a pseudo-survey

The short version is: please click here if you read this blog, either regularly or occasionally. (That's all you have to do, just click-- there's no real survey.) For more info, read on.

I'm trying to decide if I want to continue blogging, and those of you who have been around for awhile know that this happens every so often, and usually even if I think I'm going to quit, after a few weeks I start back up again. But really, having a blog--even when I'm not posting very often-- is always there in the back of my mind, and maybe it's time to free up that energy and use it for something else. I'm not sure what, but I've always liked to jump off a cliff without knowing where I'll land.

Since most of us (including me) use some kind of reader app for following blogs without actually visiting the blog itself, it's hard to get an accurate idea of how many readers I have. Blogger/Blogspot, the blogging site I've used for more than 15 years now, doesn't have the most sophisticated stats page, so I don't know if you've read something unless you click through to the actual site.

So this is kind of a pseudo-poll, because if you, just this once, click through to the website, then I'll have a more accurate idea of how many people are reading this nonsense and I can figure out what to do. It's anonymous because if the service I use (Blogger) has a way to track where pageviews come from, I don't know what it is. And if you're actually reading this at the website, then you don't need to do anything because you've already triggered a pageview.

On Feedly, there's a button at the bottom of every post that says "Visit Website" so you could click on that, or you could just click on this: To Square a Circle (Barb's blog).

Thanks.

Call me Hecate

I told you a couple of weeks ago about my newly discovered crone status, and of course I've been thinking about that quite a bit, since over-thinking is my superpower.

Like any good survivor of 90s feminist spirituality, I can't think much about being a crone without thinking of the triple goddess archetype, The Maiden-Mother-Crone. Feminist spirituality is all about The Goddess and her three eternal faces, the virgin with her sweetness and limitless potential, the mother with her creativity at full power for self and community, the crone, the embodiment of wisdom and experience.

The idea got applied everywhere-- even as a description of business cycles and the creative process: the germ of an idea (Maiden, limitless potential), the hard work of making the idea into reality (Mother, the maker), and the successful ongoing idea (Crone, wisdom and expertise that come with experience).

I've been thinking about how this might apply to me. How different is it to be in the "experienced" phase of life rather than in the "maker" phase of life? In the maker phase, you are working your butt off to get your life the way you want it, or to hang on and survive the hard work of living out the vision of the idea you had -- for a family, or a business, or a career, or all of those. And maybe the idea dies or fails (you get laid off, illness strikes, your marriage fails, bankruptcy) and you have to start again, but always the idea is to make the life you want.

When you're in the maker phase, if the vision isn't working or if it implodes, sometimes it makes sense to blow everything up and start over. Move to a new town, end your relationship, change careers. But maybe once you're a crone, the priorities are different. That's not to say re-creating doesn't happen to older people-- women way older than me have blown up their lives and started over, sometimes by their own choice, sometimes because circumstances force them to.

But maybe being a crone isn't about a specific age, it's about being smart. Instead of blowing everything up, maybe there are minor tweaks, incremental adjustments that can be made that will be just as effective. I don't want to say being a crone is about maintaining, because that sounds like stagnation. Being experienced might mean you recognize that you've already built a foundation and now it's time to be smart about how you want to preserve what's good, while moving forward into what's coming. Blowing everything up and starting over may not make sense anymore.

Hmmmm. Lots to think about. I have a houseful of company coming tonight so not sure when I'll post again.

recent events

(This is two posts mashed together, one written last fall after I read What Truth Sounds Like, one the week of June 8th, both of them edited this week. In other words, it is long. Sorry about that, but I thought it was better to get it all over with in one post. I think I've already proven that I'm not an expert on racism, so don't expect brilliance. I'm tempted to say don't read this post because honestly, white voices are not what is needed right now. Yet here I am.)

Part One

I just wrote and re-wrote and deleted and re-wrote and edited and deleted three paragraphs on the topic of racism, and I've decided to leave them deleted because nobody needs to hear about another white woman uncovering more layers of recognition of her privilege. But it's a dilemma. Sometimes you need to talk about it.

It's not like I didn't know about my privilege before--I understood the idea of white privilege the first time I heard about it thirty years ago-- but I also still have lots more to learn. And I'm discovering, after some things I posted on Instagram, that if you talk about new layers of things you're learning, the assumption is that you knew nothing before, that the whole world of white privilege was an unknown to you until this moment. I've even had people unfollow me.

Whatever you may have made of the story I told you a couple of years ago, I've been supportive of social justice work since a couple of ferociously progressive teachers in my elementary school taught us what was what back in the 60s. (I was so proud of those young men with their raised fists on the medal podium at the 1968 Olympics.)(I was in second grade.)

I may not have been very brave about bucking the status quo, but I've never wanted people of color to suffer or to have fewer opportunities than I do. But I confess that in the past, I've believed that since I vote pro-social justice, I've done everything I needed to do. Racism had nothing to do with me, I thought, because I am not one of those ignorant, racist people. 

Clearly, that kind of passive anti-racism has not been enough to change the way things are. And that means I've had a steep learning curve about the reality of racism in our country. I keep learning more and more about how insidious racism is, and how it has continued practically unchecked without me realizing that it did.

I didn't know, but at some level I have to be honest and say I didn't want to know. I wanted to be able to keep living my untroubled life, at least untroubled by racism. I wanted to believe that the only people who were still racist in the US were a small number of uneducated yahoos that everybody knew were crazy. I was wrong.

And if we can't keep talking about what we're learning, even long after our original moment(s) of insight, we're doing a disservice to the complexity of dismantling racism in this country. It's not a one-time light bulb moment. If saying that--being honest that I'm learning about racism even as I oppose it-- means I get "canceled" because I'm a racist, what are we even doing here? Are we not allowed to learn? Am I supposed to pretend I have perfect understanding when I don't?

Part Two

Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old who was shot by a white man in 2012 for simply walking through his neighborhood, was the "wake up" moment for me. I have a black nephew. He walks through a white neighborhood every day. But just like I wake up bleary-eyed and foggy-brained every morning, that wake-up moment didn't mean I instantly, totally understood the complexity of systemic racism.

I've been occasionally reading and researching ever since, but a couple of years ago I started getting more serious about it-- honestly, at least partly inspired by Colin Kaepernick. He fascinated me (Dean is a moderately serious 49ers fan) even before he set off a firestorm of white outrage. When he knelt for the national anthem (do you remember that at first, he sat?), I was curious. What was he up to? Why did something so simple, so seemingly innocuous, cause such a bitterly furious response?

At first I just read stuff on the internet. And then Austin Channing Brown's I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness. And then So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo last spring. And What Truth Sounds Like by Michael Eric Dyson last fall. And fiction by many black authors.

That probably sounds like bragging, and I suppose at some level it is, but I'm hardly a saint about this. First of all, the more I read, the more I realize how dumb I am about the experience of people of color in our country, even when I've lived and worked right alongside them. And secondly, I argue with these authors in my head. I don't always agree with them. 

But I've learned far more than I've argued. I've been shocked by some of the experiences I've read about, the statistics I've been ignorant of, the systemic oppression that happens while I've blithely looked away. And saddest of all, I'm embarrassed by the way white liberals have not been helpful at. all. (The Dyson book is especially telling on that subject.) The one thing I know for sure: the way people of color are too often treated in this country is just flat-out wrong. There is no excuse. We have to do better. 

So, not sure where I'm going here. I don't want this to be a fad, something that I get all excited about and then a couple of months from now, I've moved along to something else. For several years now, I've wanted this to be an ongoing part of how I live, and that means reading books by black authors and immigrants and Indians and Hispanics and Muslims and members of the LGBTQ community. 

I'm not sure exactly what else it means. Montana is more diverse now than it was when we moved here, but there are still only a few people of color where we live. But I can call people out for racist remarks (and I have)(I have to be honest and tell you it rarely works). I can be open to change and encourage others to do the same. And I can acknowledge that I'm still learning, still uncovering layers of ignorance in myself, hidden attitudes I'm ashamed of, and resistance to change in the places I least want it. But it's work that's worth doing, work that has to be done.