Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
How to write a poem
is one thing you thought you’d never forget
but after a while even the wobble escapes you.
Wheels warp, refuse to align.
Months of days passing the place you stashed it
before you notice it’s gone.
Stolen? At first it seems so, a ragged hole
the size of your fist
in the door just below the lock.
We believe that hundreds of UU churches signaling to their own members and to the larger community that “our faith takes racism seriously, especially within our own walls” will push our faith toward the beloved community we all seek.
On Sunday, my Unitarian Universalist congregation participated in the first #UUWhiteSupremacyTeachIn. This began as a call to action by Black Lives of UU for congregations around the country the dedicate one day of services to teaching about racism and white supremacy. Our worship team took the charge seriously, shifting not only the content of the service but the very structure of how we gather together. A new seating arrangement brought everyone face-to-face. Without the familiar printed order of service to guide us, we watched videos of anti-racist leaders like Tricia Rose, and worshiped in the company of art and music by people of color. Most notably, our pastors made unflinching use of the term “white supremacy.”
Because now we must save the whole world, my son’s bow slips from the strings. The last reverberation hums against windows closed against night. So does the cold flash of his gaze when he slaps the songbook shut.
He refuses.
I walk out.
He asks. I fumble. Events crash past, plowing under a vocabulary both dated and outgunned. My words like vestigial limbs grasp at an extinct terrain.
As we drive the short distance home, NPR wallops us with our nightly load of federal ordure. The new Congress just voted to pave the way for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Our representatives exhumed an old law which will allow them to slash the pay of any federal worker down to $1. In a stage play of quasi-constitutionalism, those who ask the toughest questions wield no power. The men in charge anoint a public opponent of civil rights as the nation’s Attorney General and an oil tycoon as Secretary of State.
Continue reading “Inauguration Eve: Make Like a Tree and (Be)lieve”
It’s old school. It’s unsexy.
It takes under five minutes.
And it’s effective.
Use this call sheet as a script to make a call to your representatives on issues of concern. Adapt it as you see fit.
Notice that the call sheet has tabs across the top. In addition to scripts, you’ll see lists of representatives and other tips. This sheet is merely a template created in the first week after the election. As events unfold, the language and issues will change.
I’m embarrassed to admit that for all decades of armchair commentary — indeed, I still consider myself “radical” despite my unexceptional suburban existence — I haven’t actually picked up the phone to talk to my senators or representatives in a lifetime and a half.
Yesterday, I made the calls. The action was straightforward and very simple. It took no more time a walk down the hall to fill up my water bottle, and arguably went much further to quench my thirst.
Poor as sin, a bottle of wet, two friends dead. A man outside her window. Wallet on the car floor, wheels spitting asphalt, WaWa bathroom, brown tile walls. Lady pushes her girl into the stall, “You go even if you don’t have to.”
First book with chapters: Sweet Valley High. Which one, all the same. Skin dry, skin slick, so pretty before but realized it too late, that’s always the story. She borrows makeup from a friend, color off. Friend is a generous term. They had been small enough to fit on the same block. Once. Adults now, those girls, dulled but also steady. Selective memory to fill gaps.
New shoes she didn’t buy. Two quarters and a dime, a pack of gum gone soft, the name of the baby they took or she gave, who remembers. The recipe for making him stay, the back of a stained receipt, a language she learned to whisper but never to speak. Paycheck stub, proof of value, plastic troll with hair, once blue.
We can do so much better. For the past few years, our patterns were stuck enough to seem hopeless. This past June, I made the choice to cultivate a more loving home.
After a long summer that included a stretch of five weeks apart, my son is back. This is the first night of his 4th grade year that he is spending with me. The evening coincides with a parent-teacher event. This means my boy runs wild around the neighborhood with his pals for a few hours before I have to leave him behind. He comes in, flushed and breathless, and parks himself in front of his video games. I lock the door behind me.
On bike, top of hill, foot down. Red light. It was green as I was climbing but turned yellow before I could get through. It’s a quiet Saturday, holiday weekend. A few cars cross in front of me, no one behind me. The rotation complete, my turn next, I step on the pedals and inch out. The light stays red, though. It is red as oncoming traffic starts to enter and turn left. Because no drivers had joined me on my side of the intersection, the signal never kicked to green. I could wait here all day at a red light that stays red. Instead, I press through. The oncoming drivers pause for two extra beats to wait for me before turning left across the empty lane.
A man jams his body halfway out of his driver’s side window. His head, arm, torso look like they’re about to climb out after me. He screams across the road, “Why don’t you obey the law, you fucking idiot!”
I catch my breath and keep riding.
Through my head race all the answers I would say if his were a real question. Louder than my imagined response is the clang clang clang of his fury: “You fucking idiot, you fucking idiot, you. . .” For the next mile at least, I tense at every approaching engine, sure he’s whipped around to come after me. Will my helmet work when he clips me and I flip onto the side of the road? It’s a quiet, leafy neighborhood. People are out. Surely someone will see it and call 911.
You fucking idiot, you fucking. . . Continue reading “Making Way”
As I shift, so does my son. I invite him to “special time,” a goofy name for a powerful connection, and he first rolls his eyes. “I’m not doing that.” The idea of playing just with me for 30 minutes is near the bottom of his list.
“You get to be in charge,” I explain. “It just has to be between here and the park.” Also, no screens, and no one’s hurting anyone else. Other than that, we can do anything he wants.
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
“Can I throw pillows at you?” His eyes have stopped rolling and now they’re fixed on me.
“Sure, as long as you’re not hurting me.”
“Can we go outside and play a tag game?”
I laugh “Of course.” Tag is the one thing that I almost always resist when he suggests it. Chase my son endlessly around the neighborhood? I’d rather stay in and clean hair out of the bathtub drain. As it turns out, it’s not tag or pillows. “Pirate ship!” he shouts, and runs into the living room to start moving furniture. We pull out the ladder for scaffolding, king-sized sheets for the mast. Bug creates turrets using plastic wine goblets. He also creates something called a “maker” which is a kind of on-deck factory that turns raw materials into weapons.
If someone asked me to describe my son with naked honesty, I might say obstinate, aggressive, bright and powerful. Curious but easily frustrated. Sometimes cold and snubs emotional connection. The boy hates to lose. He’s an Eeyore on steroids.
If that same someone were to walk into our house during our first shot at Special Time, they’d see an entirely different boy. Here is a child who is eager and spunky. He’s creating an elaborate game with unclear structure, and he’s persevering with enthusiasm. As he turns the form of Minecraft into a real-life activity, he’s engaging me in fizzy conversation. He’s cracking jokes.
The visitor in our house would meet a boy who is close to his mom, sharing and cooperating, confident enough to be fine with uncertainty. Here is a Piglet who is ready for anything.
So which boy is he?
We like to think of personality as fixed. That person in our life is a certain set of characteristics: maybe kind, a little introverted has good follow-through on commitments but fumbles in front of crowds. This is the person we know, and because we know she’s this way, we have a sense of predictability in our friendship, workplace, or marriage. If people are changeable, how could we function in our roles?
Indeed, we haven’t needed to ask this question much because most of the common (if mistaken) personality theory that dominates our lives reinforces the notion of consistency. It’s how we end up with ENFJs in workplace training with ISTPs, figuring out how to cooperate on a team. Nevertheless, as anyone who has taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) knows, the test has its flaws. A question comes up: “As a rule, you proceed only when you have a clear and detailed plan.” The test-taker then has to think, In a project meeting with my co-worker? When coaching my kid’s basketball team? Cleaning my closets? Working out at the gym?
Which rule for “as a rule”? The trainer is little help. She’ll say, “pick one area of your life and stick with that.” This test is supposed to map a person’s defining characteristics yet allows the random selection of context and perspective? A little skepticism is fitting.
The fact that organizational leadership and development professionals still rely heavily on the MBTI is not confirmation of its reliability. Indeed, there is no replicable research to back it up, and the science is flimsy at best. The lack of connection to any empirical evidence about “personality type” should gut its foundation and release its hold on us.
“What concerns me is the cultlike devotion of many consultants and practitioners to it without the examination of the evidence,” says Adam Grant, a professor of industrial psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
– Lillian Cunningham, “Myers-Briggs: Does it Pay to Know your Type?” in The Washington Post, December 14, 2012.
Corporate training is a $50 billion a year industry. Its influence is one reason we still believe so firmly in fixed personality traits. Another is based in the theory that we simply see what we want to see, that we seek out examples of certain traits and fix them to people. Personality, then, is an illusion.
Yet another curious idea is that personality, while unfixed and changeable overall, is consistent in a particular context.
Lee Ross, a psychologist at Stanford University, has another intriguing idea. . . He thinks we actually are seeing consistency in human behavior, but we’re getting the reason for it wrong. “We see consistency in everyday life because of the power of the situation,” he says. Most of us are usually living in situations that are pretty much the same from day to day, Ross says. And since the circumstances are consistent, our behavior is, too.”
– Alix Spiegel, “Is Your Personality Fixed, Or Can You Change Who You Are?” from Invisibilia on NPR.
Every so often, I look up exes to see where they’ve wandered. It’s a rare indulgence — rare enough that when I find them again, they have crossed oceans of life. One fellow was all braggadocio masking incompetence and sloth. He was stuck in debt and working a customer-service job he hated. Now runs his own business. His company lead tours in the mountains and edu-tains high school groups in the nation’s capital. The contrast is startling. It’s a marvel that he’s so completely not who I thought he was. . . or rather, that the man he was at that time and place was only one slice of a much larger, evolving person.
Traits may not be as inherent as we assume. Change the context, and the person himself can change.
If I want to become someone different (as indeed I do, with regard to how I approach my career and family), it’s not going to work for me to do so in the current stage-set of my life. If an environment rewards mediocrity, how can a person develop drive?
Shifting the situation invites a reworking of the self.
Taking on a project in a volunteer setting, or stepping into a leadership role in the kiddo’s school, or diving into HOA budget management, or committing to a regular childcare exchange with other parents in the community. . . these are just a few of the ways to “become” someone different. A new role in a new context allows for the cultivation of qualities not yet fully formed in the familiar self.
My son and I are not “who we are,” despite the inane it is what it is trope that comforts our dissonance and excuses our inertia. If we aim to invite a fuller version of ourselves, then we must change what we do, and where, and when, and how.
Image: Micah Bazant from the Trans Life & Liberation Art Series
Dear Fairfax County School Board,
Please don’t stop. You’re getting this one right. When you decided in May 2015 to add “gender identity” to the non-discrimination policy, you took a step that will put our schools on the right side of history. You’ve been facing some pretty loud resistance to the decision, and I want to tell you that those voices are not the only ones out here. Also here are parents who are thankful that our kids go to schools that recognize the dignity and worth of all people. Continue reading “Dear School Board: You’re Getting The Transgender Thing Right”
Shannon E. Williams 