Dear Mister President

Do you ever wonder what you can do in one lifetime? 

John Calvi, a Quaker healer, once said it will take at least two generations of people working socially and systemically to end torture in our world.

If we consider torture as the destination of this long journey of human evolution, we may find it makes sense in our minds.  But, it feels wrong.  Knowing about it feels so wrong to us that it exists in each of us as a tiny disease that grows in the form of disappointment and pain.  I wish sometimes that I could go back to not knowing that the United States has tried to get a confession from a male prisoner by taking his child down the hall and breaking his arm to encourage the prisoner to confess.  There are countless other stories, but this one makes me think of my own husband and sons.  

The road leading to the place in which we are now standing, has been longer than we can see in any direction.   The road leading from here into the future splits into in an infinite number of directions and is longer than I have ever considered long to be.   Just by visualizing a world without torture, one of those many paths becomes clearer.  This is hope. 

This is my sense when I allow the knowing to come.  Sometimes I think the knowingis a spiritual experience that can only be described in poetry, because it is hardly meant for words.  Other times I don’t think and I feel the knowing is as mundane as eating, seeing, and breathing.  My body feels this knowing in the turning of the Earth, the beating of my heart, and in the expansiveness of the universe.  For example, I see the stars through the city lights, or through a haze of atmosphere, and they are obscured by my mind’s inability to feel the infinite.   But, I know it is there.  I have seen it before.   Now I know.  I can’t always see it, but there is always someone who does.  This is a good thing.  In all generations, there have been people who know what feels right and what feels wrong. 

I still get overwhelmed by the visions of beauty and change that I have.  It almost feels irreverent to speak out when they are given to me.  However, I don’t think I am special in these moments.  I think we are all bringing this knowing.  We gather together in our existence and like magnetism or gravity, it pulls otherwise random senses into a whole for a blink in time.  Someone inevitably articulates the knowing in the way it came to them in that blink of a moment, so often obscured by intelligence and activity.   Like knowing that torture is wrong.   Knowing something is wrong, is knowing what love is.   It is the beginning of a grand paradigm change. 

One truth pokes through the dome of the heavens and then all we can see is that there is something beyond the dome.  It is like the well-known drawing of an old woman who is at the same time a young maid.  It is like Plato’s allegory of the cave, where an individual who only knew the shadows on the wall and who becomes transformed by the reality.  That the outside world is three dimensional and completely different from what he has experienced up until that moment.  He can never go back to not knowing.  

So, here we are. 

Just think about torture for a minute.  It’s simpler than it seems.  It feels good to be held with gentle hands by our mothers and fathers.  It hurts all over when they throw us down upon the hard floor and walk away because we were not what they expected us to be.  Somewhere in the world today, at this moment, someone is feeling that kind of pain.  Someone is doing it and someone is letting it happen and still others are letting that person let it happen over and over again.  It’s torture.  It’s political.  It is a system.  It is a cycle.  And it is like a large rock the size of the moon rolling down hill.  It feels like the best we can do is to step out of the way and wait for it to stop.   After it stops, the healing will begin.  It will take a long time to heal from torture.  The healing process will take generations.  It is like a cool, clear aquifer deep under the earth.  It has taken hundreds of years for the water to filter down through air, trees, grass, animals, people, soil, silt, gravel, clay, and rock to become a pure element.  Healing from this kind of pain will take that long.  Someday, when children grow up knowing that the human body is as sacred as our soul and that we are all one, the world will know an end to torture. 

Let’s try to stop the rock.  Let’s change the hill, shrink the mass, or become bigger than both.  Stop torturing political prisoners, stop torturing inmates, stop torturing ourselves, and stop torturing our enemies.  Stop working hard every day and giving money to the powerful and afraid and tell everyone you know that torture is wrong.  Tell them that it hurts.  Tell them that you don’t want your child to be tortured some day.  Tell them that no one deserves to feel that kind of pain.  We are all feeling it right now. 

Choose a vision of love.  Pick up the children of humanity and hold them gently in our arms like a mother or a father.  Forgive them for not being as you had expected them to be.  And change the future.   

Learn More:  Karen Tse: How To Stop Torture, Council On Foreign Relations, Something Extraordinary, OM Chant

Out Of The Wilderness

Portland, Oregon, 2-2012   by  Glee 

                  
                   Waking up all over, 

          Hearing the colors of our longing, 

                   Stepping at the pace 

                   Of granite breathing, 

                 We see alive the ringing

                    Of our Light as one. 

                                    -Glee 10-15-12

Food, Clothing, Shelter, Love

A Burning Desire For Truth: 38"X92" Chalk Pastel, Charcoal, Acrylic Paint, Collage on Butcher Paper
Created 10/2011-10/2012 By Glee

Learn More: Picasso and The Power of Art

Weeping For The Pledge of Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I wonder what would happen if each person in America today were required to put hand to heart and face an American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance before starting work.  What if we were to stop each day and stand still in the light of truth?  Words or no words, there is something about this ritual in honor of a promise that can be powerful if held up to the integrity and unity its empty words imply. 

When I think about all the times I had to say the Pledge of Allegiance to pay for my day at public school, I feel betrayed.  Never mind the individual words, picking that apart would be a waist of time. I never felt as if I would be punished if I did not say the pledge in class.  I knew that I would feel the sting of difference if I'd abstained.  For all our American individualism, I recall a sense of wanting to fit in.  The unity of being under one God, however, sounded pretty ominous and I couldn't imagine how this could be anything different from the oppression of my own mother's rules.  But, under God, lived Sesame Street, Cub Scouts, doughnuts, fireworks, and my new blue Schwinn bicycle. This was patriotism at age 5.

The Vietnam War had ended the year before we celebrated the bi-centennial.  Plenty of flags had been carefully folded with white-gloved hands and handed to the mothers and fathers of American youth.  The flag was all they had at the end of it all. There remains, in me, strong memories of raising the flag up a pole in front of our school and taking a turn to handle the flag with careful, shaking hands.  We were all convinced that the flag was a treasure to be handled with care. 

When it came time for the Pledge of Allegiance, the classroom would quiet and the day would wait for the ritual of the pledge.  I felt so much a part of something.  Words spoken or sung together vibrate in my bones like a tuning fork. As I understood it, I was being asked to devote my love and energy to the mother tit of freedom and justice. In 1976, we celebrated the 200 years since the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence with special coins, furniture sales, and parades with drums pounding to the rhythm of my heart.  We celebrated the hard fight for freedom, the one thing that was constantly in danger of being taken away.  As a kid, freedom sounded pretty good.  I'm certain that I relished the idea of doing whatever I wanted. 

Four days after my 20th birthday in 1991, I watched the United States drop bombs on human beings in Kuwait on a big screen TV where I worked.  I remember large tan colored cannons shooting from the decks of ships.  I began to sob non-stop for what seemed like days.  Why was I the only one crying? People would ask me if I was okay.  My mother tried hard to teach us to abhor war and violence as well as guns.  I had watched Woodstock the movie over and over again as a teenager.  My idols were the young people who fought long and hard to end the Vietnam War.  The one's who wore American flag shirts and played the American Anthem on electric guitars.  The ones who were beaten, jailed, or killed because they tried to change things.  I thought that once such a birth of civilization like the peace movement or the equal rights movement had taken place, war would never come around again. 

I was so deeply disappointed by my country's actions in the world, and so very unaware of the truth.  History was but a fog of romanticism and lies for me after that.  I couldn't fathom why individuals were sent to prison for killing another human being, but things could just keep right on ticking after the Native American Indian cultures were systematically dismantled. If this is how this country got started, when would things ever be in balance again? If we were to stick to the pledge of allegiance, we would have to stop everything and focus just on fixing THAT before we could move forward with any kind of integrity.  We would probably even have to elect a Native American to the office of President of the United States.  The whole of congress would have to get down on bended, bare, and hurting knees and apologize for what our forefathers and mothers did to live on this continent, for all of the terrible ignorance that has followed. After all, how can we ever put it all back?  How can we rationalize so much pain, and blood shed? I was not feeling very patriotic. 

 Two years after the gulf war, my mother informed me that I was officially a member of DAR, the Daughters of the American Revolution.  I had no idea what this meant.  I was told to attend a meeting and that it could possibly bring me some much-needed support...I never went.  The idea of sharing patriotic luncheons with those who celebrate their direct connection to warfare seemed ludicrous and sad. 

My image of the gathering was of a bunch of old republican women bloated with self-importance and surrounded by lace tablecloths and white napkins, all set up under a gigantic American Flag. Never the less, being genetically linked to revolutionaries did give me a story during a time of great thirst for cultural lineage.  I was in college in the arts program during the multicultural movement.  White, was not a culture.  White was the eraser of cultures.  The symbol of dominance over all that was expressive, passionate, and poetic.  It was the blandness of British food and the creator of the unhealthy burger and fries.  White equaled stiff dancing, lack of style and color, thick-necked men in trucks with shotguns, and pale, allergic children with thick glasses.  Whiteness paved the countryside, killed the buffalo, and hung African Americans for wanting to be treated like human beings.  My family's connection to the Mayflower and to the American Revolution was my dark secret.  It was reserved for times when I felt completely devoid of culture. 

Nostalgic tears well up each time I hear the national anthem played to a large gathering of United States citizens, their bodies straight with pride and holding hats low.  It's the rare moment when I see people stand still and quiet without some sort of tragedy having to take place.  Perhaps we are standing still to gawk at the tragedy we all deny in our hearts.  I also tear up when all the cars on a busy street pull over and out of the way of a speeding, yowling ambulance.  What do these two things have to do with one another?  It is a miniscule tick of the clock in honor of our humanity.  It's an easy way to do something heartfelt for the common good.  It is, after all, an emergency. 

Relief is what I feel when the American public shows its ability to stop and let humanity march through the middle of a hard working and hurried day.  I wonder if we should all be standing still or sitting right down where we are when we become aware that our country is using our tax money for killing, torturing, and taking.  As I see it, we should all pull our cars over to the side of the road to let the ambulance of our healing begin.  Or stand up where we are and put our hands over our hearts or sit down to weep and wail without regard for the watchful eyes of the children.  The children already know of the violence, the numb faced disregard for human feelings and human safety.  We are walking testimonies to the tragic every day.  

Our numbness to the disparity between the Pledge of Allegiance and the inequality of 99% of the people in America is like driving a car down the road while blocking the ambulance behind, siren wailing, lights blazing, and horns honking.  I see myself behind the wheel with the music turned up loud, eating a snack, drinking my coffee, and thinking about what I need at the grocery store.  A police car following closely behind will turn on its lights and administer a ticket for ignoring an emergency, for being a negligent citizen.  It would take me only a moment to see that I was in danger of being singled out and shamed for my negligence.  I envision a grueling finger wag from the police officer asking me how I would feel if my loved one were on the way to the hospital and someone failed to move out of the way.  

Now, I sit in silence with 60 to 100 other American citizens for one hour each week to connect our hearts to our heads.  In the silence, we feel things.  We witness to our humanity.  We carefully center ourselves on finding a way forward that will put war, violence, and destruction of nature on a linear path to the finish line.  We look for a way to promote a cycle of integrity, peace, simple living, community connection, and equality that will forever feed into itself for many generations to come.  I feel like I am a part of something.  I feel the rhythm of our hearts beating together.  I sit still in the light of truth and I weep.  I am feeling peaceful, patriotic, and hopeful.  I am ready to join the Daughters of the American Revolution to promote a new kind of revolution.  I am the daughter of many revolutionaries who dreamed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Learn more...

Collaborative Consumption

http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/

War Is Not The Answer-FCNL

http://fcnl.org/issues/ppdc/

Cry Your Tears For You-John Trudell

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE-NGGP_dOo

Quaker Woman Fired For Inserting "Non-Violently" 

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/29/7384

The Suspension Of Disbelief

My father is an atheist.  I'm not sure how his beliefs differ from the Quakers I just spent the week with, some of whom call themselves non-dious.  I do know that I have enjoyed listening to my father's recent musings about the nature of humanity's fascination with some entity other than ourselves, to whom we give some power of external inspiration or control. 

He took time to share his theory that bacteria in our bodies (hens forth referred to as the Bacteria) are actually leading us in all directions of development, evolution, and societal structure.  We exist simply to keep them alive. He and I discussed the need that humans have to identify a sense of being lead by a greater force other than our ego or self-will.   We were, I think, teetering on a theological discussion about religion being the opiate of the masses, an opiate keeping us unaware of the Bacteria.  I don't want to go into great detail on this, because he is writing a book about it and I want you all to read it with new eyes.  He just may be on to something. Though I don't think they will be teaching it in science classes in Kansas. 

His theory meanders the lazy river along the shores of belief and the meaning of life.  I do not claim to possess any certainty about the nature of his purely mental explorations.  Nor do I feel sure of his true feelings about the existence of a higher being.   The Bacteria do sound a bit like "that of god in everyone".  This unity stuff reminds me of his notion of matter being energy.  I feel akin to this notion of "energy" being the grand unifying theory in physics, specifically quantum physics.  Also that this energy may be the life force, the light of god, what animates the Chakras.  

For me, all of this is more about the analogy or the allegory than it is about the truth.   What matters is that my father and I can talk about spirituality.  There is very little about this "energy" that can be tested and quantified, like testing gravity by falling down.  I'll let the physicists do that.  I use my five senses to note its significance in my life and I listen for its significance in the lives of Friends.  The sense of oneness I feel may be better than any drug ever discovered by humans, with the exception of love, which very well may be the same thing.

So, what does this have to do with bacteria, besides the fact that, according to my dad, we might be killing god by washing our hands?  (Title of the editorial headline in response to his book)  There is something about this mortal coil that brings on a craving for survival.  Even at its worst, life is hard to leave.  My dad loves life and thinks it is beautiful, even if humans are only an appendage of the bacteria in our bodies.  He loves life so much that he believes in peace, love, and that we are all connected. 

As a Friend, I occasionally meditate on the story of Jesus.  In it, I discover a sense of relief that god would manifest a living being here among us to prove that being human does not mean we must give into the urge to participate in a desperate competition for survival, by vying for the failure of "others". So, my dad and I agree on these points.  There is an energy that enlivens our existence.  And that life is beautiful.  

Bacterial Bonanza: Microbes Keep Us Alive (NPR):  

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129862107 

The Quantum Activist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDi24IfILZ0

More Than You Wanted To Know About Quakers:
http://rachelheldevans.com/ask-a-quaker-response

Laughter Is Good Medicine

Who's Bill McKibbon?

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/contributor/56/

Buy a Gnomeland Security T-shirt:

 http://store.funnytimes.com/merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=TFTGS&Category_Code=TEES#.UA9mvupKBVc

Very Nice People

When I was in Junior High, my estranged father called to talk to me about God.  He detailed the atrocities of the Christian Church and its followers.  I was enlightened as to the dichotomy between seeking the truth and having faith.  It was explained to me how keeping safe in the mind throughout life would require a great deal skepticism to avoid being brainwashed.  Brainwashed, my father said, was the worst kind of defilement of one's freedom.  Walk your own path and know that at the end of it lies a clear understanding of the world around you that will induce a state of awe and inspiration.  Then he showed me Carl Sagan's The Cosmos.  It was actually quite spiritual and Carl seemed like a pretty nice guy.

I had asked my mom about God at age seven.  She said I would have to find out about God on my own, but that she believed.  She was not sure about her chosen spirituality.  As a result, we were an interesting mishmash of "everythingists".  I truly enjoyed fishing for religion with Mom.  She did it whole heartedly and seemed to hope she would find the perfect spiritual home for all of us.

Ultimate respect was given to my brother and I in this endeavor.  When I was ten and my brother was twelve, my mother scheduled a visit from some Mormon missionaries, who came to our house and tried very hard to explain the father, son, and holy ghost using finger puppets.  My brother and I had spent an hour making iced tea to share with our visitors, as we were latchkey kids and my mom was still at law school classes when they arrived.  They did not accept our kind offer and went on to tell us why they could not drink caffeine or Coke.  That, coupled with the finger puppet story, was just too much. They were not making any sense to us at all, but they were very nice people.

Today, my mother is a very satisfied Mennonite.  And a very nice person.

For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelism  or http://www.carlsagan.com/

Waiting For The Revolution

I Am Afraid

I have tucked the revolution

    into my underwear drawer

It is among the many things

    that are special to me

I am afraid

What happened to US

In a time I cannot recall

Will take everything away

    from the innocents

Who should not see the teeth of wolves

Death calls to me

"COME AND BE BORN!"

From where we all began

From the great unifying forces of the universe

I must sit and calmly find

The place where we all connect

To the now

The soothing and beautiful now

I am afraid

That all of life is real

That flowers bloom

Birds and bees

Beget more birds and bees

That it will be as simple as all that

I have an effervescent bubbling spring

    inside my body

It's connected to my want

To bring change

To send flying sleek spears of

    truth into the mammoth elephant

    of BUSINESS AS USUAL

I am afraid

I will succeed

And that the heady tip this iceberg

    will melt away 

And underneath the long beard of my grandfather

Will be nothing other than a neck

For more info on Occupy Portland: http://occupyportland.org/