At 2am, after driving 11 hours straight on a cold and thankfully snowless night, I arrived in Vermont to a sharp and loving sign on the door of my friend Dana’s house. Before going to bed with the front door unlocked, Dana had convinced her partner Victor to turn up the heat so that I “wouldn’t become a Katie popsicle.” Logistical kindnesses, plus the magic of Dana’s grandmother’s down quilt (go to bed chilly; wake up toasty) … I am indeed a lucky one.
Hard to believe it’s my final semester of grad school at Goddard, in Plainfield, VT. Some of you might even remember when I started, three years ago.
On campus, between preparing for my portfolio / thesis semester and keeping up with work for Turning Wheel, it’s been heavy on indoor and computer time. Grateful that the blog pushes me to get outside, even with my cold-wimp self.
featuring my friend and beautiful leader Karega Bailey, deep & dope hip hop with some on-point politics! lots to love. ♥
history books, history crooks
without slaves, how would this history look?
let me bring yo mind to attention
take away the builders, the building is nonexistent
…
two times for the man with the white fist
who’s quite pissed
who knew that racism existed in america
but now that the color is green
ask the poor white man how he like this
big cities with nice ****
i’d like to thank y’all for stoppin by
but these problems have existed in the hood
now that they’re in your homes
you decide to occupy
building and learning some of the history of my block from a new friend who grew up in the neighborhood and whose family lived on my street up until a few weeks ago.
then tonight i check my voicemail and 88-year-old Mr Posey up the road had called to see if i wanted to come over and watch the giants. (we watched game 3 together and made cornbread.)
plus i live within walking distance to lots of fabulous people i know, and probly many more fabulous people i’ve yet to meet.
north oakland, i really appreciate getting to know you.
Whipped this up for my friend Saqib’s birthday party — a feastful affair that included a fucking fantastic soyrizo-grits-and-caramelized-onion casserole — and had my first occasion to use the thyme that has made its way over from Vanessa’s garden to mine.
I’d meant to pick up some habañero peppers at the store (capsicum cousin to the scotch bonnet peppers more traditionally used in Jamaican cabbage-and-thyme dishes), but forgot, so in went a hefty dose of white pepper, plus orange juice. The combo brought a bit of that bright, citrusy heat that comes from habañeros. Not bad! Next time I think I’ll throw some carrots in there. Steamed cabbage isn’t my favorite to look at — needs jazzing up to let prettiness match tastyness.
And what a gorgeous party, my goodness. Black and brown, hella queer, multi-generational, turquoise walls, dishwashing shifts, deliciousness.
Yesterday: amazing political art by Young Gifted and Black, Isis Rising, and all kinds of other phenomenal hip-hop and soul-flavored performances at the Life Is Living festival yesterday in West Oakland (including an extended Nina Simone tribute that, during Jennifer Johns‘s take on Sinnerman, evoked a cathartic tear or two from the wildly dancing audience). On my way out of the park I watched this rhyme unfold in my head.
It started with the tradeoff of wages and prices, then meandered to attacks on reproductive care (thanks for that presentation, Becca!), the false liberation of muslim women thru u.s. imperialist war, and nuclear energy and fukushima (shouts to Umi for alerting me to the feminist working-class issues there).
So here you go — an extremely extremely rough experiment, something that will probably never amount to anything polished. Still, it represents my gratitude for all that I’m learning, every day, from comrades, artists, thinkers, ancestors, and people in struggle.
coconut-ginger kale with chickpeas, lemon, and a secret ingredient: a dash of smoked paprika.ginger, toasted coconut, and small sweet red onion sizzling in olive oil
Meanwhile, on Kloncke…
It’s shaping up to be another day of food and friend fotos, and I’m beginning to feel self-conscious.
You may have noticed that Kloncke contains lots of pictures. Pictures of mundane things, like the apartment. And Brassica oleracea. There’s not a lot of information, or opinion, or blueprints for fomenting feminist revolution. No hard reportage. Walking away from the world of political New Media, with its fast-paced news addictions and adrenaline rushes, is not easy on the ego, I can tell you that much. In comparison to what I used to write about, the things I now post seem frivolous and bourgie. Sharing them requires a good amount of pride swallowing: it was much easier, honestly, to write about, say, connections among environmental nativism, sexism, and anti-immigration. But my dear friend Ellen, in an email yesterday, beautifully expressed a purpose of the site that I hadn’t quite articulated to myself:
I was just reading through your blog and thinking about how healing ourselves necessarily involves elemental things like food (one of my too-many jobs right now is all about food policy, actually, and I love how it’s gently pushed me toward feeding myself better) and family and good lighting (good work w/ your place!!) and practical skills and walking/biking along riverbanks.
Ellen is right: healing is largely about getting down to basics. Which brings us back to the question of reality (what could be more basic?) and how on earth a cybernetic hallucination could bring us closer to it.
Reality isn’t a place so much as a relationship, or an attitude that each one of us can take toward what’s around us. In my experience, it’s a mixture of calm and curiosity, a kind of lilting interest. It welcomes and enjoys pleasure, but doesn’t obsess over it. It recognizes and honors pain, but doesn’t demonize it. This orientation reflects reality not because it’s one-dimensionally true, but because it allows us to see what’s really going on.
Now, what’s really going on includes, as we know:
oppression
violence
injustice
resistance
organizing
solidarity
things more important than photos of what yours truly is having for breakfast
Again, this blog isn’t about acting on these Big Things. Nope. But it is about small-r reality: trying to pay attention. Joyful attention. To the things that happen offline. And as a warm, friendly space dedicated to embracing ordinary wonders, I hope it can help restore us for whatever struggles we undertake.
A list. A hallucinatory diary of genuine gratitude. A different spin on the reality-based community.
Four years later, I’ve come so far, to the exact same spot.
Things more important than what I’m having for breakfast.
Well, that’s why they call it practice, I s’pose.
Revolutionary or not, “embracing ordinary wonders” is precisely what I’ve been feeling disconnected from, these past few months. And as we know, contentment is only partly about how many Wanted Things happen to us. It’s also (or even mostly) about how much gratitude and equanimity we generate. (Hence book titles like Sylvia Boorstein’s Happiness Is An Inside Job.)
Objectively, GREAT THINGS HAVE BEEN HAPPENING TO AND AROUND ME!
Hardworking organizers and wonderful people swim in the seas I swim in!
I get to go to eviction defense actions and they are interesting and successful!
(See how I snuck a militant direct action in there? Pride: sometimes you get the better of me.)
But I seem to be living as a hungry ghost. No matter how much beauty surrounds me, it’s not enough. I am not enough.
Speaking of both (a) hungry ghosts and (b) great things happening to and around me, just this Wednesday night I had the chance to see a talk by the incredible Dr. Gabor Maté, author of, among other books, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.
His lecture blew my mind on a few levels (maybe a whole nother post on that, sometime). But one of points he made that hit home hardest for me was the observation that political engagement, or activism, can actually serve as a kind of addiction: insofar as we use it to try to fill a personal sense of lack. He gets at a similar idea in this interview about the Hungry Ghosts book:
Question: The title of your book has its origins in the Buddhist Wheel of Life. In the Hungry Ghost Realm, people feel empty and seek solace from the outside, from sources that can never nourish. In what ways is our culture trapped in this realm? What can society learn from drug addicts who take the feelings of lack that everyone has, to the extreme? Gabor Maté: Much of our culture and our economy are based on exploiting people’s sense of emptiness and inadequacy, of not being enough as we are. We have the belief that if we do this or acquire that, if we achieve this or attain that, we’ll be satisfied. This sense of lack and this belief feed many addictive behaviors, from shopping to eating to workaholism. In many respects we behave in a driven fashion that differs only in degree from the desperation of the drug addict.
I don’t have the presence of mind to write too much on this tonight, but I want to reflect on this observation from my own life:
When I feel no pressure to be or do any particular thing, creative growth and learning flow freely, but much of my activity tends to be apolitical. Eventually, the urge for political engagement either suddenly arises, or creeps back in like a tide.
Once I get invested in the idea of being a student of political organizing, or being a revolutionary, that free-flowing sense of self-sufficiency dies away, and I find myself wanting/needing to improve and measure up, more and more. Never enough.
Obviously, the desire to improve is not a bad thing — and I know what the healthy, natural, yet vigorous version feels like. It’s just that I don’t know what it feels like in the political realm.
And THAT probably has more to do with me, and my own issues, than ‘the political realm’ itself.
I talked with my folks tonight: slow, nothing-much, touching base. The dog has tapeworms, but seems more chipper since getting his medicine. Mom doubts Pop’ll make it through this weekend’s performance of Fiddler On the Roof without dozing off. At times the silences sagged between our phones. Tomorrow they (my parents) will be moving all the furniture so the carpets can be deep-cleaned.
Suddenly my dad’s voice brightened. Can I tell you one thing about today, he said.
As he was cleaning out the study, he came across a leaderboard from my golfing days. Based on our conversation I’m still not sure exactly what kind of object he’s describing (I remember leaderboards being huge, like billboards — not something you could fit in our study chock-full of files and wires and junk), but he said it had that fine, pristine writing (those gray, permed, chalk-wielding old ladies keeping public score always cut the most dashing sevens), and at the top, number one, my name: Katie Loncke. Shot a 78 the first day; 72 the second. Below me (my father’s voice grows incandescent) are players who went on to be really serious. Casey Gee, who fell just shy of the PGA, and now works at a bank. Christina Stockton, who’s gone pro. Danielle Civitanov — we think she’s in school to be a nurse. The top Sacramento girl golfers from my middle-school and high-school years. Proof that I had bested the whole lot of them at least once. Dad mused aloud about sending the board to my Oma. Your granddaughter, number one! I could picture his smiling apple-cheeks, shaped just like mine.
If you know me well you probably know that golf and I have had a fraught relationship. I once tried to break my own finger with a hammer to get out of playing a tournament. When that plan failed, I turned to a bottle of pills.
Enough time has passed that I’m not so tense about it anymore. I can even contemplate dusting off my clubs for fun, maybe with a couple of novice guy friends. I would probably run circles around them, even though I haven’t played in years. I used to be that good.
And I made my dad proud. If he shadowed me for a round, weeks afterward he could tell you every single shot on every single hole.
Tonight, despite a thorny past, I let myself rejoice a little in his shine.
not sure why my picture’s not there, but find it hilariously appropriate
I’ve been thinking lately: we need some kind of People’s Award Association. For those of us who might choose unconventional paths, or never have a real shot at mainstream prestige in this fucked up, pseudo-meritocratic, hyper-competitive society. Our unpaid work organizing against the prison industrial complex, or fighting foreclosures, or founding radical sanghas may not yield a trophy, medal, plaque or certificate, but our excellence still matters, and people in our lives should know about it. They should have more chances to be proud of us.
Ideally a real, beautiful object for display, but even just an email — to a grandparent, mentor, partner, whomever — stating ceremoniously:
Congratulations: your loved one, {____________}, has been awarded an Outstanding {What They Do Well} Prize. This honor is conferred by the People’s Award Association in recognition of {___________}’s excellence in transforming oppression and building toward a better world: a world with freedom for all.
At 2am, after driving 11 hours straight on a cold and thankfully snowless night, I arrived in Vermont to a sharp and loving sign on the door of my friend Dana’s house. Before going to bed with the front door unlocked, Dana had convinced her partner Victor to turn up the heat so that I “wouldn’t become a Katie popsicle.” Logistical kindnesses, plus the magic of Dana’s grandmother’s down quilt (go to bed chilly; wake up toasty) … I am indeed a lucky one.
featuring my friend and beautiful leader 
Kloncke 