Slooowly reading Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. My glacial speed is partly because I never read books like this very fast (it takes me months to finish anything by Pema Chodron) but mostly because Macy’s so freakin’ Right On!

So still absorbing her analysis re how we look at the world:

World as Battleground.

World as Trap

World as Lover

World as Self

And wouldn’t you know it? Am discovering that, good Quaker that I strive to be, much of how I relate to the world IS about “the reassuring sense that you are fighting God’s battle—and that ultimately you will win.”

Whoa!

Macy talks about a variation of this paradigm: “A more innocuous version of the battlefield image of the world is the one I learned from my grandparents. it is the world as a classroom, or a kind of moral gymnasium, where you are put though tests to prove your mettle and shape you up, so you can graduate to other arenas and rewards.”

Macy’s “innocuous version”  describe an insidious trait of mine and shared by my Cambridge/Somerville/intellectual friends—and they ARE my friends—I’ve shorthanded to “The Harvard Syndrome.” Although I did not go to Harvard, must admit I see myself struggling in that “moral gymnasium,” sometimes.

Ouch.

[Good thing my New Year's resolutions didn't include posting more blogs, huh! Or I'd be feeling really guilty about now.]

Tomorrow afternoon, from 3 until 5, my husband and I are hosting a neighborhood coffee to talk about—well, the agenda is not the point.

The POINT is this: As any Patriots fan will tell you: Tomorrow afternoon is not a great time to host a meeting. (Seems there’s a game or something.)

So, yesterday, dropping another flyer for this coffee in neighbors’ mailboxes, stewed over the likelihood that very few people will show up. But since one agenda item, the controversy around affordable housing in Union Square*, is somewhat time-sensitive  (a community meeting on this issue is tentatively scheduled in a couple of weeks), decided to go ahead, anyway. Although I felt a little stupid about it. And reluctant to put much energy into something fated to be a total bust.

But, as so often happens as I trudge along somewhere, Something came to me: be faithful (or, in my case, practice being faithful). This coffee is a good idea. Be faithful to connecting people, sharing resources, creating community, etc. Just do it. Do it joyfully.

Okedoke.

* Many New England cities are organized around squares, i.e. commercial areas/transportation centers/where a bunch of streets come together.Our neighborhood’s part of Somerville’s Union Square.

Yesterday afternoon, at the Dudley Branch Library in Roxbury (a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Boston),  I attended a community meeting re the proposed  3 Strikes, You’re Out legislation here in Massachusetts. More than a hundred men, women and children crammed together in the library’s already-overheated community room to hear different voices speak out on this racist bill.

So that’s the first thing I wish to lift up: Lots of perspectives, lots of different ways to explain “Here’s what I think this legislation is really about!”

Here’s mine: Yes, as many, many speakers said yesterday, this is a racist bill. Anything to do with the criminal justice system in the United States is going to be about race. No argument.

AND: Senate Bill # 2080 and House Bill # 3818 are also about Massachusetts recently having allowed casino gambling into our fair commonwealth. So consciously or unconsciously, our elected officials on Beacon Hill must have thought: “Okay, then. Time to get tough on crime—and, oh, by the way, that’s a post-casino, surefire way to get re-elected.”

Here’s the second thing I want to note: Many, many people yesterday, when given the opportunity to ask questions re the action plans laid out, wanted to instead tell their stories. Their own incarceration stories. Stories of their sons. Stories, as one woman said, of  ”The Struggle.”

And that’s exactly how I heard her words: in italics and with quotation marks. But I heard something else. I heard those two words’ gestalt: Slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, The War on Drugs, the criminal justice system, poverty, “The jail trail,”* and that woman at the community meeting, like thousands, millions before her, struggling every day to survive, to overcome, to fly!

SO much practice. So much more to do.

* The path of poverty, inadequate education, and systemic racism which leads to eventual incarceration.

New Year’s eve was mistily magical this year; streetlights, headlights, Christmas lights were surrounded by a glowing aura. Walking through Union Square that evening just as the last Market Basket customers exited the supermarket parking lot, my husband and I were approached by two men. One of them continued to walk in our direction, the other stopped and looked down at his sneakers for a couple of seconds. When we got close to him, he said to us, “Happy new year,” in a cheerful, heavily accented voice. We wished him the same.

“That’s why he’d stopped,” we decided. “He wanted to practice.”

Thus my new year began, with this tentative, warm expression, a reminder of our collective just-starting-out, our shared need to practice!

. . . and probably cold!

Remember how utterly astonished you felt when you learned that the light from now-dead, far, far away stars still glowed?

That’s the spirit of today’s posting:

I’m feeling that glow from the deep-winter fires of ancient Ye Olde England—from the time when Anglo-Saxon was spoken (did you know that “wassail” is A-S for “be whole”?) when people who probably looked a lot like me brought greens inside and, huddled together to keep warm, celebrated Light/Birth in the midst of death and darkness.

I’m feeling that wonder—and their faith that, yes, Spring would come.