It’s been so long since I wrote on this blog that I forgot my password.
I have been moving – renovating, painting, packing, buying light fixtures and crown mouldings. But in the midst of this all, a beautiful bouquet of Mother’s Day flowers and a lovely walk in the park that is now two blocks from the house with my two young men who brought the flowers (tropical!) and the chocolate.
What if there was no penalty for being who you are, and no prize either? If you didn’t have to worry about being judged, shunned, made fun of…what would you allow yourself to do? How would you act? What choices could you make? And what if there was no pressure to do the correct thing either: that you must write the bestseller, win the race, get the promotion, wear the most fashionable shoes? No approval, no praise.
Then everything you do every day, every choice you make, would be want you want to do at that moment, what you feel is right. You would be free to take risks. You would be free to play, and to find joy. You would be free to set your own priorities.
You would be free, free, free.
Happy 2012. Have a brilliant new year.
“You have such gifts, that are important…For a long time our minds have told us that maybe we are imagining things, that it’s crazy to live according to what you want to give…This isn’t crazy…This is how to live.”
This video is perfect. Check out the website, occupylove.org for more.
Today is the day I must choose different words. To leave “my mother just passed away” behind and embrace “my mother died one year ago.” It is something of a shock. It is sudden. Yet, there it is. A new year.
This is the two of us, when she was the age that I am now.
I don’t know what this day is called, the anniversary of a passing. Today, please keep my family in your thoughts.
The genius of the Occupy Wall Street movement is its lack of demands. Not just because there cannot be one person who speaks, or one set of needs. Yes, consensus is good. But the minute something is asked for, we will be told it can’t be done. We give up our power and autonomy because we will depend on someone else to effect this change. And in the time-honored way of the politics of negativity and exhaustion, any proposal that is made will be shot down, and no other solutions offered, because the powers that be do not want change. They do not want a solution. They want us to shut up.
We do not accept this. We will not play your rigged game. You come up with something better if you want our money, our shopping at your store, our working at your company….
This is what the Occupy movement is saying, should say. No.
Because we can live without them.
The genius of Occupy Wall Street is that, in the absence of demands, we the people each have to decide what we want to do. We may not choose to live in a park in the snow. But we may embrace National Bank Transfer Day and invest in ourselves through credit unions. And we may join a CSA and become shareholders in a local, organic farm. Or we may stand up against fracking. We can turn to each other in community and start a coop or refuse to buy genetically modified food, or refuse to spend hundred of dollars on toxic beauty products. As individuals, we can decide what we want to occupy in our lives. What we want to change. Occupy Wall Street can be this generation’s version of Gloria Steinem’s proposal, years ago, on outrageous acts:
“If each person in the room promises that the very next day she or he will do at least one outrageous thing in the cause of simple justice, then I promise I will, too. It doesn’t matter whether the act is as small as saying, ‘Pick it up yourself’ or as large as calling a strike. ‘”
Perhaps only a mother knows how outrageous, how life-changing, the words “Pick it up yourself” can be.
Here is something else we can “occupy”: rape.
From Eve Ensler (this is highly abridged. Check the link for the full text):
I am over rape.
I am over one in three women in the U.S military (Happy Veterans Day!) getting raped by their so-called “comrades.”
I am over the fact that after four women came forward with allegations that Herman Cain groped them and grabbed them and humiliated them, he is still running for the President of the United States.
Which reminds me, I am so over the students at Penn State who protested the justice system instead of the alleged rapist pedophile of at least 8 boys, or his boss Joe Paterno, who did nothing to protect those children after knowing what was happening to them.
We need to OCCUPYRAPE in every school, park, radio, TV station, household, office, factory, refugee camp, military base, back room, night club, alleyway, courtroom, UN office. We need people to truly try and imagine — once and for all — what it feels like to have your body invaded, your mind splintered, your soul shattered. We need to let our rage and our compassion connect us so we can change the paradigm of global rape.
There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.
ONE BILLION WOMEN.
The time is now. Prepare for the escalation.
Today it begins, moving toward February 14, 2013, when one billion women will rise to end rape.
Because we are over it.
Look for this movement. Start your own. Because the only way we are going to get a safe, healthy, equitable, sustainable, clean and respectful society and world to live in is if we begin by picking it up ourselves.
On my calendar next week: Go to Zuccotti Park when Jan Clausen is there.
On Cara Hoffman’s blog today Jan writes:
A. I’m at Zuccotti Park, where I go every day, wearing a sign that says BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF. Cold rain is blowing sideways and I fight with my umbrella while reading Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America.” Looking up, I spy a tall young man clad in excellent rain pants, standing a few paces away. He pronounces each line as I do, with such assurance that it’s clear he knows the entire poem by heart, all the way to the famous ending (“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”). We talk. It turns out he’s one of the Occupy Wall Street librarians. “We have a whole Allen Ginsberg section in our library!” he exults. For the rest of the day, I feel more alive, because poetry lives.
And she also writes, about an anthology of essays about writing and the writing life, about the “the ragged edges and torn borders that truly invite creative motion”:
I’m certainly not saying word artists don’t need to spend lots of time alone, wrestling with their materials. Or that we shouldn’t be paid. Or that we shouldn’t study craft. I’m saying that art is more than the sum of these things, that the central impulse comes from elsewhere, from someplace webby and tentacled. What if the artist’s vocation as prophet simply isn’t compatible with being a profit center? Although Alchemy of the Word can be put to fine use, it is not a ‘useful’ book. It’s a bountiful array of forking paths leading back into the thicket where one person’s imaginative language always reverberates with the languages, purposes, visions of human others.
It is “our offering.”
Read her full essay here.