Yesterday

Yesterday - January 20. 2009 -- was, for me, tomorrow. The tomorrow I've waited for, for at least 8 years. No, for much longer -- for more like sixty years. My childhood memories of racism and segregation go back at least that far, my tangled, tortured, treasured trunkfuls of memories. Snapshots, really.
Snap: I'm with Eula Mae and she's ironing my clothes and singing. She drinks water from the special glass we keep for her in our cupboard.
Snap: I'm with my father as he snatches my doll away from a 5 year old black girl. She and I, oblivious to skin tone differences, had been happily playing together while he sold toys to her mother.
Snap: My father patiently explains why we don't allow "colored folks" to go to the same schools, the same churches, the same retaurants. "It's simple," he says. "There's chocolate ice cream and there's vanilla. They're separate. That's all."
Snap: My friend and I are sitting at the back of a New Orleans bus in solidarity with the bus boycotts. As we get up to leave, the white people who stand rather than sit in the back (the black people have filled the front seats, although it's still technically illegal) throw glares of hatred at us. One man spits at me. His spittle mingles with my own tears: tears of defiance, tears of fright, tears of injustice.
And yesterday: let justice roll down like waters keeps humming through my heart.
And I cry again as I sing with Aretha: "My country 'tis of thee...." MY country has finally done the right thing.

A New Year

Yesterday was full of talk about the coming year, and a little reflection about the one dragging its feet before it completely disappeared into the past.
At my writers' group we all talked about our past writing goals, which ones had been met - or surpassed - and which had languished unfulfilled. Some of my writer friends felt frustrated or even guilty that not all their goals had been met. It seems that there's always this tension between setting goals in the first place and then facing the consequences of not accomplishing all of them - versus not setting any in the first place. Or setting vague, ambiguous goals: "submit short stories" or "write more often" - versus specific ones: "submit four short stories by October 2009 or "write 15 minutes every day."
To me it's all a wonderful game, something to do with life that keeps it interesting. but please -- no guilt! no frustration! and no regrets for something not achieved. In all likelihood, something else just as wonderful came along and took its place.
Setting no goals at all is, in my view, a poverty of the imagination. Or maybe just being chicken about the whole thing. Last year I had only one goal: let it unfold. Maybe that was a poverty of the imagination too. A lot did unfold, and I met most of it with equanimity. This year I'm being more specific. This is year 66 - it seems to demand a specificity to define what its journey will be. Route 66 leaps to the mind. Also the year 1066 AD: the Battle of Hastings?
I'll write more on the poverty of imagination later. It's one of the more important aspects of poverty.
Last night, though, there was a wealth of imagination as all spoke of what had been good about the old year, and what we thought lay ahead. Almost all of us reported many good things, and all but one of us saw that what happened to the economy -- the American economy, at least - as ultimately a "good thing." We had no problem with letting go of the values around easy money, rampant consumerism, greed for more, bigger and better. We agreed that what might take its place would be a sturdier framework that would allow for a greater sense of community, interdependence, interconnectedness.
One woman had spent 18 months living and working in Ethiopia. She talked of how Ethiopians did not close the door to their homes, and welcomed neighbors dropping in. And of how she never got comfortable with the custom, kept her door locked. That didn't, however, prevent her Ethiopian friends from opening cabinet and pantry doors when they were invited to her house -- also unsettling until she learned that it was their way of checking to make sure she had what she needed. What was almost unforgivable nosiness in one culture became an act of kindness in another.
Maybe if we all spent time here in America learning one another's hidden assumptions, expectations, values -- and then checking to make sure we each had what we needed -- we could come to a different sense of community.
Things I want to do more of in 2009: Listen. Watch. Sit in silence. Create inner space. Look for ways to create community. Those are not goals, nor even desires, simply an honoring of what arises in the moment.