I am sitting at my desk. Looking out my window. Watching the house dog chase after a ball with such enthusiasm that there's no other word for it but "frolicking."
I am drinking good coffee that is fastly turning too cold.
I am listening to Radiohead playing a "live" concert that they recorded in their basement studio.
I am smoking a mixture of indo and sativa.
My shoulders hurt.
There is still mud on my hands and feet from when I slipped trying to climb a rain drenched hill the night before.
I am supposed to be working.
Doing the inane mundane tasks I have been putting off all week.
"I'll have it all ready by meeting time on Friday," I thought.
It is now Friday.
The meeting is in an hour and a half.
I have not even started my work yet.
I haven't written on here in God knows when.
The world, which was already on fire, kind of exploded, didn't it?
For my own tiny corner of my room, this explosion has resulted in a cacophony of writing.
Not professionally, though I think I have now proven to myself that I can do a quick turn around of a thousand words or more if properly motivated.
I have just been writing to friends.
Specifically, friends who claim to not understand a phrase like "Black Lives Matter" but are now more interested in having that conversation.
Well, some are interested in having a conversation. Some aren't so interested in the listening part that is required for such a thing.
But some real progress is being made right now as a culture. It is an uphill battle, but God damn it, it looks like we might be actually gaining some ground.
In the early days after the murder of George Floyd, I was really challenged by something the comedian and activist W. Kamau Bell said. I don't have the quote handy, but he more or less challenged white people to help other white people understand and deconstruct systemic racism in our culture.
And that sparked something in me.
I have a lot of very conservative and religiously conservative friends on social media. And over the last year during what I until very recently considered to be a lost time of depressed paralysis, I read and listened to everything these people shared. Almost obsessively. It was, one could say, not "healthy" to do this, especially after
1. being raised in a religiously abusive home and
2. having had a nervous breakdown as a result of spending a year on the road trying to understand the rather rapid move of the church to the far right over the last 50 years.
I was trying to let that shit go. But I couldn't. I listen to Christian talk radio and watch the 700 Club and am secretly in a lot of far right Christian Facebook groups.
And I had no idea how to respond to any of it. I was conflicted in my body and soul and emotions. I remembered what it felt like to believe these things. I remembered what caused me to eventually stop. But was that right? Memory is such a slippery thing.
I felt weighed down by all of it. Like a constant deluge of water.
But then suddenly, something switched.
Maybe it was just as simple as having a place to start.
But seeing my friends of faith post casual racism and easily defeatable arguments, in light of the deep suffering and mourning happening around them, gave me a better sense of clarity and urgency than I have ever experienced before.
And suddenly, I feel able to empathize and understand enough of these people's positions to find a way in to speak to them. To use their own language to help them understand. There's a real missionary impulse there.
A missionary impulse of a different sort than the ones that I knew in Christianity.
There is no element of control or colonialism here.
I don't want them to conform to my dogma.
I just want to speak love to the propaganda that they are being fed on the regular.
I want to think I am speaking Truth.
But I leave plenty of room for me to be corrected.
Man, I was going to go on and on. But alas, I now have to explain to this dude why I don't yet have his stuff done.
Until next time, friends.
11:17 a.m. - 2020-07-03
Recent entries:
Day to Day - 2020-10-13
168 - 2020-08-08
Feelings - 2020-08-06
Two Posts in as Many Days? I Must be on a Spree or Something. - 2020-08-03
Too Emotionally Soft for the Apocalypse - 2020-08-01
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