If you didn't know already, a "lurker" is someone who reads a blog but rarely or never comments. De-lurking means making your presence known. Lately I've been blessed with some particularly fabulous de-lurkings.One in the form of the above snail-mail card from my friend Jane in New York (hey Jane!).One from a fellow organizer in the illegal gender-oppressive firing campaign. (Whatup, Nick: I am stoked to start reading your highly-recommended blog on caring labor.)Another from amazing coeditor and copublisher of make/shift magazine, Jessica Hoffmann.* (Seriously, that note's thoughtfulness sent me into a semi-shock stupor for an entire night.)A writer and dharma teacher I admire a whole lot, Mushim Ikeda-Nash, de-lurked to me last week, and then followed up with a piece of much-appreciated constructive criticism. (Actually about a post I wrote on Feministe; so I'll have to be in touch with them about updating it. Thanks, Mushim!)And then there's this (not exactly a conscious de-lurk, but I found it among my incoming links):
Karen, I have no idea who you are (do I?), but thank you. Let’s be friends. :)
Really though, not to get all mushed out on y’all, but it’s truly amazing to know that what I do here helps other people out. Even a little bit.
With so much gratitude to everybody who shows up here to read, reflect, and respond,
katie
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*As of this posting, I’m delighted to say I just had a lovely, laughter-filled walk around Lake Merritt with Jess Hoffman, and man is she kind and smart and cool. (But not in the too-cool-for-you kind of way. Cuz I guess that would cancel out the “kind” part.) Jess, if you’re reading, thanks again!
[Update 5:44pm: Elise, I almost forgot you! Folks, Elise is a bad-ass, hilarious lady with sick dance moves and mad Facebook commenting skills. So good to meet you at Jamal’s party, girl!]
Ryan and I both happened to be in Sacramento again for this month’s Full Moon Walk, which turned into a full moon bike ride (hence his stylin’ reflector vest, and my hard-to-detect helmet) along the short stretch of levee that isn’t privatized.
The camera even began to see in the dark, thanks to a cloudless sky and a tripod on loan from my dear sweet mama.
Next month we’ll be in the Bay for sure. I hope you’ll join us if you’re around!
Yesterday on my way home from the Jarvis Masters hearings, I was driving down San Pablo when an object appeared in the road. Only when I drove over the object did I realize what it was: a sharp rock the size of a bowling ball.
The crunch of the undercarriage sounded real ugly. I pulled into an empty corner lot, stepped out to have a look, and sure enough, velvety black liquid was pouring from my mom’s Volvo.
I’d never seen a pool of oil that big. Part of me wanted to smear it on my arms, just to feel.
Out comes the Triple-A card. (Maybe my first time using it?) Before I’d even connected with the California office, a friendly man from the car transmissions store across the street had come over to lend a hand, and an eye.
Looks like the oil pan, he said.
Awkwardly, I patched back and forth between him — meeting his eyes, answering his questions — and the AAA person on the phone. Pretty soon he got shy or bored from my half attention, and retreated to his store. “One second,” I said into the phone, and hollered a clear thanks to him. He waved and disappeared.
The tow truck would be there in an hour. In search of a bathroom, I began to walk the stretch of San Pablo. On foot I got to see more clearly the things I’d sped past just minutes ago in the car. A tiny taquería adjacent to a car wash. A strange eco- toy store. Salvage yards sourced largely from UC Berkeley frats and sororities, brimming with windows, chairs, stone buddhas, a pink sink and matching tub.
When I finally found a place to pee, it was inside one of the most beautiful restaurants I’ve ever seen. A barbecue joint overflowing with antique radios and stoves, Black family portraits and Southern paraphernalia. Where crown molding would go, there were rows of roof shingles.
Eddie, the AAA driver who picked me up, brought the car to a shop, waited for me, and then drove me home. We joked in the massive cab.
Now, there are a lot of important factors that reduced my stress around this incident. No one was hurt. My family can afford the car repairs. I wasn’t late for some important appointment. I was in a safe, well-lit area.
Still, I have to credit some of my calm (even enjoyment) to the dhamma study. This is a practice that teaches us to stay in the moment, rather than wasting time grasping at the future (I should be home by now; It’s been over an hour, where is that tow guy?) or harping on the past (Why didn’t I swerve or something? What was that damn rock doing in the middle of the road, anyway?). Rather than wishing it hadn’t happened to us, we accept responsibility for the continual flow of our life. There’s no escaping it.
And why would we want to? Without being Pollyanna-ish (meaning, I think, refusing to acknowledge unpleasantness), we can still open up our vision enough to include the beauty of inconvenient or ouchy circumstances.
Will I take pains to avoid unknown objects in the road next time? Yes. But I certainly don’t regret my tow day.
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PS: It’s another Full Moon Walk night tonight! Think about taking a stroll, wherever you are.
PPS: I’ve been messing around with new themes for the blog, but I think I like this one better than yesterday’s experimental one. Agreements? Disagreements? Hope this guy works alright for you, for now.
Alan’s got a lovely piece up at Clear View Blog (digging his jaunty-angled question: what would MLK, Malcolm X, and Paul Robeson think about being put on U.S. postage stamps?) that points to the connections between big-L Love and the effort to, in King’s words, “defeat evil systems.”
Compassion and militancy. Neither can substitute for the other. If you’ve got militancy but don’t practice compassion, your friends and comrades — the people upon whom you most rely, politically and personally — prob’ly won’t enjoy being around you. Not in the long term, anyway. And if you’ve got compassion but no critical analysis of “evil systems,” or meaningful program to defeat them, you are, as Ryan points out, utopian.
Combine the two, compassion and militancy, and you’ll get something powerful. But you’ll also get problems.
Frederick Douglas famously asked, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” We might do well to extend the same skepticism to today’s hallowed, lovey-dovey vacation day.
Beneath the hype, MLK day can serve as a reminder that people who advance the fight for radical liberation, using their own compassion and militancy, are undoubtedly risking their lives.
So if you’re among them, thank you for your courage. May the earth continue to bless you with beauty every day. May you sometimes have a sweet picnic by the lake.
It’s a gorgeous, crisp day outside: perfect for a ride on my pretty new bike, and no time to be stuck inside blogging til dark. So the thought-connections in this post will be loose. Maybe I’ll try tightening them up sometime.
The following are three excerpts from three different pieces: Buddhist, economic, and Marxist-feminist. All deal with the same theme: work. I’m simply interested in thinking about parallels and dissonances among them, and working toward a more holistic understanding of how work operates in reality, and how we might want it to operate.
When explaining meditation, the Buddha often drew analogies with the skills of artists, carpenters, musicians, archers, and cooks. Finding the right level of effort, he said, is like a musician’s tuning of a lute. Reading the mind’s needs in the moment—to be gladdened, steadied, or inspired—is like a palace cook’s ability to read and please the tastes of a prince.
Collectively, these analogies make an important point: Meditation is a skill, and mastering it should be enjoyable in the same way mastering any other rewarding skill can be. The Buddha said as much to his son, Rahula: “When you see that you’ve acted, spoken, or thought in a skillful way—conducive to happiness while causing no harm to yourself or others—take joy in that fact and keep on training.”
One of the Buddhist precepts that I don’t hear discussed much in ‘official’ settings is the advice to “avoid using sexuality in harmful ways.” There’s a ton to unpack there, obviously, but one connection I’m making has to do with a meeting tonight of Bay Area radicals rallying around a friend of mine who got fired from her job.
She’s been an educator in an Oakland after-school program for a while, and a few weeks ago her boss fired her. Didn’t tell her why. (Still hasn’t.) Didn’t even bother to notify her: she came in and worked a whole day before being told that her contract had been terminated.
So what’s this got to do with sexuality? Well, even though no one has told her why she was fired, my friend has a pretty good idea: she turned down her boss’s sexual advances. For months he had been flirting with her, but as soon as she put a stop to it, the game changed. You can read her entire account on her blog.
Sexual harassment at the workplace? Clearly not okay. So tonight a bunch of us will get together and see what we can do to support. My friend already took the lead herself, by refusing to play along with her boss in the first place. (Reminds me of Robin D. G. Kelley’s Race Rebels, where he examines everyday worker resistance, and specifically names the form of struggle wherein women respond with calculated coldness to sexually aggressive male superiors.) But individual assertions of dignity are not enough. Not even when it comes to sila (Buddhist morality, including the precepts.) It takes sangha, community, to breathe life into explorations of harm and benefit.
And importantly, the precepts aren’t some kind of spiritual checklist. Don’t lie — gotcha; Don’t steal — okey dokey. If that were true, then as long as my shit is under control, I wouldn’t need to care about anybody else’s struggles with harm.
To me, rather than instruments for performance evaluation, precepts can act as guideposts for looking deeply and holistically into processes of harm and benefit.
We’ll see what we can come up with at tonight’s meeting.
It’s cold here in Oakland. I am a hot-weather person. But it’s all good: I’m snuggled up under some blankets, and feeling especially cozy and glad because I get to share two lovely new blogspaces with you!
The first one a lot of folks are already excited about. It’s a blog for the Clear View Project, an engaged Buddhism org led by the totally rad Hozan Alan Senauke, vice-abbot at the Berkeley Zen Center. (Which, incidentally, is just a ways down from my new apartment. hey, neighbor.)
Just barely out the gate, Alan’s blog is already shining. Current events (national and international); incredible music (DAMN!); and personal/political reporting on the ongoing hearing of author, Buddhist, and death row prisoner Jarvis Masters — with whom Alan has cultivated a friendship for nearly 14 years. At Alan’s invitation on the blog, I joined supporters for part of the first day of Jarvis’ hearings in Marin. As someone who particularly appreciates blogs that bridge the online/offline divide, I’m so grateful that the CVP’s very first post was an offering for prison-support action. Dope, dope, dope. And the icing on the cake: Alan’s a superb writer. Clear View Blog: check it out, if you haven’t already.
And the second new blog, like most of the sites on my blogroll, is by a longtime friend and fellow young status-quo-questioner (who chooses to remain anonymous). The first few postings on handful of earth are personal and insightful, with the kind of sweet storytelling that, when you’re finished reading, makes you want to go on with your day a little differently; a little better. I especially love this dharma-infused reflection on a daily commute ritual with a stranger, commenting on the connection between generosity and joy.
There it is — two brand-new cybergems. Here’s to sharing freely online, while we still have the chance.
radishes from tonight's Faithful Fools catering gig (Feast Of Fools! Dope!)
Hey friends. Sorry I missed posting yesterday: still don’t have Internet in the new place, though that’s not really a good reason since there’s free WiFi aplenty in the local coffeeshops and library. Really, it’s just been a very very full week: family visit, getting our feet on the ground in the new place (Ryan and I cooked our very first non-cereal-and-soymilk breakfast this morning, using our one pot — a huge soup beast — to boil water for tea). And blessing the apartment, Thursday, with its very first meeting: the Marxist feminist group (now weekly), preparing for a gathering the following night with two other Marxist feminist groups: one other from the Bay Area, one from New York. Pretty powerful.
Anyway, my point is I’ve been feeling pretty un-grounded (oh, did I mention I went on hormonal birth control again? motivation all plummeting; emotionality all skyrocketing), and thus blogging has suffered. Apologies! Please accept these colors (you know how I am with the colors) as a token of my love.
painting our bedroom intimations of a living room -slash- dining room. (kitchen's too small for a table.) if you click to enlarge you can see some cute details, like a shadowy bike in the left background, and the corner of my billie holiday poster in the left front
Kloncke 