I'll Keep Doing the Work You Were Doing as if I Were Two

Photo of Hadestown: Youth Edition
courtesy New Surry Theatre

This Sunday, I am struggling to live in my broken heart and not in my rage.

So having had the joy of seeing New Surry Theatre's awesome production of Hadestown: Teen Edition last night, I am reflecting on the power of live theater not only to entertain but to move us, to change hearts and minds. For the record, if you are in this area: do not miss this show! These teens are so excellent -- amazing choreography, great voices, stellar acting. Kudos to all who worked on it for a real community triumph, the type of theater we need more of in our communities, and especially to director Lori Sitzabee for bringing out the very best in her young cast.

This also causes me to reflect on why it is so important for children (and adults!) to learn to read fiction, and stories about those different from ourselves.

The arts at their best are not mere entertainment to be consumed.

Theater, literature, visual arts are the actions by which we build imagination, which is in turn needed to empathize with those not-us and then to have compassion and even to take action on behalf of others' suffering.

Imagine if instead of unrestrained male violence and a lust for power over others we fostered these things in raising our kids: imagination. Empathy. Compassion. Action. Art: the creation of beauty. Every day, a living process.

These are the human powers and skills that Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin and many other peacemakers called for and taught.

Too often, our specific culture, which continues to be dominated by white men, guns these teachers and models down.

Our power, and our trick to bringing a different future forward, is that for every individual gunned down 10 more of us step into their place.

"It could have been me, but instead it was you,
So I'll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two
I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs
A farmer of food and a righter of wrong
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through
But if you can work for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom
If you can work for freedom I can too."

- singer songerwriter Holly Near, after Kent State, in 1970 and the 1973 torture and assassination of Chilean theater director and poet Victor Jara by the junta who overthrew, with U.S. support, the Allende democracy in Chile

We've been here before. We will be here again. Those of us who believe in peace can never let up.

And if history is going to repeat itself -- let's hope we see a repeat of Nixon's 1974 resignation.

As opposed to a repeat of 1985's Iran-Contra scandal in Nicaragua -- another attempt to overthrow a democratic effort in opposition to the U.S.'s colonialist interests.

Let justice prevail, with each of our active support.

Notes to My Self on Finding A Generosity of Spirit

Notes to my self...

As my aged dog and I were standing in the yard in the middle of last night -- she, like all of us older females, up from bed to pee; me, to take her and gazing at the bright constellations -- I saw two shooting stars.

I went back to bed singing the Gloria in my head for the rest of the night.

My heart aches for a generosity of spirit amongst us.

For us, in every community, in every meeting, in every election, in every shared decision, to drop our self-righteousness.

To stop judging each other.

Those of us who consider ourselves "inclusive progressives" have too often played into the opposition's hands -- for, like any opposition, to divide and conquer is to win -- exacerbating this nation's class divides.

Sometimes inclusion comes at the cost of exclusion: putting others outside the special circle.

My brother is missing his two front teeth, lives in a trailer, and is a Trump supporter.

Do you judge him?

Sadly, we still live in a culture in which acts of hatred violate others every day.

Immigrants. Women. All people of color. Children.

It doesn't make the world better for us to condemn those who commit these acts. 

Better to condemn the action than to condemn the human.

As Greg Boyle, who for 40 years has led the most successful gang rehabilitation program in the world, says: we are all irredeemably good.

We really are. Including those who use their privilege and power to benefit themselves over others. Including those who resent those with more privileges than themselves.

Including those who are angry for what they lack.

We have a lot of illness in our cultures. Acts of hate and violence are signs of illness -- no healthy human treats others this way. Christians used to call this sin -- the places where we remain flawed, where we are not yet god, not the perfection of love.

Not the constellations, not the shooting star.

For one thing, we are afraid of "flaming out" in death and darkness.

This fear alone causes so many hateful actions and speech.

There is a lot of anger and resentment out there. Rather than dismissing it, what do we learn from it?

Humility. Gratitude. Acceptance.

The world and its creatures are not ours to judge.

How do we each hold ourselves accountable? How do we hold each other in community, in spite of our hateful actions?

The beautiful floating milkweed at this time of year reminds me of my mother in her raspberry patch.

She was not a leader, not an actor in society.

She feared but did not judge.

Casting seeds of kindness.

Sunday Morning Reflections: Diane Keaton and The Last Quarter

This past week's trail discovery.

Diane Keaton's death this weekend at age 79 reminded me, with a shock, that I am in the last quarter of my own life.

Such a weird feeling and awareness. And to paraphrase the great Mary Oliver -- what will one do with one's wild and precious twilight years?!

We watched "Annie Hall" last night. I grew up with Keaton -- "Annie Hall" (1977) was a hallmark of my high school years, a featured film in our movie-themed yearbook for which I was the editor.

Her character -- her female independence and her androgynous costuming based on menswear -- spoke to me even while the film itself did not.

And re-watching it, Woody Allen was even more painful than his male sexual angst was at the time the movie appeared. I mean: really?!

Yet Keaton soared through and above it all, as she did in so many of her films.

A great comedic actress, she reminds us to move through this wild and precious life with a sense of humor.

As Keaton herself once joked, "I think that I'm strange...I don't know anything, and I haven't learned. Getting older hasn't made me wiser."

Her "self-deprecating" -- read, humble -- humor on this subject is greatly appreciated!

And truly...if we lived in anything other than this anxious capitalism, in which we are all taught to fear we will never have enough and we must keep going, going, going like some sort of insane machines in order to prove our worth and value: we would just happily, sweetly, slow down.

We'd say: I am in the last quarter of my life. My work here is to enjoy this beautiful gift, and to give to others in return.

My work in this final quarter is not to keep racing around the globe, burning fossil fuels and causing destruction with my privilege, in order to "consume" experience. Because we must see/experience/have it "all."

It is not to make a "name" for myself. Who cares about my name, or accomplishments, or artifacts? I am but a blade of grass. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

Nor is it to keep working in order to accumulate more, out of fear that I, who have so much, will not have "enough." "Enough" is sustenance. "Enough" is food and housing security. All around us are people that do not have these basic things. Rather than accumulating more for myself, now is the time more than ever to share, to give it all away.

Here's to slowing down, enjoying the beautiful gifts of planet and lives we have been given, and giving these gifts to others whenever and however we can.

Goodbye, Diane.

The Last Quarter. It's enough.

#newblogpost

#thelastquarter

#anniehall

#dianekeaton

All Our Insecurities

I've been thinking a lot about the damaging impacts of human insecurity.

Insecurity about one's self -- is one loved? is one worthy? is one good? -- and one's place in the world -- will I have "enough"? how will I survive? -- is in my view the major contributor to cruelty done to others.

We all have insecurities, and many of you will rightly point to generational trauma as a root cause. For women, for instance, such as my own bio-mom who was sexually abused and raped and then gave me up for adoption, this is especially true. Domestic violence and sexual abuse are the unaddressed scourges of our nation, deepening child poverty and adverse childhood experiences for the next generations.

Insecure people grow into "mean girls" and male leaders -- people who will take any opportunity to put down those around them in hopes of elevating themselves and their self interests.

This is why the power of christianity's central message is so powerful that most "practicing christians" avoid it.

Merely by our being creatures of this world, we are beloved.

And in realizing that love, our duty and privilege is to share it with everyone and everything around us.

These are challenging principles! To soak in the love of the world, like sunshine and peaches, and then to share our wealth with everyone without judgement or fear.

Because insecurity also makes us fearful. Fearful we will lose the little bit we have gained.

I don't have answers for this other than my hope that we can all focus on what it means to feel beloved and to find and create ways and structures to amplify this privilege to everyone and everything around us.

In this photo: I was lucky last week to be able to go to dinner with two of my favorite people, Jeffrey Olson and Judith Jerome -- both of whom take the work of love in community very seriously and actively: love-in-action.

We were privileged to be able to go to a magical place -- Tinder Hearth -- where the beauty and bounty of this world are cultivated by some people for others.

I am so grateful for the privilege of being loved and fed -- and wonder: how can we make such experiences available to those who suffer most? to those whose experiences have led them -- and too often, many of us -- to believe they are undeserving? What new and more effective ways can we create to share our wealth and privilege?

This week, I had the privilege to speak in our community on a film on the unmediated structures that cause too many to be unhoused: poverty, mental illness.

I outlined the work of our island housing efforts, and urged the privileged members of the audience to just say, "Yes, I can" instead of "Not in My Backyard."

PM me if you want to talk about how yes, you can help.

#newblogpost

End Male Creepiness

Every single woman is all too aware there are gazillions of creepy men -- and on top of that, the creepy women who support the creepy men thinking it is in their own self interest.

Men who "depreciate" women. Men who objectify women in drawings, words, events.

Men who sexually and domestically abuse girls and women.

Men who simply don't listen to women. Men who "mansplain" to women in every public meeting -- even when the woman is the leader. Men who will bypass every woman wanting to speak in a public setting until they can't anymore.

Men who still work to keep women out of the room where it happens, if they can.

Men whose bad and unprofessional behavior is tolerated at levels that the same behavior from women never would be.

Men who devalue women's labor, and continue to operate companies and a national economy in which women are paid 20-25-30% less, depending on our race, than white men.

Men who are advocating once again for women to leave the work force, discard their career and creative and independent dreams, and stay home and have babies.

We live in a creepy patriarchal society -- despite all the advances we as women have fought for and made.

By now, there are tons of you out there who are either making apologies for creepy men; saying it is not only creepy men, but creepy women too; or that gender doesn't matter anymore.

I call BS. The data shows differently.

Most importantly, our hearts and souls KNOW differently.

All of us who apologize for and condone and accept and live with and in all ways tolerate male creepiness are part of the ongoing problem of male toxicity in this culture.

Some of it comes down to dependence on male salaries, male protection, male co-parenting.

I get it. I know it is not easy. Almost every day I have to choose to either sit through or address in some way male creepiness in the public realm.

Male creepiness is a constant. Male creepiness is tiresome.

And for many women, male creepiness is dangerous. Murderous if not of bodies then of souls.

This is only going to change when we together decide, once again as we did with second wave feminism, that enough is enough and together make a huge push for the next wave of societal change.

We need to raise and educate all of our children differently.

We especially need to let boys know that the people who should be role models in high leadership posts in government and elsewhere are the opposite of role models: their behaviors are to be condemned.

This can and should happen in schools, as women in homes are often too compromised by the constraints and dangers of patriarchal families.

Enough is enough for me.

I've had enough male creepiness in the first two days of this week alone to join the revolution.

Time for the next wave.

#endthecreepiness

#endthepatriarchy

#newblogpost

Bluebird Days & Gun Violence

 

It's another beautiful September bluebird day here, just as it was on this date 24 years ago.

Those of us who lived through 9/11 and its aftermath will never forget it, and those who died and whose lives were forever changed by that violence cannot be forgotten either.

My heart aches for all the victims and survivors of sectarian, politicized violence everywhere.

For the high school students yesterday in Evergreen, CO. For the Catholic school students last week in Minneapolis, MN. For the political assassination attempts against Nancy Pelosi and her husband, and the political assassinations of the MN state legislator and her husband three months ago. For their children and grandchildren.

For the school students across the country, every day, who die, survive, or live in fear of gun violence.

For the family of Charlie Kirk, who famously said, "It's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment".

I don't agree. Not one of these gun deaths is worth the type of uncontrolled ownership of people-killing weapons that proliferate without limits in this nation.

I have opposed gun violence for 50 years, since I was in high school.

I grew up during a period of political assassinations, starting with Medgar Evers, then JFK, then Malcolm X, then MLK, then RFK -- 5 assassinations in 5 years, stopping the progressivism of racial and economic justice of the 1960's dead in its tracks.

I live with that legacy burned into my memory.

All gun violence -- from domestic violence, to suicide, to political assassinations, to mass shootings, to war -- are signs of types of mental illness.

As humans, we all struggle - and our hearts must ache and break for each other.

What we should not be doing is fueling our human struggles with the uncontrolled tools of mass destruction.

The Second Amendment -- the right to bear arms to protect our families, communities, and most importantly, nation -- is not about the uncontrolled proliferation of military-grade hardware.

We are all the victims of gun violence.

Much of it could be prevented through very basic gun standards of ownership, registration, permitting.

My heart goes out to all the victims and survivors of our national illness of gun violence, and my compassion to all those whose words and actions serve only to fan the flames and increase the vicious cycles of hate and retribution.

#newblogpost

Hates Becoming Heroes, and On Forgiving Your Enemies (to annoy them)

"Difficult to watch how haters become heroes." - poet Joy Harjo

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - poet Oscar Wilde

I've got friends and family posting things like "I am Charlie Kirk."

I grieve for them in their grief.

We must stop elevating hate speech. It is way past time to recognize that speech is itself an action. Speech can kill, and violence is never a solution.

Hate speech is not just an opinion. It inflames anger and resentment, leading toward further violence.

This is why we have libel laws, and laws that restrict hate speech: to limit the type of political violence that threatens the First Amendment.

Hate speech-in-action killed Charlie Kirk.

Not because progressives turned into violence our disagreement with the racist, homophobic, sexist world view he described.

Because there are even greater and more violent extremists, such as Nick Fuentes, who thought Charlie's hate of others was not enough. He didn't hate Jews or immigrants or queer people or women enough.

My best self wants to believe that those who say "I Am Charlie Kirk" just don't know. I want to believe that our ridiculous social media feeds keep all of us from really understanding the whole situation unless we educate ourselves and work at it.

That for those who identify as Christian conservatives, or nationalists, or on the right -- your feed was full of Charlie sounding like the charismatic young leader he was.

It didn't include his hateful comments against everyone other than white men like himself.

Then again, if you really followed him -- you would know.

I want to believe that education and the arts and media literacy are solutions.

Perhaps the question of our time is: why are white men, and those who support them, so angry?

One answer is that this is the legacy on which this nation has been built. Angry white western men who were themselves oppressed by the ruling powers and religions of the European continent and turned their rage and resentment into its own genocidal and enslaving force on this new continent. One only has to glance at the history of U.S. colonization to see the violent, brutal rage on the surface of this culture.

Is there anything to be done about white male rage other than to restrain it as best we can with the rule of law? 

Last Saturday, we climbed into the truck and made the drive north to tekakapimek -- the new contact station at Katahdin Woods & Waters National Monument -- to be transported into the magic of this place we live and its thousands of years of stewardship by Maine's indigenous nations.

The word tekakapimek is from the Penobscot language and means "as far as one can see."

This is a "contact station," and not a traditional "visitors center," because it is "designed to foster contact and connection with the land, its Wabanaki stewards, and the wider community, facilitating a collaborative approach to understanding and caring for the monument." The station represents a collaboration between Maine's four sovereign tribes who together make up the Wabanaki Alliance: the Penobscot, on whose current and traditional lands the Monument exists, and the Passamaquoddy, Mi 'k maq, and Maliseet nations.

Accessible by dirt logging roads, the station opened to the public this summer.

Please go.

The Monument encompasses some of the great canoe trails in Maine, which Wabanaki peoples once used to transport themselves across the state. All in the shadow of the great mountain, Katahdin, herself.

The space is a treasure of indigenous art that helps bring one into the spirit of these cultures, which successfully stewarded this beautiful place as part of themselves for thousands of years before white colonization.

And there lies the giant difference between white western culture and indigenous cultures here and throughout the world: this land's tribal peoples belonged to the place. Our white European cultural heritage has and continues to see ourselves as separate from and above these places, with the "right" to extract from the land whatever we feel we need to increase our wealth.

Standing within or outside of the contact station, you will, hopefully, want to cry.

To cry for our beloved places. To cry for the fact that we as peoples are "saddled with an addiction to disposability so deep that tackling it will require a wholesale rewriting of the rules that have governed business and consumption for the past 70 years." (Saabira Chaudhuri, writing in the September 6, 2025 NYTimes).

To cry for how difficult it is to remove ourselves from the stream of daily toxicity and destruction.

One small step, one starting or building place, might be to visit places such as tekakapimek, to immerse oneself with respect and awe in the knowledge and ways of being that treat this place differently.

Also: get in your canoe.

#newblogpost

#indigenouswaysofknowing

The Importance of the Raspberry Patch

I spent a couple of hours in our garden yesterday, picking raspberries, digging potatoes, re-homing milkweed...

My mother, Mae, always said she found God nearest in her raspberry patch. When she tired of the faux-knowing ways of men and their man-made institution of the church, she still had faith that this planet and these lives are gifts to us for which to be grateful and to be treasured. She found and practiced her faith in her raspberry patch.

Now I do, too.

Today is September 1, and Labor Day. I've always been energized by September. It's my birth month. The New England weather is perfect, with bluebird sky days and warm ocean waters and crisp dry air.

Plus, I was a kid who loved school. I loved the bigger world, apart from my family -- the different people. The teachers, even those who were mean and unskilled as educators. And the learning! So much to learn about this world. New books. New challenges. New frameworks, from geometry and physics to history and biology.

I was one of the lucky ones, for whom my curiosity and hunger for this world was not squelched by school but rather deepened by it.

I was loved and supported in a stable home. This made keeping this curiosity alive possible as well.

Today, all around us and especially in leadership, we have people who think they know things yet who exhibit no curiosity, no questioning, no desire for collaboration and learning.

They make pronouncements and executive orders on things about which they clearly know very little -- yet feel entitled to damage others' lives willy-nilly with their lack of understanding, empathy, and compassion.

I so very much wish for leaders who act from gratitude and grace in their privilege. That humility, of serving others and not only yourself, is to me a primary characteristic of leadership.

Yet we are now a culture that votes for individuals who display the opposites.

We believe the acquisition of wealth is due to intelligence, when more often it is due to exploitation of others.

We need so many things to be a great nation again.

On my list:

An education president, who believes that we are all learners and not knowers and that everyone deserves equal access to education.

The values that take us and our children back into our raspberry patches, in gratitude and generosity and thanksgiving, in respect for and care of this beautiful world and lives each have been given.

Today, let us give thanks to the workers and to the unions that have fought against exploitation of selves and planet for a humane, compassionate environment in which to work: the 8-hour day. Health care. Disability. Retirement.

Let's lean into and protect our many blessings, and offer our kindness and privilege and excesses to those who do not have as many.

#newblogpost