Green roof frame up!

New cob house pics! This past week I got really frusrtated with just having a hole in the ground to show for my efforts after months (the ground's been frozen, but still), so I really prioritized getting the green-roof section framed out. Lookin' good!

I had some help (Margo, Josh shoutouts), but did a lot of the (rough) plumbing on my own with quick and dirty winches. Gotta love those knots!



I'm dog sitting Riley, back to her old stomping grounds. She's loving these lumber tarps - she goes in one end and pops out the other. Loves tunnels, this dog.

A view of the make-shift greenhouse/tool storage and roof frame.

A view of just the roof frame. The shape is kinda hard to descibe. See the designs here.

Reflections from day one of Dismantling Racism part 2: Holding Contradictions

Some context: I’m participating in dR Works second series on dismantling racism.  While part one focused on building our oppression/power analysis, part two is focusing on action and personal sustainability in the work with an emphasis on “holding contradictions.”  To me, this speaks both to the dominant white supremacy culture value of “either / or” thinking AND to the spiritual significance of the work.  These are my take aways from today.

Our day’s activities were great (including our amazing, stage setting opening documents)… the company was incredible.  I felt wildly appreciative to share space with folks that already shared a history of holding and a willingness to deepen their power and oppression analysis.  I doubly felt appreciative of the trainer/facilitators (Tema, Michelle and Vivette) – it was clear to me how my being there as a partipant (rather than facilitator myself) helped me to have the space I often need to do my own processing…and how without it, I end up processing when I mean to be doing work as facilitator.  It really reminded me how I need to do my OWN work so as to keep it from being laid on other people.
The living wisdom was really flowing.  People spoke from their heart, from “new” places very alive at the moment.  Thankfully (not surprisingly, given the shared analysis we’ve got), there was little theorizing apart from experience.  People shared tears and laughter, all the while pointing at personal truths and questions that we helped each other bubble forth.

At the end, we were given some prompts to summarize the day.  I’m not going to offer the full context here (since it’s a process that needs one’s presence to really grapple with, I think), but I’ll just offer we were grappling with notions of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, pleasure and displeasure, and what “busy” feels like… especially within the context of doing dismantling racism work or holding an analysis while doing related work.  Then we were asked to consolidate these into actionables that we could hold or contribute towards.  These are my reflections from that process.  They speak to MY experience of the workshop, obviously, not what the workshop necessarily WAS about or other people’s experience.

I decided to consolidate my take-aways into questions to hold, reminders that seemed ‘true’ for me then, and a practice or two.

Questions:

• If silence about pieces of our shared culture (experiences of marginalized groups, etc.) corresponds with personal pain, which I believe it does, how does this link work?  Through what emotional / community channels?  How does this represent our inter-relatedness… ?
• Why is it that it’s often easier for those with a “helping” bent to go to great lengths for others than to give even bare-bones self-care to themselves (ourselves)?
• How are the valid, intuitive realizations from life coopted by the “should” mindset, thus turning living wisdom into dead, conceptual tools to use against ourselves and others in the form of guilt and self/other flagellation? 
• An elder there spoke to a wisdom of experience: knowing better in advance what’s worth her time (because it would be satisfying in the end, even if not pleasurable in process) and what’s not (because it wouldn’t be satisfying in the end or pleasurable in the process).  What helps increase this intuitive wisdom besides experience?  Accountability/community?  Practiced memory/reminders/life reviews?  
• Sometimes dominant culture is “comforting” – even if just because we know the (fucked-up) score, the rules.  But how do we continue to "flip that bit" so what was comforting, but dissatisfying becomes uncomfortable?  
• Time, and beliefs about it, is heavily laden with a capitalist history.  Shared time came about because of individual community’s spirit/worship…which was co-opted by capitalist merchants into a universal time for trade. Don’t forget.  But what are healthier views of time?

Remember: 

• Wisdom flows.  When I try to hold onto stale wisdom from previous moments, I’m more likely to hold them as conceptual tools to judge self or other.  When I let go of judgements/wisdom, and return to what I’m doing (especially within the context of practice) more wisdom appears like a spring.
• I need to touch the major projects where I express my highest values often.  This represents the practice of “speaking my values” (“practice” because action there must be creatively discovered, and in that process I help define these values I, well, VALUE).  After speaking/doing, by experiencing my action and reactions, I can listen to the echo of these actions, taking that experienced echo as wisdom in the moment.  It’s nearly a conversation.
• “You can do anything for 15 minutes.”  Somehow treating the 15 minutes as nearly disposable, “not that big of a thing,” allows me to do 15 minutes of self care.  Or sitting.  Seems sad.  But it points to, I think, some sort of intimidation with ourselves....
• The dominant culture, especially capitalism (fuck run-away capitalism!) attempts to privatize, professionalize, commercialize vulnerability… after first creating it in order to sell unsatisfying “needed” products.  Sharing vulnerability with each other is therefore a radical, transgressive and liberatory act.    
• My stress arrives when experiences in my life are experienced as myriad and disparate, coming AT me (‘hither seers’, to use that Tibetan expression).  Then I experience the day full of teaching, logistics, resisting, cleaning, learning…all these different activities running me ragged.  A sign I’m working in that frame is that my activities feel “incomplete” (reminds me of this Taoism quote on complete actions) and boundaries I need to create to move on to the next thing feels artificial and imposed by the activity, not natural and born from my one practice.  This called to mind O Sensei’s saying, “Use the many to strike the one.  This is the discipline of the warrior.”  My satisfaction comes from the exact opposite experience: instead of many coming at, I sense that I’m doing one thing: practice.  Practice carries me, mostly relaxedly, through myriad activities that “awaken me” to the self.  This reminded me of Dogen’s famous lines: “to study the buddha way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be enlightened by the myriad things/activities; body and mind completely drop away, and no trace of enlightenment/realization/liberation remains; and this no trace continues endlessly.”  Of course, the increased capacity to reframe one’s experience coming AT you is both a consequence of spiritual practice AND a consequence of privilege.  I’m reminded of the Jane Elliott quote about how difficult it is to reframe challenge as opportunity when dominant culture beats at you, as it does for those that hold multiple marginalized identities.  Then again, this is exactly the framing that MLK gave to experiencing oppression for the cause of justice.  BOTH AND!  Like holding great faith, great doubt, and great determination to reconcile the irreconcilable... Hakuin, I believe.  Holding contradictions...
• I can notice when I’m falling off the path, getting stressed and run ragged by my “things come AT me” frame by my blinking, among other things.  Those microexpressions of wanting to hide or wiggle out of some situation have a mental TASTE.  Blinking, a certain kind, is one of my tells.
• I was reminded of the David Allen GTD comment about work being most satisfying when it allows you a chance to be competent (skills to contribute and grow in), purposeful (speaking to your values) and autonomous (an ability to make choices) to some degree.  But, of course, privilege and our crazy individualistic culture also grants autonomy through privileged access to choices, purpose as access to work selectivity, and gathering skills at a fast rate (through education access).  Still… there’s something there!
• Knowledge of White privilege and a power/oppression analysis in general seems to move many people to beat themselves and others up.  Given that I came to a building analysis through meditation, I somehow didn’t do a lot of this.  Instead, I noticed today, the analysis seemed to be the essential counter-point to my crazy meritocracy stories, among others I knew to be false but didn’t have language to fill them to empty, in a sense.  It helped me LOOSEN my grip on certain cultural stories, to know less instead of knowing more (or so much more depth that I couldn’t pretend to parse out the full story, sans contradiction, anymore?).  The looseness seems like a wonderful consequence of attempting to hold contradictions like these…contradictions that a power analysis (or some understanding of emptiness & dependant origination, I think) really points to.  Like, yes, I’ve been practicing for some time and have some fruits of practice…and yes, I have privilege and access and safety nets and neuroses that contribute to the same seeming fruits of practice.  I’m the union of goods and bads, of, impossible to divvy up into camps that aren’t interdependent.  So then, in that space of holding contradictions, not knowing and knowing, it seems I still have to act with the union of humility and conviction.  Hmm.  Reminds me of my previous experience/insight about how hard I was trying to understand MY practice.. before I noticed that "MY" practice is heavily contributed to by others.  I felt like I was loosening my compulsive and graspy grip on a locked door's knob.
• We have a culture that says “go go GO!”  This is in muscle memory.  I’ve clearly noticed this training and teaching tai chi and aikido over the years.  It’s a great reminder why we practice tai chi excruciatingly slow.  What in particular is, uh, excrutiated?  The muscles, yes, if you’re practicing chen properly… but also the culturally trained impatience in the mind/body.  Same with sitting still in zazen, I think.  Hmm.  Another vote for sitting still as being an act of resistence, transgression, liberation.  Like zazen needs more frames to get caught in, geeze.
• Satisfaction and dissatisfaction are different than pleasure and displeasure.  I think this is where Therevadan texts point to the difference between dukkha, which is invariably here while we’re deluded, and the three flavors of experience: positive, negative, neutral emotions, sensations, etc.  
• At the dividing line between my friend/acquaintences and close friends are all these emotions and sensations.  I often feel like whatever wisdom and faith I have is what people most naturally appreciate. Sharing tools to do emotional work or process conflict/challenge/grief often seems welcome.  But equally, for me, is great doubt, with myself and my path.  There appreciation and excitement for strange things (like injuries I get, getting Lyme disease, etc.) in almost equal proportion to my enjoyment of little things.  But those doubts and stranger appreciations, that to me feel part and parcel with the faith, don't often seem as welcomed by even close partners.  That line that I feel I have to hold is marked by embarassment, guilt over bring stress to others (with parts of myself that don't stress me), doubt, excitement about difficult changes... but joy, opporunity, excitement about practice, and a forgetfulness of myself too.  But, definitely, only being able to share the experience of life that's palatable to others, a subset of what's palatable to me, gives me some feelings of lonliness or isolation.  Thankfully, I have a community/sangha that supports me ... friends of mine that often seem to be in a similar intersecting of aikido, zen buddhism and social justice practices.  Whew, I'm glad you all are around.

Remaining Actions:

• Pose some of these questions to mentors of mine, close and far, even if in casual ways.  
• Loosely, as an experiment, try to frame some “ideal” days and practice them in order to take lessons from the experiment… given that I’ve got these ideals anyway.
• Intentionally touch my major values (ha ha, sounds so funny) daily if possible, but often at least.  Know I did so.

Pile of logs. Big logs.

At last nights party, folks helped me fell some trees and begin shaving them for posts for the green roof. Hoooray! Today I dragged them around so I could better measure, cut and finish shaving them. Then for some extra exercise, took a run with the dog. Yay! Beautiful wood, to boot...