Anti-racism

Mandiram Yoga, Barcelona

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These days I’m back into yoga, 3 to 5 times a week. I found the studio, or it found me, quite by accident. Vipassana students are encouraged to organize weekly group sittings in their communities, just silently sitting together for one hour to support one another in the practice. So when I was kickin’ it in BCN for a couple of weeks back in June, I went with a friend to check out the Sunday evening gatherings, held in an unassuming apartment building right off of Plaza Catalunya.

Have you ever entered a space and just felt it was something special?

I couldn’t stop wandering around, looking in wonder at every little thing: the fabric mats; the incense; the photo of Bob Marley alongside the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, Jesus, Buddha, and other spiritual inspirations.

Smitten doesn’t begin to describe it.

So when I decided to settle in Barcelona for a month, and wanted to sign up for a yoga class instead of a gym membership, I happened to know just the right place.

Owned and operated entirely by women teachers (though students of all genders attend), the studio has clean, airy rooms; fresh lilies every week; chandeliers; rooibos tea; a small library of works on yoga, India, and Buddhist philosophy; and extremely hardcore asanas.

Every time I go, I arrive an hour early to read, and leave drenched in sweat, floating down the street. The two-and-a-half hours in between are filled with an almost palpable sense of caring — a bright, loving, permeating awakeness. And each time, thanks to the book or the practice or both, I come away having learned something valuable about how to live. Really.

Not all yoga joints are like this, believe you me.

I hope you’ve found your own places like Mandiram. Sanctuaries. Places where the most mundane objects, gestures, and even open spaces seem luminous. Leave you feeling spacious, yourself, even (especially) when you return home and – bam! – your roommate convenes a Dirty Dishes Conversation.

Deep thanks to Gloria, Alex, and all the people who have given me, and others, this haven and springboard.

Further Death Of The Cool

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This makes me laugh.

An American study shows that “optimistic women” have better heart health and greater longevity than “cynical women who harboured hostile thoughts about others or were generally mistrusting of others.”

The findings echo results of Dutch research indicating similar correlations between attitude and health among men.

Lead researcher Dr Hilary Tindle, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, said: “The majority of evidence suggests that sustained, high degrees of negativity are hazardous to health.”

But, I mean, what if they had found the opposite?  Should we then try to be as cynical and pessimistic as possible, so that we’d have more years to fill up with misery?

Folks, I’m getting a familiar whiff of The Cool, here.  According to The Cool’s logic, being negative is worthwhile because you gain things by it: things like protection (via mistrust); righteousness (from hostility, making someone else the ‘enemy’); or realism (you’re the anti-Pollyanna/up on the news/nobody’s fool).

If we accept this logic, then we might ask whether positivity has its own compensatory benefits.

And wouldn’t you know: it does!  So science adds another tally to the “pro” side of happiness: “Being positive helps you live longer.”

But…do you see where I’m going with this?  Can you smell what I’m cookin’?

Being positive helps you live better, for however long.

Ultimately, none of the supposed ‘benefits’ of negativity that The Cool promises us are true benefits at all.  They’re simply variations on what The Cool loves best: more coolness.  Even longer lifespans can be a form of Cool.

Now, of course, blind optimism never helped anyone, either.  Nobody needs to live in denial.  Optimism and realism can, and should, go together.  All I’m saying is…when it comes to positivity versus negativity, there’s really no contest.  Chuck the pro/con list and take a page from the book of these beautiful abuelas.

Or, if you prefer, heed the wise words of De La Soul:

And stop frownin like you hostile
You know that it’s a booger rubbin up against your nostril

Heh. Can you get much realer than that?

Hat tip to Junot for the article.

Letter To Shem Walker, Deceased

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Dear Mr. Walker,

I know we never knew each other while you were living, but you’ve been on my mind a lot this week.  Your death at the hands of a trigger-ready undercover cop — who stayed put on your front porch even when you asked him to move — is tragic.  And it is an extreme example of the same overreach of the law that put Professor Gates in handcuffs and mugshots.  And Sean Bell, like you, in a coffin.  No one can prove beyond a doubt that Blackness had anything to do with it.  And yet we all know…

These prejudices, now measurable through tools like Implicit Association Tests, don’t start out explosive and deadly.  They germinate and spread silently, almost unnoticed.  Until another patch of poisonous weeds forces its way through the topsoil and bares itself in daylight.

I remember a germ of this idea.  One instance.  It was in college, and a friend of mine — white, Jewish — sat on the edge of the bed, trembling, her hands poised for storytelling.  A male student had approached her while she was studying, she said, and despite her efforts to resume her work, and then get up and walk away from him, he wouldn’t leave her alone.  Wouldn’t accept her lack of interest.  Kept flirting aggressively.  And she started to feel uneasy, then trapped, then terrified.

I’ve been there.  Many women have.  And I wanted to comfort my friend, to tell her I sympathized.  The problem, though, was that in recounting the events, she kept referring to the man as “this big Black guy.” As in, “I had this big Black guy towering over me…”

My friend wasn’t being intentionally malicious, but the implications of her words are clear.  She feared this man more because he was Black.  She automatically, and I might say unconsciously, interpreted Black maleness as a particularly dangerous threat to her safety.

Perhaps some of the same unconsciousness overcame the policeman who killed you.

Or maybe, like the infamous “Floyd” in The Fugees’s The Score, he “gets a hard-on from just shootin’ n***as.”

I didn’t object or question my friend about what she said — that day, or ever.  If the same situation arises again, though, I’ll say something.  Your life and needless death reminds me how this unconsciousness, left unchecked, spreads so quickly.  Not only costing lives, but corroding the hearts and minds of millions.  I don’t want people like my friend to remain unconscious in this way.  I love her.  And I know she can be better, more open, less afraid.  Just like Officer Crowley can be better.

Despite the circumstances and against the odds, I hope you passed peacefully, Mr. Walker.  I hope that when you saw that death’s arrival was inevitable, you accepted it, and allowed it to fill you with love and light, not anger or animosity.  As another victim of a brutal murder once said, full of compassion even throughout his killing, “They know not what they do.”

Thank you for spreading love and light to me.  You will be missed, certainly, and also, you will matter.

Sincerely,

Katie Loncke

Thank Heaven For Disasters

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NeEddra James’ blog, PARAMECultureWorks, entered my life at a great moment.  She’s a sharp writer and an incredibly insightful soul — and the email conversation we recently struck up reminds me why Internet ‘connections’ can be worthwhile.  You should check out her blog in its entirety, but here I wanted to crosspost a piece that’s been particularly helpful to me over the last few days.

NeEddra’s illustration of the value of wake-up calls gets at the heart of the Buddhist teaching that ultimately there is no good or bad, merit or demerit.  Because every uncomfortable, unpleasant, or downright excruciating event has something to teach us.  It’s a doorway leading to the higher dimension of consciousness attained through nonjudgmental acceptance of what is.  Total awareness and presence of mind. So with the valuable teachings that moments like these can offer, how can we really label them “bad?”

Putting this understanding into practice is no easy feat, obviously.  But little by little, moment to moment, and with the help of reminders like NeEddra’s parking ticket saga, we get there.

Hope you’re having a peaceful day, folks.  Whatever catastrophes (a.k.a. opportunities) come your way.

Offering To The Döns

“Practice offering to the döns* by welcoming mishaps because they wake you up.”

I always read my monthly horoscope on the first day of the month. On Dec. 1 Susan Miller told me the full moon, which reaches its apex today on the 12th, would occur in my third house: the house of other people’s money. She went on to say that I’d be writing a big, non-negotiable check, and with “Saturn in hard angle to the moon…there will be no way to avoid acknowledging one’s responsibility or alternatively, accepting a loss and moving on.”

And so it is.

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Manifestación for Iran

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Saturday evening at Plaça de la Universitat.  Sometime I’ll learn how to take better photos at night…but in a fitting way, the fuzziness implies an aspect of the experience: vision blurred with tears.

Seeing all these people here in Catalunya, families and strangers and activists and musicians, I was amazed at the sheer strength of everyone. And struck at the thought that the pain and anguish among those resisting is reflected in equal measure among the men with machine guns carrying out the repression.  Their lives, too, are hellish.

Overwhelmed by my own emotion, I kept lifting up my camera halfheartedly, and then putting it down again.  It’s like Jay Smooth says: sometimes we have to live our grief directly, without making media out of it.  Sorry I couldn’t translate the moment into better photos to share with you.

Black Girl Dancing Alone

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Today, at the park near Notre Dame, I was the only one dancing.

It’s true.

The young-white-guy jazz players, with smiles like jukebox pages flip-flapping between smugness and delight, asked so nicely.  Get up from the benches, everyone.  Get up and dance.

And the boy next to me put down his sandwich (from the Subway by the Seine) and stood alongside me for the first couple minutes, clapping.  But somewhere along the way, he disappeared.

And that was it.  The drummer kept soliciting; I gestured to people to join in; but no one budged from behind their cameras.  Taking pictures, video.  Two months from now, finally getting around to uploading their vacation photos, they’ll rediscover these and say, “Oh, darling, remember that jazz band?  They were so talented.”

What does it mean when a plaza full of people who are free to dance, free to engage with real people playing music, cannot bring themselves to participate?

And why was I so acutely aware of this freedom as freedom?

Nowhere have I felt my Blackness so self-consciously as here in Paris.  Maybe that’s why dancing today, 15 minutes of white gaze on my sore-thumb body, felt like I was just barely getting away with something.  Almost an act of defiance.  These things start small, you know?

As usual, Toni Morrison’s got something deep to say about all this.  Why art (literature) requires both solitude — the ability to dance alone — and community — an environment safe enough to dance at all.  And why we have to secure these conditions for art to go on living.

Please, let’s dance when we can.  And let’s ensure that everyone else can, too.

From the National Book Foundation website, her 1996 acceptance speech for a National Book Award.

*  * * * * * * * * *

Toni Morrison
Winner of the 1996
DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN LETTERS AWARD
The Dancing Mind
November 6, 1996

Book jacket designed by Carol Devine Carson; photo © Helen Marcus.

There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history’s rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one–an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance. The peril it faces comes not from the computers and information highways that raise alarm among book readers, but from unrecognized, more sinister quarters.

I want to tell two little stories– anecdotes really–that circle each other in my mind. They are disparate, unrelated anecdotes with more to distinguish each one from the other than similarities, but they are connected for me in a way that I hope to make clear.

The first I heard third or fourth-hand, and although I can’t vouch for its accuracy, I do have personal knowledge of situations exactly like it. A student at a very very prestigious university said that it was in graduate school while working on his Ph.D. that he had to teach himself a skill he had never learned. He had grown up in an affluent community with very concerned and caring parents. He said that his whole life had been filled with carefully selected activities: educational, cultural, athletic. Every waking hour was filled with events to enhance his life. Can you see him? Captain of his team. Member of the Theatre Club. A Latin Prize winner. Going on vacations designed for pleasure and meaningfulness; on fascinating and educational trips and tours; attending excellent camps along with equally highly motivated peers. He gets the best grades, is a permanent fixture on the honor roll, gets into several of the best universities, graduates, goes on to get a master’s degree, and now is enrolled in a Ph.D. program at this first-rate university. And it is there that (at last, but fortunately) he discovers his disability: in all those years he had never learned to sit in a room by himself and read for four hours and have those four hours followed by another four without any companionship but his own mind. He said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do, but he taught himself, forced himself to be alone with a book he was not assigned to read, a book on which there was no test. He forced himself to be alone without the comfort of disturbance of telephone, radio, television. To his credit, he learned this habit, this skill, that once was part of any literate young person’s life.

Toni Morrison receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 1996 National Book Awards. Photo: Robin Platzer.

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Friends, Meet Nyle

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Yo, isn’t it a fabulous feeling when one day you discover that a friend of yours has been…discovered? :D

Nyle Emerson and I met in the sweltering summer of 2006 while we were both volunteering for the Common Ground Collective in Post-Katrina New Orleans.  There was an open mic night for the CG folks, and when Nyle got up to do his thing, he asked for a “beautiful, willing female from the audience,” or something like that, to come up and kind of adorn his performance.  Ha! So when no one else volunteered, guess who stood up?

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Reggae Dhamma

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Until last Friday, I had never paid any attention to this pop song.  Its strongest association in my mind was with a car commercial that I must have seen a thousand times when I was younger.  Merely background music.  But last week, when it came on the jazz radio station in a café, I listened, really listened, for the first time.  And would you believe it — not only is it beautiful, but it also contains some great Reggae Dhamma.

For real, people, this is exactly what I’ve been learning through meditation. Four parts in particular really get to the root of things:

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Hell Yes.

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Gay rights march in India

Dear people of India,

Congrats for decriminalizing gay sex!

May you enjoy this new right in as many healthy, consensual, loving, joyful, and creative ways as there are people in the country.  ;)  And may this outer, legal liberation encourage your inner, spiritual liberation — toward the peace and happiness of all beings.

love,

katie

—————

Update: My friend Ellora wrote a great note on Facebook pointing out the links between queer rights and anti-imperialism in this victory. I’m not sure if you have to be friends with her on Facebook in order to read it…but if not, definitely check it out!

Happy Inaugo’naug!

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Greetings from DC!

Today has been epic and wonderful.  Wonderful even though I sense that my own excitement comes from a different place than that of many others.  Doesn’t diminish it.  I will never forget the sight of the crowds — the first time I have been surrounded by that many people whose collective witness was a celebration, not an indictment.

I’ll post my thoughts (and photos!) soon, once I collect them.  But face-time trumps typing, so right now I’m going to go enjoy some fine company in Columbia Heights,  and then hopefully Silver Spring, MD.  (Henry!  Yayy!)

Be well, everyone.