The reason ANY of this matters

Is life. Is believing that the human life is something worth living, and that each being has something beautiful to contribute to the world, to experience in the world.

Today, Troy Davis was executed by the state of Georgia. Today, I stood in vigil with about 50 other San Franciscans while we awaited the news: would Troy be executed or saved? And, then, he was "saved"--the execution was stayed. To what end? This end. The dead end. The end that shows that we as a country, we as a people, do not believe in innocence, do not believe that our justice system fails, do not believe that if it is possible that it has failed, that it will fail (it does, and it will) we should not execute another human being. Innocent until PROVEN guilty. That is practically an American slogan. We pride ourselves on being a country where doubt is possible. We, a country of believers in doubt. How can we let this happen? How have we let this happen?

In 2009, several students and I organized a protest against Troy Davis' execution. In 2011, I stood in silence, holding the hands of strangers on the hot concrete of September San Francisco, still and strong and sad in the setting sun. All of us. All of us who have nothing in common, know nothing of each other, know nothing of anything but for the small piece of existence we carry around in our minds and hearts and call reality. We all knew that this was wrong. That this man should not be killed. That our system of "justice" had failed. And the news came in: stay of execution granted! Celebration. Brief. The man whose hand I had been holding did not let go, even as all the others did. He was listening to the radio in his earphones, confirming to me that there had been a stay, and he was weeping. Tears were running freely down his cheek, a cheek that had seen 50 years, more, of this sun, worse. He told me that once, when he was driving back from San Quentin, a stay had been granted for someone there on death row... in the same drive, he said, the stay was lifted, the execution proceeded. He did not believe in this as a magical moment for America. Foolishly, I did. Foolishly, I thought that someone had finally recognized that witness' recantations do not a murder conviction make. Foolishly, I continue to believe in the idea of justice, and the fact that the United States of America, the world, human beings generally, have some idea of how to implement it.

So, with what are we left? When the execution is over, when the last breath has left the lungs of a man whose guilt was anything but certain, with what are we left? Are we left only with the sense of the struggle, the importance of it? The blind belief that someday, somehow, this will all be different? That the death penalty will finally be abolished in our arrogantly so-called developed country?

Or something more: Do we hope instead that it will all be different? That the poor will no longer be disadvantaged in this country? That poverty will be equally allocated among racial groups? That education will at least be equivalent for all persons, regardless of their economic status, their neighborhood? That our police officers will dismiss their personal biases in favor of what makes objective sense? That our jurors will do likewise? That our juvenile justice system will treat offenders as the children that they are? That our laws will not encourage harsh penalties for those already disadvantaged by a prior crime, by a difficult upbringing?

What really matters is this: life, and how you live it. When I spoke with friends about the vigil today, every one of them said they were too busy to come. One was getting frozen yogurt instead. "Oh, Troy Davis, I think I've heard about him." This is not my judgment. This is my hope: that those with the means to do something, to speak for for those without voices, to care, do so.

This is it. This is all we get. And that was all Troy Davis had. What inadequate words--'this', 'that'--to encompass life, the living of it, the joy and the sadness and the believing, the pushing, the trying, the hurting, the loving, the aching of watching an old man weep for a stranger and knowing that what he feels is what we should all feel.

Today, and always, what matters is life. Troy Davis' has ended, and the rest of us go on living. To what end? The same, I suppose. But, for what purpose, with what ideas in our minds, with how much love?

Walking this long dock into the waterless bay

I have, obviously, not been writing enough. Not here, not in my journal, and not on my computer. The strange thing about this stall is that it is not due to my job. In fact, I am settling into that better than I was a few months ago. Rather, it was the sense of shame that I feel in writing a blog. The shame that I had buried to finally start writing this blog. The shame that was pulled back to the surface by a good friend who too often criticizes others for their leaps into potential embarrassment. After a general criticism of the blog form, this friend told me that a journal is just "a self indulgent echo chamber where true self analysis is impossible." It has taken me a while to bounce back from that, although my indignation was manifest in an immediate email response.

The thing is, almost everything that everyone does is embarrassing. We are all fucking up our lives in small ways, all of the time. And you can't be afraid of that. The worst thing is to be afraid of it--to be too scared to move out of your small space, your small ideas, too scared to flex into whatever comes next. Whatever else I may be, I am unafraid of that. Blogs and journals are imperfect means of examining your own actions, of understanding your world, but they are an attempt. And that is all we can ever do: try to understand ourselves, to understand others, to understand the world around us, and to live in it intentionally and thoughtfully. A journal, for me, is the best way to do this. It is the underlying step of self-examination that leads to actions far from its destroyed pages.

Of course the journal is not the best medium for everyone, and some people think it's a waste of time, that conversation or deep thought without written record is the only way to do this. I'm not here to judge those methods. But I do believe that thinking deeply about an issue, and then writing about it, just for yourself, before you begin posturing or absorbing others' thoughts, is a valid means of understanding the issue as well as yourself. Each person reacts differently to the world, and each of those reactions is influenced by every other person with whom he or she converses, interacts. Before the influence, though, there is a personal, unique response. That is what I record. That is the purpose of a journal. Rooting myself. Understanding who I am before I am pushed and pulled by the world, before I am stretched. And after I am stretched, I will return to the journal, and write whatever I believe about the next issue that strikes me as significant. It is not a vacuum, it is not an echo chamber. It is influenced each day by everything around me, but it retains my own unique pen press of thought.

Self-analysis is possible only in rare moments, and I don't believe that journals provide a more regular occasion for it. I do, however, believe that the ability of a journal-keeper to look back on his or her recorded thoughts of a year ago, five years ago, and analyze the changes through which he or she has gone, the transformation of thought processes, is enormously enhanced by the existence of such a record. For me, it works. Perhaps, for my friend, it does not. But each person has a different route to self-analysis, to comprehension of the world; it is not valuable to undermine another person's route simply because it is not yours.

In the garden.

My farming internship with Alemany Farm began this week. It was a beautiful experience, even if I would have chosen different weather for it. There are about 30 of us taking the course--a year-long program, one Saturday a month, for which we read several themed articles before class, then have a skills-sharing session, then work, harvest. Because it was the first class, we spent a long time learning about each other, touring the farm. We spent many hours under the willow tree, partly sheltered from the pouring rain, shivering and excited about what we were doing. For some of us--including me--this was the first time we had been on the farm. I know very little about farming/gardening/growing, although I always talk about it, and think of myself as a someday-farmer. Well, I'm now one step closer to fulfilling a ridiculous fantasy.

The farm is fairly large, for an urban garden. It's just off the 280, below Bernal Heights. A long bike ride away from my place. The lower gardens are more intensively farmed, with long, planted beds and a lower-lower garden of raised beds of carrots and potatoes. There is a huge natural pond, several small frog ponds, a pre-pubescent redwood grove, an old windmill from when SLUG (San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners, defunct after a funding scandal) first began the farm. The hill is terraced and maintained through permaculture methods. Lots of fruit trees up there, and perennials like artichokes and asparagus.

Immediately, it is clear that this place, and this sort of growth, only makes sense over the long-term. It is only productive over seasons, years. You plant something in October to harvest in May. You wait years, pruning differently, adjusting manure, compost, wood chips, hoping your olive trees will bear fruit. It is a trial. It takes belief, patience, endurance. In fact, it seems a lot like a long-distance relationship--something I've never been very good at. And so begins: a year-long learning process, a year of watching physical growth and hoping for some form of personal growth. An attempt to learn patience--or just how to live with things as they are, for a little longer than I am comfortable. Maybe a lot longer. Discomfort will undoubtedly be part of this.

Part of this self-tourism is, for me, a means of understanding what it is to be an adult and assume full responsibility for my own present and future. The hard part isn't the assumption of responsibility, it's the absence of a definite end date to help me look forward to the next step. That realization looks something like this: many of us are just in motion, just pushing ourselves through every day, trying to move, move, thinking that after this great show of force, something will be different tomorrow. It will be easier, it will be less complicated, we will have fewer things to do.

But that's not really how it is. Instead, we are so often moving, just to move, because speed propels us even when an idea of the future does not. Speed feels right even when we aren't doing anything useful with it. It is a purpose unto itself. And when the journey is just about the motion, the speed of it, as mine so often seems to be, aren't we missing so much? So my journey of self-tourism will be a slow one--a slow learning process, anyway, about the process. Not about the end result. Slowly, slowly, because the breath matters. And the seconds when your lungs are full. And the seconds when they are empty. And the tick tick of your mind as you wait for the process to unveil itself. But this is the process. Breathing and being and learning who you are by letting yourself ask the questions, and giving yourself space and time to answer them.

I am learning, slowly (and, sometimes, thoughtfully), to let those answers come into being without trying to force them. There is too much, and we are wading through it.

Inhale.

It's been a long time since I last posted. Although it may look like I have succumbed to the long working hours of the job, especially with the new year and the newly important billable hours tolling on my desktop timer, this is not the case. In fact, I took a few weeks out of the office--driving up to Sonoma and then down PCH with my South African boyfriend, showing him my corner of the world, and trying to convince him to make it his. He was here for 5 weeks, and all that mattered during that time was spending time with him. Of course, there were the rough patches and the moments when I wanted nothing more than to go for a run , clean my apartment, or read a book in complete silence, but it went well, all told. In fact, he's moving back here in March, at which point some of my perspective on "what matters" and the importance of myself in all of that might change. But for now, I've settled on the idea of this blog as a tool for self-exploration, and an invitation for any readers (my sister, maybe?) to do the same.

And this also starts with my understanding that "self-tourism" is an adventure over an ever-changing landscape. Few things are constant, but the way you move over that landscape seems to remain the same. Being conscious of that, and understanding what your method of movement means for the way you interpret the world, yourself, and others, is very important.

My (ironically) slow realization about my own method of movement is that it is VERY fast. I jump from thing to thing to thing, and rarely do a great job tying up loose ends, or completely understanding something. I just think: sweet! mission accomplished! maybe I'm a genius, after all! and jump right into the next thing without considering what else I can get out of a particular experience. As you may imagine, this impacts not only my extracurricular interests, but also my dating life, and potentially, my career choices. I don't know if there is much I can do about my short attention span (do adults take Ritalin?), but I can control myself beyond the initial impulse to change activities/people/jobs. I can slow the action, if not the thoughts and emotions. So that is the project for now. Trying to be more thoughtful, slower, in my daily routine. Focusing on fewer projects at work, for more time, and pretending that the hours billed to a client don't matter. And focusing on a set number of things that I love to do, and really getting into those things: writing, reading, outdoors physical activity, drawing. And, finally, trying to relax about how bad I am at keeping in touch, how crazily my list of emails-to-be-sent and phone-calls-to-be-made and subsequent thoughts of self-loathing and guilt accumulate. It's ok to focus on the people more immediately in your life--everyone does it, and there's no point apologizing your mutual inability to communicate on a weekly basis across continents.

Nostalgia

This entry is in response to a book reading I went to (it has been a long while now) at City Lights, for Erik Davis' Nomad Codes.

It's strange being old enough to consider yourself a peer of 40-something writers and professors, and young enough to have participated in a wholly different version of Western culture in my youth. Davis' reading was witty and charming. He has huge amounts of exuberance and thoughtfulness that endeared him to me (and likely the whole audience) very quickly. He read from three sections of his book, focusing on his drugged-out experience as a 14-year-old (and the idea that the use of LSD, etc., was a lifelong reference for him as to the importance of the imagination), a very funny encounter with an in-car emergency response system (and the subsequent moment of the uncanny when he realized the radio was talking to him--a very brief time, he said, when you are aware of how technology is changing our lives without our knowing, when you haven't yet absorbed that technology as a normal part of life and it is still shocking and strange), and his experience following a developing-country-loving band around the Middle East.

All great until the question period, when a few sycophantic individuals asked things like, "You're going to Rice. And you're so creative, so intelligent. What would you say about [dramatic pause, clearing of throat] 'attention span'." (it was not posed as a question) What? A few people got up to leave, demonstrating what the author could not about the modern attention span, if that was, in fact, the question this woman was asking. But the real downward spiral came when a few older men (some of them shockingly young to be thinking this way, quite frankly) started asking questions (following long, rambling intros) about music today. Davis had written about rock bands for 10 years, had been very hip-to-the-moment, as he described it, but didn't really follow it anymore. Someone's question focused on the amazement they experienced as a child, when a new Beatles album came out--this is it!! the only one that will ever be like this! the best album ever!--and the disappointment they feel now--oh, well, just another one. i'm sure there will be something just like it next year. And Davis' response just enforced this way of thinking: Yeah, I always listen to music today and think, man, that sounds just like Band X. But, he noted, this isn't a good thing for him--in fact, it probably meant he was getting old. The last question I sat through was the City Lights host describing, in detail, his experience of listening to a record as a youth. "You know how it is. You buy the record. You carefully peel the plastic off. You put it on the player. You adjust the arm, swivel it over the record. And then there's that crackling noise. When anything is possible. You know? That crackling. When you don't know what's coming. How good it's going to be, how bad...." (yes, it went on.) Sitting there, a modern consumer of both MP3s and LPs, I was amazed by his overwhelming nostalgia for this thing of the past. And not just nostalgia (which can be great), but value-laden nostalgia: this thing of the past, with its cracking and plastic cover, this was the thing, the moment of possibility; this MP3 of today, it is less good, less meaningful. And Davis again affirmed (sort of, though I sensed his discomfort with the value judgment): Yeah, there's an attachment to a physical thing, the record player. A nostalgia attached to that material thing. And that's ok. But today, music feels like data. You listen to notes of music from an MP3 player like data, not like 'that's a bass note'.

When I left, soon after/in the middle of this conversation, it was with a sense that these 40-somethings, 50-somethings, 60-somethings, left their sense of perspective in their 30s. Music is still music today. People still hear the notes the same way. It is not data anymore than the notes embedded on an LP are data--it's just more easily transferable. The "coolness" strata have broken down along different lines. No longer do listeners have to rely on people like Davis to haunt record stores to ferret out the incredibly cool music before writing about it. Today, we can all access bands' websites, YouTube, MySpace, music blogs, and decide for ourselves. And the "crackling when anything was possible" is a complete re-construction of the experience. There is a nostalgia-based value in that crackling. But to say that there is any more of a possibility in that moment than in the moment before you hit Play on your MP3 player is to falsely remember the past. I have no doubt I will do this someday, too, but I left feeling frustrated with this nostalgia--it seemed to have alienated this group of the 40+s from the rest of us. It seemed to mean that they did not value the culture in which we were participating, even though they were participating in it, too. Because they had participated in this earlier, "better" culture, they seemed to think of themselves as somehow outside of the current culture. We all ascribe value to different things in varying ways, but it seems important to reconsider every now and then--to think of what mattered and what matters, and perhaps, the distinction between your appreciation through the lens of nostalgia and through your still-unsettled, undistilled present.

All that said, interesting talk and interesting guy. I appreciated the perspective, but mostly because mine isn't already rooted in the 1960s.

Always Asking, "What is Possible?"

At least, that's what the 60-some-year-old teacher of my instructed life drawing class said tonight. "Always ask yourself, 'what's possible?'. Drawing is an extension of consciousness. Don't scribble. Don't be too constrained, too thoughtful. Just feel it. Feel what draws you to this pose. And always think, 'where am I going with this?'"

Biking the 35 minutes over there after running out of the office at 5 so I could make it home to get my bike, pencils and paper and then make it over the the far end of the Mission neighborhood by 6:15, I thought that my attendance was the limit of possibility. The fact that I, as someone with no artistic abilities, no drawing experience, was rolling up to this incredible studio filled with people who have been drawing for decades, seemed to be a far reach in the realm of possible. This was me, stretching.

So I stretched my way in, awkwardly situated myself behind a drawing board with 40 sheets of newsprint and charcoal stubs and wondered what I was doing there. The class started--and it is 20 weeks in to an instructional course--with a 15 minute session of poses. The model poses, you draw; she warns you: "Ten seconds"; you turn over to a new sheet; she adjusts; you draw. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Before the class started, I had asked the woman next to me, "umm, so how do you do this?" And she said, "Just feel it. If you can, try not to even look at the page. Just let it flow." It turns out, she was very talented, but strangely unsure of herself. She confessed when we discussed our work, her feelings of anxiety over the possibility of being a bad "drawer" (and then "I don't think that's a thing. Unless you're a piece of furniture." She laughed.) And the thing I learned first was that no one was sure of herself; all of us were awkward and uncertain. The thing I learned next: beginning with the premise that I suck at something is actually great for me. It works well in yoga, too: I think I'm terrible, so I just let it go. And at the end of the three hour class, I was happy with what I had done. There is no doubt that it isn't art. No doubt that it is the creation of a talentless hack, but it is a creation of a three hour stretch beyond my expectations of myself. It was a manifestation of what was possible, for me. And this: having 30 sheets of charcoaled passably human bodies rolled up in my bag while I bike home at night through abandoned city streets, feels like where I might be going. There is no definition to it, no certainty, and no comfort. Just bliss and energy and an edge of fear.

Working and Avoidance

Saturday. Sunny and beautiful, after a morning of indecisive fog. I woke up early, planning to be industrious--I would do laundry, get a coffee, call my bro for his birthday, and then Work! Yes, I am working weekends. Or, rather, I am supposed to be working weekends. I have enough work to occupy the entirety of my weekend... and, if I were really to learn the statutes and regulations that I should know to feel competent in this case, I would be pretty busy for the next couple years. It is a struggle getting the small things together, in keeping life organized when you refuse to give up anything you love to do. So, for my weekend, and for life, this is what matters: refusing to give up the things you love because you have work. There will always be work. Work will always be overwhelming. And it will always feel important. It is important; but, it's not all that matters.

This week, I worked a lot. I learned a lot. I wrote a memo that earned a "Nice work!" and I felt, momentarily, very proud of myself. So, Friday, I decided there was no way I was staying in the office until 8pm again. I gathered up treatises and papers and cases and took them all home. Immediately, I felt better. Immediately, I stopped doing work. I spent my night having fondue and wine with a friend and then coming home to paint a terrible painting while listening to Tom Petty and singing along, loudly. (Apologies, Neighbor.) And today, I managed to avoid my work just as happily. A long phone conversation with my brother, laundry, and putting together my photo wall! This afternoon, I'm going into the Mission to organize an art show with a bunch of random creatives--could be either amazing or a total flop. In any case, I think this is a beautiful way to avoid my work, to maintain my sanity. Monday will come, and I will be held accountable for the things I need to do--and, somehow, will manage to get done today, tomorrow (after a half-marathon over GG Bridge!). But for now, I have remembered some of the other things that matter: the faces of the friends and family plastered all over my picture wall are good reminders of everything else outside of the statutes, case law, and bumbling attempts at being a lawyer.