Letter to Dad on Father's Day

Dear Dad,                                                                                                     Father's Day, 2020

Michael Amos Hall, my father, at work, where he often was, 1987ish .

You have been dead for just over 30 years now, since March 15, 1990. You died ten days before your 53rd birthday. Sometimes, I would hear Mom say "work killed Dad"; it seemed to be a trend in our family to blame outside forces for deaths: I heard Mom say that her mom was "killed by that modern monstrosity the neighbors built next door".

Besides a deep abiding love of puns and an affectionate nature, workaholism is one of the characteristic I inherited from you. I used to find comfort in a the false control overworking can bring me. Over the last fifteen years in particular, as I have practiced and taught Buddhism, alongside writing and photography, I have found the insidious grasp of overworking to help calm any doubts I've had about the worth of my work and myself. But I have also learned to push back and recover from overworking, as best I can, one day at a time.

You were a different generation, and you were male. You grew up in a house with two women; one of whom was able-bodied and single mothering you and her sister, the other woman, with crippling Rheumatoid Arthritis. So certainly, you got a lesson from Alberta, your mom, my grandma, about working hard - it was necessary for survival. Your father, Amos, whom you write about in the few journals of yours I have found, was intensely overbearing, a distant man, 100 miles away who worked (and lived, it seemed) as a judge. You had it modeled from both lines in your family.

My mom didn't work most of her adult life, and the few jobs she had early on in adulthood were adjacent to yours: scanning Fortran cards or filling out paperwork and/or correcting papers with you. By the time us three kids came along, you were living the home-owning, single income, three kids life promised to white middle class families. Except you seemed to believe you still had to prove yourself.

Letter to my students from Chislehurst, Kent, England

from Frank Bowling's painting "Remember Thine Eyes"

Letter to my students from Chislehurst, Kent, England                          June 10, 2019

Dear ones,

I am sitting in the kitchen at my elderly friends’ house, where my sometimes-called-Godmother June, her husband Bruce, and their daughter and her two adult boys live. It’s a rainy day - very rainy, sort of un-English actually, as the rain keeps coming and coming, rather than just sort of spitting and passing. But I am happy for them; the last summer this area of England - near London - had massive droughts, and a very dry winter this last winter meant they might be headed for the same. Climate chaos doesn’t hit England any harder than any other country, but when I have people I dearly love - family - in a place, I think more about how the climate affects the weather and the lives of the millions of strangers in the British Isles more than I would otherwise.

Ilana and I are now halfway, two weeks, through our trip. We’ve been in England this whole time, first in the northern part of the city, in Highgate, near the famous cemetery where Karl Marx, Douglas Adams, and George Eliot are all buried, amongst hundreds of others. We then went to Devon, which is in the southwest, and had the good fortune to stay with a friend who lives in a village inside Dartmoor National Park. Neither of us had been to Devon before; on a vast scale Devon reminds me of our Driftless Region in Wisconsin - ancient, green, and rural in a progressive way. 

We then came back to London area, and have been a week at June and Bruce’s in Chislehurst. Today we go to south London, Crystal Palace, to stay with another friend until Wednesday, when we head north to Edinburgh, followed by Holy Isle off the west coast of Scotland, where I will teach my first course. 

Spiritual Shadows in Whiteness Work

Trigger warning for People of Color: This post deals with the anniversary of Tony Robinson's death, recent assaults by a white teacher of a young black girl in Madison schools, and white spiritual bypassing. Please read at your own discretion.

For white folks, this post is likely to make you as uncomfortable to read as it made me to write. So please, read with kindness. But read it. It's essential.

What seemed separate suddenly wasn't.The new hashtags #blacklivesmatter or #blm had, previously, felt important, but far away. Distant. Not that I did research to see when any Black people had been shot by police in Madison. Not if, but when. Police violence against Black bodies seemed conveniently elsewhere, even if Ferguson was in the Midwest depending on who you asked, even if it was the hometown of one of my longest running students, a white woman shaken to the core by how close it suddenly felt to her.

But checking twitter that night in March four years ago, I swear - though this may be 20/20 in hindsight - I could feel the walls falling, the distance closing. Seeing at first the bare descriptions - a young black man, an older white male cop - then the name: Tony, called Terrell - Robinson. Then there was a face, too, varying depending on who was putting it up - local Black community or police department. There were no pictures of him where he looked like a thug. No, that difference came in description, evocation of the incident - mentions of drugs, possibly being armed, uncontrollable.

***

Ilana is reading the 76 page police report - with a lot of redaction - about an 11 year old black girl whose braids were pulled out, who was dragged on the ground, and hit by teacher at Whitehorse Middle School a couple of weeks ago in Madison. Reading the report is bringing it closer, clear, even with all the details protected for privacy. That feels important, because the white male teacher won't be returning to Whitehorse, but this week our Black District Attorney announced he will not press charges against the teacher.

Colors of Space

My intention this year was to work with space. Actually, my intention was just the word “space” - no "work with," no "feel more of," no "find more," etc. No direction at all, which is, after all, a bit antithetical to space - direction, that is.

The word arose naturally, intuitively, and would not go away, as my intention word for the year usually does. I was not surprised - I was in the middle of a  teacher training for what is called Maitri Space Awareness. MSA is a program that focuses on using colors and postures to help understand the natural energies that flow through all of us. These parallel the elements - air, earth, fire, wind - and also space. Space, in this case, referred to as Buddha*, is both an element (though not one we commonly think of in modern western society) and also the ground for all the other elements to arise from. Early on, I noticed how pure space, all by itself (symbolized by the color white in this tradition), is quite rare. It is usually colored with something - green, red, blue, yellow - eg one of the other families. And then, as I got closer to Space as an element itself and began to feel out its characteristics, I noticed there’s an uncanny closeness to Space and Whiteness. 

Mourning in a Culture that Denies Death

For years now, I have visually tracked the differences between Day of the Dead and Halloween. I started doing this one year, when I was traveling a lot to the Southwest, because I noticed there was a huge difference in the felt tone of visual representation of death in the two main cultures I was witnessing. I hadn't noticed Halloween decorations that directly - not their violence or oddness - because I grew up with them. More noticeable to me were the relatively new-to-me symbols and representations of Day of the Dead. After being immersed enough in those, turning back to Halloween felt like culture shock. Sickening culture shock. I started to photograph that.

1. Most of my life, I have hated Halloween. Resented it, even. As a kid, I occasionally liked costumes, but once I hit my teens and twenties, that no longer suited me. I take the "holiday" too seriously. I am irritated at the college girls dressing up in sexy versions of working costumes, annoyed with the massive consumption of alcohol and resulting noise and violence, and at best, find decorations amusing. It's helped a lot to have a way to photograph Halloween decorations, one that reveals the edge of how it seems to force our faces into horror and death, without ever dealing with it directly. This is actually what I think about the most with Halloween - how it represents white North American culture's avoidance of actually dealing with death. It leans into horror and humor without any nod to actual impermanence. Ugh.

I hate horror movies for the same reason. I've dealt with a lot of death in my life - though little of it has been violent, it must be said - and it feels almost offensive to me how I was not, as a teenager completely freaked out by death, able to share my feelings or be heard, but my peers and adults I knew would flock to horror movies and happily dress as ghosts, zombies, skeletons. How come there's so much focus on that and not on real loss?

I was into horror novels in my teens. I only realized a few years ago this was because I was looking for something more awful, more horrific than losing my dad when I was twelve to cancer after a multi-year battle. So when I'd see kids get a kick out of a horror flick, I'd cringe.

"Have you ever been haunted by your dead father?!" I wanted to scream at them.

The answer is: even if they were haunted by something, no one was talking about it. All metaphor or secret, as kids, as adults. That bugs the fuck out of me.

2. Day of the Dead is a holiday I can sink my teeth into. It is honest. It honors those we have lost, encourages us to discuss them and make connection with them. I am very, very careful about appropriation. I was not raised in any of the cultures which celebrate this holiday. But over time, I have collected experiences, images, and objects that help me lean into the reality of death around this time of year. Most of those come from Mexican culture. I've also been influence strongly by Tibetan Buddhist culture, which uses the reality of death constantly in liturgy and images to help fuel the fire of our practice, and remember to celebrate life as we are living it.

On Day of the Dead, there's room for celebration of someone's life, and for community with others who live and remember those we loved and lost. These were all things I missed as a teenager and person in her twenties mourning my elders. I felt alone. I felt isolated. I felt out of my element, and, at times, like a weirdo. As if I were in the wrong culture.

I am not claiming I should have been born in Mexico. Not at all. But something feels at home in Day of the Dead than in Halloween. I can bring my adult self to it, and I can bring my kid self, the one who felt so adrift for a decade, trying to find a place to both mourn and celebrate those she lost.

3. I have only realized recently how angry I am about this. Enraged, really. It is most accurately directed at whiteness. Whiteness, in the North American form I best know it, required - and requires - of me and mine to overlook impermanence. To leave behind any rituals acknowledging death and focus only on life, in a sick, confused way. When we discuss death, it should be in hushed tones, mocked, or exaggerated to horrific proportions (not just for Halloween; look at the way media deals with death on a daily basis).

In my experience, the "mainstream" white approach is to not discuss death, to use euphemisms and hint at things without stating them directly. To channel all our fear about death into an absurd day that involves extreme comedy, degraded social norms, candy, costumes, and scaring the shit out of each other in hyper unrealistic ways.

4. I'll be keeping an eye on all of this in October. Noticing my anger, tracing it, as I prepare to re-bury the ashes of the seven elders of our family who all died before I turned 22. As I insist on talking about death with myself and those I love, not to horrify, but to acknowledge. I'll be leaning into altars and shrines, candles and food offerings, blending my Tibetan Buddhist beliefs with Day of the Dead in a way that attempts to respect the fact that I was raised in neither.

The culture I was raised in doesn't mirror the truth my face was forced into by circumstance. No one in the communities I have practiced observing death with in a real way has been bothered by me dropping in and taking part. They don't want me to be alone in death. I don't want to be alone in death - not when I know full well I am not. This incidental isolation has done more damage to me than all the grief. This is what I need to return to when I feel the loss - we will all die. All of us. I find comfort in the universality of this, relief in the honesty. I wish more folks did. I wish they could.

The False Immunity of Being White

A few years ago, I got a flu shot. I don't usually get one - no particular reason other than no good reason to get one. But that year, ilana was getting one and I thought, "Why not?"

We didn't have health insurance, so we got it at a pharmacy. I kind of hate getting shots (likely another reason I hadn't gotten them often) and so felt a bit woozy during and after. They had me lie down and rest, and then I could get up and move around. I felt pretty sick for a couple of days - fever and all - when we called the pharmacy they said that can happen. It passed and I didn't get the flu that year, but I don't usually get it. Ironically, I did cancel classes that week due to the severity of my reaction to the innoculation - I did understand that one week sick is better than multiple weeks.

Why do I bring this up?

I've been thinking a lot about white fragility lately, and how easy it is for those of us who are not often exposed to the pain behind racism to get overwhelmed by it. So many good fellow white people I know - dedicated, heartfelt humans and activists, everyday Janes and Joes - are simply unable to endure the log haul, emotionally and physically. Self-care, like in any area of our lives, is crucial, but I also think we whites have to accommodate for our previous lack of exposure (chosen or by-product of privilege) and lower ourselves in slowly, or we wind up leaping in and out and being inconsistent in our support of important movements.

Innoculation a, by design, give us tiny exposures to a disease in order to build our immune systems to better handle them. Racism is a disease, an endemic one, and one that is in the air and water all the time. The thing is, white people, we think we are immune. But it is a false and dangerous immunity. We simply have the privilege to not be forced to be exposed as often, to choose our exposure and its effects on us. We have to choose to breathe common air, to drink common water. Even more accurately, we drink it, we breathe it and get sick - for racism injured us, too - and somehow don't feel the injuries.

Looking at the Flint water crisis is a great

Literal metaphor and example of this. Large numbers of people who are poor, and most often of color, pay the true environmental price of the computers and technologies of the privileges enjoyed by the few. When the few on top - the folks who are predominately white, and sometimes rich - hear about these prices, we are outages for a hot minute, then forget. 

Why? 

Because we can. Because media encourages us to see such things as anamolies and unconnected, as if the flu were called something different each year, instead of being variations on the same strains. Because we are so unaccustomed to, so normally unexposed to just how bad - literally and psychologically metaphorically - the air and water are. Our shock is a symptom - rather than showing our righteousness, it shows our privilege. And our indignant and impatient responses are also a sign of how unaccustomed we are to the real situations.

This is not all bad. When the people on top begin to realize how bad it is for those on bottom, if they work on it and stay sympathetic, they can actually take action to help reverse the trends. If we inoculate ourselves enough (preferably with other white people so folks of color don't have to put up with our constant questions and emotions) we can actually have the benefit of having been protected from the disease, and having realized there is no protection for anyone so long as the disease persists.

The disease of racism can only be truly overcome through obliteration. This is where innoculation as metaphor falls apart. We have to be able to abide it so we can be allies in the race for the cure - to wipe it out. But that will take a long ass time. It just will. So becoming truly immune - not just above exposure but able to abide alongside those who have no choice but to drink and breathe it - helps us to truly see it, feel it, and touch the passion needed to get rid of it.

So if you are white, and curious, expose yourself. Go gently, but persistently. When you feel worn out, take a break but come back. Don't give up. Be inspired by people of color who have written about how to keep up the good fight in the long run.

And don't wait to get your shot like I did. If one wipes you out, then maybe more regular exposure is needed. Rest for a few days and try again. Keep trying.

*My back porch apologies to all the epidemiologists and other scientists I know who may cringe and my using the flu as a metaphor. I claim poet's license here!

Opening and Closing in Crisis: Alton Sterling and Philando Castle

Buddhism teaches this: when tragedy strikes, there are two ways to go:
We open.
We close.

I am trying to learn to open. Everything in me, all my privilege, all my familial training - all of my protective devices from both being a victim in the past and also having not had to face as much victimhood as a lot of other folks - all of that training says CLOSE. FIND ANSWERS. GET COLD. BE PRECISE.

And all of my Buddhist training says "Soften. Open. Trust. Feel."

I make mistakes when I feel, but I make worse mistakes when I don't.

This week, I am feeling the Alton Sterling killing. Then, the completely overshadowed but far more telling, Philando Castle killing not twenty four hours later. I am trying to stay open.

Intersectionality and Interdependence

This International Women's Day, I celebrated the fact that I am re-engaging with activism. This time, my focus is on racial justice, and in particular, working with white people on their own racism. Mindfully.

Mindfully, because I am now a Buddhist, unlike ten or so years ago when I was last directly active in any kind of movement. Mindfully, because I watched people burn out so badly and I have faith now that compassion is fierce and needed. Mindfully, because hell hath no fury like white people dissing other white people for their racism in order to distance themselves from their own tendencies.

Today I Give Thanks For My Privilege

(a poemletter to my white American cohort celebrating Thanksgiving today
and anyone else who has privilege who feels compelled to give thanks today)

Today I give thanks for my privilege
at a laptop computer
(Apple, no less)
in my own, relatively quiet, and totally safe home.
A white woman, queer but accepted fully by
family
by my chosen society
(the immediate 18 miles that surround me).
With a warm, fat cat on my lap and
another in the bedroom -
more than one room, three bedrooms, in fact
(though small, I want to say, and the traffic outside
can be loud when it is not a holiday).

I have today off. The whole day off. Because
I am self-employed doing 100% what I love.
When people ask me:
"How can I do what you do?"
I have to pause in order not to start with:
"Do you have enough privilege to get going?"
An inheritance? Which I did.
A good credit rating? Ditto.
White skin and an educated upbringing? Tritto.
Because these are what made all the rest of it possible.
Even though it took dead parents to get
the money
and a lot of forced independence
for that credit rating -
the skin
the education
came first and most importantly
based on nothing other than chance.
Not a single choice in my life hasn't rested on that chance.
On privilege.

My desire to hedge, to say
"I am privileged, but..."
is itself a privilege, a mark of my own knowledge
the freedom I have to feel responsible
guilty, even,
or not.
Today, I choose not to feel guilty or ashamed.
Today I choose not to brag but to give thanks.

Because it is due to grace
that I am here.
That I am not in Syria
or trying to escape Syria
has absolutely
not one thing
to do with who I am
or my goodness.

This is privilege -
to feel safe. To feel unthreatened
except by my own mind.

I ask you to join me in giving thanks
giving back to what has been given to you.
I do not ask for guilt
I do not ask for shame
I do not ask for hedging or apologies or amendments
I do not ask myself for these
today
and I do not ask you either.

If you are in North America and your skin ever reads as white,
you are privileged.
Please stop trying to fight it.
On a day like today, where people focus on
gratitude for all the extra things,
I would like you to consider
like I am
giving thanks for being the basics:
for being alive
(because consider the alternatives)
for being here
for being safe.

I am not asking you to give up your privilege.
I am simply asking you to
See it.
Give thanks for this blind gift.

Because it is a gift, it is something that can be given away.
Risk it, risk it for the black people being shot
in Minneapolis,
in Chicago.
For the Syrians fleeing -
the migrantsrefugees the whatever whichever newspaper wants to call them today -
the human beings risking their lives to live.
Risk your reputation with your family
with your careful safe society
and side with those who don't have such safety.
Risk your sense of self
and consider what it would be like
to be born somewhere else
or in another time
or in another body

What you - what I - take as fact
is chance.
This life as a privileged white North American
is not fate.
It is not a manifested destiny you have earned.
None of it.
Not a whit.
All if it comes out of privilege.
And the best way to honor it
is to start by giving thanks
whole hearted
nothing held back thanks.

Then, to show our real gratitude,
we must risk it.
In small ways, in big ways.
Why?
Because privilege brings with it power.
Because we can do more
since others read us as not a threat.
We can go into the frontlines
(if that is your way)
or into the headlines
(if that is your way)
and still keep our privilege.
Since it is so indelible, such a given,
give it away. Just try.
You cannot lose it.
It cannot be taken from you.

Privilege was given to you completely.
Give it away completely.
People without it have sacrificed more and more readily
for centuries.
Start small
but
start today.

Today I give thanks for my privilege.
Today I ask you to do the same for yours.