Got me some free grow beds!

I went on craigslist's free section and someone happened to be giving away 2 4'x6' elevated beds. Some guy in brooklyn whose family gives tours of New York and another nice guy were hoping to get them to a good home. They are worth about $350, he told me as we loaded the lumber into my car. It was a rainy spring night in some vaguely familiar section of brooklyn. The wood is treated, so it should last a long while, he explained. I am very excited by the prospect of getting them up and running. I have my starters ready, and my direct seed packets, but there is a rather large and intimidating pile of brush standing between me and my goal. So I will have to bag up a heck of a lot of stuff before I'll have the space cleared for my lovely raised beds.

Still, I am grateful that the universe conspired to give me free grow beds (well, almost free- I bought them a 6 pack of Magic Hat beer, one I'd never tried, as compensation. We don't have to understand how something is going to happen, we just have to have faith that it will. The details will take care of themselves. I find that this part, having faith and letting go, is the hardest part. But I am willing to try because it seems impossible to grow without faith and letting go. in the garden I find I lack faith that the seeds I have planted will amount to anything. Sometimes I lack that faith in myself as well, that I will not amount to anything much, just be another being come and gone without much disturbance to the current. I've always wanted to be an instrument of positive change, a revolutionary. My lack of faith causes me to crowd the earth with seeds, and the metaphor stretches over to my life as well. Rather than focusing, I disperse many seeds of ideas. Some stick, some don't. They seem to prioritize themselves. I may disappoint others from time to time, but I am happy.

Reza is refusing to nap, having rested for only 5 minutes. Now, if I'm not mistaken, he is banging on the wall! This kid is a trip. I can't imagine what he'll be like in a few years!

How to Read

I contend that, for the most part, we read like we live our lives.  We make generalizations and then we filter our experiences so that they confirm the generalizations.  Gillett says, “A generalization about life is like a fixed compartment or a square box.  If life does not fit the box, we distort it until it does” (31).  While many generalizations from experience are good and instructive, some generalizations may become extreme and actually limit the believer.  Gillett gives an example of this, showing how a useful generalization might become limiting if it is taken to extremes:

If a boy’s father beat him whenever he spoke out as a child, the generalization that the father is dangerous and that it is probably therefore unwise to speak out in front of him would probably be useful.  It is already a generalization because the father is almost certainly not dangerous in all situations.  Nevertheless it is a reasonable protective assumption.  If however the generalization becomes more extreme, for instance: “Men are dangerous and it is unwise to speak out in front of men in general,” then the boy would begin to distort reality and to limit his choices.  When the generalization becomes more extreme still, for example, “People are dangerous and I will never speak out in front of anybody again,” then he lives with an oppressive illusion and his choices are crippled.  It may affect every relationship with every man for the rest of his life.  Quite automatically he will assume that men are threatening whether they are or not.  He will misinterpret benign expressions as hostile.  He will even find a negative motive for a kind action: “He only gave me that because he wants to control me.”  In short, he cannot see reality because it is distorted by his belief (34-5).

Similarly, when we read, we become readers who “know how to read.”  After the beginner’s mind (more on what this is soon!) wanes and wears thin, we read generalizations into the text that correspond to our beliefs, and then we push the text to fit this contrivance.  We come to both life and texts with satchels of generalizations and stereotypes hanging from us.  There are the ones that come from our given culture and country (or cultures and countries), from our school and education,  from our class, from and about gender, about body image, wealth, power, about aging and death, just to name a few.  We use this information to confirm or justify our relationship to the text, which is often something that we decided long before we ever opened the front cover.  We participate while we swear up and down that we are merely observing. 

How to Read a Book, the 1970s revised version of the 1940 bestseller, explains in plain language exactly what the title says.  Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren explain in detail the different levels of reading that exist (which they define as Elementary, Inspectional, Analytical, and Syntopical), and offer practical information on different ways to read.  The book explains the activity and the art of reading—how to “come to terms with an author” by understanding their use of terminology, how to determine an author’s message, how to criticize a book “fairly,” how to agree or disagree.  How to Read a Book might be seen as a book explaining what to do with the information in a book, how to relate to a text, and even how to manipulate the text according to your own needs.  They outline a few concrete ways to configure the elements involved in reading.  I think that Adler and Van Doren’s exploration of what one should do when one reads offers a compelling springboard from which to launch my own suggestions of what might be done when one reads.

Reading as an adult is not often an exercise in discovery.  It frequently becomes little more than a way to affirm what we already “know” of the world.  We choose our genre of choice—news journalism, juicy romance, detective thriller, celebrity tabloid, comic book, instruction manual, academic journal—and we approach the text with a pretty good idea of what to expect, and what not to expect, from it.  We do not anticipate finding spiritual nourishment, for example, in Cosmopolitan magazine, and we do not imagine finding a new hairstyle, for example, writ into the stories of the bible.  We anticipate new information from reading, but we generally expect for literatures to stay true to genre. These expectations create the circumstances where we are hardly ever disappointed, perhaps because we ourselves are disabling other possibilities.

 Adler and Van Doren illustrate this phenomenon, seeing it as reading to gain information rather than understanding.

There is the book; and here is your mind.  As you go through the pages, either you understand perfectly everything the author has to say or you do not.  If you do, you may have gained information, but you could not have increased your understanding.  If the book is completely intelligible to you from start to finish, then the author and you are as two minds in the same mold.  The symbols on the page merely express the common understanding you had before you met (7).

The majority of reading that most of folks do in everyday life is this one, reading to gain information.  This type of reading “is at once thoroughly intelligible to us” (9).  We are not fumbling in the language, or struggling with meaning.  They explain, “Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started.  Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth” (9).

Adler and Van Doren make a distinction between reading from which one gains information and reading from which one gains understanding. 

Let us take our second alternative.  You do not understand the book perfectly. Let us even assume—what unhappily is not always true—that you know enough to know that you do not understand at all.  You know the book has more to say than you understand and hence that it contains something that can increase your understanding (7).

The authors reveal that what they are calling “understanding” is really an analytical frame or paradigm, something that might “throw a new and perhaps more revealing light on all the facts he [the reader] knows” (9). In this second sense of reading, reading to gain understanding or to possibly reframe our existing understanding, the book has “more to say” than the reader can comprehend.  Adler and Van Doren point to an inequality between the author and the reader as a prerequisite of such reading.   

Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader.  The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding.  Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing.  Here by “learning” is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess (9).

Adler and Van Doren ask a valid question- what to do with these texts you can’t understand?

What do you do then?  You can either take the book to someone else who, you think, can read better than you, and have him explain the parts that trouble you. (“He” may be a living person or another book—a commentary or textbook) (7).  Or, instead of enlisting the help of others, Adler and Van Doren suggest “doing the job of reading that the book requires” (8).  This is accomplished in only one manner.

Without external help of any sort, you go to work on the book.  With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more.  Such elevation, accomplished by the mind working on a book, is highly skilled reading, the kind of reading that a book which challenges your understanding deserves (8, their emphasis).

I am particularly intrigued by this second type of reading that they suggest.  In it there is just the reader and the text working with and on each other.  This suggests becoming an active and mindful participator with the book.  In a sense, the reader becomes the co-creator of the text.  We are invited by the text to cast off our usual way of thinking about things, in order to meet the book wherever it is.  Rather than casting our net of generalizations over the book, we let it fly free.   And as the text soars about the landscape, we are free to choose who we are in relationship to the soaring text, what we are going to do about it, or with it, if anything.  I am interested in what we can do in these readings Adler and Van Doren recommend.  How can we read in such a way that reading enables us to get to know ourselves?  What would have to change about reading itself in order to create these different readings? Can we attempt to rearrange the elements of reading, as Colás suggests, to activate new possibilities? 

I believe that reading in a different way will produce different readings, ones that do not necessarily reinforce stereotypes and reiterate damaging social meta-narratives, ones that might invite us to challenge and question our limiting views of ourselves and the world.  Thus, reading becomes an exercise in freedom and an invitation to power.  There is a way in which we can read texts “to live” as Colás asserts in his work.  There is a way in which we can read texts not to dissect them or manipulate them to prove a point, but rather to learn tools for life.  These tools can range from the practical to the esoteric, from the mundane to the spiritual. 

These readings also engender new ways of knowing, moving the notion of “knowing” out of our heads and into our bodies, growing there to embody the understanding that Adler and Van Doren describe.  I call these alternative ways of knowing “feminine” or “Yin,” because they call on more subtle and indirect understandings that are very different from what we often consider “knowing” or “knowledge.”    Far from an essentialist reiteration of cultural stereotype, I draw from the Eastern concept of “the feminine” as a necessary energetic force bound to and interdependent with its male counterpart.  Gloria Karpinski is an author who is very much in touch with forms of Yin knowing.  She will describe a vision she had while meditating, or even intentionally “take” a subject into meditation and report on her findings.  She trusts herself as a vessel of knowledge.  One of the big myths of Western culture is that knowledge comes from outside the body; her work confounds that idea and encourages others to do so as well. 

I define Yin knowledge as knowledge or information that comes from the inside out, whereas masculine or Yang knowledge goes from the outside in.  Thus, Yin knowledge would be found in intuition, dreams, experiential knowing, embodiment, and various other forms or directives that come from within the individual.  Yin knowledge can also come out of the individual in different forms, such as poetry, myth, art, and symbols.  Yin knowledge, for me, encapsulates the many alternative ways of knowing that fall—like the black swirl in the yin/yang symbol—into darkness and outside of normative ways of knowing.  Yang knowledge, by contrast, includes what we are told, what we read, and various other directives that come from outside of the individual.  Gloria Karpinski defines Yang knowledge in Barefoot on Holy Ground as “specificity, knowledge, hierarchy, dominance, and possession, extremes that led to separations from each other and the earth” (43).  The construction of “knowing” is more often than not Yang—rational, linear, dichotomous thought—and it is privileged and maintained through more widespread and/or more deeply engrained cultural frames.  These frames are upheld through interpersonal relationship to and communication of an ideology that seems to breed a climate of fear.  More subtle experiential or extra-linguistic ways of knowing are given little currency because they can’t be accurately transmitted from within this framework, and the corporate/academic culture makes it feel risky to try to work beyond the existing frames.

Both masculine and feminine knowledge are ever-present in balanced amounts in everything, though we might not always perceive that fact.  Karpinski explains the specifics of the relationship between Yin and Yang.  She writes that “The Taoists describe the movements within wholeness as yin (feminine) and yang (masculine).  The one is always in process of becoming the other.  We are not one or the other; rather we are both.  Yin and yang are movements of energies, not identities” (53).  Margo Anand confirms this, “Each of us has an Inner Man that is associated with dynamic, active energy; with setting and achieving goals; and with getting things done.  This is what the Taoists call the Yang aspect of our nature—the engaged, noncontemplative self.  And each of us also has an Inner Woman, a natural capacity for letting things happen, for going with the flow of life without setting goals, for relaxing and being playful.  This is what the Taoists call the Yin aspect of our nature—the contemplative, intuitive, communing self.”  If we want to read holistically, we must approach wholeness by reading in a way that incorporates the feminine as well as the masculine.  Karpinski reminds us that “This [is] but an outer dramatization of the collective inner drama, a drama that is neither male or female but human” (43).

Part of the difficulty we have been having with introducing feminine paradigms is that we have been attempting to use masculinist frames and masculinist lenses to perceive feminine knowledge.  We strive to capture multiplicity, simultaneity, and interdependence within a system of linear and dichotomous classifications.  This is similar to seeing an iridescent-blue-and-black butterfly pinned to cork in a display case.  If we think that we can “know” the butterfly by observing it in the case, we are missing out on most of its story.  We have no idea of its starts as a caterpillar, of the goings-on inside the cocoon.  We don’t know what it’s like to see a butterfly in an open field.  We don’t even know that it flies (though we might assume so based on wing-size and other assessments).   Feminine ways of knowing, by contrast, are engendered primarily through experience. 

Certain practices help to cultivate Yin knowledge.  Two of these elements are beginner’s mind and mindfulness meditation, which draw the attention inward and widen the lens so that we might see holistically.  The way of reading I am advocating—and practicing—in this book takes the usual elements of reading and combines with them the practice of mindfulness meditation and the practice of creative expression, which often puts us in touch with our beginner’s mind.  By cultivating different practices, we can know things in a different way.  Practice in this case becomes a revolutionary tool because it is reiterative and re-inscriptive.  One key to personal and global change is cultivating a regularly recurring practice that corresponds to and confirms what one wants to see existing in the future, whether that thing be world peace or a new car.  This is a literal spin on Gandhi’s words, “Be the change that you want to see in the world.”  I am not proposing that we abandon other ways of reading entirely.  Rather, I am advocating some people sometimes trying something different, ostensibly, reading such that the text is a mirror that reflects ourselves back to ourselves, reading as a journey of self-exploration.

One of the reasons I am advocating for a different method of reading is because I believe that reading books gives us an opportunity safely and intimately examine our beliefs.  Books can take us all around the world, deep into different cultures, often seen through the eyes of someone possessing a completely different belief system.  They can also take us into the deeper inner workings of lives of people we see as “like us.”  The most interesting thing that we encounter when we read is not the “other,” but ourselves.  Through our judgments, likes, dislikes, thoughts and emotions—all of which often come out during reading—we are able to get a firmer grasp on what it is that we believe.  Like the meditation cushion, reading can create a safe haven in which our thoughts and actions cannot harm another, but can be explored.  I truly believe that the combination of reading and meditation might engender some very different understandings of the self.

 

Decolonizing Our Minds Using Dr. Richard Gillett's Change Your Mind, Change Your World

                I believe that oppression is not (only) a complex interweaving of insurmountable institutional policies and practices, it is also a condition of mind.  If we are able to decolonize our own minds, as everyone from Ngugi Wa Thiongo to Franz Fanon has implored us to do, then we can begin to navigate the landscape before us on our own terms.  In Rock My Soul, bell hooks writes, “Used politically in a relationship to governments, the term decolonize means to allow to become self-governing or independent.  In a personal sense decolonizing the mind means letting go of patterns of thought and behavior that prevent us from being self-determining” (69).  To do this requires us  to look within and examine our beliefs, and ultimately to abandon those beliefs that are limiting.  This is a difficult but very worthwhile practice, in my opinion.  To some this may sound like mind control.  But I would argue that while we cannot control circumstances, we can exercise control over our reactions to them.  We need not be at the mercy of our emotions.  Through  examining the numerous factors that contribute to our beliefs, such as culture, race, family, gender—to name but a few—I think we are able to observe our own beliefs with less attachment and more objectivity. 

    Identity is an umbrella term used to describe an individual’s comprehension of herself as a discrete, separate entity.  I think of identity as primarily threefold, consisting of a personal identity (or the idiosyncratic things that make a person unique), a social or cultural identity (or the collection of group memberships that may or may not define the individual), and a psychological identity (or a person’s mental model of him or herself, comprised of self image, self esteem, and individuation).  My work draws on the interconnections and fluidity of all three of these ways of looking at one’s identities, acknowledging the multiply-determined ways we identify with the world around us.  Identity is not a fixed thing, but rather floating, adaptable, and contingent.  

But identity is not just what we know; it is also how we know.  If we call on intuitive powers, rational thought, gut reaction, dreams, if we are able to express ourselves through drawing, through dance, through words, through song, this is also a part of who we are and how we identify. From within our identity, from inside our world view and our complex network of identifications, we function.  Our identity serves as the motherboard of our mental computer, the set of processing systems that tell us what to do with the information coming in.  

If identity is the series of identifications that mediate how we know, the self is perhaps who or what we are striving to know. I see the self as being a multi-layered entity, and though I will try to give names to different elements of the self that I explore, one must bear in mind that these are fluid and contingent categories that are in no way hard, fast or definitive.  Jiddu Krishnamurti writes his holistic version of the self:

                   You know what I mean by the self?  By that I mean the idea, the memory, the           

                   conclusion, the experience, the various forms of nameable and unnamable intentions, 

                  the conscious endeavor to be or not to be, the accumulated memory of the 

                  unconscious, the racial, the group, the individual, the clan, and the whole of it all, 

                  whether it is projected outwardly in action, or projected spiritually as virtue; the 

                  striving after all this is the self (126).

When I unravel Krishnamurti’s complex bundle, I see the self as having some identifiable key components.  There is, for example, the Self with a capital “S.”  I like to think of this as the spiritual, philosophical Self within us that observes.  Rather than the one acting, it is the one observing the acting.  It is linked, for some, to a concept of the divine, where this Self might be seen as our God Self, our innermost consciousness that is linked with all other consciousness.  With the notion of the Self as God, where “I am” is God, our very existence indicates our godliness.   For others, a better image might be that the Self is your primordial, foundational, or true self. 

There is another self as well, the “self” with quotation marks and a lowercase “s.”  This might be seen as synonymous with the ego.  It is a gross accumulation of positive and negative beliefs about ourselves, from “My Auntie always told me I had a nice smile” to “I have my father’s temper” to “Women can’t be president” to “We are all born in sin” to “I’m a failure” to “Nice girls don’t give it up” to “Being poor is shameful.”  Furthermore, it is the hidden beliefs that we do not even realize we have.  It is what we think everybody else sees when they look at us.  Our “self” is constructed around and within these various conscious and unconscious beliefs.  Some of these beliefs come from our immediate society, from our parents, friends, or members of our race, social class, gender, or sexual community.  Others are taught by our religions, schools, or by the media.  Others are ideas that figure into our national identity, the ways in which we position ourselves globally and grow to embody on a personal level many of the things we tell ourselves about our nation.  Still others function on a preconscious level and may be erroneous conclusions that we drew on our own based on the dynamics of our family. 

Krishnamurti says that this identification process is the essence of the self (22).  These messages are tossed to us by friends and family, pushed on us in school and in hierarchical social interaction, vomited on us by corporate advertising telling us what is and is not possible, and for whom.  Our “self” is formed in relationship to these imposed beliefs.  These beliefs end up creating the very limiting framework from within which most of us operate, similar to Marilyn Frye’s birdcage in her seminal feminist essay, “Oppression.”  She writes:

                Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot 

                see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic 

                focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see                 why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere... It is 

                only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take

                a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go 

                anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental 

                powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically 

                related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by 

                their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.  It is now 

                possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one

                can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will 

                without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to 

                understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged,

                whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced (176).

This is what happens to us all.  All of us began life as children, bursting with beginner’s mind.  Beginner’s mind is the state of wonderment and awe that comes from experiencing things for the first time (or as if for the first time, but more on this in Chapter 2, “Beginning with Beginner’s Mind”).  Within beginner’s mind is the joy of an unmediated interaction in and with the present moment, the dizzying stimulation of something genuinely new.  We begin life thinking that anything is possible, full of beginner’s mind, full of joy, but day by day, instance by instance, circumstance by circumstance, we are taught and re-taught limiting beliefs about who we are and what it means to be who we are.  Wire by wire, the birdcage is constructed.  There are mysteries and magic everywhere for a child, but these slowly disappear as we grow up.  As we grow out of our natural beginner’s mind, we begin to think we know “how things are,” we know “how it is,” we know “how it goes.”  We become “the ones who know,” who have figured it out.  Wire of experience by wire of information, we construct our world view, our understanding of how the world works, and our identity within that world, who we perceive ourselves to be in relation to that world.  From money to relationships to war to our own bodies, we decide upon a personal meaning for everything in our universe, based on our experiences and what information we have at the time.  We make meaning.  Our powerful drive to understand and make sense of the universe is the reason we abandon the awesome magic of beginner’s mind. 

There is a third self I would like to define: the self, lowercase, no quotation marks.  I see this self as both the Self and the “self,” everything that falls under the heading of “who I am.” 

The relationship between these selves is well articulated in Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsh.  In response to the question “Who am I?” God responds:

                Whomever you choose to be.  Whatever aspect of Divinity you wish to be—that’s 

                Who You Are.  That can change at any given moment.  Indeed, it often does, from 

                moment to moment.  Yet if you want your life to settle down, to stop bringing you such 

                a wide variety of experiences, there’s a way to do that.  Simply stop changing your 

                mind so often about Who You Are, and Who You Choose to Be (21).

John Dewey once wrote that “What man does and how he acts, is determined not by organic structure and physical heredity alone but by the influence of cultural heredity, embedded in traditions, institutions, customs and the purposes and beliefs they both carry and inspire.  Even the neuro-muscular structures of individuals are modified through the influence of the cultural environment on the activities performed” (30).  Our life goals are influenced by our view of who we are, what we are like, the way we would like to be (or would like to avoid being), as well as our perceptions of what is feasible.  These perceptions impact more than just our goals, however.  As psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr. Richard Gillett explains in Change Your Mind, Change Your World, “Our beliefs about ourselves and the world alter our perception, our memory, our hope, our energy, our health, our mood, our actions, our relationships, and eventually even our outward circumstances.” (13)   Thus, the self as a construct has far-reaching implications for behavior, self-esteem, motivation, and emotions as well as for interpersonal relationships, society, and culture.

When we look at the world around us, we often see and process information that confirms our beliefs while rejecting or ignoring information that contradicts them (Gillett 53).  It is hard to admit that our subjectivity is mired in the muck of our culture/s, our family/ies, and our own preconscious inventions.  It is difficult to acknowledge that what we thought was objective thought is actually quite subjective.  At times it is hard to even see that we participate by observing.  As Gloria Karpinski explains in When Two Worlds Touch, “Since the 1920s when Werner Heisenberg developed the uncertainty principle, science has been showing us that there is no such thing as purely objective analysis.  Our observation of a thing is part of its reality—and our own” (25).  Gillett points to physical and mental limitations to explain the futility of thinking in terms of “reality” or “truth.”  He writes, “There is no such thing as seeing the world ‘realistically,’ because our very sense organs and brain mechanisms are highly selective in the extent and quality of information they handle” (27).  Furthermore, as Gillett explains, “The way we see the world is based on our senses, our language, our innate prejudices, and our personal history” (27).    But there is freedom in acknowledging that our truth is not the Truth, but rather it is simply one truth, and it can be a temporary one if it is not serving us.  We might accept Antonio Benitez Rojo’s assertion that, “There cannot be any single truth, but instead there are many practical and momentary ones, truths without beginnings or ends, local truths, displaced truths, provisional and peremptory truths of a pragmatic nature” (151).

We cannot see the truth because we cannot handle the truth, quite literally.  The so-called “truth” of “what is” contains too much information for us to rationally process.

Gillett gives some valid sensory examples:

                We can see wavelengths of light only between about 400 and 700 millionths of a 

                millimeter.  This is a tiny proportion within the vast band of electromagnetic waves, of 

                X-ray, gamma-ray, ultraviolet, visible light, infra-red, microwave, and radio wave.  In 

                other words, most electromagnetic information simply passes us by….  Our hearing, 

                too, is limited by the capacity of our ears, which hear only wavelengths between 20 

                and 20,000 cycles per second, and have limited sensitivity and discrimination….  

                These examples illustrate the relativity of our senses…  Since much of what we believe 

                tends to be based on trusting our senses, it reminds us to understand that our senses, 

                for all their magic, are limited and highly selective encoders of information (28-9).

The capabilities of our senses place limits on what we can know of the information present at any given moment. 

Gillett also points to the distortions of language as a reason that we cannot grasp truth.  “The divisions and generalizations of one language create a different picture of reality from the divisions and generalizations of another.” (Gillett 29)  He uses another interesting example:

                Richard Bandler and John Grinder tell of a Native American language in  northern 

                California called Maidu, which divides the basic color spectrum into three colors.  In 

                Maidu there is a name for red, a name for green-blue, and a name for what we would                 call orange-brown-yellow.  In English the rainbow is usually seen as divided into seven                 colors.  So in English a yellow object and a brown object will be seen as different,                 while in Maidu they are the same color.  In physiological reality, the human being is                 capable of 7,500,000 discriminations of color between different wavelengths of light.                  So where we draw our lines between colors is arbitrary (29).

Language simply becomes a coded frame, a filing system for the millions of bits of information hurled at us.  It is very difficult to see and understand beyond the limits of one’s language.

Gillett makes another distinction about language—that there might be many words for slight varieties of a thing in a culture where that thing is seen as important.

                Eskimos have many different words for different kinds of snow; in Sanskrit, the                 language of ancient India, there are over fifty words for “consciousness”; while in                 Luganda (one of the languages of Uganda spoken by the tribe of Baganda) there are                 over forty different words for a banana.  To them a matoke is completely a different                 thing from a gonja, while to Americans, they are both just bananas (29).

Gillett points out that ultimately language functions as a handicap.  “No matter which language you speak, the divisions are matters of convention which determine how we organize our thoughts and how we classify the world” (29-30). Language functions as an important lens that mediates our experience of the world around us.

Julio Cortázar’s observation was really quite astute, that:

                Everything is fiction, that is to say a fable…  Our possible truth must be an invention, that                 is to say scripture, literature, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures of the world.  Values,                 tures, sainthood, a ture, love, pure ture, beauty, a ture of tures (384).

Upon examination, we notice that what we consider reality is really quite subjective, an invention.  How we choose to understand information determines what that information can and will mean.  Knowledge is, after all, an invention according to Nietzsche, as Foucault says, “behind which there is something quite distinct from it: an interplay of instincts, impulses, desires, fear, will to appropriation” (14).  Thus, the framing itself becomes part of the experience of the thing and, as such, the knowing of it.  It is a fiction we choose, and as such we are free to choose differently.

How I got this way...

It was a balmy Indian summer day, typical of Midwestern Septembers, during the first week of my first year in graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was invited to a cocktail reception that evening with the faculty of the Program in Comparative Literature, its returning students, and my cohort of seven new additions to the program.  I recall both my excitement and nervousness at the prospect of being among those who were to be my peers and teachers for the next few years to come.  After my first few days of signing up for classes, learning my way around the campus, waiting in line to buy books and course packs, and looking around town for a part time job or two, I was filled with anticipation at this evening’s activity. I felt very much like the filmic debutante awaiting her coming of age ball.  I couldn’t wait to meet the cast of characters that would play lead and supporting roles in this new act of my life’s story, one which would require of me the demanding role of playing a scholar convincingly for seasons and seasons of episodes.

My journey to grad school had been neither swift nor sure, and I had tremendous fear of what this new experience would entail, how it would change me, and whether I had the mettle to do and be what would be required in this new place.  I was—at that point—an interesting hybrid of hippie beliefs, urban dreams, and overachiever work ethic, rolled into a charismatic if confused ball that might fall under the heading of “seeker.”  I was searching for language that my undergraduate years had not afforded me, a level of dialectic and discursive acumen that would help me articulate my thoughts, most particularly around issues of race, gender, class and culture.  I was also searching for meaning in my own life which, after finishing college, had become more and more mundane.  Life, I was finding, was not an endless exploration of ideas, a constant unraveling of mysteries and weaving of tales, it was often something far less passionate and vital. 

Perhaps most importantly, I was a spiritual seeker of sorts, searching out a philosophical and metaphysical framework upon which I could base my life and my goals, an orientation from which I could view the world.   From an early age, I had been interested in the deeper metaphysics of the world around me.  I remember voluntarily going to church with friends of my family, for what reason I’m not really sure, though I think it had something to do with wanting to make sense of the world around me.  I chose to be baptized at 18, behind which again I cannot recall my logic.  I knew, perhaps, that there was more going on than what I had been taught to see.

So off I went, down tree-lined Michigan streets in late afternoon, to my welcoming reception for this new adventure that would surely change my life. As the canopy of verdant leaves cast its shadows across my excited form, I realized that I too was green, fresh-cut, and unripe. I don’t think I will ever have another moment like that in life—where I am so blessedly ignorant, so aware of my own ignorance, so excited by the infinite possibilities ahead of me, so observant of myself and my surroundings, so mindful of my own words and actions, so blown away by the words and actions of others—as my first year in graduate school.  I know now that I embodied what is known in Zen Buddhism as “beginner’s mind.”  In his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki affirms that “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few” (21).  I began my journey of many miles with unsure, un-calloused feet wending their wobbly way in party shoes.

I mingled with my peers, met my professors, had a glass or three of wine, then rolled up my sleeves and began the nebulous and quite unexpected process of defining myself (through conversation with the afore mentioned parties): as a scholar, as a woman of color, as a Black scholar, as a colorless and genderless being, as a soul, as a practicing heterosexual, as a middle class heterosexual soul of color.  I was awkwardly tagged as American, as Caribbean-American, as African-American, as Black American, as cosmopolitan, as world-dweller.  My identity was constructed unwittingly and off the cuff, for I became these things more in response to assumptions, questions, projections and derisions directed toward me by my peers and teachers than of my own volition. With each passing moment I became less and less sure of who and what I actually was.

But the party progressed.  The chair of my department began introducing us, one by one, to the merry band of scholars.  So and so is a specialist in Ketchuan language and literature with a Masters from such and such…  Mr. so and so comes to us with a Masters in blah blah from such and such school…  So and so hopes to study postcolonial lah-di-dahs and blah-zi-blahs…

I noticed a twinge of anxiety welling up in me.  I had no real credentials just yet.  Wasn’t that what I was there to get?  I didn’t know what Ketchuan was, and I wasn’t sure I really knew what some of those other things were.  I wasn’t even sure what I knew or didn’t know anymore.   Oh Jeez, I thought for the first of many times in my graduate career, maybe I’m not like these people! It didn’t cross my mind that my peers might have been feeling similar (or different) anxieties and inadequacies, or not even been aware of the naming ceremony taking place.

When he finally got to me, I mustered a discomfited smile.  Nicole comes to us from Amherst College, though she has spent the past two years in the workforce in New York (this was already an egregiously generous depiction.  My time in New York had been spent floundering about, working as an administrative assistant, teaching briefly at a school for troubled teens, ditching that to become a 1940’s style cigarette girl in the nightclubs, and eventually taking a job as a sales rep for a beer company.  I put the “irk” in “work” and turned it to “shirk,” so to speak.). 

Her bachelors is in English and French and she expressed an interest in studying, “non-normative literature.”  A light chuckle moved through the crowd at the “non-normative” part, and I wasn’t sure why.  Now I realize that the language simply fell outside of comparatists’ usual jargon and perhaps sounded naïve and underscored my un-indoctrinated rawness.  As a beginner, comparative literature and school in general still held all possibilities, whereas for those there it had already taken some shape, sometimes in limiting or conflicting ways.  Had he said that I was interested in employing Eastern metaphysical precepts and feminist methodologies to explore strategies for pragmatic critical reading of texts that tell stories of marginalized peoples toward the goal of liberation, I’m sure the response would have been different.  But I didn’t know how to say that yet.

Regardless of the reason why, I was crestfallen after these giggles and guffaws.  I felt like the butt of an inside joke, where everyone was on the inside pointing and laughing at me on the outside. 

Go figure, the girl interested in studying marginalized people felt marginalized herself yet again. 

This one moment really did set a tone for my graduate experience.  At first this was to my detriment, where I felt I did not measure up and perhaps I had no place at the university.  Half way into first semester, I had what felt like a nervous breakdown, but I realize now was more of a spiritual one.  My spirit was broken.  I had no faith in myself and my ability, no faith that the Universe had brought me to this place on purpose, no will to push on.  The workload was insurmountable, and I was certain that no other graduate student on the planet (let alone in my classes) felt the same way.  I was left only with my fears, my stress, my loneliness, and my painful certainty of inadequacy.

And then three strange things happened to me!  I’m not completely sure of the order of them, but they all conspired to teach me a wonderful lesson, without which I may not have made it through even that first year, let alone my second, third, fourth, fifth…

One was I fell in love.  What a wonderful gift to have happen to me at that moment.  How delicious and sedating was love’s elixir!  How amazing was the way in which love’s drunken stupor mandated a complete reconfiguring of my priorities!  Whereas first semester I would literally sit in the company of others and think “This is not so much fun that I should be here instead of reading,” my second semester was spent truly basking in the company of others, staying up until all hours of the night talking, playing cards, watching movies, and most importantly, remembering that I was alive and human and connected and caring by being completely head over heels for someone.  I learned to skim books, articles and essays, to continue to do my best, but without the guilt and self-doubt previously associated with what my best was.  School became the thing that filled the hours between when I would drink him in again, which was a lot better than it being the crushing blow to my spirit that it had been. What being in love taught me was that there were things out there more important, more urgent, and more wonderful feeling than what I had previously been allowing myself.  Love helped me put everything in a different, equally imbalanced, but much more delicious perspective.  I glimpsed the ways in which my own beliefs affected and at times created my reality.

Another thing happened to me—I began to read “holistic” books.  I had begun to feel in graduate school that I no longer took much pleasure from reading.  It was “institution food,” given at steady intervals and “good” for its consumer, but completely devoid of the colors, textures and flavors that made its consumption exciting.  But I started to find time to sneak in books by Thich Nhat Hanh and Wayne Dyer, to explore the philosophy behind yoga and to wrap my mind around Buddhist concepts.  My exploration of the precepts guiding these different belief systems might at first seem too far off the beaten path of scholarship to merit discussion in an academic forum.  But it is my belief that they actually enable different relationships to texts, and new ways reading and deciphering multiple oppressions.  They take up the important job of learning how to perform self-care (and other-care).  They offer different paradigms, etiologies, ontologies, symbolism, and mythologies, thus providing both the substance and structures for completely different interpretations of life and its events.  In other words, I changed my practice from reading books I didn’t want to read to reading books that excited me.

The third important thing that happened was that I found my academic sangha, or community—consisting of two important mentors for my scholarship and my career.  These were two very different scholars, and they were fulfilling two very different needs that I had at the time.  One, Santiago Colás, was able to single-handedly validate my counter-current thoughts and my own challenges as a being being in the world.  He handed me the resources and tools that would come to be central and integral to my life, my work, and my being.  Further, he challenged me to explore what was most vital, passionate, and alive in myself, rather than simply following the herd, regardless of outcome. 

The other, Frieda Ekotto, showed me that it was possible to live the dream I had of scholars and their lives.  She was a striking figure with long dreadlocks and an unmade face, clad in cosmopolitan linen suits at the beginning of the year with her passport still tucked in her briefcase.  She went to conferences in Cuba, dined and drank wine with virtually every celebrated African filmmaker on the planet, and even interviewed luminary Aimé Césaire.  She was basically a badass, painting her life in bold strokes of her own brush.  As I got to know her, I came to see that her life and her work were brilliant works of art being created, negotiated, and expressed outwardly.  She became a role model in many different ways, as well as an advocate and a friend.

With these new events, shifts, and resources, my own non-normativity soon turned to an advantage—at least in my eyes.  I knew that I was different from my peers in learning style, interests, expectations, and goals, distinct in thought, word, and deed.   Hence, it stood that I would have to “do” grad school on my own terms and in my own unique way.  It has been an amazing exploration.  I have gotten to study languages, literatures, cultures and philosophies of Latin American, African, and Caribbean peoples.  I have read some of the most important scholarship on race, gender, class, spirituality, metaphysics, philosophy, and psychology ever written. I was able to complete a certificate in Women’s Studies, which exposed me to invaluable methodological and epistemological foundations for my work.  I have nourished and come to know my soul and soulfulness through delving deeply into the ideas and practices of Buddhism and theories of self-help, self-care, and self-improvement. I spent time in intentional communities in the U.S., Brazil and, unwittingly, in Guinea Bissau, Africa as part of my explorations.  And though still restricted in some ways by the limits of language itself, I am as best equipped as I can be to begin my work of creating, negotiating and expressing some of the truly fascinating ideas I have been fortunate enough to explore inside and outside of the academy during my tenure as a graduate student.

Icky Imperialist Ivy (League)

I spent more of today than I should have trying to uproot some very invasive and very firmly established ivy in my front yard. My to do list keeps getting longer, and the garden is an addicting escape.  The plants always instill in me this feeling of urgency, a life or death-type thing that MUST BE STOPPED IMMEDIATELY.  On close examination, I realize that some plant is trying to take out another plant.  I will cut back some branches and notice that there is another plant, shivering and gasping, hidden within the branches of the first.  Or an insidious vine will seem just moments away from dominion over some massive tree.  So I convince myself that these lawless plants must be taken care of STAT.

The absolute worst, I have noticed, is the ivy.  Once planted, I believe, as a pleasant ground cover some 50-odd years ago, the ivy has now grown to epic proportions.  It climbed 2 dogwood trees and hung so prolifically from its branches that most people thought it was part of the tree.  It's berries looked lush and radiant in the sky!  It's vine had thickened and hardened into a bullying strong arm, snaking its way up the tree.  The dogwood tries to stretch its long arms out, just to grab at a few bits of sunshine, to bloom just a few flowers.
 
I so loved the tree's ardent attempt at survival, that I took to that ivy with a hedge clipper big enough to clip a bike lock and I had at it. And I'll tell you, I fucked that ivy up.  Ivy is now toast.

But while out there clipping, I started thinking about "Ivy League" schools.  I just finished my PhD and am about to embark-- I hope-- on some kind of academic career.  So what kind of school I would like to teach at rattles about in my brain when my thoughts are quiet enough for me to survey my inner landscape.  It is really quite an interesting analogy, in some ways, I think, that they have chosen to see themselves as ivy.   Ivy is self-interested and self-important, dominant, subversively powerful, ever climbing to the top, unapologetically limiting the possibilities of those trying to grow around it.

So, where did this term come from?  Let's look it up on Wikipedia, that awesome, reputable source!

Origin of the name

The first usage of Ivy in reference to a group of colleges is from sportswriter Stanley Woodward (1895–1965).

“	A proportion of our eastern ivy colleges are meeting little fellows another Saturday before plunging into the strife and the turmoil.	”
—Stanley Woodward, New York Tribune, October 14, 1933, describing the football season

According to book Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1988), author William Morris writes that Stanley Woodward actually took the term from fellow New York Tribune sportswriter Caswell Adams. Morris writes that during the 1930s, the Fordham University football team was running roughshod over all its opponents. One day in the sports room at the Tribune, the merits of Fordham's football team were being compared to those of Princeton and Columbia. Adams remarked disparagingly of the latter two, saying they were "only Ivy League." Woodward, the sports editor of the Tribune, picked up the term and printed the next day.

Note though that in the above quote Woodward used the term ivy college, not ivy league as Adams is said to have used, so there is a discrepancy in this theory, although it seems certain the term ivy college and shortly later Ivy League acquired its name from the sports world.

The first known instance of the term Ivy League being used appeared in The Christian Science Monitor on February 7, 1935. Several sportswriters and other journalists used the term shortly later to refer to the older colleges, those along the northeastern seaboard of the United States, chiefly the nine institutions with origins dating from the colonial era, together with the United States Military Academy (West Point), the United States Naval Academy, and a few others. These schools were known for their long-standing traditions in intercollegiate athletics, often being the first schools to participate in such activities. However, at this time, none of these institutions would make efforts to form an athletic league.

Ivy covering West College, Princeton University

 

The Ivy League universities are also called the "Ancient Eight" or simply the Ivies.

A common folk etymology attributes the name to the Roman numerals for four (IV), asserting that there was such a sports league originally with four members. The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins helped to perpetuate this belief. The supposed "IV League" was formed over a century ago and consisted of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a 4th school that varies depending on who is telling the story.However, it is clear that Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Columbia met on November 23, 1876 at the so-called Massasoit Convention to decide on uniform rules for the emerging game of football, which rapidly spread.

Interesting.... so the term "ivy league" hasn't been around since forever?  I imagined it to be as old as those institutions, as old as the institutions those institutions uphold!

I say this somewhat tongue in cheek, for I know that while these schools do represent something I don't much appreciate in our American culture-- white patiarchal hegemony (look it up if you need to) -- they are actually places where really interesting and exciting research and academic work is going on.  For instance, I have a girl crush on Ellen Langer of Harvard.  She's my Angelina Jolie, a bold bad-ass I find brilliant.  But I can't get past the ways in which ivy league schools legitimate and perpetuate the social, economic, and political dominance of a select and almost impenetrable elite.

I know that my next move career wise will possibly set the tone for the entire trajectory of my career.   And I want to aim high.  But part of me can't imagine ever being chosen to teach at an ivy league school.  As you get to know me, dear reader, you will see that one of the limiting beliefs I am fighting (what's a limiting belief?  See my post called LIMITING BELIEFS!) is that I am "weird," "deviant," that "I don't belong," I'm "not a member."  I confront this belief quite often, whether in social circles or academically.  I have in many ways convinced myself that I don't fit in...  But we'll talk about that later.  Anywho, all this to say that part of me feels this would be impossible, so why even try?  And would I want to teach at an ivy anyway?

I look up at the tree.  Its truck is covered in thick, serpentine swirls of ivy-- grown to resemble a tree itself now, brown and hard.  Most of the branches closest to the trunk are dripping with ivy, its pretty, preppy, peppy green leaves, its bunches of purple black berries.  But two or three branches still reach for the sunlight, their white flowers not just beautiful, but also hardworking.

I am more dogwood than ivy, I decide.

My goal, my hope, my intention, dear reader, is to chat with you as I create a garden in my home and in my life.  I want to mindfully choose what I want in these gardens-- things that will sustain me and things that will add beauty, color, and sweetness to my life.  I know that it won't be easy, but I am not scared of hard work.  I hope that sharing my thoughts will help illuminate my path.