I’m back, at least for a bit, and hopefully more consistently over the summer.
Spring classes are over and the papers are flooding my in box. I heard Becky Thompson, an inspiring professor and writer, speak Monday night, and she talked about her decision to discontinue all email communication with students. Makes them talk to her in person instead, so she can get to know them. The fantasy of rejecting email is appealing, but the thought of all those people showing up at my office door…How well do I want to get to know them? How much time do I not feel like I have?
I’ve committed to holding off grading until I revise and resubmit a journal article I need to get out the door. Momentum is key. Fruit languishing on the vine is psychologically enervating.
I am watching green things, many of them newly planted, grow all over my property. Paying close attention. A tiny third leaf of a columbine sprouted yesterday on my plate of seedlings, and I look forward to nestling it in with the other personalities in my corner planter.
The Andy Goldsworthy-inspired plant sculpture is coming along. I’ll post a good picture soon.
The first pink and white rose on my rosebush bloomed on Sunday and took my breath away. The first bloomer on the bush always strikes me as the most perfectly glorious.
I found a tiny bug on my hand towel in the bathroom Monday night. Couldn’t tell if it was a spider, but worried it was a tick, based on its deep red, bulbous abdomen. Couldn’t shake it off the towel, so put the whole thing on my front porch to give it a chance to escape. It rained all night. I didn’t have time to check in the morning. Last night I come home and the poor thing is still on the towel. Wave of compassion and sadness that it hasn’t eaten, seems stuck. I dislodge it with a postcard, it lands on the doormat. Go inside. Wave of fear that it will find Paco’s warm skin when he sits on the doormat. Wave of violence as I get a piece of toilet paper and smash the doomed thing. Wave of repulsion at human fear, which destroys so much that is elegant and divinely designed.
Later, I watch a long-legged spider carefully make her way across the ceiling of my living room while I sit with a book ten feet below. Having just killed the tic from small human fear, I discipline my body to sit still instead of scurry away to avoid her “dropping” on me. (We’re so self-absorbed.) The shadow cast from the light fixture doubled her size. Indomitable, sure footed, elegant. She can walk upside down. What can I do?
The Universe keeps leading me to academics who write passionate, connected, penetrating, out-of-the-box books–role models, clearly, of what can be done if you’re willing to swim against the current. Ruth Behar. Bob Jensen. And the aforementioned Becky Thompson who, it turns out, also did her undergrad at UC Santa Cruz (a fated experience for most of us). I see glimpses of a path I may be carving for my voice. I am writing differently. Trying to write this book in the voice that feels most true.
Trying, too, to live much more sustainably, less wastefully, less obliviously. And yet thinking, as I regularly do, about the glacial consciousness of the academy, and the vicious cancer of predatory global capitalism with its harem of nasty ideologies, I still feel strong periodic urges to pull out of the whole thing. Send me an invitation at the right moment and I’ll unplug from all this and join with the human pockets of resistance all over the globe to try and throw it off altogether and create new livable alternatives. I’m serious. I admire Barack Obama, but like Bob Jensen was saying last night when I heard him speak, and I know it to be true: the system is neither humane nor sustainable the way it is. And yet my little plot of private property is such a retreat. I ask my students this: can we call plots of earth our own private property and still find ways to take care of each other, to not exploit each other through the incentives that come with ownership and consumption?
Monday morning I went to the city administration building, office of licenses, to support my neighbors Kristen and Kenny Johnson, in their efforts to secure a license to serve beer and wine in their sweet and thriving neighborhood cafe. Eighteen neighbors showed up and spoke on their behalf. The Johnsons are Black; most of the supporters gathered were white. They testified about how much KJ’s Cafe had been bringing our neighborhood together, families with young children, couples, gay, straight, black, white, Latino. And it’s true. And this in a world where the great political scientist Robert Putnam finds that in the most racially diverse neighborhoods people know each other the least. So this little business, in a neighborhood with almost no such businesses, matters. And the showing up for the Johnsons matters. And it’s a pocket of resistance.
