Last year, unrest broke out in Kenosha WI, just a few miles from my home in Racine. I did some writing on Facebook. As we wait for more verdicts with 500 National Guard soldiers penetrating in the town, it seemed good to share these posts here. One written in June of 2020, on in August. May they help us reflect and remember, even what we may have gained in one year.
Love,
Jeanne
June 1, 2020
Sitting here last night with Kenosha under Civil Emergency and Racine on alert. The realization I have to write something that I haven't been able to express. It will come.
Right now there is just a feeling that saying "Black lives matter" just isn't enough to say. I mean of course, and it has maybe helped to say something simple. But like duh. That is the lowest bar.
We have to go further. We have to kneel and say as whiteish Americans to blackish Americans: Black lives don't just matter, they are profoundly needed, necessary, essential, loved, have added untold value to American culture and spirit, have been our rock. Without your heart and soul we are definitely, definitely not Americans. "Black culture" (which IS American culture) has held incredible, incredible space for heart, integrity, spirituality, faith, humility, wisdom, rhythm, muscle, intelligence, song, strength under profound duress. From the first day of my first grade classroom when I met my first darker skinned classmates, it has held me up, helped me laugh, helped me learn, helped me remember the deeper truths I can forget in the culture and skin I was born in. I bow deeply to these gifts and this wealth, to your generosity.
To say you have suffered too much under the yoke of white pride, white violence and white fear is to understate it. It has to stop. But we can't neglect to give honoring, thanks, gratitude too. I, for one, would never want an America without all of this in it. Can you imagine how tight assed we would be? Not to mention how much more paranoid, traumatized and insane. Good God, thank you. Thank you. May we learn to love your gifts even more.
And to my black friends, please keep guiding us in what it means to help shift insanity. For now, I will work on what I need to write, put on my mask and go to the protest Tuesday here in Racine. In solidarity for way more than the end of brutality. For the creation of a new vision of a tolerant, loving, creative country that we seem to have to reclaim and again and again and again...
August 27, 2020
It’s hard to express how much is running through my body and soul right at this moment. That is why I haven't been writing I guess.
Just seven miles away, another American war zone opens up. Seven miles from my house in Racine, her sister city, Kenosha: fire, bullets, blood and glass where a tidy waterfront town used to be. As they say here, what happens in one town usually happens in the other sooner or later. We are praying this isn't so.
My move to the midwest from NY 20 months ago was inspired at least in part by the 2016 election and the grief I felt that year returning to my hometown in the Midwest. I felt a deep desire to return to somewhere home-like. To participate in something I didn't have words for, in a way that felt right to me: as a member of a not-too-big town in the middle of the country. By water.
And now here it is. Another election. A world full of Fire. Too much fire. And here I am, in Racine, embedded in the web of it.
My handyman was a former cop on the Kenosha force. We have had talks about the cop trauma, cop fear and the evolution of cop machismo and his own confusing experiences. He is buddies with the cop who pulled the trigger, who lives in his neighborhood. One degree of separation. Both of them fully human, I am sure feeling that they are doing their best for others. Meanwhile, in my other worlds, I know wonderful activists and advocates of BLM, some of whom are formerly incarcerated. Surely they know fear almost all the time. They are also fully human, doing their best to be in service to right change.
How to hold it all. Where does the healing begin?
In the last several years, I have focused on bringing teachings forward through SoULL. Some people think that these teachings are about death. They aren't. They are about everything. How we live in a sea of relationships. How relationships form and un-form. How we are at least partly tribal. How tribes form and un-form.
Healthy and unhealthy lives and relationships. Healthy and unhealthy tribes. Healthy and unhealthy relationships between tribes. How tribes exchange and help each other (and people in them) grow, or combat each other's growth. The key to all of this has been in watching how individual bodies and energy systems change. So I teach that.
And that is what I am thinking about now as we look for new way of being in a post tech-revolution world. This revolution has challenged our basic systems of relationship, identity and exchange. Such swift changes are hard for our mind/bodies to get used to, being as they evolved over so many centuries for such different ways. I am thinking that we need to remember the old wisdom of how to really be human again. No matter what kind or tribe or identity, our bodies teach about our common humanity.
Anyway, I will spend the weekend writing about all of this.
In the meantime, I ask for your prayers for Kenosha, for Racine, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland and all of the cities where the fires of confusion, change and fear are raging.
Pray for water. Rain, healing rain, and the ability for our deeper natures to grow together again, inspiring and supporting each other like these two sister cities, Racine and Kenosha, have done again and again in their history. Two tribes that have grown so similar by rubbing their backs against each other day after day, night after night. Coming to each other's aide.
Header photo by Markus Spiske
