Long Hot Summer Days

Are so much better in Albuquerque than they were when I lived in Baltimore!

Been flying around these days, registering voters still and seeing docs now that at long last I have Medicare in place.

Registering voters is tough, besides being hot work and logistically challenging. The toughest part for me is encountering people who have lived here for years and still aren't citizens. My most frequently used Spanish words are "lo siento"! (I am sorry.) I'm also sorry when I find people who stubbornly refuse to vote even when they could. I tell all mothers with babies in their arms or bellies that it's even more important that they vote because they are voting for their kids too! And then there are the folks who choose to live in denial of global warming. When I run into a streak of stubborn ignorance, I have moments of despair. I also shared many laughs with my fellow citizens over a cartoon I was sent showing a map of Florida and calling it Electile Disfunction. If anyone knows who produced this cartoon, I'd love to credit it. Oh and yes, I am aware that some folks have associated this cartoon with reasons to not vote. I am not buying them.



There are high points also, thank the Goddess! Last Friday I attended an event being held in Albuquerque hosted by the NM State Committee on the Platform. I was buoyed by the attitude of the 40 some people who attended and met for 5 hours to hammer out their recommendations to Barack Obama and the DNC. If the folks who met that evening had their way, we would turn the country on it's ear pronto! They adopted many resolutions including one in favor of repealing the Patriot Acts, for forbidding military recruitment in High Schools, and the one I authored.

"Energy conversion is essential to economic recovery. Developing renewable energy would create jobs, reduce military spending for unnecessary wars, and lessen our dependence on petroleum. By renewable energy we mean using safe non edible energy sources and minimizing our impact on our water supply."

We also moved for the end to the Iraqi war and support universal single payer
health care. And much more!

It's important to get large new numbers out to vote this year and to keep grassroots pressure on the Democratic party.

My garden is having it's difficulties. I told you all about growing corn. Now I wonder how the pueblo peoples survived? My corn seeded and grew nicely and then, just as it started producing pollen, the monsoon season (yes, in this desert land we have a summer monsoon) hit. Twice I found all my nice stalks bent and tangled. I propped 'em up again with sticks, but they were not happy. Seems like the Navajo dug holes to plant the seeds so that the earth would support the stalks. Live and learn!

The rain, however forceful, is welcome. The desert blooms with wild sunflowers and lavender desert nightshade. Lucky us! We also have great local fruit stands. I am forever going into chain stores, cruising the produce aisles to tell people shopping there the prices (lower by half) for the produce at the farmers market I patronize. Many people don't even know it's there!

Let's hear it for insidious eccentric old ladies! What have you done for local produce this week????

Sychronicity and Mad Perils

I got an email from Kate Waterbury today, another wonderful woman who writes, and she has been blogging too! http://earthairfireandwaterbury.blogspot.com Last time I saw her was in the very early spring of 2008, when she did her first round of chemotherapy at my home here in Albuquerque. She writes that she is planning to return and "maintain wellness for the foreseeable future!"

It was particularly good to hear from her as I have been struggling within my own matrix of vulnerability during this last week. Sometimes the universe hands us dilemmas that are particularly vexing, and I think that for people who are accustomed to solving problems and dealing with life from a position of relative internal strength (even if we have little "power" in the "real world"), the process of ageing really taxes our resources. It's hard to learn when to let go, acknowledge that there are some things we just can't fix and that struggle is probably fruitless, and move on to what we are able to do.

I have severe spinal stenosis, which means, like I told my doc, that I am beginning to feel like "all the lights are going out below my waist." This really pisses me off, even though it's a common side effect of ageing. It angers me because, as the day goes on and time moves forward, I am losing sensation, energy and the ability to stand and walk for extended periods of time. By dinner time I cook for myself in little bursts between sitting, and cooking used to give me so much pleasure in my life.

I recently took a part time job working for ACORN http://www.acorn.org registering voters. I wanted to do this because I believe that organizations like ACORN are really vital to progressive movement in this country, and I wanted to make a contribution. My supervisor told me day one, after I informed her of my disability and my concerns about my ability to perform as a canvasser, that I would not have to work the 29 hour week required of canvassers and that she would try to accommodate my disability by letting me do other tasks as well as canvass for voters.

I thought this was working out well, and I was excited to be a part of gathering voters for the upcoming presidential election! I made official looking registrar badges for my fellow canvassers. I went out and bought two visors and printed red tags to affix to them saying "Register to VOTE!!!." These were just a couple of the ideas I executed and brought to my supervisor, based on the problems we were having in the field (some of our registrars are essentially "street people" and have problems establishing credibility, many of them had been asking for badges for weeks). I drove fellow canvassers from location to location. I scanned for events we might canvass, took one of my fellow workers to Jazzfest on the Civic Plaza here in Albuquerque. My supervisor appeared pleased with these ideas. I also kept her informed when, on at least two occasions, I was simply in too much pain to continue standing up to solicit registration. The heat of the day is also very difficult for me to cope with as I have had a quad bypass and take meds that make me more susceptible to heat than some folks. I worked for 6 days and was told by her assistant, quite suddenly, that I was being "suspended" for not producing enough registered voters. Somehow the assistant organizer expected me to perform at the same rate as able-bodied folks who were registering voters full time.

That was Tuesday.

Mind you, I am not sure I can be of any help to ACORN even if they DO let me resume work. This is not because I lack skills or ideas or commitment, but because I just don't fit in the "box." What annoys me to the core is that I suspect that part of the reason I was suspended is because I DO have skills, ideas and commitment and ACORN could not make the effort to find a way to use them.

I think the next time I am told I am "overqualified" I will poke some one's eye out!

Yesterday, Thursday, I went into the office prepared to make a proposal to my supervisor. I had tried to call her twice and she did not answer. She wasn't in the office. Her assistant told me, when I requested some registration forms so that I could try to get some more voters lined up while waiting for a position to open up in the back office where they do quality control, that I could "go to the Board of Elections and get some forms if I wanted to 'volunteer'." I didn't even bother trying to explain to this woman what I wanted to propose, a sort of self subsidy, where we could agree on what constituted a "reasonable" rate of registrations per hour and I would only charge hours for registrations returned. When I asked her to please help me find out how many registrations I had returned in the previous week, so that I could compare them to my hours worked, she told me she wasn't "authorized" and had no time to do that. It seemed apparent that my needs would not get a hearing with her. So I left the office, and am still waiting to hear back from my supervisor.

All I really want is an opportunity to be of service where my talents will be used pursuing objectives I can support. I want to be treated fairly, and to have a good understanding of what is expected of me. I think I may have to just let it all go and move on.....just a little disillusioned, hurt and frustrated.

The only comfort is knowing that I am not alone.

P.S. Apologies are due to Stop the War Machine (Albuquerque) and to Peter Neils for not attributing the photos on my Patriotism piece properly. Stop the War Machine does an irreplaceable job of keeping the information circuits open here in Albuquerque regarding progressive events and actions: http://www.stopthewarmachine.org/events/past.htm.

Time and the Spirit

This is not a polemic! It's a meandering.

I often wonder what it would be like to be allowed only one deity. As a modern Druid I can generally write my own pantheon along with my rituals, sometimes going pure Celtic, sometimes mixing in acknowledgement to Buddhist or Hindu traditions, not to mention Christian or Natural Deity like the sun, the moon, the plant and animal kindred. It's a very rich palette to work with.

Funny, my elder sister wrote from Radcliff to her parents some 55 years ago that we were given not freedom of religion, as my parents who were renegade Catholics often opined, but rather freedom from religion. Our parents always told us we could go to any church we wanted to, and their three daughters went to none-until I came along.

In my fifties, I began to review my life as a sort of spiritual quest. Married twice, first to an American Jew and later to an Egyptian Moslem, I joked that I was now looking for a female Buddhist. In sincerity, I wanted a spiritual home, a community of others who also honored and prayed to a confluence of deity, who recognized that life itself was a sometimes miraculous coming together of diverse energies: some "natural", some "human" (male and FEMALE), some yet to be understood. Since by this time I knew that my knowledge of the entities/forces supporting my existence would always be imperfect-there is just too much going on in the matrix of living for any one being to be fully cognizant-and that I needed wisdom from others (physical and metaphysical) in order to choose "better" actions to take on my path of living-I joined a community of seekers who foster many paths.

Likewise, when I moved to New Mexico with all its ancient sacred haunts, I committed myself to a spiritual duty-to seek guidance and listen to the manifold messages the universe might offer. When I decided to move here, my reasoning was somewhat obtuse. In the simplest words, it felt like "home".

In my new home, I strive to be "open." Under the "influence" of whatever gifts come my way.

So, when the opportunity presented itself to join the Raging Grannies, I did. When it occurred to me to wear a chador (burka-Islamic women's covering) in an anti-war demonstration, I did. When I wanted some corn pollen to honor the sunrise and use in healing ceremonies, I grew some corn. When it became clear that I would not easily find employment after undergoing a quad bypass, I applied for disability and gratefully found some time to finally do something I have wanted to do since I was a child: explore my abilities as a writer.

And when I saw 10 cop cars arrive on my street, and assault my neighbor's home in the name of "Nuisance Abatement"-a really devious new sort of statute that sneaks around due process and allows folks to be expelled from their homes if they can't come up with the cash to bring their houses up to code within a 90 day time frame-I took it upon myself to go and ask the cops what exactly they were doing. They claimed they were "inspecting for code violations"-but in fact they were executing a search for criminal activity-domestic violence, association with known felons, meth labs, drug distribution-in homes where they hadn't done the due diligence to obtain a legitimate warrant. I got on the "horn" and called several city offices to protest. In speaking with the police officer in charge of the Nuisance Abatement Team here in Albuquerque, I said: "It seems to me that this Ordinance could render homeless women and children who are the victims of domestic violence. Oh, and since we have a political system that seems to have made prisons a growth industry, I'm curious, where are ex-cons supposed to be allowed to live?" His response: "I don't know-Phoenix perhaps? Just not in my jurisdiction." Gees!

My "guides" haven't given me a way to proceed on this problem yet. But the young woman with two children under 6 who I sheltered in my yard while the "Inspectors" were going through her house was spared from eviction while two other homes on my block were shut down. She told me she thought my action helped her, and said that when the inspectors returned to recheck for compliance they came with only 2 cops.

I am not yet clear about what I am doing on this earth. Maybe I'll never be. Yet I am enjoying the process here in Albuquerque! Gratefully. And finding that good questions are frequently more spiritually satisfying than pat answers.

Patriotism

I have my earth flag flying over my door. In 2002 on the 4th of July I flew an Irish, a French and an Earth Flag from my porch in Baltimore.

Its difficult to encompass the strange twists of events in this country since "911."

Patriotism has always been a difficult pill to swallow, and yet I consider myself firmly American. Not always proudly. All the best sources indicate more than one million Iraqi civilian deaths can be attributed to our war in Iraq. I am not proud to be identified with such indiscriminate slaughter.

People here in this country really went nuts over 911. Yet the 911 death toll was a drop in the bucket compared to the million who died in internecine power struggles in Nigeria between 1966-70. http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat2.htm#Rwanda I have often wondered what makes American deaths so much more valued than those suffered in other lands, particularly non-European lands. That's a piece of patriotism I have serious trouble with.

Even when I was a kid, I felt conflicted at the Memorial Day parade. I didn't like the martial atmosphere then either, but the marching music was compelling. And all the people coming together to celebrate.

On 911, my main concern was to locate my daughter. She was working in an Egyptian-owned Subway in Baltimore where, since the month of Ramadan had just recently transpired, and the owners had broadcast Arabic music during the holy month. I had visions of some fool entering the store in a random fit of rage and letting loose with a semi-automatic. I was very relieved to find her safe.

We couldn't figure out what to do with ourselves, so we went to a mall and ate ice cream because that was the only place that was open. Surreal. We decided to give blood, so we went to the Red Cross and stood in the endless line of other folks who were at a loss as to what to do with themselves. The man just in front of us was trying to emulate Bruce Springsteen, bandana and bluejeans: muscled.

He looked at me and started muttering something about how "those moslems and their mosques better watch their backs." I responded very clearly and distinctly, hoping that others in the line would hear, "Sir, have you ever met a Moslem, or a person from the Middle East?" "No." "Well then," I replied, "let me introduce you to my daughter who was born in Egypt."

He turned his head away, paused for a moment to collect himself, and said, "Somedays I can be a real asshole, and this appears to be one of 'em." Then he shook my daughter's hand.

Yeah. I do enjoy seeing folks come together to celebrate. I am moved when they mourn together also. But when they decide to make enemies out of folks they don't know, wrap their fear up in hatred then shroud it in red, white and blue--then infringe on the very liberties that this country stands for--count me out.

The most patriotic action I took this year was wearing a chador at the gates of the Kirtland Air Force Base (here in Albuquerque) at a demonstration against the war in Iraq(Albuquerue Raging Grannies at City Council 9/17/07). The cops tried to tell me there was a law against covering my face in a protest. I held my ground and offered to show them my face and my ID to indicate that I was not hiding anything, but rather trying to "show" something. I was demonstrating my solidarity with the innocent victims of our foreign policy.

I ended up getting an apology from the Chief of Police.

Go figure!

P.S. My apologies for not properly crediting STOP THE WAR MACHINE and PETER NEILS for photographs on this piece earlier. I am still trying to figure how to blog...http://www.stopthewarmachine.org/events/pictures/15SEP2007/PeterNeils/index.htm