Patricia Wild

July 28, 2010: What Have We Done?

I live in a densely populated, 79% paved-over city that, in the past, had been sneeringly referred to as “Scummerville” or “Slummerville.” (These days, that Somerville is so hip has pretty much quashed those taunts—but not entirely.) Whenever my husband and I venture outside our fair city and see some lovely countryside or acres of trees destroyed by McMansions or a strip mall or another highway, we sigh. But then we tell ourselves,” You know, sometimes it’s less painful to live in Somerville where the rape and destruction of the land and its rivers happened three-hundred years ago!”

As I’ve noted in many of these blogs, I have been drawn to the Transition Town movement and its fundamental, resilient message that, given climate change and the eventual end of the Cheap Oil Era, the ONLY way we’ll survive these huge and scary changes is collectively. So from time to time I hang out with Somervillians who are into weatherization or the Buy Local movement or community gardens or extending the bike path. Wonderful initiatives. Wonderful people.

Marla Marcum of “Climate Summer”* said something recently that really shook me. A climate change activist and deeply spiritual person, Marla noted that there’s something deeply shameful about what our species has done to this planet.

More and more I am feeling that, perhaps, my role in Somerville’s ongoing initiatives re the huge upheavals we’re facing ** is to somehow engage in community-wide conversations about that shame. And, oh yeah, about our overwhelming feelings of helplessness and terror.

Maybe?

* “Climate Summer” has been about a group of college students biking throughout New England to talk about climate change. Marla was one of the chief organizers.

** I use the present tense because Somerville, like so many communities around the world, has already suffered 3 times this year from dramatic, destructive weather—in Somerville’s case, 3 devastating rain storms.

July 21, 2010: Thank you, Emily

Emily Sander, “loving wife, mother, grandmother, social worker. artist, tennis player and much more,” * a much-beloved member of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, died on June 5th; her memorial was Monday. FMC’s capacious meetinghouse overflowed; those of us unable to squeeze inside sat on rented chairs outside.

Clerk of FMC’s Memorials Committee and knowing that centering at Emily’s memorial would probably be difficult for me, I spent meeting for worship the day before remembering her. And, as Emily’s beloved John Woolman would say: “. . . in calmness of mind went forward . . . ”

Here’s where I was; here’s where I got:

In the early months of 2007, when a weekly meals-and-sharing for the formerly incarcerated at FMC was being discussed, I’d offered to meet with anyone who might have concerns. One of those meetings was with Emily. After carefully listening to me, she smiled—oh, how I’ll miss that radiant smile—and thanked me. She understood more, now, for which she was grateful, she told me. If memory serves, and it seldom does, it would probably be inaccurate to report that Emily gave the Wednesday night sharing circle her blessing. But she did not stand in the way. And in April of 2007, Meeting approved these circles, still going strong.

A coda to that story: When a couple of the men from the circle began attending meeting for worship, Emily, as always, sought them out and graciously welcomed them. And continued to do so!

In 2007, I’d attributed Emily’s change of heart to both the rightness of the action and, to my shame, that I’d done such a stupendous job explaining it to her!

But, the week before her memorial, I rethought that. Twice, that week, in The Boston Globe and on NPR, the results of a recent study were discussed. This study revealed, basically, how almost-impossible it is for humans to shift our thinking. Indeed, the more facts we’re given which question our cherished, long-held views, the more strongly we hold onto what we believe!

So in the midst of assisting her amazing family to arrange for Emily’s memorial, I contemplated this gentle, gracious woman in a new light. Emily did shift her thinking. She did let go of whatever was of concern. How extraordinary!

Sitting in worship on Sunday, I had a “great opening” (George Fox). I think that this month’s blogging on shame and how marbled our emotions truly are informed this opening: If Emily’s ability to change her thinking was, in fact, very rare, then maybe I ought to also contemplate the rest of us, the stubbornly I-know-what-I know folks, differently. With—gasp!—compassion?

What a gift! Thank you, Emily Jones Sander, April 15, 1931—June 5, 2010

[* from the beautiful pamphlet distributed at Emily’s memorial.]

July 13, 2010: “I wrote a book about it!”

Last night at Porter Square Bookstore, twenty-nine year old Melissa Febos read from her amazing book, Whip Smart, a beautifully written, insightful, totally honest, redemptive memoir re being a dominatrix and drug addict—until she wasn’t. (Full disclosure: She’s the daughter of a dear friend.)

More than once during the Q & A, when to further explain something she’d touched upon during her reading, she’d answer, in effect: “Humans are incredibly complicated, I’m complicated, sadomasochism is complicated. Please don’t ask me to give you a quick answer to complex topics. None of this is easy or facile. That’s why I wrote a book about it. Because after four years of being a dom, I know stuff. About power. About shame. About ‘God-shaped holes.’ Read my book.”

Yes. Do.

July 7, 2010: First of all. . .

. . . what’s the difference between shame and guilt? And does it matter?

A story: When I first taught English to deaf high school students, one of the first things we did was work on feelings vocabulary, i.e. words and their respective signs. To connect the word and the sign for “Frustrated” was especially appreciated, as I recall! (An ironical Fun Fact to Know and Tell: the sign for “Frustrated” is a flipping gesture with your entire hand, palm side out, so that your splayed fingers flip up and cover your mouth.)

So as I sit here on a steamy, summer day contemplating the usual: systemic racism, our criminal justice system, and climate change (in the midst of this heat wave, especially the latter!), part of me knows that a precise understanding of word and meaning is useful, part of me doesn’t want to get bogged down.

So for what it’s worth: guilt is about “remorseful awareness” and shame is about “the painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt [hmm], embarrassment, unworthiness or disgrace.”

Here’s what I make of those culled definitions (thank you, Random House Dictionary): Guilt is something you come up over time and feel terrible about. Shame is in-the-moment, reactive, makes you cringe, get red-faced, stammer. Involuntary, maybe? Hard-wired, maybe?

Why am I writing about this? Because I’m beginning to think that shame plays a huge role in our lives. In MY life. And that if I want to really effect change in the Ghandian sense, I need to look at this thing.

So I will. All this month.

June 23, 2010: That Guy in the Gray Minivan

[When the student is ready the teacher appears.]

Next to the Porter Square subway entrance is a bus shelter often used by homeless people, their worldly belongings, crammed into black garbage bags, piled beside them as they sleep.

The other day I was walking on the sidewalk opposite that refuge just as a guy in a gray minivan was going the other way. Seeing that someone was asleep in that shelter, Minivan Guy honks. A “Hey, Loser! Wake up!” honk. A held-longer-than-usual-to-be-really-heard honk. (The homeless man did not stir.)

A paunchy, middle-aged white man, Minivan Guy’s grin, one part sheepish, three parts pleased with himself taught me something: This is what evil looks like. It looks like an overweight guy in a polo shirt, a father, maybe, doing something mean and nasty and feeling a little bit bad about it but mostly delighted to get away with it. (And a helpless, vulnerable victim versus a guy in a moving car isn’t exactly Fair, is it. But that’s what evil looks like, too.)

Like most privileged white people, I have spent much of my life bewildered by the heinous things humans have done and continued to do to one another. “How can people BE like that?” It is only now, in my sixties, that I am finally accepting that the possibility for cruelty lies within all of us. ALL of us.

Minivan Guy inflicted a brief, random, but consciously evil act.

Minivan. Mini-evil.

How easy it is, now, for me to extrapolate how beating up your wife, sexual abuse, anti-semitism, racism—you name it—happens.

June 13, 2010: That Construction Worker in Union Square

[When the student is ready the teacher appears.]

The other day I was walking through Union Square feeling sad about my rapidly declining father, when a construction worker, singing “Hey, Jude” really, really badly, made me laugh out loud. Because he was so genuinely off-key but so equally genuinely into what he was singing, I took full advantage of my little old white-haired lady status by joining in. And (I am so glad none of my daughters were with me; they would have been mortified), I waved my arms around in a futile, I-wish-this-were-a-Technicolor musical moment, vainly trying to encourage other Union Square pedestrians to join in.

“Take a sad song and make it better,” indeed!

A little background: For what feels like decades but has really only been a couple of years, Somerville Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares and half a block from my house, has been under construction. Which has meant endless tie-ups, ear-shattering noise, sometimes, and ongoing daily annoyance. (Good thing I mostly walk or take public transportation.) So my attitude towards the guys in hardhats has been a little like someone living under occupation.( A little, I said. Okay?): When are you going to leave? When can I get my normal life back?

So that one of those construction workers should, by his guileless, horrible singing—he was loud, too!—crack me up, was a huge gift.

So what did this teacher in a hardhat teach me?

I heard his goofy, open-hearted song and thought: He hates this noisy, sweaty, sometimes dangerous, sometimes stultifyingly boring job. That’s why he’s singing. To get through it.

We don’t sing aloud, do we. Unlike those Technicolor musicals, we don’t burst into song. But that construction worker didn’t care. He sang, anyway. Even though he was terrible. So he taught me something about ART. Even badly done art. You do it because you can’t NOT do it.

The next time I wake up at 4:00 AM panicky because I’m scared no one will love the book I’m writing, I’m going to remember that guy.

Bonus: My enormous relief to laugh showed me the depth of my sadness. (I don’t do sad very well.)

Good to know. And why I was so ready to laugh.

June 3, 2010: A FORJ Shoutout

[When the student is ready the teacher will appear.]

Much as I am eternally grateful to Dr. Lynda Woodruff and Reverend Owen Cardwell for all they patiently and lovingly taught me, I need to give mega credit to Friends Meeting at Cambridge’s Friends for Racial Justice. For it was only because of FORJ’s workshops and discussions that I was (kinda) ready to be schooled by Lynda and Owen. So as I begin this month’s account of the teachers, mentors, and kind souls who’ve brought me along and brought me up short, a Quakerly fluttering of outstretched hands* for FORJ!

Fluttering your hands in the air is a customary Quaker sign of approval, a gentle and quiet substitute for clapping.

May 29, 2010: Spiritual Preparedness

[The opposite of fear is love.]

The prediction of 7 (7!) major hurricanes this year in yesterday’s paper was still very much on my mind when Allison, my California daughter, called. Predictably, this forecast had left me blue; hearing my daughter’s bouncy, animated voice cheered me up. Still. . .

When, after catching up with her exciting news, I’d admitted that I’m struggling with, you know, a pervading sense of DOOM, Allison responded perfectly. Not “Oh, Mom! You’re such a downer!” Not “I call you from 3,00 miles away and I get this?” Not “I don’t need this right now.” No way.

Instead, my California, always waiting for The Big One daughter asks me: “Do you have an emergency kit?” And then gently coaches me on how to prepare for disaster.

So, yeah, I’ll start to put together the things she suggested and other items that just make sense in case we lose water or electricity. I’ll get ready.

But what do I need in my spiritual kit? That’s a question I’ve started asking, too.

Stay tuned.

May 20, 2010: Coded

[The opposite of fear is love: this month’s theme.]

Noticed a new feature in this morning’s Boston Globe: “Coping with less.” A pretty lame article re the closing of rest stops in Massachusetts, this new feature nevertheless sorta/kinda acknowledges what’s really going on: Yes, things are bad. No, it’s not going to get better.

Over the past couple of years, every Wednesday night, I have had the great privilege of hanging out with people of color whose interpretation of what’s said by the media is ALWAYS startling. What’s said, what’s left out, who’s telling the story, who’s got a stake in the story, who, because of their rarified, white viewpoint, doesn’t have a clue what’s really going on; I get to listen to such conversations.

So, guided by these conversations and knowing what I know about climate change, about a global economy based on cheap oil—and its inevitable collapse—and the HUGE impact these will have, I read my morning paper searching for the Truth.

Surprise! it’s NOT there in black and white. It’s in code. Like this new feature: “Coping with less.”

Coping. As if. As if we all just, you know, shrug our shoulders, take a Valium, whine to our friends, grit our teeth but cope. Deal. Man up.

Is The Globe shouting: “Listen up, everybody. We all have to use less. It’s our dying planet’s only hope.” ? Naw.

Another theme I hear from people of color: ” ‘They’ don’t. . . ” ” ‘They’ always. . .” [fill in the blank], “they” meaning the white-dominated power structure. And sometimes I agree. Sometimes I hear paranoia/conspiracy theory and disenfranchised people giving “us” way too much credit.

But on this coded, not telling it like it is thing? I definitely see a conspiracy of silence. Take the two devastating rain storms we had in Massachusetts in March. Was there a front page article in The Globe saying: Yikes! Climate change is happening, it’s here, let’s get ready! Naw.

So where’s the love in all this mess? In us. Who, in countless ways, are showing that we’re sensing some fundamental truths. Yeah, even those crazy Tea Party people. All that anger? If someone, ANYONE in power would just admit the truth, acknowledge that a major sea change is happening, the climate (get it) in this country would radically change.

May 10, 2010: “We can do no great things, . . .

. . . only small things with great love.” —Mother Teresa—

Last week while watching my energetic grandson play in a Brooklyn playground, I happily sat on a park bench in dappled sunshine. A mother with two children joined me, a daughter about 4 and an infant asleep in his stroller. After greeting the trio, my attention returned to never-stopping Dmitri. Watching him dart from here to there, I nevertheless was aware of the 4-year-old’s persistent and nasty cough.

Her raggedy sounds put me in a terrible funk: I was immediately reminded of a dire article re an alarming rise in childhood asthma in the NE. The sounds of heavy traffic just a few feet away from the playground didn’t help my “Oh, God, we’re doomed—these precious children are doomed!” terror.

And given the weird weather we’ve had this spring, thinking her cough might just be allergies wasn’t all that comforting.

Confronting my pervading fears re global warming, climate disaster, etc, etc., and what life will be like for Dmitri’s generation, it actually helps to remember that as a young(er) mother, I’d had exactly the same heart-racing fears around nuclear proliferation. And to remember that amazing anti-nuke march in NYC when my daughter Hope was just a baby. (1981? 1982?)

And, thinking about Mother Teresa’s wise words, to contemplate what small, loving, life-affirming acts I can be doing in my small, precious part of this ailing planet.

May 6, 2010: A Spiritual Exercise

Yesterday, leaving NYC on a Peter Pan bus, heading home on I-95 N, a truck caught on fire just ahead of my bus. What a scene! Billowing smoke, screaming fire trucks somehow getting past the backed-up traffic and, in very short time, a complex, beautifully organized rerouting process involving stopping all the traffic on I-95 S and miles of backed-up cars and trucks and buses on I-95 N—like the one I was on—crossing the median strip to get on I-95 S—and, presumably, alternative routes. (And yet my bus eventually arrived in Boston only a half-hour late.)

Having just left the Big Apple, where every newspaper I saw screamed something about the Time Square (botched) bombing attempt, I immediately assumed that truck fire was a terrorist attack. How could I not?

Well, here’s how: all this month, I’m going to write about fear and its antidote: love.

Keep reading.

April 26, 2010: Working the Room

The last time I was in a hotel banquet room was precisely one year ago— at a writer’s conference in Boston; best-selling novelist Ann Patchett delivered the keynote address. Lunch had already been served so the wait staff stood at the edges of the huge ballroom while Patchett expounded to 300 or so rapt writers, editors, et al.

Although I’d really appreciated her message (Hey, writers: None of this waiting on the Muse stuff, please. Just plant your butt on a chair and WORK!), there was one very uncomfortable moment in that ballroom. When she’d heard that her first book was going to be published, she was truly excited, she told us, because now she could actually live! Because, you see, she’d been in a nowhere job, wasting her life, going nowhere waitressing. As I remember it, she’d denigrated waitressing at some length.

My friend Lynne nudged me, pointing to the (black and white) wait staff in their black and white uniforms standing nearby: “Wonder how they’re feeling about what she’s saying?” she’d asked rhetorically.

This past Saturday night, in a banquet room in the Richmond (VA) Marriot Hotel, I joined 80 or so wellwishers to celebrate Owen Cardwell’s 40th pastoral anniversary. When, during one of the songs performed by the talented LeRoix and Chantel Hampton and their band, I noticed one of the (all black) wait staff singing along, I remembered Ann Patchett’s insensitivity.

“So,” I thought. “When those serving and those being served are black [mostly], something different can happen, huh?”

But then it really got interesting: Soon after person after person had stood up to tell what “Pastor” had meant in their lives, Elder Jason Boswell, co-mc for the evening, was suddenly moved to directly address one of the waiters (Quakers and Baptists: we’re both sometimes just moved to do something!)

“You from New York?” he asked the burly waiter standing by the banquet room’s main door.

Nonplussed when the whole room went quiet, the guy said he was, then stated how moved he’d been to hear all the nice things people had to say about Dr. Cardwell.

Well!

Before you knew it, that waiter’s [I don’t know his name] standing in the front of the room being prayed over, the room’s cheering and clapping, and he’s publicly declaring that he’s accepting Christ into his life.

I’ll never know what accepting Christ means to that waiter (or myself, for that matter.) Or, over the long haul, what that moment will mean in his life.

But I sure know how moved I was when Jason broke through that them-us divide.

Beautiful!