As stiff as...

Stiff. On Thursday afternoon, I climbed up a fence at Empire Grade, with the aim of crossing the road and then another jump over another fence and a long run into Wilder, past the cow pastures, down into the cool woods, a still-nervous totter after all these years across the single tree trunk "bridge" over the  precocious little stream that babbles even through droughts, up past the old lime kilns round the Boar Trail, cresting at Engelman's loop for a quick pondering of the immense and unending beauty of the rolling hills and bay before turning back home. All these images as real and strong and exciting in front of my eyes as the gate I was scaling, or perhaps more so, because something went wrong in my balance and I slowly, too slowly, began falling backward. There was enough time to tell myself not to try to break my fall with my hands and wrists, to hunch my shoulders forward a bit to create a broad space across my back to fall on and to tuck my chin in to (hopefully) prevent banging the back of my on the ground and knocking myself out. My last thought, just before I hit the ground was, "Fuck, this is taking way too long." My left elbow and forearm hit first, then my shoulder blades and neck. It hurt. I lay there in the dirt, well aware that I was letting the pebbles and germs hang out in the scuffed up skin on my arm, but the wind had been knocked out of me and my neck muscles throbbed so I just stayed put for an assessment. A dull ache spread from my neck to my forehead and in a final painful flash disappeared, escaping from some unknown gate. I eased up to standing, squeezed some water on my cuts and thought, "Well, let's try that again." I got over without trouble and in no time I was tamping my rhythm again. I was fine, really. The run was great. But there's always a price to pay for ignoring hints to turn around. My neck's been sore and stiff ever since. As stiff as...


Well, shit. That paragraph is a fine piece of writing and could be taken somewhere sweet or poignant, wrapping it all up like a sitcom, as I tend to attempt in my writing, but all I really want to tie it to is my favorite quote from Julie and Julia (perhaps my favorite quote in a film all year). Julia Child pulled a couple cannelloni from boiling water with her bare hands and exclaimed to her husband, "These damn things are as hot as a stiff cock!"

That is priceless.

On to more serious stuff. This past week, I fell in love with three people, all over again. Jimmy Carter for calling racism racism when no one else would, and Ketih Oberman and Rachel Maddow for methodically explaining what so many pundits and strategists and even President Obama tried to dismiss: that no matter how much we deny that racism is at the root of the conservative so-called back-lash to all things Obama, it doesn't make it so. I get that Obama can't be the one to lead this conversation, since it would be political suicide, but it still needs to happen. Rev D said it best today: you can't claim Oneness and deny that things like racism, sexism, and so on don't exist. The only way to one day be equal is to heal the collective wounds we've all  been festering in for so long. We can't claim we're all in this together and expect those of us who've experienced oppression not to question what this "togetherness" will require us to discount in our own experiences. We can't claim we're all going to move forward united without seeing that those privileged among us have a lot less to lose if this "unity" falls apart or can't be sustained. I got to feeling pretty discouraged and the day Nancy Pelosi choked up about the violence in the late 70s in San Francisco, I recall thinking, "I'm not sure that even race-based violence would get us, as a nation, to finally talk."

So I turned off the news, and turned on my choir practice list and began to sing my prayers. Rev D urges us to watch the news not to see the worst in the world confirmed but to watch for all the prayer requests from the world. We gotta heal, we gotta talk about this stuff, and I pray for that.

I know all we need to heal is the sense of separation -- from ourselves, from each other, from creativity, from love, from God, from whatever it is that gives us peace. So I type, type, type, hoping that someone out there may be soothed as I am by words, that someone may just think about something differently, or that I may, or just feel grateful for a moment to breathe and read.