I Walk Out Into the Country at Night
The moon is so high it is
Almost in the Great Bear.
I walk out of the city
Along the road to the West.
The damp wind ruffles my coat.
Dewy grass soaks my sandals.
Fishermen are singing
On the distant river.
Fox fires dance on the ruined tombs.
A chill rises and fills
Me with melancholy. I
Try to think of words that will
Capture the uncanny solitude.
I come home late. The night
Is half spent. I stand for a
Long while in the doorway.
My young son is still up, reading.
Suddenly he bursts out laughing,
And all the sadness of the
Twilight of my life is gone.
--Lu Yu
(From One Hundred Poems From the Chinese, Trans., Kenneth Rexroth. New Directions, 1971.)
My definition of a writer: someone who is interested in everything.
--Susan Sontag
I think the artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.
--Romare Bearden
Each person has a literature inside them.
--Anna Deavere Smith
People change when they awaken to what is inside them already, and the art of change is to create the context for that transformation. That is done through stories, narratives, humor, the exploration of one's grief, but not by actually trying to change someone's views. That never works.
--Paul Hawken
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness--and our ability to tell our own stories.
--Arundhati Roy
For the first 90 percent of this country's history (about 350 years) slavery or legal segregation was generally in place. Only for the last 10 percent or so of our entire history have we been free of slavery and legal segregation. Thus, racial oppression makes the United States very distinctive, for it is the only major Western country that was explicitly founded on racial oppression. Today, as in the past, this oppression is not a minor addition to U.S. society's structure, but rather is systemic across all major institutions.
--Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism
It is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of high maturity, to rise to the level of self-criticism.
--Martin Luther King Jr.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them.
--President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 2009
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Ancient Remnants
A shattered stone statue
Some old copper coins
Strange ornaments of blackened silver
Several broken bronze vessels
Were unearthed
In a desert
And people say that centuries ago
Here where there is only a desert
A city was once settled
And a thought strikes me:
Even today, at a party
A gathering
When I come face to face with you
For one second
Just for one moment
The warmth of your body
The fleeting chance of meeting our eyes
The shine of your red bindiya
The rustle of your clothes
The fragrance of your hair
And sometimes, unintentionally
A tiny flower of touch
And then again, that unending desert
That desert where once
A city had flourished.
--Javed Akhtar
(From Anthems of Resistance: A Celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry, by Ali Husain Mir & Raza Mir. IndiaInk, 2006.)
For the new issue of Tikkun magazine, the editors "asked writers representing the breadth of the spiritual progressive movement to write memos to our new president...Together, these memos reflect the hopes and aspirations of what might be called the Religious and Spiritual Left in the U.S. at the beginning of 2009."
You can read Drew's "Memo to Obama" on p. 47.
Some of you might be interested in the writings of Tim Wise.
Several years ago I heard an amazing lecture by Wise, who is probably the most important white anti-racist activist of our time. Wise, who is Jewish, gave are very powerful and interesting critique of white supremacy, racism, and colonialism in the founding of Israel, and in Zionism.
About seven years ago I participated in a sit-in at the Federal Building in Oakland, and was arrested along with a couple dozen others demanding an end to U.S. funding of Israel's military.
What would Dr. King say about U.S. tax dollars funding White Phosphorus bombs and the killing of children and other civilians in Gaza? Probably the same thing he would say about bus bombings, rocket attacks, anti-Semitism, and the whole circle of violence in the Middle East and elsewhere: It is tragic, immoral, and it has to stop.
What is happening is Gaza right now is truly heart-breaking. My prayers are with all the people of Israel and Palestine.
Here are some links to Tim Wise and some of his essays on Israel and Palestine and Zionism.
http://www.timwise.org/
http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/nationalismoffools.html
http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/statespeopletoo.html
http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/fraudfitforaking.html
Lately I've been kind of obsessed with John Denver. Now, before you go thinking that John Denver sucks, allow me to say, I know. Believe me...growing up in the 70s, John Denver on the radio was like community-sanctioned child abuse.
(That's one of the interesting things about music: even the greatest songs, played too much, can, at best, lose appeal, and, at worse, drive you nuts.)
But a few weeks ago PBS showed a special about John Denver. (This was during their pledge week, when they pull out all the old music to tug on the heart- and purse-strings of their Boomer donor demographic.) Suddenly childhood memories were washing over me in his melodies--from the early 70s when I was 3 or 4, through to the end of the decade.
And I had to appreciate again that John Denver kind of kicks ass. There is definitely a reason he was so insanely popular.
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" If we are to have peace on earth…we must develop a world perspective."
--Martin Luther King Jr., December 24, 1967
"Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here's the earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty! "
--Commander Frank Borman, Apollo 8, December 24, 1968
Forty years ago, on Christmas Eve 1968, an astronaut orbiting the moon took a photograph that changed the world. As we near the end of the 40th anniversary of one of the most heart-breaking years in our history, it is worth remembering that the year of trauma ended in triumph.
As '68 dawned, the Tet offensive dispelled illusions of easy victory in Vietnam. Later that spring, in the early evening of April 4, one of the world's most visible and visionary activists for justice was shot down in Memphis, triggering waves of outrage and sadness, as more than 100 cities burst into flames of despair and rebellion. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed in Los Angeles.
Throughout '68, student protests and general uprisings broke out in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. In Mexico City, the Summer Olympics set the stage for the raised-fist defiance of John Carlos and Tommie Smith. In August, police and demonstrators clashed violently at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
This was the troubled world that the crew of Apollo 8 left behind in December, as they became the first humans to journey around the moon. Just as it seemed the world was falling apart, the astronauts on Apollo 8 took a photograph that would bring us all together, and forever change our image of the planet and ourselves.
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"This is widely recognized as a transformative moment in the history of the USA and, perhaps, the world. The neo-liberal model - which views greed as good and wealth as a reward for virtue; which believes that markets possess infinite wisdom and regulation and unions can only detract, and which discredits every objection to rising inequality and upward redistribution of income as an unwarranted assault on the class that creates prosperity - has, for all intents and purposes, imploded. It clearly is no longer viable. How else to explain Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's nationalization in all but name of the insurance giant AIG? The admission by former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan that he was wrong to believe financial markets would self-regulate?"
--Eileen Appelbaum, TruthOut, Dec. 14, 2008
Like many of you, I wept a tear or two the night Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The tears that flowed for so many across the country gave testimony that the last 8 years have been trying. But more than that, the tears of joy and relief--springing from the depths of our national soul--testified to four centuries on the fault lines of freedom and slavery. A history filled with trauma, though not without triumphs.
November 4, 2008, was one of those triumphs.
I felt giddy when my dad called early in the evening and said, " It's over. Obama won Ohio." Though the networks wouldn't call it for another hour, I went to the fridge and popped a bottle of champagne. Channel-surfing the live TV coverage with my son, we were watching Jon Stewart's show when he told Stephen Colbert and a delirious crowd the official news: Obama would be the 44th president. Involuntarily, my chin buckled a bit, my chest quaked, and I did something like a half-sob. On TV, the usually ever-ironic Colbert was wiping his eyes.
The tears around the world were not only mirrors of the past, but also libations for the future, dedicated to the proposition that we can heal and transcend the brutal shadows of history, see the full picture of the present, and manifest a transformative tomorrow.
The election of President Obama represents a stunning moment in the history of systemic racism in this nation--a profound moment in the spiritual journey of the country, and an amazing moment in the history of the world.
But as Obama said on election night, " This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. " Looking at the past, we see that history is made by mass movements, more so than by a single person--even a prophet or a president. To reverse catastrophic climate change and runaway global warming, we need a movement. To dismantle institutional oppression, we need a movement. To save the Earth's biosphere--the sacred, fragile and disappearing web of living species--we need a movement. To end poverty, and the unnecessary, unconscionable suffering it causes, we need a movement. To transform our country from an empire into an ally, we need a movement.
We desperately need to start a new story.
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Changing the structure and rules of the global economy will require a mass movement based on messages of compassion, justice, and equality, as well as collaborative and democratic processes…If we stay positive, inclusive, and democratic, we have a truly historic opportunity to build a global movement for social justice.
--Medea Benjamin
The future will have no pity for those who, possessing the exceptional privilege to speak words of truth to the oppressor, instead take refuge in cynical indifference and cold complicity.
--Frantz Fanon
The history of tomorrow is the struggle, which has already begun, between conquerors and artists...Political action and artistic creation are the two faces of the same revolt against the world's disorder, the same desire to give the world unity.
--Albert Camus (1947)
For me the process of art and the idea of political freedom have always been inextricably mixed, not always theoretically, but since I can remember, in feeling....Within the human psyche…poetry is a secret way through which we can restore authenticity to ourselves.
This is perhaps why poetry has been so important to feminism and the feminist movement. Language itself had made us invisible to ourselves. The very vocabulary we inherited locked us into a diminished state of being.
--Susan Griffin, " Poetry as a Way of Knowledge"
When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer.
--John Russell
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.jpg "Drew at the Whidbey Institute, delivering the Thomas Berry Legacy lecture, October 2008")
