work. So ABAG seeks to bring them closer to their desks, and gilds this project with ecological tinsel, saying that city densification will curtail expressway traffic, and preserve the countryside by curtail urban sprawl. To facilitate this, massive construction of high income apartments and condos is required. And planned. It is a restructuring of the area to facilitate its role as a major capitol city for the Pacific Rim Economy.

That the Plan’s focus is on the very well-to-do is evinced by the absence of necessary infrastructure – enhanced public transportation, social services to enable low income people to deal with inflation, and affordable housing. Instead, funding of services is cut, and mitigations are enhanced that enable developers to avoid including affordable units. In other words, communities and life styles will be sacrificed to the wealthy, and moved out to the suburbs to replace the former commuters.

Many white people think they can weather this storm as people of color leave because they live in the development industry’s target areas. Berkeley’s black community is now a third of what it was a decade ago. Many people of color wonder how it is that a version of the old time colonialism has resurfaced, without everyone noticing, and why they and working class whites are the one’s who must move out of town. It is a corporate process, but with a racialized dimension.

The corporate picture

The fundamental operations of corporate developers

Developers are corporate businesses. They operate on the basis of profit. A developer (corporation) will buy land or real estate where prices are lowest, so that when it sells the building and real estate to the next owner (and some of these buildings go through three or four owners before construction is even finished), its profit will be maximized. Working class neighborhoods generally have lower valued real estate, which is why workers find they can afford to live there. When real estate values go up, or rent levels rise – perhaps because the area is targetted for development – low income people find themselves forced to find other low priced areas. This is especially true for black and brown communities, where real estate values have been keep low by redlining and segregation (banks restricting loans to black and brown people, charging higher mortgage rates, restricting employment, discriminatory hiring and union membership, low funding for education, etc.). Without access to credit, property owners have trouble renovating or improving their properties. Without access to advanced employment opportunities, communities suffer forms of cultural famine. The purpose of segregation may or may not have been to provide for land profitability, but it now provides the opportunity for high development profit.

Oddly enough, the Plan Bay Area broadcasts where the development areas are going to be (Priority Development Areas or PDAs). And Berkeley has actually published a list of properties that will be the targets of development in each of its four PDAs. That means that developers will face increased property values, as the property owners raise their asking prices in dealing with them. Three effects of this are foreseeable. (1) It will neutralize opposition to development among property owners. (2) It will set them against the social movements that demand affordable housing and political input into the process. (3) It will induce new buildings to be aimed at higher income use.

The corporate origins of Gentrification

Yet this doesn’t explain the conflict between corporations and affordable housing. Why do they find it unprofitable? It is not just inflation, raising the cost of materials and labor. And it does not stem from the difficulties low income families have in getting rent subsidies. It has to do with the corporate structure itself.

Affordable housing is housing whose rents or mortgage payments relate to the residents’ income, rather than to the value of the property or the real estate markets. "Affordable" is defined as no greater than 30% of a family’s income (specifically for those earning less than the area’s median income ($90,000 a year for this area).

Because the affordability of housing is controlled and regulated by political means – namely, land use permits, construction permits, rent control laws, and federal grant conditions – it is more difficult to recapitalize the building. When, in the course of construction, a developer to find itself out of funds, it will seek to sell the partially constructed building. This happened roughly three times for one building on San Pablo Ave. Each time it is sold, profit is made on the initial capital outlay, even though the process of construction may have been operating at a loss, because the actual construction process, the debt structure that finances it, and the investment holdings that manage the finances are divided among different corporate entities (from constrators to holding companies). The debt structure can be reconfigured by recapitalizing the assets (stock, land, etc.), limiting losses to lower levels of operation, with profit made through recapitalization and sale at the higher levels.

Thus, for a developer, the nature of the building is immaterial; what counts is the ability to recapitalize, and the stability of its securities on the securities markets. Since short term debt is acquired using capital assets (usually stock) as collateral, any drop in its stock price will diminish the value of that collateral, and require supplementation, which could easily threatens financial crisis. If cash must be used, the borrower can easily run out of funds, and be unable to meet its wage bill (for instance).

So the corporation must operate to keep its securities attractive on the securities markets (demand maintains price levels). And the need to deal with political regulation mars that attractiveness. Capital will flee that developer’s securities.

Capitalism may operate to meet human demands, but corporations operate to meet financial demands. They do so by creating securities demand, to the detriment of human demands. For this reason, developer-financed buildings must cater to an upper income class of people, and engage in larger projects which move greater amounts of money, producing higher earnings within the financial domain. In short, the financial survival of development corporations depends on an expanded level of gentrification, to which affordable housing and community character are sacrificed. The drive for gentrification is systemic, peculiar to the corporate structure.

The racialized picture

The racialized dimension to this has already been suggested. It has been evident in the continual relocations of people of color – from SF to Oakland and Berkeley, now out of Oakland and Berkeley to El Sobrante or San Leandro, etc. Rents go up, services are cut, destitution and crime increase, and people move out. Speculators move in, buy up buildings and sell them to developers at a profit. In other words, the presence of more homeless people, who are precisely the ones who need housing most, become the means of clearing an area in order to build housing for richer people, who don’t need it so badly.

Sadly, many white working class communities ignore the logic of this process. Those who feel that race is the real problem welcome the processes that induce that relocation. Later, they will be unable to resist when the same process is turned on themselves.

Racialization is a vestigial product of colonialism, invented as a way of ruling conquered peoples and justifying settlements. It persists as white supremacist hegemony (the power of white people to have far-reaching social impact on people of color, which people of color do not have) and a complex social hierarchy. The terrible massacre that just occurred in South Carolina is only a direct expression of this sense of hegemony. The history of racialization begins with slavery (a form of prison labor), continues through Jim Crow with its chain gangs, plantation contract labor and rural debt servitude, and now takes the form of the largest prison system in the world, fed by racial profiling and persisting segregation in education and housing. It produces neighborhoods on which corporate development can opportune.

Direct Democracy vs. Representationism

Corporate need is incommensurable with social need. It is a conflict between human concerns and financial interest. What benefits one becomes a detriment for the other. They confront each other in ghostly battle. Yet housing remains a human right. To withhold it by whatever means (economic or political) is to violate human rights.

Corporate interest may proclaim itself to be the public interest; it rarely looks that way to the people displaced. When it appears in the form of gentrification, those displaced are thrown into the silence of distance. No nice-sounding platitudes will bridge the gap. One side pays for land and buildings; the other side organizes social resistance. One side monopolizes the flow of information; the other side depends on word of mouth, discourse and meetings. One side buys politicians in the present; the other can only vote for or against them in the future.

The political decisions that foster gentrification are made by agencies like ABAG or city planning departments that also dispense with major human concerns. Cuts in social funding, racial profiling, and the substitution of comments in hearings for participation are all methods by which a city government clears the land for corporate development.

Finally, there is a continual demonization of social movements for "opposing" development. However, it is not development these neighborhood movements oppose, but elite settlement that will devastate their communities. They are demanding development at a human level. The job is to transform political acquiescence to elite development into a social process for affordable development.

The problem for communities is how to gain democratic participation in planning, and not be simply restricted to “public comment,” as if that were input. It is how to create conduits by which to implement local collective decisions. If we are to rescue our city from the corporate jaws preparing to consume it, the democratization of development is a necessary place to start. That doesn’t mean electing other representatives, but locating the power to decide locally in the neighborhoods.

Today, we elect representatives who represent nothing and talk politics elsewhere. Democracy would mean people talking politics, making decisions, and electing representatives to represent those decisions. Development will be democratized when local neighborhoods have the ability to make development decisions in dialogue with developers, before the developers go to get their permits.

This is the fifth article in a series of articles Dr. Martinot has had published in Berkeley Daily Planet. You can go to the Daily Planet to read the others.

middle-out economics

Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.

 The above is a small excerpt from an interesting article entitled "The Pitchforks are Coming", written by a bona fide billionaire. He calls for a more equitable economic realm of human life.

the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats

Later in the article, the zillionaire author (he refers to himself thusly) writes:

The oldest and most important conflict in human societies is the battle over the concentration of wealth and power. The folks like us at the top have always told those at the bottom that our respective positions are righteous and good for all. Historically, we called that divine right. Today we have trickle-down economics.
What nonsense this is. Am I really such a superior person? Do I belong at the center of the moral as well as economic universe? Do you?

masked self love

The mere egoistic, soul-stirring talk of loving our fellow-men and acting upon this love at the first opportunity, that does not constitute social life. This sort of love is, for the most part, terribly egoistic. Many a man is supported by what he has first gained through robbing his fellow-men in a truly patriarchal fashion, in order to create for himself an object for his self-love, so that he can then feel nice and warm with the thought, “You are doing this, you are doing that.” One does not easily discover that a large part of the so-called love of doing good is a masked self-love.
Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 186 – Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being – Bern, 12th December 1918

co-heartedly joined

Co-heartedly joined. What does this mean?

falling in love v. loving

Falling in love can be wonderful, and a lot of fun. Loving the other around all of their impediments is work, the work of love, which is the work of life.  Do the hard work of working around conflicts, disapointments, hurt feelings and love.

I do this thing within myself in which I have a conscious sensation of my love being a neon beam that sometimes has to dodge around human imperfections, curve around the other's flaws but which steadfastly keeps going to reach its goal, which is to love the other.  I love that I do this, love that I can do it. I love loving.

I stumble. I have offloaded my pain onto someone I love, but never consciously. When I get caught in hard emotional pain, I think that I hurt someone I love because I trust that they will go on loving me. It's not right, to offload my pain on someone dear to me. I do it less and less.  It's also not right to punish me by shunning me when I have acted like the imperfect human everyone is.

Anyone who has chosen to shun me forever because I acted from my human imperfection never loved me. Love stays, to quote a poem an acquaintance wrote for his girlfriend but, weirdly, shared with me. And, gosh golly, it hurts so much to realize "oh, he didn't love me at all".  I can get so bogged down in feeling my pain when someone I have loved severs ties with me that I fail to see that the person shunning me is wrong, unjustified and even behaving cruelly, projecting their weaknesses, their inability to love around impediments, onto me. And then I do it to myself, blame myself. Bah humbug. I have never done anything that justified banishment, shunning me from someone's life.

just let me be your ticket home

Lyrics to 'you aint alone' by Alabama Shakes, their Boys and Girls debut album, look for the song on youtube if you don't have it. I actually bought the album on iTunes when it first dropped.

You Ain't Alone

You aint alone, so why you lonely?
there you go on the dark end of the street
are you scared to tell somebody how you feel about

somebody? are you scared what somebody's gon think?
or...
are you scared to wear your heart out on your sleeve?
are you scared me?

cause i'm scared the bomb gonna take me away...
oh, but i really don't know what i got to say...
alright!

1-2-3, are you to scared to dance for me?
bite the bullet or tug my sleeve?
or are you scared out on your own two feet?

we really aint that different, you and me.
cause I'm scared the storm gonna take me away..

but i really don't know what i got to say...
hold on....hold on...

cry, if you gonna cry
come on, cry wit me.

you ain't alone,
just let me be your ticket home....

Everything is waiting for you

EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
~ David Whyte ~

forgiveness

Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.

-- Lily Tomlin

FACT

squash blossoms, another recipe for happiness

Every year, when the markets are selling squash blossoms, I feel a skip of happiness.

Squash blossoms.
Lovely words.
Lovely flowers
Tasty treats.
Yum.

I am going to sautee my dozen squash blossoms, which were priced at four for a dollar, in garlic-infused olive oil, along with spinach. My dinner. Nothing is better than spinach braised in garlic-infused live oil but squash blossoms are a once a year, tasty, beautiful treat.

Update: when I got out some spinach and my squash blossoms, I saw I had some strawberries from last Saturday that were not going to be edible tomorrow. I sliced them up and braised them with my greens and blossoms.  I was going to give my meal a splash of lemon but I got lazy. Also I concluded the strawberries would flavor my meal.

I love it that I can happily savor a meal such as the one I had for dinner this evening.

recipe for happiness

“There’s always hope in love. Love and hate are viruses. Love can make a civilization bloom and hate can kill a civilization,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti told KQED  when they returned, at his request, to complete their interview of him on a more positive note. In the first round, he had portrayed a fake-artistic city with no artists, because artists can't afford to live in SF these days, at least not the undiscovered ones, or poets (when do they ever make money?) . At the interview do-over,  he read this poem:

“Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace”

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.
One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.
One fine day.

Curious about the boom/bust cycle that is reshaping the Bay Area? Check out KQED's Boomtown series.

the path is a spiral

This was posted on my timeline, credit to Facebook page for '2nd'. That's it, the whole name.

let go and trust the cosmos

Let go, let go, and let go some more.
Trust in the cosmos' plan for you.
There is nothing more you need to do.