greetings from the heartland

As I look through my postings on this very young blog, I'm noticing how often I mention Kansas. What's up with that? Probably the Michigan cold was getting to me. Definitely, the Michigan cold was getting to me. A few days before Christmas, I was driving along the freeway in the Detroit suburbs I love so dearly, in 10 degree cold, when the coolant in my car erupted (at least that's how I imagine it) and went on a five-second murderous rampage that consumed the engine the way the Warner Brothers Tasmanian devil consumes woodland. Noting a foul smell and steam pouring out from under the hood, accompanied by a rapid increase in engine temperature, I scooted over to the shoulder. The next seven hours involved lots of time on hold with AAA, lots of freezing my ass off, about four hours of pacing in the lobby of an ice hockey arena (don't ask), mild hysteria, and the incredible mercy of strangers. Fortunately, if you're going to bust up the engine of a Ford Taurus, there's no better place to do it than Detroit. Salvage engines abound. All in all, I guess I'm pretty fortunate. There was a hot bath waiting for me at the end of that ordeal, which is more than a lot of people get.

As it happens, I'm back in my wheaty home state right now, visiting my parents, college friends, and extended family. It's seriously warm here--in the sixties, even--and I'm so intoxicated with the pleasure of not having to put on five layers of wool before I walk out the door that I keep finding myself dreaming about ways that we (my husband and I) could live here again. I'm sure it's just the weather. I keep reminding myself of all the things that would suck, were we to actually settle down here, particularly if we were to raise hypothetical children here, in the same rotten school system that I went through...I see why some older folks complain that my generation has too many options and that things were easier when you knew exactly where and how you were going to settle down and didn't ask so many fricking questions about it. I wouldn't give up my options for the world, but still, I can see why they say it.

All this seems ridiculously insignificant in the face of so much death, though. I didn't let myself think too much about the tsunami devastation until last night, when I started reading some stories coming out of India and Sumatra on the web and...well, there are no words. Please, if you have some extra cash, send it to Oxfam or something, and if you pray, send prayers. I won't attempt to garner meaning out of something this huge in this forum, other than to say that I hope we can all find ways to help, however minimal our means may be.

I'll be returning to more regular postings again in a few days when I get to Michigan and settled back into routine. For now, happy New Year to everyone! I wish you all blessings.

my home town

I’m listening to a CD by the Spanish flamenco group Ojos de Brujo (means “eyes of the wizard”) right now, trying to jump-start my brain, but the problem is the track that it’s on. Most of this CD is fabulous, but this track starts out sounding kind of like Metallica, and then turns into heavy metal flamenco Indian hip-hop that sounds pretentious and kind of silly. I’m all for global pop fusion, but it’s got to make some aural sense. That track sounds like a fun jamming session that never should have made it onto a recording. Then again, someone out there probably loves it. It could just be that during the prime Metallica years, I was in my bedroom practicing Mozart flute concertos and reading novels by the Bronte sisters, avoiding all the metalheads who were threatening to beat me up for being such a loser. Now when I hear metal riffs, I have association problems. See, I never got over high school. I just moved away to a new town where it’s acceptable to demonstrate critical thinking skills.

I grew up in a town of about 30,000 people in south central Kansas. It’s an old railroad burg, and back in the nineteenth century it was pretty much the Wild West. It’s still a little bit on the rough side, for a small town, which could be left over from its raucous history or could be because the economy perpetually sucks. It’s an interesting mix of Mexican, Mennonite, and working-class white culture. I used to think it was an ugly place, but that was before I saw suburban Detroit. I still dream about it a lot, and in my dreams, it often morphs into a larger city where I keep getting lost.

Here is the modern cliché I inhabit. I have moved away from my rural, Midwestern, conservative, economically limited home town to more affluent upper Midwestern university towns, where I am constantly broke and surrounded by privilege that is alien to me, but stay because a) there are no career opportunities back home, b) I am away from “people who think they know exactly who you are and would be happy to remind you,” as Garrison Keillor says, c) My political affiliation does not brand me as the Antichrist, and d) I can buy exotic food from people for whom it is not exotic. After more than six years, I still have an invigorating sense of escape. But now I live in such an elite place; it’s hard to feel like I’m doing much to “find common ground” when I’m safe within the borders of Ann Arbor.

For many reasons, I’ve disassociated myself in recent years from the Mennonite faith. What I miss about Mennonite communities, though, is peace and justice activism that is organized around spiritual principles, done by people who still believe in separation of church and state. Of course, Mennonites don’t have it all figured out by any means; they can be awfully self-righteous about their causes. In my aforementioned small town, they are largely viewed as a pack of snobs, and while that’s not all their fault, they worsen the situation by patronizing their more conservative neighbors—just like I did in the first paragraph with my critical thinking quip! See, I learned well. (If you don’t know anything about Mennonites, don’t think from my post here that they’re all liberal activists. The range is wide.) But it’s also from Mennonites that I learned about interdependence, about being merciful and generous even when you don’t see immediate benefit to yourself, about resisting a government’s dictates when they go against your conscience; almost all of the values that I’ve carried into my secular political life have a spiritual source.

I agree passionately with what NewGottland wrote in his response to my last post. The activist rabbi Michael Lerner wrote something similar recently—it might have been in Tikkun magazine, but I can’t remember for sure—on the need for religious Democrats to invoke their religious and/or spiritual values in political conversations. The Kabbalah scholar Arthur Green made some similar comments on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday about how we need to challenge the right-wing ownership of the word “values.” There were so many horrific statistics to throw around in this last election about how much things have gone down the tubes in the last four years. I think a lot of people got mired in the statistics and forgot to make the “heart” arguments.

ah, media

Well, I would have posted yesterday, but I was too busy researching what the various sources say on whether or not Lindsay Lohan’s breasts are real. And things seemed to be pretty lively here without me.

Does anyone actually know who Lindsay Lohan is? Suddenly she is all over the supermarket aisles, and whole articles are devoted to the subject of her disputed endowments, but I still haven’t figured out what the heck she’s famous for.

Well, OK, I picked up Jane magazine at a lust-but-don’t-buy trip to Barnes and Noble the other day after I couldn’t stand to be in front of the computer one minute longer, and I was hoping that I wasn’t too late to read the article revealing Hollywood’s fifteen biggest bimbos, but it turns out that was in the last issue, the one with Christina Applegate on the cover, which I didn’t realize until I was halfway through the extremely thought-provoking article on Miss Lohan, which I really needed to read for academic reasons. And I read the whole article, and at the end I still didn’t know why she is a celebrity! Is it really just the physical proportions, or does she actually act or sing or something? It’s tormenting me. I’ve almost forgotten about Julia and her heroic delivery room performance, so preoccupied am I.

I could have been reading The New Yorker or The Economist. I’m not a vapid consumer of lowbrow popular culture with no thought of AIDS, war, or poverty, but I can play that role.

(My apologies to Richard Russo—if you’ve read the book Straight Man, you know what I’m talking about.)

Having grown up in a church that is relatively cognizant of social justice issues, it’s always startling to see how much more pressing the matter of bringing people to Christ before the End Times seems to be in the minds of the Christians who have the media mike, or the worry that if gay marriage is permitted we’ll all suddenly be rushing to the altar with all manner of beasts and livestock and aliens, unraveling society at the seams or whatever it is they’re worried about. I go back and forth from the bleaker view—that the majority of American Christians are truly more preoccupied with the “weapons of mass distraction” than with real injustice—and the more hopeful view (hopeful in a twisted sort of way), that it’s just the media that makes us think so, because they give so much air time to extremists. I’m sure that, as with most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I live in a progressive bubble here in Ann Arbor, so my grasp of reality is thin.

One of my biggest worries is that the rest of the world doesn’t realize how many people in America care and want to do something (about poverty, disease, war, corporate imperialism), because their media is giving most of its America coverage to the most obscene and abusive aspects of our culture. I remember a conversation that I had with an Arab friend awhile back who said that even though she was living in the US at the time that the Iraq war started, she had no idea how many huge anti-war protests there were around the country because her family got all their news from Al-Jazeera and they didn’t really cover those protests. Without knowing much about Al-Jazeera’s pre-war coverage in America beyond what she told me, I’m still saddened to think of all the possibilities for solidarity and cross-cultural friendship that are lost by clueless media on both sides of a conflict.

I guess we just have to step over the corporate-media wreakage and proceed with the job of alliance-making on our own.

news freeze and thoughts on community

It was such a thrill to open up my e-mail account this morning and discover that four people had already responded to my initial post yesterday. Thanks to everyone who has visited. I’m looking forward to everything we’re going to create here.

I should have warned you all yesterday that the only thing standing between me and complete ignorance of life on the Web is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Web Page and Blog. I am slowly attempting to understand what all is possible in the blogging universe, so bear with me as I learn.

I’m tentatively working my way out of the news freeze that I put myself on starting the day after the election. I do this periodically, when I find that I’m spending twice as long trying to recover from the news as I spend listening to it. Of course, recovering from the election required something more a bit more intensive than the usual round of swearing and yogic breathing. It’s called escapism on a massive scale. The Daily Prophet of Harry Potter became the news in my world. I listened to all of my David Sedaris books on CD again (thank God he just came out with a new one, or I’d be reciting Me Talk Pretty One Day along with the recording). I put old Garrison Keillor tapes in the car so if I were unfortunate enough to actually have to go somewhere, I wouldn’t be tempted to touch the radio dial. It was out of control. It was necessary. I did pick up enough to learn that some god-awful things have been happening in Fallujah, that Arafat died, that CBS and NBC suck fully as much as I always suspected they did, that Bush cabinet members are on a mass exodus to “spend more time with their families,” and that the Ukrainians are bit more pro-active about preserving democracy than we are. Now I’m up to about ten minutes a day. I think I’ll stick with that for a while.

Did you vote for Bush? If so, please don’t check out right now. Stay, and help me understand why (if you can do so without being insulting; otherwise, please go elsewhere). Also, try this website by my friend Tess Miller. It’s called Writings to the President: a Leftist Approach to Reaching out the Right. (www.writingthepres.com). The day after the election, she made the unbelievably ambitious commitment of e-mailing the president every single day of his next term (give or take a few days; she’s only human). She tells him about her spiritual life, her career, her hopes for the nation; it’s crazy how much it sounds like she’s writing to a real person rather than an automated system. However, she has made a blog of her writings so that real people actually get to read them. Her writing is respectful, timely, and very question-oriented, and it’s a shame Bush doesn’t have time to sit down and answer her. Maybe others can.

I grew up Mennonite, and went to a Mennonite college, and if you spend any time around Mennonites, you will learn quickly that they use the word “community” ALL THE TIME. It comes partly from being separatists for so much of their history; when you’re not involved with wider society, the people you’re surrounded with on a daily basis become incredibly important. You have to preserve those relationships or you have nothing. Surrendering to God, or divine wisdom, in a Mennonite setting, often entails leaving behind self-interest when it conflicts with the community’s ideals. I’ve seen this concept work beautifully and I’ve seen it take on some very ugly sexist and homophobic teeth. The endless community talk can get insipid and mind-numbing. I have friends who designed a drinking game with the alumni bulletin of our college: read out loud, and everyone has to take a shot every time the word “community” comes up. The resulting collective stupor creates the sort of community the writers never intended.

Despite all the time and energy that I’ve spent running away from Mennonites who talk too much about community, I’m starting to see their point. When I look at the breakdown of local culture in the United States, recent political events start to make more sense—in a way. I still don’t understand why hateful rhetoric and thinly disguised lies are such effective political tools, beyond the reasonably obvious conclusion that fear has a lot to do with it. But I am starting to see that when Americans are bereft of community and a sense of belonging, they turn to religious institutions that give them that, and if they inherit a load of –isms and phobias as part of the package, well, better those then being hopeless and bereft again.

If I keep writing, I’m never going to tackle my list of things to do and no one’s going to bother to finish reading my verbal spewage, so I’ll wrap this up for the day. Please, keep the comments coming. Tell me about your communities.

Welcome to sweet water--first posting ever

Why use bitter soup for healing when sweet water is everywhere?

~Rumi (translation by Coleman Barks)



Welcome to the Sweet Water Journal! I’m writing to you all on a very, very rainy day here in Southeast Michigan. I can’t remember the last time I saw sunlight; truthfully, I can barely remember the last time I left my apartment. I’m loopy, vitamin D deficient, and missing my home state of Kansas, where it may be flat and dry and they may use the Bible as a biology textbook, but at least I can get through a winter without hemorrhaging serotonin. At the moment, words are my lifeline.

So here’s why I’m blogging. The Sweet Water Journal is both a literary and a peacemaking project, and while it’s now merely a blog, my goal is to eventually create an e-zine. I’m looking for readers and writers who are interested in religious communities, in the connections between religion and ethnicity, in interfaith projects, and in general, in bringing people of different spiritual persuasions onto the same literal and/or figurative page to create art, peace, and community. Phew. It’s a tall order, but I know it can be done.

The impetus is pretty obvious. After living through the most bitter American political season of my lifetime (I’m twenty-eight), it’s become apparent to me and everyone else who’s awake that religion and faith are central factors in most of the conflicts making the headlines. I can’t do a whole lot about all these stupid wars, but I can help create a space on the web for people of different faiths to share with one another about their everyday lives and experiences.

This isn’t just a project for professed members of specific religions. If you have any investment in spirituality and deliberate, examined living, you should be part of the conversation. If you were once a part of a religion and moved away because of personal beliefs and/or frustration with close-mindedness and intolerance within the faith, you should definitely be part of the conversation. The need is not just for church, mosque, and synagogue-goers to gain more understanding of each other’s humanity. As evidenced from the recent election, the –goers and the non-goers are having a lot of trouble getting through to one another these days, and the need for communication on that front is just as urgent.

We can’t all talk at once and expect to get anywhere, but we can create literature from our lives, put it out there, and hope it makes a difference. This is my own brand of faith, possibly insane: I have a naïve, fanatical belief in the power of the written word. I’d like to see this blog be a place where we meet and throw around ideas; I’ll be sure to post my own thoughts several times a week to get discussions rolling. (At all times, be respectful, because if you’re not, I’ll delete your comment and it will all be just a big waste of your time anyway.) There are several articles planned already for the e-zine, which I’m hoping to have up by next fall; if you’re a writer interested in these issues, please start posting on the blog so I can learn of your existence and your ideas. A special invitation to high school and college-age writers: your voices are especially needed, and I’m hoping to feature you regularly.

One last word about the name of this blog: the quote from Rumi comes from a short poem about Jesus, a frequent subject of the Sufi mystic poet. I like the “many faiths, one altar” ideals that Rumi represented, and I believe that in creating artistic communities that defy hatred and violence, we are choosing the sweet water over the bitter soup.