Loving the bones

If your people are originally from the northern hemisphere, then this is an important time for you. Across the north, as the earth is moving from hot to cold, festivals, ceremonies and teachings exist that celebrate light's relationship to darkness, that celebrate the line between life and death, that honor the harvest time before the freezing or death time. This is, like all time, a sacred time.

Across my family lines, we alternately know this time, really this particular day, November 2, as All Saint's Day, a Catholic recreation of the older rituals.  Some of those earlier rituals still linger. My family lines have celebrated il Giorno dei Morti*, the Day of the Dead, a celebration that still exists in Italy although it is slowly disappearing under the US mass marketing of Halloween.  We have celebrated Winternacht, one of the three great blessings in the Norse year, the time of honoring the dead, similar to Samhain. We also know this time as the time between the Freezing Moon and the Little Spirit Moon, the Ojibwe calendar that knows this as a time of living close to the spirits, a healing time. And so many other festivals and traditions whose names we don't remember. I did not grow up with any of these but I am learning to claim them now.

All of these lines and traditions know about the power of bones. And oh how I love bones! Sacred bones, glorious bones. There is a big difference between living bones and the dead bones that we usually get to see and hold. Living bone is this glorious mix of fluid and hardness, something that holds its shape but also can flow. Bone is flexible, it contracts in response to pressure and then it expands when that pressure leaves. Bones are where we keep the stardust, those extraterrestrial parts of ourselves, magnesium, calcium, cystalline structures that emerged within the intense heat and pressure of a star and which, eventually, move through space to fall like rain on the planets, on us. That stardust is part of the material that creates many parts of our bodies but especially our bones. We build ourselves up out of the materials of the lands where we live: the food we eat, the water we drink, the bits and pieces of organic and inorganic matter that find their way into us because we breathe, we touch things, we are alive. 

Oh magnificent bones. When we die, most of our flesh turns back into earth, mixing in with all other organic matter as soil. Our bodies are - mostly - no longer recognizable.  This is true whether we burn, are lifted high on bowers for the sun, rain and birds to feast upon, or whether we are placed under the ground so that the microbes of the soil can take us apart. All that remains recognizable are our bones. Over time, even when the shape of the bones disappear, still the magnesium and calcium, the zinc and chromium and so many other minerals remain. They are constant, both within our bones and when we have passed, as part of the earth, of the bodies of other living beings that emerge again, one generation after the next. 

Many of our traditions show reverence for the bones of those we have loved. Many traditions wash the bones, bring the bones out when it is time to speak with the ancestors, redden the bones, make rattles and horns from the bones, love them, know them, listen to the bones for divination, set the bones down at table for meals with us, bring the bones and make sure they travel from old homes to new.

While I write this, I am baking bone cookies with a Sicilian friend. We are making four different kinds and will give some away as gifts and will put some on our altars and will enjoy the rest, letting the crunchy sweetness melt on our tongues. All of the cookies are made to be hard, crunchy, not cookie-like but bone-like until we eat them and they change. One recipe surprised us because after baking, the cookie separated, the inner softness pushing through a hard white crispy shell, like marrow pushing through the hard body.

The bones are the infrastructure of the body. They developed to support the fluid-filled bag that is the rest of us. With the bones, we can move. The bones help us push off against gravity. They are the constant around which our fluid body organizes itself. On this day I think of our ancestors as the same kind of infrastructure, the constant thread that comes forward from a dizzying number of generations. Knowing them, staying in relationship to them, we can move. Without them, we flop around in our present time, tilting back and forth in response to earthquakes and other external movement, but not carrying our own guide rope back to gravity.

This image is from the catacombs underneath Naples, Italy, about sixty miles from the villages where my father's maternal line lived for generations upon generations.

* Hey all you Italians and Sicilians, just because our people also celebrated remembering the dead at this time of year and called it Day of the Dead (in Italian and Sicilian) does not give us license to then celebrate Dia de los Muertos. They are not the same honoring. They have different indigenous traditions embedded in both and different histories of colonization on top of each. And since, if your people like mine came to the US and then traded language history and culture for whiteness, this adds another layer of "don't do it!" It is vital that raised white folks reclaim culture and tradition outside of whiteness. It is also vital that while this happens, white folks are working fierce and fast to end white supremacy - in your bodies as well as within systems and cultures. Tread carefully and with deep passion and conviction.

A midwestern POCI conversation about healing

Place matters. All action is local, even when it is sent through the internet to be a national or global initiative. It's local because we experience it locally. In our bodies. It matters deeply that I am from the midwest - started on the eastern edge of the midwest in Ohio and have ended up here on the western edge, in Minnesota. The feel of this land, its seasons, what its food and water carries into my body, the fact that it is already in the 30s today, cold and dark early: these are what forms me. Where you are is what forms you.

I am resharing this conversation here, although I've already shared it through Facebook. I am sharing it here and prefacing it with place because the 23 indigenous and POC healers and healing practitioners who are talking on its pages also live here, on the Dakota homelands, in Minneapolis and St. Paul. These are people close to my heart, some of whom are in my everyday life. We all live here, on this land, right now. And that matters.

The focus of this conversation was on how to support leaders of color and indigenous leaders, people who are often working in toxic spaces where their leadership is under attack, where they are under-resourced and where the weight of white supremacist systems and organizations makes the work of liberation feel sometimes close to impossible. The question that Nexus wanted us to sit with was to better understand how healing can happen within these spaces.

I am resharing the report that came out of that conversation here, when we are on the cusp of an election. Many of you are involved in some kind of voter work. Many more of you are impacted by what happens at these elections. And no matter what, shifting power at the electoral level is important but it isn't about healing. It can, however, set the conditions that allow the potential for healing to increase or decrease.

So I share these words with you because, well, we all need words that make us dream bigger. Feel free to share with me what you have read and written. This is a conversation. Trauma is disconnection. So how can healing, re-connection or connection for the very first time, happen right now. Here.

The image above is of a single nerve cell, something that doesn't really exist because a nerve cell only exists in its relationship to the other cells around it. And yet it also does. A single nerve cell can shift how communication is happening within the body. It is powerful. And yet a single nerve cell depends on the communication that happened before and after, its role in change is only about those who came before and those who came after. A single nerve cell.

Dealing with the original wounds

This is not a trigger warning, but it is an invitation that you pay attention to yourself. I am going to talk about the violence that is the foundation of the creation of the United States. It is easy to read history and turn it into information: something that a person “knows” and “understands.” Please don’t do that. Everything written here is about real people; people like you and your kin. What is written here might be about your kin or your people might be the kin who were committing the violence. Either way, notice yourself as you read. Listen deeply, listen to how your ancestors might whisper to you through your DNA, through your spirit. Read this as a prayer, not a school lesson. And then breathe.

I just finished taking a walk along the Mississippi River. The leaves are mostly fallen, the sumac is bright red, and the ancient cottonwoods loom large along the riverside. I usually walk near Coldwater Spring, a sacred Dakota site that has been taken over and domesticated by the park service, and along the river just north of Fort Snelling. I never go there without remembering where I am and what happened at that place. I never go there without remembering that eight generations ago, there was no Fort and this was only Dakota land. I never go there without remembering the 1600 Dakota families who were interred at the Fort after and during the Dakota war, only six generations ago. I go there and remember the expulsion of the Dakota people from their homelands, still six generations ago, all of these actions taken by President Lincoln within months of his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

As a bodyworker who studies craniosacral therapy and learns from other modalities, I know that if you can identify the original wound, the first significant hurt, and if you can support that original wound to get what it needs to transform, then many of the things that happened afterwards will transform at the same time. I have seen that kind of unwinding, this moment of deep healing, within the cells and tissues of people who invite me to be with them. Held trauma is a moment of unfinished history. Life wants to come back to the present moment, to feeling connected to other life. This means that held trauma will find a way to resurface again and again until it is finished. This is why a person seems to get involved with the same kind of person, the same boss and situation at work, the same feeling of isolation and sadness. Until we can heal or shift the original conditioning or experiences, we will get tangled up in the same tangles.

The same is true of what happens to the collective body. I believe that for those of us who live on this land, there are two significant original wounds. These wounds overlay a whole range of histories that we have separately brought as people coming from many different places but when we settle here, on these lands, then we settle in relationship to the original wounds.

The first wound is the attempted genocide of those people indigenous to this land. For over 500, 5000, some peoples say 50,000 generations there were people who lived on these lands. They moved and migrated like people do, from one ocean to the other, from the south to the north and the north to the south. Real people who did all of the glorious and absurd things that real people do, who had wars and who got sick and died and who lived contented lives, real people who never lost their relationship to the land. Real people who understood - and understand - that we are the land and the land is us. The first wound happened when Europeans brought their wounds to this land and planted them. Those wounds were the wounds of disconnection from land and the idea of land ownership. Their wounds included the idea of profit, something that is not possible without inequality. They included rigid and specific gender assumptions that subjugated anything seen as feminine and they included a patriarchal and transcendent God who expected harsh discipline and service from his followers. These were the wounds that had evolved in western Europe for thousands of years. In their European homelands, people were (and are still) fighting for a connected life that does not depend on violent inequality at its base. Many of those who first crossed the ocean to come to this land came because they wanted to find a place where they could live more spiritually grounded simple lives. But even those who came seeking heaven on earth came bringing their own original wounds, this deep disconnection from life, and they carried it like a virus as they built their farms and towns and expanded across the land. This is the first original wound: the attempted and unceasing disappearance of the original people of this land through murder, forced assimilation, land theft, and cultural policing and minimization.

The second original wound came soon after first contact with these lands. This was the wound that enabled those who settled to increase their profits and to feel justified in doing so. First the land was turned into an object to be sold and used for personal purpose and second, human beings were turned into objects to be sold and used for personal purpose. The second wound is the institution of slavery, the economic system that depended on the creation of race as a way to organize the complexity of life. The European system of slavery or the owning of people has its roots in European feudalism, anti-Semitism and the colonizing mix of the Catholic inquisition and crusades. The way the institution of slavery developed in the Americas is born of these histories with each colonizing country putting the pieces together slightly differently. This second original wound is entwined with the first; both together creating the foundation of the creation of the United States: indigenous disappearance and the violent policing of anti-Black racism. The institution of slavery had already been started in the islands and lands to the south of us. This means that as Europeans first started coming north to settle and colonize, they brought with them enslaved Africans. The first settler’s legal code, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, legalized slavery in the colonies. After the Bacon Rebellion, a shared fight by Black slaves and Black and white indentured servants only two generations after the first large scale settlement in the East, race rather than class became the tool for social control.

When you attend to an original wound, are not distracted by all of those things which show up at the same time, you increase the potential for transformation.

There are many other wounds that exist here on these lands: gender oppression and classism and ableism and religious persecution and anti-immigrant hatred and all kinds of phobias. But they are not the original wounds of this land. Most flavors of US-based class and gender oppression have European roots, not indigenous or the many different kinds of Asian or African cultural roots. Forms of gender and class based oppression might well exist in those lands, but upon settling here, in the United States, those other homegrown inequalities merged with the European form of cultural divide.

The one thing all of us share who are living on this land that is now called the United States is the experience of being raced. This is true whether we are new immigrants or our people have been here since first contact. This is also true for those who are indigenous to this land but it doesn’t quite work the same way. Being native to this land exists before race and so identities like Lakota or Ojibwe or Cree are cultural experiences that exist before they were raced. Being raced means having the complexity of your history, your culture, and your understanding of yourself and your kin aligned with a category that you have no power to shift. The only people who get to experience life without the awareness of being raced are white people.

White supremacy, I believe, is a system of coddling European-descended people so that they don’t have to feel the impact of the wounds they brought with them over the ocean and then transplanted directly and indirectly into this land and into people’s bodies. White supremacy is a system set up to maintain these original wounds so that they are raw and bleeding, never able to heal and then transform into something new. White supremacy exists so that European-descended people don’t have to experience the profound contradiction between the life they are leading and the values they claim to hold.

To me, healing justice is about directly addressing these original wounds. Period. This means healing justice seeks to stop the violence of these histories as they show up in the present day, including in how newer immigrants are defined through the lens of anti-Black racism and anti-indigeneity or with the added layers that are defined in relationship to US global economic interests.

As healers and healing practitioners, we work most of the time with individual bodies. Life shows up in healing spaces in very local ways: as an experience of pain, of emotion, of disconnection, of compromised movement or energy. We are there in response to how the truth of someone’s life shows up in any given moment.  This is healing. What makes it healing justice is how we hold the truth of the present moment within the larger context of the original wound. How we do this is part of what I will keep reflecting on in this blog.

I want to be clear about one more thing: paying attention to the original wound does not mean ignoring the real pain of gender and class and all other forms of oppression and violence. But it does mean still and always paying attention to the original wound. There is no gender or class liberation possible on this land without attending to the original wounds. Without attending to and healing the origins, other fights will eventually become aligned one way or another with white supremacy. It matters deeply that profound class divisions, sexual violence and rigid gender binaries did not exist on this land prior to colonization. They are not native to this land. They were brought here and transplanted, just like a Monsanto seed, fighting its way into the reproductive cells of native seeds as they are transformed against their will.

Beneath all of what I wrote here is the foundational hurt: the one that these histories made possible and maintain. Beneath all of this is our separation from the life that sustains us. This land, right here, below our feet. The kin who are within arm's and heart's reach. How we experience the connection of all things, spirit, life.  And the ancientness of our selves, our ancestors joining hands along our DNA. Notice your breath. Right now.

How we talk about bodies matters

Because I am restarting this blog to talk about healing justice, I am starting with some fundamental pieces that feel, for me, like the underbelly foundation in how we hold this work. They are not offered as the capital T "truth" but rather like poetry, like ceremony, like song. I want to be in conversation with you, with the connection of all life. I am most interested in how these words resonate in your life, in your body, in how you experience your breath.

We didn’t ask for it. We didn’t create it, but it’s true. Every time we talk about bodies and healing, we are in relationship to histories and beliefs about what is normal and what is not. These histories and beliefs carry invisible assumptions as heavy as gravity.

Many of our people had some belief or practice that saw their kin with different physical bodies or different ways of expressing or different experiences of their senses as evil or possessed by spirits or a danger to the community as a whole. Not all of our people believed this. Some saw those who were different as gifts, as beings in closer relationship to the sacred. But those European histories that first colonized this land and created the mainstream beliefs that define healthcare and religion and politics come from histories of torturing, killing or separating those who were seen as physically, emotionally or mentally different. It wasn’t and isn’t only European histories that had violent ways of dealing with difference. For the purpose of talking about culture in the US, I am writing here about Eurocentrism but please learn and know your own histories. Very few of us come from people who knew how to love radical difference within our intimate spaces, even before we were colonized.

As scientific ways of thinking began to define European culture in the 1800s, this added a new layer of defining the body. Now the science of anatomy, of medicine, of health and wellness began to define “normal” and “abnormal” and to create public policies for managing society along these lines. Who was and is defined as normal shifted over time but most often it included people with physical impairments including cognitive differences, gender non-conforming people, those seen as delinquent or deviant or criminal, and those who are raced as not white. Eugenics developed along with the theory of evolution as a respected science focused on creating the “perfect” race.

This is not a history that is finished. The collective trauma of murdering our own kin because someone defines them as inferior is unfinished and shows up again and again as policies that define any person as diseased and therefore not worth having control over the meaning of their own life. This includes how conversations about assisted suicide unfold, racialized beliefs about who is more violent and who is smarter and who is more generous, how healthcare policies are defined and how healthcare expenses are treated, how accessibility to public and private spaces is supported or dismissed, the obsession with super fit bodies, making assumptions about gender and experience based on the genitalia or our perception of the body in front of us, the use of the words crazy or insane or foolish to dismiss anyone you disagree with, the invisibility of mental health struggles, the assumption of a certain kind of neurotypical cognitionl, the physical and mental and emotional assumptions made in movement spaces where liberatory political work demands long hours of physical and mental energy, and in every space where people talk about healing.

I have heard many different healers use words like “whole” when referring to where someone’s body needs to be. I have heard many healers talk with community members about the outcomes of doing healing work: feeling better, feeling more connected, being stronger, better, faster, just like Superman. I struggle with this whenever I talk about healing - and usually try to only talk about trauma as disconnection and healing as connection - and to then be clear that what connection feels like is defined by the person who wants to heal and NOT by anyone else.

Eli Clare talks about much of this in his book, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. If you identify as a healer or healing practitioner, read this. Now. Assume that even as you are doing powerful work in support of the person you show up for, you are also re-entrenching a history of ableism that slides its way into every sentence that you speak, every assumption that you make. All trauma is collective and as people who care about healing justice, we don’t get to claim our own work as healers without directly attending to disability justice.

There is work to do. Deep work that is dealing directly with how histories of violence are held in the cells of the body. There is also deep work to do about not holding on to what the idea of transformation or liberation looks like. There is deep work to do as healers about not assuming what is normal or valuable and what is not. And there is deep work to do about separating the many different ways that a life experiences itself and allowing that life to define for itself and within relationship to its chosen communities how it wants to define healing.

I make mistakes every single day. In the morning before I practice and when I pray, I ask for help in showing up in the best way that honors the sovereignty of the individual and collective lives in front of me while also working to stop the histories that negatively impact their sense of possibility. As healers or people committed to healing justice, let’s spend the rest of our lives doing a better job of not getting in their way because of the violent histories about wellness and bodies that inform the very practices that we use in support of their liberation.

The image at the top of this page is of a slime mold, the first multicellular reproductive organisms or our shared first mother. When a slime mold is split into parts, it finds its ways back to reform together. And when a slime mold learns, it learns instantaneously, outside of linear time.

Starting again

As you can tell by looking after this post, I am restarting this blog. I want a place to reflect on the lens of healing justice, on liberation work and time.

It's not surprising to me that I started this blog and then left it about ten years ago. It's kind of the rhythm of parenting and middle life. When your children are small, you have less time in some ways and more time in others. When they get older, it all shifts. I stopped this blog when life became too full for reflection. I am restarting it when my child is in high school. I am restarting it on the other side of middle age. If the circle of community were not broken, then it would be natural that I start to reflect on the things my life has taught me. There would be times when we sat together and I got to tell stories, as well as listen to stories from those around me.

Sadly, we don't live that way. And so the vanity part of this blog is that god damn it, I still want to sit by the fire and tell stories. Think out loud and, if I am lucky, have you listen.

And the other vanity part of this says, hey, we talked about things differently ten years ago. I also understood myself differently ten years ago. There are things I say, political language I use, and how I identify that isn't exactly the same. But there you go... change is real. God is change. And so I am just gonna leave it all.

A follow up letter to Gary Schiff

Because so many of you read the first letter, I am including this response to the conversation about the letter that took place on the e-democracy list for Powderhorn Park.

Hey neighbors,

I’ve taken some time just to read your responses on the e-democracy listserv and listen without jumping in and commenting on each point. Some of what I’ve heard in what you’ve written includes concerns about limiting democracy or concerns about political leaders being asked to run or not run based on their race. Some of you have also voiced frustration with how Councilmember Cano has or hasn’t shown up and responded to calls. And then others shared moments of agreement with points I raised in my letter.

I started the letter by naming it as a love letter. It still is. I agree with each of you who shared any concerns about limiting how democracy operates by any kind of exclusion including race. The vision of democracy has got to be a place where any person can enter, offer to represent a constituency and then be in real conversation with that constituency so that we can decide whether or not they represent us. This is the ideal and I feel fiercely about it.

Which is why my letter to Gary was a spiritual letter or a moral letter or a values letter before it was anything else. It’s why it started with love because this letter feels, to me, like reaching out to kin to say, hey! I see you. I have heard you share your values with us for a lot of years and I am telling you, this feels like a contradiction in your values.

We all act in ways that contradict our core values from time to time. Such is the way of living in a complex world. Such is the way of living alongside structures of deep oppression and colonization. I act in contradiction all of the time and, when I do, I trust the people I am in relationship with to lovingly and responsibly hold me accountable. For example, my partner read the final version of my letter after it had been published. She laughed and said, “ Yeah, Susan, so you are talking about racial justice but look at what you did at exactly the same time! You ended your letter by implying that 19 year olds are immature!”

OOf! Right there. In my push to write about racial justice, I inscribed an assumption about age and maturity that I don’t actually believe. Contradiction.

I blustered for a minute, “well, I didn’t mean that… “ with all of the self-defensive posturing that always seems to come up most intensely with my partner who I love and trust. And then I took a deep breath and said, “Crap. You’re right. “ Because she was. There are way too many 19 year olds who out-mature a lot of the 50 somethings like me. My partner knows me. She knows my values (hi Rocki!). The ending sentence of my letter contradicted the values I hold and I needed someone to show that to me. Period.

Our experience tells us that institutions such as schools, courts and the media are negatively biased towards indigenous people, people of color and immigrants. Data and research proves that experience again and again. It is a contradiction in our core values if we then refuse to do the work of changing those system, both in the intimate individual moments and at a larger scale. When people who have access to the benefits of these systems compete for public resources and electoral positions on platforms that name equity as a value, it is a contradiction to then take away the leadership and power of people of color and marginalized people who are fighting for justice. In doing this, we repeat the violence and inequality of the systems that got us here. This is not simply an individual misstep. It is the remaking of a collective wrong. When someone who benefits from unequal systems runs against someone who does not, we face a collective spiritual contradiction. A morals and values contradiction. It happens. It doesn’t make someone a bad person. Naming it isn’t an attack or a performance. It’s just an act of being in accountable relationship. It’s how we hold each other accountable within love and community.

That’s what I’m doing right now with you, Gary. I’m just looking at you and saying, “Hey there, neighbor. You can do this differently. What does it mean for you to recognize the complexity of how power and access has impacted the political system and then make a personal moral choice to engage with that history differently?”

I would still love to sit down with you, just the two of us, and talk about this. Because these are, to me, the hard moral and spiritual choices that reach towards the potential for a new and different world where democracy becomes a practice of love and community and agency and reparations and justice and possibility… and perhaps even freedom.

Warmly, even though it’s cold in our ward today,

Susan Raffo

An open letter to Gary Schiff

Gary,

First, you might not know it, but this is a love letter, a letter of hope in the way that hope lives in the places where we hold each other accountable, ask the hard questions, and tell the truth about disappointment. So I am writing this letter to you, because I am disappointed. I am completely open to talking about this after you have received it.

Last weekend, you publicly announced you were running for City Councilmember, Alondra Cano’s, seat in Ward 9. You have not yet officially launched your campaign and, at the time of this writing, you don’t have a campaign website so the language we are getting is from the Star Tribune. Despite not formally launching, your message is clear. It’s even repeated on the meme your campaign is sending around, vote for Gary as he runs for his “old seat in Ward 9.”

I am tired of the self-centered approach to US politics, Gary. I am tired of feeling like everything I read is designed to make me react in a particular way. It’s the reason why the only politics I trust are local politics. I have known Councilmember Cano for six years. And I have known you, Gary, for about 23 years. Since you were, I think, 19 or maybe 20.

You are a white man running for elected office at a moment of intense division in this country, particularly around race and white supremacy. You are choosing to put yourself forward against a Latina, an immigrant. You will be looking for ways to counter Councilmember Cano’s work, while at the same time attempt to shield your actions from anything that might obviously refer to your racial differences. It doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do to try and get around this. As a white man choosing to run at this moment, you have agreed to participate in this moment of deep racial pain and divide.

When I read the phrase, “Running for his old seat in ward 9,” I heard echoes of “make America great again,” There is no innocence in this game. In this particular moment where white supremacy is continually affirmed at the federal level, as much in progressive ward 9 as anywhere else in the country, it is not possible to make a statement like that and not immediately play into white fear.

The problem with racism and white supremacy is that it is interwoven with the survival systems of those who were raised to be white in this country. This means that it is always a tool, lying just out of reach, to use in subtle and overt ways when, for whatever reason, a sense of personal survival or safety feels at risk for those who are white. I can’t help but wonder, Gary, if you are more invested in being a career politician than working for the residents of ward 9. Last election, you ran for the mayoral race and lost. Word on the street was that you were thinking about running for Senator Keith Ellison’s chair. When all other political doors seem to be closed, you now go after the position that is most likely to ensure your political survival, to make ward 9 “great again," for yourself and those who have been riled or made uncomfortable by Council Member Cano’s leadership.

I don’t understand why someone with your experience and relationships doesn’t immediately say to Council Member Cano, “it matters deeply to me that you are successful in your role on the city council. We all need you to be successful. Tell me how I can help, tell me what you need from me, tell me how I can support your leadership.” Instead, you think you have a better idea for what needs to be done.

Gary, I first met you when you were 19. You were a student at the LGBT Programs Office and I was staff. When I first met you, I felt kindness towards you. You were dating someone I liked a lot. I knew that your family had had a hard time with your gayness. You were arrogant as hell but it felt like a particular flavor of young. I remember you coming in with a whole bunch of ideas for how to make the LGBT Programs Office and other LGBT student activities better stronger faster. I listened to you and said something like, you should find out what others are doing first, see what others have tried, build some good relationships and then see what you can do together. You smirked at me (literally) and said that you already knew what needed to be done.

When you were first running for city council, you called me for an endorsement. Embarrassing as it is, I didn’t understand what it meant to endorse someone. And so, months later, someone I knew who was also running for your seat came and asked me to endorse him. I trusted his work so I said sure, put my name on your flyer. After you saw his flyer, you called me. You were furious. You wanted to know why I had endorsed him. Again, I was embarrassed. I explained that I hadn’t fully understood the endorsing process and that you only had the one chance and that I hadn’t thought it through about this candidate versus you or anyone else. You said to me, you realize he is only reaching out to you to get to me. I said, this man is running for a ward with a high LGBT population. Of course he is talking to LGBT people to garner their support and to show that he gets our issues. You repeated that I was naïve and he was doing this to get to you. That it was personal. You hung up, furious at me.

Gary, you have long struck me as being the progressive south Minneapolis version of the same line of political posturing that includes Bill Clinton and possibly even, at its most extreme end, Donald Trump. Remember what I said: white supremacy hijacks the body’s survival systems and so will use whatever is necessary to make sure that the body feels ok, settled, and empowered. While the political differences between the three of you are huge and I would never say that you are the same nor do you represent the same communities, interests or issues, I would say that there is similarity in terms of how you play the fields, the communities, you are trying to reach. It’s this self-interest, the ways that in moments of stress you can pull on whiteness to lift your own body over others, this ignorance of how you contradict your own spoken values when you do this, that makes me disappointed in you.

Right now is there is an astonishing and powerful coalition of POC and white candidates who are emerging to run for new ward seats who will work together including with councilmember Cano. This is what collective politics as opposed to self-interest politics looks like. This is what it looks like to say our electoral campaigns are about changing the patterns of control and pain that keep putting us right back in the same place of deep inequality. Gary, many of us are looking for people who are going to ask communities who are struggling right now with more things that get in the way of a liberated life, how can I best have your back? How can I most support your leadership and vision for change? I wish you would ask that question, Gary, in service to those who have not been represented by US political history rather than what seems to be service to your own career. It would make me think that 19 year old boy had finally grown up.

Sincerely, Susan Raffo, 9th Ward resident

(This was posted in February 2017 as a Facebook note)

A call for economic justice that reflects the occupation of this land, the role of the institution of slavery and immigration

In 1944, FDR spoke about the meaning of security for "post war" America.  As part of that speech and in response to the growing international focus on human (mostly political) rights, he called out for a "Second Bill of Rights" guaranteeing Economic Rights. These are the rights he suggested:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.

While not all of these were enacted, some, like Social Security, Medicaire and fair mortgage practices, were created. These are the very economic safety nets that the Right is politically working to end. But in 1944, FDR's call was not the only action taking place.

Also in 1944, The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) a Native American indigenous rights organization, was founded in response to the ongoing termination (otherwise known as genocide) and assimilation policies that the United States forced upon the tribal governments in contradiction of their treaty rights and status as sovereign entities.

1944 is also seen by many historians as the year the Black Civil Rights movement began as Black soldiers returned from fighting in WW II and began to organize. It is when NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall won Smith v. Allwright in the U.S. Supreme Court guaranteeing that "all-white" primary elections are unconstitutional, a landmark case in demanding Black political voice and Black agency.

1944 is also the year when the federal government ended the internment of Japanese families. It is the year after the US ended the Chinese Exclusion Act but created the Bracero program, a "guest worker" program that brought Mexican families to the US for low wage work without granting the benefits of citizenship.

Economic change in the US has always been directly tied to the history of the occupation of this indigenous land, the histories of the institution of slavery and its ongoing impact, and the histories of immigration and control. Sometimes economic change has benefited the mostly white middle class while largely ignoring those who are poorest or have least access to the political and legal benefits of citizenship. Sometimes economic change has happened precisely because of the political protests of the poorest and those with least access. And large scale economic change has always happened without taking into account the fact that the resources that feed economic health - land and the work that happens on top of that land - are resources taken from stolen land and a continuous history of broken treaties.

Let's do it differently this time.

(This was posted in October 2011 as a Facebook note)

Beneficial nematodes

I have drunk the kool-aid. Or rather, I have drunk the swamp goo. This is the second year in a row that my lovely squash plants have begun to grow insipid and die. It's all account of the squash vine bore - an evil greasy looking grub thing. Prior to discovering my new love, all of the books told me to get out there as the sun was rising, squat down and see if I can see those squatting bores chowing their way through my plant, then pull them off and kill them.

I'm not that kind of a gardener - organic, sure, but spending my morning pulling bores off my plants is just not going to happen. Enter the lovely beneficial nematode.

"Beneficial Nematodes are microscopic and live below the soil surface and like a moist environment. Looking like short non-segmented worms these voracious predators make their way through your lawn and garden looking for food. Nematodes do not harm worms, birds, plants or the environment, in fact they are part of the environment and are found the world over.

When the nematode comes incontact with a pest the attack by entering through body openings or simply by boring through the body wall, once inside the Nematode will release a bacteria that kills it's host within 48 hours. They will feed and reproduce before exiting in search of fresh prey."

Apparently, we fuck up the natural nematode order of things with our chemicals and construction and general damage to the ecocycle. But now we can reinsert them and let them microscopically munch their way through the big bad bores and other squishy cousins.

I will report back after I scatter my nemotode friends and watch to see my squash plants unfurl in companionable pride - their roots protected by their nematodies.

Twin Cities US Social Forum

I know, it's been four months since I last blogged. I am an incredibly part-time blogger. I am, however, pausing here to add a post about a new blog - the Twin Cities US Social Forum blog.

For those unaware of the US Social Forum, it took place in the last week of June and was a movement- building gathering in which 15,000 people from all over the country - mostly people of color with a significant queer and youth presence - gathered together to share workshops, strategies, lessons learned and visions for, literally, making another world possible. This was the US contingent of the World Social Forum - the WSF has the theme "Another World is Possible" and the US Social Forum carried the theme - "Another World is Possible, Another US is necessary".

A few months before the US Social Forum, a small group of us began to organize in the Twin Cities, seeking to help local activists get to Atlanta for the US Social Forum and working to begin building connections for an eventual focused and ongoing social justice movement building effort in the Twin Cities. There is extraordinary work happening here - particularly in immigrant justice/worker rights and green urban planning - but there is also a lot of work to be done. Our Twin Cities moment is, what we hope will be the start of a slow and thoughtful effort to make connections between communities and groups working in the Twin Cities for broad-based social justice, something that is, at its core, led by and envisioned by those whose lives and communities are most affected by the ravages of capitalism and US imperialism.

So, check out our new blogsite - it's mostly for communicating about activities and sharing resources, but it's a start!

http://tcussf.blogspot.com/

Caucawhatsit?

Twice this week - once on the radio and once in a magazine article - I've heard people refer to "Caucasian" as a race. Please please can we throw this term - and all attached to it like Negroid & Mongoloid - to the ground?

The term "Caucasian" originated in the 19th century when physical anthropologists (remember, anthropology at this time was a newish academic discipline born when the colonizers wanted to study the colonized - Europeans studying Africans, Asians, Indians, etc. - and needed something to differentiate them from us so while sociology could continue to be the study of ourselves (white on white) anthropology became the study of the other) tried to find a way to define different types of people/races based on the shape and size of their head. Yup, race as skull bumps, nose bends and chin juts. "Caucasian" comes from Mount Caucasus in what is now, I believe, Russia and was used because some British folks at that time thought the people who lived on Mount Caucasus were particularly beautiful - in a light-skinned, thin-nosed, small-lipped way. The same folks who brought us "Caucasian" to describe Europeans (and people from the Indian subcontinent due to the Sanskrit-Aryan connection) also cited Mount Caucasus as the origin of all human life on earth. They believed it started with all us light-skinned, thin-nosed, small-lipped white people. Poor folks, what would they have done with tiny dark Lucy, the mother of us all?

I'm not sure why some folks still use "Caucasian" to describe white folks, other than its what they learned. I've heard some people talk about white people as "Europeans" in a way to distinguish us without using the politicized idea of "white" but, since Europeans in 2007 are dark-skinned, olive-skinned, snow-skinned and so on down the line, that isn't accurate either.

For me, "white" is what we have, however inadequate that is. But then, that's the problem with race. It doesn't exist. There is no real difference between individuals based on skin color, facial features, hair texture, or body type. It's the systems we've created that exist - racism, white supremacy, etc. And to try and talk about us individual bodies impacted by and propping up these systems, we have to use this largely ineffectual language.

But please, not "Caucasian" anymore.

As exotic as housepaint

This morning, walking down Lake Street towards the bus stop, I was reminded by how subjective the experience of "exotic" is. There I am, meandering down a street that is two blocks from my house, peeking in the store windows, trying not slide on the ice, when I noticed a family standing on a nearby corner. A white middle-class-seeming family - mom, dad, two adolescent children in warm nonstandoutish clothes. They are holding hands and looking around them with very big eyes. As I approach them, I hear this: "Yeah, I know, it's amazing isn't it," said the dad. "And it's not even 9:00 yet but look at all the people." The daughter was peering into the window of the Latin American grocery store on the corner and she turned to her mom, "I'd be afraid to go in there. I wouldn't know what anything is." "Aw honey," said her mom, "It' s just exotic. You don't have to be afraid of exotic things."

At that instant, I felt a part of their "exotic" urban tableau and wondered if I was an addition to their movie or a disappointment. Was I too white to fit into their exotic white frame or was my fake fur coat and Tibetan scarf "urban" enough in that earthy crunchy PC way?

This reminded me of something that happened when I was 18. Accepted into a private liberal arts college that was about 20 minutes from my high school but which none of us had heard of before, I was sitting in the coffee shop, reading and people-watching. I idly noticed a group of students at the next table over talking about this service project they had completed the weekend before. The group had gone into "the city" - Cleveland, in this case - and had helped kids do some gardening or build a playground. All of these years later, I can't remember WHAT they were doing, only that there were kids and they were helping them. I wasn't paying super close attention to what they were saying until I heard, "God, I couldn't believe how poor they were. Those poor kids, I mean, I don't know what their life must be like everyday. Doing this made me really realize how much I want to help people." Now, the youthful enthusiasm and raw feeling aside, there really isn't that much to examine in that statement beyond unpacking the notion of "help". But that isn't what I did at the time. It was the next statement that caught me. The group began to describe in detail a Virgin Mary grotto up on the side of a hill, talking about how "cool" it was and how amazing and admirable it was that poor folks still hold on to folk traditions instead of just watching TV or something like that. What caught me was that, with their description of the grotto and the rest of their words, I realized that they were talking about MY neighborhood, the one where my grandparents lived, where I had gone to elementary school. My emotional or political or personal development at age 18, combined with how much I was struggling at this college anyhow, meant that I felt embarrassed by their comments, as though they could see through the cafe divider and know that I was one of "those people." I felt like I was part of their tableau and the conclusions they were drawing made me deeply uncomfortable, even alienated.

It's hard to look at anything with compassion, curiosity and zero judgement. The tapes play in our heads: "papers blowing around a streetlight, must be poor here, oh is that tagging, what annoying hoodlums they are" or "white nuclear family looking out of place on Lake Street and somewhat afraid, probably Republicans from the suburbs."

I'm trying, really trying, to just listen and look without defining and judgement. It's one of those life lessons I'm feeling all embroiled with. It's also astonishingly difficult, particularly when I realize just how much of my history is based on gaining recognition and even a kind of strength through the articulate nature of my judgements. In some ways, and my friends will laugh, these days I am feeling quite mute.

What did you say?

I told you I was an inconsistent blogger. Here it's been a timespan again since last writing - and so much has happened, too. I could have blogged about the day that Luca and Raquel came home from Brazil, about putting Luca to bed after not being home for three weeks, about how cute she looked nestled into her bunk, and how startled we both were when Raquel, following her nose, came in to Luca's room to see what smelled funky, picked up the duvet covering Luca's innocent little body, and then gasped as a cascade of dried cat shit flew through the air, bouncing off our heads, the bed, and the walls. I could have written about that and asserted that my nose was stuffed and smelling no wrong, that I hadn't been in Luca's room since they left for Brazil, but I did not.

I could have blogged on Monday about how lovely the snow was this past weekend, how we spent Sunday morning as a pod of kids and parents, breaking the new snow with our sleds on the hill in front of our house. I could have told you how funny it was to see the kids, tired from climbing up and down the hill, all sitting at the bottom and playing in the snow while their aging parents whooped and hollered on the sleds.

But none of that got me to blog. Instead, I'll write about what happened this morning - with a preface first.

Raquel and I will have been together for 12 years this September. That qualifies as a "long time." Over many of those 12 years, Raquel has frustratingly asked me to get my hearing checked. This, of course, in response to my vacant looks, my request that she repeat herself (usually expressed as "huh?" or "what?"), and my lack of response to her repeated questions.

Because I love my girlfriend, I went this morning at 7:30am for a hearing test. First, those booths are kind of cool. I mean, you're in this little gray womb, all hushed and dead air, and then you put on little headphones. The sounds that come through each earpiece - one ear at a time - is specific and sent straight into your head. There is something strangely intimate about the whole thing.

So we did the bup-bup-bup sounds and the high pitched squeals and the low heartbeat throbs. Sometimes the sound was so quiet that it felt like a slight vibration, like the ghost of sound itching just on the precipice of your hearing. After the assorted timbres and tones, we went into word repetition: "Say the word: throat." "Throat." And so on.

Having told the hearing technician that I was getting a hearing test to see if I was losing my hearing or losing my mind, and then having explained that this was a gift for my girlfriend, the technician, named Mike, came in at the end, took off my earpieces and whispered, "You have freakishly excellent hearing."

"Freakishly excellent." Shit.

Time to pay better attention.

Internet magic

It's Valentine's Day and my love is far from me. (Guitar music picks up, something "olde english," like Greensleeves only different.) She is gone to lands across the sea. With her silvered hair and shotput wit, she carries my heart with a catcher's mitt. Oh my lo-o-o-o-ve, on Valentine's Day, I sit here at home, alone and gay. (Music slowly winds down into something evoking longing, ocean storms, dykes wandering alone atop widow's walks on old Cape Cod houses, the sound of seagulls....)

Yeah, well, I sent the olde luv and the young daughter some roses via the internet. Funky that it's cheaper to send a dozen roses to Rio from Minneapolis than it is to send them to Minneapolis from Minneapolis.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I'm baaack part two

Here's the other thing that happened upon getting back: I had four different phone and email messages from friends telling me they missed me, were glad that I was home, and would like to see me. I hadn't checked messages when I last wrote.

I feel very loved.

I'm baaack

Thanks to the wonders of the red eye flight, I am back in Minneapolis, staring blearily at my first television in two and a half weeks: the Today Show. My partner, Raquel, and daughter, Luca, are still in Brazil. I called them right after I arrived home to let them know I was safely here. 
I miss them.

So now I have to take all of this stuff from the last two weeks - that hands on the skin kind of quiet - and find a way to build it into my life here. I'm sure the Today Show is not part of the strategy.

I talked on the phone with my mother a few days ago and she reflected on how scary it is to face a total life change - meaning I am currently "career" successful and have plenty of work as a fundraiser/nonprofit organizational type. I now want to shift this, move the focus away from this work as my primary and build my craniosacral therapy training to eventually move into the lead. It isn't scary to imagine that outcome, it's more overwhelming to think about how to build a daily practice, the new lifestyle that supports craniosacral therapy.

I don't think this makes for terribly interesting blogging - nothing pithy about navel gazing and life change.

Let me get my hands on ya.

It's a great big planet

I'm here in Berkeley, California and it's raining. Not thunderstorm-raining but that all day damp drizzle that reminds me of England. It's also warm enough to walk around with a light jacket that remains unbottoned.

At home in Minneapolis, people that I love have not ventured outdoors for more than ten minutes at a time. It's dangerous-cold where the sky is so frozen and absent of water than your skin slow cracks along every joint.

My daughter, Luca, and partner, Rocki, are in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This is what life looks like for Luca:

Islamic University opens in Minneapolis

I find this awesome and fascinating. The first traditional Islamic University has opened in Minneapolis - traditional meaning how Islam is taught but not conservative traditional in that women make up 35% of the student body.

I found the news in an article in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, an online compilation of mainstream and alternative media related to, appropriately enough, the Twin Cities.

Apparently, the Twin Cities are twelfth in the nation in terms of the size of the Muslim population. The university is set up to both teach Muslim students multiple subjects but with an academic Islamic approach and to provide community education on Islam to the non-Islamic world.

I love that this is here and I will visit it when I'm home. One of the professors interviewed described the focus of the university as "radical-averse", meaning they are academic and humanistic-political rather than fundamentalists.

Very seriously, I send out all kinds of light and good energy that no assholes decide to firebomb the university out of some warped idea of patriotism.

And how do you say, "dog"?

Yesterday morning, en route to my class, I stopped at the Whole Foods to stock up on goodies. As I left the building, I noticed this man standing on the sidewalk with a very interesting dog. Now, as is not surprising to many, I am not a dog person. Wait, let me say that more directly, for the most part, I don't like dogs. They're too eager to be my friend, take up too much space, have too many needs. It's a quality I often find attractive in people but on dogs, well, I wish they were more cat-like.

This dog, however, sat there on the street with his ears perked up and this great big smile on his face. There was something about that dog. So I walked over to say hello, first making eye contact with the man holding his leash. "What kind of dog is that?" I asked. The man started and looked at me, frightened and wary. (Forgive my bad phonetics here): "Eh um Frensh not spik Inglish." I smiled and racked my brain for any French words I might have (croissant? cafe late? voulez vou couchez avec moi cest sois or some spelling). I thought I might try Portuguese with that silly American idea that since he speaks a Latin language, maybe he would better understand my Latin language. Instead, I smiled and said, "ciao" and he looked happy.

As I walked away, not more than a minute passed and I turned back because I heard something. "What a lovely dog! What's his name?" asked the big burly white man with arms full of grocery bags. At the same time, a woman came up from a different direction, dropped to her feet next to the dog and began to pet him, looking up at the French man and saying, "oh, my aunt has a dog like this, I can't remember what kind it is, what is it called?"

I turned away and got into my car as I saw this man's face grow redder. I sure hope whoever was in the Whole Foods came back soon.

Sitting on the floor on a Sunday morning

The alarm went off at 7am and I reached for it, bleary and still asleep but also realizing that if I were home with Luca, I'd be up already.

This is the last day of the first proper craniosacral training. I feel compelled to write but I'm not sure what to say. I have moved between being so very happy and clear and then being scared. I already know that this is different from anything I've ever done. Sometimes when I'm in the room, seeing someone winding their body off the massage table, feeling the strange mystical clarity of a cranial wave, hearing a voice inside me telling me things about the person I'm touching and then acting from that voice and finding it is right, during these times I can hear a whole realm of my friends popping their fingers up in the evil eye symbol and hissing, "oohh, witchy-whoo-whoo." I can hear it because sometimes I get overly conscious and nervous and want to put my fingers in the protective horn as well.

But mostly as a defense against my own changes. It isn't that I don't believe. I actually believe very deeply. This feels like some of the truest deepest learning I have done for quite some time. My defense is over how much I have to change to do this well. And the changes are changes I hunger for - stillness, deep listening, privileging time for meditation and connection - but they frighten me. It's like a whole lifetime of defenses and identities and preferences and shortcuts is sitting there and many of them have to unwind and drift away.

And a lot of the time I don't even know what I'm afraid of. But I am. Afraid.

And also very certain that this is the direction where I want to move.