b o t t o m l a n d

*healthy* is the new happy!

I loved reading all of your personal and encouraging comments on the previous two posts.  It is always good to be reminded that one is not alone.   

One thing I wanted to emphasize, that I don't feel was very clear in my writing about this, is that for me, healthy body image comes through embracing and honoring the shape I am now AND maintaining a commitment to regular exercise and healthy, mindful eating and portion control.  I used to feel like these things were mutually exclusive, but now I find that they can coexist.  I find that when I am eating fairly well, I actually enjoy the "treats" more because I feel better about my eating overall.  I am not interested in "dieting" (Frankel's book is all about breaking her diet-addiction!), but in finding a life-path of eating that nourishes me and helps me stay at a healthy weight.  (One blog that I love along these lines is happy foody!)  I am also not interested in an exercise regimen that takes me to a gym and away from my kids for hours at a time (that would be setting myself up for failure, because I could NEVER do that!), but making time for yoga before bed, or getting up early to take a brisk walk alone really feeds my body and my spirit.  I recently realized that I had gotten into a pattern as a mom of NEVER being alone, except when I go to work, and that really wasn't healthy for me.  Both yoga and walking are ways I can exercise my body while remaining present in my spirit, which I think would be harder sweating on a machine at a gym.  Anyway, this is my vision of health that I am trying to live into, and gently create some new habits that will feed me for years to come.  Now that I've admitted it publicly, feel free to harass me about how well I'm following my goals!

On the theme of body-love, I have been really moved by Erin's (of bluebirdbaby) self-portrait series.  She has, I think, made some peace with her body-image demons through the discipline of self-portraiture.  Most of us women have a very hard time seeing our selves, our faces, our bodies, as beautiful.  As someone who feels SO much more comfortable BEHIND the camera, I can't even begin to image something as daring as this, but I love her artistic vision.  She recently shared her story on her blog about overcoming her eating disorder and it is very powerful.  I would encourage all of you to read it.  The conventional wisdom says that eating disorders are not something easily "recovered" from.  Like alcoholism, they can torment the sufferer for years.  Because of this perception (which is very much based in the realities of many women and men) it is especially important to hear the stories of those who have healed, to know that healing is possible.  

I'd love to hear examples of small ways that you honor and love your body.  What is "feeding" you these days, literally and figuratively?

**Photo courtesy of Erin Wallace, used with permission (thanks Erin!)  Click here for a link to her flickr page.  Her reflections on this picture are powerful.  Also, check out her professional photography website, e.wallace photography.**

thin is the new happy :: part II

**A continuation of the previous post.  Scroll down to read that one first.**

Me (on the left) with E., my best friend from college, the summer after our senior year.

It was easy for me to think that being thin wasn't that big of a deal, when I WAS thin!  I was something of a "tom-boy", into college, and my personal style ("hippie") tended toward bell-bottom jeans and old faded tee shirts that I'd find at rummage sales.  I was proud of the fact that I didn't pay "too much" attention to my appearance.  I was even somewhat (and this is embarrassing to admit) disdainful of people who spent a lot of time working out--it seemed vain to me.  There was certainly an inner conflict there, as voices in my head simultaneous said, "I don't care about what I look like!  I'd be happy with any body size!  Aren't I looking especially thin today?"  

I've always had two dimensions to my personality--on the one hand I am sensitive and brooding, and on the other, I have an optimism and lightheartedness.  For a long time my attitude toward my body was fairly light and "breezy," centered in that second part of myself.  But, as I've written about before, college certainly had it's ups and downs for me, and I experienced a powerful sense of having my "feminine voice" silenced, which, incidentally, coincided with changes in my body.  

I started gaining wait right around the age of 22, and haven't really stopped.  Certainly my level of physical activity changed as I transitioned from the life of college to working at a job, and I'm sure there are natural metabolic changes that happen in the twenties as our bodies continue to mature.  I tried to tell myself, looking down at my now-squishy belly, that flat stomachs were a myth and that "real women have curves."  Secretly, I wondered if my new husband was attracted to me.  I didn't like looking at myself in the mirror without clothes on.  I swallowed hard when I needed to start buying pants in the double digits.  And yet, I kept telling myself, "I'm a feminist!  I am liberated from a need to conform my body to an unattainable ideal!"

My twenties wore on, and the weight crept up.  I kept defiantly eating as much as I wanted to, and never exercising.  I bought bigger clothes when my old clothes got uncomfortably tight.  I cried every time I needed to go up to a bigger size, but then I felt guilty for feeling bad about it.  Pregnancy brought on many more added pounds than I would have liked, and I was definitely one of those women who are pregnant everywhere--no little basketball out in the front for me!  When Little C arrived two months early, via emergency C-section, I needed to treat my body with genuine care for a few weeks, but somehow I never started pushing my body again, even after my recovery was over.  Sometimes I would wistfully think back to the physical strength that I had as a young woman in college, leading wilderness expeditions, but by and large my experience of childbirth left me feeling weak and disempowered.  My body had failed me--it was an infection in my uterus that caused Little C's premature birth.  And that whole traumatic experience left me feeling scarred, but unsure of how to heal.  

One source of healing for me was certainly breastfeeding--an incredibly empowering experience for me.  As time went on I started to feel strong in new ways: waking up in the night to patiently nurse an little one took a whole new kind of strength.  However, I did not experience the magic weight-loss capacities of breastfeeding!  In fact, nursing left me with a bigger appetite than pregnancy did, and of course, I still "had no time" for exercise.  Before I knew it, I was chasing a toddler, still without any time for myself, and here I am today, with an almost-4-year-old, and 40 pounds heavier than I was a decade ago.

My miscarriage last fall was a real wake-up call to me.  Both my counselor and my midwife told me that the baby's gift to me was myself: that I might learn to mother myself.  At one of those appointments my midwife lovingly told me that I was 20 pounds heavier than I was when she first saw me, 3 months into my first pregnancy, 4 years earlier.  She told me to lose 15 pounds, that I would be healthier without the weight, and that I NEEDED to be exercising 4 times a week.  She told me that every person has her own "healthy weight" range, and so while it is not about conforming to an arbitrary ideal of beauty, it is about taking care of myself.  This was hard for me to swallow.  Even though I could see the wisdom in what she was saying, there was still this stubborn part of me that thought that I SHOULDN'T care about my weight.  True confession: it's now 6 months later, and I haven't lost a pound.  I also haven't been exercising, which is my real downfall.

WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR ME TO PRIORITIZE MY OWN NEEDS???  I am SO stubborn with this stuff!  I turn 30 this year, and yet I STILL haven't figured out to take care of myself, to love myself.  It's embarrassing!  I can feel an awakening happening in me, though, and I know in my heart that my body is my home.  If I don't love it and care for it, it won't get cared for.  No one else can do this for me.  This is an important part of the growing up process that I missed somehow, but it isn't too late.  I can make healthy choices now, and, like Valerie Frankel, having a daughter is damn good motivation.  I am learning to accept the shape I am right now, even while making new choices that will lead to health--emotional, mental, and physical health!

Another thing I've learned about myself recently is that I have a food addiction--and no, I'm not just being over-dramatic here.  (Just because my addiction is shared by most other Americans does not make it any less serious!)  I eat when I'm hungry, I eat when I'm bored, I eat when I'm sad, I eat to celebrate something.  I eat to distract myself from ______, whatever reality I don't want to deal with at the moment.  I love to eat, and yet I eat mindLESSly.  I don't pay attention to what or how much I am eating.  The simple act of being mindful about my food completely changes my relationship to it in two great ways: I enjoy it more, and I eat much less!  This is yet another reason why growing my own food, or at least knowing where my food comes from, is so important to me.  Local, in season food tastes better, and feels more REAL to me, therefore I treat it with greater reverence.

Anyway, I digress.  I'm sorry for this long and rambling post, but my thoughts on this topic are so all over the place, and so evocative.  It's hard to say just one thing about my body and how I feel about it.  I will close with a passage from Frankel's book (did I mention that you should all read it?) in which she is sharing her new "tenets" for healthy body image and healthy living.  Her first one is "Live a little!"  Don't be so stressed out about every calorie or ounce.  Food is to be enjoyed--in moderation, yes--but truly enjoyed.  Then she tells of seeing a woman in her late seventies in a gym lifting weights and working out really hard.  The woman winks at Frankel, and becomes her inspiration.

::

What did the wink mean?  Probably nothing.  The habitual act of a friendly person.  But I decided that she was trying to send me a message.  A covert message, from one exerciser to another:  "Be good to your body, because it's the only one you're ever going to get."...

I wanted to be that bench-pressing granny.  I wanted to be her now, at forty-one.  And I wanted to be her at fifty-two and sixty-two and ninety-two, should I live so long.  She seemed to represent a conscious choice between (1) a healthy, strong future of thriving and surviving and (2) a slothful existence of inactivity, illness, decline, and dependence.

The choice was obvious.  For me, there would be no more fooling around with weight loss and re-gain, or a protracted periods of inactivity.  At a certain stage in the aging process--and I was well into that--fitness shouldn't be a goal or an obsession.  Fitness is life itself.

You have to love your body as a living organism, not hate it as a flawed decorative statue.  Only a fool or a child would put a premium on pretty over healthy.  Bad body image, I realized, was kid stuff.  Mine had kicked in at eleven.  I'd dragged a childhood problem into my forties.

That wink was my wake-up call.  My grow-up call.  Which brought me to Tenet #2:  Take care.

My bad body image, a vestige of the past, was now history.  My future would be devoted to strength--of character and muscle.  My new role model was that iron-pumping grandma with the fingerless gloves and the frosted blond hair.  When the body image demons rattled the cage, as they sure would from time to time, I'd think of her and remember that I only had one body, and one choice.  To love it--or leave it.  I wanted to stay around long enough to see my daughters' daughters take a big bite out of a cookie and smile with unmitigated pleasure.

So, yeah, I choose love.

::

There are so many reasons why women don't choose love, and instead live out our lives hating ourselves and our bodies.  Shame has been the currency of female existence for centuries.  There is a real and true misogyny in our culture that comes through our media, our social structures, our religion and other meaning-making cultural narratives.  We need to speak our stories out loud, and rail against these sources of oppression.  But we also need to simultaneously take responsibility for loving ourselves and showing our daughters (and sons) a different path.  It's interesting, and not coincidental, that our mouths are used for two things: for speaking and for eating.  Let us speak the truth in love, and let us nourish ourselves with love. 

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." -- Muriel Rukeyser

thin is the new happy

From the cover:

“Val Frankel is a woman of amazing insight. . . . Read this, weep, and heal.”

—Stacy London, cohost of What Not to Wear

You’ve heard the phrase “the mirror is not your friend.” For Valerie Frankel, the mirror was so much more than “not a friend.” It was the mean girl who stole her lunch money, bitch-slapped her in the ladies’ room, and cut the hair off her Barbie.

If you’re like 99.9 percent of women, the war you wage with yourself over your body image begins at the ripe age of eight, and the skirmishes are fought for the next eight decades. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’ve won. (How many of us have taken out a photo from high school and thought, “Hey! I looked great—why didn’t I know it?”) This book is for anyone who has spent most of her life on—or thinking about being on—a diet. It’s for anyone who ever wished for candlelight in dressing rooms. It’s for anyone who has ever owned a pair of “fat pants.” In short, this book is for anyone who ever felt good or bad about themselves based on how they look.

Valerie Frankel, like most women, has spent most of her conscious life on a diet, thinking about a diet, ignoring a diet, or failing on a diet. At age eleven, her mother put Val on her first weight-loss program. As a teen, she was enrolled in Weight Watchers (for which she invented creative ditching methods). As a young woman, her world felt right only when she was able to zip a certain pair of jeans. Not wanting to pass this legacy on to her own daughters, Valerie set out to cleanse herself of her obsession. Thin Is the New Happy is the true story of one woman’s quest to exorcise her bad body-image demons, to uncover the truths behind what put them there, and to learn how to truly love herself. It’s a poignant, hilarious, and all-out honest account of one woman’s struggle with body image—the filter through which she’s always seen the world—and the way she ultimately overcame it.

Let me start by saying that I loved this book.  I mean, what's not to love about a book with a dedication like this:  "Dedicated to...THE LAST FIFTEEN POUNDS.  I don't miss you, not one tiny bit, you bitches."  This book made me laugh, a LOT, and yes, it even made me cry a fair amount too.  It's completely crass and irreverent (see the dedication above) so if that's not your thing, you might want to steer clear, but other than that I think this book should be required reading for all women.  WHY ARE WE SO HARD ON OURSELVES?  I'm not even a chronic dieter, like Frankel and many other women out there.  And yet, I have really been struggling with my weight and general body image for the last number of years (particularly post pregnancy).  We all know that the way in which we view our bodies affects far more than our physical health.  When I'm feeling bad about my self my energy is lower, and I actually have LESS motivation to eat well and exercise. Frankel makes the sad point that, "Among all oppressed peoples throughout history, we women hold the dubious distinction of being the only group to persecute ourselves.  We are our own enemies.  We chose the battle that we could never win." 

I was having chatting with a new friend recently, and was saddened to hear that she spent a solid decade of her life struggling with an eating disorder.  This story is all too familiar to me.  My feminist conscience was really developed when I was in college and started hearing story after story of young women that I knew who were, literally, killing themselves through a full blown eating disorder or "merely" disordered eating.  (See some important and depressing current statistics at this site.)  I started to get angry because at my sanitized Christian college campus, this was not something that was being discussed publicly.  Why are we so silent in our pain?  Raising awareness of this issue became a galvanizing force in my emerging "college activist" role, but 10 years later, it is still haunting friends, and "disordered eating" is still plaguing me.  The thing that broke my heart as I sat with my new friend, listening to her describe how she is now 40 pounds heavier than she was 8 years ago, was the simple observation of how beautiful she is.  It was chilling for me, because I've been dogged with especially negative feelings this past winter as I've watched my weight climb higher than it's ever been outside of pregnancy.  As I was noting how beautiful and healthy my friend looks, a little voice in my head implied that maybe I don't look half bad either.

I spent the first 20 years of my life on the thin end of the spectrum, even bordering on "skinny" at times where mono or depression brought me to unhealthily low weights.  I was the girl in high school and college that other girls loved to "hate" because I could eat whatever I wanted (LOTS of ice cream!) and not gain any noticeable weight.  I was not remotely athletic, but I was "outdoorsy" and my periodic hikes and rock climbs, combined with my youthful metabolism, kept me thin without ever having to work out.

On spring break, my senior year in college, a few months after a very dark depression that involved insomnia and very little appetite.

**I'm falling asleep in my chair, so I'm going to bed.  I'm going to post what I have so far, but I plan to continue this tomorrow, so stay tuned for Part II!  In the mean time, I'd love to hear your stories of your own journeys with body image.  It it's too personal to post in the comments, e-mail me and I can share things anonymously.**

The current of spring

Well, fair blog readers, you all know how much I ardently admire Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky.  Also, you may well remember my series of poetry posts from last April.  April is National Poetry Month, and in that spirit I share this poem that speaks beautifully of the cycle of renewal that is stirring in the earth these days.  Wishing you all a blessed spring day!

THE CURRENT

By Wendell Berry

Having once put his hand into the ground,
seeding there what he hopes will outlast him,
a man has made a marriage with his place,
and if he leaves it his flesh will ache to go back.
His hand has given up its birdlife in the air.
It has reached into the dark like a root
and begun to wake, quick and mortal, in timelessness.
a flickering sap coursing upward into his head
so that he sees the old tribespeople bend
in the sun, digging with sticks, the forest opening
to receive their hills of corn, squash, and beans,
their lodges and graves, and closing again.
He is made their descendant, what they left
in the earth rising into him like a seasonal juice.
And he sees the hearers of his own blood arriving,
the forest burrowing into the earth as they come,
their hands gathering the stones up into walls,
and relaxing, the stones crawling back into the ground
to lie still under the black wheels of machines.
The current flowing to him through the earth
flows past him, and he sees one descended from him,
a young man who has reached into the ground,
his hand held in the dark as by a hand.

old friends

I've been listening to the Indigo Girls lately.  

 

If you want to enjoy a blast from the past, watch this video.  It's perfectly 80's.  Now, I grew up listening to the Indigo Girls.  I have memories of being twelve and in my best friend's mom's car, listening to Galileo.  And then high school brought girl friends and singing harmony at the top of our lungs while driving in Siobhan's truck wearing our cut-offs and bikini tops.  I spent hours upon hours singing along with these songs, or practicing them myself on my guitar.  The Indigo Girls taught me to like myself--that I had something to offer and that I shouldn't let myself be pushed around.  Their songs spoke of love lost and gained, but also of injustice, prejudice and resistance.  Their words fueled my young sense of activism and empowerment.  They sang to me that maybe I shouldn't be quite so certain of things I thought I knew, but that uncertainty didn't need to be scary--wonder could be freeing.  They provided a much-needed soundtrack to adolescent angst and pain, and I didn't feel so alone when I could sink into that music.  

When I went off to college I got introduced to the like of Patty Griffin, Dar Williams, and other new musical delights, and my loyalty to the Indigo Girls subsided at bit.  Then I married a man who frankly dislikes them, and all of that adds up to a decade of very limited Indigo Girls consumption.  Which brings us to the present.  I recently was given a bunch of IG in digital form (I owned them all on cassette) and have been able to put them on our ipod.  It is so fun to listen to them again and be transported to a self that I have trouble remembering.  My teen years were hard in many ways--complicated emotions and relationships that were frequently over my head--and yet there is something so innocent, sweet and simple about those years as well.  It feels like a gift to be brought back into some of those old memories, and to know that that spunky girl with flowers in her hair and a more developed sense of adventure is still with me.  

The other night, at the end of a crummy day, I lay in the dark next to my snoring husband, unable to sleep.  I got up and dug out the ipod, then lay there, listening to songs that my younger self knew by heart.  Suddenly I realized that not only is she still with me, but she is a comfort, even a friend to me.  That spunky, care-free girl took my by the hand and said, "You're all right.  Life will come and life will go...  So you know it's all right.  Cause you just got a letter to your soul.  When your whole life is on the tip of your tongue, empty pages for the no longer young, the apathy of time laughs in your face.  Did you hear me say, each life has it's place?"

Thank you, Amy and Emily, for helping me find the words.

argh.

I am so frustrated.  I just lost 68 pictures, capturing my last 3 weeks and our transition into spring.  I had all these delights to share with you tonight, and now nothing.  No maple sugaring updates.  No equinox festivities, no spring nature table shots.  No images of the incredible amaryllis blossoms which have now passed.  No shots of sharing lunch with old friends, or pancakes with new ones.  Oh, and Jason's birthday party and music night, all that is gone too!  Can you tell I'm bummed???  This is the downside of the ephemeral nature of our digital age, I suppose, but it hurts.  The other evening a woman came into the library almost in tears.  She is a mother of 4 and her youngest had accidentally send the external hard drive that holds their entire digital library (all their photos and videos of their family life) crashing to the floor to it's demise.  So I guess the moral of the story is, BACK UP EVERYTHING!!!

On another note, I'm just tired writing this, which makes losing the pictures more of a bummer.  I'm tired because it's late at night, and late at night seems to be my only time to blog these days, hence the sparse posting.  I'm having trouble managing my time--I've picked up new hours at the library, which is a good thing on the financial front, but I'm feeling very pinched personally.  I hardly have time to be a good mom and keep the house in some sort of bare order (that area has been hit hard, I tell you!) but sitting down to write and share my thoughts with all of you has felt like too much of a luxury these days.  I don't like that, and I want to find the time in my life for what is important to me, like this blog.  So I'm going to try to find spaces to carve out for this, somehow.  In the mean time, I'm off to bed.  Tomorrow is a long (VERY long) day, and rebuilding my spring photo collection will have to wait for another day.

Wishing you peace,

Caren  

a new sweater

Thank you all so much for your encouraging words in response to my last post.  I love that I can share stuff I'm thinking about in this space, and know that I am not alone.  Wishing you all a warm and peaceful Sunday!  

Knit with love by a beloved friend.  Thank you, Tante Eden!

dreaming my dreams

I usually live in a state of trying to catch up with my own life.  I think this comes in part from being an idealist--I see so vividly the life I LONG to be living, and so when I'm not living in that space (which I never do perfectly anyway) I feel bifurcated and disappointed.  I live in an almost constant state of disapointment with myself.  I am in a season where I am trying to plumb the depths of this dissatisfaction (where does it come from?), and learn to accept myself, and just be.  It's hard, but good to think about.

What is the right relationship for me and my dreams?  I have so many longings, so many hopes.  And these are all good things.  But if they leave me unsatisfied with my life, are they really bringing me life?

Tonight Papa D and I were talking about these things, and about the immense amount of pressure I feel because I work part time and am home with Little C part time.  I feel like I don't do either as well as I would like.  This is what he said to me:

"I think what's hard about where we are is that the things that are crushing us are the things that we love most.  Our dreams are too varied, to wide, to many to be able to live them all.  We need to give them up and learn to just be, and see what dreams are given back to us with time.  It's probably almost like an exorcism where we reject all these false masters, and ask God to help us reject their false power.

But the bigger question is why are we clinging to these things in the first place?  They are a symptom of deeper longings for connection with the Divine and ourselves, for Christ in us AS us, as Randy (our pastor) says."

What would a new kind of freedom look like?  How can I love myself better now?  What if I stopped letting every thought in my brain hold sway over me and demand something of me?  What if I stopped demanding so much of myself and others?  I have a hunch that I would be a lot more peaceful and a lot less depressed.

Why do our human brains always want to judge everything, to proclaim value and worth on everything?  I have been loving the Rumi quote lately:  "Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field...  I'll meet you there."  

That's where I need to go...

This quote that I lifted from Erin is interesting to me as well.  "There's no one to be..."  I like that.

It's like falling in love with yourself. There's nothing to do, no one to be, no responsibility, no meaning, no suffering, no death.  Comparing is nothing more than believing the story that a past would invent as a future. It's so much simpler to be what I am.
~Byron Katie

i'm back

I mean it when I say we've been buried in snow and February.  It's been an interesting month of no internet access (or at least, not at home) that has afforded time for reading, watching movies, mailing out a family valentine's letter (if you haven't gotten yours yet, don't loose heart!  I'm still working on getting them out!) visits with family, filling the bird feeder on a near-daily basis, playing in the snow, drinking nettle tea, reconnecting with old friends, reconnecting with ourselves...

I love this Calvin & Hobbes-esque snowman now gracing our front yard...

One of my worries about buying this house was that I would feel isolated and claustrophobic at the end of a dirt road in a small house, and I am glad to report that as we near the end of a long and snowy winter, I've never once experienced either of these feelings.  I love the coziness of our little house when we're home, and with my now 21 hours a week of work at the library, we get out of the house plenty.

I hope you all have had time to find simple beauty in the spareness of February, and I look forward to catching up with what has been happening in your lives as I reconnect with the world of blogging, e-mail and facebook.  I do hope to take some of the stillness of this month with me back into the web-world. 

I'll leave you with a slideshow set to the song "February"  by Dar Williams.  I have to admit, it's a bit of a downer, but as someone who's often affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the deep depression of winter, I hold long-abiding affection for this song.  Not to mention the fact that when I was in college (and listening to Dar non-stop!) I used to perform this song at coffee-houses (*sigh*--THAT was a long time ago!  So enjoy the moodiness for a moment, and know that Spring is on her way!

Wishing you peace!

see you soon

Happy February!  I have some fun posts up my sleeve, but I've been swimming in busyness (I hosted a women's spirituality retreat at my house last weekend) and now I'm heading to the hills of VT for a weekend away with Papa D!!!  We NEVER do this, so it will be great.  See you soon!

fresh snow and a poem

We awoke the other morning to more fresh powder.  I love winter because it is such a time of grace--fresh snow covers everything with this beautiful, sparkling blanket.  Making everything clean and new.  A fresh start.  Like the one we got this week in Washington DC.  *Exhale*

  

This picture is of a farm a few minutes from my house--it is one of my favorite spots, and may just inspire me to paint my barn door red!

 ___________________________________________

Praise Song for the Day 

by Elizabeth Alexander 
A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues. 

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum, 
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, 

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign, 
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light. 

Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. A chapbook edition of Praise Song for the Day will be published on February 6, 2009.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and non-violence

 

On Monday we celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King, and yesterday we watched the inauguration of our country's first black president.  The symbolism was lost on no one, but I did want to mark these days in this space, and bring your attention to a part of Dr. King's legacy that is not quite as popular as his work of racial reconciliation.  

Dr. King is one of my heroes, certainly because he stood up for the rights of his people who were being treated as less than human, but also because he so embodied the maxim that "no one is free when one is oppressed."  His concern for human rights did not stop with the black community, but extended across cultural and national bounds to include people that his government was telling him were his "enemy."  He realized that he could not preach non-violence to the black community without speaking against the violence that his own government was perpetrating against the people of Vietnam.  He gave an excellent speech just 12 months before his assassination that beautifully and eloquently sums up his conclusion that "a time comes when silence is betrayal."  The entire speech is a compelling read, but even better to listen to.  You can find the complete text and audio here.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

But King's reasons for speaking out against the war were more than pragmatic, they were also deeply rooted in his Christian faith:

I... have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all [people]—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved His enemies so fully that He died for them? 

I have personally experienced the disconcerting concern of certain people who think that my concern for peace somehow takes me away from "the gospel," and I share King's bewilderment that any person who calls him- or herself a follower of Christ wouldn't see the connection.  Another name for Christ is in fact "the Prince of Peace."  And we need peace as much today as we did 2000 years ago, when Jesus was born under the brutal rule of a dictator who readily killed thousands of innocent babies in an attempt to extinguish this "Prince" (who wasn't even seeking political power, ironically enough) and as much as we needed King's prophetic words 40 years ago.  In the words of an anonymous Iraqi nun, spoken in the buildup to the current Iraqi war, "we need peace more than we need bread."  

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam" [and "Iraq."] It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of [people] the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

America is in as grave a need as ever for those who are willing to work for the "health of our land" and speak out not only about the unjust war we are waging in Iraq, but about our complicity in the situation in Gaza (those tanks, planes and guns that obliterated Gaza over the past few weeks were not Israeli, but American), our silence in the face of myriad humanitarian crises in Darfur, Zimbabwe, and the Congo (to name a few), our endless raping of our planet's natural resources, oh, I could go on.  I love this country, and that's why I am committed to holding it's feet to the fire as much as I can.

And so it is with a heavy but hopeful heart that I welcome Barak Obama as our new president.  Yesterday was an exciting day for me, probably as proud a day as I've had as an American.  It was especially fun to share the excitement with Little C.  We went to watch the inauguration at my sister's apartment with my mom and dear friend Kelcey and her daughter.  

Obama won me over in the primary last January and I shared my personal reasons for voting for him in November here.  I remain cautiously hopeful that he will be able to take our country in a new direction, with more just economic policy here at home, and more humble foreign policy.  We shall see, we shall see...  For now I am just thrilled to join my voice with so many of my fellow Americans (Republicans and Democrats alike) in celebrating the fact that our country really has come a long way in electing a black man (and bi-racial at that!) to the office of president.  Racism isn't dead in our country, but this is certainly a decisive blow!  

Little C showing her doll Abby the festivities of the inauguration, who seems to be clapping enthusiastically in response!

Kelcey doing a self-portrait with the prez at the town-wide inauguration party last night.

My cute mom (on the left, who organized the party) with Kelcey's mom, Linda.  And we all know the man in the middle!