The most dangerous seat on the bus

The other night, after meeting a friend for dinner, I took the bus home. I usually take the bus home from work, but it's the nice bus, the rush-hour bus filled with weary professionals and hipster students returning home after a day of office work or comparative literature studies. Dinner went late, so I took the bus that takes forever to get home. The bus that stops at nearly every single corner between Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The bus filled with loud cell phone conversations, blaring hip hop, and the occasional teenage fight before curfew kicks in. This bus makes me feel scared for absolutely no logical reason. Nothing bad has ever happened to me on this bus, but I'm the only quiet white girl in sight. Logic has a long way to go before it can fight the movies, the way we're taught to fear people who aren't quite like us, and the mysterious reasons why we make such effective zenophobic sponges.

In the July issue of The Sun, there's a great interview with Tim Wise, an author and activist who's fought to challenge white privilege and describe the racial situation in American to its bare, honest bones. He describes how girls are subconciously taught to fear black men, how denying white privilege and racism are tantamount to saying that someone else's experience has been false, and how fear cuts across all racial (and other) boundaries. He describes the fear that comes from challenging oppression, the fear of being considered an instigator, the fear of being considered a criminal based on one's skin color.

As I mentioned, this bus stops at every single bus stop known to man. As more and more people get on, folks are crowded in the back and standing in the aisle, and I'm the only person without a seat partner. As I start to look around, I'm wondering if I'm sitting next to the most dangerous seat in the bus - the seat next to the young white girl in the dress and heels.

I've written a lot about fear in the past, mainly because I'm a big fan of looking at it long enough until one of us blinks. Usually my fears only hurt me - they make me less open with other people, they make me focus on things that aren't terribly important. If my individual fears and our collective fears as a society when it comes to race - talking about it, turning it on its head, looking at it from every conceivable angle, and listening, paying attention always - are hurting other people, then that's a problem. I hope I can learn to be the one who blinks in that instance. And smile. And listen.

Viva la Farm: A Love Story in Photos

Praise the bread

Alabanza

Just a quick note tonight to share a poem that I find beautiful. It's titled "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100" by the poet Martin Espada. The poem is a memorial for the 43 employees who were working at the Windows on the World restaurant and lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.

Click here to visit Mr. Espada's web site and read "Alabanza"

Ms. O'Riordan

While debating whether to splurge on Dolores O'Riordan tickets (she's at the Fine Line in October), I thought of something funny that happened a couple of years ago. I was on a plane between Osaka and San Francisco, sitting between a traveling friend of mine and a rather uptight-looking businessman. My friend was looking through my CDs, and he asked who The Cranberries were after noticing how many of their discs I had. The businessman looks up and asks incredulously, "You don't know who The Cranberries are?!?"

~

To jog his memory, the businessman erupts into this Celtic, 50-syllables-per-second yodel a la Dolores O'Riordan. I giggled for the entire 2 remaining hours of the flight. Wherever you are, Mr. Businessman, you rock.

A horse of course

I've been drawn to horses lately. I was never a horsey girl, never played with horses, didn't want one, didn't see the use or beauty of them. Never wanted my wild heart to be broken, never cared for Fur Elise, never pretended to be Elizabeth Taylor.

Lately I've noticed how many of their likenesses I keep around.

Like any Svenska flicka, I keep a dala horse in nearly every room to welcome good fortune.

A coffee-stained red horse prances on the back of my writing journal.








Plus...I grew up next to one of the biggest (probably, right?) dala horses in the US.

The biggest is in Mora - I've never visited it, but it's on my list.


I had dinner with a friend on Wednesday night, and we were talking about bad news and catastrophic thinking. She mentioned how sad it was that we spend so much time putting these energies and thoughts about disaster into the universe...that a more positive approach would be to think and plan for what you hope will happen, for the good and lovely experiences that pass by so often when we're worrying about the bad ones that rarely seem to hit.

It made me think about Diomedes, the savage Thracian king who (in myth, at least) trains his horses to be just as savage by feeding them human flesh. In the end, Hercules feeds Diomedes to his own horses, and there's a great painting immortalizing this gory end. It's been five years since I last saw the painting, and I still keep an eye on the horses at the county fair.

Maybe when we feed the bad things in the universe pieces of ourselves - our thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreads - we let them keep living and, in the process, they develop a taste. There's something to be said about the hero who's eaten alive by the savagery he's created to protect himself.

I have a friend who says, "Every thought is a prayer...so be careful." He's also a pilot, so he knows how to sign off:

Blue Skies, Everyone!

Monsters

"The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes, savage Poseidon; you won't encounter them unless you stow them away inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up before you."

~C.P. Cavafy

Something I suspected all along...

"There is nothing more beautiful, more spiritual, than science.

The poet is a philosopher is a scientist."

~Swami Veda Bharati, July 22, 2009