The Beating Heart of History and Memory - #BlackHistoryMonth

With Carolyn, my church friend who invited me to be part of the Black History Month celebration in her assisted living facility.

Despite years of teaching and formative years spent performing in theater, I confess that public speaking sets my heart racing. But like any good exercise, I know that it is good for me to get out of the house, get out of my comfort zone, and push myself just enough to at least break a sweat.

So thank you Carolyn, for the invitation to share some thoughts. And thank you all for your hospitality and willingness to listen.

I thought this talk would be a meditation on how the world, our country, and my family would be if three contemporaries - Anne Frank, Martin Luther King, Jr., and my grandmother, Janie Mae White - had all survived the torments that killed them - directly with Anne and Martin - and indirectly with Grandma. But that reflection was bringing me into a place of pithy cynicism. And then four days ago, my Uncle Henry - the Griot of our family history - passed away. And I’ve not been able to resume the thought exercise. We can never know the What Ifs of an alternate timeline where loss and horrors are beaten back. When we try to imagine it ... what we try to imagine ... always says more about the daydreamer than it can ever say about the ones we lost.

In drafting these remarks, I had to be honest with myself and with you and acknowledge the way history and memory function in the lives of my one beating, grieving, hopeful heart. The two - History and Memory - are like a blood pressure dance between the systolic and diastolic, striving to find a sustainable level of exertion in relation to the walls of society and family that define what it means to be fully human.

The systolic blood pressure measures the force of blood against our artery walls while our ventricles push blood out to the rest of our bodies. The diastolic blood pressure indicates how much pressure our blood exerts while the heart is at rest between beats.

There is a curious relationship between blood pressure and arterial walls: the higher the pressure the greater the stress on the artery. And yet even when the blood pressure is within the range of normal, the artery can still have fundamental, structural flaws that make it weak and vulnerable to collapse or rupture. Arterial walls can thicken, thin, become inflamed, calcify, and rupture in response to injuries brought on or aggravated by neglect or carelessness as we sustain the body as a whole.

Society has similar needs for nurturance. Societies that habitually fail to care for the beating hearts within them, eventually develop an atherosclerosis that not only debilitates the individual hearts but also the society as a whole. History is the systolic measure of how our forebears strove to make their lives in the context of the society in which they found themselves. It is a measure of both the force of the exertion and the inflexibility of the social constructs. Memory is the diastolic measure of those moments of pause and recovery, however fleeting and confined.

Lifestyle changes - like eating more fish oil, fresh fruit and veggies, reducing intake of empty carbs and sugars, and managing our weight can help restore elasticity to our blood vessels. Similarly, acknowledging painful history, remembering the losses, discovering overlooked innovation, and understanding the continued impacts of them all, are necessary societal changes that improve the arterial health of the heart of our society.

If he had to die - as I know we all must - at least Uncle Henry’s heart beat its last on Valentine’s Day during Black History Month. His love was complicated and not always easy to discern. But his love of our family, of our country, of our Black American History and of telling that history was absolute. Despite the systolic pressure from navigating racism in South Carolina, the Midwest, and his tours in Korea to eventually become one of the first black customer engineers at IBM and a seasoned entrepreneur, he reveled in the diastolic memory of family helping family navigate the changes in society’s walls.

During our last call, two weeks before he passed, he sounded like a young man, remembering with reverence the resilience of our family during one of our nation’s cruelest periods. He wasn’t bitter. He was inspired and in turn, he inspired me.

I believe Black History Month is an invitation to practice an ethic of care and remembrance on a broader scale. It invites us to prioritize healing the systolic damage caused by the struggle against the calcified cruelties of racism, segregation, and discrimination. It invites us to explore the diastolic calm when our hearts rest, our minds remember, and our communities honor the persistence of dreams, perseverance and resilience that can inspire us all.

For the Love of a Small Tourist Town

I've had friends marvel that even when we lived in a Classic Six apartment on NYC's Upper West Side, two blocks from Riverside Park, and zoned to one of NYC's best public schools, my heart longed for a little faux Bavarian town in the Eastern Cascades.

Today, on The Last Day of Summer (unofficial), I was reminded of the wisdom of choosing to come Home, of admitting that the Upper Valley is Home, not because I was born and bred here (I wasn't) but because the cadence at the river's edge and the casting magic of the undulating light on the mountains tune the resonance of my heart and soul.

We strolled from home around midday, dropped our books off at the library, and made a little pit stop at the tasting room of one my favorite wineries. Then we meandered through the waning throngs of tourists and made our way to the river. 

On its sandy banks, Z swam, I read, and others floated, swam, napped and generally enjoyed the perfect day. 

I looked up from my book to find my daughter building a volcano at the water's edge. A little girl, with a sweet Spanish lilt to her voice asked if she could help. Z said yes. A Somali family frolicked with their toddler nearby, even as she looked over at The Big Girls and clearly set some personal goals. A boy - a bit younger than Z and the brother of her new helper-friend - asked if he could help too. 

As The Trio dug and chatted, other voices from other corners of the world passed by, like starling murmurations at twilight. Some Russian, Japanese, English, and a couple languages I could not place. And laughter - sometimes raucous, sometimes giggly, all of it pure.

All of us - most of us with our children -  simply enjoying the day. And respecting each other's right to Be and Enjoy and Savor the gift of this place and time. It was remarkable in its unremarkableness. 

Some fifty years ago or so, this community was a struggling logging town staring down the prospect of its own decline. But in recognizing the community's topographic similarity to communities in Bavaria, residents saw Hospitality as a path to renewed prosperity. 

Welcoming strangers to experience the Beauty of this place meant inviting strangers to weave this landscape and community into the fabric of their families and their lives. Some of those strangers became neighbors, friends and family. Some of those strangers never returned. And over the years, the community stabilized and grew and evolved.

To be fair, not all of the growth or evolution has been well or equitably managed. Many of the descendants of that first generation of re-inventors cannot afford to return or stay. The economy traded one primary industry for another, with little diversification. And the housing prices and vacancy rates have no correlation to local median income or need.

But the community has persisted as it has evolved. And Hospitality has made this small hamlet of less than 2,000 year-round residents, a home away from home for over 2 million visitors from around the world, annually.

At times, it can feel a bit like the utopia of the Tao Te Ching: small with neighbors nearby but not in your face; a place for community and cultural experiences; and a respite for peaceful reading and writing and creating. At other times, it can feel like a case study in Overtourism.

Today, it felt like what it has become - from my first rafting trip over ten years ago, to today as my daughter made impromptu play friends on the banks of the river - Home.

March Madness

It's remarkable how tempting it is to over-stuff the weekend when so many opportunities and priorities compete for the limited waking hours. There's so much life to cram in.

I had hoped to help register voters at the March today but I have A LOT of cleaning to do ahead of my kid's 8th birthday costume dance party tomorrow: my costume to layout, her costume to mend (thanks to Cocoa, our Rabbit with Bad Habits), baking, shopping, my first jog after three days of crud, cleaning and more cleaning still.

I wanted to march in remembrance. But as I ease into gear today, I'm going to try to exorcise my memories of pulling the van over on the way to my kid's preschool, on my Mom's birthday, to ugly cry at the news of Sandy Hook. I'm going to try to exorcise my memories of the gallows humor I began to develop in the early Nineties when "going postal" entered the national vocabulary and I had already attempted to bury memories of the shooting at my Mom's work a few years before, under layers of other drama (mostly involving Butthead, my stepfather, who thankfully never had a gun). 

As I bake Z's favorite sheet cake and scatter rainbow sprinkles over the buttercream frosting she loves, I will rehearse how to ask family and friends - without judgment, just due diligence - whether their kids know the combination to the family gun safe, or know where the concealed but unsecured guns are. I don't want to seem nosy or judgey - because finding and keeping Mommy Friends is hard, y'all. I'd just like my kid to keep living to see another play date. 

And as I whisk and rehearse, I will remember that one time she won at hide-and-seek when we visited some friends. They lived on an island where break-ins were common but no alarm service seemed to operate, and both violent crime and vicious wildlife were practically non-existent (well, except for that one cougar who had swam across the inlet and laid low, except for a couple chickens...unless that was the raccoons). After the other kids couldn't find her, I joined the search and found her in the parents' bedroom closet (Ugh! Kid!) - giggling quietly, one hand on her mouth, the other grasping the door jamb ready to spring from her hiding place. She was utterly unaware that her little hand was next to a shotgun -- barrel up.

I have since repeatedly reminded her about staying out of grown up spaces - for so many reasons. I don't know what to do about our new friend's gun safe in the family fun room where the computer and family pets live. Why is it so much easier to compare and align strategies for holding our kids accountable during play dates in our respective homes than it is to discuss the steps we each take to insure that our children are safe in each other's homes? How do we talk with friends and family who seem to be responsible gun owners and parents? We are all raising kids who also seem pretty good...until they're not. 

We are raising human beings who are learning everyday, how to be good people. And they often, heck, almost always learn by making mistakes. Don't touch the fireplace grate, it'll burn you. Check. Walk before you run, or you'll face-plant. Check. If you grab the cat by the tail, she might scratch you. Check. Don't eat the yellow snow. Ever. Ugh, check. Don't throw sticks or play shovels, someone could get hurt. Check, which is why my dear girl has a third dimple thanks to the teacher's kid who will forever be That Little Sh*t, to me. 

But at least he didn't have access to a gun with which to kill her as he overreacted to her hoarding of that swing. 

On the spectrum of bad choices when kids can access their parents' guns (not because they should or are allowed to but because they are physically capable of finding or stumbling across damned near everything we don't want them to find), we have: 

• the two year old boy who broke the rules, unzipped his mom's concealed carry purse, and accidentally killed her
• the six year old who shot a classmate, 
• the eight year old who played with a poorly concealed family weapon and accidentally killed himself - apparently one of three such kids in that weekend
• the twelve year-old girl whose show-and-tell gun shot two classmates - one in the head -when she accidentally dropped the backpack
• the sophomore at my high school in 1992, who shot himself in the head playing Russian Roulette in a car in the school parking lot (though, to be fair, I'm not sure where he got the gun); 
• the "love-sick" misogynist teenage boy just last week, who couldn't handle rejection, so he shot and killed the "Object" of his "Affection"; 
• and the list goes on and on and shamefully on. 

The gift of childhood as fought for and created and nurtured in America requires that we create environments for our children that foster Failing Forward into being better individuals, better citizens, better friends, better family... better people making better choices. That means minimizing their exposure to the dangers that are not age-appropriate. That means creating opportunities for learning - and failing - that can help the children we know and love without hindering or killing the children we don't know (or even the Little Sh*ts we don't like).

Guns are the third biggest killer of American children. And the majority of children killed by guns in the developed world, are Americans. While most of that death is intentional and caused by their own family and friends, or themselves, a non-negligible amount is accidental. And more than 80% of the accidental gun deaths occur in the home, with unsecured guns. There are nearly 2 million children living in homes with unsecured guns and I can guarantee that the vast majority of those kids go to and host play dates. 

I don't want any more children - but especially my child - to be exposed to that degree of risk. And yet it feels increasingly like too many of my gun-enthusiast friends and family prefer to protect their weapons more than our children. The tools they have embraced for protecting their children have become more precious than all of our children. As adults, he have failed backward and our children - all of them - are being dragged by the backdraft.

No wonder so many are marching. And crying. And screaming. And acting out. It's what our children do when they are hurting. And scared. 

I miss the days when my girl was only afraid of zombies because I may have prematurely shown her Michael Jackson's "Thriller". So far this year, she has brought home a flyer from school featuring the NRA's Eddie Eagle, and parents have received two incident messages THIS WEEK with allegations about creepy dudes and kids from her K-2 elementary school talking crap about guns. None of it was true but all of it caused anxiety.

No wonder my girl is desperate to be homeschooled. At least with homeschooling, she's unlikely to be normalized into accepting the risk that a kid, a parent, a neighbor, or a teacher might go rogue (with a gun or without) and kill her while she practices her cursive. 

But homeschooling does nothing about play date safety, which ever since she won hide-and-seek, has taken on deeper meaning for me.

And as a single parent, working for a nonprofit, I cannot afford to homeschool her or hire an old school tutor. So...I guess I'll just bake an effing cake, prep my Mommy Pirate costume, pregame my knees with ibuprofen to prepare for garage dancing to KidzBop with a dozen of my kid's friends and parent-friends, who will also hopefully be in costume. 

The life-and-death matters that should plague me today are how we are going to get through the pre-tween years without me having a heart attack, and whether the party will wrap before the late afternoon hangries create an elementary Battle Royale. Instead I remember the ones lost, the ones we could have lost, and the childhood innocence my eight year old is rapidly losing. I could march but instead I'll bake a cake and try, one more day to keep the anxiety of this worsening Normal at bay. 

Grief and Gratitude

Today I learned of the loss of a Coulda-Been-Friend. And I am so...very...sad.

She whisked into my life at a time when work and purpose and my sense of self were all swirling in a fog of passion, gratitude, uncertainty, and malaise. And one day, over a bed of weeds at an urban farm, she graced me with the gift of compassionate listening, and generous mirth.

In the months that have passed since we met, she would periodically check in on me, and I on her. We would exchange anecdotes and mutual encouragement. And when my journey brought us both into the same state again, we made tentative plans to meet and catch up.

But there was always work. Or vacations. Or illness. Or simply the impatient and speedy passage of time.

And so we never met up.

And now, we never will.

Just two days and about a dozen emails. But those two days at a conference and those dozen or so emails were an encounter with Grace. For that, I will always be grateful.

Rest peacefully, Seana. I know you walk with the angels.

Springing Forward...with Stubborn Persistence

I am a fair-weather morning person. So like so many people, this was a rough week. Late winter gloom, Daylight Savings Time and early allergies have made mincemeat of my energy, sleep pattern and focus. 

And yet, I am also jazzed, with clarity about a single-minded mission: becoming a flower farmer and farmstead entrepreneur.

Sure, I just began a new job I love (and which, sadly, is under acute threat if 45's budget hit list is to be believed). But it is 3/4 time and is values-aligned with my stubborn desire (going on eight years now) to start and grow a farm-based business.

A property I have been eye-balling for almost two years went back on the market a short while ago, and my wheels began to turn.

I began communicating with the owner, visited the snow-blanketed property, and went into feasibility research mode in every spare moment. 

This week, my meeting with the local Small Business Development Center went very well, and while I have more homework to complete before our follow up meeting next week, I am reassured in the feasibility of the concept AND my ability to execute it. 

Over the years, I have developed a number of business projects that usually got to the capital raise stage and petered out. I used to lament these but I stopped doing so once I realized that with each effort, I learned more about myself, the markets, and the nature of business itself. But I also learned that it is so much harder to build a business without being rooted in community. 

We are home. 

Finally. 

And this community is one I love and have loved for years. 

It's telling that when I envision the Farm, I don't just see the fields and the canning garden or even the canning kitchen - spaces of meditative work for me and my soul. I envision people coming as guests. People integrating the story of the Farm into the narratives of their lives. Communities planted through seeds of commerce and cultivated through the humus of hospitality, memories and joy.

And so I persist...with spreadsheets, the business plan, and preparing documents for loan applications and prospective investors.

The seed has been planted in good potting soil. It's incubating in the greenhouse, with the seedling beginning to break through. By the grace of God and the stubbornness with which the Divine has gifted me, this is the year the seedling will transplant well and the Farm will finally bloom. 

The Ones That Sing in Winter

I stepped out

Expecting silence to swallow

Each crunch of my pensive steps.

The hubris of my forgetting

Your songs and feathers 

Tumbling the snow 

dust from the leaves

Your lilting melodies 

Indifferent to my progress

As you soar freely above.

Embracing Hygge, Solstice and Faith

A short while ago, I came across two writings - an excerpt from a book and an article - that have struck such a chord with where I am and who I've become. While not driving the decision I have made, they have helped me better understand it as more than an act of mothering and self-care. The decision was a necessary pang for new birth.

First, from The Spiritual Meaning of the Winter Solstice:

The birth of a divine child and savior at the winter solstice has formed a central part of spiritual beliefs throughout the world since the beginning of history — in ancient Egypt as the birth of Horus, the birth of Mithras in Persia, the birth of Jesus at Christmas, the birth of the divine Son at Alban Arthan of the Druids, etc. These celebrations have tapped into a universal spiritual principle that is just as relevant now as it was then. 

They speak to us of a mysterious and universal understanding of spiritual transformation. All things which come into being must first be born. Even as creation was borne by the great Mother of the universe, so too must we be born of the spirit to become spirit. The winter solstice is a celebration of being born again — not of flesh, but of the spirit. It’s a celebration of the birth of the spiritual Son, the Christ, within a person’s consciousness in the process of awakening. 

Symbolized as a child just as the winter sun is at its weakest, it will grow until reaching its full strength at the summer solstice—just as the spirit grows within a prepared individual to transform them completely from inner darkness into light.

And so the Winter light begins to return, with ever increasing clarity.

Friday marked my last day working for an organization I have admired for many years and worked for, for nearly two. I made the bittersweet decision to resign as the Best for Colorado Campaign Manager because - despite my love for and success with the work - it was becoming increasingly clear that for my family, and my own heart and soul, we need to return to Washington state. 

And so, I return Home, not to the state of my birth but to the state of my becoming. Where I became an adult more fully than I'd ever been before. Where I reconnected with my bucolic heart. Where I became a mother. Where I became better attuned to the resonance of my soul.

I don't know what's next. But I know my kid is happier than she has been in months.

Professionally, I have an interview scheduled with another organization I have admired and with which I have wanted to work for several years.

Residentially, I have a few leads on rentals in the notoriously tight rental market.

But thanks to the parting generosity of my former employer, I don't have to act with immediacy on the first "Next Gig". And we have friends who have offered interim shelter until I am able to find us a home.

What a rare and precious gift.

I have resources to take the time to release, relax and recalibrate. If my interview on Tuesday doesn't work out, then I will fail forward into other opportunities, as I make myself fully at home in a community that I have adopted, a community that brings Z closer to her paternal family and to which we have regularly returned as our True North since leaving Washington in 2012.

And while I HATE moving - especially cross-country moving, which I've done twice in the last 18 months for opportunities with B Lab  - and I have never moved in the dead of winter, I find that I don't entirely mind.

I have embraced my professional down time and even the move as an exercise in the spirit of the Danish tradition, Hygge.

Now, I'm pretty sure there is no Danish in my family history. But when I read an article about Hygge, a light bulb of recognition went off. Hygge describes what I'm looking forward to. Hygge describes how I plan to spend at least the next two - three weeks (well, depending on the move timeline).

“Hygge, during the short, dark days and long nights, is akin to wintering. To slowing down, allowing the year to fold in on itself, and tending to ourselves and to each other."

And it has six core elements.

1. Slow Down

My last year has been a case study in Marathon Busyness. And since I'm more of a 5k with Sparkle Dust kind of gal, I need to Slow...The Frak...Down.

I will slow down by taking snowy walks and finally some cross-country skiing lessons for the first time in almost seven years.

I both need and want to recalibrate my sense of Now, with a greater focus on presence and an unlearning of the disease of "busy." 

2. Create a Circle of Warmth

Hygge is "sort of a full-on embrace of all things toasty, cozy, and restorative."

I look forward to the warmth of old friends and the joy of new ones. And the introvert part of my extraverted introversion equally looks forward to the comfort of my favorite sweats. I might even see if I can find one of those sensory deprivation pools in dark rooms for a little Womb Return reenactment.

3. Soothe Your Senses

But I don't want total sensory deprivation. I want and need a sensory reset with familiar landscapes, and favored flavors (Cave B Cuvée de Soleil, Chukar Cherries and all things Tillamook ...I have missed thee). All at an altitude that doesn't still have me wheezing.

And then there's the Sister Santa massage gifts and some day soon, a pilgrimage day to Olympus.

4. Embrace the Small Stuff

A small home in a small town can root and grow big dreams.

5. Celebrate the Season (and not just The Holidays)

Unlike the cacophony that often takes over the Holidays, the Winter season - especially in the mountains and high desert - has a majestic silence when we turn off the gadgets and allow ourselves to fully embrace the season. It creates an unavoidable encounter with Self.

6. Know That It Won't Last Forever

Having never been unemployed, with a child before - without also being a full time student - the most comforting part of Winter may be the reminder that This Too Shall Pass. One can survive Winter and just be glad to get through it. Or one can decide to thrive during Winter and commit to making the best of it. Slowing down, scaling back, and turning inward need not equate to coming to a stand-still, giving up and shutting down.

I am cocooning for a few weeks. And like all cocooning, mine is a stage in active transformation. It is not without its risks. But it's also not without its opportunities. And I know that it is the best choice for me, my daughter, and our family.