On Tyranny and Advent Season

 My juniors are reading Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng; it is a dystopian novel written during the pandemic, thinking about what would happen if the chaos of the early months of that crisis were intensified. I like it because it talks about 21^st century examples and issues—Asian American hate, all of our information on computers and not books—as well as the old favorite of silencing dissent by, as Timothy Snyder would say, obeying in advance.  As we moved through the book, I handed them Snyder’s list of acts against tyranny and asked them to find examples in the book and, if they can not, then in the world. It was hard.  The language is challenging and the concepts are fairly abstract. I spent an hour and a half talking students through different actions. Corporeal politics? The frog outside of ICE. Professional ethics? Teachers can’t tell you what to think but they can present you with challenging assignments that make you think. We are not done with the assignment; each student or pair is going to pull one of the actions out of the hat next week and make a poster, using the graphic version of the book as an example, where they explore how these ideas play out in the book and in our world.

I’ve been thinking about this assignment and the list of actions for about a year now. Some people find Snyder stressful because you can see how authoritarianism, according to his work, is increasing all over the world. It feels both very close to home and very hard to stop. I find him hopeful. Grim, but hopeful. There are 20 actions we can all take to halt the spread of authoritarianism, they just need a bit of grounding in our daily world.

Every Advent, I try to take on a focus. Some years it’s big, like democracy or climate change. Some years, it’s small, like what do I love about my life or daily image in my notebook. The practice helps me get through this, the darkest time of the year, while we are all waiting for the world to shift and the light to return. This year, I want to attempt to ground On Tyranny in daily practice. I will strive to take action on all twenty of his points, but I will give myself a little leeway, because I hope I do not have to “be reflective if you must be armed” or “stay calm when the unthinkable arrives.” For those, I will substitute actions of my own—build community and participate in ritual—because I believe that will also counteract tyranny.  I start on the first night of advent and work until Solstice Eve.

This is the list. Please, join in. There is nothing more empowering than taking action.

• Do not obey in advance.
• Defend institutions.

• December 2: Beware the One Party State

  The last line of this statement talks about engaging in local politics as a way to maintain a healthy democracy.  Benton county has ranked choice voting, so I am a registered member of the Green Party—have been since Ralph Nader!—because I believe in a multitude of political parties, not just two.  Not everyone has ranked choice voting (it can be a challenging sell to voters) but we can all participate in local politics. Showing up is the most important thing you can do to work for change. Sit in the audience, look your elected officials in the eye, and dare them to vote against what you and everyone else in town has been asking for.  I promise you, it matters.

  I am about to head out to a meeting on downtown and economic vitality, if you want to come along. Madison Avenue room at four o’clock. 

• Take responsibility for the face of the world.
• Be wary of paramilitaries.
• Be reflective if you must be armed.

December 3: Remember Professional Ethics

Education around the country is struggling after the pandemic; students are not coming to school as well prepared to learn and we have been making adjustments. However, some of those adjustments are starting to fray in a way that is reminding me that I, too, have professional ethics. When I give students credit in my class, it means that they have made significant progress on their journey to become better readers and writers as well as thinkers. They don’t all start in the same place; they don’t all make the same amount of progress in the time allotted for many reasons; they don’t all go gracefully along the path. But, my professional ethics remind me that a credit means something—progress.  We have many students this year that won’t make progress. It’s not that they can’t do the work—I know what to do to help those students—or they don’t do the work because they are on what I call a Work Strike because they are making  statement to someone about control in their lives. It’s a softer action. Won’t.  They can, but they won’t. There is pressure to drop the bar and push these students over—but, where does that leave us? Their skills stagnate, then fall behind. I’m a grouchy old teacher—they have to show progress to earn credit. I’ll work with you, but I am not going to do it for you. Professional Ethics.

December 1^st: Stand Out.

Standing out means saying what you believe, even if it goes against the popular will or thinking of the group. I am getting good at this—last night, I was the minority vote three times. Once to not raise the city manager’s salary five percent after a 4 percent COLA; second to not send social service funding to the county to distribute; third to establish sanctioned camping spots in town so that people do not have to move every 12 hours. Each time, I was trying to remember the impact of my decisions on the people who have the least money and influence in our community. Not everyone has the “benefit” of being on the city council, but we can all urge our lawmakers to consider the impact of the decisions on the least powerful.

• Be kind to our language.
• Believe in truth.
• Investigate.
• Make eye contact and small talk.
• Practice corporeal politics.
• Establish a private life.
• Contribute to good causes.
• Learn from peers in other countries.
• Listen for dangerous words.
• Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
• Be a patriot.
• Be as courageous as you can.

 

Basement shelves

 

                My friend Mark says, in total seriousness, that he moves piles for a living. The idea resonates with me. His piles are big, mostly wood and lumber for work, while mine are smaller—books and papers—but they are rooted in the same trees. And, as winter comes in, I move more piles. Winter stores and outdoor furniture need homes inside out of the rains; our books and laundry both hang out inside rather than out; food precessing tools that lived on the edges all summer need to return to their homes on shelves. Meanwhile, books, leaves, and cats pile up inside.  Ours is not a minimalist, pure white house.  Everything has its place, but it  requires constant pile moving to keep it there.  I have spent years building shelves. Even now, I eye a blank wall, especially in the basement, hopefully. Can I lift up a long board and stack something there, out of the winter flood zone?

                My favorite little shelves hang out half way down the basement stairs. I got the idea from a friend who removed the sheetrock from a wall and built little shelves between the studs to hold his canned roasted tomatoes, all neatly packed in half pint jars.  I don’t want to take plaster off of our walls, but, after we transformed the garage into the dining room, there were exposed studs on the stair side.  One afternoon, I built a bunch of little shelves and filled them with the useful debris of living—cleaning supplies, sidewalk chalk, water bottles, and trash bags. A few days later, I returned to the project on the other wall and added shelves for candle holders and vases, along with a very sturdy bench that I found by the side of the road as a step to the highest shelf. Some hooks for rags and candle wax scraps, and we were good to go. A cleaning station worthy of Martha Stewart!

A few years later, we thought it would be good to bring Mark’s college graduation present into a more useful spot, so we built another series of shelves at the top of the stairs. He used some slats from a futon frame (also found by the side of the road) to create the floor and let them project out over the stairwell. When his father was here that summer, they wired a plug for the microwave and our toaster oven, so that we could pop out of the kitchen door and heat up our lunch or tea.  We hung all of our canvas grocery bags off of the extensions.  I keep several potholders right by the oven and a couple of gnarly old towels that we use to clean up floor spills below them.  On the other wall, I used the metal shelving system with brackets to hold the extra serving bowls and water pitchers, as well as my bean pot and big pasta pot. Underneath are the three bags that hold plastic and recycling.

The back hall is probably full—even a little tight at times. But, because everything is right there, it’s not a big deal to move it back to its rightful place (even if it migrates out again the next day).

               

                 

Rainy Sunday Morning

 The rains have begun. We hung the storm windows, brought in all of the garden art and chairs, made hazelnut pancakes for breakfast, and read the New York Times by the dining room stove while laundry dried around us and the cats napped.  We are not sure we are really ready for the Rainy Season, but it is ready for us.

Back Pain

 

                My back hurts. Right where all of the moving parts come together at the base of the spine. It’s stiff. I can walk and cook dinner, but not bend over or turn to far either way.  I am not really complaining, although it is annoying. It has been worse—a few winters ago, my entire pelvic ring seized up, compressed some nerves and arteries, and took five weeks to settle down. I didn’t sleep through an entire cycle of the moon and could barely walk. This is not that. I am grateful. And I have an appointment already with the woman who undid all of the tightness two years ago on Tuesday.

 But I am wondering, why my back, now?

I’ve had reoccurring pains before. Urinary tract infections that lingered and flared up for four years, until I knocked it out with a nasty sulfa drug that made me so ill I had to leave work in the middle of a Saturday rush.  I lost my voice regularly for years when I first started teaching, once for two weeks.  I’ve had neck pain that made my hands go numb and a weird shoulder clicking that I finally cleared out by lying on the floor and making snow angels over and over. Migraines have knocked me out while back packing  or when I did not get enough sleep.  All of these pains feel related, in some deep way, to stress on that part of the body and all have moved on to bother someone else.  This will, too.  

 But why my back, now?

Is it sitting too much in chairs that are too big for my frame? There was a six hour council meeting last Monday night and then four late afternoon meetings of an hour and a half to two hours each, after several days of conference in Portland.  Am I sitting the wrong way in my chair, where my legs dangle above the floor sometimes?  Was it the grand tug of two huge pieces of black plastic mulch off of the school garden so we could begin to prep the beds for blueberries in the spring?  My book bag banging into my spine? I do not know.  But, as my actions are limited for this week, at least, I’ll be spending some time considering the problem.

What is my back telling me?

 

Portland

          

      When I first moved to Oregon, I lived in Portland. It was a good time for many—the tech industry was booming and food lovers were flocking to town—but I struggled to make ends meet and find affordable housing, several times leaving my cats with a friend and sleeping in my van in the city so that I could get to work on time (5AM some days…). The local papers wrote many articles about the decline in SROs as the old weekly hotels were torn down and replaced by high rise, expensive, apartments for hipsters. Street Roots was starting up; I interviewed for the cook’s job at Sisters of the Road Café; the number of people living on the streets was growing. But the city did not feel unsafe to me.

                One night, I was waiting for the bus on the downtown transit mall. Because I had no money, I had started carrying a loaf of bread from my job at Great Harvest in my backpack.  If someone asked me for money, I gave them the loaf. It had been a long day—I worked for nine hours baking bread then came downtown to teach an adult education GED class in the basement of the Pioneer Place Mall. My timing was off—I just missed the bus.  It was winter but not too cold and not raining.

                A man sidled up to me, holding a sign “Spare Change?  Anything helps.”

                “No,” I said, “but I have a loaf of bread.” I held out the round, whole wheat loaf. He smiled.

                “We thank you,” his next sign read.  As I nodded, he reached into his collar and brought out a white pet rat. We smiled at one another and he slipped off into the night.

                I was in Portland last week for a conference. My room had a beautiful tree right outside the balcony; crows woke me up the first morning, gossiping with one another about local food services. I walked the downtown streets for several hours—it is not a Hellscape. It is not a War Zone. It looks a great deal like it did that night, thirty years ago, when I handed over a loaf of bread to a homeless man and his companion.

 

Bits of the Past

 

                My friend Maureen hunts down old Fine Gardening magazines, reads them over afternoon tea, and then sends them my way. (I send her our New Yorkers.) I got a bunch on Friday afternoon and was poking through one from about 2000. There, in the Northwest section, was an article on Cracked Pots, an arts fair full of garden objects made from recycled materials. One photo caught my eye. The two pieces looked…familiar. Like I had just seen one and helped move the other, back in the day. I looked closer. It was a stool and an insect, both made by my friend Anne Hart. The insect did not sell that day and it now sits on my front steps. Her name was not in the article; I wonder if her work would have sold better if it was.

 

                When I was in grad school in Boston, I had a job at a Jewish bakery in Newton, Massachusetts, where we lived. It was a small place—served coffee to commuters in the morning, bagels and cream cheese to the high school students from down the street at lunch, and loaves of rye and challah to the Jewish mothers who came in during the day. I started in September, right before Rosh Hashanah. Women called all day, ordering bread for the holidays.  “I want three round challies,” they would say, “two plain and one raisin.”  “Challie?” I asked one of the people I worked with. “Challah,” they explained.  All righty, I thought. Challie.

                When I moved to Portland, I called the loaf “challie.” “Challah,” my west coast Jewish roommate corrected me. No pet names here.  Last night, I made a rather huge braided challah with fig paste rolled in for a potluck. My friend Leah, from Brookline—right next door to Newton—reached for a piece. “I want some of the challie,” she smiled.  

 

Equinox Earth

 

Every six weeks, I pull on Tarot Card, asking for guidance in the coming time.

 Last night, it was the Equinox, the day and night when light balances and the world pauses before shifting into the dark time of the year. We had gone for a walk out at the wildlife refuge, stopping to look at the hazy sunlight in the dusty ferns and oak trees and gathering acorns.  When we came home, I made pesto from our basil plants and cooked corn from the market. After dinner, while Mark did the dishes, I started  a small fire in the back garden and held the cards.

For these moments, I use an old deck. It was once Mary Jane’s—the older woman all of the Ceres bakers consulted for readings. She introduced us to the Mother Peace deck, round, with images of women in power for her readings, preferring the ambiguity of a circle to the clarity of upright and reversed. This was an old deck she handed  on to my friend Cheryl, who gave it to me when I drove across country for three months. It lived in the Ark for years coming inside when we bought the house. I have put it down to rest once or twice, but I keep coming back. The edges are frayed, the colors subdued, the silk wrapping cloth in tatters.  

It was just twilight. The kittens were still out, stalking each other around the garden beds, rustling in the leaves. The chickens chatted for a bit as they settled in. In the distance, muted traffic and college students shouting at one another.  But, close at home, wind in trees and creatures settling down. The fire shot sparks into the sky and swirled around the chimney pot. The light from the kitchen reached as far as the outdoor table, but not to the back.  Sitting cross legged on the ground, I held the cards: what will help me in the coming weeks?

The Ace of Pentacles replied, “How is your spiritual treasure dispensing wisdom?”  Is it? I wondered.  Pentacles are about material abundance—maybe all of the fruit we have brought in for the winter? Maybe a successful grapefruit sale?  It didn’t seem like good response, so I waited and looked further in my two books.  Sitting in front of the fire, watching it swirl, feeling the warmth on my face and stomach, the ground beneath me, the answer came. Pentacles are also Earth cards. Return to the Earth.  Return to the earth again, I thought. I can do that.