You Know You're Living...

... in a fascist police state when:

I said "You need a degree to get a good job", so he went into debt to go to college, while I got rid of the jobs; he protested #soipeppersprayedhim

I took his job away - sent it overseas - and then when his family lost their house, he protested, #soipeppersprayedhim

He proclaimed "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed" #soipeppersprayedhim

He wanted to complain about tuition increases #soipeppersprayedhim

He hadn't had a shower in 3 days and was living in a tent, for chrissake #soipeppersprayedhim

He said "MIC CHECK!" #soipeppersprayedhim

JP Morgan Chase gave me $4.6 Million to do their bidding #soIpepperSprayedHim

They were gathered together having a teach-in #soipeppersprayedhim

They set up a library and were reading books! The nerve! #soipeppersprayedhim

Those kids were way too peaceful... #soipeppersprayedhim

They said they didn't like it when we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Riot Police but closed public schools #soipeppersprayedhim

They were chanting about corruption #soipeppersprayedhim

They were sitting on the grass with their arms linked #soipeppersprayedhim

He questioned Bernanke's ability to create money from nothing, #soipeppersprayedhim

Somebody looked at me funny #soipeppersprayedhim

I was handing out fliers to people as they walked by #soipeppersprayedhim

Someone shared an idea that was different than mine #soipeppersprayedhim

He was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask #soipeppersprayedhim

He said they wouldn't let his special ed kid go to their charter school #soipeppersprayedhim

He said it was time for the rich to share their wealth #soipeppresprayedhim

He said he wants real change in government #soipeppersprayedhim

He said "They only let white kids go to that charter school" #soipeppersprayedhim

He said "My kid doesn't know how to speak English so they wouldn't let him go to their charter school" #soipeppersprayedhim

He said "CEO's making 435 times the amount of the average worker is too much for one person" #soipeppersprayedhim

He said "Bill Gates granted billions to charter schools, but the state cut public education budgets, closed schools", #soipeppersprayedhim

He said he works two jobs and can't pay his bills when I told him "go get a job, take a bath" #soipeppersprayedhim

He said "It's the poverty, stupid" when they told him his public school was failing #soipeppersprayedhim

He said "I do my job every day, why doesn't Congress do theirs?" #soipeppersprayedhim

He said "We all have a right to a free and public education" #soipeppersprayedhim

He said "You can't put an idea in jail." #soipeppersprayedhim

She was 84, he was in a wheelchair and their friend was very pregnant #soipeppersprayedhim

  

 

Raindrops on Roses...

More change on the horizon and there's some internal resistance to that...

So... while that's doing its thing, let's focus on some beauty...

It's Been A Hard Week...

 

It seems it's my time to break some more old, unhelpful patterns and face up to shortcomings that sabotage my capacity to live a full and abundant life...

“Who ever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn himself into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” - Nietzsche

John Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare

I've been fighting (for quite a long time) internal grief about loss in my life - loss of innocence, self, family, roots, connection, belonging, home - and most recently losing the home I created 2.5 years ago for myself and my son. 

I've also been fighting my resistance to change, to acceptance of the reality of our situation, and feeling a sense of despair at what's going on in the outside world and not wanting to participate in that paradigm any longer...

All of which have left me feeling stuck, paralysed, not knowing what to do for the best, nor willing to take any steps forward...

I've been feeling like I've been straddling the abyss... one foot in my old life wanting to hang on to that, the other foot in my new reality knowing that the old patterns will no longer work - not for who I am now or for the world that is coming into being...

But I'm frozen in that place - I can't go back to the old but I'm feeling too scared, that I don't have enough momentum, to jump into the new...

I'm not confident there's a safety net there to catch me, even though inner guidance says there is, that there's nothing to fear, that the fear is False Evidence Appearing Real...

For many of us, the inclination is to resist change until the pain/discomfort of a situation becomes unbearable... 

Well, life has this (nasty) little habit of pushing us into a corner and forcing change, if we won't go there voluntarily.

I've been 'hiding' from the world and from success... I've been spending all my time, energy and focus on social and education activism, working to change things on the outside, hoping to avoid having to change things on the inside.

I know what I've been doing is valuable and has had an impact - people write and phone me from all over, they stop me in the street to thank me for what I'm doing, people across the globe read this blog... 

And for me, the panic, pain, discomfort is around financial shortage... I haven't been getting paid for spending all of this energy and time and my efforts to "save the world" have left us financially impaired... 

There are other factors in that financial equation over which I have no control, but I'm the one who's been making the choices about what I focus on and how I spend my time...

This past week, I finally ran out of wiggle room and now I need to get 'real'  - find/generate/manifest meaningful quantities of income immediately... 

I need to acknowledge my responsibilities to myself and my child, "save" us first, stop waiting for others who owe us energetic and financial debts to "do the right thing" and step up...

I need to acknowledge, own and put right those areas in my life and those relationships where I'm out of financial and energetic integrity with others...

I need to feel the grief I've been avoiding and keep moving forward anyway...

Sometimes all that's needed is the recognition and owning of what's going on for the shift to happen; more often though, what's needed is action in line with the new understanding - and that's the bit I've been avoiding...

But the cost of being an ostrich in this particular situation, is more than 10 times the cost of dealing with some of these issues when they first arose - an expensive (but obviously necessary to get the understanding!) experience...

And I need to soften towards myself in that... 

Healing from the wounds that have brought me to this place inside first takes awareness and then love and time.

We're all doing the best we can with what we've got...

If we could do it any better, we would... 

US Democracy Is Dead...

Democracy in the US is dead.   We are, in effect, living in a totalitarian state controlled by a handful of billionaires who are attempting to exert complete political, economic and societal control and fiddling while it all begins to crash around them...

Shooting Myself In The Foot...

On a purely personal note today, I have become increasingly conscious of how often I "shoot myself in the foot" and take actions - or more accurately NOT TAKE ACTIONS - that result in more 'difficulty' in my life than is necessary...

Compared to 4 billion or so other souls on the planet, my son and I are living well; we have somewhere warm and dry to live, clothes, food, transport and people around who care what happens to us...

Compared to others who are similarly or more privileged, there's a lot in my life that could be 'improved'.

We are living day-to-day financially which is stressful and not how it has to be.   And that's because of several factors:

• Politically and personally, I find it almost impossible now, to participate in the current economic and social paradigm - it's  anti-life, dysfunctional and toxic...

• Because of that, I'm choosing not to work in the corporate madhouse (though some might say that with 25% unemployment in the US that is not a choice I - as an older, over-qualified, woman - am making necessarily)...

• The journey here in the US has been completely intense, complicated and difficult, comprised of getting into and then getting out of a situation of domestic violence and experiencing cancer... This has taken much of my focus and a great deal of energy.   And it doesn't seem likely to end anytime soon, as my son's father continues to play power and control games (mostly now around money) and I go back to court tomorrow to ask  for the renewal of a Protection Order for yet another year...

• Single parenting my son takes time, focus and energy that would otherwise be available for money-making activities.   I don't have the same amount of energy as I did when I was raising my first family, and I choose to give my son first call on the energy I do have - everything and everyone else has to queue up behind him...

BUT.... there are things I can do that would both add to the positive in the world and bring in cash...

I have plans to start the Purple Dove Foundation to raise money for and awareness about (and the eventual eradication of) the horror of domestic violence.

The Foundation would do what the Komen Foundation does in the field of breast cancer - raises billions of dollars and then distributes it to organisations working to cure breast cancer and to individuals living through the experience - basically acting as a clearing house for funds...

The Komen Foundation is successful because many people can't deal with facing their own mortality... fund raising for disease-fighting is quite easy...

But most people don't want to talk about domestic violence - it's the nasty little secret thing that happens to other people, behind closed doors in the house down the street...

And that's just not true... it happens in one-in-five households and is probably happening to your next-door-neighbour as I write and you read this... or it's been happening in your house, or in the house where you grew up...

It happened in my house where I grew up, though I didn't know what it was and that it was not 'normal'... and a form of it happened in my first marriage, though again I didn't recognise it for what it was until much later...

Did you know:

• One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime.
• An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.
• 85% of domestic violence victims are women.
• Historically, females have been most often victimized by someone they knew.
• Females who are 20-24 years of age are at the greatest risk of nonfatal intimate partner violence. 
• Most cases of domestic violence are never reported to the police.

- Domestic Violence Fact Sheet

I've had this in my head for five years now - a fully fledged, perfectly sound, perfectly viable  idea that only needs implementation...

And I have begun taking small steps to make it a reality... 

BUT... something inside holds me back from taking the big strides forward necessary to make this idea really come alive in 3D...

My inner critic says it's because I'm lazy and afraid of failure, all talk and no action...

I know I'm not lazy - I've worked hard all my life...

I know I'm not all talk and no action - I've done things in my life that have changed reality for quite a few people.   I've walked the talk and put my money where my mouth is...

Am I afraid of failure?   I have put myself out there, laid it all on the line in the past and sometimes that has cost me a lot AND I kept going, no matter what, because it was the right thing to do...

Am I afraid of exposing myself, telling the story over and over again, perhaps being pitied or shunned?

When I teach - in the personal growth/spiritual arenas - I always use personal experience as the main teaching tool... after all, I'm the only person/thing I am an expert on... and being prepared to be vulnerable and to take myself down to my students' "level" gives them permission to open up and share... the most amazing learning/shifts happen all around...

I believe in equalising/leveling the playing field...that's what's real and takes the "power over" element out of teaching/sharing/nurturing.    

I tell my students (and my kids and the kids I teach electives to at school) that in some aspects of life, I'm a master, in some I'm a novice, in some an apprentice, and in some a scholar, as are they... And in some areas they're the masters whereas I'm still a novice or an apprentice...

Am I afraid I wasn't really a "victim" because I got out before it got really bad - I didn't end up in the hospital with broken bones, that I'm just a fraud?

Just as  I wasn't really a "victim" of cancer because I  'only' had a mastectomy and reconstruction - I didn't need radiation and chemotherapy, my hair didn't fall out, I didn't spend days huddled over the toilet puking up my guts?  

I know, quite ridiculous really, but that's how the uncontrolled mind works for many of us, especially women...

Am I afraid of success?   What would the world look like with no violence in it?

Maybe I'm just plain mad, mad, mad, having a huge temper tantrum that my life isn't all peaches and cream... a case of sitting on the pity-pot crying "why me, why me?"...  What is it they say?    "Shit, or get off the pot already"!

Maybe I'm just plain mad at my supposedly intelligent self, for having made certain choices that have gotten me/us to this place...

And yet, I know this particular section of my life's journey was 'meant to be'... I don't think any other experience would have led me to recognise what was the pattern of abusive relationships the female line of my family has endured, for generations, and to decide "It Stops With Me"... 

And it has stopped with me... my daughters and sons now have knowledge I didn't when I was young and they need not make the same dysfunctional choices I did, as my mother and grandmothers did before me...

Indigenous people say that what you heal in this life time, heals seven generations into the past and seven generations into the future, so maybe there was a worthwhile point to all this after all!

But there is no complete peace in that; there's still anger, rage even, at the men who carried out this abuse - sexual, physical, emotional. 

To them - dead and alive - I say: "I understand your pain and why you did what you did... You did the best you could with what you had, as we all do... 

BUT - please, accept, own and live with your guilt instead of denying it... live with your guilt as I have to do with mine, for not protecting my children as I should have, just as my mother did not protect me..." 

 

Maybe I (still) want to be rescued - have the proverbial white knight  come galloping in on his charger, solving all my problems, whisking me and my son off to the always sunny land of happiness ever after, flowing with milk and honey, all rainbows and cherubs playing heavenly music!

Maybe I'm just resistant to change in my own life...good at helping others handle/achieve change in their lives, but when it comes to my own little world, Life has to drag me kicking and screaming through the hedge backwards!

Maybe my ambivalence about being in this country is what's getting in the way... If I put in more energy creating something, that means on some level that I'm committing to staying here, in a place I dislike...  I like, love even, many of the people in my life here, but this society gives me the creeps... I want to go home, but where is home now?

Or maybe I'm just tired... too much needs attention in this world and I'd rather just sit back, take care of me and mine and let all the rest go to hell in a handcart...

We shall see...

 

 

 

Not In Our Name: The Pledge of Resistance

I wanted to post this this morning, to reflect how I feel about the Seattle School Board rubber stamping our education deformist Superintendent's move to bring Teach for America recruits to our schools, especially to the most vulnerable students in our city.

This is being done despite the fact we have no shortage of highly-qualified teachers in the city, all eager for work, the District has to pay $4,000/year for each of the two years the TFA recruit signs on for, plus salary and benefits, this was a sole source contract (in contravention of regulations), there was no public engagement, the contract was written by and protects TFA and not the District, student privacy is endangered, there are no guarantees and the District assumes all liability while TFA shoulders none...

And this is all being done in the name of "our children".... and that is complete BS... its being done in the name of the privatising education deformers, the Billionaire Boys' Club, the oligarchy...

Six more months and we shall have charter schools in our city and the deform agenda will have been completely implemented...

See here for more: 

http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/seattle-school-board-rubber-stamps-yet-another-item-on-its-broad-superintendents-ed-reform-agenda/

http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/search?q=TFA