Are We There Yet?

I can’t believe how the weather has finally turned so beautiful. It was bound to happen, but when it did it was still amazing, sweet success. Summer has begun, and likewise mine feels like it must be getting closer. My living situation has driven me to the brink of insanity; to bi polar psychosis. The gears are churning at such a painfully slow pace...it’s like in a dream, when you are trying to do something, run, get the attention of your lover as he/she is walking away, and it feels like you are trapped in sand or mud, your movements, even on step or gesture, so slow and labored.

As a person so familiar and infused with flow, movement, constant change, being stuck in limbo, stagnation, is so, so painful. For me it is usually the decision-making time that I slow down. I have made a decision, so what the hell is the problem, let’s get on with it!

I have to admit, I am a bit of an occultist and I consult Iching (How could Mom, Carl Jung and Pink Floyd all be wrong?), and it has helped me with my faith that a great place in which to create the home I need will show up, that I need not make any rash decisions and settle for something that won’t make a comfortable hearth. But the waiting is hard. Two thirds of my life is packed away in the garage, my daughter and I squished into a single room. We are artists, how can we create if we can hardly move? Where just putting something away is a chore because it goes in the box behind the other box in the closet.

As I have finally, for the first time found a great community in which I have chosen to lay down so roots, I now have this burning intense desire to create the home/hearth from which to thrive and conceive (no, I am not talking about children). But all has rolled to a stop. As I search for our home we exist in another’s home. I have for most of my life lived with roommates and in communal situations, but here is different, my roommates are very nuclear and the house is very normal. We work, create, learn, experiment, shake things up and live from our home. MY home is full of art, science, music, political commentary, books, dinner guests…not banal clutter, and all the regular furniture. This is not my home.

This town isn’t big enough to have 20 rentals to choose from. They trickle in and 2 property managers monopolize the market. It is hard to discuss section 8 vouchers with a corporation. They aren’t people and the middleman always makes all the rules.

So to escape all the pain of stagnation on the home front, I push my life forward in other areas. Picking up again my Zapatista, Latin America solidarity work. Picking up again my battles in the world of gender. And filling my life with others who say NO to school.

Spent the whole afternoon and early evening with unschoolers yesterday, on the Russian River. Already have three camping trips slated for the summer. Two with groups of unschoolers and another with some amazing, radical, super smart friends….one of which I realized I have a crush on. Though I would never tell her.

PS as I cut and posted this from Word to post up here, my roommate came home and told me she is moving...sooo I said go ahead and give 30 days...so now I have 30 days. Exciting and nerve wracking. Let the count down begin. 

I just say no to school

I was starting to get on board and just accept that I would be sending my daughter to school.  All her friends that are older than two are planning to go to school.  I hadn’t connected much with any parents in the Homeschooling Association here. And what single parent in their right mind, who has no help with this child raising fiasco, would forgo all that free childcare provided by the public school system?  Me?

Though I had planned from the beginning not to send my daughter to school, over the last months of chaos and pain, I had determined that Ramona would do just fine there.  I would have more time/freedom to research and create in solitary peace.  Ramona’s education and socialization needs will be handed to us on a silver platter.  And, well, what  makes us so special, that school isn’t good enough…but…every time I would meet someone who was ditching school permanently, my throat would tighten and my heart sink. Jealousy.  Compromising my ideals, yuck! I want the freedom they have and the guts to go through with it…I have that, don’t I? 

In the beginning I liked school sort of, but not particularly.  I complained about school starting so early from the first day.  I hated how people were so uptight and mean because I wasn’t like they were (actually was really painful).  I felt like I was wasting my time at school. By the time I was a teen and I realized that the person the designed the school I went to also designed the local prison I REALLY despised school. I hated that when I didn’t go to school, they would send the police over to escort me and threaten to send my mom to jail.  Whoa, fascists!  Compulsory public schooling to me looks like a lot of compulsory conditioning…first invented in Prussia in order to create good soldiers and citizens.  While some parents want their children conditioned to support and carry on the current social structure that happens to be coming unraveled at the seams, I see friends of mine spending a lot of time undoing the damage that the experiences of school creates for their children. 

I dropped out before the age of legality, to live my rebellious life.  Five years later, I took my GED and went to college .  That’s when I got even angrier at school.  I realized how much of what I learned was superficial as well as completely wrong.  In college I reconnected with my innate drive to learn, the one that nearly everyone is born with,  the one that school had wrung out of me.  In college I was treated with respect rather than a subject to be “taught” (conditioned) to some weird standard that was created by some shmucks who think they know what my child needs to live her future adult life. 

I know that school has changed some in some places since I was a child. I guess I just haven’t seen good results with reform, so I’m not a reformist. Some people like school…and it isn’t so much that there aren’t alternatives to the lame status quo mainstream classroom, especially here in Liberal Northern California.  My objections to school run much deeper than that.  They spring from the center of my being, which is where my activism, creative  energy and way of life also spring. Where once my activism emerged from resentment and rebellion…now it emerges from rebellion, hope and dedication to a better future.  Some magical experiences I have had involving Mexico, research and alternative schools; a collage of Zapatismo, Oaxacan rebellions and Gustavo Esteva’s writing and work brought me to this place. “Imagine the future you are dreaming of and fighting for in vivid detail. Now, build that future, in everyway that you can, miniscule and humongous, in the here and now.  Let every action be an action towards realizing your utopia. Live the future now.” The ideas snuggled in these words have salvaged me.  They have given direction to my creative and political energy and a voice and contentment to my innate self. 

If you crush it, smash it, tear this “white racist, homophobic, patriarchal bullshit paradigm” down, what have you but a power vacuum followed by more power grabbing and the “join me, join me” propaganda war? How can we change if we aren’t creating something to change into. How can we fight “power over”  without  cultivating personal power?  After spending years fighting and dying and screaming and crying I realized I had been ignoring the other side or more likely I didn’t feel the power to think outside the paradigm…but the Zapatistas have been trying it (they were a bit farther from our western controled paradigm already).  Gustvo Esteva has been working on it as well.  Two years ago I had the opportunity to study for a month at the so-called university that Esteva co-founded called Universidad de la Tierra. It’s about building.  Building connections, building alternatives,  building whole lives…defragmenting and decentralizing EVERYTHING. 

So as my life fell apart this winter and my inspiration stagnated, so did my desire and ability to build the new paradigm that is being built in a million tiny pieces and places all over the world and growing and growing (seriously, but much of what is going on ISN’T in the USA).  I want to struggle against fragmentation and centralization and for self-empowered people and communities.  Power from above centralizes as people power and self-sufficiency dwindles.  The power that we give to the government is the power that we give to the government.  Our relationship with our work, our food, our educations, our children, our health, out water, our environment, our lives are fragmented and we become helpless and dependent on centralized power to give us everything.  We know that this isn’t sustainable. The struggle for sustainability should be the struggle for self-sufficiency.

Schooling is synonymous with conditioning.  I want my daughter to learn in freedom.  I want her to learn from the real world, not about it.  I want her to know that (outside of math) there is always more than one answer, that are always more than two sides of a story and the truth isn’t always somewhere in the middle. To know that what is impossible to solve in one paradigm may be simple in another.  I want her ability to follow her bliss to stay intact. 

Funny thing is that while I often hear parents worried that their children aren’t being stimulated enough, I see children being over-stimulated.  So-called “stimulation” actually looks a lot like distraction to me.  Distraction from listening to the self and learning to deal withit. When my daughter is in preschool, she expects adults to always give her something to do; to keep her busy.  When summer comes, she goes crazy for a couple weeks (driving me crazy), and then when she realizes I am not going to give her everything to do, she will start being creative.  Finding her own things to do. She becomes amazingly focused and creates her best work.  Following her own passion, or at least discovering it.  If this is already obvious to me in preschool, I am afraid what happens in the higher grades. 

It isn’t that I don’t believe in the public good, or public education, it has more to do with schooling and conditioning of children. Ordering 25 seven-year-olds to a room for most of the day, day after day, accompanied by one adult and pressuring the teacher to teach to some Government standards based on making our country competitive in the global factory is not a good way to learn; it isn’t even safe (this is why so much of Teacher Training programs are focused on “classroom management.”) The structure of school requires hierarchical power structures and carrot/stick punishment and reward tactics to keep the peace and encourage students to fulfill government mandates.  What our children learn as children will profoundly affect the way they exist as adults. I know there are better, less costly ways to learn.  Ivan Illich had some good ideas about this.  His book “Deschooling Society,” touches on a lot of the problems with schooling, that I haven’t even began to go into in this blog, as well as a few ideas and solutions.  I also know that present day school is the better option for many children whose parents don’t have the capacity to put them anywhere better or even make educational decisions for them.  But I hope for everyone to one day have better options.  The more people say “no” and take a step out, the easier it is for others to do the same.  And as people find popular-based and local-based solutions, the humongo, centralized,  misguided federal government solution becomes less desirable.  Maybe I am a pioneer.  I hope I am a pioneer. I can’t do this alone.  I see more parent cooperative, community schools and free skools on the horizon.  At least for my daughter’s and my sake.

I recently started a homeschool/unschool Park Day in my town.  I think it was a hit.  I find more and more families are turning towards, “No More School” by the week.   And they mostly aren’t rich or religious.  Look at me.  The Crazy Anarchist.

If you have actually made it through that long post, and your still interested, well, I would like to share a couple links.  Here is a link to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society online with notes and commentary…it is posted as a reading group on Wikiversity. http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich:_Deschooling_Society

And here is the text of a speech Gustavo Esteva gave to some college students around commencement, that talks about some of his amazing life, thinking, meeting of Ivan and most importantly the thinking and actions that gave birth to the bad ass learning space in Oaxaca, Universidad de la Tierra. http://www.gustavoesteva.com/english_site/back_from_the_future.htm

Also, this is an awesome awesome  awesome movement  in India, I really dig the “Walk-Out” campaign.  http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/

Today I ran into this small poem online:

I work consciously to return to creativity. In that darkness of standing still I discover stagnation and creation are two parts of the whole, each always moving into the other.

yeah, remember that lady...it will save you a lot of headache.

That's it, I am posting a blog!

I am tired of starting writing little blogs and not finishing.  This morning I am writing a blog with no idea what I am going to say.  Really, what is going on is I am again stuck in this limbo.  New rain fallen, just a few drops gathering together, sliding down the hill, struggling to become a trickle, the trickle becomes a small stream, soon finding its way to the creek and the point of no return as it builds and builds into...whoops, ran into a dam!  The water level slowly rises against the dry cement wall.  That's where I am right now.  Again, the water will begin to crest. A few drops are beginning to breach the blockade splashing over the edge with the rhythm of the new body of water trapped behind it, then the point of no return again...or maybe some eco-activists or local villagers will smash the wall and set me free all together. 

Anyway, I am just hanging, looking at the computer, looking for a home, but not finding the right place.  Not wanting to settle for the wrong place.  So I just hang out in another’s house, dreaming of where I will be going.  Hoping my loud-ass roommates will quiet down so that my daughter can get all the sleep she needs.  This is my life, day after day.  I have all the faith that things will turn our great, but until then I sit here, gathering ideas, dreams, intentions and packing them away for later, like all the stuff in the garage.  Two-thirds of my life packed away in boxes waiting for the move, two-thirds of my ideas packed away in my mind waiting for some space to be realized.  It can get really annoying, but what I can and have been doing with this time of creative/life limbo, is connecting with people, strengthening relationships, building my community.  Don’t need space to do that.  And oh I am so excited for the summer.

Another Train of Thought...

I’m kinda writing sometimes, here and there.  It is kinda how I am trying to stay sane, connected to myself.  But I feel like everything I write and could write is repetition.  Of course it mostly doesn’t get posted anywhere.  

Like how I am trying to play guitar, or stay connected to it.  I play/sing the same song or two, the ones I know well, every day, because I can’t/won’t/want to make the effort that goes into creation, self-discipline, learning something new.  I put in just the minimum daily dues, so that, “yeah, I play guitar,” rather than, “I should be playing” or “I haven’t been playing or "I used to play.” 

So I write, a little, and I bore the hell out of myself.  Everything is lack for me now.  Time, space, sanity, desire…except of course sexual desire.  I have plenty of that, but too frazzled to figure out where to direct it.  Getting lots of attention from a nice 24-year-old jobless guy.  Sweet.  Should I or Shouldn’t I?  My problem is that I am always thinking of the future.  I would always say yes to my appetite if I knew I would never have to see the devoured walking around town, talking to my friends, frequenting my café.  That sounds so callous.  Its not though.  It is actually that I am so sensitive.  I don’t like hurt feelings.  I don’t like severed connections.  Sex can ruin relationships.  Sex ruins most relationships between men and women.  Especially the platonic ones.  I usually connect much easier with men, in a non-sexual way (on my part). I have lost so many friends due to jealous or insecure girlfriends. 

So, since I don’t have two hours to rub together to evolve my inner self, my creative self (living in a house full of people, single mom, taking care of her incapacitated mother, looking for a home [refuge] that isn’t not yet for rent), I have been developing myself as a lover and partner, though I am a virgin mom. Does that even make sense? I am developing myself for something that isn't happening, yes.  I'm broadening horizons, being caring and open with people other than myself and my daughter. Reaccustoming myself to sexual tension. Not giving to cold shoulder to anyone who approaches me...you know...letting people a little bit closer. Not being so god-damn independent.  

But yeah, adult love and partnerships are not very common these days in my life.  And it's going to stay that way if I don’t start trying to attract a suitable mate right?  Sounds so weird, but all animals do it.  Attract mates.  I am talking about everything. 

You know, my mom never taught me anything about sex, except how it affects children to hear their mom getting laid on a regular basis.  Other than that I learned about sex from “Wild America.”  Do you know what that can do to a person? 

frog arms

The big tadpole popped an arm just now...Yesterday he was so lethargic, with two bumps on his side.  Made me think of wisdom teeth trying to push their way through my gums when I was younger.  Red under the skin.  Pressure.  This morning I took this picture:

Looks stressful and painful to me.  The Metamorphosis. Then I look just a couple hours later and the left arm has popped out. What a relief for the little thing!  Check out this proud tadpole with his brand new arm!

Any time now, pow! Out will come the other. I am such a proud froggy mama.  Then the frog should start absorbing its tail...Slurp.  Fascinating.

Handouts

I feel like I won the sweepstakes.  But really I just signed on and waited.  Tomorrow, I go in for my appointment with HUD to do paperwork that should lead to my being issued a voucher to help me pay for rent.  Section 8, now called the Housing Choice Voucher Program.  I spent over three and a half years on the list.  I actually applied over 4 years ago, but didn’t get my update form in on time (5 minutes late) so was bumped of the list and had to reapply.  Don’t most of our tax dollars going to terrorizing and bullying the world anyway?

I got the letter weeks ago, but my intake appointment was of course weeks later.  That way us “clients” can collect all our paperwork (and there is a lot of documentation to collect). I am surprised at the feelings I have gone through over the weeks about this.  I was surprised at how I felt like I should keep it a secret, like it was something to be ashamed of…you know with all this anger about fair shares of taxes.  Am I paying my fair share?  Is there such thing as a fair share?  And if so, who decides?  And why should taxes be fair when everything else isn’t?  Aren’t taxes our remedy for our unjust system anyway?

What is fair?  Does fair even exist? Is being born into poverty fair?  I mean, I like who I am, and what would I be like were I not born poor?  Would I like myself then? More or less?   Poverty isn’t the thing I would change, would I?  The unfairness in my childhood is mostly fine with me now, though it wasn’t then.  What I did learn is that it was the interactions with people that affected me, that’s what I would have changed.  I would have chosen a different dad, probably. I would have wanted my mother to spend more time with me.  But if she had spent more time with me, would my relationship with my daughter as an adult have changed? Would I be so determined to give my daughter the love, compassion, consideration that I desperately wanted as a child?  Or was it actually the poverty that robbed me of the love, compassion and consideration?  Isn’t it poverty that forced my mother to destroy her body through hard work as a low-wage slave? Isn’t it poverty that forced her to choose between giving her children enough time, or giving up her passion (Art). Isn’t it poverty that drove her to the brink of insanity over and over again? So was it fair we were impoverished? Or was it just punishment for having a mother with the audacity to raise children absent of a breadwinning male head-of-household?  And should I be punished as well?  Hmmm, Some would say, “YES, I should be punished” but they’re generally the same people who would tell me I couldn’t have had an abortion if I wanted one.

Okay, stop thinking about those crazies.  I am ecstatic…just when I thought single-motherhood in America was about the gut me.  I will be able to rent a two-bedroom place for 1/3 of my income…in northern California none-the-less.  The idea of not having that huge bill to contend with has opened up so many possibilities to me.  One is entrepreneurship.  I won’t work for the stockholders and the upper crust.  So I have non-profits and myself left to work for. Having a small job that I do from home has taught me that this is what I want. I want to work from home.  I don’t want to dress up to impress others.  I need to be me.  I want to throw out my work clothes.  Since my teaching job is out for the summer in 4 weeks, and I should be moving around then…I have all summer to recreate myself.  I get to take risks because I won’t be paralyzed by the fear of not being able to pay rent. Untrapped. I get to be an asset to society again.

I still wonder if it is fair that I get to pay 1/3 my income for rent while others pay more.  Well, the program is out there…anyone can sign up.  And you know, I work all the time, I work in my community, I work with my daughter and she is a beautiful, positive, intelligent addition to society. The work I do is far more beneficial to my community and society that anything the average money mongering CEO does.  I have been doing volunteer work since I was 12…wayyyyyy before career experts and George W Bush told everyone to volunteer because it is good for our resumes.  I am so excited to have a chance to recreate and organize again.  Move back into the realm I am comfortable with and direct my energy into the systems that make sense to me.  The natural movement of my life, comfort.  I am so excited!