Blog of Love for the Blue Moon

I have a thing for the moon. Bad poems level of a thing. You understand.

It is a day off and there are books to read, cauliflower fritters to make and podcasts to catch up on instead of binge-watching Sense8 like I really in my heart places want to but that would be crazy awful because Amazing Roommate and I are binge-ish-watching it and it is so fun to overreact together. She is pretty fucking great. So, instead of that and instead of blerging a bunch of words in an order that cannot possibly be meaningful right now, have this list of amazing and beautiful.

It's been a while since this happened. They used to be a pretty regular feature of my life. I hope I remember how to do it. with added #FF feature.

Another Round is clearly a problem for me on account of I do not have a job at Buzzfeed. Where friendships are cultivated through the clever application of alcohol and technology that did not sound right at all but it's not leaving the sentence oh well. (Are y'all watching Whine About It. Because, bro, just bro.) @Anotherround

Sense8. Here's an interview that is very important that you can watch that will tell you nothing but will perhaps inspire you to want to watch the show maybe. I kind of don't want to link to anything about the show even though I have no other pitch than it is good. 85% fewer angsty white men than usual. The part where I'm actually not lying just now occurred to me. @Sense8

Everyday Feminism. Everyday Feminism. Cannot stress enough how important this website is. Intersectional feminism. Intersectional feminism. @EvrydayFeminism

Angel Sanchez. This guy who dances with other guys in New York. This guy. @bboyrebels

Roxane Gay got real important to me this year. Bad Feminist. Tumblr. Other Important Reasons. I feel that this year, she could get real important to you, too. @rgay

GoodMuslimBadMuslim another podcast I know because podcasts are the best ever in the history of all of the things. Zahra and Taz are my new imaginary best friends except for the part where they are real and amazing have way other things to do than to be my new best friends (which is totally fine because the best friends who are in my life are beyond the best.  (The precedent is set though in case either one needs, like a whole new set of extra amazing besties like for emergencies or life-hacking or role-playing Sense8 on occasion (but not that occasion (you totally know what occasion I mean)))). @ZahraNoo @TazzyStar

Rabih Alameddine shared a poem for a Friday. @rabihalameddine

Rain Towards Morning by Elizabeth Bishop

www.stephen-weaver.com

My thoughts have been straining for sunsets in the Sandhills. It's a Nebraska thing. It doesn't leave.

Love and respect to all.

Safe Spaces considered 1*

this is a contemplation that begins in the middle

I was listening to an episode of Another Round, one where the words "safe space" were spoken and I smiled and it was lovely to consider how to listen differently while listening to someone else's safe space and then something happened and the women began to laugh. They laughed like I laugh. I could not see them. I imagine that they laughed with full open mouths and mirth and the sound was joyfilled and overwhelming and something landed on my heart and I understood something I had only known.

Safe Space.

Two spaces immediately suggest themselves.

One is a reading group that was begun by a good friend of mine. We call it Feminists in Love because she found herself surrounded, almost cocooned, but lightly, by conversations about how feminists can experience loving relationships. What does that look like in friendship? What does that look like in romance? Is it different in a same-sex relationship than in a hetero-normative-seeming one?

The big question that I notice right in the middle like some radioactive nucleus is: how do you learn to love? What the hell happened that this has to be sought out and learned?

The patriarchy: that sex-negative, racist, sexist, imperialistic, economically parasitic system that we have is not sustained by full and complicated and varied relationships. It needs a power structure that is based on control of others. Others can only be controlled at the expense of compassion, respect, honor and flexibility. We score people based on how many lives they control. You get more points the more the people under your control are there unwillingly.

Not the best place for love, for celebration, for friendship. And yet. We find each other. We have always found each other. At the kitchen tables, around camp fires, on the way to the bathroom, in the breaths between giggles at socially accepted ladies' gatherings. We always find each other. Together we learn to carve out time for speaking out of code; for speaking honest and terrible thoughts about the lives we've been living and how we are not loved. We speak in sentences as heavy as weights, that we must practice carrying from hour to hour and day to day until we can meet again and share again and learn to carry more awareness until it is nothing to recognize the need to shift, to move, to understand. We teach each other to be resilient and we learn to learn from those whose burden includes us.

Last weekend, The Movement For Black Lives convened for the first time. They spent three days together in Cleveland Ohio and shared empowering, community building, healing and vital time with each other. Time that is sorely needed in communities that are tested and tried every day with news of another murder by police hands, another suspicious church fire, another hanging. This Safe Space is necessary and strengthening. This Safe Space is sacred.

They met, at the end, police with pepper spray trying to arrest a teenaged boy waiting at a bus stop. People came together and prevented the arrest. the young man was reunited with his family. Safe Space engenders compassion, respect and strength in action. Safe Spaces are places to learn and to discover how to grow. They heal and help the people involved in them.

When I was a girl, I did not participate in the things that brought me into women's spaces. Nothing in those spaces made room for the girl I was. I spent years crafting room for my friendships out of scraps of time and park benches and obsessive focus. I did not understand how to be safe in a room full of my peers. They did not understand how to be safe with me. It is different now.

I learn to listen.


*This blog post is numbered because I have latched onto an idea, and it will take more than a few paragraphs to explore it.

Perspective and privilege

I've been watching Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson on Netflix. Carl Sagan's show was captivating to me and this one is no less so. In the first episode, Tyson describes Sagan as a science communicator, a phrase that I love and find apt. Richard Feynman once remarked that if you can't explain something then you don't understand it. By that logic, these folks know what they are speaking of, and they speak of it well.

(found on TEDtalk website) Full disclosure: I have a mad Feynman crush.

The experience of watching this new show has been much more settling than I'd anticipated. Well, settling and then unsettling and then settling and then unsettling and again and again. Observing the movements and patterns of nature is an extraordinary exercise. It shifts your gaze, fills your immediate thoughts with data and relationships and can impart a sense of awe at the world in which we find ourselves that seems to let us shake off the horror of personal hatred and shame. As we are reminded, we are all made of star stuff, and if you believe this, if you look into the stars and you see what made you and me and everyone around you, it is possible to imagine that it could weaken your notions of privilege and superiority.

from youdopia.tumblr.com

There is a breath, a sigh that comes with a re-focused gaze. Partly because I get So Over searching around my own little life from time to time and partly because there is joy in learning and understanding that cannot be measured. 

There is another breath, another sigh that happens when I think of all the ways in which critical analysis, observation and experiment, the building of systems of understanding and questioning, the communities of thought that offer foundations to young scientists and new projects, how all of those are constantly under attack. At the heart of science, at the heart of art, lies the fundamental need to keep asking questions of the answers that life provides. That is a habit that dangerously undermines the stability of a controlling interest; an authoritarian state that relies on ignorance and compliance to perpetuate; an economic system built on separation and hierarchy; a myth of tradition that prizes anti-intellectualism and rigid social roles. 

There is privilege in education. There is privilege in being non-conformist (non-compliant, as well). There is privilege in creativity and curiosity. There is privilege in quiet, in conversation, in leisure time, in the practice of watching art and observing nature and reading and writing. There is privilege that allows for the development of skills of critical analysis. There is privilege that surrounds the safe spaces where intellectual stimulation and complication and frustration and clarification can happen.

Shows like this keep trying to extend privileges, to further respect for intellectual pursuits, to encourage involvement and imagination. This one in particular, also reminds me how limited our access to lives not constantly running up against the walls of privilege really is. The universe is tremendous and weird and fascinating and fantastic.

from patheos.com

The Voyage to Necessity

The request to sit in on a store reading group could not have landed at a better time of week. The book: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine, a book I'd been handsold by a customer.

An Unnecessary Woman is the story of a few weeks in the life of Aaliya, a 72 year old former bookseller and divorced, childless woman living on her own in an apartment in Beirut. Her relationships are scattered and mostly in the past. Her family has spent the last 50 years trying to get her to move out of her apartment. The novel opens with Aaliya a bit tipsy on red wine realizing that she's dyed her hair blue.

Aaliya is a reader. She's the kind of reader who understands that the life of a book is limited to the access readers have to it. Every year (sometimes every other depending on the year before) she translates a book from English & French into Arabic. She chooses carefully in an inner monologue that I recognize from hours spent lingering over the spines of books waiting to give shape to some future meditations. And she has become almost agoraphobic over the years. A person not much given to outgoing behavior with no good friend anymore and no job to force her into interaction, she finds the proximity of her neighbors (almost all women) physically difficult to bear.

I legit love this book.

The day before we were to meet to discuss the book, one of my co-workers asked me how I feel about books where 'nothing happens.' I asked him to define 'nothing' in a narrative sense because I quite like reading huge hunks of writing that are not filled with Action!, Intensity!, and Plot! He agreed and we chatted in a work appropriate and disjointed (on account of work) way for the rest of the afternoon about the nature of narrative and building situation, etc.

I take this as the Goddess reading over my shoulder, on account of this is a book in which very little happens for a very long time. At least not in the sense of Action. From my perspective as a reader, everything is happening. I am engrossed, engaged and reaching out to Aaliya as she is retreating into her world, her apartment, her memories and her confusions.

Rereading the book was astounding. I had remembered Beirut as the framework of her life, but I had not remembered how alive and astonishing her relationship to the city is. Her physical experience of walking around it with memories living in an on every block and sidewalk section is overwhelming, to the point that my physical discomfort began to mimic hers. Happily, my experience of being moved by this book is one that was shared by the members of the book group.

They echoed the idea that even with nothing happening, there is so much going on that they really had a hard time putting the book down. We talked about her mother, about Hannah, about her loneliness and the books. We talked about the power of memory. We talked about how much we all loved Aaliya. We talked about how much we loved this book.

And then this happened: Every one of them. Every. Single. One. of Them. shared how surprised they were to learn that this book was written by a man. I got to the end of the book before I knew. I was not the only one. The astonishment we felt is not new. More to the point, the disappointment that is on the surface of how not well most men write women was gone, and that was new. It is disturbing to feel relief at a woman written as a whole character, a recognizable person, by a man.

That Aaliya faced other people's expectations of her with no intent to fulfill them. That she continued to live and to feel love for so very few. That she lived through five decades of verbal abuse from her family at her front door. That she remained essentially her own person, self aware and humorous in the face of life offering her the one narrative gift she thought she could well do without (worth it). All of these specific personality traits are generally not found in the person of one woman when that woman is written by men. So it is always strange and almost unrecognizable when it does happen.

If, as Virginia Woolf asserts "the fact that some of the most famous heroines even of the nineteenth-century fiction represent what men desire in women, but not necessarily what women are in themselves" is true even in the twenty-first century, and I believe that it is, then the women in this novel are more than necessary - they may be a signal.

Ida B. Wells

Under the protective layers

This is the time to face the work. 
The deep breaths of inevitability 
build to something like a meditation.
Time to dig in to the muck of laundry 
and dusting and boxes piled without purpose.
Time to redefine the boundaries of possibility 
according to my wingspan.

Naturally, I am sitting with a computer and writing words. Making marks of something like intention as I move muscles again and stretch behind closed eyes to the rhythms of a sound long mouthed, rarely spoken.

No, but for real. My room is a damn mess.