Today is a tricky day, because we aregoing to celebrate. We are going tocelebrate loveanddiversityeven as some people seem to be on a mission to make it harder to show that love and harder to be a diverse society.Still,wearegoingtocelebratebeinghuman. The following is a revised excerpt from a 2020 post.
Making contact
I believe
The greatest gift
I can conceive of having
is
to be seen by them,
to be understood
and
touched by them.
The greatest gift
I can give
is
to see, hear, understand
and to touch
another person.
When this is done
I feel
contact has been made.
*
– from the poem “Making Contact” by Virginia Satir
For those of you who missed the memo: I am a huge fan of the work of therapist and author Virginia Satir. Born today in 1916, she is known as the “Mother of Family Therapy” and placed her work in “family reconstruction” and “family sculpting” under the umbrella of “Becoming More Fully Human.” She developed the Virginia Satir Change Process Model, which was adopted by corporations in the 1990’s and 2000s as a change management model, and the Human Validation Process Model. Similar to other existential therapist (although I’m not sure she ever used such a label), Satir found that when people came into therapy the presenting, or “surface,” problem was seldom the real problem. Instead, her work revolved around the idea that the real issue was how they coped with situations in their lives. Additionally, she documented that people’s self-esteem played a part in how they coped with conflict and challenges. So, here again, the issue comes down to functional versus dysfunctional thought patterns and how those thought patterns manifest into words and deeds that alleviate suffering or cause suffering.
When Satir worked with patients she would utilize role playing as well as meditations. The role playing was to get family members to consider each other’s perspectives and, in doing so, cultivate empathy and better understanding. The guided meditations were a way for people to recognize that they already had (inside of themselves) the tools/toolkit – or abilities – needed to overcome challenges and obstacles within their relationships. They also empowered people to use the tools that were inside of them, and to cultivate those tools. However, Satir did not see her work as being limited to “traditional” families; she believed that if her work could heal a family unit, it could also heal the world. They key, again, was offering people that “greatest gift” and figuring out what people really wanted and/or needed.
“It is now clear to me that the family is a microcosm of the world. To understand the world, we can study the family: issues such as power, intimacy, autonomy, trust, and communication skills are vital parts underlying how we live in the world. To change the world is to change the family.”
*
– from The New Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir
Satir was born on the anniversary of the birth of the award winning novelist Pearl S. Buck, who was also known as Sai Zhenzhu. Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia in 1892, Buck spent most of her life in China. Her experiences in China, both as a young child of missionaries and as an adult, resulted in a plethora of novels, short stories, children’s books, and biographies that exposed Western readers to the people, culture, and landscape of China. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Buck was a humanitarian who wrote about everything from women’s rights and immigration to Communism, war and the atomic bomb. Her work was a form of activism, but she didn’t regulate her actions to the page alone. When it came to Asian, mixed-race, special needs, and international adoptions, Buck was more than a writer – she was a parent. In addition to advocating against racial and religious matching in adoptions, Buck adopted six children of various ethnicities and nationalities. (Previously, she had given birth to one special needs daughter. So, she was a mother of seven.)
“I was indignant, so I started my own damned agency!”
*
– Pearl S. Buck explaining why she started Welcome House in 1949 (after multiple agencies told she could not adopt Robbie, a mixed race 15-month old boy, because his skin was brown)
Pearl S. Buck co-founded Welcome House, Inc., the first international, inter-racial adoption agency (with author James Michener, lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II, and interior designer and decorator Dorothy Hammerstein); established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to support children who were not eligible for adoption, and opened Opportunity Center and Orphanage (aka Opportunity House) to advocate for the rights of orphans in South Korea, Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam. Buck believed that families formed from love (as opposed to blood, race, religion, or nationality) and that they were living expressions of democracy – something she felt the United States could not unequivocally express during the Jim Crow era.
In 1991, Welcome House and the foundation merged to form Pearl S. Buck International to continue Buck’s legacy. However, like so many historical figures, that legacy is complicated. She was (and still can be) considered controversial when you think about her family history and some of her views. Buck was described as “a thorn in the side of the welfare establishment” and her award-winning novel The Good Earth is considered by some to be literary propaganda.*
“What lingers from the parent’s individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.”
*
– from Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir
Take another look at the poem at the top of this post.
No, don’t read it… just look at it.
What do you see? More specifically, who do you see? Granted, your device, your eyes, or even your brain may not see what I see. But, consider what you might see. What if you saw yourself? What if you saw someone you loved? What if you saw someone you didn’t like? Even if you don’t see what I see, the underlying meaning is the same: Right in front of you, there is an individual, with open arms, wanting, needing, and waiting to be seen.
“We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”
*
– Virginia Satir
*
“We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.”
*
– from The New Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir
Please join mefor a 65-minutevirtual yoga practiceon Zoom today(Sunday, June 26th)at 2:30PM. You can use the link from the “Class Schedules” calendar if you run into any problems checking into the class. You can request an audio recording of this practice via a comment below or (for a slightly faster reply) you can email me at myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com.
Sunday’s playlist is available on YouTube and Spotify. [Look for “0626022 Satir & PRIDE”]
“After long searches here and there, in temples and in churches, in earths and in heavens, at last you come back, completing the circle from where you started, to your own soul and find that He for whom you have been seeking all over the world, for whom you have been weeping and praying in churches and temples, on whom you were looking as the mystery of all mysteries shrouded in the clouds, is nearest of the near, is your own Self, the reality of your life, body, and soul. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it.”
– from “ The Real Nature of Man” speech, delivered in London and published in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Volume 2, Jnana-Yoga) by Swami Vivekananda
Yoga Sutra 2.26: vivekakhyātiraviplavā hānopāyah
*
– “The clear, unshakeable awareness of discerning knowledge (insight) is the means to nullifying sorrow (created by ignorance).”
“A good sequence is like a good story. There is a beginning (an introduction), the middle (the heart of the story), and the end (the conclusion)”
– Maty Ezraty
Every practice tells a series of concentric – and sometimes overlapping – stories. There is the obvious physical-mental story, which is the story of where your mind-body has been, where you are, and where you could go. This story overlaps with the related story of vedanā, based on your sensations, feelings, and/or vibrations in the past, present, and future. We can call this an emotional story, but it is also an energetic story. Then there is also the story of symbols, stereotypes, and archetypes – which is how our mind-body often frames these other stories in order to better understand them. Finally, when I lead a practice, there is the story (or stories) I tell to frame the other stories.
The stories – or themes – that I share during the practice can be purely philosophical; religious; rooted in math and/or science; fictional; historical; and/or biographical. In fact, sometimes there are elements of all of the above. And while I use the āsanas (“seats” or poses) and the sequences to tell these framing stories – and, of course, I use my words – a lot of the story gets told with the music.
Ah, yes, music, “sweet music” – which spirals in a whole other set of concentric (and sometimes overlapping) stories. One of those spirals (i.e., one of those stories told by the music I select to tell the other stories) is the story of where I come from and the timing of when I came and developed in the world. Yes, I sometimes do a little research and may adjust some of my old playlists to be more inclusive – I’ve even been known to include a song or two that don’t particularly resonate with me. Ultimately, however, I am who I am and (like every other storyteller that’s ever existed) I tell the story based on what I know.
Which means: The stories I tell (and even how I tell them) would be very different if I were a white American-born man of a certain generation or if I were a Nigerian-born British woman of a certain generation.
[The the remainder of this post, excluding details and links for today’s classes, was originally posted on July 21, 2020. If you want a little musical challenge, read this “Tale of Two Writers” and then create your own playlist based on their lives. You can even share it or link it in the comments below.]
“… she has, over time, changed her politics about race and gender differences. This Emersonian political shift — ‘Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again’ (McQuade 1 : 1148 ) – is one measure Morrison ‘ s developing sensibility as a woman and as an artist. Two examples immediately come to mind. In 1974, Morrison cautiously spoke of what she considered to be ‘a male consciousness’ and ‘a female consciousness’ as totally separate spheres. She then stated, ‘Black men – and this may be way off the wall because I haven’t had time to fully reflect about this – frequently are reacting to a lot more external pressures than Black women are. For one thing they have an enormous responsibility to be men.’ Morrison went on to reinforce her conviction: ‘All I am saying is that the root of a man’s sensibilities [is] different from a woman’s’ (Taylor-Guthrie 7). Morrison slightly modified this view when she spoke of her construction of Sula as a rebel, as a masculinized figure, and an equal partner in sexual relations in the 1920’s and 1930’s. She stated that Sula did not depict ‘as typical black woman at all’ (Septo, “Intimate Things” 219).”
– quoted from Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference by Lucille P. Fultz
This is a tale of two writers. Both born today – one in 1899, the other in 1944 – one was male, the other was female. One was White, the other was Black. We can get into nationalities later, but…. One won a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and a Nobel Prize in Literature, while the other was designated OBE. Both have foundations named after them. One you have studied, probably in high school, maybe in college (even if you weren’t a literature major) and one you may have never read (let alone studied – even if you studied literature). She was born on his 45th birthday, when he was in Germany (curiously attached to an infantry regiment and doing things that would eventually bring up charges against him by the Geneva Convention). Both are recognized as successful authors and both wrote from their own experiences. However, so far as I can tell, only one of them has (as of today) ever been featured as a Google Doodle. (Spoiler Alert: It’s not the one you’ll be thinking when their identities are revealed.)
Let’s start with the man – one, because he was born first and second, because he is considered to be the model of a man’s man. In fact, he made his living as an author writing about characters who are considered to be the epitome of masculinity (even when, as it sometimes was, very obviously toxic masculinity). He went to a public high school, in a major U. S. city, but did not attend college. He was married four times, traveled the world, fathered three children (all boys), and spent his 26th birthday starting his first novel – which would also be one of his most famous works. (I think) he smoked and he (definitely) drank for most of his life; however, his drinking became excessively excessive after a couple of plane crashes in Africa. He was devastated when his first wife lost a suitcase full of manuscripts and (towards the end of his life) super paranoid that the American government was keeping tabs on him. They were; the FBI had a file on him – in part because of his ties to Cuba. He received electroshock treatments/therapy at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and committed suicide, just like his father, sister, and brother (as well as one of his father-in-laws). He was 61. It’s possible that his paranoia and suicide were (in part) caused by the same thing that caused his father’s paranoia and suicide; they bother suffered from hereditary hemochromatosis, which causes the body to absorb too much iron and leads to physical as well as mental deterioration. He is often quoted as saying that in a man must do four things in his life (in order to be a man): plant a tree, fight a bull, write a novel, and father a son (although some have said “raise a son”).
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because this first author is Ernest “Papa” Hemingway. (He has not been featured as a Google Doodle – but he has been quoted in reference to Google Doodles for Josephine Baker and René Maran.) Hemingway started off as a journalist, who served in World War I (as a Red Cross ambulance driver, because the U. S. Army diagnosed him with bad eyesight), and somehow (see “curiously” note above) attached himself to a U. S. army infantry regiment during World War II. His work includes novels, novellas, short stories, non-fiction, articles, and published letters. He referred to his minimalist style of writing as “the iceberg theory” or “the theory of omission.”
“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”
– quoted from Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway
As I mentioned before, the woman also wrote about what she knew – of course, what she knew was very different. She wrote, for example, that “you are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace, because everyone is responsible for the other person.” Her gender initially meant that she would be kept at home; however, she convinced her parents that there was a benefit to her going to school. She attended private primary school, earned a scholarship to a private secondary school, and eventually attended the University of London. However, she was also engaged by age 11, married and pregnant at 16 years old, and separated and pregnant with her fifth child by the age of 22. By all accounts, she not only gave birth, she also raised her children and managed to earn a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree in Sociology by age 28 and a PhD by the time she was 47 years old. She received a second, honorary, doctorate from a second University a year later. Her marriage was unhappy, violent, and punctuated by her husband’s paranoia about her writing. He burned her first manuscript. She rewrote it, but five years passed in the interim. She worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London, as a youth worker and sociologist, and as a community worker – all while writing, publishing, and raising her children. Her writing eventually enabled her to travel around the world (including to the U. S.) as a guest professor and visiting lecturer. In addition to working a variety of cultural and literary organizations, she and one of her sons ran a publishing company (that printed some of her own work under her own imprint). She was made an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2005. She suffered a stroke in 2010 and died 7 years later. She was 72. She once said, “I work toward the liberation of women, but I’m not a feminist. I’m just a woman. My books are about survival, just like my own life.”
If none of this sounds familiar, you might be surprised that Buchi Emecheta was celebrated with a Google Doodle a year ago today (on what would have been her 75th birthday). She reportedly started writing as a way to deal with the troubles in her marriage and went on to write novels, children/YA books, plays, articles, and an autobiography. Her son Sylvester, who established a publishing company to ensure his mother’s work stays in print, said that Emecheta was the descendant of storytellers who passed down to him and his siblings the “Moonlight tales” that she learned from her aunts and father.
“Living entirely off writing is a precarious existence and money is always short, but with careful management and planning I found I could keep my head and those of my family, through God’s grace, above water.”
– Head Above Water by Buchi Emecheta
Ultimately, we are taught what someone has decided it is important for us to learn. We may not have any reason to question why we are taught one thing and not another, one author and not another. And, if we are not big readers, we are unlikely to read outside of our primary society’s canon. Maybe, as we get older, we turn to mass market fiction (or non-fiction) as a form of escapism. Maybe we turn to award winning literature – but we don’t really question why one author gets published but not the other, why one book makes the short list but not the other. Since many of us have grown up in society where we were encouraged to learn/do/teach (or see/do/teach) this means that we teach what we were taught – even if we are not teachers. Furthermore, as has happened recently, when we start to question and explore… we start with what (and who) we know – even if the authors we know are not experts in our latest field of study.
This paradox reminds me of Newton’s Laws of Motion (particularly, the law of inertia: an object in motion remains in motion, an object at rest remains at rest – unless something disrupts its condition). It also reminds me of college.
I studied English Literature at a major U. S. university. There had previously been some pretty prestigious guest professors over the years; however, when I started, in the late 1980’s, there were no African, African-American, Black British, or Black anything modules in literature. You might read a writer here or there in a 20th Century survey class, but you couldn’t (as I did with Russian literature) sit in what was essentially an oversized closet with a professor and three or four other students and learn about literature written from the perspective of the African diaspora. (Honestly, in college, I probably didn’t even know how to write a sentence like that – that’s how far African-American literature was outside of my wheelhouse!)
Dr. Lucille P. Fultz joined the faculty my senior year and, with some new awareness, I decided to take one of her classes. She had graduated from Spellman College (a historically black university for women) and completed her graduate degrees at the University of Iowa (which is known for its writers) and Emory University (which is just known). I remember her as my own personal stereotype of a Spellman woman: mature, petite, dark-skinned, natural, knowledgeable (in a seriously erudite way), well-spoken (but also soft-spoken), and dressed to the nines. In my head, she wore white gloves – but honestly, I think I made that up. I may also have made up the idea that she did not original study literature with the intention of teaching African-American literature. I say “I may have made up the idea” because she is now recognized as an authority on Toni Morrison (whose history as a writer/mom/publisher in some ways mirrors Emecheta’s history as a writer/mom/publisher) and she got me to read The Bluest Eye, which was quite possibly the only Toni Morrison book I had not read on my own.
My alma mater now has a history department with “a strong team dedicated to the history of Africa, the African diaspora, and African-American Studies” and a newly established Center for African and African American Studies. Curiously (and going back to the idea that we learn what we are taught and teach what we learn), two of the six members of that dedicated team are easily recognizable as people of color – and they are the only ones on the team who graduated (as undergrads) from the school where they now teach; one graduated just before me, the other attended after Dr. Fultz was firmly established at the university.
“Everyone’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
– Ernest Hemingway
“[I write] stories of the world…[where]… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.”
– Buchi Emecheta
Hemingway wrote about war, sex, love, loyalty, fishing, bullfighting, and the feeling of being lost in the middle of an adventure. Emecheta wrote about sexual discrimination, racial prejudice, sex, love, changing nappies, being a single parent, and religion. They both wrote about culture clashes, their experiences in Africa, as well as about the roles and relationships between men and women, but much of what they wrote looks and feels very different – even when, occasionally, the wrote about the same situations. Take Africa, for instance. To Hemingway, the continent of Africa was an exotic land of (physical) danger and adventure. To Emecheta, Africa (and specifically Nigeria) was home and a land (socially and physically) dangerous in the way it marginalized women.
As I mentioned above, they had different ideas on suicide (even different ideas about why one might consider suicide) and they had very different ideas about education. In her autobiography, Emecheta wrote, “An uneducated person has little chance of happiness. He cannot enjoy reading, he cannot understand any complicated music, he does not know what to do with himself if he has no job. How many times have I heard my friends say, ‘ I want to leave my boring job because I want to write, because I want to catch up with goings on in the theatre, because I want to travel and because I want to be with my family.’ The uneducated man has no such choices. Once he has lost his boring job, he feels he’s lost his life. That is unfair.” On the flip side, Hemingway had significantly less (formal) education than Emecheta, struggled with depression, and stated that when he started writing his first novel, “Everybody my age had written a novel and I was still having a difficult time writing a paragraph.”
“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
– A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
“She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks.”
– Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta
Please join me today (Wednesday, July 21st) at 4:30 PM or 7:15 PM for a yoga practice on Zoom.Use the link from the “Class Schedules” calendar if you run into any problems checking into the class. You will need to register for the 7:15 PM class if you have not already done so. Give yourself extra time to log in if you have not upgraded to Zoom 5.0. You can request an audio recording of this practice via a comment below or by emailing myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com.
Wednesday’s playlist is available on YouTube and Spotify. [Look for “07212020 A Tale of Two Writers”]
If you are using an Apple device/browser and the “Class Schedules” calendar is no longer loading, you may need to upgrade your browser, or you can email me at myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com at least 20 minutes before the practice you would like to attend.
In the spirit of generosity (“dana”), the Zoom classes, playlists, and blog posts are freely given and freely received. If you are able to support these teachings, please do so as your heart moves you. (NOTE: You can donate even if you are “attending” a practice that is not designated as a “Common Ground Meditation Center” practice, or you can purchase class(es). (Donations to Common Ground and Mind Body Solutions are tax deductible; class purchases and donations directly to me are not necessarily deductible.)
“If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, ‘Impossible,’ when orders came?”
– For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
“Just keep trying and trying. If you have the determination and commitment, you will succeed.”
– Buchi Emecheta
If you are thinking about suicide, worried about a friend or loved one, or would like emotional support, you can call 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also call the TALK line if you are struggling with addiction or involved in an abusive relationship. The Lifeline network is free, confidential, and available to all 24/7. YOU CAN TALK ABOUT ANYTHING.
If you are a young person in crisis, feeling suicidal, or in need of a safe and judgement-free place to talk, call the TrevorLifeline (which is staffed 24/7 with trained counselors).
[This is the “missing” post for Monday, June 28th. You can request an audio recording of Monday’s practice via a comment below or (for a slightly faster reply) you can email me at myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com. This post includes statistics that may be triggering for some.
In the spirit of generosity (“dana”), the Zoom classes, recordings, and blog posts are freely given and freely received. If you are able to support these teachings, please do so as your heart moves you. (NOTE: You can donate even if you are “attending” a practice that is not designated as a “Common Ground Meditation Center” practice, or you can purchase class(es). Donations are tax deductible; class purchases are not necessarily deductible.
Check out the “Class Schedules” calendar for upcoming classes. If you are using an Apple device/browser and the calendar is no longer loading, please email me at myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com at least 20 minutes before the practice you would like to attend.]
“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”
– quoted from an originally unpublished introduction to Animal Farm by George Orwell
Unlike what happened in Selma, Alabama on “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” the events that took place in and around New York City’s Stonewall Inn 52 years ago today were not televised around the world. People did not see the brutality and, initially, they did not see the indomitable human spirit rising above the brutality. Bottom line, people did not see the humanity that some were trying to systematically erase and/or ignore. Therefore, it took a while for people to get it…. Although, some would say, there are still people who don’t get it. What people sometimes don’t get, is that regardless of which marginalized (or even non-marginalized) group you discuss, civil rights are human rights – and, last time I checked, we’re all human.
There are a lot of problems we could get into when it comes to how any one of us understands “humanity.” Like, what does the word even mean? I’m fond of Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language – because it’s so intentionally “American” and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – because it tends to be so comprehensive when it comes to the English language. That being said, Webster’s 1828 definition of “humanity” has religious overtones that could turn this into a very different conversation. It agrees with the OED, however, in the understanding that “humanity” relates to the human race and to “human beings collectively.” The OED (and other dictionaries) also point to “The fact or condition of being human; human nature.”
Think about that last bit for a moment. What are the conditions of being human? Are the conditions that you find acceptable for your existence being met for those around you? Who is around you?
According to the Williams Institute, a think tank at University of California, Los Angeles – Law, about 4.5% of American adults identified themselves as part of the LGBTQIA+ community. 29% of those within the general community are raising children. While the percentage of LGBTQIA+ people who identify as white (58%) is lower than the percentage of white Americans in general, other racial demographics are pretty much a mirror of the general population stats (21% Latino/a and 12% Black). While people under the alphabet umbrella reside all over the United States, Black LGBTQIA+ people are less likely to live in the South than the general Black populace.
When it comes to education, the statistics for LGBTQIA+ people are fairly close to those outside of the community. However, when it comes to people who have obtained a Bachelor’s degree or a post-graduate degree, the statistics flip and indicate a higher rate for people outside of the community. Prior to the pandemic, the percentages related to people who were unemployed, uninsured, food insecure, or earning an income below the poverty line were higher within the LGBTQIA+ community. This was especially true for Black and Asian and Pacific Islander (API) adults.
1.2M Black LGBTIA+ adults live in the United States, with 26% of them raising children and 56% having a low income household (which is, coincidentally, the same percentage of people who annually get tested for HIV). 26% of the Black LGBTQIA+ community have been diagnosed with depression; 79% reported experiencing verbal insults or abuse; and 60% reported being threatened with violence.
Additional studies conducted prior to the pandemic showed that people within the LGBTQIA+ community had as high or higher experiences of violence (in particular, intimate partner and/or sexual violence) than the general population. However, the “higher” statistics were related to women and People of Color – and, in most cases, people indicated that they did not always report the violence and/or assault. A higher percentage of transgender people (versus cis gender people, whose gender identity matches how they were designated at birth) indicated they had experienced intimate partner and/or sexual violence. That last statistic goes up again when specifically related to Black transgender women, who have an average life expectancy of 35.
According to a 2018 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide was the 10th leading cause of death in the United States for the previous 10 years, but the 2nd leading cause of death for youth – and GLBTQIA+ youth were ten times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. In fact, The Trevor Project (and this same report) indicated that almost half of the transgender population had attempted suicide, “many before age 25.”
Recent polls indicate that nearly 90% of Americans say they personally know someone who is lesbian, gay, or bisexual. However, GLADD, an American non-governmental media advocacy organization for the LGBTQIA+ community, published an online survey conducted by Harris Poll in 2015, which surveyed 2,000 U.S. adults (18 years and older) and pointed to a very different experience regarding transgender people. According to that survey, the number of people who said they knew (and/or worked with) someone who was transgender had doubled from 8% (in 2008) to 16%. More recent polls show that the numbers have gone up again – to 20%. What that means, however, is that the majority of Americans (polled), 80% only know about people who are trans because of something they see in the media. Additionally, what they see in the media (up until recently) was created by people who were not trans and who, given the statistics, may not have known anyone that was transgender when they started telling their story.
“The ways in which trans people have been represented have suggested that we’re mentally ill, that we’re that we won’t exist. And yet here we are. And we’ve always been here.”
– Laverne Cox, quoted in the trailer for her 2020 Netflix documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen
I’ve said it before (from a Black and female perspective) and I’ll say it again (here, as an LGBTQIA+ ally): If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. But, who knows how they will tell it or what they will tell. For a long time, People of Color (especially Black and Indigenous men), women, and people of living with disability have had their stories told and controlled by people who were not them. Furthermore, those stories were told to/for an audience that was not them. Thankfully, that is changing. But just as we can’t un-see what we’ve already seen, we can’t automatically stop thinking what we’ve been taught to think. We have to see what is right in front of our eyes. That’s why representation matters – and that’s why it still matters when a prominent figure, in the sports world or anywhere else, comes out.
“Living a full, vibrant and healthy life is a priority for [Vice President of the Minneapolis City Council Andrea] Jenkins, especially since some authorities estimate that the average life expectancy for a transgender woman of color is 35, primarily because of violence.
Her most recent volume of poetry is titled The T is Not Silent as a way to signify that the T (transgender) of LGBT can no longer be overlooked.
‘The only way we can change that horrifying statistic is through understanding. I have been able to live my life out, but not all transgender people have that opportunity,’ she said. ‘I realize that my age is a blessing, and I’m thrilled and grateful for my relative longevity. I try to advocate and lift up the narrative of my community every opportunity I get.’”
– quoted from the November 2, 2018 Minnesota Good Age article “Zen master – Andrea Jenkins talks poetry and politics – and shares why she never loses hope.” By Julie Kendrick
There is no playlist for the Common Ground practice (but there is a Stonewall PRIDE playlist, which we used on Sunday and I have updated it so the “forbidden” music should now play).
If you are thinking about suicide, worried about a friend or loved one, or would like emotional support, you can call 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also call the TALK line if you are struggling with addiction or involved in an abusive relationship. The Lifeline network is free, confidential, and available to all 24/7. YOU CAN TALK ABOUT ANYTHING.
If you are a young person in crisis, feeling suicidal, or in need of a safe and judgement-free place to talk, call the TrevorLifeline (which is staffed 24/7 with trained counselors).
*
Errata: Some typos have been updated and one link has been added.
### LOVE TO THOSE WHO ARE OUT & LOUD (and to those who are not so out and/or not so loud) ###
“… she has, over time, changed her politics about race and gender differences. This Emersonian political shift — ‘Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again’ (McQuade 1 : 1148 ) – is one measure Morrison ‘ s developing sensibility as a woman and as an artist. Two examples immediately come to mind. In 1974, Morrison cautiously spoke of what she considered to be ‘a male consciousness’ and ‘a female consciousness’ as totally separate spheres. She then stated, ‘Black men – and this may be way off the wall because I haven’t had time to fully reflect about this – frequently are reacting to a lot more external pressures than Black women are. For one thing they have an enormous responsibility to be men.’ Morrison went on to reinforce her conviction: ‘All I am saying is that the root of a man’s sensibilities [is] different from a woman’s’ (Taylor-Guthrie 7). Morrison slightly modified this view when she spoke of her construction of Sula as a rebel, as a masculinized figure, and an equal partner in sexual relations in the 1920’s and 1930’s. She stated that Sula did not depict ‘as typical black woman at all’ (Septo, “Intimate Things” 219).”
– quoted from Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference by Lucille P. Fultz
This is a tale of two writers. Both born today – one in 1899, the other in 1944 – one was male, the other was female. One was White, the other was Black. We can get into nationalities later, but…. One won a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and a Nobel Prize in Literature, while the other was designated OBE. Both have foundations named after them. One you have studied, probably in high school, maybe in college (even if you weren’t a literature major) and one you may have never read (let alone studied – even if you studied literature). She was born on his 45th birthday, when he was in Germany (curiously attached to an infantry regiment and doing things that would eventually bring up charges against him by the Geneva Convention). Both are recognized as successful authors and both wrote from their own experiences. However, so far as I can tell, only one of them has (as of today) ever been featured as a Google Doodle. (Spoiler Alert: It’s not the one you’ll be thinking when their identities are revealed.)
Let’s start with the man – one, because he was born first and second, because he is considered to be the model of a man’s man. In fact, he made his living as an author writing about characters who are considered to be the epitome of masculinity (even when, as it sometimes was, very obviously toxic masculinity). He went to a public high school, in a major U. S. city, but did not attend college. He was married four times, traveled the world, fathered three children (all boys), and spent his 26th birthday starting his first novel – which would also be one of his most famous works. (I think) he smoked and he (definitely) drank for most of his life; however, his drinking became excessively excessive after a couple of plane crashes in Africa. He was devastated when his first wife lost a suitcase full of manuscripts and (towards the end of his life) super paranoid that the American government was keeping tabs on him. They were; the FBI had a file on him – in part because of his ties to Cuba. He received electroshock treatments/therapy at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and committed suicide, just like his father, sister, and brother (as well as one of his father-in-laws). He was 61. It’s possible that his paranoia and suicide were (in part) caused by the same thing that caused his father’s paranoia and suicide; they bother suffered from hereditary hemochromatosis, which causes the body to absorb too much iron and leads to physical as well as mental deterioration. He is often quoted as saying that in a man must do four things in his life (in order to be a man): plant a tree, fight a bull, write a novel, and father a son (although some have said “raise a son”).
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because this first author is Ernest “Papa” Hemingway. (He has not been featured as a Google Doodle – but he has been quoted in reference to Google Doodles for Josephine Baker and René Maran.) Hemingway started off as a journalist, who served in World War I (as a Red Cross ambulance driver, because the U. S. Army diagnosed him with bad eyesight), and somehow (see “curiously” note above) attached himself to a U. S. army infantry regiment during World War II. His work includes novels, novellas, short stories, non-fiction, articles, and published letters. He referred to his minimalist style of writing as “the iceberg theory” or “the theory of omission.”
“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”
– quoted from Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway
As I mentioned before, the woman also wrote about what she knew – of course, what she knew was very different. She wrote, for example, that “you are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace, because everyone is responsible for the other person.” Her gender initially meant that she would be kept at home; however, she convinced her parents that there was a benefit to her going to school. She attended private primary school, earned a scholarship to a private secondary school, and eventually attended the University of London. However, she was also engaged by age 11, married and pregnant at 16 years old, and separated and pregnant with her fifth child by the age of 22. By all accounts, she not only gave birth, she also raised her children and managed to earn a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree in Sociology by age 28 and a PhD by the time she was 47 years old. She received a second, honorary, doctorate from a second University a year later. Her marriage was unhappy, violent, and punctuated by her husband’s paranoia about her writing. He burned her first manuscript. She rewrote it, but five years passed in the interim. She worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London, as a youth worker and sociologist, and as a community worker – all while writing, publishing, and raising her children. Her writing eventually enabled her to travel around the world (including to the U. S.) as a guest professor and visiting lecturer. In addition to working a variety of cultural and literary organizations, she and one of her sons ran a publishing company (that printed some of her own work under her own imprint). She was made an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2005. She suffered a stroke in 2010 and died 7 years later. She was 72. She once said, “I work toward the liberation of women, but I’m not a feminist. I’m just a woman. My books are about survival, just like my own life.”
If none of this sounds familiar, you might be surprised that Buchi Emecheta was celebrated with a Google Doodle a year ago today (on what would have been her 75th birthday). She reportedly started writing as a way to deal with the troubles in her marriage and went on to write novels, children/YA books, plays, articles, and an autobiography. Her son Sylvester, who established a publishing company to ensure his mother’s work stays in print, said that Emecheta was the descendant of storytellers who passed down to him and his siblings the “Moonlight tales” that she learned from her aunts and father.
“Living entirely off writing is a precarious existence and money is always short, but with careful management and planning I found I could keep my head and those of my family, through God’s grace, above water.”
– Head Above Water by Buchi Emecheta
Ultimately, we are taught what someone has decided it is important for us to learn. We may not have any reason to question why we are taught one thing and not another, one author and not another. And, if we are not big readers, we are unlikely to read outside of our primary society’s canon. Maybe, as we get older, we turn to mass market fiction (or non-fiction) as a form of escapism. Maybe we turn to award winning literature – but we don’t really question why one author gets published but not the other, why one book makes the short list but not the other. Since many of us have grown up in society where we were encouraged to learn/do/teach (or see/do/teach) this means that we teach what we were taught – even if we are not teachers. Furthermore, as has happened recently, when we start to question and explore… we start with what (and who) we know – even if the authors we know are not experts in our latest field of study.
This paradox reminds me of Newton’s Laws of Motion (particularly, the law of inertia: an object in motion remains in motion, an object at rest remains at rest – unless something disrupts its condition). It also reminds me of college.
I studied English Literature at a major U. S. university. There had previously been some pretty prestigious guest professors over the years; however, when I started, in the late 1980’s, there were no African, African-American, Black British, or Black anything modules in literature. You might read a writer here or there in a 20th Century survey class, but you couldn’t (as I did with Russian literature) sit in what was essentially an oversized closet with a professor and three or four other students and learn about literature written from the perspective of the African diaspora. (Honestly, in college, I probably didn’t even know how to write a sentence like that – that’s how far African-American literature was outside of my wheelhouse!)
Dr. Lucille P. Fultz joined the faculty my senior year and, with some new awareness, I decided to take one of her classes. She had graduated from Spellman College (a historically black university for women) and completed her graduate degrees at the University of Iowa (which is known for its writers) and Emory University (which is just known). I remember her as my own personal stereotype of a Spellman woman: mature, petite, dark-skinned, natural, knowledgeable (in a seriously erudite way), well-spoken (but also soft-spoken), and dressed to the nines. In my head, she wore white gloves – but honestly, I think I made that up. I may also have made up the idea that she did not original study literature with the intention of teaching African-American literature. I say “I may have made up the idea” because she is now recognized as an authority on Toni Morrison (whose history as a writer/mom/publisher in some ways mirrors Emecheta’s history as a writer/mom/publisher) and she got me to read The Bluest Eye, which was quite possibly the only Toni Morrison book I had not read on my own.
My alma mater now has a history department with “a strong team dedicated to the history of Africa, the African diaspora, and African-American Studies” and a newly established Center for African and African American Studies. Curiously (and going back to the idea that we learn what we are taught and teach what we learn), two of the six members of that dedicated team are easily recognizable as people of color – and they are the only ones on the team who graduated (as undergrads) from the school where they now teach; one graduated just before me, the other attended after Dr. Fultz was firmly established at the university.
“Everyone’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
– Ernest Hemingway
“[I write] stories of the world…[where]… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.”
– Buchi Emecheta
Hemingway wrote about war, sex, love, loyalty, fishing, bullfighting, and the feeling of being lost in the middle of an adventure. Emecheta wrote about sexual discrimination, racial prejudice, sex, love, changing nappies, being a single parent, and religion. They both wrote about culture clashes, their experiences in Africa, as well as about the roles and relationships between men and women, but much of what they wrote looks and feels very different – even when, occasionally, the wrote about the same situations. Take Africa, for instance. To Hemingway, the continent of Africa was an exotic land of (physical) danger and adventure. To Emecheta, Africa (and specifically Nigeria) was home and a land (socially and physically) dangerous in the way it marginalized women.
As I mentioned above, they had different ideas on suicide (even different ideas about why one might consider suicide) and they had very different ideas about education. In her autobiography, Emecheta wrote, “An uneducated person has little chance of happiness. He cannot enjoy reading, he cannot understand any complicated music, he does not know what to do with himself if he has no job. How many times have I heard my friends say, ‘ I want to leave my boring job because I want to write, because I want to catch up with goings on in the theatre, because I want to travel and because I want to be with my family.’ The uneducated man has no such choices. Once he has lost his boring job, he feels he’s lost his life. That is unfair.” On the flip side, Hemingway had significantly less (formal) education than Emecheta, struggled with depression, and stated that when he started writing his first novel, “Everybody my age had written a novel and I was still having a difficult time writing a paragraph.”
“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
– A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
“She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks.”
– Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta
Please join metoday (Tuesday, July 21st) at 12 Noon or 7:15 PM for a virtual yoga practice on Zoom featuring two different perspectives. Use the link from the “Class Schedules” calendar if you run into any problems checking into the class. Give yourself extra time to log in if you have not upgraded to Zoom 5.0. You can request an audio recording of this practice via a comment below.
“If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, ‘Impossible,’ when orders came?”
– For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
“Just keep trying and trying. If you have the determination and commitment, you will succeed.”
– from the poem “Making Contact” by Virginia Satir
For those of you who missed the memo: I am a huge fan of the work of therapist and author Virginia Satir. Born yesterday (June 26th) in 1916, she is known as the “Mother of Family Therapy” and placed her work in “family reconstruction” and “family sculpting” under the umbrella of “Becoming More Fully Human.” She developed the Virginia Satir Change Process Model, which was adopted by corporations in the 1990’s and 2000s as a change management model, and the Human Validation Process Model. Similar to other existential therapist (although I’m not sure she ever used such a label), Satir found that when people came into therapy the presenting, or “surface,” problem was seldom the real problem. Instead, her work revolved around the idea that the real issue was how they coped with situations in their lives. Additionally, she documented that people’s self-esteem played a part in how they coped with conflict and challenges. So, here again, the issue comes down to functional versus dysfunctional thought patterns and how those thought patterns manifest into words and deeds that alleviate suffering or cause suffering.
When Satir worked with patients she would utilize role playing as well as meditations. The role playing was to get family members to consider each other’s perspectives and, in doing so, cultivate empathy and better understanding. The guided meditations were a way for people to recognize that they already had (inside of themselves) the tools/toolkit – or abilities – needed to overcome challenges and obstacles within their relationships. They also empowered people to use the tools that were inside of them, and to cultivate those tools. However, Satir did not see her work as being limited to “traditional” families; she believed that if her work could heal a family unit, it could also heal the world. They key, again, was offering people that “greatest gift” and figuring out what people really wanted and/or needed.
“It is now clear to me that the family is a microcosm of the world. To understand the world, we can study the family: issues such as power, intimacy, autonomy, trust, and communication skills are vital parts underlying how we live in the world. To change the world is to change the family.”
– from The New Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir
Satir was born on the anniversary of the birth of the award winning novelist Pearl S. Buck, who was also known as Sai Zhenzhu. Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia in 1892, Buck spent most of her life in China. Her experiences in China, both as a young child of missionaries and as an adult, resulted in a plethora of novels, short stories, children’s books, and biographies that exposed Western readers to the people, culture, and landscape of China. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Buck was a humanitarian who wrote about everything from women’s rights and immigration to Communism, war and the atomic bomb. Her work was a form of activism, but she didn’t regulate her actions to the page alone. When it came to Asian, mixed-race, special needs, and international adoptions, Buck was more than a writer – she was a parent. In addition to advocating against racial and religious matching in adoptions, Buck adopted six children of various ethnicities and nationalities. (Previously, she had given birth to one special needs daughter. So, she was a mother of seven.) She also co-founded Welcome House, Inc., the first international, inter-racial adoption agency (with author James Michener, lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II, and interior designer and decorator Dorothy Hammerstein); established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to support children who were not eligible for adoption, and opened Opportunity Center and Orphanage (aka Opportunity House) to advocate for the rights of orphans in South Korea, Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam. Buck believed that families formed from love (as opposed to blood, race, religion, or nationality) and that they were living expressions of democracy – something she felt the United States could not unequivocally express during the Jim Crow era. In 1991, Welcome House and the foundation merged to form Pearl S. Buck International to continue Buck’s legacy.
“I was indignant, so I started my own damned agency!”
– Pearl S. Buck explaining why she started Welcome House in 1949 (after multiple agencies told she could not adopt Robbie, a mixed race 15-month old boy, because his skin was brown)
“What lingers from the parent’s individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting.”
– from Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir
Take another look at the poem at the top of this post. No, don’t read it… just look at it. What do you see? More specifically, who do you see? Granted, your device, your eyes, or even your brain may not see what I see. But, consider what you might see. What if you saw yourself? What if you saw someone you loved? What if you saw someone you didn’t like? Even if you don’t see what I see, the underlying meaning is the same: there is an individual, with open arms, wanting, needing, and waiting to be seen.
“We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”
– Virginia Satir
“We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.”
– from The New Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir
If you want to talk about people who did not let other people’s limited perceptions define them, let’s talk about Helen Keller and the people that surrounded her. Born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, today in 1880, Keller lost both her ability to see and her ability to hear when she was 19 months old. She fell ill with what might have been scarlet fever or meningitis and while she lost two of her senses, Keller was far from dumb. She figured out a way to use signs to communicate with Martha Washington (the Black six-year old daughter of her family’s cook, not to be confused with the 1st lady) and by the age of seven she had developed more than 60 signs – which her family also understood. Furthermore, she could identify people walking near her based on the vibrations and patterns of their steps – she could even identify people by sex and age.
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us… Happiness is a state of mind, and depends very little on outward circumstances.”
– from To Love This Life: Quotations by Helen Keller by Helen Keller (with Forward by Jimmy Carter)
Keller’s mother, Kate Adams Keller, learned about Laura Bridgman (who was a deaf and blind adult) from Charles Dickens’ travelogue American Notes for General Circulation. The Kellers were eventually referred to Alexander Graham Bell who, in turn, introduced them to Anne Sullivan (who was also visually impaired, due to a bacterial infection). Keller and Sullivan would form a 49-year relationship that evolved over time. Even when Sullivan got married, Keller (possibly) got engaged, and illness required additional assistance from Polly Thomson, the women worked and lived together. Keller would go on to learn to speak and became a lecturer, as well as an author and activist. Sullivan would be remembered as an extraordinary educator whose devotion and ability to adjust to her student’s needs is memorialized in school names and movies like The Miracle Worker and Monday After the Miracle. Keller (d. 06/01/1968), Sullivan (10/20/1936), and Thomson (03/20/1960) are interred together at the Washington National Cathedral.
“At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him.”
– from “How I Became a Socialist” by Helen Keller (published in The New York Call 11/03/1912)
Helen Keller, like Pearl S. Buck, is notable for many reasons, but both women were (and still can be) considered controversial when you think about their family histories and some of their views. Buck was described as “a thorn in the side of the welfare establishment” and her award-winning novel The Good Earth is considered by some to be literary propaganda. Keller’s father, and at least one of her grandfathers, served in the Confederate Army and she was a related to Robert E. Lee. She was a suffragist, a pacifist, a radical socialist, an advocate for people with disabilities, and a supporter of birth control – but/and she also believed in eugenics. Yes, history has shown us some pretty messed up examples of people believing in eugenics, the idea that we could genetically pre-select character traits in order to create a better society. Besides the basic humanitarian issues, one of the problems with eugenics is that at its core there is a lack of faith in humanity.
In referencing the coincidence that she was related to the first teacher of the deaf in Zurich, Keller wrote in her autobiography, “… it is true that there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.” There is clarity in knowing, deep inside, that you are connected to both sides of the coin. That clarity comes from going deep inside one’s self. If we pay attention to what’s going on inside of our own hearts we have a compass that steers us right – at least, that is the message of contemplatives.
“After long searches here and there, in temples and in churches, in earths and in heavens, at last you come back, completing the circle from where you started, to your own soul and find that He for whom you have been seeking all over the world, for whom you have been weeping and praying in churches and temples, on whom you were looking as the mystery of all mysteries shrouded in the clouds, is nearest of the near, is your own Self, the reality of your life, body, and soul. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it.”
– from “ The Real Nature of Man” speech, delivered in London and published in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Volume 2, Jnana-Yoga) by Swami Vivekananda
Yoga Sutra 2.26: vivekakhyātiraviplavā hānopāyah
– “The clear, unshakeable awareness of discerning knowledge (insight) is the means to nullifying sorrow (created by ignorance).”
Please join me for a little discernment in the form of a 90-minute virtual yoga practice on Zoom today (Saturday, June 27th) at 12:00 PM. You can use the link from the “Class Schedules” calendar if you run into any problems checking into the class. Give yourself extra time to log in if you have not upgraded to Zoom 5.0. You can request an audio recording of this practice via a comment below.
Today’s playlist is available on YouTube and Spotify. (This playlist is dated 06032020.)
“You can never give up because quitting is not an option. No matter how dark it is or how weak you get, until you take that last breath, you must fight.”
– Wayman Tisdale, professional musician and basketball player
“Sad times, may follow your tracks Bad times, may bar you from Sak’s At times, when Satan in slacks Breaks down your self control
Maybe, as often it goes Your Abe-y, may tire of his rose So baby, this rule I propose Always have an ace in the hole.”
– from “Ace in the Hole” by Cole Porter
Here’s a question: Have you ever experienced trauma, loss, and disability? We all have, on some level, and we all will before we leave this earth.
So, here’s a better question: Have you ever experienced trauma, loss, and disability that changed the way you viewed yourself and the world? Many who would have answered “no” to that question a month or two ago (or even a year ago), might answer “yes” now.
I specifically mention two months ago, rather than two weeks ago, because two months ago I was participating in the seventh annual Kiss My Asana yogathon, which benefited Mind Body Solutions. Known for their adaptive yoga program, which includes teacher training, and training for care givers Mind Body Solutions “helps those who have experienced trauma, loss, and disability find new ways to live by integrating both mind and body.” Founding teacher Matthew Sanford is constantly reminding us that at some point we are all going to experience trauma, loss, and disability. Even if we do not become physically disabled, we can experience trauma and loss that disables us and makes it impossible to do things the way we did them before. The practice of yoga, especially as it is applied by the teachers at MBS, is both simple and complex – because the way we deal with trauma, loss, and disability is simultaneously simple and complex… because humans are both simple and complex. Ultimately, it’s not the if/when/how we experience the trauma, loss, and disability that’s important. Ultimately, what’s important is how we deal with it.
“I am only half a man now.”
– Cole Porter to his friends in 1958
“Cancer might’ve taken my leg, but it can’t take my smile.”
– Wayman Tisdale in an ESPN interview released in 2008, five months before he died (The reporter noted that he followed the words with “that famous, ear-splitting grin.”)
Depending on how you look at them, Cole Porter (who was born today in 1891, in Peru, Indiana) and Wayman Tisdale (who was born today in 1964, in Fort Worth, Texas) don’t have a lot in common. Except for the whole birthday thing… and the fact that they were both professional musicians whose parents started their musical training at early ages. (Porter’s mother started him on violin lessons at 6 and piano lessons at 8. Tisdale’s father bought him his first bass guitar at age 8.) Tisdale said music was his “first love” and, undoubtedly, Porter would have shared the sentiment. They both ended up being known for jazz – although slightly different kinds of jazz. Oh, then there is the fact that they both engaged in highly physical activities (outside of music); Porter as an equestrian, Tisdale as a professional basketball player who was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame (2009), the Oklahoma Hall of Fame (2009), and played in both the Olympics (1984) and Pan American (1983) Games. Both men were extremely well-liked and remarked upon because of their sunny dispositions.
Oh, and they were both (right leg) amputees.
Weird coincidence, huh? But, that’s not really the point today. The point today is how they dealt with their trauma, loss, and disability.
“The doctor had never given anyone chemo that was my size. They just calculated how much chemo to give me and said, ‘We hope it doesn’t mess up your kidneys. If it does, sorry.’”
– Wayman Tisdale in an ESPN interview released in 2008, five months before his death
In 1937, a horseback riding accident resulted in the horse crushing both of Cole Porter’s legs. In 2007, Wayman Tisdale fell down a flight of stairs and broke his leg – an accident that revealed he had osteosarcoma in his knee. Both men were bound and determined to live, despite their situations – which involved immense amounts of pain and uncertainty. By all accounts, including his own words, Wayman Tisdale accepted the amputation and focused on using the support around him to help him heal and move forward. He even appreciated the attitude of one of his master teachers/precious jewels, who he didn’t think wanted him to get better, stating in a 2008 ESPN interview, “At the time, I frowned on that. I look at it today that had I not persevered through a lot of the stuff [USA Team coach Bobby Knight] put me through, I probably wouldn’t be here today. I thank God for that dude because he pushed me.” Cole Porter, on the other hand, seems to have given up. He fought the amputation until he was given no other choice and, while he wrote an immense amount of music after the accident that ultimately cost him his leg, he wrote (so far as we know) not a lick after the amputation.
“The lines of ceaseless pain have been wiped from his face…I am convinced that his whole life will cheer up and that his work will profit accordingly.”
– Noel Coward writing in his diary about his friend Cole Porter, after Porter’s leg was amputated in 1958
“But when we first talked on the phone, he [Wayman] made me feel better. Ninety-five percent of us would’ve gone into a deep depression, but he didn’t.”
– Arthur Thompson, drummer and friend of Wayman Tisdale, in a 2008 ESPN interview, after Tisdale’s diagnosis and amputation
Please join metoday (Tuesday, June 9th) at 12 Noon or 7:15 PM for a virtual yoga practice on Zoom, where you can check in with your attitude. Use the link from the “Class Schedules” calendar if you run into any problems checking into the class. Give yourself extra time to log in if you have not upgraded to Zoom 5.0. You can request an audio recording of this practice via a comment below.
Tuesday’s playlist is available on YouTube and Spotify. (Links will be available on Zoom and I have updated this page, with links, shortly before the Noon class. NOTE: Spotify users may have 2 Eartha Kitt songs. Enjoy.)
“For a man who lives by schedules to not know the next day because of being so fatigued, that puts things in perspective.”
– Dolphin Davis, Sr., Wayman Tisdale’s friend and personal trainer
“The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.”
– from A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living by Joseph Campbell
“Democracy doesn’t work without citizen activism and participation. Tickle-down politics doesn’t work much better than trickle-down economics. Moreover, civilization happens because we don’t leave things to other people. What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it as if the cause depends on you, because it does.”
– from Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times by Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers, born today in 1934, is more than a journalist. He is an ordained minister who served as the 13th White House Press Secretary (working with both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson) and produced, along with his wife, “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” (filmed on George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, in 1988), “Mythology of Star Wars, with George Lucas” (also filmed at Skywalker Ranch, in 1999), and “Faith and Reason.” A big fan of Moyers, Campbell, Lucas – as well as faith and reason – I look forward to celebrating June 5th of every year with a yoga practice which features the symbols and archetypes of the Hero’s Journey / Cycle. Even when I don’t teach on the 5th, I usually practice the mandala, which moves through the core elements of every adventure story, as outlined by Joseph Campbell: Being in the Ordinary World, Call to Adventure, Refusal of Call, Supernatural Aid, Crossing the Threshold, Belly of the Whale, Road of Trials, Meeting the Goddess, Temptation, Atonement (usually with the Father), Apotheosis, Refusal of Return, Magic Flight, Rescue from Without, Crossing the Return Threshold, Master of Two Worlds, and Freedom to Live.
In mid-April, my friend Julie K. sent me this pandemic version of the hero’s journey, which I was going to use as a fun way to highlight today’s post. Fast forward to the last couple of weeks and this very creative take on an old classic seems dated and, for some, not that relevant.
“All my life I’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer, but I’ve never prayed, ‘Give me this day my daily bread.’ It is always, ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Bread and life are shared realities. They do not happen in isolation.”
– from “Pass the Bread,” baccalaureate address at Hamilton College (20 May 2006), as quoted in “Moyers on Democracy” by Bill Moyers
Don’t get me wrong. How each of us recognizes ourselves as the hero of our own story and how we engage each stage of the hero’s cycle is still relevant. We can still identify our version of the “Ordinary World” – it’s just that how we defined that world on Memorial Day or May 26th is very different from the way we defined it on April 15th. Now, we’ve all heard the Call and, while some answered the call right away and started moving into the mythical world that eventually leads us to a boon/reward for society, some of us are still in the “Refusal of Call” stage. Which is, dare I say, OK; because we are all going to get there. Part of the Role of the “Supernatural Aid” is to pull, us, drag us, push us – sometimes, kicking and screaming – into this experience.
“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.”
– from A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living by Joseph Campbell
What happens next is always painful, often dangerous, consistently challenging, and (eventually) satisfying/rewarding. (At least, that’s the promise of the myth.) There will be moments when we are not sure we can (or want) to keep going and times when we experience some relief (or the great love of the Goddess) and we want to stay right where we are – even if it is in the “Belly of the Whale.” But, in the end, we are promised a boon, a reward, something that we can bring back to our community – something that serves all of mankind. We are also promised that, through this experience, we will become the “Master of Two Worlds,” and that mastery leads to the ultimate freedom: Freedom to Live. This final stage is partially defined as the freedom to live “in the moment, neither anticipating the future, nor regretting the past” – which is also one of the goals of Eastern philosophies like yoga and Buddhism, to be fully present in the moment.
“…really pay attention to what’s happening internally…. Meditation is learning how to get so still, and so calm, tranquil, through the directing of the attention, to this present moment, that we begin to see really deeply…. And so we go more and more and more deeply into the nature of things, and when that happens, and reactivity ceases, then responsiveness arises.”
– Gina Sharpe, Suffering and the End of Suffering
“Allow yourself that conceit – to believe that the flame of democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in one citizen’s hand.”
– from Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times by Bill Moyers
If you need a little of that “Supernatural Aid” or to feel the divine love of the Goddess, get on the mat or the cushion. Take a walk. Sit by the water. Or, check out the free (outdoor) acupuncture happening on Saturday (11 AM – 5 PM, see details here). Either way, I’ll see you when you cross the threshold.
If you are a certain age or older (as I am) and from certain countries (ditto), and you don’t even have to click on the link above to see the photo. Just the name immediately conjures up the general timing (1989), if not the exact date (which is June 5th), and circumstances. Even though the picture is still, you can probably “see” the little bits of motion that surround this “incident” in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989. That’s how the people in China refer to it (if they refer to it): the “June 4 incident” or the “six-four incident.” Not the protest and (definitely not) the massacre, unless they are outside of China. The Chinese government initially referred to the events in 1989 as a “counterrevolutionary riot,” but then started diminishing the impact. The “counterrevolutionary riot” became just a “riot” and then a “political storm.” Now, the government calls it “political turmoil between the Spring and Summer of 1989.” They did not initially acknowledge that anyone died in and around Tiananmen Square, after what started out as peaceful student-led protests against the government. Later, they would acknowledge that “some” people were injured and “a few” died…but they still distance the injuries and deaths from the “incident.”
Keep in mind, “some” and “a few” are calculated in the thousands.
More telling than how they speak (or don’t speak) about what happened over the next couple of days in 1989, is the fact that if you grew up in China and you are 35 years old or younger, you can probably identify the location (after all, it is a landmark in Beijing), but you may not be able to identify the time, date, and circumstances associated with this picture. At least this was the finding of PBS interview dated April 11, 2006. When I watched the interview, I was a little surprised. What surprised me even more was that if you grew up in the United States and you are 35 years old or younger, you might not even be able to identify the location. (I asked around.)
Do you know this woman? Do you have any idea why (or what) this woman would have been celebrating today in 1919? It’s not surprising if you don’t, regardless of your nationality or age (since if you are reading this blog, you probably weren’t alive at the time). But there are some clues, in particular the date: June 4, 1919. Ring a bell? Does it help if I say she’s connected to the United States?
Feel free to Google it. I’ll wait.
Even if you somehow know this woman is a suffragist, her name (Phoebe E. Burn, “Miss Feeb” or “Feeb” to her friends) may not mean a whole lot to you. Even if you’ve attended one of my August 18th classes and heard me mention her name (and that of her son, then 24-year old Harry T. Burn, Sr. of Tennessee), it still might not immediately register that the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave women the right to vote, was approved by Congress today in 1919. It was passed with 56 “ayes” and 25 “nays,” and ratified by the required three-quarters of the Union on August 18, 1920. Harry Burn, the Republican Representative from Tennessee, was the youngest congressman and was expected to vote against the amendment; which would have killed the legislation. When he voted, he was wearing a red carnation, indicating he was against the amendment. However, unbeknownst to those around him at the time, he carried a note from his mother telling him, “Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the ‘rat’ in ratification.” And, so he did.
Some states got on board relatively quickly, but it would take a while for other states to make the law officially valid. In fact, women would not “officially” and legally have the right to vote (without impediment from the state) in Alabama (until 1953), Florida (until 1969), Louisiana and Georgia (until 1970), North Carolina (until 1971), South Carolina (until 1973), and Mississippi (until 1984).
If you’re wondering why it took so long, consider the fact that many people in power (i.e., men) saw women as little more than children or property. Additionally, they feared what would happen if the power dynamic shifted and women were not only seen as their equals, but also given equal time to be heard as they voiced their concerns about the country. (Speaking of power dynamics, don’t even get me started on how long it took some states to ratify the 13th Amendment, which didn’t even include the right to vote. Yes, I’m looking at you, Delaware, Kentucky, and Mississippi.)
Protests, revolution, and change: it always comes down to this. It also comes down, once again, to perspective. When leadership does not get on board with the changes their constituents are demanding, progress is slow and painful. When individuals do not do the little bit that they can do, for as long as they can do it, very little to nothing happens. When people do not speak up to those they love who may be on the wrong side of history, we find ourselves at a stalemate.
Just consider the historical examples of today.
Despite the quarantine, the political landscape in China looks similar to 1989 – people are once again protesting. And, while women have the right to vote in the United States, own property, drive, and operate a business (that’s not a brothel, boarding house, and/or saloon), there are still major discrepancies in the lived experiences of American men and women.
But, wait a minute. I’m kind of leaving something (or should I say, someone) out of the discussion. Do you see it? Can you see it? If you can’t, you’re in “good” company, because some people couldn’t see it in 1919 either.
A Joyful Practice 