Practice Radical Compassion

I've been listening to people ask the question, "What now?" a lot.

"What now?"
"What next?"
"Where do we go?"
"Where do we start?"

Everyone I know has been inspired by big things -- myself included! make no mistake! -- and all those big things have been happening fast and piled on top of each other. Protests, recalls, elections, occupy, marches, even one brave girl standing against her culture: it's all one giant source of motivation and strength for anyone with an eye on changing the future.

And those moments, those big moments, are important. It's important to know that you're not utterly alone in wanting a different world, and it's important to know what it feels like to stand with 100 or 10,000 or 100,000 of your fellow human beings, voices raised together. It's important to know what that feels like, for an individual, and it's important for the world at large to know that there are so very many individuals working in concert.

But the big moments are demonstration, not change.

Politics will never change the world. I'll say it again: Politics will never change the world. Part of this is the nature of politics as compromise. Perhaps we've all lost sight of this, so here's a reminder. Politics is the art of compromise through persuasion. But that means you are never going to get everything you want, and your opposition is never going to get everything they want. Even a majority must compromise with the minority in a representative, nominally democratic system.

(Side note to everyone involved in politics: Could you maybe start compromising? Just a little? It's your job, so do your job, please.)

But politics imposes a consensus compromise on people from the outside. To change the world, you have to change the people. The only way the world will get better is if we make humanity as a whole better. The only way to stop people from doing awful things to each other, either actively by waging war and murdering and raping, or passively by ignoring the hardships they suffer, is to make every person in the world acknowledge the humanity of every other person.

Overwhelming. It's an overwhelming thought. Are you overwhelmed?

Don't be.

No one, no one in the world, can alone effect change of that scale. No one. It's not possible.

Here's what you can do: you can change one person. You can reach out to one person and show them that you're human, and they're human, and that you respect their humanity. You can show one person the effects of the decisions they make. You can show one person that you respect them, that you love them, despite any and all differences, and you can hope that such a demonstration inspires them to change even a little.

Here's another thing you can do: live humanely. Live your life to the best of your ability such that you respect and care for other people. Think about how you define "people." Then think about how you define "people who deserve respect." Are these two definitions the same? Probably not. What can you do to make them the same?

Who are your neighbors? Do you know their names? Do you know what they value? Do you know what they dream of? Can you help them? Who are their neighbors? What do they dream of? Can you help them? Build a community based on personal relationships; the larger community will build itself, so long as you maintain the long view of respect for all people simply because they are people. Those people don't have to have the same values you do; they don't even have to agree with you on anything. Your job is to respect them anyway. Your job is to care about them anyway. Your job is to love them anyway. Lead by example. It's the only leadership that works.

Politics in America, and everywhere, has long been the art of defining "The Other" for one group or another. Most of human history, in fact, can be viewed through the lens of power pitting groups against each other to maintain power. Reject that history. Reject it forcefully. Refuse to think of anyone as The Other, as unlike yourself. Refuse to accept that you have to denigrate and degrade another person, no matter how far away and no matter how strange their life seems, just to make yourself feel better.

After all, you are the scary, frightening Other to someone else. What would you prefer they do, when you meet: kill you or listen to you? Don't conjecture about what is LIKELY to happen. Don't rationalize shooting first, or cutting someone off, because of what you think they will do, or even are likely to do, or what they've done in the past. Stick to this alone: which would you rather happen? Then you have to choose to do the thing that you would like to happen despite whatever fear, rational or irrational, you feel.

You want to be a radical? You want to be a revolutionary? Here's the ultimate radical act: Love the Other. Love them like you'd love your own child. Endure deprivation for them, live with the knowledge they might take advantage of you, forgive them when they do, and go right on loving. Love them until they cannot but recognize your humanity, and love you back. It takes courage, and forgiveness, and a deep sense of self, and a firm commitment to the worth of the future being built. But you can do it. And if you mess up, if you can't do it, if you're too scared or too dazzled by the world, forgive yourself, too: you're human.

And then, try again. Pick yourself up and try again. And again. As many times as it takes.
Love will change the world, and the world will change one human being at a time.

Traveling Light

I bought myself a plane ticket to Spain for my birthday. I leave tomorrow. I intend to spend the dawn of my 28th year on earth in misty mountain solitude, listening to medieval chants and wandering around the oldest still-functioning monastery in Europe.

After that, I'm going to Barcelona to party.

I am refusing to take a suitcase on this trip (not such a strange thing, for me) but I am also resistant to even taking a backpacking pack. It's too big. I'm packing a duffel bag for this trip, the kind of bag one takes on a long weekend. A "weekender," the fashion people would call it. It's fake red leather, and my mother spotted it on the free table at Value Village Thrift Store two months ago and brought it home for me. It has no rips and no holes and the strap is still attached and the stitches are firm and the zipper works, so I'm not sure why it was on the free table, but it has a good home, now. This is a bag I will love.

I have my little duffel loaded up with clothes: underwear, cardigans, a cocktail dress. A toiletry bag. A current converter. I'll add a pair of fancy flats later tonight.

I have a backpack, too, a carry on, the backpack that has been on every single trip I've taken since I was fourteen and went to Oceania for three weeks. This backpack has been around the world. It's been to Australia and New Zealand, it's been to Spain before, it was with me when I got stranded in Morocco, it's been to Paris and seen the Mona Lisa, and it's held water and sandwiches while I hiked in the Schwarzwald. It's met my daughter's father. It's climbed Mayan ruins on the Yucatan, seen waterfalls in the Andes, gone to street parties outside of Santo Domingo. This backpack has been to New York City more times than I can count, seen the redwoods of Big Basin State Park in California, wandered around downtown Detroit. It's been to St. Louis and Indianapolis.

Into this backpack I will put my camera bag, laden with camera and lenses and lens filters and cleaning cloths and memory cards and a battery charger and a card reader. I will put my tiny pink computer, and its charger. I'll put my phone and its charger. I'll put in two books and a wallet and a passport and three packs of American Spirit cigarettes, in the yellow box, and a lighter. The lighter will also be yellow.

I've had butterflies in my stomach for days now, anticipating this trip. My insides are quivering in anticipation of being unattached for seven entire, glorious days. My wanderlust is ferocious, voracious, and stems primarily from a desire to have no attachments at all. My daydreams are always about taking off into the sunset and leaving everything behind. My fondest, most impossible wish is to start over, completely, from scratch. I want to disappear with my duffel and my backpack and never come back, never look back, reinvent everything about myself.

I can't do that. Having babies really puts a damper on your ability to disappear without a trace. Well, unless you're my baby's father.

(Heh.)

So, I take the next best thing: Whenever I can, I go somehwere alone. Like tomorrow.

I have many vices. Cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, pretty dresses, vintage hats, ridiculous high-heeled shoes, loud music, driving too fast. Some of these are probably even full-blown addictions. But of all my vices, and all my addictions, this is most certainly the worst. This is the one that could cause me to abandon everything, hit rock bottom, sever every tie. It would be so easy since the addiction is to rootlessness, restlessness, the ability to move on whenever the urge hits, to put one's life in two small bags and go, onward, forward, sideways, backwards, it doesn't matter as long as you're moving.

The addiction, you see, is to this fluttery feeling I get before stepping off into the unknown. I am addicted to the rush of adrenaline and the limitless vistas of possibility. This feeling is better than any drug, than any drink, than any touch. This feeling is better than any love. This combination of knowing everything theoretically and nothing concretely and being able to see everything and nothing all at once is better than anything else you can name. I would chase this feeling endlessly if I could. I would step off every cliff, climb every mountain, turn down every blind alley to find it again.

If I could. If only I could.

I Don't Blink In Dreams

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if you hadn’t absconded.

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if you reappeared, magic, poof, a solid reality instead of the ephemeral set of memories I live with every day.

I dreamt about you. Recently. Not last night, not the night before that. Last week, maybe. I don’t remember, precisely. My memory was never good when it came to you. You were always about the moment. I was always in the moment with you, and time and detail ceased to matter. Who needs linear abstraction when there is so much else to pay attention to, so much that is real to feel? Who knows how long a second can be? I know that it can be an eternity. The second between the inhale and the exhale can be eternity. Who needs to remember the paintings in the Tate when I can say that every busker in London played “Wonderwall” whenever we walked by?

We looked at the paintings anyway. We sat through a lecture in the National Gallery. And when the dry woman with the dead-leaf voice was done telling us things we already knew about Adam and Eve and Eve in art and the place of the feminine in Christian-sponsored art, we escaped from the auditorium like children let out for recess and we skipped down the hallway giggling like mad things and we played hide-and-seek among the soldiers of the Terracotta Army until a burly, black-jacketed docent asked us to leave in politely threatening tones.

We knew the secret to removing ourselves from the ordered world, you and I.

But I dreamt you, recently. I dreamt you to my door and into my bedroom. We stood face to face, and I put the tips of my fingers on the sharp protrusion of your cheekbone. My right hand, your left cheek. Just so. Just the way we stood when you picked me up at Heathrow, that time you were late and I called and called and there was no answer and I worried and thought about taking a cab but didn’t know where to take it.

Remember?

You finally appeared. You were apologetic, profusely, abundantly apologetic.The tumble of words from your lips was torrential, neverending. I put my finger tips on your cheek. I didn’t trust myself to touch your lips; I didn’t trust you to have my skin against them. So I touched your cheekbone, instead.

You stopped talking.

We walked to your car together. You started talking again. We drove through the City center on the way to Rose Cottage; it was Sunday, it was late, there was no congestion charge. You played tour guide. I sat sideways, my back against the car door, my knees pulled up and my toes poking at the gear shifter. You put your hand on my ankle in between gears. You circled it completely in your hand, and I felt every callous and every training cut.

In my dream, you went to open up my skull, like you used to do, to swing it back on those ivory hinges you installed yourself, but I had changed the lock. Your key didn’t fit.

You laughed at me.

“Don’t you remember, love? I’m a thief. I’m a doorman. You can’t keep me out,” you said. Cocky cockney.

And you pulled out your kit, your picks and your wires, and you picked that bone lock on my forehead, right between my eyes. I watched you the whole time. I don’t blink, in dreams. I didn’t want to keep you out, you know. I changed the lock so that you’d have to touch me, take your time. I changed the lock to slow you down.

But then you’d done it, and my skull swung back on those ivory hinges you installed yourself, and your calloused fingers were in my brain, buried deep, all the way to the palm. I could feel the weight of your heavy hand on my frontal lobe, affecting my judgment.

The tips of your nails tickled my temporal lobe, and I remembered: living with you was like living in a dream. There was eternity in the space between inhaling and exhaling. I never blinked.

I have you in my dreams. I don’t need you in front of me anymore.

Living With Art

Last night, I stood in the presence of art. Art. Capitol A Art. My nose was inches from a Picasso ceramic. I put my hand on the frame of a Matisse. The room hummed and thrummed with energy, with life, with beauty and statement and meaning and history and emotion. This is why people create, isn't it? So that all that life inside them gets transferred to some other vessel, and when they die, some part of them is left behind. And when a group of art is gathered in a room, the room sings as if the artists were there, having a party.

Madame Pampadour, Henri Matisse.



We were just a group of people at a holiday party. There was wine and beer and food and laughter. But the party was in the former gentleman's homestead of Mr. And Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, and still houses the collection of work Mrs. Lynde Bradley amassed that has not been donated or loaned to museums.

Vase, Pablo Picasso



It is an amazing, incredible, uplifting, giddy feeling: to be in the presence of art, of Art, without glass or sensors or security personnel watching silently and with hawks' eyes. It is a rare thing, to be able to reach out and touch and feel the buzzing from the canvas, the cool porcelain regal and domineering and utterly self-contained. I could have spent hours, days, months in that room. I could have gently placed my fingers on each and every piece and slid it carefully from its place in the rack made of two-by-fours. I could look at each of those paintings, each of the Toulouse-Latrec lithographs, forever.

Every moment is eternity in the presence of art. In the presence of Art.

But, as I was discussing with a fellow adventurer prior to being overawed by Mrs. Bradley's collection, living with art is a very different experience than visiting it in a museum or a gallery. There is a subtle pressure, when you go out of your way for something, to experience it fully or to appreciate it all, and immediately. It's the Mona Lisa syndrome: visiting the Louvre inevitably means a trip to see the Mona Lisa, even though the painting is small, and the crush of people around it so thick and intense that you don't get to look at it for more than a moment before the tide of humanity carries you away. And this generally leaves one with a sense of ennui about the whole experience: "All this, and just for that? Sigh."



Treasures at the Lynden Sculpture Garden.



But living with art is different. Matisse in your living room can be sat and stared at for hours, just you and it and the quiet of your home. It can be absorbed, in slow sips rather than great gulps. It can be taken in fully.

And, Matisse in your living room can be ignored. It can be pushed to the back of consciousness while you read, or entertain, or play the piano, or eat a midnight snack, or chat, or write, or whatever it is you like to do in your living room. And then, at some point, you look up from what you were doing, and Matisse is still there, and you are struck anew, and you want to devour all that beauty again.

I want to live with art.

I Am A Girl Who Reads

Last year, as I was in the midst of realizing that the boy I was dating had a girlfriend and was a malignant narcissist, I discovered Thought Catalog.

I discovered it because there was a post that started making the rounds of social media. It was called You Should Date An Illiterate Girl, and it made me cry. I sat at my desk with tears dripping down my cheeks, my throat so tight I couldn't breathe, holding on to that knot desperately so that I didn't sob, so that my cries remained inside and only silent tracks of saltwater tracked down my face and over my chin and onto my neck and over the knot in my throat.

It made me cry because I saw myself as the illiterate girl. I saw myself as the settler and the one settled for, as the woman that would die with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of my capacity to love.

I shared it, of course, as I am wont to do.

And later, when the boy and I communicated for the first time since my sharing, he saluted me, "Hello, girl who reads."

I was confused.

I've been thinking about that piece lately, so I read it again.

And you know what? He was right. I am the Girl Who Reads. I can differentiate between the soullessness of someone that cannot love and the desperation of someone who loves too much. I can read the lie in the hesitation of the breath. I know the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and a lifetime's worth of bitter cynicism. I have said goodbye so many times I am comfortable with it. I can close a book and look at it with only a little longing, I can go back and reread the same words with nostalgia but not regret that the story doesn't change.

I do insist that my narratives be rich, that my supporting cast be colorful, that my typeface be bold. I demand these things because life is short and without good stories and good friends and beauty it is also boring. I will not be bored. I will not live a life unfulfilled.

And I'm sure that's why he couldn't love me. And I'm sure that's why I couldn't actually love him, despite all my best efforts.

I will tell my stories. I will read and read and read until I understand and then I will tell my stories. And my narratives will be rich and my characters will be colorful because that has been my life. I will live the stories I want to tell.

And it would be nice, at the end, when I am an old woman and I am fading into the dark of my own denouement,  if someone was there to hold my hand and stroke my brow and whisper that our life was good. But I won't sacrifice my stories to have that person.

I am a girl who reads. I have words. I have rhythms and cadence and connotation. I can feel love and truth in my skin and I want nothing more than to absorb beauty into my bones. And if you can really understand that, then you won't fail me. If you can really live with knowing that my stories come first and everything else comes second, you're not too weak to love me.

I Will Never Be A (Paid) Writer

This is a sad realization for me. Actually, it's a downright heart-shattering, soul-crushing revelation, but I guess it's time to face facts. I won't cry forever, I promise, just for the next ten years.

And the facts are, I will probably never get paid for anything I write. And no one will ever read it, apart from you few, dear, darling readers. (I love you. Don't ever leave me. No really: DON'T. Please.)

See, generally short-form publishing falls into two broad categories these days. Ponderous and heavily-researched tracts, and essays of emotional vulnerability humored up with liberal doses flippancy.

I don't have the discipline for research. Honestly. I just don't. I had a good run in college, and I'm sure that if you managed to find a professor that remembered me at all, they'd remember my stellar research papers because I always had interesting theses and I can actually construct a proper sentence and every once in a while I was able to make dry, dull, academia not make you want to slit your wrists through the judicious use of peppy adjectives and anecdotes.

(I am still pretty proud of some of the papers I wrote in college. "America shouldn't seek global hegemony because it is MORALLY INCONSISTENT WITH AMERICA'S VALUES" is one of my best works EVER.)

But, my papers would never be described as well-researched or well-annotated. I did the bare minimum in that regard, because I just don't like research.

Also, I never graduated college, so the idea that anyone would pay me to write academia is pretty funny.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is perhaps more promise! I mean, I do personal essays like no one's business. I can write about my life forever because I am just that narcissistic, and also because I have fully bought into the maxim that you must "write what you know" and really the only thing I know is my life. Everything else is mere theoretical knowledge, and that's not really knowledge so much as conjecture, since theory is grounded in naught but conjecture.

But then there's that "funny" requirement that is increasingly being satisfied by a display of flippancy that I just don't have. I'm not flippant. I am not ironic. I am intensely, terribly, vulnerably EARNEST. I'm like a puppy that just wants to be loved. (But I don't pee on the floor. I have a toddler that refuses to get potty-trained to handle that for me.)

I'm not funny. And I'm especially not funny when I'm displaying vulnerability because the last thing I want is for people to LAUGH at my EXISTENTIAL PAIN. Seriously. Who wants to have someone laugh in their face when they're crying? (On the inside, guys. I don't cry in front of people. I'm British that way.)

SO... that's that. No more dreams of a daily byline on Thought Catalog or hellogiggles. No more wistful longings that Salon would hire me to take over Broadsheet since Tracy Clark-Flory went back to being a full-time sex writer. (Added bonus of the Salon daydream: the idea that Alex Pareene would become my bestie. That man is ACTUALLY FUNNY, and about politics no less. Also, he smokes. It would be so great to have a bestie that smokes so I didn't feel so guilty about my still-occasional habit.)

I mean, I can keep plugging away on this collection of short stories that's clogging up my hard drive (and I WILL) and sketching out the outline of a novel, but no one's going to publish it unless my name already means something and my name will never mean anything because I'm a bad researcher and I'm not funny.

Life's a bitch.

(xo!)