Making Change

Two weeks ago, I got fed up. In the face of imminent budget shortfalls that will grow our already enormous class sizes (2nd largest in the nation, by state, in elementary) next year, losses in P.E., music and the arts, as well as further days cut from our school year (already the shortest, by state, in the nation), our city refused to pass an income tax that would act as a bandaid to schools that are losing a lot of life-blood. At the same time, I participated with anxious hope as our school attempted to win a $50,000 Pepsi grant to cover some of our cuts. We lost yet again.

We need faces to represent the statistics of school budgets cut, I think. We need to refuse service if there are so many primary needs met. Can you imagine being a young person sitting through 7 hours of desk time with only two 10-15 min. recesses and no P.E. class to move around in? What are we doing to our future populations when creativity is discouraged in the absence of designated times for art and music? What exactly do we mean by "public education?"

I am not so worried about my kids. We have the resources, as a family, to supplement or even homeschool if we choose to. I am thinking, primarily, of the thousands of children and families that do not see themselves in choice about the education that they are paying for with taxes and not receiving in a way that adequately meet their needs.

I am thinking that choice is power, and sharing power in our community is what will make positive change happen. So, we're going on strike.

We are the customers here -- children and families -- and we have a right to send our educational offering back to the kitchen if it is half-baked. The problems lie in the districts, the state government, and even the federal government's support (or lack of) for this system. The problems are many, and there are countless possible solutions.

Right now, we need to stand up as citizens, families, and students to say that we want our faces to be seen behind the numbers ticking away in this crisis. We are a part of this community, and to support education is to nurture long-term social sustainability. The prisons get three times the funding that schools receive. Where will our disenfranchised, under-educated population go, I wonder?

I can tell you where we're going. The boys and I are riding our bikes to the state capitol building in Salem this weekend so that we can be on the steps to protest on Monday morning at 10:30 a.m. At the same time (10:30 a.m. Monday, June 13), I invite people from all over our state to pull their children from schools and meet in their district parking lots. Tell friends and community, and we will all show up en masse to make a stand for quality education!

This is our chance to show what a monkey-wrench is thrown into the works if we, the customers, refuse to participate in an educational system that is woefully short on resources. We can build awareness in our community and legislature on Monday. We are to be reckoned with!

I hope to see you there. It takes courage, and I know we can all play our part with loving hearts and the full expectation of finding a way.

A Confession

Forgive me, God/Goddess, for I have sinned.

I have stood before the altar of the Great God Pepsi, and I have typed in my email and password more than twenty times this month. I have heard the crackling pop sound effect that resonates from behind my keyboard and the luscious bubbling music of cold soda trickling into a glass. I have sinned in my mind about drinking it.

My sins run deeper yet. My kitchen table is full, truly full, of empty Pepsi bottles. More are recapped with the safety seal broken in crates on the floor. I have acquired them rather dishonestly; others have brought them here. Others have paid.

All in the name of education.

This month, our alternative school has been chosen to participate in a popularity contest with 2,999 other good causes to receive a grant for 50K from Pepsi Cola Corporation. That's $50,000. A sum that equals teachers, a reading program. "Everything would really be okay," I'm told by our lead teacher. It would.

But there's this little hitch about the voting. In this month of May, everyone gets one vote per day, two if they text one in. And you get more (surprise!) if you buy some Pepsi, remove the top and enter the code in the cap. You get ten more votes in fact, and each is a "Power vote" valued at 5, 10, 25, 50 or even 100 votes.

You now understand the state of my kitchen.

My kitchen is not the only one littered with liters. Kitchens across Eugene and the nation are full of Pepsi right now, full of hope, as this morning we were in slot #19 -- only 9 away from the top ten that will receive the "grant." (Read: Cash Prize! Thank you, Bob Barker.) This fact moved teachers and parents alike to fill our VW buses, bicycles and hatchbacks with Pepsi to drop off with friends and family to get in the vote!

Are you sick yet?

Some of the kids are for sure. Someone out there is in bed with Pepsi poisoning right now, mark my words. My kids believed me when I told them it was only for scientific experiments, drain cleaning, and laundry. They bought Mento candies and attempted explosive events in the back yard. But surely others drank it.

Okay, so I might get in trouble for admitting it, but Seda was one. She is very ill and regrets it, for the record.

It is sad, sad sad. I'm embarrassed to say that the worst consequence is upon us one day before the closing of the vote. I am sitting on this conundrum: I have convinced my boyfriend that it is his civic duty to vote with Pepsi since the state of Oregon as a whole doesn't seem to give a rip about our children's education. No P.E., music, or art and class sizes at 30+ for lower elementary next year.

Ben has been plunking away at the keyboard, activating power codes, and voting with the spinning golden cap for our school. And our rank has fallen...to 56. In hours. All of our potential gifts for the children of tomorrow dumped like so much Pepsi down the drain because 2,999 other noble causes in this country got bit by the hope bug -- perhaps it was a scorpion? -- and they are now messing with our chances.

Since when do we gamble for our children's future? And when did public education become a charity?

With all due respect and even admiration for those who have made a tremendous effort at this grant (ours are the sins of the innocent parents and teachers who wanted only a decent education for our children), I am praying for forgiveness. I am praying for answers. And above all, I pray that our children can forget that we once tried to buy them school with poison.

Today's Work

How can I stretch my mind, my heart, to find tenderness for all of our gifts and limitations?

"Do not apologize for the state of your garden," he chided gently, a man who had been a garden educator for years. "It's exactly how it's supposed to be."

To celebrate that, to hold it dear, I must extend a gentle heart to my work in its many forms as it contributes to both order and chaos: there was the time I chose to write rather than to mulch, the day I slept late to recover from a quarrel that lasted until three a.m. and I did not water, the day I spent at the coast instead of planting the onions.

Dandelions and curly dock I have made friends with. Nettle and bittercress sustain me as I wait for spring lettuce to unfurl before the sun. The crab grass still strikes dread in my heart and the morning glory, it's dark green leaves tender and small, are poking through the too-thin mulch as I turn away, unwilling to watch.

How may I set foot into the pathway of my garden welcoming the presence of every being, green and brown? How can I find it in my heart to offer amnesty to the myriad slugs and snails, flea beetles and aphids? (It is not actually mine to offer, I know. They allow me to grow here, too.)

My work is not the work of the lonely. Raccoons, a pestilence to my chickens, eat snails. The chickens will do serious seasonal damage to the crab grass if I give them half a chance.

I suppose it's about trust, knowing that the resources are here with me to find harmony, peace, and beauty in this bed I've made. When I turn my eyes to the earth and see only obstacles to my intentions, I may close them again and recall all the beings that I am connected to that together encompass a greater vision, and I am offered a view into that.

When I open them, voila! The morning glory blooms effortlessly into tiny flawless cups of sunshine, greenery raises its head in every spot I've not taken the time to cultivate, and my mother Earth reminds me that the world is always in movement, always unfolding whether I am capable of bearing witness or not.

The garden is possibility. It is a model of patience, waiting for me to find love.

By Sam, Uncut

Sam escaped off to his room tonight and wrote this, which sounded an awful lot like a blog post to me:

"I was playing basketball in my bedroom when my brother, Trin, called for me. I wondered if he wanted to talk to me about a giant spider that I saw a couple days ago. It turned out that he wanted to give me tips on how to make a good picture. I said that I didn't want any tips, exept for money tips. Mom laughed."

I have printed it exactly as Sam wrote it: spelling, capitalization, grammar. I am delighted with his ability to express himself at barely eight years old!

This is what he had to say about writing afterward: "When you play video games, you get done and you always want more. When you write something like this, you go 'oh, now I got that out!' and then you [feel ready] to do all kinds of other things you like to do. Because you got it out. And it feels good."

What an important point to make! I had been sharing with the boys my joys in witnessing their art for the evening (Trinidad was drawing landscapes with the guidance of an art book from my mom while Sam drew or wrote) and told them that one of my concerns in making computer games accessible is that they would always use the time doing that instead of using their imagination and (in my mind) growing their souls. Then Sam pointed out the above.

Wow. The difference between hungry and full, yearning and content. I had never thought of it that way.

Trinidad, on the other hand, earnestly argued for full reign of all of his faculties with computer access included so that he could grow his ability to choose and discipline himself.

I think he has something there, too, and as usual, it asks more growth from me. :)

Wise

Tonight is Sam's last night of being seven years old.

"It's not healthy to hurry," he told me quietly as I rushed around gathering food, water, shin guards, and shoes for Trin's soccer match.

I laughed as loudly as I agreed. Then I rushed on.

We picked up Trin, and I lit into him (translation: earnestly expressed my feelings and unmet needs) about not calling me after school as we'd agreed this morning. For almost an hour, I had chewed my nails waiting for the phone to ring so I could tell him to walk the 2.5 miles home alone -- a new independence for him -- but when it finally rang, it was a friend's mother who had taken him home with her son as rain was pelting the soccer field where they had played. If only I could instill in him awareness, that invaluable notion that (m)others have needs at the same time we do....

We talked and listened and talked with each other, and in the end I could see how he saw it and he could see how I saw it, and both of us were moved to tears that we could be seen, really seen by one another when there had been such tension only minutes ago. What precious relief and hope filled us both as he wiggled into my lap for a snuggle, long legs dangling shoes nearly as big as my own off the end of the car seat.

Later, Ben offered him a book from the 1950's that showed a pictorial progression from a woman with a cat outward into the cosmos until the Milky Way itself was only a speck in a cloud of stars.

Awareness, I thought. How insignificant are my efforts to cultivate family-oriented awareness when I am missing so much: the young man with the sign on the corner who is shivering in the cold while I drive to a soccer match (borrowed car), children eating chemicals that are marketed as "hot lunch," kids being crammed thirty-six to a classroom. How much am I willing to take responsibility for in a given moment?

How big is my cosmos?

"It's not good to hurry or worry," said Sam.

And he should know, being nearly eight years wise.

Turning

Did I tell you that I tried to stop the world with my shoulder?

It's been aching for a year or so, inflamed to crisis point twice. How did that happen? Hard to say.

This is what I know: people have been dying left and right in my world for the past year, all of them mothers or children. I am not opposed to death, not opposed to the sun setting. I am not against that which is most predictable, lightness and dark, and how could I be? I am sitting inside it.

All the same, I think that I wanted it to slow down a trifle, give me time to say goodbye in my own human way, uncatch my breath. I think with that in my sub-mind, I set my shoulder against it.

The physical therapist, Erik Verdouw, master of the art, smiled knowingly when I told him this. Think of the speed with which this planet revolves, he told me. Think of how everything that appears to be still is yet in constant motion. If you lay on your back in a rainforest when there is not a breath of wind, the trees will creak and lean gently at all times, repositioning themselves with the turn and tilt of our planet. You cannot stop it, he said.

In fact, I do not even think I slowed it down, me with my shoulder. But maybe that's not so. Maybe the pain of withholding scraped into my art so that all that lay before me for a year was blank canvas. There have been precious few blog posts. So much has felt private, guarded. I did not wish to harm anyone in my attempt to capture moments with words.

Our bees have died, too. I am embarrassed to say it, shocked, and sad. I know things die. It is in my picture of the world. Every rotation is complete; we greet the dawn and the dusk each day the same, and still the sadness turns me in my tracks across the yard. I lean against the rabbit pen and cry with a dull moan like tall trees moving without knowing why.

I understand nothing. One hive has honey, more than twenty-five pounds left, I think, and the other needed feeding. But now, it's hard to say whether even the light hive starved; the marauding bees are filling the air around it, and they have been swarming it for a time, I suspect, looking back.

Between the frames, the bodies of my bees are piled light and paper thin, softly coated in mildew. They have been dead awhile, and it has not been wet.

All of this stopping things with my shoulder hard against the turn of the world, this effort to pause, take things in, has rendered me blind, I see. How did I not notice that the bees were not my own?

I am a stillpoint in a sea of color, some cosmic kaleidoscope spilling perfect prisms into one another at every rotation. Something always sticks and holds within the glass, but still the colors change, falling all around as if the stillness itself demanded motion at its edges.

I am breathing again, and that is something toward letting go, moving along. At dusk, I will check the hives in my full bee suit to be sure my colonies have indeed collapsed. Then, I will bring the boxes in so that the spring swarms I plan to catch will have a meal waiting.

What else is there to do?

How To Fight

Let me tell you how to fight.

It's not the way I was taught: tough lady pushing or pleading with words, sometimes sharp like daggers, and slammed by a fist or the flat iron back of a hand nearly as big as her head.

Not that way.

Not the way I did as a child either, screaming all the right words inside my head fierce as beach wind but only shaped by it on the inside -- a thousand steep dunes with cryptic passage to the sea.

Not like my father who shreds those around him without realizing that he is always right behind each, bearing the scars he has left on one and all.

Let me tell you, it is much softer than all that, and still it is deeper and darker than I ever thought possible.

This is how you fight: you listen. You crack yourself open and you let the other come rushing in until you know how they taste, how they smell, how they move in the world. You open your pores until the other seeps into you and you can feel how they feel because they are not outside and other at all.

You soften because all those holes leave you open and full at the same time, moving, jitterbugging with the electricity of connection.

And then you can speak, and when you speak, your words don't belong to you anymore. They are words of love, because it is love to listen like that. And you speak from deep down where you broke yourself open. You speak from that brokenness and there is a chance you will be heard from that place because words from down there, they echo. They sound different like a song in a narrow red canyon, and that music is rare and demands an ear.

But sometimes not. Sometimes the walls just shake all around and there is no ear, and that is no time to stop trying.

That is no time to be silent.

Into that canyon, you pull the ear, you bend it and teach it how to listen, how to crack itself open. You sing into it so it cannot resist, and the more that fight means to you, the softer you sing. How can you resist me?

I have you in me now, and you may be right or you may dance with me here.

Being right is lonely.

Being right does not echo or shine or even break through walls. Being right is a dull thud in our favor, and we want more, by nature we want more.

We have to fight for it.