So, I’m back on the Blue Timeline. It has been a little disorienting. I had forgotten the feeling of constant urgency and the pressure to be relevant and timely. Cultivating a voice on this blog, no matter how isolated it felt much of the time, was a good discipline. It required me to be more honest about my voice, more vulnerable, and more patient.
That said, I am happy to be connected again with friends near and far, new and old. To be clear, my use is still very restricted, and even my friend count has been scaled back (part of the terms by which I am permitted to return to FB).
I did not think too deeply about how I would re-engage. I just sort of dove back in where I left off. Part of me wonders if I should be reflecting more on the lessons I learned from being away. Then I realize that most of the lessons I learned in the last year had more to do with the why of me being away. Being away just provided more space for me to absorb those lessons.
I want to be more intentional about engaging in the communities that Facebook helps to maintain. One way this has happened already is through coordinating attendance at protests, and with a possible writing group. I want more things like that, and more opportunities for virtual community to turn into actual community.
I will continue, I think, to write more politics on FB, and more personal stuff here. I don’t want to lose the momentum I’ve had in doing a lot of the recovery work I’ve been doing this last year, even as I move out of isolation.
More rain has fallen in Southern California today than I can remember in the time I’ve lived here. The sky is streaked with grey sheets, the roadways clogged and flooded. The symbolism of this meteorological fact can be applied to any circumstance or agenda. Franklin Graham (ugh), at the presidential inauguration this morning declared rain a symbol of God’s blessing. He’s not wrong. At the same time, there are those–like us struggling to stay dry on the West Coast today–who might see a different meaning: The sun is hidden, our light obscured by a storm that turns the sky and many moods dismal.
They’re not wrong.
In this time when presidents and their meanings are so much at the forefront, there’s been much talk of how these men we elect to this office are also symbols whose meaning can be manipulated and projected onto any agenda, any ideology. Barack Obama was many things to many people, and the identities that were projected onto him (Socialist Muslim tyrant; post-racial civil rights icon; progressive hero; drone-wielding champion of U.S. Empire) say a lot more about we as a people than they say about him as a person.
I am tempted to say the same thing about Donald Trump. After all, he has exposed our divisions more starkly and cynically than any public figure in memory. His supporters see in him a longed-for embodiment of American strength, vitality, pride, (and White privilege). His opponents…well, just read more of this blog. Point is, people see in Trump what they want to see, and that reveals us to be more divided than we thought we were.
The more I think of it, though, I’m less satisfied with talking about presidents as symbols. Yes, in the Bible rain is a blessing from God. It is life-giving water for the crops that sustain human community. But keep reading, and rain and floods are also instruments of destruction and wrath. God used rains to eradicate humanity. Floods and storms are symbols of chaos, over which only God himself has control.
On a more practical level, rain is an actual, physical reality whose benefits or costs vary depending on where you stand. Farmers in arid areas pray for rain, but when too much comes, it can mean disaster. Climate change has disrupted weather patters, leaving many dead in recent years from record rains in the U.S. and Europe.
Like rain, Donald Trump is an actual, physical, reality. And, like rain, there is not much to him. Rain is water falling from the sky. I am more and more convinced that there is not much more to Donald Trump than what we see. He is not complex, self-reflective, analytical, a long-term visionary, someone who grasps complex systems and the details that make them function. Impulsivity, lack of empathy, a fragile ego, vindictive and puerile personality–these qualities are not disputed between his supporters and his haters. These qualities (and many others) are plain to see, and you either love them or hate them.
The problem is, they will have real-life impact on our country and our world. A President Mitt Romney or a President John McCain would have had character flaws of their own, and they might even have tried to radically re-make America along conservative lines. But something different is happening here. We fear it because we have not seen it before in this country. If we’ve been paying attention, we’ve seen it in other countries. This is not to say America is morally clean or hasn’t perfected violence, injustice, or chaos through the force of law and bureaucracy.
But to combine the mechanisms of empire with the temperament of an insecure and authoritarian populist? I don’t want to throw words around lightly, but students of history should know what that has led to in the past. At the very least, it should give us cause for deep concern.
But concern is one thing. Action is another. Trump will use the instruments of government (insomuch as he is allowed to by the other branches, the media, and a strong popular resistance movement) to shape America according to his dismal and deluded vision. The border and the “inner cities” are not flooded with crime and carnage. Foreign governments have not “destroyed” or stolen our jobs (they’ve been shipped away by greedy corporations, like the ones represented by many of Trump’s cabinet picks). But it doesn’t matter what is factually true. What matters is that false rhetoric can and will be solidified into actual policy.
The border with Mexico is already more militarized and surveilled than it has ever been, despite record low illegal immigration. What will be the consequences of spending billions more on a project that is not only useless and doomed to fail, but that will destroy families and innumerable human lives?
What will be the consequences of an administration treating the free press like an opposition party? What will be the consequences of an abandonment of federal oversight for police abuse of power, corporations’ environmental impact, or states’ attempts to curtail voting rights?
It is true that these things were already piecemeal or fragile, even under “liberal” administrations. Things might very well not get as bad as we think they will under Trump. We just don’t know.
This is why we have to move beyond concern, and into action. Trump and his government will not tire of action. They’ve wasted to time getting to work, as their days in office will be numbered. But the rest of us, we will still be here (let’s hope). Obama himself is fond of urging citizens toward engagement and activity in the service of a free and inclusive society. We’d do well to heed his call. And it is not just his call. It has been the occupation of so many freedom fighters and patriots through history who deeply lived out the vision: “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream”
With that in mind, I will focus my political posts on this blog on sharing opportunities for regular people to take action, get involved, and lead. I hope–I know–that we can make a meaningful stand to protect the communities and values that are dear to us–and that are just as much a part of America as any others.
A reading list created by a group of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Muslim, and Jewish people who are writers, organizers, teachers, anti-fascists, anti-capitalists, and radicals.
Gazing back on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt. Why? Other characters in the Bible disobey God without meeting the same fate. Perhaps it is her irrepressible interest in the destruction she has been spared — her sense that the evil she has left behind is more real than the possibilities that beckon — that dooms her. Instructed to choose life over death, Lot’s wife opts to find life in death. The known past is more compelling than the promised future. Hence the salt — a substance that suspends time, that preserves things by drying them out.
As liberals and leftists confront the reality of a Trump Administration, they will face a similar question of orientation. Will they oppose Trump in the name of a transformative vision that lies beyond him — a multiracial social democracy that emancipates all men and women from the fetters of caste and class? Or will they look on Trump’s America with an apprehension, born of fear and fascination, that its ravages are realer, more in sync with the deep and ugly truths of the world, than whatever story of progress they can muster in reply? Will they welcome every act of Trump’s brutality as a revelation of our national whole? Will they make of themselves a pillar of salt?
It’s been a while. I was in Virginia and D.C. for almost a week. Now I am in an undisclosed location for work, preparing for the beginning of the legislative session in a state that is close to my heart. The state capitol is round and made of brown stucco. It snowed here all weekend.
Being out of the normal routine, I haven’t been reading or writing as much. On the flip side, more experiences and good food.
I watched President Obama’s farewell address from a hotel room blocks from the White House. The next day, my coworkers and I tuned in to the Trump “press conference” on the big screen TV in our office. Witnessing history as it happens, knowing it could all have been so different and we’ll have to tell our children how, how it could (and should) have been different.
Another thing that came of this week: I realized that I really love working in policy and if I could, I’d teach others to do it. This week I participated in another advocacy day, which included trainings and workshops for parents and providers of early childhood programs on how to talk to legislators and tell their stories. Later it dawned on me– I’ve done enough of these and I believe in this work enough that I really want to share that with others, especially those who do not have the resources or education that I do. As I met and talked with young families, program directors, and organizers from all over this state, gathered in the state capitol and preparing for conversations with their elected officials, I felt what I felt when I first got into this work: I belong here.
Readers might think that this is already what I’m doing (or have done), but that’s not entirely the case. I’ve watched it done and helped out, and more recently I’ve done policy work that feels more removed from communities. At this stage in my career, I feel like I am ready to take initiative and lead in a way I haven’t before, and to do that in a way that brings me back to the reasons I started.
These thoughts are early, but I am determined to follow them. I have a few ideas about what this might look like. Keep me accountable this year as I look for ways to make it real.
You have a lot of choice as to whether this year ends up looking like the previous one. Some things will be non-negotiable: groups, the counselor, detailed travel plans for work trips, other restrictions. But within that, what can you do, where do you have more autonomy? What do you want to do? With your counselor the other day, you talked about finding your voice. A voice you never really had. If you want to use that voice, you have to be ready to deal with the risks–disagreement, conflict, uncomfortable feelings, triggers. Resolve this year to stop being afraid of those things. Stop being afraid of the consequences of having a voice, of being decisive, of making choices, of having needs. It might feel like you’re being callous or mean. But you need to let that feeling come, and always balance things with loving actions.
Loving actions toward your wife. How can you make her feel loved? What are concrete things you can do? This year has been one of rediscovering what you are to each other. Are you friends, lovers, partners, the only people you are each comfortable being fully seen by? The answers aren’t simple, and seem to change as the years pass and pains and joys accumulate.
You have what, by any measure, is an incredible and rare gift: the devotion, love, trust, and stability of a long term monogamous partner. Many single people would kill for what you have.
Yes, you want the comfort and safety, but is that all you want? Is that all there is? You think often of other men you’ve known, like J___ and A____. They lived their lives recklessly and passionately when it was appropriate: 17 to 25. Then they settled down (marriage, kids, home ownership), and seemed to do so with superhuman loyalty, integrity, focus, patience, and capacity for suffering and self-denial. You, being older than them, have often felt ashamed at what you see as your lack of those qualities. You felt ashamed that there was always some part of you that questioned the value of “settling down,” at least in they way they (and your family) seemed to define it.
Ironically, you had those qualities earlier in life, when they counted for less. When the benefits were not as substantial. You walked the straight and narrow from 17 to 25 and now maybe you feel like you missed out. Do you feel shame that this belief, if you were to express it, would be insulting to other friends like J___ and K____, who are still looking for domestic bliss? It surely must be worthy of scorn from the likes of the two others mentioned above, whose lives are now poured into their precious children and the work of building a life for them. Serious, sacrificial work. Work that moves along at the pace of boring, stressful, or tedious days. Work that involves quiet suffering but also heart-filling moments of happiness. Work that must be done with a sober but joyful eye toward the long, long term.
You no longer have a joyful or long-term eye. Your eye now is pointed toward sensation, gratification, actualization, emotional survival, recovery and rebuilding. It is pointed toward the ticking clock of your youth. Your horizon has shrunk, both temporally and interpersonally. It is shorter and includes fewer people outside yourself. But the scope and range of who you want approval from has shifted. Before, it was Christian friends and community. It still includes them, but now it encompasses a broad and vague population, real and imagined people who are engaged and successful in areas that are important to you.
How can 2017 be different? How can you be more physically and emotionally healthy? There will need to be more discipline and sacrifice of your free time. Time for working out, time for serving others, time for writing in a more focused way. You’ll need support and accountability.
Also, time is too precious to dwell on regret and resentment. You’ve been given a miraculous second chance and a lot of useful tools, not to mention a job situation that is incredibly ideal. Take advantage of all that! Embrace change. Do the work. It will only get harder as you get older. And while you’re setting your goals, remember to step back and remind yourself what it’s all for. What are the deeper truths and values you want to (need to) align your life with? Keep spending time with people who can remind you of that. They will be a lifeline to you…
“Santo Tomas Catholic Church in Abiquiu, N.M., is the site of an annual saint’s day celebration in late November that includes cultural elements of the genizaros, the descendants of Native American slaves.”
Since I was a kid, studying my family’s history and the history of New Mexico has been a passion of mine. This piece that aired this week on NPR was amazing to hear, and sheds light on a key part of why New Mexico is socially and racially unique. There is little doubt that the history described here (of genizaros, or de-tribalized Indian slaves who were taken into Hispanic homes and culturally assimilated) is also a part of my own family’s story.
Stories of interactions between Indians and the Hispanic vecinos or settlers of New Mexico are passed down in many families. A great-great grandfather of mine was captured by Apaches or Comanches in the 1870s at the age of nine and returned to his family ten years later as a young man. Such occurrences were common, but less talked about is the racial mixing that took place. Pretty much all native New Mexicans (those who trace their ancestry to the original Spanish/Mexican settlers) are sure to have some Indigenous blood in their family trees.
New Mexico, for the first 300 years of its history as a Spanish colony and a Mexican frontier province, always had a fragile existence. The colonists were always under threat from raids by the nomadic tribes that held sway over the Southwest: Diné (Navajo), Apache, Comanche, Ute, and Kiowa. The tribes would raid villages for livestock, horses, and slaves. The Spanish would retaliate with their own raids, also taking slaves. These Indian slaves were incorporated into Hispanic households, given Spanish names, baptized as Catholics, and blended into village life. These people were called genizaros, and their original identities were largely erased in the historical record. Even so, they were a significant part of New Mexican society, where they were bought, sold, and intermarried with the Spanish.
The descendants of the genizaros live on (I could be one of them), and what I learned from this NPR piece was that there is a modern movement to recover and reclaim genizaro identity. I think it is fascinating how, through hundreds of years, erasure, and assimilation, cultures somehow persist and identities survive. In every time and every place, humans seek to keep their own voices with which to tell their own stories.
we carried
together
a large animal’s body up the hill’s side through scrub oak and
ponderosa and there was the smell of musk and blood and deer
droppings and we kept the ridge of the next hill in sight and I kept
you in sight and I tried hard to never let you out of my sight
you brought peace to me
and then you didn’t
but you still searched for me
for that part of me that needed you
that ache in my days
and after a while I began
to make plans and then I made a life that didn’t have you in it and
I no longer think about whether that makes you sad or not
in the photo where you kneel holding the animal’s head and I
stand behind you at the bottom of that hill we climbed
it is impossible to figure out the name of the emotion on my face
II
there was the soft electronic jingle of my phone’s alarm clock and
there was the orange yellow light that spills across the city by the sea
dripping off the fronds of palm trees making me squint to see
what was outside my window
just the roof of the building next door
and the sound of a vacuum cleaner
then
there was the Trader Joe’s parking lot and
there was the black plastic funnel that they use to measure out
and pour whole roasted coffee beans into paper bags and
there was a white pastor frustrated with his parishioner’s
gossiping about other parishioners’ scandalous Instagram accounts and
there was the writer and star of a new HBO series having brunch
by herself at the next table
(at the restaurant that serves cornmeal pancakes) and
there was garbage skidding along a concrete drainage channel carried by the flow of recent rains and
there was the graffiti on the asphalt of a new bicycle path and
there were mothers and goddaughters
killed in drunk driving accidents and
there were menus with Brussels sprouts on them and
there were younger brothers who dropped out of college and
there was a cactus plant with its arms hacked off and
there was a black man with a yellow mohawk driving a Jetta
with Juvenile’s 1999 hit “Back Dat Azz Up” playing at high volume outside of an expensive pastry shop on Washington and
there was the chasm between me and the people I love
III
you gently tore a small plant from the earth and told me that it
was wild strawberry
a pair of dragonflies floated, wobbling, over our heads and I
watched them, no longer listening to you
in the grassy center of the valles caldera in northern new mexico
large herds of elk grazed and they had no worries and they were
warm in the mountain sun and you watched them through
binoculars and I smelled the smell of the smoke on your flannel
shirt while I spun a thick stalk of grass between my fingers wondering
will I ever be like you
IV
now I wish people would love me by clicking the pixelated buttons
near my name and
the incompleteness I carry with me every place I go is still there and
I still am someone i no longer recognize
a few weeks ago I sat with four other men at a restaurant in pasadena and
we ate pizza and spoke of money jobs wives college
cities we have siblings in
I did that to give you something that would give you hope
because there is a debt I will never pay off and so I have learned
to talk to these men and to other men who are like me in ways
I don’t want to think about
you and I ate salad together on a sidewalk the corn was roasted
the dressing was delicious and then we walked back to the room
where all our worst moments happened and I remembered
looking in your misty red eyes and apologizing and saying that it will never happen again
I hope it will never happen again I will try my hardest but
some days I will not try my hardest
you asked me to stay and not go
we cried and could not let go
you paid a great price and
I learned that there is a price I would have to pay and
I learned that I am not as good as I thought I was.
inside the Frontier restaurantSan Felipe de Neri church, founded in 1706
Yesterday we returned from a five-day trip to Albuquerque. As always, time there is bittersweet.
Albuquerque is a better place for Christmas than Los Angeles. The air is clean and the stars plentiful. The cold has a bite to it, and may even come with snow, which everyone knows is beautiful when it covers brown adobe walls. There’s also the deeply rooted Catholic culture and a Middle-East-looking landscape filled with pilgrimage sites and place-names like Belén. Red and green chile match the decorations, and in the days before the holiday, neighborhoods and public buildings are lined with luminarias.
I was able to enjoy most of these things on this trip, but the comfort and familiarity of being back in the Motherland always comes with reminders of why it was easy (or necessary) to leave.
2016 has been a year of life-changing upheaval not just for me, but for my immediate family. Being with them last week was difficult, not just because of the holiday stress, but because the brokenness and toxic patterns in their lives are the brokenness and toxic patterns I carry in me. As much as I try, I can’t be an objective observer or impartial counselor when there is drama or conflict between parents and siblings or parents and parents. At 18 I left the house and made a life for myself, but my family’s emotional DNA has shaped that life, despite my best efforts.
Those best efforts, though, are so, so important. 2016 taught me that. If I am not making an effort, if I am not working on becoming more healthy, more honest, more whole–then that emotional baggage will wreak havoc. That happened this year, in ways that were worse than I would have imagined. Call it God’s grace, call it the super-human love of those closest to me, but somehow I’m rebuilding and 2017 is looking a lot more hopeful.
It’s not that I don’t love my family. Of course there is love, and of course there is loyalty and sacrifice. But I know now that I need boundaries, and one of the best things I can do is work on myself so that I don’t pass on the same pain that was passed on to me.
yucca plants in Old Town Abq
Another thing home and family dysfunction remind me of is my faith. I’ve avoided writing about my faith on this blog. This might seem strange to those of you who have known me longest. My last blog, which I kept most actively in 2005 and 2006 when I was serving as an intern with an urban youth ministry in Pasadena, was deeply spiritual. I was passionately seeking to know God and his love for justice through writing about my experiences in ministry, work, and community.
I also remember vividly how my holidays at home in New Mexico seemed to test my faith, and the urgency with which I pleaded to God for intervention, comfort, and hope. As I got older, I incorporated Advent practices and disciplines as a way of orienting my mind and heart toward the deeper truths and mysteries of Jesus’ being with us–Immanuel. I found great comfort in that, and being a part of various communities of faith after college always helped reinforce it even if I felt distracted, unmotivated, or too busy.
a trash can in Old Town Abq.Pueblo gingerbread
This all began to change for me around 2012. I finished my Master’s degree and began pouring myself into a new career. Detailing what happened and how things began to unravel is a topic for a future post (which I probably don’t have the courage to write right now, but I’m open to persuasion ;P), but yes, this is when I really began to stray from the Father’s house. I started doing and thinking and wanting things I hadn’t before. I learned that I was not as good as I thought I was. I learned that I did not really know how to love people or receive love.
Fast forward to today–God feels like a friend who knew me in my best years and still waits for me to get in touch with him after moving far away. I really thought I believed in grace, but when I think about the last couple years, I see that the lies I carried with me were louder and more compelling: I don’t deserve to have people’s attention or love. I am unappealing and unlikable at the core. I am not good and I can’t be good, and everything that people see about me is an act, so they’ll like me. If they saw past the act, they wouldn’t like me.
Maybe this is why attention–on social media, from employers and coworkers–began to appeal to me so much. I knew it was the kind of attention that only arises for a limited time and then fizzles out. That’s what I could handle. That was manageable for me. If it got any more intimate, then I would be confronted with the prospect of people getting to know me on a deeper and more vulnerable level. That would be unacceptable because I’m so afraid of being seen as a fraud, of having my deep unworthiness exposed, of being rejected.
I still go to church, but it is largely because I don’t know or have other ways of cultivating the kind of deep adult relationships I want and need. I sit and stand, daydreaming. I might have some moments of clarity in which I think about how I wish I could be more surrendered to God. I sometimes feel resentment toward church and people in church for seeming to have a faith and a sense of belonging that I want so much but don’t believe is for me.
Then I stop myself. Life is too short to be mired in resentment. Why waste precious years like that? What can I do to make the most of my life, to live more authentically and vulnerably?
This is one of the questions I’m committing to ask myself this next year. Whatever the answer(s) might be, I am sure that it starts with learning how to be less critical and dismissive of my own self. I’ve always been taught that the way to do this, simply, is to practice seeing ourselves through the eyes of God. God, we are told, sees the best and worst of us and loves us all the same. When I saw myself, as I did when my faith was stronger, in the light of that truth, there was less room for shame and pride. Shame dismisses the good and focuses on the bad. Pride does the opposite. Both are distortions.
Now I am gaining the tools to see myself rightly. It’s a slow process, and I don’t think I could do it if I hadn’t walked away from where I came from. Now I have to hope that when I walk I am walking towards Home.
Back in LA after a pre-Christmas weekend in the Yay Area. I’d forgotten how cold it gets up there and how weak I’ve gotten since Illinois days. I wore a tshirt and a hoodie exiting the Oakland airport and froze my ass off walking to the newly built monorail shuttle and waiting for the BART train. I seriously expected the station to have heat lamps like they do in Chicago. I stood on the platform judging people in puff coats while simultaneously judging BART for not having heated stations.
So today it was a sunny 75 degrees in Culver City; I worked part of the day from the sidewalk outside the coffee shop near the apartment.
Having grown up and lived in places that actually have seasons–changes in climate that mark the different times of the year–winter in Southern California has always been disorienting. Something about it feels off, and not just because of the temperature.
I recently read something that captured that feeling:
The very qualities that make it America’s chosen stage on which to mount the drama of self-creation also make it a site of a profound dislocation. Swaddled year-round in warmth and light, you imagine yourself to be moving through a perpetual present; there’s always time to begin again, to wake up and do things better, to manufacture yourself anew. Time is a renewable resource, plentiful as sunshine. The sky looks like someone’s taken the roof off the world and the city itself stretches on ecstatically, looking like someone jammed a bunch of buildings together with great enthusiasm but little forethought.
You can abide all this for a few months until you actually are moving through a perpetual present in which the seasons at best mark infinitesimal variations in light and warmth and the palm trees are always swaying gently, imperceptibly, maddeningly to and fro like faulty metronomes. This isn’t to say that time is static. No, it dilates and contracts according to the whims of traffic; a trip that took you 20 minutes one day takes you an hour the next. You reminisce about an episode in your life as if it took place a year ago, only to find that three years have elapsed.
I get this idea of the perpetual present in Los Angeles. Time doesn’t seem to really pass. It is a renewable resource, just like the sunshine, and one year seems the same as the last. This is why this place is so good at forgetting or ignoring its history so much. But its also why so many people come here. The industry we’re known for is the one that promises the power to become someone new.
When I lived in Chicago, I felt that city carried the weight of its history like a heavy burden. It was carried with pride, but it also could be heavy and limiting, like the layers of ice and snow that lingered for months on end. In New Mexico, history is like a vast ocean (more like an ocean of land, but stick with the metaphor), and we float in it, specks on the surface. It is bigger than us, it contains us, and we are just passing through it. It touches everything– the architecture, the surnames of the people, the mountains and mesas where people lived millennia ago and their descendants still live there.
Even now, I feel like it’s easier to mark and measure the episodes and progress in my life that happened in those places. It’s not that things haven’t happened to me here in CA. Quite the opposite, as some of you know. I guess what I mean is, we who live here have to pay a little extra attention to ourselves if we want to reflect on our growth and change. If the light and the warmth and the time never seem to change, it is harder to notice the change in ourselves. This can be very addicting: live each day in the present, hit the Reset button on your life each morning or whenever you experience frustration, pain, or failure.
It might be because I was a history major and my mind is wired that way, but I’ve always believed that the deepest meaning can be found in the past. Where we came from shapes who we are. Who we were in he past explains why we are who we are in the present.
But this way of thinking can also be crippling if taken too far. Regret and nostalgia are just as dangerous to personal growth as forgetting. No surprise, then, that these are the traps I fall into in my own life.
I could write at length about those things, but I won’t here. I think the only reason I wrote this post, initially, was so I could share that quote about LA. In the pressure to fill out the post with more original thoughts, I arrived at what you just read. Not terrible, but also maybe not super profound.
I guess it is just one way for me to relate what it is like to live where I live.
Brief and Wondrous 