Author Archives: Patricia Wild

February 13, 2012: World as Lover

The one beloved becomes many, and the world itself is [my] lover. (Joanna Macy)


Maybe it’s like this:

A couple of years ago, I bought a beautiful, little area rug from a struggling Tibetan/Nepali shop around the corner from my house. This rug now graces my front hall. Given how lovely it is, I paid very little for this gem. Why? Because, as the woman in the store was good enough to show me, it had two, small worn spots on it. And then she threw herself ON the rug to demonstrate how those worn spots were the result of someone, many someones, maybe, kneeling in prayer!

Taken aback by her over-the-top demonstration, stymied by my complete lack of information—Nepali people pray on rugs? I thought only Muslims do that. I am so ignorant!—I was not able to really take in what she told me. Not really. But the other day, vacuuming that rug, I got it. And was filled with, yup, great love for both that agile saleswoman and all those unseen, only to be imagined knees!

February 3, 2012: World as . . . battleground?

Slooowly reading Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. My glacial speed is partly because I never read books like this very fast (it takes me months to finish anything byPema Chodron) but mostly because Macy’s so freakin’ Right On!

So still absorbing her analysis re how we look at the world:

World as Battleground.

World as Trap

World as Lover

World as Self

And wouldn’t you know it? Am discovering that, good Quaker that I strive to be, much of how I relate to the world IS about “the reassuring sense that you are fighting God’s battle—and that ultimately you will win.”

Whoa!

Macy talks about a variation of this paradigm: “A more innocuous version of the battlefield image of the world is the one I learned from my grandparents. it is the world as a classroom, or a kind of moral gymnasium, where you are put though tests to prove your mettle and shape you up, so you can graduate to other arenas and rewards.”

Macy’s “innocuous version”  describe an insidious trait of mine and shared by my Cambridge/Somerville/intellectual friends—and they ARE my friends—I’ve shorthanded to “The Harvard Syndrome.” Although I did not go to Harvard, must admit I see myself struggling in that “moral gymnasium,” sometimes.

Ouch.

January 21, 2012: (Practice) Being Faithful

[Good thing my New Year’s resolutions didn’t include posting more blogs, huh! Or I’d be feeling really guilty about now.]

Tomorrow afternoon, from 3 until 5, my husband and I are hosting a neighborhood coffee to talk about—well, the agenda is not the point.

The POINT is this: As any Patriots fan will tell you: Tomorrow afternoon is not a great time to host a meeting. (Seems there’s a game or something.)

So, yesterday, dropping another flyer for this coffee in neighbors’ mailboxes, stewed over the likelihood that very few people will show up. But since one agenda item, the controversy around affordable housing in Union Square*, is somewhat time-sensitive  (a community meeting on this issue is tentatively scheduled in a couple of weeks), decided to go ahead, anyway. Although I felt a little stupid about it. And reluctant to put much energy into something fated to be a total bust.

But, as so often happens as I trudge along somewhere, Something came to me: be faithful (or, in my case, practice being faithful). This coffee is a good idea. Be faithful to connecting people, sharing resources, creating community, etc. Just do it. Do it joyfully.

Okedoke.

* Many New England cities are organized around squares, i.e. commercial areas/transportation centers/where a bunch of streets come together.Our neighborhood’s part of Somerville’s Union Square.

January 8, 2012: “The Struggle”

Yesterday afternoon, at the Dudley Branch Library in Roxbury (a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Boston),  I attended a community meeting re the proposed  3 Strikes, You’re Out legislation here in Massachusetts. More than a hundred men, women and children crammed together in the library’s already-overheated community room to hear different voices speak out on this racist bill.

So that’s the first thing I wish to lift up: Lots of perspectives, lots of different ways to explain “Here’s what I think this legislation is really about!”

Here’s mine: Yes, as many, many speakers said yesterday, this is a racist bill. Anything to do with the criminal justice system in the United States is going to be about race. No argument.

AND: Senate Bill # 2080 and House Bill # 3818 are also about Massachusetts recently having allowed casino gambling into our fair commonwealth. So consciously or unconsciously, our elected officials on Beacon Hill must have thought: “Okay, then. Time to get tough on crime—and, oh, by the way, that’s a post-casino, surefire way to get re-elected.”

Here’s the second thing I want to note: Many, many people yesterday, when given the opportunity to ask questions re the action plans laid out, wanted to instead tell their stories. Their own incarceration stories. Stories of their sons. Stories, as one woman said, of  “The Struggle.”

And that’s exactly how I heard her words: in italics and with quotation marks. But I heard something else. I heard those two words’ gestalt: Slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, The War on Drugs, the criminal justice system, poverty, “The jail trail,”* and that woman at the community meeting, like thousands, millions before her, struggling every day to survive, to overcome, to fly!

SO much practice. So much more to do.

* The path of poverty, inadequate education, and systemic racism which leads to eventual incarceration.

 

January 2, 2012: Practice, practice, practice!

New Year’s eve was mistily magical this year; streetlights, headlights, Christmas lights were surrounded by a glowing aura. Walking through Union Square that evening just as the last Market Basket customers exited the supermarket parking lot, my husband and I were approached by two men. One of them continued to walk in our direction, the other stopped and looked down at his sneakers for a couple of seconds. When we got close to him, he said to us, “Happy new year,” in a cheerful, heavily accented voice. We wished him the same.

“That’s why he’d stopped,” we decided. “He wanted to practice.”

Thus my new year began, with this tentative, warm expression, a reminder of our collective just-starting-out, our shared need to practice!

December 12, 2011: Still Glowing

Remember how utterly astonished you felt when you learned that the light from now-dead, far, far away stars still glowed?

That’s the spirit of today’s posting:

I’m feeling that glow from the deep-winter fires of ancient Ye Olde England—from the time when Anglo-Saxon was spoken (did you know that “wassail” is A-S for “be whole”?) when people who probably looked a lot like me brought greens inside and, huddled together to keep warm, celebrated Light/Birth in the midst of death and darkness.

I’m feeling that wonder—and their faith that, yes, Spring would come.

December 8, 2011: And today’s day-blind star is . . .

U.S. Youth Ejected from Climate Talks While Calling Out Congress’s Failure
Durban, South Africa – After nearly two weeks of stalled progress by the United States at the international climate talks, U.S. youth spoke out for a real, science-based climate treaty. Abigail Borah, a New Jersey resident, interrupted the start of lead U.S. negotiator Todd Stern’s speech to call out members of Congress for impeding global climate progress, delivering a passionate call for an urgent path towards a fair and binding climate treaty. Stern was about to speak to international ministers and high-level negotiators at the closing plenary of the Durban climate change negotiations. Borah was ejected from the talks shortly following her speech.
Borah, a student at Middlebury College, spoke for U.S. negotiators because “they cannot speak on behalf of the United States of America”, highlighting that “the obstructionist Congress has shackled a just agreement and delayed ambition for far too long.” Her delivery was followed by applause from the entire plenary of leaders from around the world.
Since before the climate talks, the United States, blocked by a Congress hostile to climate action, has held the position of holding off on urgent pollution reductions targets until the year 2020. Studies from the International Energy Agency, numerous American scientists, and countless other peer-reviewed scientific papers show that waiting until 2020 to begin aggressive emissions reduction would cause irreversible climate change, including more severe tropical storms, worsening droughts, and devastation affecting communities and businesses across America. Nevertheless, the United States has held strong to its woefully inadequate and voluntary commitments made in the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 and the Cancun Agreement in 2010.
“2020 is too late to wait,” urged Borah. “We need an urgent path towards a fair, ambitious, and legally binding treaty.”
The U.S. continues to negotiate on time borrowed from future generations, and with every step of inaction forces young people to suffer the quickly worsening climate challenges that previous generations have been unable and unwilling to address.


December 2, 2011: Seeing Stars

Recently someone asked me when I first sensed Something beyond myself (some people call that prickly feeling God). My answer? Looking up at the night sky when a kid.

Trouble is, these days, living in a dense city, only the brightest stars or strategically located planets are visible. I miss that sense of utter wonder; I miss stars!

So last week, on a moonless night, while on a family vacation in Palm Desert, CA, my husband and I drove up a windy mountain road and, almost to the summit, found a conveniently banked as to completely block off any light from the valley below dirt road and, lying on that dirt road, I saw stars. Millions of them. Bonus: A shooting star, too.

Home now, that sense of wonder stays with me—well, maybe slightly dimmed but, hey, I KNOW they’re up there. I’ve been reminded.

Just as I KNOW amazing, loving, compassionate things are happening.

Like this: As I learned last night at a wonderful talk in Cambridge, the ground-breaking Our Bodies, Ourselves is now translated into 27 languages. Each version has been carefully and collectively written by the women (and, sometimes, men) of countries around the world, each version addressing the women’s health issues most needing instruction and gentle guidance in their own communities.

Doncha love that!

November 21, 2011: Tis the Season

How grateful I am to the Occupy movement for demanding that all of us look at and discuss money: “Wall Street,” that all-purpose phrase incorporating a host of ills, bank bailouts, how politicians are bought and sold, the student loan crisis; how grateful I am that, thanks to those courageous souls of  Zuccotti Park et al, these conversations form the fabric of public conversation.

And how grateful I am to the Transition movement for teaching me to look at the world around me systemically (I still have much to learn!)

Thinking more deeply and more interconnectedly about money has had one immediate effect, I’m noticing: My reaction to Christmas, a holiday I usually LOVE, is pretty muted this year. In fact, verging on “Bah, humbug.” I see Christmas lights, for example, and think, “What a waste of money and energy!”

I have faith that the essential Christmas Spirit will prevail—maybe, as it often does for my husband, in January, February! Meanwhile, I’ll try to take comfort from these words from Faith and Practice of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends‘s twelfth query: “. . . When discouraged, do you remember that Jesus said, ‘Peace is my parting gift to you, my own peace, such the world cannot give. Set your troubled hearts at rest, and banish your fears.”?

Nov. 6, 2011: “you have the poor among you always,”* . . .

. . . and, by the way, their fashion-sense may differ from your own.

Today at our Meeting’s Forum—a 45-minute opportunity to listen to and ask questions about whatever various individuals or groups wish to impart—we learned about AFSC’s Clothing Room. Housed in the basement beneath our meetinghouse, the Clothing Room used to send donated clothing all over the world. Nowadays it services those in need  who, after they’d been recommended by a social worker or anti-poverty agency and had scheduled an appointment, arrive at the designated time to browse through the ton of donated stuff and take take whatever they need.

“But you need to park your ego at the door,” the presenter, who often volunteers in the Clothing Room, explained. “Like one time I saw a whole bunch of turtlenecks being recycled.” (Sometimes donated items are given to other agencies or, if absolutely unusable, thrown away.) “Perfectly good turtlenecks! So I protested. But was told, ‘ No one wants turtlenecks. So we don’t bother keeping them on our shelf.’ ”

Is it just me or is that one of most, ahem, telling stories you’ve  ever heard?’

*Matthew 26: 11.

November 4, 2011: “Move the money”

I have a Bank of America Mastercard. Any day now, I can proudly say, “had.”

The last straw, of course, was B of A’s decision to charge a fee for debit card transactions. C’mon! That’s just mean. So while the mega-financial institution recently rescinded this exploitive scheme, it’s still, “So long, baby!”

The switch-over was incredibly easy. I contacted Joe Grafton, head of LocalFirst, a Somerville-based agency urging all of us to, ahem, shop local, and asked him who issued credit cards around here.

Answer: the CPCU Credit Union. Started in 1928, the Cambridge Portuguese Credit Union’s Somerville office is  a couple of blocks from my house. (I’ve been using their ATM for years.)

For $25, I became a member so am now eligible for a no-annual-fee Visa.

A couple of days after I made the switch, a green and white Door 2 Door van—a free service for local seniors—drove past. Guess what was painted on the side of the van? Yup.  An announcement that CPCU sponsored this most-needed service.

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. 
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. 
And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, 
is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle,
the subject and the object, are one.
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; 
but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson—

We’re all deeply interconnected: “Move the money.”