Sunday, October 19, 2008

About that Running Thing ...

Earlier in this blog I wrote about learning to play guitar, and how beginning to play guitar had many useful similarities with learning to write a dissertation, not to mention learning to live into an anti-racist identity.

The most important similarity, of course, is being willing to mess up. You may recall the mental bumpersticker that goes along with that: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." At first.

I loved learning to make fairly musical noise on the guitar, but hit a wall when it came time to switch over from finger-picking notes to actual chord-strumming. My beloved M. -- a guitar player from way back -- has tried to help me, but learning to play the guitar requires a basic willingness to make noise, and somehow I don't have that. Yet. Maybe because my noises just aren't musical enough yet. Or, maybe I have just retained a certain childhood certainty that quiet is safe, and safety is not a sure thing, and so quiet is best.

There is another and more obvious reason for laying down the guitar, for a little while: the posture for guitar playing -- at least when you are learning -- is a lot like the posture for writing or reading. And I spend way too much time in that posture already. Too, the activity of learning musical notation and to make music is a lot like learning a foreign language, and right now I need something completely different.

Like running.

I started running at about the same time I set the guitar aside, though that was unintentional. I just wanted to get a little more exercise without driving to the gym for a workout class or to lift weights. (Somehow driving somewhere in order to get exercise just makes less and less sense.)

I had heard about this music source called Podrunner: Intervals (you can find it on iTunes or at the creator's web site, http://www.djsteveboy.com/intervals.html) and I tried it out. The idea is that you listen to the music as you run, and music changes cue shifts in running or walking speed and duration. Using Podrunner, I have worked up to an 8k distance, or a little over five miles in about 50 minutes.

Which is astounding to me. Less than a year ago I was in a workout class and the instructor had us run an indoor lap and I could barely finish.

But intervals are a great way to increase speed and strength and distance gradually, and I am happy for anything that helps me keep moving and relatively fit.

As my distance and fitness increased, a funny thing happened: I began to be able to think while running. And I noticed that when I am thinking about my dissertation, I run a little faster and with less discomfort. Alternatively, when I am thinking about something that I feel worried or sad or angry about, I have more trouble running. I am intrigued by these signs of the connections among my thoughts, feelings and physical abilities.

I remember in the year after I came out to God and myself and lost a bunch of weight in the process, there was a day when I was playing with my kids (who were then 11 and 9) and realizing I could chase them around. I was running. Out of curiosity, I began running then, back in 2003, but could not get more than a mile or so into a run before I was too bored or tired or something hurt. I kept up with workout classes and biking, but let the running go.

Until I discovered intervals, and slowly began increasing my distance, and learned that the first mile or two is always the hardest; even now that I am running a little over five miles, it is the first part of the run that is the hardest, even if I stretch and warm up really well. I've also discovered that the more often I run, the easier that beginning stage is.

And that got me to thinking about writing.

Back when I was in college, I picked up Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, which is about writing as a Zen practice. Natalie says you should write every day; that writing is a muscle, and like any other muscle, it needs work to be strong, and stretching to be flexible.

I tried that for a while ... got bored and distracted and quit.

And then I read the same thing in Madeleine L'Engle's memoir, A Circle of Quiet. And then a third time the advice came, when a friend and I decided to read (and do the work in) Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

I usually get the hint when the universe tells me a third time to do something, so I adopted Cameron's "morning pages" and have stayed fairly regular with the discipline of writing something every day. I fall off the wagon now and then, and have learned that not judging myself too harshly makes it easier to climb back in. I have accumulated about ten years' worth of spiral notebooks (the writing equivalent of running shoes and a road).

In writing, as in running, as in any disciplined activity, regular practice or exercise makes regular performance or execution far easier. Your thinking mind or your bicep or your lungs or your writing hand ... makes no difference. Your body needs your mind to tell it to keep going; your mind needs your body to be fit enough to sit and write, or focus and read.

And of course, body and mind are incomplete, too, without spirit. This I learned for real only after my coming-out process began. I did not know how dis-integrated I was, until I became integrated, body, mind and spirit. Prayer was revolutionized in the process: I had asked my spiritual director for years why I could not feel God's love. I knew it was pouring down on me, like a constant and invisible rain, but I thought I should be able to feel it, and I could not. This felt like a failing to me.

Slowly but surely, as the realization of my lesbian identity unfolded, so did my prayer life. I could feel myself going to deeper and deeper places in my self and in God when I prayed, or -- as it felt -- when prayer was happening in me. I realized that my self-knowing and self-loving were key ways that God knew me and loved me. If I could not love myself, then God could not love me through that avenue, either. In being cut off from myself, I had cut myself off from God. In coming into a fuller awareness of myself, I came into a fuller awareness of God.

This integration was startling in the intensity and viscerality of its effects. My coming out process began the year before I started this Ph.D. program, and I remember in the first year of the program, there were times I was sitting in class, participating in discussion, reading a new text, when I felt as if I would jump out of my chair, I felt such a keen and physical excitement. Sometimes the heat of intellectual passion literally ignited a sensual response in my body, and I knew what Audre Lorde said about erotic energy being the life force in an integrated self was absolutely true. I knew it in my own body. I know it still.

Which brings me back to running. And writing. And the natural interconnections of an integrated life. Just as I got to thinking about these interconnections, I stumbled across a book title and knew immediately I had to read it: Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It's a memoir writting by a long-distance runner who also is a novelist.

Murakami notes some interconnections among his writing and running; some of them we share, and some we don't. As I read the book, I realized I experience some interconnections that are unique to me. Here are a few of the first and the latter.

Like Murakami, I have learned the value of momentum: if you stop running at a point when you still feel strong, you are more likely to run again; similarly, if you stop writing at a point when you are going strong, it will be easier to get started again the next working day.

Murakami says he often writes to know what he thinks; I do this, too. I often don't really know my thoughts clearly on a topic until I have written about it (and, I have noticed, what I will write and how I will say it changes over the years, as time and experience shape my perceptions, even if I am writing again about the same event).

Murakami describes himself as someone who is capable of being happy on his own -- an important trait for a writer, which requires long hours of solitude -- and that he is not interested in team sports or particularly competitive sports; he really only competes with himself. I too need a certain amount of alone-time, and typically am happy on my own; but I have such an abhorrence of competition that I really will not even compete with myself. I do not time my runs, or set goals to exceed; I just try to keep running, and writing, and living, as well as I can, on any given day. Each outing, each effort has its own integrity, and I try to be my best in each one, simply because that is the simplest, truest way to experience abundant fulfillment.

Like Murakami, I am happy with running's low-maintenance nature; all you need are shoes and a road (well, and a good sports bra, I have to add). And a dose of discipline: all runners and writers know that you have to get through the days you don't want to run, or to write, and do it anyway. That's the nature of discipline; and that's where treating all running and writing as practice is useful. When the running isn't going well, or the writing feels stiff or blind, treat it as practice and keep moving. That way tomorrow has a chance to be better.

Murakami decribes the three necessary qualities of good writing (and running) as talent, focus and endurance. Murakami describes focus and endurance as qualities that can be developed; he is less sanguine about the ability to cultivate talent.

Focus is something I struggle for, and balance is important, too ... rather than talent, I think a third ingredient is "something to say." Which seems not to apply to running, unless you generalize to something like "desire." Maybe I am kidding myself, but I think desire or passion are more important even than talent. If you have a reason to and want to run, or write, you will, and nothing will stop you.

Running is schooling my mind and my body ... and my spirit. My legs are stronger, and so is my belief in my own ability to endure and persist. My "wind" lasts longer, and so does my ability to stay in the flow of a writing. My tolerance for struggle is growing, as is my willingness to stay in that struggle. When my mind is tired of reaching for the words, I think of how I felt in the third mile yesterday, and how much better the fourth and fifth miles felt, and I push a little harder until the words are flowing again.

When I am running, there are voices in my head that say "this hurts, let's quit" or "that's far enough" or "maybe I won't be able to run all the way back." I have learned that these voices are impostors, and that I can listen for and hear the truer voice whispering from somewhere in the back of my head. That voice just says "keep going." And "it's worth it." And "you can do this."

I need to know the sound of that voice when the world interferes with the dissertation. Those impostor voices say "Who wants to read about love?" and "This is all so obvious." Or "you are not post-colonial enough" or "you are not anti-racist enough" or "you are talking to yourself and no one will want to read this." Or, worst of all, "You are not doing and can not do justice to the idea God has put in your head ... if it was in fact God."

The true voice says, "You can do this. It's worth doing. It needs doing. Just pray some more ... write some more, pray some more, run some more, and then rewrite. Some more."

Two more chapters and an epilogue -- by Christmas, I hope -- and the first draft is done. The block of marble will have been assembled, and I can begin to carve. Because the process of rewriting is where all good writing gets done.

Help me, Beloved. Help me do justice to this idea. Your love, your justice, your grace, which we all need so much more of.

(And then maybe I can get back around to that guitar ... and maybe a triathlon? That should get me through the job search process!)

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Running for Love of Women

October 19, 2008 was Race Day in Dallas; Race for the Cure, that is.

I have had friends over the years who have had breast cancer; many have survived and thrive still. Some have died of the disease. Breast cancer has come closest to home in the person of my beloved M., who is a 20-year survivor. I marvel at the stories of what she went through during her two surgeries, with subsequent chemotherapy; and I whisper small grateful prayers for our meeting, and our life together. It so could have been otherwise (and when I think this, I always think of Jane Kenyon's poignant poem of that name, "Otherwise").

Given that I started running this year, and -- much to my surprise and delight -- have stayed with it, and given that my daughter decided to walk with a team of women from the office where she worked this summer, it occurred to me that I could run in the race this year. I've been running five miles at a whack pretty regularly, so I figured a three-mile run was doable.

We got to the race location early, riding transit with many other pink-clad women down to the massively-crowded site; about 25,000 runners and walkers participated in the 25th anniversary Race today.

We walked around for a while, since we got there early; I noticed a strong representation of African-American women; some Latinas were there as well, but it did not seem to me there were a number representative of their overall population in Dallas. That got me wondering ...

And then it was time to run. As a novice, I was one of the few runners clueless enough to start at the back of the pack; the first two miles were bumper-car running through yards, among walkers and strollers, and sometimes on the street where I was supposed to be. About halfway through we ran by a high school, and a bunch of kids were passing out water; I noticed they were mostly Latino/a.

The sweetest moments came in the last mile, as the road opened up for a clear run, down and then uphill, and then around a corner where a high-school group was cheering and clapping. I knew it wasn't personal, but applause and a band playing is rare for those of us who are not playing high school football, so I got a lump in my throat. I noticed the group was all Latino/a kids, too. And then the finish line was in site, and I was looking for my beloved M., who promised to wait for me and watch me cross the line.

It felt great to run across the finish line; it felt even better to see the grin on M's face as she snapped my picture and gave me a big hug. I was thinking about a finish line she crossed 20 years ago, done with surgeries and chemo and learning to live into her survivorhood.

We walked around afterwards, waiting for our teenager to finish, and got to participate in donating to a local tissue bank that is supporting breast health research.

As we walked around, I wondered about the representation of ethnicities among the women involved, and got curious.

When I got home, I Googled up some statistics on breast cancer findings by ethnicity. In a report titled "Trends in Breast Cancer by Race and Ethnicity"*, I read that "The average annual age-adjusted incidence rate from 1996 to 2000 was 140.8 cases per 100,000 among white women, 121.7 among African Americans, 97.2 among Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, 89.8 in Hispanics, and 58 in American Indians/Alaska Natives."

Although more breast cancers are diagnosed in white women, tumors found in women of color tend to be larger (by the time they are found) and tend to be at later stages, with resulting increases in rates of death. Racial disparities in access to health care, including mammography and other screening and diagnostic services -- particularly for low-income women -- are primarily to blame. Other contributing factors leading to a higher rate of death from breast cancer in women of color include delays between abnormal mammographic findings and definitive diagnosis, more limited access to health characteristics, and variances in follow-up care. For instance, studies have shown African-American women are less likely to have follow-up radiation therapy after surgery.

When treatment protocols are equalized, death rate disparities are substantially less. For instance, "An analysis of the survival experience of women with breast cancer treated in US military health care facilities suggest that the disparity in breast cancer survival between African American and white women could be reduced by 70% by providing
equal treatment to all women."

The study referenced above asserts that "Passage of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention Act of 2000, which states the option to provide medical assistance through Medicaid to eligible women who were screened through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, should reduce economic barriers to those who meet the eligibility criteria."

Options ... shoulds ... well. Laws don't always have intended outcomes. What's the funding level? Who qualifies through Medicaid? What about women who don't qualify?

The authors of this study note the truth that much additional research is needed on the causes, prevention, and treatment of breast cancer; but they also note that "much progress can
be made by applying current knowledge fully and equitably to all segments of the population."

Indeed. That's a race I'd like to be helping to win.

* Here's the citation for the journal article that provided the statistics I quoted: CA Cancer J Clin 2003; 53:342. Asma Ghafoor, MPH, Ahmedin Jemal, DVM, PhD, Elizabeth Ward, PhD, Vilma Cokkinides, PhD, MSPH, Robert Smith, PhD and Michael Thun, MD, MS

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Coming Out Day

Coming Out Day is a chance to celebrate the courage and freedom of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people (who have been able to choose) to be open about who they love. It’s also a chance for straight allies to express their support.

Of course, for lgbt people, pretty much every day is coming out day: we come out over and over and over, to different people in different ways, and we are always calculating the cost, even if we have been able to choose to live out of the closet all the time. Some people love our reality; some tolerate us; some hate us; some kill us.

Coming out stories are fascinating to me (and to enough other people that collections of coming-out stories have been published); they bear all the earmarks of conversion experiences, of metanoia. I like to hear the stories of people who seem to have always known their same-sex preference, and the stories of people for whom the realization came slowly, and the stories of “late bloomers” like me, who lived straight lives until some catalytic event catapulted them into their own reality.

My own reality tried to peek through the blinds of my enculturation as a straight girl, but there were enough barriers in the way for me as a young person that I could not let myself fully acknowledge what I felt and what it meant. That truth hid in a gray space in my soul I kept so carefully locked away it seemed even God could not find me in it. I thought the gray space was constructed to contain the childhood sexual abuse I had experienced; but the truth was buried even deeper than that.

A different light came, slowly. First, through language. There was the feminist theology class where I heard the term “compulsory heterosexuality.” Then through visibility: there were the lesbian friends I met in my M.Div. program who I could see living into full Christian identities. Finally, through experience: the friendship that teetered on the edge of becoming something more.

What surfaced through that friendship had the power to reach what I thought was the deepest wounded place in my life, and turn it into my deepest question: am I a lesbian?

The question was too risky; I ran from it, into deep and heartfelt prayer, including fasting prayers. A day here, a day there … my life as spouse, parent, pastor and student continued, with regular activities and exercise. Every day I prayed Psalm 51: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit with me.”

This came not from a sense of homosexuality as sin; I had a longstanding affirmation of lgbt folk as beloved children of God, deserving of justice and acceptance. However, I was struggling with the notion of accepting this affirmation myself, when it seemed everything hung in the balance: my marriage, my children, my ministry, my ordination, my church.

I asked God to take away the desire for this woman, for any woman, even as the awareness began to surface of how there had always been an important woman in my life. The truth was streaming in; I was stubbornly running. The cost of embracing this truth would be too high. “Take it away, God. Take it away.”

Weeks went by … five, six … I was oblivious to what was happening in my body as I prayed back against the frightening freedom beginning to dawn in my soul.

Finally, one day, I stood lost in prayer before my closet, wondering what was happening in my life even as I wondered what clothes I could put on my body that I would not feel lost in. A small voice came, in response to my by-now monotonous prayer for clarity: “Have you noticed that your lifelong addiction to food is gone? If I can take away that unhealthy desire, don’t you think I could take away this one? If I thought it was unhealthy? You don’t need clarity. You need courage.”

Stunned, I moved through my day, accepting the implication. Later, at the local Y, I stood on the scale. Forty pounds had melted away … and God was right. I felt completely different about food, and I was beginning to feel differently in myself, and about myself.

I was changing, from the inside out: changing shape, changing identity, changing allegiance. Having come out to God, I began the process of coming out to myself.

And a funny thing happened. My spiritual director, a pastoral counselor friend, and my womanist theology professor all gave me the same good advice in a space of weeks: “Tammerie, before you can figure out who you are meant to love, you have to learn to love yourself.”

And so, I set about the task of learning to love this new self God had given me. I went about it the way I would love another: I would want to know the beloved’s favorite activities, joys, passions; I would want to know where the hurts where, what needed tenderness, what brought pleasure. I gave myself the space and permission to experience healing – to feel healed. I chose when to say no; I chose when to say yes.

There was a high cost; the women of color I was co-pastoring with could not abide the questions or the changes coming about in my life, and it took several years for those relationships to regain their footing (and I am thankful they did). The anti-racist, multicultural church we were pastoring together – a vessel for so many dreams and hopes – had already been struggling to survive, and this was one difference too many. We came apart.

To make space for my own and our family’s discernment, I found the courage to resign my credentials in and respectfully disengage from a denomination and a church that could not affirm even the question of my orientation. I moved to a local church community in the United Church of Christ, which offered room for the asking and answering of this question. And over time, God and community helped me and my family to move as nonviolently as possible through the painful process of ending a 21-year marriage, and beginning family life anew in a way that spans two households. I am grateful that my ex-husband has happily remarried; and I am unspeakably happy in the rightness of the love I now share with my beloved M.

I have made choices and taken stances to live into who I feel made and called to be. I meet white people who are uncomfortable with my stances on racism, anti-racism, white privilege, feminism, or my queer identity. Some individuals and communities of color struggle too with homophobia, and sometimes in those settings I experience tension between my queer identity and anti-racist stance. Sometimes, when my feminist commitment runs up against a person of color behaving in a sexist way, I need to find the way between my anti-racist and feminist stances.

I feel the constraints of respecting positions I know in my embodied self to be wrong. In wrestling with those tensions, I come back to the primacy, for me, of my anti-racist stance. I name the truth as I can, and live into my commitments.

Given the interconnections among forms of oppressions, and the similarities of their processes and effects, I gain some insight from the experience of sexism and heterosexism that helps me in my attempts to be an effective white ally, in dealing with racism and white privilege. And, conversely, I have learned some things from people of color about how to deal with and resist oppression when it comes. I have not learned everything that is on offer, but I have learned some things, about courage, honesty, grace, and being human.

I will never regret coming out, because it has been a coming into my own, a coming into the self that God uniquely created me to be. I will always thank God for bringing me to my senses. Literally.

Rhythm? No. Rhyme and reason ... some.

I thought I would develop some rhythm in the writing of this dissertation, and the blog that (sometimes) reflects it. Well, no. Real life keeps getting in the way. I recall with some humor the concluding words from the acknowledgments in a text written recently by someone on the faculty of my institution:

"Finally, I'm grateful to my family, who gladly leave me to my intellectual pursuits without complaint."

Okay, yes, it is a man who wrote that, white, of a certain generation. This sentence conjures up a whole (imaginary) world for me, of a person for whom laundry is done, food is acquired and cooked, a house is kept, children are raised ... and all that goes on outside the door of a closed office, in which this man has the leisure to cogitate, reflect, and write. For long stretches of time. In peace.

I don't live in that world.

In my world, there are the teenagers, the widowed mother with significant health issues who just moved closer by, and my beloved M., who has been slowly but surely moving into our house and winding deeper into our hearts, and who unintentionally tugs at the strings of my wanting-to-be-with.

I am grateful to my family, too ... though they do not typically leave me to my intellectual pursuits. Pursuit of laundry, shopping, and transportation, yes. Intellectual pursuits ... well, when we do talk about my work, I usually learn more than they do. So, it's a good thing I am not completely left to my own devices.

It is hard to write a bit here, think a bit there, edit and reorganize and try to hold onto a train of thought until my mind gets to the station. And yet, I can't stop with reflecting on the lack of male privilege in my life. Because there is plenty of white privilege, and the difficulties I have being a sandwich-generation full-time mom and lot-of-the-time daughter and part-time instructor while attempting to write a dissertation do not change that.

I sit in a house acquired through one of those they-had-no-right-give-her-a-mortgage loans; and I have been supported not only by my own efforts and employment but also by gifts and inheritances flowing through the gates of a white world. My mother has moved into an assisted living center where the nurses and administrators (in higher paying jobs) are for the most part white women, and the nurses' aides and housekeepers and hands-on care providers (in lower-paying jobs) are all women of color. The cost for this is paid for with money my dad made, profits generated in part by using underpaid Latino labor.

White privilege plays into all of my environment ... and I do see my complicity. But I can't stop with noticing. It's like housekeeping; you know you are going to keep making messes, just by living, and so you keep cleaning up, and you try to make a little less mess than you clean up.

I have been working for 15 years now on accepting that what I can do is good enough; becoming a working mother -- even with white privilege -- took a big bite out of my perfectionism right off the bat. I had to accept that I could not be the employee I wanted to be or the mother I wanted to be, if I was being both, and so if I wanted to be both, I had to accept the notion of "good enough." (I had some help in that department from Bonnie Miller-McLemore's Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, which I picked up for working mother tips, not realizing it would trick me into quitting my job and eventually going to seminary.)

Beginning to (try to) live into an anti-racist identity took a few more big bites out of the perfectionist cookie. You realize the original sin of whiteness: i.e., you are born into and grow up in systems that teach you (and help you internalize) your superiority, such that you think it's natural and inevitable. You realize that it is sheer grace that causes God and people of color to love you anyway, despite the ways you keep acting white (see Macon D's excellent and prolific blog at http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/ and everything Tim Wise every wrote). You learn to forgive yourself so you don't get paralyzed with guilt, and you learn to be willing to risk being wrong -- even as you try your darnedest to do the right things right -- so you don't get paralyzed with fear.

You learn that partial and imperfect progress is better than no progress at all. And so you set yourself to write an anti-racist theology, even knowing that you will be making a part-time and imperfect effort that will not be the best, not even the best you could do, but it will be the best you can do, and that whatever you can do is worth doing.

My committee probably won't want the dissertation cover to read "Best That Could Be Done Under the Circumstances."

So, maybe I'll just acknowledge on my acknowledgments page my gratitude for everything that gets in the way of this project -- because every distraction reminds me what it's really about.

Having the courage to see the world, name what's not right, and take responsibility for doing something about it.
 
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