Category: essays

I live a hundred million light years away from white people on this planet. I remember when I was about five, a white boy who lived next door to me took a hammer and smashed my fingers as I walked along the side of a fence between our houses. His mother stood on the back porch unflinching with her arms folded in front of her. There were no cell phones with video cameras. So, yes, in answer to any queries, I’m sure it happened. What did I do to provoke him. you ask. What, under the sun, could I have done to deserve that?

This is my America, A hundred million light years away from whiteness.

The founding fathers, all but one, owned slaves in order to amass fortunes. They considered my people chattel. In the same breath, these founding fathers mouthed and penned the Constitution. Most Americans from the dominant culture can’t see the founding fathers as anything other than heroes, and me an ungrateful asshole because I consider them assholes.

I don’t have the capacity to have conversations with people whose eyes are sealed so tight. I wouldn’t have any energy left to live.

As I write this, I am worried that no one is quite like me, while at the same time I am certain that no one is. I want someone to give me a nod of understanding as I speak and I recount my life.

Someone died on the corner where I live last week. I saw the ambulance come, but I didn’t know what the fuss was about. I only heard the reason for the fuss later. The fuss was about an old man who died. He went to sleep on the sidewalk and never woke up.

The next day, I went walking because I woke up tired and groggy after sleeping quite a while. Walking is how I fix groggy. On my walk, I saw another old man lying on some grass next to a sidewalk. I approached a parked AC Transit bus close by. I stared at the driver through the door.  After a minute or so, the driver looked at me and held up four fingers, which meant she was leaving in 4 minutes.

After another minute, she opened the back doors of the otherwise empty vehicle. I saw that the front part of the bus was cordoned off with yellow tape from floor to ceiling, formed into a large X with a box around it. I stepped inside of the bus and pulled my mask down and asked, “how long has that man been laying on the ground?” She looked at me in the rear view mirror as I went on.  “Someone died on the corner by where I live the other day after he fell asleep. He was an old man, and that is an old man.

She replied, “have you said anything to him?” I shrugged and walked out as she watched.  I stood above the man as he lay motionless. I said, “how are you doing?” He stirred in his sleep. He was alive, but I didn’t know what else to do with one man on the street, among many. He remained asleep and I don’t know if he’s dead today.

He was black, and I’m black, and the bus driver was black, and I hate what I imagine privileged white people will feel as I am saying this. I am imagining pity. I just hate it. I ask the universe to transmute my hatred daily. Constantly. I do this for my own personal reasons having to do with healing. Anyway, I don’t regard what happens to us as acceptable any more than I would regard what might happen to someone that I know personally as acceptable.

And, I have many people from my past, including friends and family members that I am no longer in communication with, and I tell myself that I don’t know what to do with them other than distance myself from them for my own emotional health, and this is another story, or perhaps, it is the same story. And perhaps healing my own personal anger is part of the same story.

I passed the bus driver as I continued on my walk and I looked up at her as she looked at me. I shrugged and she nodded.

I remember how my own family’s response to having me live with them last year as I struggled to stay housed was to turn me down summarily.

I had put the old man by the bus out of my mind by the time I woke up the next morning feeling tired even though I slept ten hours. It was hard for me to get out of bed. Since the shelter-in-place orders, aside from feeling next to nothing, I have been feeling my mortality. I ate the coconut yogurt that I made several weeks prior.  I very much wanted to douse it with honey, even thought I don’t need sugars for six or seven really good reasons having to do with my general health and my relatively even-minded brand of sanity.

Technically, the yogurt still tasted good, and technically, I slept long enough, so maybe all of this is hard, even though I won’t run out of money by the end of the month for the first time since longer than I care to admit.

Maybe the black jogger, Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, that those two men shot is weighing on me. Or maybe my reading about that black paramedic, Breonna Taylor, that the police shot in her home after trying to serve an arrest warrant on the wrong residence weighs on me.

Maybe this tiredness ought to be happening because tiredness is my only possible reaction to what I witness with the emotional tools that I possess.

I’m going to talk with my editor about the plot to the novel I’m writing. I say that to help me embrace that this is not always how I will feel because this is a mere snapshot in time.

I want to believe that this time in human history, along with this helpless feeling and this dread, will pass on as part of something divined by the living earth, perhaps. I’m taking it upon myself to go a piece of the way toward my personal recovery from the western culture in which I am immersed, as I witness it stumbling and falling down.

Some days, I say to myself, I love this world so much, I want to watch it burn.

I want this instant to be one of seeing without mindlessly circumventing what is inside of me or in front of me. I want this to be an instant of reacting to things like old men who sleep or die on sidewalks next to empty buses as I wonder and wonder (don’t stop wondering) what I need to do next.

Some part of me, some front and center part, really doesn’t want to write this because I really don’t want white people thinking they understand what I am feeling.

One day when I was either in preschool or early grade school, I was out by the pomegranate tree that grew in the side yard next to the house where I grew up in East Oakland, My dad came up to me and told me about my ancestors. Time moved differently when I was four or five. It might have been the day after the kid hit me with the hammer, It might have been a week later, or the next month As he spoke an epoch had passed because the prior was out of my mind.

He said, “Your ancestors were slaves. White people enslaved us. They stole black people from Africa and they murdered them and they raped them and they beat them with whips and they tortured them and our ancestors had to work all of their lives in fields to make white people rich. He said Mo was mostly an Indian, and Mo’s mother was kidnapped from her tribe when she was four, and he spoke of how white people made her mother clean house for other white people.

I listened quietly, Mo may have been the untouchable person in my life that I looked up to. I woke up next to her at four in the morning the summer when I visited her in her tiny house in colored town in Arkansas. My great grandmother who took me fishing. I sat next to her on her back porch while she plucked a chicken or snapped beans.

I’d follow her to the yard in the predawn while she dug up night crawlers. She piled me into her pickup truck and she took me fishing. I sat at the kitchen table while she made tomato preserves that I would later eat with her buttermilk biscuits. She had a habit of going for hours without an utterance, and that silence lifted a burden from me. Her silence did something to my mind that saved it.

Her house sat on an unpaved street and with infrastructure so bad that some of the people had outhouses. It wasn’t until about a year ago, as I read the story of a present day segregated town in the south with no paved streets or adequate plumbing in the black section, that I realized how intentionally hateful the substandard conditions were. As a small child, I thought that my dad’s relatives merely lived in the country under rural conditions.

On that day with my dad by the pomegranate tree, after he told me about my ancestors, he got up and and he left me alone.

Eventually, later that week or later that day, my mother took my brothers and me to a store up the block called Lucky’s, filled with white people who worked and sometimes shopped there. It didn’t seem that we were particularly disadvantaged, and my dad’s talk gave me context for how the people looked at me. On that day, partly because of my mother’s chronic emotional instability, and partly because of what my father told me, my mind filled the world with a sense that anything awful might happen to me or all of us, and that my parents could do nothing to stop it.

It would take me decades to associate the two incidents, the boy with the hammer with his mother who looked on, with my father telling me of all of those things that happened during slavery and reconstruction, and to Mo’s mother when she was only four. Until I could make the association, I was so angry at my father for scaring me, that I hated him and then pushed the hatred away. Until lately.

Then, ever since I saw the video of George Floyd being murdered, I have been filled with the same sense of inconsolable anger and hatred, This time, with hatred of whiteness instead of my dad for scaring me, I am told by more than one wisdom tradition that hatred is like poison. Still, this emotion persists in my chest, affecting this body which houses my soul. So I ask that the universe, or my higher self or something bigger than me or the situation solve this. I ask that there be an altar that I can place it on.

I went vegan. It was as if the universe was trying to tell me that there will be no simple answers. I don’t have the digestive system to consume grains. I ate wheat for decades, and I got that thing where you can’t eat gluten any more, It got worse, yadda, yah.

I can’t disengage from the oil economy as neatly and easily as I would like to. I would like to heal everything as simply as a slogan ending in an exclamation point. Really, I would. I would like to manifest a cob house and grow my own food, yet, I have no home because of gentrification and displacement.

I would be dead if it weren’t for the oil economy because at age 13, I had to have an operation for a tumor that was disintegrating my jaw. The question for me becomes how do I proceed to save the world after I have completed step one of getting off my prayer and meditation cushion.

I look at people who, with millions of dollars, believe that they can never have enough. Up until now, they can’t stop doing and start being. They have the inability to share. One of them I know intimately. A viral illness infecting our mind states has people with more money than they can ever spend in a lifetime believing that they need more. So this is the dilemma that I find myself in while inhabiting a country that drives this mind states.

As a culture, this country hasn’t cured itself of worshiping the forefathers who owned slaves and sanctioned genocide while proclaiming that all men are created equal. Its citizens are barely cognizant of how America became the cultural force that it is. If the Constitution is beautiful to read, I suspect that the energy of its writers as also infected it, no matter how eloquent, and us.

I’m not nearly done, but so far, I have concluded that healthy mind states can also infect the culture like an advantageous virus as I consider myself to be the earth walking, talking, and taking guidance from the earth under my feet, guidance on how to heal itself and ourselves through me. In my case, I am healing bitterness and cultivating compassion and understanding. In my case, I attempt to hold dilemmas that I cannot instantly solve. For me, this looks like learning more and more every day about how my very existence is devastating to the planet, even while eating mono crop vegetables, which can include soy, a lot of which is grown in what used to be rain forests of Argentine. For me, living means holding heartbreak and choosing to have enough room to also find healing.

And for me, living looks like a lot of my own food prep.  It means considering where my food was grown and how it was treated, for example, bio-dynamic and humanely. I consider the time and the skills that I take in food preparation a gift that I asked spirit for some years ago. When I run out of funds, I have compassion for myself, for all I have been through as I heal my blockages to abundance, and I buy what I need to eat to stay nourished as best I can, as I consider this life I’ve been given a gift.

From the Work That Reconnects

The whales. Let’s save the whales. And the rainforest. Species are going extinct with each breath I take. Did I mention that the world had gone mad? I am Gaia therefore I speak for her. So my heart breaks for all of those creatures and plants and communities.

Continue reading “I am in relationship to what?”