re-entry into life, rethinking the blog

As my crazy work schedule winds down, I find myself mired in the chaos of an unattended life. Not the good kind of chaos, the uncomfortable kind. The house in total disarray and me lacking the energy to do anything about it. The regret of missing the beginning of what seems to be the biggest social movement in my adult life. A feeling of estrangement from my daughter and fear of loosing our connection. A feeling of estrangement from society. The realization that in doing everything that I do, I can’t do anything well. Many things aren’t working, and as I reenter my life I see an opportunity to make some major decisions about it. I need to pair down.

I have started with the decision to forget working in public education. I can not meld into the professional world. I have spent too much time trying to fit into places that I don’t and I am done. And I hate the way that it has made me constantly want to correct people’s grammar (especially people’s tendency to use adjectives in place of adverbs). I loved the fluidity of the English language before it was netted in my standardization and Webster.


But outside education I am a writer, a videographer, and artist, a musician, a single parent, an activist, a “home educator,” an intellectual, a traveler and wanderer, a member of the working class, an urban homesteader…how do I manage? I want to spend time with people too!

I shall start with integration.

Video is a great tool. It is a job I feel comfortable doing. It is an outlet for creativity. It is something I can be paid for. It is a project I can do with my daughter, and help her learn. It is a way to document. Video is a tool for activism.

Writing is something I love. It keeps me sane. It is a form of activism for me. I recently stopped journaling after reading an article from someone I respect saying that in order to be a “famous “ writer, I should write for others, and not waste time journaling to myself. I took the advice and it had devastating effects. For me, writing is not only a mode of communication with the outside world, but a mode of communication with my inner self. I am an introvert and much of me is deeply buried. Writing is an exercise in digging. I am working on adding journaling back into my life. When I journaled regularly I liked my writing.

I am rethinking my blog. What is it here for? I liked it when more mothering was happening in my blogging. When my mothering looked like acts of rebellion. But really I guess it still is. I feel strong in my ideas about how to raise my daughter without regular schooling, at least for the short term. I have plans. I am determined to have a life that doesn’t revolve around my daughter as well. And integrated life is an act of rebellion.

I don’t feel like tackling the other stuff on my list right now…

We will see where all the sticks fall as I come out of super worker mode. 55 hour work weeks plus 6-7 hours of commute time is a lot, even for a hip mama. The cat is laying herself on my wrists as I type this.

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/

anarchist mama; thoughts on community, ideology.

The other night we went to the Day of the Dead Celebration. It was a hit. It seems to get better every year, luckily there was no rain to rain on our parade. I had this peculiar feeling of being home, in my community at its best. It was my fourth Day of the Dead in Petaluma, I have been here just over three years. Less and less do I feel like I need a group of "radicals and anarchists" to feel part of a community. Yes, I am an anarchist mom. I dedicate my time to dismantle power (from above, that is) while cultivating grassroots and personal power (or power from within). When I was more deeply involved in anarchist groups and collectives, the question persistently asked was, “How do we get people to join us?” My natural inclination was to respond with, “We don’t get folks to join us. We join them.” The truth is that the lifestyle of the average anarchist group is just not attractive to most people (and vice-versa). Anarchist principles are helpful when practiced in the general public than small bands of radicals. As change becomes more and more inevitable, as our old unsustainable and unjust ways of living and institutions crumble, anarchist principles and ways of organization have begun to be explored and integrated (but we usually don't have to call them anarchist, it makes people jumpy).

As people realize that we can’t depend on government or rich people and their corporations to make things function well for the rest of us, we look to more grassroots ways of organizing. Which is where anarchist theory is based. Power of the people. Direct Democracy, deep democracy, consensus building, self-government, mutual aid, crushing hierarchy, radical self-theory, taking our lives into our own hands, localizing power...localizing everything. Horizontal organization and co-operation without coercion. The time is right, as folks are fed up and joining horrible groups like the Tea Party in reaction to big government, there needs to be a better movement towards freedom from too much control.

But back to community. My money-centered, gender-normative community… I am often pleasantly surprised. As I come more and more into myself, as I learn to trust my instincts and my own strengths and convictions and not worry so much what the “community at large” will think, and as I root myself deeper into my community and value it, I realize I am not so different. Instead of quietly becoming jaded and critical, I open my mouth and say crazy things with faith (or hope?) that what I say will find fertile soil.

But what is community anyway? What is an "activist community" or progressive community? Perhaps an activist community is a place to feel connected. But at the same time, are communities today to be groups of people who think alike? In this country, in this day, community cannot mean what it once meant, because we have changed. We are not a homogeneous group or tribe. It is normal to want a groups of comrades, but we pride ourselves so much on individuality and diversity, so shouldn’t we celebrate that, even if our neighbor voted for Bush? Community building is as much an inner journey as an outer one. Learning to live with and connect with the Other, this is where the real work of building community comes from. Community can no longer be about feeling comfortable, if anything, it ought to be about coalition building. At least, perhaps we need to understand and differentiate between two kinds of community. An intentional community of folks working toward a common goal, and a community of neighbors, where we learn to live together, create dialog, breach “the aisle.”

An Activist Community is a bit incapacitated unless it engages with and becomes part of the community at large. Community building is acting from where you are, with those you live with. Change starts locally, things change when people change, because the government won't change until we do. My utopia isn’t so different from the majority of the other utopias in the minds of so many folks around here (land of the liberals). I am just crazy enough to deschool my mind and head for the Utopian horizon. Three steps forwards...two and half steps back...I do it for my daughter. If things don't change, if the dominant ideology stays intact, I may survive my life with relative ease, but it is Ramona's life her friends lives and her children's lives (if she chooses to have them) that will suffer at our inaction as a society.

To me, mothering is about caring, which goes beyond sleep training, schools, educational toys, etc. You don't even really have to be a mother to mother. It is about caring for the life and the world that our children are entering into. Mothering is political. Caring is an action, or it ought to be. Mothering is about building our utopia today, in all the ways that we can. The future is now.

The media that dominates and propaganda may confuse and manipulate the so-called “sheeple” but people are becoming more awake with a desire for a different better way of life, evolution, that stays intact in the ocean of misinformation and hidden agendas (while some others are fighting to stay in denial/asleep). I think that people can sense an era ending. The mechanistic mind, industrialization, capitalism vs communism…all so passé. The ideas that I once thought too radical to spout all over Petaluma just aren’t. Decentralize Everything. It’s more democratic, its more fulfilling, its more sustainable, its more productive. And it creates the one thing that I hear folks around here (especially mothers) pining for. Community. Communities are arising throughout the world as the major site of struggle against oppression, consumer culture and environmental destruction and for dignity. These remarkable communities are mostly located in what we call the Global South, but it could happen here. Maybe it already is.

Or am I getting too far ahead of myself?

rad·i·cal adj.
1. Arising from or going to a root or source; basic: proposed a radical solution to the problem.
2. Departing markedly from the usual or customary; extreme: radical opinions on education.
3. Favoring or effecting fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions: radical political views.
4. Linguistics Of or being a root: a radical form.
5. Botany Arising from the root or its crown: radical leaves.
6. Slang Excellent; wonderful.

Life as Activism

A friend of mine asked on facebook what poverty had done to people. Her mother’s response was:

When we were broke, for many years, we grew our own vegetables, put up food, cooked from scratch, baked bread, went hiking, spent time outdoors, figured out ways to keep going without much money. It made us more resourceful and taught us to really appreciate being better off when that finally happened. But I look back on those days as probably being the happiest of our lives (of course that's partly because you came along then). What wasn't good was not being able to get the medical & dental care we needed and having to sell cherished books to keep the utilities from being turned off.

My friend responded that even though her mother is better off now, some of those things are things she still takes great joy in.  Many of the things the she wrote about doing are things that I do now and are also things that are often found to contribute to ones inner sense of happiness. These are also things that decentralize power.

I am “broke.” I know ways to be less “broke”, but this involves seeing my daughter less, putting my creative passions aside and being less involved in my community. I LIKE my life. I grew up in a cage of desperate poverty, but I could also see the cages that money and materialism create for both individuals and society. Growing up in poverty taught me to be resourceful and learn a sense of security that did not come from having money, but in having community; my sense of connection from my creative life; my sense of happiness from within.

The word “poverty” has such negative connotations; it imbues a sense of powerlessness. Sometimes I replace the word with “economically poor.” For those with no resources in community or family, it very well could be powerlessness and poverty. There is dignity in being poor in a community or just to choose to live a simple life. I don’t feel like I live in poverty because my lifestyle has afforded me the privilege to step away from our hegemonic and unjust system, even if only a little bit; taking just a little power from said system and putting it in my hands. I will not accept that as a single mother either have to spend most of my day away from my daughter, leaving others to fill most of her emotional needs or live on welfare, in poverty and powerless. 

Money is at the center of our culture; the word revolves around it, and that is what the dominant logic and the media tell us over and over. If you read the news, you would think that the only hope for our future is that “consumers” (what ever happened to citizens?) start spending more. When we didn’t buy enough last Christmas to make our economy grow as much as economists wanted, we were called stingy and scrooges in the media. When we were attacked by terrorists, the president told us we could support our country by shopping. “Shopping Therapy” is actually a real expression! Yes, consumerism is what keeps the system running smoothly, but our system is crumbling as it just isn’t a sustainable model (the rich have known this for decades folks).

Once, I spent a lot of time fighting the system, but I always wondered what would happen if the system I was fighting went away. Or if we were winning the fight. And what exactly were we fighting for? An authentic life? Real productive and fulfilling work? An end to our military terrorism on the world? A rich community life? Equality? Justice? Dignity? It didn’t feel okay to me, to my nature, to work for and perpetuate the capitalist machine by day and yell about it at night.

Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see.” The Zapatistas say, “We are not here to change the world, something that is very difficult, next to impossible. We are here to create a whole new world.” And now as the world economy crumbles, what we are doing (or should be doing) is building a new world in the shell of the old, right where we live. Things will not fundamentally change unless we, the people, change. My idea of revolution is not about changing faces in the great halls of power, but diverting that powering into the hands of regular folks; building from the bottom up, rather than the top down. I find small ways to live my utopia today, in the here and now. What better way to bring about change than to live it? What would the world look like if we took some of the power away from money and institutions and diverted it into creating a sense of community? What would it look like if most of our activities involved no money at all.  Our lives and our communities are the most powerful sites of dissent.

A new world is possible, but it won’t happen we don’t live in it. So, I grow vegetables, bake bread, cook from scratch so as to rely less on the industrialized capitalist polluting food system. I buy organic and local to cut out the “coyote” middle men, eat fresh food and saving the pollution involved in shipping. I find creative ways to reuse my trash before I recycle it or throw it away. I share a home because living together is how we build community and…learn to live together. I skip the rat race and instead of sending my daughter to a million enrichment classes a week I enrich our lives by learning kids songs on the guitar or spending a day at the beach with a picnic lunch and my daughter, living and learning together. We wish we knew more kids to share this money free fun with! Maybe these are all small things, but I think it is the small things, those small acts of resistance…added together that can make big changes.

Community service has opened up many opportunities to Ramona and I, such as free tickets to events, free theater classes for Ramona, not to mention the feeling of connectedness. I work a lot, I just choose to try to live a more integrated life and take as much control as possible as to where that energy goes. I work with my daughter, in the garden, distributing posters, cooking, or she plays while I make lesson plans. Sometimes she helps me clean her school which gives me a discount on her tuition. I also do house and pet sitting, and always ask my clients if their pets would appreciate playing with a little girl, thus “work” and life can happen simultaneously even in this culture, like it still does in so many cultures.

I do wish for more money sometimes for things like fixing the growing cavity in my tooth or visiting Ramona's paternal family in Costa Rica. I can’t get Ramona all the cool toys made of “natural materials” that many of her friends and schoolmates get, we settle for the plastic barn at the thrift store. But these are the choices I live with and I do not regret them because I will watch my child grow up, I will not let the capitalist machine drive that wedge between my daughter and I.  I can do this without a husband to bring home the bacon. 

In closing, I know there are many ways to parent. I know that sometimes mothers are earners and fathers are the nurturers and this causes me to rejoice! I know that the rat race does not affect all families the same. I know that everyone’s contribution to positive change can come from different places. Many children do great in full-time childcare. I wanted to share my activism and what my life means to me, largely because I feel us single parents  are pressured to live the victims life in powerlessness. There are other options for single parents. I want to support the idea that we can be a society where we really do help each other out.

The March for Human Rights

Yesterday was the first time Ramona and I had gone protesting since she was an infant.  I am actually not much of a protester these days.  However, the protest yesterday was the first one I really felt compelled to join in quite a while.  It was a march for Human Rights, organized in response to the Arizona law SB 1070 that encourages and advances racial profiling and racism.

I am so proud of my little girl.  She was so present at the protest, she danced with the Aztec Dancers.  She has never walked so far.  She was so inspired by the energy and the people at the protest, she didn’t complain one time during the three hour ordeal.  She walked (and ran, as her little legs were no match for the rate of the march) at least a mile, and carried the sign the rest of the over three mile march as I carried her.  She was completely absorbed in what was going on and asking all sorts of questions which I answered as best I could in terms I hoped she could understand.  It was sort of easy to explain the reasons for people coming and the reasons for the protest, but difficult to explain to her why there are borders in the first place and how the people got so poor.

Later, when we got home, my friend Christina came over to stay the night and I beamed with pride as I heard Ramona explain to our friend what had transpired earlier in the evening.   She really personalized her retelling of the story, by talking about the woman  (she loves) who runs her daycare, who emigrated from Mexico.  “People like Maria come here and make their homes and then others say, you can’t be here go away, and they say, ‘No this is my home!’”  She continued to chant today  “Aqui Estamos, y no nos vamos.”  I think Ramona knows more about immigration than any three year old I know (who isn't an immigrant, of course).  It also helps that she has spent some many months in Mexico.

These are the kinds of experiences that shape children, these are the places that children learn.  In society, in the street, through rich interactions with life…not locked in an institution 6-7 hours a day, five days a week.  Learning about the world by experiencing it, not being told about it from inside four walls.  Learning how to act by experimentation, not by authority and the culture of the carrot and the stick.



Ramona is at 1:30 in this video