So, tell me about your day...

I've always resonated with the idea that how you spend your days is how you spend your life--and I thought of it especially yesterday, when I had a particularly interesting, although not atypical, day in the office. I thought WES members in particular might be interested to know what a Wednesday looks like for me, so here goes: 9:30 - arrive at the office, check and respond to email, take a look at the newsletter which will need to be sent out in the next day or so; 10 - meeting with a member of staff and a community organization director, talking about how our two organizations could work together in a way to make use of WES' space and benefit both organizations and the community!; 11 - work on information the Board has requested, check email again, check in with some staff members; 11:15 - head out for a lunch meeting with a local rabbi, where we talked about possible ways for our congregations to work together; 12:45 - back from lunch, check email (phone call with a member on the way to and from lunch...but of course carefully watching the road!); 1 - meeting with a visitor to WES to talk about last week's platform and shared interests; 2 - meeting with two WES members to talk about congregational life, great conversation and one of my favorite things to do!; 3:30 - office and administrative work, like editing a lease for our downstairs space, following up with WES members on their gun safety work, meeting with the consultant who's in the office to see how the focus groups are going, and supporting the folks working on logistics for our upcoming anti-racism training; 5:15 - head out the door to pick up my kids! No evening meeting last night, so a little time in the evening on email. And that's a day in the life! What I loved about Wednesday was that it included lots of time connecting with people: with staff members, WES members, visitors, community leaders, and other clergy. I get so many ideas from those conversations, plus they're fun. Now today is another story...a few meetings and a phone call, as well as staff meeting, but I simply HAVE to clear off my desk and clear out my inbox. Wish me luck!

Adapting to Carpets

A couple weeks ago, my family went on vacation to Florida (it was great). We stayed in a condo there, and over the course of the week--and through the process of being littered with toys and books and stuffed animals--it felt sort of like home. After our week in sunny paradise, we came back to our real home. And it felt...not like home. My husband and I both noticed right away that it felt different. Bare somehow, or empty, or just a little off. After a little while, we were able to identify that the problem was that our house wasn't carpeted. Of course, our house has never been carpeted. But apparently that one week of wall-to-wall carpeting in our little Florida condo was enough to re-train our minds to see non-carpeting as empty, bare, wrong. We adjusted back quickly enough, and now our floors just look like floors again. But it got me thinking how quickly we adapt to things, how easy it is for us to be taught that something is acceptable, desirable, even mandatory. What other things in life have I adapted to? What do I think I need to own, to wear, to believe just to be normal? And what process do I go through to examine those adaptations, what trips do I take--should I take--to consider what's really essential? Just musings from my comfortable, "necessity"-filled existence.

Being and Becoming White: Resources

I'm sometimes asked, after a platform address with a lot of "teaching" in it, to share my resources. And I always say "oh, of course, I'll put them on my blog!" and then it is Sunday afternoon and I have officially lost the ability to function. Can you guess how often they make it here? So I'm putting up the major resources I'm using for tomorrow's platform tonight. Ta da! Website for traveling exhibit about race The classic essay on white privilege A great list of common "detours" (I like that phrasing, too) that lead to white guilt and denial [I didn't use this resource as much for this platform, but I think it's a good list] And two books: "The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control" by Theodore W. Allen - great if you have, oh I don't know, a PhD and a lot of time (but it is a seminal work in this field) "What If All the Kids Are White? Anti-Bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families" by Louise Derman-Sparks and Patricia G. Ramsey - totally readable and engaging, I think even if you have nothing to do with young children because it just has some good background on white identity and privilege Happy resource reading!

Zen and the Art of Packing Ornaments

I love un-decorating for Christmas. I love decorating, too, putting up each sparkly ornament and ornate stocking holder. For a while, my house looks like it was taken over by the glitter-and-gold fairy, and it's a welcome spot of brightness in the cold, dark days. But just as good, in my opinion, is taking them all down. All my regular things suddenly look simple and elegant. My living room seems huge without a six foot tree in it. There's a sense that everything is back in its place, quiet and unassuming. And that's winter for me, too: not just the sparkle of the holidays, but the waiting and quiet and beautiful dark of the rest of the months. A poet calls winter a time of "pregnant negativities"--the spare architecture of the trees, showing us the house across the street that we almost never see in the summer time; the cold ground, where we just know the bulbs are gathering strength for their big showy blossoms in the spring. So I invite you, in the weeks and months to come, to look at the spaces where the decorations are not, where the leaves are not, where the sun is not. And to find in those places, too, a kind of beauty, a quiet waiting for what comes next.

Heartbreak

Dear ones, and I mean every reader, every American, every other human. Again today our hearts break as we read the news of the little children killed in Connecticut. Again we ask ourselves what we can do to prevent this violence, to change our laws and our culture and ourselves so that children are not in danger when they go to school. Again we weep. Friends and colleagues have been posting about the need for tighter gun control, and about the very human need to hug our children, any children, hard today. Both of those needs are true for me. And true, too, is the need to weep, to keen, to lament loudly. Sometimes at a memorial service a family member will warn me they might cry, or apologize later for crying too much. I usually say the same thing in response: this is the right time to cry. This is a moment that deserves the respect of our tears. And so if you are crying today, I say thank you. Thank you for having a heart that still breaks, for recognizing in these children your own children, for seeing that we are one human family and that when tragedy hits one of us it hits each of us. I will be crying too. Don't forget--after the crying, we organize, we protest, we legislate. But first, we weep. Again, we weep.

Swimming, Piano, and Lessons of Life

As readers of this blog may remember, my older daughter recently started taking piano lessons. I wrote a few months ago about my excitement for her, and how I was trying to rein it in and allow her to have her own experience. Turns out, she loves them. She has a fabulous teacher, but she also clearly has at least some natural interest in and aptitude for music. She's doing well in the lessons (whatever "well" means for a 4 year old...she's no prodigy!) and most importantly she's having a great time. The last lessons she took were swimming lessons at our local Y. She also had great teachers, but she didn't have much interest or aptitude for swimming. And although I think it's important to learn to swim for safety reasons, we're giving her a break from that...trusting that somewhere along the line a camp counselor will get her the rest of the way from the doggie paddle to proficient. What's interesting to me as I look at her two experiences is how much differently she behaves--and, I think, feels--when she's learning about something that is the right fit for who she is. It has me thinking about all the kinds of things we try to convince ourselves to be: to be a certain kind of parent, or a particular profession, or a kind of exerciser. All the boxes we try to fit into, and then the freedom and joy we feel when we move from that box into another box, an us-sized box, one that really fits our true selves. We can become completely convinced that we're an inept exerciser, only to discover that it's just that we didn't like running, but we really rock at kick-boxing. Or think that we can't study worth a darn, until we discover a subject that we're passionate about, and suddenly we're making flashcards and absorbing material like the A student we never thought we could be. Who knows if piano will stick, or if my daughter will eventually come to love swimming. I just hope that all of us find the freedom to explore until the right box comes along.

Ally Yourself

I've been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be an ally. As a white person, a person with economic privilege, a straight person, I've often seen myself as an ally to people who experience less privilege in our culture's system. But recently an anti-racist educator challenged that idea of being an ally, suggesting that the whole concept is embedded in a system of oppression...where some have privilege and some don't, and those with privilege can be an ally. She encouraged me to think about the idea of being an anti-racist white person instead, of choosing to put forth an identity that actively works against the system of oppression. If this is all getting a little heady, let me suggest a more tangible example--a time recently when I might have been an ally, but when I felt like I was just part of a new culture. The recent election included the passage of marriage equality in Maryland, something I had worked a little on and hoped a lot for. In the days that followed, I had an interesting experience. As I spoke with friends who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual--the people who would be potentially affected by the new law because they were now able to marry their partners, at least in one more state--I struggled with what to say. Part of me wanted to say "congratulations!" as though this was their victory. And I recognize that on some level, as a woman married to a man whose marriage has never been called into question, my friends and colleagues who are LGB or queer have a personal relationship with this law that I will never experience. But at the same time, I felt as though I wanted to say congratulations to myself, to all of Maryland, to everyone else who had worked on and hoped for this. I felt not like an ally to a group that had finally won its rights, but like a part of a new thing, a full participant in a society that was doing something right, something loving and inclusive. I think that this was a taste of what it's like to move beyond ally-dom and into anti-ism-dom, whether it's racism or heterosexism or any other kind of ism. Or maybe it's not even anti-ism-dom but inclusion-dom, or equality-dom, or whatever kind of world isn't just about fighting systems of oppression but actually imagining itself without systems of oppression. We have a long way to go, on all those isms. But I'm beginning to think that on that journey, I don't want to be just an ally...I want to be a full traveler. I would love to hear thoughts and responses to all of this, from those who resonate with the word ally, who don't think it's quite right, and everything in between!